[HN Gopher] If we lose the Internet Archive, we're screwed
___________________________________________________________________
If we lose the Internet Archive, we're screwed
Author : raybb
Score : 1283 points
Date : 2023-04-06 14:30 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sbstatesman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sbstatesman.com)
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Someone needs to start a competing Internet Archive, which only
| archives, you know, THE INTERNET, and not xbox games, warez,
| movies, music, books, etc.
|
| The overreach at IA is much bigger than it looks on the surface.
| Go look at the things people are uploading there.
| oefrha wrote:
| > Someone needs to start a competing Internet Archive, which
| only archives, you know, THE INTERNET
|
| And a faster, more reliable (in terms of percentage of 5XX
| responses) one would be nice. Right now Wayback Machine
| performance leaves a lot to be desired. I end up using
| archive.is whenever possible.
|
| Yes, I donate to Internet Archive, don't chastise me.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I'm surprised there isn't a paid alternative to Wayback
| Machine. I'd pay for fewer 5xx errors (which are often rate
| limiting, I.E. "You clicked more than 10 times in 10 minutes,
| that's WAY TOO FAST bro")
| bloppe wrote:
| I agree with the title and general sentiment, but the article
| comes across as a diatribe and the author does not seem to be
| arguing completely in good faith ("There's no evidence the
| borrowing program scooped up any independent writers' income"
| relies entirely on the impossibility of proving a
| counterfactual). I want more information about the nitty gritty
| details of the case; the implications of the ruling on the CDL
| and books besides the 133 involved in the suit. It's seems like a
| pretty narrow case; not an existential threat to the IA itself.
| phmqk76 wrote:
| [dead]
| _the_inflator wrote:
| Internet Archive is hugely important for me. I found a lot of
| antic books regarding technical specifications from vintage
| computers like Commodores VC 20, C64, C128, Amiga series as well
| as Atari ST and 286/386. Manuals, magazines, construction plans,
| whatever you want to search for.
|
| A lot of software references for long gone C compilers, Turbo
| Pascal whatever was popular during the 80th - if you cannot find
| it in the IA, it didn't happen, so to paraphrase.
|
| I love the IA for its effort, to deliver high quality material in
| a digitized format.
|
| While I understand, that there might be copyright, I opt against
| a right to be forgotten. To me these books are classics, like any
| other literature. Preserve this heritage. You can donate to IA.
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| > When Julius Caesar burned the Library of Alexandria, it was
| harder to imagine a greater destruction of scholarship.
|
| Dude. We're not talking about losing secret ancient knowledge.
| We're talking about losing pictures of cats.
|
| There is nothing on the internet that's so valuable that we
| couldn't live without it. Real research, real knowledge, makes
| its way out of the internet. And besides, most of the internet
| that we can actually discover is cached in search engines.
| DanTheManPR wrote:
| >Dude. We're not talking about losing secret ancient knowledge.
| We're talking about losing pictures of cats.
|
| But we're literally talking about book lending, and preserving
| the old knowledge of the early internet. However lofty and
| pretensions the analogy may seem, comparing it to the burning
| of the library of Alexandria actually does seem like a better
| analogy than "we're just losing pictures of cats"
| Mike_12345 wrote:
| Internet Archive stores much more than pictures of cats. Books,
| magazines, technical manuals, documents, software, movies,
| music, images, documentaries, concerts, etc. These are files
| that users upload. The web crawler is just one part of it.
|
| You will find the most obscure things that practically cannot
| be found anywhere else. Stuff that would otherwise be
| permanently lost.
|
| https://archive.org/
|
| "Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free
| books, movies, software, music, websites, and more."
|
| "As of January 1, 2023, the Internet Archive holds over 36
| million books and texts, 11.6 million movies, videos and TV
| shows and clips, 950 thousand software programs, 15 million
| audio files, 4.5 million images, 251 thousand concerts, and 780
| billion web pages in its Wayback Machine."
| breck wrote:
| I'd extend this to say, if we don't abolish (c)opywrong, we're
| screwed.
|
| Does anyone want to go back to the closed source software
| development model of the 1990's? Then why do we not push for the
| open source model not only in software, but across news,
| academia, music, film, databases, et cetera? How many of your
| hard earned tax dollars go to pay for Microsoft's and Oracle's
| technical debt? How much of your tax dollars go pay for
| Elsevier's and Random House's and Wiley's closed source databases
| of publications? Why do we allow this inferior model of treating
| ideas to exist, when we now have solid data that the open way is
| far superior "for the progress of arts and sciences?".
|
| Write your representatives. Organize your communities. It's time
| to pass a new Amendment to the Constitution:
| Section 1. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of this Constitution is
| hereby repealed. Section 2. Congress shall make no law
| abridging the right of the people to publish ideas.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > I'd extend this to say, if we don't abolish (c)opywrong,
| we're screwed.
|
| Then consider us "screwed," because what you propose has a
| snowball's chance in hell of actually happening.
|
| Also, too many software engineers overreact to some reformable
| problems with the IP system with burn-it-all down radicalism. I
| think your proposals would cause more harm than good. They'd
| likely stop most media creation that you're used to*, and
| what's left with either be cheap (think fanfiction) or under
| tighter lockdown than any DRM you've ever seen.
|
| * Tell me, who's going to invest 10-200 million dollars to make
| a movies or TV shows on a regular basis, without copyright?
| breck wrote:
| > * Tell me, who's going to invest 10-200 million dollars to
| make a movies or TV shows on a regular basis, without
| copyright?
|
| We can have a world where:
|
| - Every child has access to humanity's best information
|
| - We cure cancer
|
| - 90% of American's media is controlled by 6,000, not 6,
| corporations
|
| - College tuition costs drop dramatically
|
| - Lower taxes
|
| - More income equality
|
| - No more opioid pandemics
|
| - Making the world resilient against AI domination
|
| Or a world where:
|
| - We make sure that we don't risk disrupting new Game of
| Thrones spinoffs
|
| I know what I choose.
| tablespoon wrote:
| >> * Tell me, who's going to invest 10-200 million dollars
| to make a movies or TV shows on a regular basis, without
| copyright?
|
| > We can have a world where:
|
| > - Every child has access to humanity's best information
|
| > - We cure cancer
|
| > - 90% of American's media is controlled by 6,000, not 6,
| corporations
|
| > - College tuition costs drop dramatically
|
| > - Lower taxes
|
| > - More income equality
|
| > - No more opioid pandemics
|
| > - Making the world resilient against AI domination
|
| LOL. The thing preventing us from curing cancer is
| copyright?
|
| Sir, you have created an entertaining satire of software
| engineers. I congratulate you on your achievement. Good
| job!
