Tag Archive for: Tillis

Senator Thom Tillis Seems Really Pissed Off That The Internet Archive Bought A Record Store To Make Rare Recordings Accessible

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Senator Thom Tillis (or perhaps some staffer in his office who is desperate for a job as a legacy copyright industry lobbyist in his next job) really seems to have it in for the Internet Archive. Beyond trying to rewrite copyright law to make it favor the legacy players even more than it already does, and beyond telling copyright experts that they shouldn’t even dare think of commenting on the state of copyright law today, Tillis really seems to have an infatuation with the Internet Archive wanting to help people by providing them information. I don’t know what the library ever did to Tillis as a child, but as a Senator he sure seems to hate the very concept. He sent one very confused, misinformed, and angry letter to the Internet Archive over its National Emergency Library, and now he’s sent another one after news broke that the Archive had purchased the distressed, but famed, Bop Street Records in Seattle.

When the news originally broke that the Archive had purchased Bop Street, most portrayed it as great news. The owner, Dave Vorhees, had decided to shut down the shop a month earlier, and he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to sell off the 500,000 recordings the store held. So people were excited that the Archive stepped in — and did so not with plans to lock up and hide the collection, but to find the gems that could be made available and do so:

Kahle has a particular interest in obscure recordings, he said. “High school marching bands, soundtracks for foreign movies you’ve never heard of — those are just treasures.”

The diversity and quality of the Bop Street inventory, which includes more than 100 albums by jazz pianist Fats Waller as well as a healthy selection of classical music, rock, R&B, jazz, country and other musical genres, was exactly the kind of thing the Internet Archive is on the lookout for, Kahle said.

If you can’t tell, Brewster Kahle has the mind of someone looking to preserve and share culture.

Thom Tillis, on the other hand, has the mind of someone who thinks that culture must be locked up:

According to a May 15, 2020 article in the Seattle Times, the Internet Archive has purchased Bop Street Records full collection of 500,000 sound recordings with the “inten[t] to digitize the recordings and put them online, where they can be streamed for free.” It is not clear from the article, or others, if you intend to digitize all of the sound recordings acquired from Bop Street. But it is clear that these sound recordings were very recently for sale in a commercial record shop and likely contain many sound recordings that retain significant commercial value. This raises serious alarms about copyright infringement.

As I understand, Bop Street Records, which the Wall Street Journal once deemed a top-five record shop in the country, focuses on collectible-quality vinyl records across a diverse range of musical genres. According to its website, there sound recordings includes “Rock, Soul/R&B, Jazz, Blues, Classical, Country, World and many other genres from the 1920’s to 1990’s.” The overwhelming majority-if not all-of these sound recordings are protected by U.S. copyright law, and thus may not be digitized and streamed or downloaded without authorization.

In a similar vein, I am aware of the Internet Archive’s “Great 78 Project,” which has already digitized-and continues to digitize daily-a vast trove of 78 rpm recordings, many of which are also commercially valuable recordings already in the marketplace, and has made those recordings available to the public for free through unlimited streaming and download. I understand that the Internet Archive is framing this and its other sound recording projects–which include both obscure gems for music fans and hits from the likes of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Johnny Cash-as preservation, but your current practices raise numerous potential issues of copyright infringement. The Bop Street collection is likely to add to that. Among other things, your sound recording projects do not appear to comply with the relevant provisions of the Orrin G. Hatch-Bob Goodlatte Music Modernization Act (MMA), which deals only with pre-1972 sound recordings and would not allow for streaming or downloading. Moreover, there are additional copyrights, such as the musical composition and the album artwork, that are displayed on the Internet Archive website and would not be covered by an exception for preservation.

The inclusion of the Great 78 Project here just seems to be a gratuitous anti-culture attack by Tillis for no goddam reason other than he is against the preservation of cultural artifacts. The Great 78 Project has been out for a few years now, and it’s a project that was put together not just by the Internet Archive, but in collaboration with the Archive of Contemporary Music and George Blood LP. The project is a recognition that tons of old 78rpm records are the only copies of that music ever recorded and my grandparents were the last generation to have easy access to a 78 rpm record player. The archival of those records falls into a murky space in copyright law because, thanks to insane copyright term extension. You can be pretty damn sure that anything on a 78rpm record, when it was recorded, was recorded with the clear understanding that by 2020, it would be in the public domain. The fact that some might not be isn’t a condemnation of the Great 78 Project, but of Congress for destroying culture in this manner.

Now, someone who was actually, say, an elected official representing the public and who took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, including the clause that pretty directly states that the purpose of copyright law is to “promote the progress,” might look at that last paragraph and say, quite obviously, that if a jumble of messed up copyright laws are getting in the way of preserving music that no one can listen to, and of making it widely available — or that merely posting album artwork is somehow against the law — that maybe the law is pretty damn messed up, and that Congress — or even the Senate Intellectual Subcommittee, of which Thom Tillis is the chair — would want to fix those obviously broken laws.

But, nope. To Tillis it’s an opportunity to attack a library that has stepped up to save a massive collection of rare items, and to give them a new life. To someone of Tillis’ point of view — that seems to merely be an unfiltered, unthinking conduit for some giant Hollywood interests — this kind of public good must be stopped.

Techdirt.

Senator Tillis Angry At The Internet Archive For Helping People Read During A Pandemic; Archive Explains Why That’s Wrong

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A few weeks ago, we wrote about the misguided freakout by (mainly) publishers and some authors over the Internet Archive’s decision to launch the National Emergency Library during the COVID-19 pandemic, to help all of us who are stuck at home be able to digitally access books that remain in locked libraries around the country. A key point I made in that post: most (not all, but most) of the criticisms applied to the NEL project could equally apply to regular libraries. And perhaps that’s why hundreds of libraries have come out in support of the project, even as those attacking the project insist that it’s not an attack on libraries.

