One of the most frustrating aspects in the ongoing conversation around the preservation of older video games, also known as cultural output, is the collision of IP rights and some publishers’ unwillingness to both continue to support and make available these older games and their refusal to release those same games into the public domain so that others can do so. It creates this crazy situation in which a company insists on retaining its copyrights over a video game that it has effectively disappeared with no good or legitimate way for the public to preserve them. As I’ve argued for some time now, this breaks the copyright contract with the public and should come with repercussions. The whole bargain that is copyright law is that creative works are granted a limited monopoly on the production of that work, with that work eventually arriving into the public domain. If that arrival is not allowed to occur, the bargain is broken, and not by anyone who would supposedly “infringe” on the copyright of that work.

[…]

But it just doesn’t have to be like this. Companies could be willing to give up their iron-fisted control over their IP for these older games they aren’t willing to support or preserve themselves and let others do it for them. And if you need a real world example of that, you need look only at how Epic is working with The Internet Archive to do exactly that.

Epic, now primarily known for Fortnite and the Unreal Engine, has given permission for two of the most significant video games ever made, Unreal and Unreal Tournament, to be freely accessed via the Internet Archive. As spotted by RPS, via ResetEra, the OldUnreal group announced the move on their Discord, along with instructions for how to easily download and play them on modern machines.

Huge kudos to Epic for being cool with this, because while it shouldn’t be unusual to happily let people freely share a three-decade-old game you don’t sell any more, it’s vanishingly rare. And if you remain in any doubt, we just got word back from Epic confirming they’re on board.

“We can confirm that Unreal 1 and Unreal Tournament are available on archive.org,” a spokesperson told us by email, “and people are free to independently link to and play these versions.”

Importantly, OldUnreal and The Internet Archive very much know what they’re doing here. Grabbing the ZIP file for the game sleekly pulls the ISO directly from The Internet Archive, installs it, and there are instructions for how to get the game up and running on modern hardware. This is obviously a labor of love from fans dedicated toward keeping these two excellent games alive.

[…]

But this is just two games. What would be really nice to see is this become a trend, or, better yet, a program run by The Internet Archive. Don’t want to bother to preserve your old game? No problem, let the IA do it for you!

Source: Epic Allows Internet Archive To Distribute For Free ‘Unreal’ & ‘Unreal Tournament’ Forever | Techdirt

What would you think if an author told you they would have written a book, but they wouldn’t bother because it would be available to be borrowed for free from a library? You’d probably think they were delusional. Yet that argument has now carried the day in putting a knife into the back of the extremely useful Open Library from the Internet Archive.

The Second Circuit has upheld the lower court ruling and found that the Internet Archive’s Open Library is not fair use and therefore infringes on the copyright of publishers (we had filed an amicus brief in support of the Archive asking them to remember the fundamental purpose of copyright law and the First Amendment, which the Court ignored).

Even though this outcome was always a strong possibility, the final ruling is just incredibly damaging, especially in that it suggests that all libraries are bad for authors and cause them to no longer want to write. I only wish I were joking. Towards the end of the ruling (as we’ll get to below) it says that while having freely lent out books may help the public in the “short-term” the “long-term” consequences would be that “there would be little motivation to produce new works.”

[…]

As you’ll recall, the Open Library is no different than a regular library. It obtains books legally (either through purchase or donation) and then lends out one-to-one copies of those books. It’s just that it lends out digital copies of them. To keep it identical to a regular library, it makes sure that only one digital copy can be lent out for every physical copy it holds. Courts have already determined that digitizing physical books is fair use, and the Open Library has been tremendously helpful to all sorts of people.

The only ones truly annoyed by this are the publishers, who have always hated libraries and have long seen the shift to digital as an open excuse to effectively harm libraries. With licensed ebooks, the publishers have jacked up the prices so that (unlike with regular books), the library can’t just buy a single copy from any supplier and lend it out. Rather, publishers have made it prohibitively expensive to get ebook licenses, which come with ridiculous restrictions on how frequently books can be lent and more.