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| > LOL. The thing preventing us from curing cancer is
| copyright?
|
| Outright _preventing_ might be slight hyperbole, but it
| 's definitely not helping, no.
|
| See the scientific publishing model, which charges
| scientists twice for their articles (once to publish,
| once to view). Open Science and Scihub are two approaches
| to fixing this issue.
| Apreche wrote:
| We already have laws for historical landmarks. These laws ensure
| the protection of things of societal significance, even to the
| point of restricting the rights of their private owners.
|
| We need such laws for the digital realm. If we had them we
| wouldn't have to worry about Internet Archive, dpreview, etc.
| Imagine if we had such laws in place long ago. We could be living
| in a world where Geocities and MySpace still existed, even if
| only in a read-only form.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Laws are only as good as people's willingness to defend them.
| _They are not real._ Resource mobilization is a much better
| long-term strategy than agreements backed by the threat of
| force, because legislative capture is a real thing and your
| precious laws can done away with by fiat. It has happened over
| and over. Please, do not put your faith in process.
| TylerE wrote:
| Why should tax dollars be used for this?
| i_k_k wrote:
| Because government, and the tax dollars that support it, are
| how we, as a society, take collective action?
| TylerE wrote:
| Why is an archive of DPTeview something that is more
| important than covering basic things like health care
| (especially mental) that we do terribly at?
|
| Why can't those who care about or undertake the effort?
| Thousands of nonprofit private historical societies exist.
| digging wrote:
| > Why should tax dollars be used for this?
|
| Because:
|
| > We already have laws for historical landmarks. These laws
| ensure the protection of things of societal significance
| TylerE wrote:
| The Statue of Liberty is an historical landmark.
|
| Random Geocities pages are not.
| ArcticLandfall wrote:
| Individual Geocities pages are not valuable landmarks,
| but Geocities as a whole - the aesthetic, the community,
| _the history_ - is definitely something to preserve. And
| the cost of saving all of Geocities is a tiny fraction of
| any physical monument.
| TylerE wrote:
| What about the right to be forgotten? I certainly
| wouldn't want some random geocities page I made as a pre-
| teen, quite possibly with personal information on it,
| preserved and accessible for all eternity. Times were oh
| so much more innocent back then, putting mailing
| addresses and phone numbers on personal sites wasn't
| uncommon.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Jumping from one argument to another doesn't make for a
| good discussion. Either defend your initial argument, or
| start a different argument on the same level as the
| first.
| digging wrote:
| That has nothing to do with it. The right to be forgotten
| is not mutually exclusive with public funding for the
| preservation of culturally valuable records. No one is
| saying you couldn't ask to have a specific datum removed,
| edited, or obscured to the public to protect your
| personal information.
| anthonypasq wrote:
| have you heard of the idea of a museum by chance?
| TylerE wrote:
| Yes, they involve this thing called curation, not bulk
| archiving.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| Bulk archival is cheaper than hiring a curator. It uses
| up less of the taxpayer's money.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| What's been preserved of the earlier web will always be a
| little more precious because so much was lost, I suppose.
|
| Back in the day, I assumed anything I did online would be saved
| in some way unless explicitly stated otherwise. I also assumed
| the same of my software environments. I was, of course,
| painfully disabused of these notions multiple times before the
| lesson was fully drilled into me.
|
| I'd like to live in a world where everyone was more aware of
| the value of making special efforts to preserve certain kinds
| of data (see also: having more control over it)-- like where
| it's part of our deeper culture. I think we're steadily moving
| in that direction in some ways, but it would've been nice if it
| had been more thoughtfully considered by both companies and
| governments 25+ years ago. I suspect if they'd known how much
| cheaper storage was going to get, they would have done a lot
| more.
| navierstokess wrote:
| Could we partially back up the Internet Archive to Filecoin?
|
| According to https://file.app/ storing 1PB of data to Filecoin
| for a year would cost $2,336, that's an amount that could be
| crowdfunded.
|
| Of course, IA has much more than a petabyte of data, but it
| wouldn't be impractical to save the most important ( however you
| decide that ) parts of it.
| lenocinor wrote:
| I appreciate the metaphor with the Library of Alexandria, but TIL
| that it may not have burned catastrophically and may have been
| rebuilt after:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria
|
| "Despite the widespread modern belief that the Library of
| Alexandria was burned once and cataclysmically destroyed, the
| Library actually declined gradually over the course of several
| centuries. This decline began with the purging of intellectuals
| from Alexandria in 145 BC during the reign of Ptolemy VIII
| Physcon, which resulted in Aristarchus of Samothrace, the head
| librarian, resigning from his position and exiling himself to
| Cyprus...The Library, or part of its collection, was accidentally
| burned by Julius Caesar during his civil war in 48 BC, but it is
| unclear how much was actually destroyed and it seems to have
| either survived or been rebuilt shortly thereafter; the
| geographer Strabo mentions having visited the Mouseion in around
| 20 BC and the prodigious scholarly output of Didymus Chalcenterus
| in Alexandria from this period indicates that he had access to at
| least some of the Library's resources."
| legitimayzer wrote:
| the roman catholics burned it so to make their mythical "jesus"
| figure stick.
|
| with the info destroyed in that fire we became 'disconnected'
| from the real historical jesus; thereby enabling the rise of
| the mythical figure tweaked to allow easier control of the
| masses. "what would jesus do?"
| theli0nheart wrote:
| Came here to write this. That Julius Caesar burned the library
| seems to be a common misconception.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| It's not just a metaphor, btw. IA actually partners with the
| modern Bibliotheca Alexandrina.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliotheca_Alexandrina#Intern...
| hansoolo wrote:
| Wow, this is really cool!
| tap-snap-or-nap wrote:
| It is few people and their passionate thankless decades of
| unpaid labour that we all heavily rely on.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| So if I'm reading the law[1] right, which I'm probably not, the
| damages for the 127 books should be around $3.8 million, with
| ~$20 million the absolute max? Neither of those amounts seem high
| enough to destroy the IA.
|
| [1]https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/504
| k__ wrote:
| Could they mirror it to Filecoin or Arweave?
| Alifatisk wrote:
| Filecoin & siaskynet have not been reliabile to me
| k__ wrote:
| How come?
| user3939382 wrote:
| I don't know how their finances are structured but the way you
| solve this problem is with a big endowment.
| RGamma wrote:
| We need an IA backup project _right now_ : /
| LinuxBender wrote:
| How many PB is their entire site? I assume they could enable
| native read-only rsyncd easily enough on some caching nodes.
| Anyone re-publishing their library would be at legal risk but
| private mirrors should be _safe_.
| RGamma wrote:
| According to https://archive.org/web/petabox.php it's 99 PB
| unique data and 212 PB total storage on 28k HDDs as of Dec.
| 2021 (3.2M USD at 15 USD/TB for the 212 PB, not sure if the
| price is realistic). It's quite something for a private
| initiative...
