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Morning Coffee – 1 March 2019

Here are a few stories to read this Friday morning.

 

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Disgusting Dude March 1, 2019 um 6:43 am

The Digiday UK piece is just precious.
They’ll never get it.
"The money just rolls in."


Barry Marks March 1, 2019 um 11:36 am

I like your blog in general but I wish you’d make your headlines less judgemental.

While you may think that what the internet archive is doing is wrong, always referring to it as a pirate site is just as wrong. The vast majority of what they do is good, honest stuff. The few copyrighted books they offer are questionable but that matter hasn’t been decided in law yet. There’s nothing wrong with having and expressing your opinion but what you’re doing is name calling. I wish you’d stop it.

The same is true with the LA Times headline. While we might agree that what they’re doing is bad policy stealing is a legal term and that hasn’t been decided yet. More name calling.

Your blog, overall, tends to be pretty responsible and informative, but I’m afraid to recommend it to friends when they might see you doing things like that.

Barry

Nate Hoffelder March 1, 2019 um 12:55 pm

I didn’t say the IA was a pirate site; I said this one part was a pirate site. And you’re wrong about whether "The few copyrighted books they offer are questionable but that matter hasn’t been decided in law yet"; it’s already well established that The Open Library is committing piracy.

What you may have missed is that the Internet Archive is hoping to be sued over this and get a ruling in their favor. That may happen, but until it does it is completely reasonable to say The Open Library is engaging in piracy.

I’ll take the other under advisement.

Disgusting Dude March 1, 2019 um 4:48 pm

It is a matter of legal record that ebook and pbook editions of the same manuscript are different products requiring separate and distinct licenses, just as audio, translation, and performance adaptations for video or radio.

You can’t buy a print copy of a book and use it as a script for a radio show or read it as an audiobook without expecting to be sued and losing. Those are all separate derivative works that require explicit licenses. (You can do that privately for personal use and get away with it but not on a large scale.)

Scanning and ocr’ing a pbook for personal use is one thing; distributing it without a license, whether one at a time or thousands of copies at a time is the exact same violation of copyright. So yes, piracy is the correct term.


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