[…]

The key part of the case is whether or not the Internet Archive’s scanning and lending of books is fair use. The Second Circuit says that it fails the fair use four factors test. On the question of transformative use, the Internet Archive argued that because it was using technology to make lending of books more convenient and efficient, it was clearly transformative. Unfortunately, the court disagrees:

We conclude that IA’s use of the Works is not transformative. IA creates digital copies of the Works and distributes those copies to its users in full, for free. Its digital copies do not provide criticism, commentary, or information about the originals. Nor do they “add[] something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the [originals] with new expression, meaning or message.” Campbell, 510 U.S. at 579. Instead, IA’s digital books serve the same exact purpose as the originals: making authors’ works available to read. IA’s Free Digital Library is meant to―and does―substitute for the original Works

The panel is not convinced by the massive change in making physical books digitally lendable:

True, there is some “change” involved in the conversion of print books to digital copies. See Infinity Broadcast Corp. v. Kirkwood, 150 F.3d 104, 108 n.2 (2d Cir. 1998) (“[A] change in format . . . is not technically a transformation.”). But the degree of change does not “go beyond that required to qualify as derivative.” Warhol II, 598 U.S. at 529. Unlike transformative works, derivative works “ordinarily are those that re-present the protected aspects of the original work, i.e., its expressive content, converted into an altered form.” Google Books, 804 F.3d at 225. To be transformative, a use must do “something more than repackage or republish the original copyrighted work.” Authors Guild, Inc. v. HathiTrust, 755 F.3d 87, 96 (2d Cir. 2014); see also TVEyes, 883 F.3d at 177 (“[A] use of copyrighted material that merely repackages or republishes the original is unlikely to be deemed a fair use.” (internal quotation marks omitted)). Changing the medium of a work is a derivative use rather than a transformative one.

But, that’s not what a derivative work is? A derivative work is not scanning a book. Scanning a book is making a copy. A derivative work is something like making a movie out of a book. So, this analysis is just fundamentally wrong in saying that this is a derivative work, and thus the rest of the analysis is kinda wonky based on that error.

Tragically, the Court then undermines the important ruling in the Betamax/VCR case that found “time shifting” (recording stuff off your TV) to be fair use, even as it absolutely was repackaging the same content for the same purpose. The Court says that doesn’t matter because it “predated our use of the word ‘transformative’ as a term of art.” But that doesn’t wipe out the case as a binding precedent, even though the Court here acts as though it does.

Sony was decided long before modern technology made it possible for one to view virtually any content at any time. Put in context, the “time-shifting” permitted by the defendant’s tape recorders in Sony was a unique efficiency not widely available at the time, and certainly not offered by the plaintiff-television producer.

So because content is more widely available, this kind of shifting is no longer fair use? How does that make any sense at all?

Then the Court says (incorrectly — as we’ll explain shortly) that there’s really nothing new or different about what the Open Library does:

Here, by contrast, IA’s Free Digital Library offers few efficiencies beyond those already offered by Publishers’ own eBooks.

The problem, though, is that this isn’t quite true. Getting licensed ebooks out from libraries is a difficult and cumbersome practice and requires each library to have a vast ebook collection that none can possibly afford. As this lawsuit went down, more and more authors came out of the woodwork, explaining how research they had done for their books was only possible because of the Open Library and would have been impossible via a traditional library given the lending restrictions and availability restrictions.

[…]

From there, the Court explores whether or not the Internet Archive’s use here was commercial. The lower court said it was because, ridiculously, the Internet Archive had donation links on library pages. Thankfully, the panel here sees how problematic that would be for every non-profit:

We likewise reject the proposition that IA’s solicitation of donations renders its use of the Works commercial. IA does not solicit donations specifically in connection with its digital book lending services―nearly every page on IA’s website contains a link to “Donate” to IA. App’x 6091. Thus, as with its partnership with BWB, any link between the funds IA receives from donations and its use of the Works is too attenuated to render the use commercial. Swatch, 756 F.3d at 83. To hold otherwise would greatly restrain the ability of nonprofits to seek donations while making fair use of copyrighted works. See ASTM I, 896 F.3d at 449 (rejecting the argument that because free distribution of copyrighted industry standards enhanced a nonprofit organization’s fundraising appeal, the use was commercial).

