1) Copyright law is a nightmare, largely thanks to Disney.
2) Publishers suck for various reasons but are necessary for the survival of many authors & much of the publishing industry.
3) Authors always get the shit end of the stick when things go wrong & often when they go right.
2) Publishers suck for various reasons but are necessary for the survival of many authors & much of the publishing industry.
3) Authors always get the shit end of the stick when things go wrong & often when they go right.
4) Libraries have many problems (often due to 1 & 2) but when people use libraries, authors are ultimately compensated and do benefit, often significantly. Libraries are good.
5) The Internet Archive is good and its archival services are important and necessary.
5) The Internet Archive is good and its archival services are important and necessary.
6) When the IA put a metric fuckton of books online for free, it did not do so the way a library does. It did it the way the Pirate Bay does. Authors did not benefit at all. Nor were they consulted in advance.
7) While the revenue loss due to piracy thanks to IA's stunt is generally nil-to-negligible for any one specific author, it IS statistically significant for the PUBLISHING HOUSES involved.
8) Because copyright law is a broken nightmare (see 1), if an entity does not actively defend its copyright in the case of significant infringement, it establishes legal precedent for non-ownership. This is fucked up, but it is how the system works.
9) What IA did is a textbook perfect example of a "we have to sue these motherfuckers or we're all screwed" situation. Which blows, because IA is important and does lots of necessary things. They also put a gun in their own mouth and pulled the trigger here.
10) Ultimately, this has mostly resulted in people who don't know anything about how libraries, copyright law, or the publishing industry work screaming at random authors (see item 3), who were mostly broke when this started and are slightly more broke as a result.
11) So what we have here is a situation where, as galling as it is, the good guys have done a bad, stupid, irresponsible thing, and the bad guys... are... completely justified and in the right.
If it makes you feel any better, Disney is significantly to blame for all of this.
If it makes you feel any better, Disney is significantly to blame for all of this.
12) Also, nearly every author and librarian getting yelled at right now is fully aware of IA's importance, and doesn't want to see it go away. So they're REAL unhappy it has gone and picked a fight with them that they cannot decline.
