Thread by @AlexandraErin

One thing I'm noticing about the newly mobilized "Authors Are Cops And Landlords And Also Landlord Cops" Twitter: mostly they don't seem to know anything about the initiative that prompted the conversation they're so eagerly having. They think it's just about the IA.

They haven't read or understood the press around the Internet Archive's "emergency library" and are assuming that a bunch of lazy (ha!) millionaire (ha!) authors only just now found out the IA exists and are mad about that.

Even if you ultimately come down on the side of the Internet Archive in this specific case or if you're just not big on copyright in general, the fact remains that this represents a huge rights grab by the Internet Archive.

If publishers unilaterally decided to use the pandemic to push a sweeping new theory of copyright that said they didn't have to pay authors anymore, it would be a labor crisis.

Now IA is positioning themselves as a lending library, but in electronic spaces, the difference between "lending" vs. "publishing" is kind of notional? The difference between me sending you an ebook that I produced as a publisher and a library issuing a copy is immaterial.

And when I say it's immaterial, I don't mean it doesn't matter, I mean it *isn't* matter. It's one of those things that if we were to reduce the universe to atoms, we would not find it in the wreckage, to paraphrase Terry Pratchett.

Anyway. If you're just catching up, the Internet Archive has not simply pointed that they've got a lot of archived stuff people can read, they have chosen to use this opportunity to test (or re-test, some commentators say it's already been thrown out in court) a legal theory...

...that says they can make available books they have digitally archived, without any kind of licensing agreement or compensation, under the doctrine of fair use.

If this holds up? It will mean a very brief and exciting period for people who think books should be free.

I say "brief" because it won't be sustainable, which by definition means it won't last. We'll get new laws clarifying the situation, and/or people will stop writing books. Probably a horrible mix of both. Expect the new laws to be more draconian and byzantine.

Ultimately no law can work without some level of consent by society. Copyright laws have been twisted so that giant corporations are the big money beneficiaries, but they still ultimately serve the purpose of helping creators get paid for their work.

Copyright law, like any other law, works as a solution to allowing creatives to profit from their labor only so long as there's a baseline level of agreement in society to more or less follow it. It's never going to be 100%. For any law. We know that.

If the current system of copyright stops working well enough to work, the result is not going to be digital anarchy and fully automated luxury cyberspace communism.

It's going to be more DRM and punitive measures. Because corporations are the primary big money interests here.

But don't do it for fear of the corporations. Do it for love of the art and the artists. If you love reading enough to care about availability of books, then you should love authors. Writing a book is not just having an idea once and then getting paid for it forever.

If an author spends a year or more on a book, writing it basically as a full-time job (possibly while working other jobs)... it can take years of sales for that book to pay off, for the labor to pay for itself.

I have seen someone on this site today argue that once the book exists, trying to get paid for it is "rent-seeking" (a term that applies to someone trying to get paid for exploiting something they put no labor into, like commanding a toll for crossing a stream).

But most authors don't get a giant lump-sum payment when they "sell the book". And the payment they do get, giant or not, is called "an advance" because it's an advance on expected royalties from sales. The book still has to sell to pay out!

If a book that doesn't make back its advance... technically the publisher can claw the advance back from the author. That doesn't always happen, but also that's how you kill the next book deal. An advance is a bet the publisher makes that the sales will happen.

The money people pay for books, the money that libraries pay for books... those are what pay the author back, slowly and over time, for the months or years of labor that went into the book.

"But Alexandra, why are you on the tradpub authors' side when you don't do it that way? You let people read your work for free and then see if they want to pay for it. Isn't that the same as what piracy sites do?'

I make choices about what to do with my labor. Marketing choices.

Me putting my work out there under my name with links to where people can pay me for it is a marketing decision I make, as an informed decision based on what I know about my work, my audience, and the marketplace. It's a good strategy for me.

But like anything, it's got its trade-offs and I wouldn't want to nuke the other ways of doing things just because I've got something else that works for me.

TL;DR - no one in literary Twitter is labeling the Internet Archive as a whole "a piracy site". The objection is to them using the coronavirus crisis to push the boundaries of fair use to a point where one can distribute a whole book without any license.

...okay, and I'm getting that a lot of people don't like the idea of copyrights period. Information Wants To Be Free and all that. But your revolution needs an order of operations. If you kill the copyright first, while we're all still toiling under capitalism, you hurt workers.

I'm going to leave this link here and mute the thread. The Open Library doesn't have a license to lend books, it has a legal theory that says it can, based on specific fair use justifications that are probably more narrow than it used them for before.

the-digital-reader.com/2020/03/28/aut…

I'm not going to sit here and argue. I've said my say in my space. If you disagree you're free to do the same in yours. I didn't @ anyone with my opinion, feel free to not @ me with yours. Don't expect a response if you do.