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.
When I want to pirate books I go to Library Genesis for that so this doesn’t impact me.
What would impact me is if IA loses enough of these lawsuits that the Wayback Machine goes offline. So maybe stop poking the bear, IA?
Perhaps you only care about the wayback machine, but there’s more to the Internet Archive than that, and they shouldn’t be expected to roll over and take it whenever some awful company decides to do a bit of digital book burning.
The linked article is specifically asking what impacts me. I am responding by explaining what impacts me.
Yes, IA has more than just the Wayback Machine. I’m not sure what your point is though. All of that is threatened by these lawsuits. Maybe if preserving that data is important IA should focus on preserving that data. Giving out unlimited copies to everyone is an unrelated secondary goal to preserving archives, so if a big company with a strong legal case comes along and says “stop giving out unlimited copies or we’ll destroy you” then maybe stop giving out unlimited copies.
That’s not “digital book burning.” The opposite, in fact. It’s acting to preserve digital books.
They don’t care about your story of how losing their library of books doesn’t impact you. I’m not sure why that wasn’t obvious to you.
They asked:
There’s no asterisk on that specifying “only answers that favor our lawsuit are desired.”
They are trying to say that people aren’t using it for piracy, that they’re using it for legitimate things like academic study. That’s what they want stories from.
They also aren’t poking the bear, they’re appealing a lawsuit.
The lawsuit was the result of bear-poking. It’s a result of their “National Emergency Library” that they briefly rolled out in 2020 where they took all the limits off of their “lending” and let people download as many copies as they wanted. Was “legitimate academic study” not possible before, with the old limits that weren’t provoking lawsuits?
That is simply a lie.
https://www.eff.org/cases/hachette-v-internet-archive
Why you told a lie that was so obviously false I don’t know.
Here’s the Wikipedia article on the lawsuit. From the opening paragraph:
IA was using the CDL without any problems or complaints before the National Emergency Library incident, with the one-copy-at-a-time restriction in place. It was only after they took those limiters off that the lawsuit was launched.
What I said was true.