The legal ruling against the Internet Archive has come down in favour of the rights of authors.

  • NateNate60@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I remember my aunt (lawyer) coming up with some insane conspiracy-level solution to this problem:

    The Supreme Court has ruled in Allen v. Cooper that Congressional attempts to make US state governments liable for copyright infringement are unconstitutional. In other words, US states can’t be sued for copyright infringement under US federal law without their permission. Under standard federal jurisprudence, all subdivisions and departments of a state are considered to be the state they are a part of for the purposes of sovereign immunity. This also applies to organisations that receive most of their funding from and are wholly dependent on state government agencies as well.

    The solution would be to have a friend state government either:

    • donate a copious amount of money to the Internet Archive to make it “financially dependent” on that state government, or
    • in cooperation with the Internet Archive, pass a law that makes the Internet Archive an independent state agency of that government (probably safer in terms of keeping the IA independent)

    This would make the IA fully immune from copyright lawsuits because they would benefit from their patron state’s sovereign immunity. But it comes at the cost that the patron state has a lot of power over the IA. A considerable trade-off.