| yeeeeeee wrote:
| I'd argue we lost the Internet Archive when they started to
| remove archives of websites because of public backlash.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| We need a new internet archive archive just to stay safe is what
| I'm hearing.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| > We need a new internet
|
| I totally agree.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| https://archive.org/donate/
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Every dollar donated here will end up going to the book
| publishers.
| jawns wrote:
| I know the government has viewed certain companies as "too big to
| fail," because of the negative financial impact we would
| experience if they were to do so.
|
| I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a
| repository of digital or physical artifacts is "too big to fail"
| because of the negative cultural impact their failure would have.
|
| In the absence of that, anyone who sees high cultural value to
| the preservation of these digital artifacts should,
| counterintuitively, _not_ treat the Internet Archive as having
| some special status, but should treat it as a liability. It has
| become the custodian of too much, and too much is on the line if
| it fails.
|
| Rather than trying to constantly shore up the IA so it can't fail
| financially, we should be looking at ways to preserve those
| artifacts redundantly, so that even if the IA fails, it's not a
| calamity.
| paradoxyl wrote:
| No profit in that for lobbyists and corporations. They are the
| only voices that matter in the current system.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| > we should be looking at ways to preserve those artifacts
| redundantly, so that even if the IA fails, it's not a calamity
|
| Its 212 petabytes as of december 2021[1], that alone would be a
| bit less than 12 thousand 18 TB HDDs or LTO-9's. We've made
| virtually zero significant progress in long-term storage
| technology.
|
| Its like if they are getting burned like the library of
| alexandria because of some copyright vampires, I wouldn't even
| be angry, just sad, its just what we deserve.
|
| [1] https://archive.org/web/petabox.php
| cosinetau wrote:
| Interestingly, IA partners with the modern Bibliotecha
| Alexandria to warehouse some of the archival material
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliotheca_Alexandrina#Intern.
| ..
| ummonk wrote:
| An order of magnitude more expensive than HDD (let alone
| tape), but doesn't M-Disc offer a solution here?
| tablespoon wrote:
| > I know the government has viewed certain companies as "too
| big to fail," because of the negative financial impact we would
| experience if they were to do so.
|
| > I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a
| repository of digital or physical artifacts is "too big to
| fail" because of the negative cultural impact their failure
| would have.
|
| If there is, the Internet Archive isn't it.
|
| Yeah, it's super important in certain weird technology and
| library subcultures, but few people outside of them would even
| notice it if disappeared. If they shut down, the story wouldn't
| even be able to muscle it's way onto the front page of the New
| York Times: it would loose to whatever the latest Trump drama
| is and the Nth repetition of the standard mass shooting media
| package.
|
| > In the absence of that, anyone who sees high cultural value
| to the preservation of these digital artifacts should,
| counterintuitively, not treat the Internet Archive as having
| some special status, but should treat it as a liability. It has
| become the custodian of too much, and too much is on the line
| if it fails.
|
| > Rather than trying to constantly shore up the IA so it can't
| fail financially, we should be looking at ways to preserve
| those artifacts redundantly, so that even if the IA fails, it's
| not a calamity.
|
| Yeah, especially since the Internet Archive (as an
| organization) has proven itself to be irresponsible.
|
| Lots of people want to turn the publishers into the villains,
| for ideological reasons as well as a bias towards the Internet
| Archive, but the it's the IA that fucked up here. They
| imperiled their core mission for some unnecessary
| grandstanding. They either need to fire whatever lawyers OK'd
| the "Emergency Library" or the leaders that refused to listen
| to sane legal advice telling them not to do it.
| ramblenode wrote:
| > Yeah, it's super important in certain weird technology and
| library subcultures, but few people outside of them would
| even notice it if disappeared.
|
| A service can be important even if few people use it
| directly. The service can have downstream effects that are
| beneficial to a lot of people because the people who do use
| it are creating and disseminating other content that filters
| its way down.
|
| An analogy would be the US National Weather Service (NOAA).
| Few people look directly at an NOAA feed, but it's used by
| news channels, apps, airlines, scientists, etc. and becomes
| content and services that most people have benefited from.
|
| A robust archive lowers the cost/time of doing research. It
| enables fact checking and investigation, particularly of an
| historical or obscure nature. It services the long tail of
| less frequently accessed content that many of us will, at
| some time, want access to. Basically all the reasons a
| research library is useful.
| kelnos wrote:
| Just because most people may not have heard of it, it doesn't
| mean it's not critically important.
|
| I'm sure most people in the US hadn't heard of many of the
| banks involved in the 2008 financial crisis, but many of
| them, after that fact, might agree that they were indeed too
| big to fail.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| > If they shut down, the story wouldn't even be able to
| muscle it's way onto the front page of the New York Times
|
| What do New York Times reporters use to check web history
| when researching for their stories? Do they just make stuff
| up?
| chongli wrote:
| I think they mostly pull trending stories off Twitter.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _certain weird technology and library subcultures, but few
| people outside of them would even notice it if disappeared_
|
| It's pretty much indispensible to anybody who's a researcher.
|
| It's very frequent that you're tracking down citations to
| webpages that don't exist anymore, and the IA is the only way
| to find sources.
|
| Not to mention that it's also often the only way to quickly
| get access to non-bestseller books that are more than a
| couple of decades old, which is also commonly needed for
| research purposes. Many of these books are only otherwise
| available in the country's largest research libraries.
| (Google has copies too, but nobody can view them.)
|
| It's not weird or a subculture unless you think those labels
| apply to researchers. And there are a _lot_ of researchers
| out there, across academics, non-fiction authors, and
| journalists.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| I do wonder if we're rapidly entering a world where finding
| sources, doing research, etc is going to only be
| interesting to weird subcultures and everyone else will be
| satisfied with whatever the first Google result says, or a
| confident bot's fabrication.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| It was always this way. Replace Google with your neighbor
| who owns an encyclopedia, or the local priest. Caring
| about research, truth, and sources has always been
| something that only a minority cares about.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > It's not weird or a subculture unless you think those
| labels apply to researchers. And there are a lot of
| researchers out there, across academics, non-fiction
| authors, and journalists.
|
| I do think the label applies to researchers. And except for
| the case of "tracking down citations to webpages that don't
| exist anymore," researchers can continue to do all those
| things using traditional methods (which may be a harder,
| but still easy enough, especially if it's your job).
| monknomo wrote:
| What is the traditional method for finding a webpage that
| does not exist anymore?
| ghaff wrote:
| In fairness, a lot of content created over the past 25
| years or so only exists in ephemeral digital form. Some
| is captured in sources that libraries subscribe to but a
| lot of it isn't. (Of course, libraries also subscribe to
| content that was never on the open web.)