Either way, it was only a matter of time before publishers got their lapdogs in Congress to start making noise, and first out of the gate was Senator Thom Tillis, who is already deep into his attempt to make copyright law worse, and who last week sent a letter to the Internet Archive’s Brewster Kahle that reads very much like it was written by book publishers. First it gets high and mighty about how the pandemic has “shown the critical value of copyrighted works to the public interest” which is just a weird way to phrase things. The fact that something valuable is covered by copyright does not automatically mean that copyright is helpful or valuable for that situation. Then it gets to the point:

I am not aware of any measure under copyright law that permits a user of copyrighted works to unilaterally create an emergency copyright act. Indeed, I am deeply concerned that your “Library” is operating outside the boundaries of the copyright law that Congress has enacted and alone has jurisdiction to amend.

A few days later, Kahle responded in a detailed and thorough letter to Tillis. It points out that the Internet Archive is well-established and recognized by the state of California as a library, and that it has already shown that it has a legal right to digitize books. And then goes on to explain that the point of the NEL is to help enable Tillis’ own constituents to access to the books that their tax dollars paid for while they’re locked up collecting dust inside libraries that are closed during the pandemic.

The National Emergency Library was developed to address a temporary and significant need in our communities — for the first time in our nation’s history, the entire physical library system is offline and unavailable. Your constituents have paid for millions of books they currently cannot access. According to National Public Library survey data from 2018-2019, North Carolina’s public libraries house more than fifteen million print book volumes in three-hundred twenty-three branches across the State. Because those branches are now closed and their books are unavailable, the massive public investment paid for by tax-paying citizens is unavailable to the very people who funded it. This also goes for public school libraries and academic libraries at community colleges, public colleges and universities as well. The National Emergency Library was envisioned to meet this challenge of providing digital access to print materials, helping teachers, students and communities gain access to books while their schools and libraries are closed.

It also highlights something else that many had missed: the NEL does not include any books published within the last five years — which is pretty important, since the commercial value of a book usually exists in the first couple years after publishing. Indeed, a recent study highlighted how the vast, vast, vast majority of sales tends to come soon after a book is published and then sales decline rapidly. So the argument that the NEL is somehow taking away from author income is already somewhat questionable.

And, indeed, the Archive is currently seeing evidence that suggests the NEL is not actually impacting author earnings in any significant way:

In an early analysis of the use we are seeing what we expected: 90% of the books borrowed were published more than ten years ago, two-thirds were published during the twentieth century. The number of books being checked out and read is comparable to that of a town of about 30,000 people. Further, about 90% of people borrowing the book only looked at it for 30 minutes. These usage patterns suggest that perhaps that patrons may be using the checked-out book for fact checking or research, but we suspect a large number of people are browsing the book in a way similar to browsing library shelves.

The Internet Archive has also been highlighting case studies of teachers and students helped out by the NEL.

Kahle also explains to Tillis how he’s wrong to say that copyright law does not allow this kind of lending. It’s called fair use.

You raise the question of how this comports with copyright law. Fortunately, we do not need an “emergency copyright act” because the fair use doctrine, codified in the Copyright Act, provides flexibility to libraries and others to adjust to changing circumstances. As a result, libraries can and are meeting the needs of their patrons during this crisis in a variety of ways. The Authors Guild, the leading critic of the National Emergency Library, has been incorrect in their assessment of the scope and flexibility of the fair use doctrine in the past and this is another instance where we respectfully disagree.

The reference regarding the Authors Guild being wrong about fair use refers to its years-long fight to stop libraries from digitizing books, which resulted in a massive loss for the Guild’s ridiculous interpretation of copyright and fair use.

In the end there are a bunch of important points here: even if Tillis is right that copyright is somehow proving its value in a pandemic (and he’s not), that doesn’t change the simple fact that this library is enabling people who cannot check out physical books from their locked community libraries to at least be able to access those books while remaining safe at home. The Internet Archive has legal scans of these books, and hundreds of libraries are supporting this effort. While it’s true, as some authors and publishers highlight, that there are official ebooks for some books, many (especially older) books do not have them at all — and those include lots of books that are commonly read in classrooms. And, as we pointed out last time, in cases where there are official ebooks, almost anyone would prefer to get those copies, because they are much easier to read and designed to be read on a reading device (specialized reading device, tablet, or phone) as compared to the NEL scans, which are straight scans of the book pages.

No matter what, it’s a really bad look for Tillis to stomp around complaining that his constituents might actually be able to read books that are currently locked up in libraries. Remember that the entire intent of copyright law in the first place, and the subtitle of the US’s very first copyright law, was that it be to enable learning. The Internet Archive is trying to help push forward that clear goal of copyright law… while Senator Tillis seems to want to stop it.

In the end, there’s very little “there” there to the complaints about this project. It’s difficult to see how it’s harming author revenue in any real way, but it is clearly helping schools and students while the libraries and books they normally use are unavailable. And, there are strong arguments for why this is perfectly legal under copyright law — and if the claim is that we should wait until that’s absolutely proven in court, well, that kinda misses the whole point of helping out during a pandemic.

As professor Brian Frye recently wrote about all of this: “When you find yourself complaining about libraries, you might want to think twice about your priorities.” And I’d say that counts double in the midst of a pandemic.

Techdirt.