It also disagrees that this use is commercial because there’s a referral link for people to go and buy a copy of the book, saying that’s “too attenuated”:

Any link between the funds IA receives from its partnership with BWB and its use of the Works is too attenuated for us to characterize the use as commercial on that basis

Even so, the lack of commerciality isn’t enough to protect the project on the first factor analysis, and it goes to the publishers.

[…]

Source: Second Circuit Says Libraries Disincentivize Authors To Write Books By Lending Them For Free | Techdirt

There is a lot more, but it’s safe to say that the courts in the US and copyright laws have run amok and are only feeding the rich to the detriment of the poor. Denying people libraries is a step beyond.

I can’t believe this, but it happened again. Almost exactly a decade ago, Tim Cushing wrote about a bonkers story out of the UK in which a passport applicant who’s middle name was “Skywalker” was denied the passport due to purported trademark or copyright concerns. The question that ought to immediately leap to mind should be: wait, nothing about a name or its appearance on a passport amounts to either creative expression being copied, nor use in commerce, meaning that neither copyright nor trademark law ought to apply in the slightest.

And you would have thought that coming out of that whole episode, proper guidance would have been given to the UK’s passport office so that this kind of stupidity doesn’t happen again. Unfortunately, it did happen again. A UK woman attempted to get a passport for her daughter, who she named Khaleesi, only to have it refused over the trademark for the Game of Thrones character that held the same fictional title.

Lucy, 39, from Swindon in Wiltshire, said the Passport Office initially refused the application for Khaleesi, six.

Officials said they were unable to issue a passport unless Warner Brothers gave permission because it owned the name’s trademark. But the authority has since apologised for the error.

“I was absolutely devastated, we were so looking forward to our first holiday together,” Lucy said.

While any intellectual property concerns over a passport are absolutely silly, I would argue that trademark law makes even less sense here than copyright would. Again, trademark law is designed specifically to protect the public from being confused as to the source of a good or service in commerce. There is no good or service nor commerce here. Lucy would simply like to take her own child across national borders. That’s it. Lucy had to consult with an attorney due to this insanity, which didn’t initially yield the proper result.

After seeking legal advice, her solicitors discovered that while there is a trademark for Game of Thrones, it is for goods and services – but not for a person’s name.

“That information was sent to the Passport Office who said I would need a letter from Warner Brothers to confirm my daughter is able to use that name,” she said.

This amounts to a restriction on the rights and freedoms of a child in a free country as a result of the choice their parent’s made about their name. Whatever your thoughts on IP laws in general, that simply cannot be the aim of literally any of them.

Now, once the media got a hold of all of this, the Passport Office eventually relented, said it made an error in denying the passport, and has put the application through. But even the government’s explanation doesn’t fully make sense.

Official explained there had been a misunderstanding and the guidance staff had originally given applies only to people changing their names.

“He advised me that they should be able to process my daughter’s passport now, ” she said.

Why would the changing of a name be any different? My name is my name, not a creative expression, nor a use in commerce. If I elect to change my name from “Timothy Geigner” to “Timothy Mickey Mouse Geigner”, none of that equates to an infringement of Disney’s rights, copyright nor trademark. It’s just my name. It would only be if I attempted to use my new name in commerce or as part of an expression that I might run afoul of either trademark or copyright law.

What this really is is the pervasive cancer that is ownership culture. It’s only with ownership culture that you get a passport official somehow thinking that Warner Bros. production of a fantasy show means a six year old can’t get a passport.

Source: UK Once Again Denies A Passport Over Applicant’s Name Due To Intellectual Property Concerns | Techdirt

It sounds absolutely batty that there is a strong, bipartisan push to lock up aspects of our law behind copyright. But it’s happening. Even worse, the push is on to include this effort to lock up the law in the “must pass” National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This is the bill that Congress lights up like a Christmas tree with the various bills they know they can’t pass normally, every year.

