The publishers' lawsuit against the Internet Archive (Hachette v. Internet Archive) has resulted in the removal of more than 500,000 books from our lending library, including over 1,300 banned and challenged titles. We are actively appealing this decision to restore access for all our patrons.
We want to hear from you! How has losing access to these books affected your reading or research? What does it mean to you that these 500,000+ books are no longer available? Please share your story below.
Your feedback may be featured in our blog posts and other communications to highlight the impact of this significant loss on our library community.
As time goes on, we should be simplifying laws, not creating more. The reductionist view is that content should be freely available as long as the IP isn’t being developed/marketed still. And in order to prevent practices like Disney’s vaulting we need a developed IP rotation of every X years to prevent IP hoarding. At it’s root copyright law is rooted in greed, after you are done with the initial release, it just becomes part of everyone’s culture.
I’d like to see a world more like that, but it feels like something that would require a society much different than the one we currently have.
Even your simplified mention of freeing IP not being marketed, in the Internet age, does having an item listed as for sale but out of stock or for an unreasonable price counted as being marketed? It’s technically advertised for sale at no real cost, and can be done so in perpetuity. Or they could sell themselves product to show legal sales.
Simple rules and judgement operating under the intentof the law makes sense to rational individuals like us, but with scammy business and individuals, that’s why we end up with a complex legal system. If we hate when legal loopholes are taken advantage of, we can’t outright hate when laws get more complex.