Internet Archive lawsuit

[Joseph Backes]

I just found out about this.  There's a lawsuit over the copyrighted material on this site that could result in the site being taken down which would be a disaster.

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[Bob Ness]

12 minutes ago, Joseph Backes said:

I just found out about this.  There's a lawsuit over the copyrighted material on this site that could result in the site being taken down which would be a disaster.

See - 

 

 

Yeah, I doubt a judge would shut this down en masse. The IA shouldn't be involved in distributing copyrighted material if a valid complaint is filed against it and should have its own enforcement guidelines to protect itself and the owners. At a minimum they should notify the owners of their intent and record permissions granted by all of the appropriate holders.

Creators have the right to distribute their works according to their terms and conditions and the reason why is that in order to create those works they have to invest time and money. They have a reasonable expectation that the users who benefit from that investment help to defer the cost of producing it. If this isn't done, creators will cease making their material available at an affordable rate and restrict access to it to only those able to afford it.

For instance I got into an argument with a video store owner years ago who would buy movies off the shelf for $9.99 and then put them out for rental at $3.99 or something. At the time video store owners were required to purchase movies for that type of consumption from a distributor for $29.99 (I believe) because the copyright holder's needed to protect against undercutting their product but wanted to make it available in that market. It was legally actionable for the copyright holder to sue the video store owner, but they could have just made it unavailable to them. The video stores would have no business. In that world everyone has to scratch each other's back.

In the music business now it's not possible to make money from record sales because of the theft and other economic reasons so you have to go pay $500 per ticket to see The Cure play.

I'm not really very sympathetic to most of these aggregator sites but IA is one I really like. They just need to mind their pints and quarts and not try to justify theft if they're partaking in that.