Tomorrow, @internetarchive will file their reply brief in the suit from major #publishers to end the right of IA and all #libraries to own and preserve #spyware-free digital #books.
Reading what they’re replying to, we’ve gotta ask:
Who is the real “Napster” here?
A thread.
What the Archive’s book library does is scan paper books to make their own digital copies so that they can loan them without letting tech companies and publishing conglomerates spy on readers. https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2023-12-07-25-human-rights-organizations-call-on-2024-congress-to-investigate-big-tech-and-publishings-stranglehold-over-digital-books
And loan such books out in a 1-to-1 ratio, just like they would the paper book sitting in their warehouse, without paying totally atrocious licensing fees over and over.
https://ebooksforus.com/
But tomorrow, Internet Archive is replying to legal arguments that libraries scanning and loaning the books they own amounts to the impact of #Napster on the #musicindustry in the ‘00s, but for publishing revenue.
…does it now?
The #RIAA even included this chart in their amicus brief, which shows how recording industry revenues plunged down by half over the years that the internet really started to happen.
(Whether that was the fault of piracy or just the fact that dinosaur record execs were plugging their ears and saying “lalala the internet doesn’t exist” is for another thread.
As is the fact that recording industry profits are higher than ever yet musicians are struggling worse than ever.)
Either way, the numbers don’t lie in the RIAA’s chart. The recording industry had a huge revenue problem in the ‘00s.
So if Internet Archive and other libraries are devastating publishing by lending books, there’s a chart to show that too, right?
No. There is no chart to show the same economic harm to publishing from what @internetarchive or any other library does, not even from piracy.
So, we charted it ourselves using ten years of data from Association of American Publishers
Publishing profits are better than they were 10 years ago, all the time that Internet Archive has been doing its thing—loaning the books it owns.
And yet Big Publishing is pouring money into suing the Archive, saying that they’ve been economically devastated?
We don’t see it.
What publishing wins from the Archive, if they win (and they shouldn’t), is $$$ straight into the pockets of lawyers and lobbyists, not #authors.
Ask us how we know?
We made a third chart.
While the tens of billions publishing is making has been at historic highs over the past several years, median author incomes, which frankly were always pathetic, have gone down over 50% since 2007.
This massive dip on the chart of author incomes (thank you #AuthorsGuild for the data!) looks an awful lot like the plunge that record labels took when, their words not ours, someone was “stealing” from them.