And this year, they’re pushing the Pro Codes Act, a dangerous bill to lock up the law that has bipartisan support.

[…]

There are lots of standards out there, often developed by industry groups. These standards can be on all sorts of subjects, such as building codes or consumer safety or indicators for hazardous materials. The list goes on and on and on. Indeed, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has a database of over 27,000 such standards that are “included by reference” into law.

This is where things get wonky. Since many of these standards are put together by private organizations (companies, standards bodies, whatever), some of them could qualify for copyright. But, then, lawmakers will often require certain products and services to meet those standards. That is, the laws will “reference” those standards (for example, how to have a building be built in a safe or non-polluting manner).

Many people, myself included, believe that the law must be public. How can the rule of law make any sense at all if the public cannot freely access and read the law? Thus, we believe that when a standard gets “incorporated by reference” into the law, it should become public domain, for the simple fact that the law itself must be public domain.

[…]

Two years ago, there was a pretty big victory, noting that his publishing of standards that are “incorporated by reference” is fair use.

But industry standards bodies hate this, because often a large part of their own revenue stream comes from selling access to the standards they create, including those referenced by laws.

So they lobbied Congress to push this Pro Codes Act, which explicitly says that technical standards incorporated by reference retain copyright. To try to stave off criticism (and to mischaracterize the bill publicly), the law says that standards bodies retain the copyright if the standards body makes the standard available on a free publicly accessible online source.

[…]

They added this last part to head off criticism that the law is “locked up.” They say things like “see, under this law, the law has to be freely available online.”

But that’s missing the point. It still means that the law itself is only available from one source, in one format. And while it has to be “publicly accessible online at no monetary cost,” that does not mean that it has to be publicly accessible in an easy or useful manner. It does not mean that there won’t be limitations on access or usage.

It is locking up the law.

But, because the law says that those standards must be released online free of cost, it allows the supporters of this law, like Issa, to falsely portray the law as “enhancing public access” to the laws.

That’s a lie.

[…]

t flies in the face of the very fundamental concept that “no one can own the law,” as the Supreme Court itself recently said. And to try and shove it into a must pass bill about funding the military is just ridiculously cynical, while demonstrating that its backers know it can’t pass through regular process.

Instead, this is an attempt by Congress to say, yes, some companies do get to own the law, so long as they put up a limited, difficult to use website by which you can see parts of the law.

Library groups and civil society groups are pushing back on this (disclaimer: we signed onto this letter). Please add your voice and tell Congress not to lock up the law.

Source: Congress Wants To Let Private Companies Own The Law | Techdirt

The complaints against OpenAI and Microsoft in New York Times Company v. Microsoft Corporation and Daily News, LP v. Microsoft Corporation include multiple theories––for instance, vicarious copyright infringement, contributory copyright infringement, and improper removal of copyright information. Those theories, however, are ancillary to both complaints’ primary cause of action: direct copyright infringement. While the defendants’ motions to dismiss focus primarily on jettisoning the ancillary claims and acknowledge that “development of record evidence” is necessary for resolving the direct infringement claims, they nonetheless offer insight on how the direct infringement fight might unfurl.

Direct Infringement Via Inputs and Outputs: The Daily News plaintiffs claim that by “building training datasets containing” their copyrighted works without permission, the defendants directly infringe the plaintiffs’ copyrights. Inputting copyrighted material to train Gen AI tools, they aver, constitutes direct infringement. Regarding outputs, the Daily News plaintiffs assert that “by disseminating generative output containing copies and derivatives of the” plaintiffs’ content, the defendants’ tools also infringe the plaintiffs’ copyrights. The Daily News’s input (illicit training) and output (disseminating copies) allegations track earlier contentions of The New York Times Company.