|
| It's also the case that pre-web, a lot of that sort of
| content was pretty much lost to time. Per a discussion, a
| little while back, relatively little from the BBS era is
| preserved because it was mostly a distributed group of
| hobbyists.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _researchers can continue to do all those things using
| traditional methods_
|
| No they can't, as I stated. Citations that point to URL's
| that no longer exist require IA. There's no other tool
| currently.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > Lots of people want to turn the publishers into the
| villains
|
| I mean, they _are_ the villains here. They're sueing the IA
| over something that is less than a footnote in their balance
| book.
|
| They're purely doing this for the chilling effect it will
| have on other people that might be impertinent enough to try
| and share their books with others.
| agentwiggles wrote:
| I can't disagree about the irresponsibility of the IA when it
| comes to the Emergency Library stuff. But I for one would be
| pretty heartbroken to lose access to the absolutely enormous
| catalog of live shows from a ton of bands that IA hosts
| completely legally.
| patcon wrote:
| > but few people outside of them would even notice it if
| disappeared.
|
| Um... I don't get the impression that you are speaking from
| any sort of authority
|
| Look up any of their stats and tell me that's librarians and
| "weird technologists".
|
| Small example: 600,000 new users per month are niche
| technologists?
|
| https://archive.org/about/stats.php
|
| More ppl in every town prob use IA than their local library.
| It's important (albeit overly central, but they are working
| on resolving that via IPFS and other technologies)
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Yeah, especially since the Internet Archive (as an
| organization) has proven itself to be irresponsible.
|
| I think the archive made a bad decision. I do not think it is
| generally irresponsible.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| The Internet Archive is one of the easiest-to-access source
| of warez right now, among other things.
|
| Either they have a grand plan for the targets they are
| painting on themselves, or they are bloody irresponsible
| idiots; I'm inclined to bet on the latter given no further
| contexts.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| https://archive.org/about/dmca.php they have a legal
| exemption
| justinclift wrote:
| Hmmm. When they decided to do something so boneheaded, and
| so _obviously_ going-to-seriously-piss-off a bunch of
| famously deep pocketed litigious publishers, they crossed a
| whole bunch of lines.
|
| Not just a "this was a bad decision" line, but past a few
| others as well. eg "reckless behaviour", "wilful
| disregard", and probably more. :(
|
| Hopefully some kind of Hail Mary saves the day. But at the
| _very_ least the senior people at the IA who reviewed and
| green-lit this program should be moved to less senior
| roles.
|
| They clearly needed an adult in charge to have said "No,
| don't do this".
|
| The whole program fails even the most cursory risk
| assessment, and should have been obvious that if it goes
| badly they'd risk killing their whole organisation. :(
| hyperhopper wrote:
| > If they shut down, the story wouldn't even be able to
| muscle it's way onto the front page of the New York Times: it
| would loose to whatever the latest Trump drama is and the Nth
| repetition of the standard mass shooting media package.
|
| That is not a good metric. If the louvre burned, that would
| make headlines everywhere, but it would be nowhere near as
| disasterous as if the internet archive was destroyed.
| drdebug wrote:
| Internet Archive is likely the only memory of the digital
| world. They may or may not have made a mistake during the
| covid pandemic by extending their book lending program, but
| in the age of IA where many text and images are going to lack
| any source of truth, they may be one of the very few ways to
| document modern history.
| tablespoon wrote:
| I'm not saying it's not valuable, I'm saying not that many
| people would even notice, let alone care, if it
| disappeared.
|
| You may personally be one of the people who cares about the
| IA, or know a lot of people who care, but if you go to a
| shopping mall six months after the IA shuts down and ask
| people about it at random, you'd find that level of
| knowledge and caring is unusual. It's not the kind of too-
| big-to-fail that the government would take interest in.
| billiam wrote:
| Sorry, but this is a reductionist argument. There are any
| number of things that could disappear without mall
| visitors knowing about it (NOAA, Earth's magnetic field,
| etc) but that doesn't mean they are not important for
| researchers, students, and others all over the world.
| tablespoon wrote:
| You're missing the point. The question _isn 't_ "is it
| important for someone," it's "is it too big to fail"
| (i.e. does the government think it's _sooo_ important
| that it must swoop in and save it).
|
| If the Internet Archive shuts down and its archive lost,
| the economy will keep humming, masses of people won't
| lose their jobs let alone be inconvenienced, etc. Sure,
| some paper about Geocities culture cira 1997 won't get
| written, some researcher won't be able to access some old
| dead link, and I won't be able to access the download the
| PDF manual for some old product from a company that went
| out-of-business. Life will go on with almost no
| disruption, and no one will lose an election because they
| failed to act to save it.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| > and no one will lose an election because they failed to
| act to save it.
|
| At the very least in a just world, I think the ability to
| reference historical data from the web probably _would_
| influence some elections.
|
| In the unjust world we actually live in, access to
| historical data can be used as a tool (or weapon!) by
| journalists, pacs, candidates, etc. to find strengths and
| weaknesses, and to influence elections.
|
| "back in 2026, the candidate enacted XYZ, as proven by
| [1][2][3] (all ia links). Ten years later this ended in
| <great victory|terrible disaster> therefore you
| <should|shouldn't> vote for them"
|
| ... Also, eg. Wikipedia often uses IA links for
| references to deal with link rot, which happens a lot
| more than you'd think. I won't say WP would shut down
| completely, but it's effectiveness would definitely be
| degraded.
|
| Same probably for a lot of professions and jobs that
| require research. (including eg. secretaries, special
| librarians, political assistants, etc...)
|
| Just because you personally can't imagine the impact on
| society, doesn't mean it doesn't have an impact on
| society.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| I agree with tablespoon that the demise of IA would not
| even be a footnote for the commons. So what if an archive
| of the internet goes away? Most people aren't going to
| care, and that's the brutal and apathetic reality.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| I agree that many people might not _directly_ care if IA
| goes away. But obviously the destruction of such a large
| amount of knowledge would not be without consequences
| (including to courts themselves)
| labster wrote:
| Just on the defense of NOAA, I think most people would
| notice if they couldn't get a weather forecast or
| couldn't fly a plane in stormy weather. NOAA is a major
| collector of weather data, and provides half of the
| world's GCM initial conditions ... the European models
| would get worse with a huge data hole.
|
| This is just more libertarian bullshit that entire
| government departments could disappear without anyone
| noticing. But if NOAA disappeared it would wreck the
| economy. What a terrible example.
| chongli wrote:
| If earth's magnetic field disappeared then the solar wind
| would begin to strip away the atmosphere. It'd be the
| beginning of the extinction of all life on the surface of
| the planet. It would also interfere with communications
| and knock out power grids everywhere. People would be
| bombarded with radiation and begin to get cancer at ever
| increasing rates. We'd also be able to see the aurorae at
| lower latitudes.
|
| People would notice!
| Aeolun wrote:
| Eh, if all nuclear research would disappear overnight
| less than 0.001% of the world population would be
| impacted. I'm still inclined to say that a repository of
| that knowledge is too big to fail, simply because the
| knowledge is so important.
|
| Not that that's necessarily true for the internet
| archive, but...
