Of course someone needs to scan/digitise those books but for those which already are, there is Anna’s Archive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive

Programmers not law makers really control what goes and doesnt online.

Bittorent and ipfs etc are nice but things would be better if there was a large static archive with desktop clients exchanging chunks in a complex modular way.

Say: I have pages 1-15 of file 123456, you have page 16 but are looking for page 1 of doc 2345, if i can obtain that page a fast exchange is possible. If not a different module can issue an iou that either means i owe something, you are owed something or both. Other modules could create groups that aim to store part of the archive without duplication amoung members. Spam driven modules could also be interesting.

The archive can be organized by how dubious the copyright is so that one can limit participation to 50 or 100+ year old publications and/or living or dead authors.

Its not unlike living on a far away island with the british empire seeking to control every aspect of your life without sufficient means of force.

For Kagi users, I recommend putting books.google.com as a pinned domain. This way, you'll many times be presented with some of the best sources for any search query. Then it's a matter of finding the ePub file of that book. To read on MacOS, FBReader is a high quality app.

We need a Copyright Term Reduction Act.

It's time. 50 years, renewal is possible but expensive.

  * 20 years from date of first publish (renewable up to CAP? 50 years)
  * Must remain available every year
  * 10 year renewal blocks with massive registration fee increases
  * Compulsory maximum license fee cap (can offer for less) in the laws

Let’s rewrite copyright law:

1. The author gets to say, “I produced this”, and to control if it gets published.

2. Exclusive copyright for 15 year terms.

3. Renewal possible if author still alive. Non-human rights holders (corporations, etc.) limited to 30 years total (one renewal) from date of first publication, regardless of item ownership. Failure to renew automatically opens up the product.

4. Existing copyright can be overridden if demand isn’t being adequately serviced (sliding scale, challenger must capture minimum % of existing market demand to prove). Pricing of overriding attempts must be reasonable, only cost of production can be directly paid for, everything else goes into an escrow account until the attempt is concluded. This is where anti-abuse rules for both sides are most extensive.

Information and knowledge must be free. Our civilization depends vitally upon that freedom.

I’m sure the lawyers will eventually figure out a way to train an LLM on them.

Written from a capitalist perspective, extolling "market forces" and legitimizing corporate and government limitations on copying.

"between 1923 and 1963 ... copyrights back then had to be renewed, and often the rightsholder wouldn’t bother filing the paperwork" - oh no, how terrible. How lucky we are that in these modern times one doesn't even have to file paperwork in order to prevent you from copying information.

and they go on to suck to Google and decry how they didn't get to legitimize their control over a large swath of human knowledge and cultural heritage.

"It certainly seems unlikely that someone is going to spend political capital—especially today—trying to change the licensing regime for books, let alone old ones." <- copyright regime, licensing regime - all of this stuff is illegitimate apriori. Poetry, literature, music, software, papers and books - we cannot and must not tolerate restrictions on their dissemination.

What arrangements the commercial and governmental entities come to, our "arrangement" should be that everything gets disseminated widely and without restriction, so that curtailment, censorship, commercial control etc. just fail.

James Somers writes beautifully; https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/james-somers has some of his other writing

> Copyright terms have been radically extended in this country largely to keep pace with Europe, where the standard has long been that copyrights last for the life of the author plus 50 years. But the European idea, “It’s based on natural law as opposed to positive law,” Lateef Mtima, a copyright scholar at Howard University Law School, said. “Their whole thought process is coming out of France and Hugo and those guys that like, you know, ‘My work is my enfant,’” he said, “and the state has absolutely no right to do anything with it—kind of a Lockean point of view.” As the world has flattened, copyright laws have converged, lest one country be at a disadvantage by freeing its intellectual products for exploitation by the others. And so the American idea of using copyright primarily as a vehicle, per the constitution, “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,” not to protect authors, has eroded to the point where today we’ve locked up nearly every book published after 1923.

This is disingenuous: the article doesn’t mention that the biggest proponent of the prolonging of the copyright terms were Americans (e.g., Walt Disney Corp and Jack Valenti, see “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” for more) not Europeans.

The tragedy is that Google is tasked with this at all. It would be cool if public libraries could work together on a massive public digital library. This shouldn't be Google's responsibility.