Fair Use Inputs and “Fringe” Outputs: OpenAI’s June arguments in Daily News frame “the core issue”––one OpenAI says “is for a later stage of the litigation” because discovery must first generate a factual record––facing New York City-based federal judge Sidney Stein as “whether using copyrighted content to train a generative AI model is fair use under copyright law.” Fair use, a defense to copyright infringement, involves analyzing four statutory factors: 1) the purpose and character of the allegedly infringing use; 2) the nature of copyrighted work allegedly infringed upon; 3) the amount of the copyrighted work infringed upon and whether the amount, even if small, nonetheless goes to the heart of the work; and 4) whether the infringing use will harm the market value of (or serve as a market substitute for) the original copyrighted work.

So, how might ingesting copyrighted journalistic content––the training or input aspect of the alleged infringement––be a protected fair use? Microsoft argues in Daily News that its “and OpenAI’s tools [don’t] exploit the protected expression in the Plaintiffs’ digital content.” (emphasis added). That’s a key point because copyright law does not protect things like facts, “titles, names, short phrases, and slogans.” OpenAI asserts, in response to The New York Times Company’s lawsuit, that “no one . . . gets to monopolize facts or the rules of language.” Learning semantic rules and patterns of “language, grammar, and syntax”––predicting which words are statistically most likely to follow others––is, at bottom, the purpose of the fair use to which OpenAI and Microsoft say they’re putting newspaper articles. They’re ostensibly just leveraging copyrighted articles “internally” (emphasis in original) to identify and learn language patterns, not to reproduce the articles in which those words appear.

More fundamentally, OpenAI and Microsoft aren’t attempting to disseminate copies of what copyright law is intended to incentivize and protect––“original works of authorship” and “writings.” They aren’t, the defendants claim, trying to unfairly produce market substitutes for actual newspaper articles.

How, then, do they counter the newspapers’ output infringement allegations that the defendants’ tools sometimes produce verbatim versions of the newspapers’ copyrighted articles? OpenAI contends such regurgitative outcomes “depend on an elaborate effort [by the defendants] to coax such outputs from OpenAI’s products, in a way that violates the operative OpenAI terms of service and that no normal user would ever even attempt.” Regurgitations otherwise are “rare” and “unintended,” the company adds. Barring settlements, courts will examine the input and output infringement battles in the coming months and years.

Source: Inputs, Outputs, and Fair Uses: Unpacking Responses to Journalists’ Copyright Lawsuits | American Enterprise Institute – AEI

Even though parents insist that it is good and right to share things, the copyright world has succeeded in establishing the contrary as the norm. Now, sharing is deemed a bad, possibly illegal thing. But it was not always thus, as a fascinating speech by Ryan Cordell, Associate Professor in the School of Information Sciences and Department of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, underlines. In the US in the nineteenth century, newspaper material was explicitly not protected by copyright, and was routinely exchanged between titles:

Nineteenth-century editors’ attitude toward text reuse is exemplified in a selection that circulated in the last decade of the century, though often abbreviated from the version I cite here, which insists that “an editor’s selections from his contemporaries” are “quite often the best test of his editorial ability, and that the function of his scissors are not merely to fill up vacant spaces, but to reproduce the brightest and best thoughts…from all sources at the editor’s command.” While noting that sloppy or lazy selection will produce “a stupid issue,” this piece claims that just as often “the editor opens his exchanges, and finds a feast for eyes, heart and soul…that his space is inadequate to contain.” This piece ends by insisting “a newspaper’s real value is not the amount of original matter it contains, but the average quality of all the matter appearing in its columns whether original or selected.”

Material was not only copied verbatim, but modified and built upon in the process. As a result of this constant exchange, alteration and enhancement, newspaper readers in the US enjoyed a rich ecosystem of information, and a large number of titles flourished, since the cost of producing suitable material for each of them was shared and thus reduced.

That historical fact in itself is interesting. It’s also important at a time when newspaper publishers are some of the most aggressive in demanding ever stronger – and ever more disproportionate – copyright protection for their products, for example through “link taxes”. But Cordell’s speech is not simply backward looking. It goes on to make another fascinating observation, this time about large language models (LLMs):

We can see in the nineteenth-century newspaper exchanges a massive system for recycling and remediating culture. I do not wish to slip into hyperbole or anachronism, and will not claim historical newspapers as a precise analogue for twenty-first century AI or large language models. But it is striking how often metaphors drawn from earlier media appear in our attempts to understand and explain these new technologies.