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a
| repository of digital or physical artifacts is "too big to
| fail" because of the negative cultural impact their failure
| would have._
|
| Here it is: https://loc.gov
| hinkley wrote:
| I think we need a PBS for the web, and the Internet Archive
| should be one of the cornerstones of such an organization.
|
| Add to it other educational materials that would otherwise show
| up on youtube or elsewhere with advertisements, and you have a
| decent basis for the 21st century and beyond.
| bruce511 wrote:
| >> I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a
| repository of digital or physical artifacts is "too big to
| fail" because of the negative cultural impact their failure
| would have.
|
| You can wonder all you like, and call me a cynic, but the US
| runs on money not culture. The American identity is built on
| money and wealth and excess, not on anything you might describe
| as "culture".
|
| The IA would not "fail" if it was just left alone, but business
| never saw a nickel they didn't want to grab, so the law suits
| are not exactly surprising. And I expect the courts to lean
| towards the publishers.
| Zetice wrote:
| Shit on the US all you like, but any country could step up to
| save the IA...
|
| This isn't an American problem, it's a drawback to the
| economic system the globe has adopted.
| misssocrates wrote:
| It was built on entrepreneurship that made Silicon Valley and
| Hacker News.
|
| Now it's arguably a culture of attention and tribal identity.
| Fr3ck wrote:
| The USA's biggest export is our culture...like it or not.
| Think of movies, music, etc. Some of it is intangible.
| paradoxyl wrote:
| That's not an export, that's propaganda.
|
| That's like saying fiat currency is just as valuable as
| lithium deposits. It's the hubris of the West.
| nemo44x wrote:
| The fiat currency is just as valuable as the lithium
| deposits because the fiat currency is backed by the most
| powerful force of military might the world has ever seen.
| When you trade for a dollar you're trading for that.
| Better than them just taking the lithium, as was the old
| way.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| No, it's worse.
|
| Empires that over-expand and seize too much sow the seeds
| of their own military destruction. Economic empires
| backed by ever-increasing military become overwhelming
| and then define any pushback as terrorism. What you end
| up with is a planetary-scale protection racket. Please do
| not construe this as an endorsement of other would-be
| hegemonies.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| I fundamentally disagree. Not US citizen, but what US seems
| to be exporting most are dollars. Most world trade is done
| with dollars.
|
| They give dollars and get resources and services.
| pasquinelli wrote:
| you don't export culture, you export stuff. it sounds like
| you're disgreeing with "america runs on money, not
| culture", but the fact you conflate culture with, like,
| movies sold internationally proves the point: american
| culture is in the form of market transactions. given that,
| how do you end up with "culturally too big to fail?"
|
| and i'd dispute that entertainment is our #1 export. not
| all exports are on the books; i'd bet arms is our real #1
| export.
| chroma wrote:
| You can look this information up pretty easily.[1] If you
| only count physical goods, the US's biggest exports are
| cars, aircraft, petroleum, food, drugs, industrial
| machinery, and semiconductors. Even if we count the value
| of all the military equipment sold to allies such as the
| Netherlands, France, Japan, Korea, the UK, etc, _and_ we
| count all the Ukraine aid, the total value last year was
| $205.6 billion. That 's less than petroleum exports
| ($258.3B) or food ($208.2B).
|
| 1. See page 22-23 of https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/fi
| les/2023-02/trad1222.pdf
|
| 2. FY2022 had $51.9B of sales to foreign militaries and
| $153.7B direct commercial sales, for a total of $205.6B:
| https://www.state.gov/fiscal-year-2022-u-s-arms-
| transfers-an...
| firatsarlar wrote:
| [flagged]
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Please do not. Either write out your comment, invest the
| effort to condense it, or link to your blog post. I like
| chatGPT, but _if I want an AI version I 'll generate it
| myself._
| firatsarlar wrote:
| I got you. You downvoted me. Please stop asking me more.
| Summary -intention- make the message short, easy, not
| time consuming. Solid good intention. I spend 1 hour to
| make communication solid. I put my intention. I cant be
| the person you dictate. Please is not the way to soften
| do as I -we- want. I do not read rules, I obey them in
| conflict, I do not ask permission, I say sorry. If we
| need rules, there need to be consensus. Other, a carma
| pramit , ranks, kind a god mode thing. I'm new in this
| block. We do not know each other. Talk to me privately if
| you seriously bothers you. Do not Elonize -Alianite- me.
| Do not make me buy this place, and sell it to my ego, I
| may put my every entry on top of HN.
|
| If you want to offend, please kindly do that. The world
| "myself" bothering me -I'm not make these comments for
| yourself- , provoked me, changed my emotional state. If
| you want to share openly argue, I already made a
| submission - which will never see the sun -, go there,
| say something. Or say authentically what you feel - say
| bad things in private or openly, I do not my, because I'm
| reflecting my pure emotions right now. And yes. My
| intention is not to offend you but, I need to say a big
| NO to you. Sorry if you emotionally offend. I do not know
| you, and you are a candidate - in a real community- of
| new friend to me.
|
| And please think: You should thank me for my 1 hour
| effort to make my comment solid, understandable, for the
| sake of quality. Thanks my downvote. It made me some kind
| of joke "Do not Elonize me" And sorry for my emotional,
| instant, Chinglish - People mock my English like that-. I
| cant use tools we build because of haters, ignorants,
| paranoids, unwarenes - I can easily take all those words
| to me and look at that mirror -
|
| I passed this way on SO. Argue with people - yes I'm
| emotional sometimes-, I felt kicked there, not a place
| for me, .... Idea was simple - I cant rich my upper brain
| because of emotional state so even I would like to share
| that post - Put a badge to people's profile Not a Native
| speaker. Because as we can see currently my English is
| not enough for higher communication. I'm old. Not live in
| English speaking country - so not use it -. My grammar
| rusty. Mockers were right it is Chinglish :) - I'm not
| Chinese by the way-. Some advised Google Translate, which
| I was already trying and not getting the way I want to
| say. So, knowing or not knowing do not alienize me,
| please welcome me, no need to hug. Just smile. Think
| pure, I now you can summarize but , one of my downvoted -
| suspicious- comments about has had a quote like " I do
| not find time to make it short, please forgive me" I'm
| doing what they apology.
|
| It is your karma, it is your self sufficiency to generate
| summaries, Please continue to punish me if you like it.
| As I said, It make me productive - yes aggressive- Look
| at I wrote lots of human words - not AI , synthetic - And
| it is my naked poor English community could easily mock.
| Yes It is USA, I need to talk in your language. Yes It is
| yourself, you don't me to summarize my post for you.
| Thanks. Apologies. PLUR -< if you know what this mean
| orangepurple wrote:
| The export is propaganda to promote US government stability
| and induce demand of American goods and services. So in the
| end it's money anyway.
