This is the kind of thing that drove Ezra Pound mad. It is a controlling impulse and we always ignore how indebted any writer in the English language is to Shakespeare and Chaucer and a half dozen other writers. I truly despise copyright law and how people abuse it. Disney isn't paying out royalties to DW Griffith's descendants every time a new marvel drops. The film industry is lucky Birth of a Nation is so racist. It allows them to ignore the film that created the art form. It's probably why Hollywood fought so hard to keep Welles out. To acknowledge him as a filmmaker was to acknowledge the entire form's massive debt to him and it throws the notion of copyright on its head.

fucking terrible guys

Dinosaurs bleating about how many pairs of eyes may look at a lent book while GPT has already consumed every book ever written. These people are a fart in the wind.

As a Deadhead I've been following this pretty closely. This court case is pretty specific to a branch of the Internet Archive that launched during the pandemic. Essentially they pushed the limits of Libby to extend lending permission for ebooks to more than one person. Thats what the lawsuit focuses on specifically, but doesn't go much further. It's important to realize that the IA is not a library, and is closely linked with the EFF. The website is a great resource and is run by an activist nonprofit group that can be described as a having a pretty radical take on copyright law. I see actions like what they did with the "national emergency library" (the subject of this lawsuit, not mentioned in this NYT article) which expands lending capability, as provocation. The goal, in a sense, is to bring copyright laws to the supreme court For what it's worth, I fully support the IA. Copyright law is a disaster zone decades behind reality. If you spend any time on the IA poking around though, you'll find some pretty egregious illegal and infringed content (and a ton of homemade pornography). Im concerned that this court case will lead to more overzealous lawyers plying their hideous trade on the IA and bury the good-faith users.

dulla

2 months ago

Some might call it a 'radical take on copyright law'...you might not be wrong, but I definitely subscribe to this belief of the free information Internet that we've come to enjoy for a few years, although I am also of the belief that the days of this may be waning and the anti-piracy campaigns of the late-90s/early-naughts pre-movie ads may finally win out in the end with copyright lawyers seemingly winning out to paywall, gatekeep, and monetize all of these resources that we've previously (and still currently) have accessibly at our hands as free. Sufficed to say, for those who have enjoyed easy access to movies, TV shows, books, and music, get a hard drive and be sure to store what you enjoy because I feel a permanent era of Internet microtransactions for everything is coming, and $10 to watch a movie or book that you enjoy per time used, will inevitably put constraints on the amount of media you'd actually be able to explore.

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