The whole speech is well worth reading as a useful reminder that the current copyright panic over LLMs is in part because we have forgotten that sharing material and helping others to build on it was once the norm. And despite blinkered and selfish views to the contrary, it is still the right thing to do, just as parents continue to tell their children.

Source: Sharing material used to be the norm for newspapers, and should be for LLMs – Walled Culture

Major music labels are taking on AI startups that they believe trained on their songs without paying. Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Group sued the music generators Suno and Udio for allegedly infringing on copyrighted works on a “massive scale.”

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) initiated the lawsuits and wants to establish that “nothing that exempts AI technology from copyright law or that excuses AI companies from playing by the rules.”

The music labels’ lawsuits in US federal court accuse Suno and Udio of scraping their copyrighted tracks from the internet. The filings against the AI companies reportedly demand injunctions against future use and damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work. (That sounds like it could add up to a monumental sum if the court finds them liable.) The suits appear aimed at establishing licensed training as the only acceptable industry framework for AI moving forward — while instilling fear in companies that train their models without consent.

Suno AI and Udio AI (Uncharted Labs run the latter) are startups with software that generates music based on text inputs. The former is a partner of Microsoft for its CoPilot music generation tool. The RIAA claims the services’ reproduced tracks are uncannily similar to existing works to the degree that they must have been trained on copyrighted songs. It also claims the companies didn’t deny that they trained on copyright works, instead shielding themselves behind their training being “confidential business information” and standard industry practices.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the lawsuits accuse the AI generators of creating songs that sounded remarkably similar to The Temptations’ “My Girl,” Green Day’s “American Idiot,” and Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” among others. They also claim the AI services produced indistinguishable vocals from artists like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson and ABBA.

Wired reports that one example cited in the lawsuit details how one of the AI tools reproduced a song that sounded nearly identical to Chuck Berry’s pioneering classic “Johnny B. Goode,” using the prompt, “1950s rock and roll, rhythm & blues, 12 bar blues, rockabilly, energetic male vocalist, singer guitarist,” along with some of Berry’s lyrics. The suit claims the generator almost perfectly generated the original track’s “Go, Johnny, go, go” chorus.

To be clear, the RIAA isn’t advocating based on the principle that all AI training on copyrighted works is wrong. Instead, it’s saying it’s illegal to do so without licensing and consent, i.e., when the labels (and, likely to a lesser degree, the artists) don’t make any money off of it.

[…]

Source: Record labels sue AI music generators for ‘massive infringement of recorded music’

So they are not only claiming that stuff inspired by stuff a computer listened to is different from stuff inspired by stuff a person listened to, but they are also claiming copyright on something from the 1950’s?!

[…]

A letter to publishers seen by Reuters on Friday, which does not name the AI companies or the publishers affected, comes amid a public dispute between AI search startup Perplexity and media outlet Forbes involving the same web standard and a broader debate between tech and media firms over the value of content in the age of generative AI.

The business media publisher publicly accused Perplexity of plagiarizing its investigative stories in AI-generated summaries without citing Forbes or asking for its permission.

A Wired investigation published this week found Perplexity likely bypassing efforts to block its web crawler via the Robots Exclusion Protocol, or “robots.txt,” a widely accepted standard meant to determine which parts of a site are allowed to be crawled.

Perplexity declined a Reuters request for comment on the dispute.

The News Media Alliance, a trade group representing more than 2,200 U.S.-based publishers, expressed concern about the impact that ignoring “do not crawl” signals could have on its members.

“Without the ability to opt out of massive scraping, we cannot monetize our valuable content and pay journalists. This could seriously harm our industry,” said Danielle Coffey, president of the group.

Source: Exclusive-Multiple AI companies bypassing web standard to scrape publisher sites, licensing firm says

So the original clickbait headline comes from a content licensing startup scaring content providers up but with no details whatsoever. Why is this even news?!