| [deleted]
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| You can find positive effect with it only being an indirect
| and fragile benefit of the system
| tablespoon wrote:
| >> You can wonder all you like, and call me a cynic, but
| the US runs on money not culture. The American identity is
| built on money and wealth and excess, not on anything you
| might describe as "culture".
|
| > The USA's biggest export is our culture...like it or not.
| Think of movies, music, etc. Some of it is intangible.
|
| Yeah, but that's not high culture. It's mass-market culture
| that makes a lot of money.
|
| I think what the GP is referring to as "culture" is _high
| culture_ --the kind of stuff that is not popular and
| requires subsidies and special effort to sustain.
| simiones wrote:
| I don't think so at all: the IA has little to do with
| what is normally termed "high culture", and much more to
| do with "low culture" (lots and lots of internet trivia
| that would mostly be of interest to archeologists).
| ghaff wrote:
| I doubt the average person on the street has even heard
| of the Internet Archive much less thinks it's some
| essential cultural institution.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| The IA is the _only_ way to see a _lot_ of what was
| written and widely read starting in the 1990s onwards.
|
| Libraries used to keep archives of old newspapers and
| publications on microfilm, and anyone who needed to
| research something could go and look through those
| archives. The IA holds a similar function today - but
| it's the _only_ one with its breadth and age. If we lose
| the IA, we lose a lot of important historical
| information.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Libraries used to keep archives of old newspapers and
| publications on microfilm, and anyone who needed to
| research something could go and look through those
| archives. The IA holds a similar function today - but
| it's the only one with its breadth and age.
|
| Newspapers very frequently maintain and provide public
| access to their own online archives now. That's also not
| a function the IA is even especially good at--its
| coverage is spotty, and unless you have an old URL, it's
| very hard to find stuff in the IA.
|
| The one unique thing the IA does is have is a broad and
| deep collection of internet ephemera.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| > The one unique thing the IA does is have is a broad and
| deep collection of internet ephemera.
|
| That's what I was referring to. Blogs especially are an
| important source of historical information from this
| period that will not exist in newspaper archives -- and
| many of those have appeared and disappeared in the last
| 20 years. IA is the only record we have of much of that.
| [deleted]
| netr0ute wrote:
| What's the definition of high culture?
| carapace wrote:
| If we still read/watch it in a century?
| ghaff wrote:
| Not really. Both Shakespeare and Dickens were pretty
| mainstream culture at the time.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| It means the culture of the upper class.
|
| It's also one of those phrases where people insist that's
| not what it means. You can see this bizzare battle
| playing out on its wikipedia page:
|
| > In popular usage, the term high culture identifies the
| culture either of the upper class (an aristocracy) or of
| a status class (the intelligentsia); high culture also
| identifies a society's common repository of broad-range
| knowledge and tradition (folk culture) that transcends
| the social-class system of the society.
| orangepurple wrote:
| High culture is exactly equal to "surrogate activities"
| defined in this document:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
| srv/national/longterm/unab...
| chroma wrote:
| The US runs on rule of law, and copyright law has been around
| for centuries. Many sites that violate copyright laws would
| be fine if left alone. That doesn't mean they should be
| immune from lawsuits.
|
| Everyone was telling the internet archive that this was a
| dumb idea because it opened them to lawsuits with ruinous
| fines. Now the chickens are coming home to roost and IA is
| crying foul.
|
| It can be true that the internet archive is an invaluable
| store of history while also being true that they made an
| embarrassing own-goal.
| arvindhmani wrote:
| >The US runs on rule of law
|
| Oh you sweet summer child.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > US runs on money not culture
|
| fortunately, someone saying that does not make it real. Think
| of a "soup" and of "experiment" and you will get more detail.
| Resolving an entire nation to a 1 or 0 classification is not
| defensible, right?
| lanternfish wrote:
| In this case though, the question is what underlying
| motivator dominates. The claim doesn't need to be as strong
| as 'the us is money, no culture' and can just be 'in the
| US, money accounts for more willpower and political capital
| than culture in a head to head'
| hyperhello wrote:
| Resolving the statement to a 1/0 classification isn't
| necessary. If the US ran on culture, the archive would be
| considered a jewel; but the US runs on money so it's seen
| as an underoptimization. If you're predicting what a group
| would do in a specific case and decision, it really is
| correct to apply generalizations.
| Zetice wrote:
| Er, no. Culture isn't one specific thing, of which you
| either have or lack.
|
| Our culture can be a rich one and also not value the
| things the IA represent.
| splitstud wrote:
| [dead]
| boredumb wrote:
| Essentially a digital museum?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| A distributed, highly resilient digital museum. The internet
| archive meets S3 meets BitTorrent. We're most of the way
| there, just need improvements around durability, rebalancing
| around geographies, and the identity and metadata (item
| inventory) planes.
|
| (no association with IA, just an active contributor)
| zachh wrote:
| Do you know if the IA is working on such projects / is
| there a way to get involved? Or is it mostly third parties
| doing so?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| http://blog.archive.org/tag/distributed-web/
|
| My personal opinion is that they're going about this the
| wrong way, with IPFS, anything blockchain, etc. They can
| support this entire model with a DHT (supporting PKI for
| identity) and torrent advertising, the latest version of
| BitTorrent (which has great support for cross swarm file
| serving by hash), and RSS or other feeds for advertising
| the corpus or chunks of it.
|
| I maintain a copy in Cloudflare R2 of all IA item
| metadata, and would love to work on the ArchiveTeam
| equivalent of a Warrior appliance: appliance or container
| starts, consumes an RSS feed to request the least seeded
| items, downloads them up to disk space allowed, and then
| serve downloaded item files to the swarm.
| zachh wrote:
| Agreed! Super helpful, thanks.
| boredumb wrote:
| I could imagine something like IPFS and a strong community
| of volunteers hosting nodes with different partitions. I'm
| not sure how IPFS would scale to IA sized storage, if for
| nothing else there would have to be a good way to segment
| and balance data across volunteers nodes.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| With regards to "too big to fail", one side that doesn't get
| talked about as much is that "too big to fail" banks get more
| regulatory scrutiny and how much risk they are allowed to take
| on is regulated.
|
| If the Internet Archive is "too big to fail" then there should
| be more scrutiny of their actions and the avoidance of risky
| behavior.
|
| Anybody with any legal sense could have told you that the
| "National Emergency Library" was a risky move.
| Maursault wrote:
| > we should be looking at ways to preserve those artifacts
| redundantly, so that even if the IA fails, it's not a calamity.
|
| We don't need to look too far. IA could simply extend their
| middle-finger and move to Mexico, Spain, Thailand, or Sealand.
