Arizona State University Librarian James O’Donnell’s comments on new developments in the lawsuit against the Internet Archive, published here with the author’s permission.
The case of Hachette et al. v. Internet Archive lumbers on. It is mostly impossible to comment on this case without getting into the partisan weeds, and not much point to doing that. This is the kind of case that will have its life independent of what the enlightened general reader thinks or expects and will end where it ends. For the latest [an update from Publisher’s Weekly].
But I will allow myself what feels like a non-partisan set of observations.
1. The future of intellectual property is bound up with accessibility, use, and reuse. A book or article that is not accessible in the space of intelligent consumption—a digitally dominated space—will disappear forever, like an ancient poet who never managed to get copied into the newfangled codex technology and lies today in the sands of Egypt hoping, for the most part in vain, that some archaeologist may yet dig up his papyrus roll. When (not if) humankind outsources much of what we now call reading to bots and agents and other AI interventions yet unborn, the inaccessible intellectual object will simply no longer have a meaningful existence.
2. It is equally unmistakable that we do not yet have a civilizational strategy for rescuing much of our heritage from inaccessibility. A book that has not entered the public domain depends utterly for its future on the wishes of the owner of its copyright and the owner’s ability to find a medium of dissemination that suits their needs. Many such books are trapped in the estates of dead authors who have no resourceful heirs to ensure propagation of the work. That way lies oblivion.
How shall we rescue our past, that is ourselves, from this dilemma? Controlled digital lending has been introduced as one hypothetical path forward, with many advantages and of course disadvantages. If the only reasonable reaction to its strategy is outraged suppressive litigation, then the only reasonable question to ask of the outraged parties is: So what do we do instead? How do we rescue the past? I may have missed something, of course, but I’ve not yet heard a coherent and realistic answer to that question.