If you found out that 500,000 books had been removed from your local public library, at the demands of big publishers who refused to let them buy and lend new copies, and were further suing the library for damages, wouldn’t you think that would be a major news story? Wouldn’t you think many people would be up in arms about it?

It’s happening right now with the Internet Archive, and it’s getting almost no attention.

As we’ve discussed at great length, the Internet Archive’s Open Library system is indistinguishable from the economics of how a regular library works. The Archive either purchases physical books or has them donated (just like a physical library). It then lends them out on a one-to-one basis (leaving aside a brief moment where it took down that barrier when basically all libraries were shut down due to pandemic lockdowns), such that when someone “borrows” a digital copy of a book, no one else can borrow that same copy.

And yet, for all of the benefits of such a system in enabling more people to be able to access information, without changing the basic economics of how libraries have always worked, the big publishers all sued the Internet Archive. The publishers won the first round of that lawsuit. And while the court (somewhat surprisingly!) did not order the immediate closure of the Open Library, it did require the Internet Archive to remove any books upon request from publishers (though only if the publishers made those books available as eBooks elsewhere).

As the case has moved into the appeals stage (where we have filed an amicus brief), the Archive has revealed that around 500,000 books have been removed from the open library.

The Archive has put together an open letter to publishers, requesting that they restore access to this knowledge and information — a request that will almost certainly fall on extremely deaf ears.

We purchase and acquire books—yes, physical, paper books—and make them available for one person at a time to check out and read online. This work is important for readers and authors alike, as many younger and low-income readers can only read if books are free to borrow, and many authors’ books will only be discovered or preserved through the work of librarians. We use industry-standard technology to prevent our books from being downloaded and redistributed—the same technology used by corporate publishers.

But the publishers suing our library say we shouldn’t be allowed to lend the books we own. They have forced us to remove more than half a million books from our library, and that’s why we are appealing. 

The Archive also has a huge collection of quotes from people who have been impacted negatively by all of this. Losing access to knowledge is a terrible, terrible thing, driven by publishers who have always hated the fundamental concept of libraries and are very much using this case as an attack on the fundamental principle of lending books.

[…]

And, why? Because copyright and DRM systems allow publishers to massively overcharge for eBooks. This is what’s really the underlying factor here. Libraries in the past could pay the regular price for a book and then lend it out. But with eBook licensing, they are able to charge exorbitant monopoly rents, while artificially limiting how many books libraries can even buy.

I don’t think many people realize the extreme nature of the pricing situation here. As we’ve noted, a book that might cost $29.99 retail can cost $1,300 for an eBook license, and that license may include restrictions, such as having to relicense after a certain number of lends, or saying a library may only be allowed to purchase a single eBook license at a time.

The ones who changed the way libraries work is not the Internet Archive. It’s the publishers. They’re abusing copyright and DRM to fundamentally kill the very concept of a library, and this lawsuit is a part of that strategy.

Source: 500,000 Books Have Been Deleted From The Internet Archive’s Lending Library | Techdirt

One of the arguments sometimes made in defence of copyright is that without it, creators would be unable to compete with the hordes of copycats that would spring up as soon as their works became popular. Copyright is needed, supporters say, to prevent less innovative creators from producing works that are closely based on new, successful ideas. However, this approach has led to constant arguments and court cases over how close a “closely based” work can be before it infringes on the copyright of others. A good example of this is the 2022 lawsuit involving Ed Sheeran, where is was argued that using just four notes of a scale constituted copyright infringement of someone else’s song employing the same tiny motif. A fascinating new paper looks at things from a different angle. It draws on the idea of “first-mover advantage”, the fact that:

individuals that move to a new market niche early on (“first movers”) obtain advantages that may lead to larger success, compared to those who move to this niche later. First movers enjoy a temporary near-monopoly: since they enter a niche early, they have little to no competition, and so they can charge larger prices and spend more time building a loyal customer base.