| Frankly, IA should be mirrored in every country that does not
| respect the West's initiative of blocking access and
| unresolvable takedown notices. Fuck US copyright anti-
| information bullshit. Publishers represent themselves and their
| own greed, not the authors and artists that created the
| content. There are rare success stories[1], but how many other
| works have been looted by publishers at the expense of the long
| dead content creator's family?
|
| [1]
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/jun/14/books.booksnew...
| justinclift wrote:
| > IA could simply extend their middle-finger and move to ...
|
| Unfortunately, the US government directly expands the reach
| of (US) copyright, patents, and trademarks with the "Free
| Trade" agreements they've managed to get countries around the
| world to sign up to.
|
| If Sealand had an effective army ;), and could thereby say
| "Thanks, but no" then that might be an option. Until then
| though...
| Mindwipe wrote:
| You mean like this one - https://www.bl.uk/collection-
| guides/uk-web-archive
|
| Or this one? - https://netpreserve.org/
| SllX wrote:
| UNESCO Cultural Heritage Sites are basically this in spirit.
|
| But "too big to fail" is bad policy no matter what you apply it
| to. That we have practiced this bad policy does not mean we
| should continue doubling down on it.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Culture doesn't pay for lobbying.
| beojan wrote:
| > I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a
| repository of digital or physical artifacts is "too big to
| fail" because of the negative cultural impact their failure
| would have.
|
| In the US that would be the Library of Congress with its
| Mandatory Deposit requirement.
| [deleted]
| ghaff wrote:
| Which in the grand scheme of things almost nothing is
| deposited to since the US aligned with Berne Convention lack
| of explicit copyright notification requirements.
| mminer237 wrote:
| Maybe indie games aren't, but anything touched by a major
| publisher will be. You have a copyright without registering
| now, but you still have to register the copyright before
| you can sue anybody for infringement and unless you
| register it before infringement you only get actual
| damages, which are nearly impossible to prove.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Isn't this kind of the point of the Library of Congress, though
| their content isn't generally available to the public afaik.
| nradov wrote:
| The Library of Congress is open to the public. Visitors can
| freely read most of the books and other materials in the
| collection. You will generally have to travel to the actual
| library; only a limited subset of their collection is
| available online.
|
| https://www.loc.gov/visit/
| musicale wrote:
| We've built this amazing "internet" technology to enable
| readers all over the world to read things, removing many of
| the limitations of physical books.
|
| We should make better use of it.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| But think of the lost copyright fees!
| H8crilA wrote:
| Too big to fail comes from the fear of popular unrest (btw,
| this also works in non-democratic countries, albeit is weaker).
| There will be no popular unrest here.
| causi wrote:
| _which made copyrighted books available for free during the
| COVID-19 pandemic. The publishers behind the lawsuit alleged that
| this entailed copyright infringement._
|
| Along with everybody with two brain cells to rub together. We all
| screamed "Hey, you idiots are going to ruin everything if you act
| like the pandemic has magically nullified the concept of
| copyright" and they fucking did it anyway, and now exactly what
| we said would happen is happening. It's like you found a landmine
| in your front yard and your buddy said "That landmine shouldn't
| be there so I'm gonna go step on it" and you told him not to and
| then had to watch him throw himself onto it while declaring it
| would be morally wrong for it to blow his stupid ass up.
|
| Controlled digital lending had a chance of getting off the
| ground. The IA's Emergency Library's unlimited digital lending
| burned it to the ground and stomped on the ashes.
| justin66 wrote:
| It's weird that anyone believes the Internet Archive were
| somehow unprepared for a lawsuit. Lobbying for new legislation
| and fighting to define the limits of existing laws in the
| courts are the two ways the Internet Archive can map their way
| forward.
|
| > Controlled digital lending had a chance of getting off the
| ground. The IA's Emergency Library's unlimited digital lending
| burned it to the ground and stomped on the ashes.
|
| Such a baseless, pointlessly stupid comment.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| Not only _that_ , but the logic of the whole thing was weak
| anyway and I'd argue it didn't achieve any of its goals.
|
| There are plenty of places to torrent books online. If people
| are desperate for a book and savvy enough to know about the
| Internet Archive, chances are they would have found an
| available copy online anyway. It's also not as though
| downloading an illegal copy from IA put the user at any less
| legal risk than downloading from elsewhere (other than giving
| publishers a bigger target to go after, which is exactly what
| happened).
|
| It's a shame, because IA felt like a _true_ public good on the
| Internet, and now it looks like it 's going away. Sigh.
| Xelynega wrote:
| They're not in court for the emergency library. They're in
| court for the 1-1 CDL lending they did.
|
| I'm tired of seeing this "well IA shouldn't have done the
| emergency library" line. Do you honestly believe the only
| reason publishers went after IA is the emergency library? I
| think this would have happened eventually, so pointing to the
| emergency library does nothing but tell everyone that you were
| right all along.
|
| They operate in a country where precedent is set in a court of
| law, how did you expect CDL to "get off the ground" if not
| challenged in a court of law?
| matwood wrote:
| > Do you honestly believe the only reason publishers went
| after IA is the emergency library?
|
| Yes, it's even mentioned a few times in the judgement.
| Publishers didn't like the CDL, but were mostly ignoring it.
| The NEL forced their hand, even if the lawsuit was not about
| that directly.
|
| > They operate in a country where precedent is set in a court
| of law, how did you expect CDL to "get off the ground" if not
| challenged in a court of law?
|
| If the IA really set up the CDL to have a plausible challenge
| they would not have shot themselves in the foot with complete
| lack of implementation controls, and clearly setting up a
| profit motive. Everyone should be furious at the IA for
| poisoning the CDL well.
|
| I highly recommend reading the judgement, https://storage.cou
| rtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.53...
| Mindwipe wrote:
| > They're not in court for the emergency library.
|
| They are in court for the "emergency library". The emergency
| library is a key part of the case. It's just inevitable that
| the lawsuit would also hinge on if 1 - 1 CDL is legally
| permissible and the case will inevitably have to rule on
| that.
|
| And yes, timing wise, and from the letters the publishes sent
| to the IA, they are explicitly about the "emergency library".
| thebooktocome wrote:
| I read the opinion. The emergency library appears once,
| only insofar as CDL being found not fair use entails that
| emergency lending was also not fair use.
|
| It's an entirely severable part of the decision. The
| publishers legally had a case against CDL without it.
| jrmg wrote:
| The emergency library is definitely not what the case is
| about. You can read the decision and it's hardly mentioned.
|
| https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.5
| 3...
|
| It might be the case that it prompted publishers to file
| earlier, but I have a very hard time believing they'd have
| just let 1:1 digital-for-physical lending slide for ever if
| it hadn't happened.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The "emergency library" was a gift on a silver platter for
| the publishers. It was a reckless and stupid action that made
| the worst case scenario that the publishers wouldn't have
| been taken seriously about a reality.
|
| Obviously the 1-1 lending was an issue to the publishers, but
| higher risk from a litigation perspective.
