Morning Coffee – 6 April 2020

06.04.2020 Nate Hoffelder 3 Comments

Here are a few stories to read this Monday morning.

The first 5 stories are all on the same topic (the Internet Archive’s recent acts of piracy), so I have split the other links into a separate section.

• Bill Rosenblatt reached the same conclusion about the Internet Archive’s National Emergency library pirate site that I did, that Brewster Kahle’s goal was less about helping libraries and more about forcing a lawsuit in order to rewrite copyright laws. 
• Karin Wulf believes that the " Internet Archive is not breaking the glass to save anyone but rather seems to be just… breaking glass". 
• David Newhoff questions the ethics of the Internet Archive’s decision to deprive creators of income, and rightly so. 
• Victoria Strauss explains how there’s no legislative or judicial basis for the IA’s claims of fair use. 
• Ryan Clough lays out the measures real libraries are taking in response to the current crisis, all of which are far more limited than the Internet Archive’s acts of piracy. 

• A new theory has been invented about who actually wrote Shakespeare’s plays. 
• When it comes time to refresh your author website, I have a few ideas of what you should look at. 
• Online ad rates fell last week, and continue to fall (because people aren’t buying). 
• Here’s a bunch of ways to save money when buying more books. 
• Ted Goia points out how many web platforms such as Facebook and Youtube are designed to get creators to give their work away so companies can exploit it.