The paper explores the idea in detail for the world of music. Here, first-mover advantage means:

The artists and music producers who recognize the hidden potential of a new artistic technique, genre, or style, have bigger chances of reaching success. Having an artistic innovation that your competitors do not have or cannot quickly acquire may become advantageous on the winner-take-all artistic market.

Analysing nearly 700,000 songs across 110 different musical genres, the researchers found evidence that first-mover advantage was present in 91 of the genres. The authors point out that there is also anecdotal evidence of first-mover advantage in other arts:

For example, Agatha Christie—one of the recognized founders of “classical” detective novel—is also one of the best-selling authors ever. Similarly, William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer—a canonical work in the genre of cyberpunk—is also one of the earliest books in this strand of science fiction. In films, the cult classic The Blair Witch Project is the first recognized member of the highly successful genre of found-footage horror fiction.

Although copyright may be present, first-mover advantage does not require it to operate – it is simply a function of being early with a new idea, which means that competition is scarce or non-existent. If further research confirms the wider presence of first-mover advantage in the creative world – for example, even where sharing-friendly CC licences are used – it will knock down yet another flimsy defence of copyright’s flawed and outdated intellectual monopoly

Source: First-mover advantage in the arts means copyright isn’t necessary to protect innovative creativity – Walled Culture

The Japanese government is pushing ahead with a plan to make Japan’s publicly funded research output free to read. From a report: In June, the science ministry will assign funding to universities to build the infrastructure needed to make research papers free to read on a national scale. The move follows the ministry’s announcement in February that researchers who receive government funding will be required to make their papers freely available to read on the institutional repositories from January 2025. The Japanese plan “is expected to enhance the long-term traceability of research information, facilitate secondary research and promote collaboration,” says Kazuki Ide, a health-sciences and public-policy scholar at Osaka University in Suita, Japan, who has written about open access in Japan.

The nation is one of the first Asian countries to make notable advances towards making more research open access (OA) and among the first countries in the world to forge a nationwide plan for OA. The plan follows in the footsteps of the influential Plan S, introduced six years ago by a group of research funders in the United States and Europe known as cOAlition S, to accelerate the move to OA publishing. The United States also implemented an OA mandate in 2022 that requires all research funded by US taxpayers to be freely available from 2026. When the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) announced Japan’s pivot to OA in February, it also said that it would invest around $63 million to standardize institutional repositories — websites dedicated to hosting scientific papers, their underlying data and other materials — ensuring that there will be a mechanism for making research in Japan open.

Source: https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/05/31/1748243/japans-push-to-make-all-research-open-access-is-taking-shape?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

Quite ironic that the original article is behind a paywall at Nature.com 🙂

Anyway, if the public paid for it, then the public should get it. A bit hugely late, but well done.

Delta, an emulator that can play Nintendo games, had to change its logo after Adobe threatened legal action. You’d think it would face trouble from Nintendo, seeing as it has been going after emulators these days, but no. It’s Adobe who’s going after the developer, which told TechCrunch that it first received an email from the company’s lawyer on May 7. Adobe warned Delta that their logos are too similar, with its app icon infringing on the well-known Adobe “A,” and asked it to change its logo so it wouldn’t violate the company’s rights. Delta reportedly received an email from Apple, as well, telling the developer that Adobe asked it to take down the emulator app.

If you’ll recall, Apple started allowing retro game emulators on the App Store, as long as they don’t offer pirated games for download. Delta was one of the first to be approved for listing and was at the top of Apple’s charts for a while, which is probably why it caught Adobe’s attention. At the time of writing, it sits at number six in the ranking for apps in Entertainment with 17,100 ratings.

The developer told both Adobe and Apple that its logo was a stylized version of the Greek letter “delta,” and not the uppercase letter A. Regardless, it debuted a new logo, which looks someone took a sword to its old one to cut it in half. It’s a temporary solution, though — the developer said it’s releasing the “final” version of its new logo when Delta 1.6 comes out.

Source: Adobe threatens to sue Nintendo emulator Delta for its look-alike logo