| tracker1 wrote:
| They really should have tried to work with the publishers
| to introduce maybe a reduced rate rental interface if a
| work wasn't available from their "digital library" as a
| loaned book. More work, but if they have loan mechanics
| worked out, then rental is just a payment above that.
|
| Or, if Amazon had/has a rental system in place, just
| affiliate link through to amazon when unavailable for
| rent/purchase there... that could fund IA without the
| minefield at all
| jacquesm wrote:
| And it is strictly speaking not a thing that IA should be
| doing in the first place. They should have set up a
| completely different legal entity for this and kept them
| visibly separated on all fronts, especially online.
| misnome wrote:
| > Do you honestly believe the only reason publishers went
| after IA is the emergency library?
|
| I mean, they did so right after IA did it, specifically
| citing IA doing it as why. Maybe they would have come after
| it eventually anyway but the Emergency Library specifically
| marked IA as an organisation that couldn't be trusted; even
| if they would have come after CDL, IA didn't have to hand
| them a slam-dunk case.
|
| In all their comms about this IA is desperate to reframe it
| as nothing to do with Emergency Library, probably because
| they know how it undermines their case completely.
|
| Edit: EA -> Emergency Library
| [deleted]
| birdyrooster wrote:
| What is the EA?
| misnome wrote:
| Flubbed their emergency lending library acronym in my
| head into -> EA. Edited to clarify.
| jahsome wrote:
| E-A Books... It's on the Page!
| rPlayer6554 wrote:
| DLC: Table of Contents | $10.99 |
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| jahsome wrote:
| What, no battle pass?!
| mayormcmatt wrote:
| Thanks for the chuckle!
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| Too used to dunking on Effective Altruists?
| kodah wrote:
| Frankly, this isn't out of character for the IA. They want to
| be treated as a global system of record, but then started
| hostile initiatives like ignoring robots.txt. They've
| somewhat rectified this now, but their blog post about
| brazenly doing this is still up. It's good insight to how
| they think about themselves. They want protection but none of
| the regulation that will come with it. The proof of their
| character has been in the pudding the whole time.
| gkbrk wrote:
| > hostile initiatives like ignoring robots.txt
|
| Why would an organization with the goal of being a digital
| "library" care about robots.txt?
|
| Would you expect public and private libraries to discard
| arbitrary books of a publisher from their collection
| because the author put a file called libraries.txt on their
| website?
| kodah wrote:
| If your public library found your journal laying on the
| floor would you expect them to put it on their shelf,
| even if you had a message inside the cover that said "not
| for reproduction"? Would they eschew blame if you'd
| shared this journal with friends?
|
| The answer is no. You wouldn't. Some people put things on
| the internet but don't want them slurped up by some
| mindless machine, and some people post both public
| content and content which they don't want handled by a
| machine. It's a fair ask that the IA respect long-trodden
| patterns of the web.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I don't mind their desire to slurp up all the things... my
| bigger/biggest issue is probably the
| reproduction/distribution by making what they slurp
| generally available (when they bypass said robots.txt as an
| example).
|
| For expired works, or works that are no longer published,
| I'm pretty morally flexible here and lean towards making it
| available.
| snapetom wrote:
| The lawsuit was filed three months after NEL was launched.
| Controlled Digital Lending has been around for years and is
| used by public libraries. Publishers didn't like it CDL, but
| they lived with it.
|
| There absolutely is a correlation between NEL and the
| lawsuit. It's a small part of the lawsuit, but it's clear it
| pushed them to go to war against IA.
| thebooktocome wrote:
| > Publishers didn't like it CDL, but they lived with it.
|
| Publishers spent millions of dollars developing digital
| lending platforms with fewer features and worse ROI than
| CDL, and then bullied libraries into adopting them.
|
| This is a reasonable summary of their pre-IA activities:
|
| https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art
| i...
|
| > There absolutely is a correlation between NEL and the
| lawsuit.
|
| As many comments point out in this thread, legally the
| trial and the judicial decision had little to do with the
| NEL. Therefore, in the counterfactual where the NEL had not
| been part of the dispute, the publishers would have still
| won their case.
| snapetom wrote:
| > As many comments point out in this thread, legally the
| trial and the judicial decision had little to do with the
| NEL.
|
| That's not in dispute.
|
| > Therefore, in the counterfactual where the NEL had not
| been part of the dispute, the publishers would have still
| won their case
|
| That fact that they brought the case _does_ have a lot to
| do with NEL. Timeline-wise, it 's clear NEL triggered the
| case. The HN crowd breeds a binary "yes/no" mentality,
| but real world businesses decisions, especially legal
| ones, take many things into account.
| causi wrote:
| They were only sued after they launched the Emergency
| Library. Also, Koeltl's current ruling applies in particular
| to lending without the waitlist restriction is legal. CDL in
| general isn't yet ruled on. IA's actions with the NEL not
| only prompted the lawsuit in the first place but have almost
| certainly poisoned the well with regards to the final ruling
| on CDL.
| jrmg wrote:
| _Koeltl 's current ruling applies in particular to lending
| without the waitlist restriction is legal. CDL in general
| isn't yet ruled on._
|
| That's not the case. The decision is clearly written, and
| clearly about CDL.
|
| https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.5
| 3...
| causi wrote:
| Ok, that appears correct. Still, the NEL prompted the
| suits in the first place and, among other things, proved
| that when the IA says it cares about the legal rights of
| publishers and authors it is lying. That's tremendously
| influential. If CDL had more years to become a regular
| thing that a significant fraction of people use, it
| would've had a much better chance in court.
| matwood wrote:
| > If CDL had more years to become a regular thing that a
| significant fraction of people use, it would've had a
| much better chance in court.
|
| Not as implemented by IA. They admit they had zero
| controls in place for the 'pool' libraries so they likely
| had books in circulation in both print and digital at the
| same time. The also had a side for-profit company selling
| used print books linked from the digital CDL. This case
| never had a chance.
| jrmg wrote:
| Yeah, I agree with that. I'm not sure it would really
| have changed the opinion of the court though.
|
| Personally I'd much rather the money being spent on this
| was spent on a campaign to change copyright law to allow
| things like CDL rather than implausibly shoehorning what
| they want to do into the crevices of the current law.
| It's an uphill battle, but one that I think might be more
| likely to succeed in the very long term.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| >They were only sued after they launched the Emergency
| Library
|
| There is plenty of evidence they were planning this far
| before the Emergency Library. Like the 2019 press push,
| https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-
| news/l...
|
| > Also, Koeltl's current ruling applies in particular to
| lending without the waitlist restriction is legal. CDL in
| general isn't yet ruled on
|
| Completely untrue. The entire judgment is about the CDL
| with the NEL only being mentioned as also being illegal as
| the CDL already was
| rsync wrote:
| "I'm tired of seeing this "well IA shouldn't have done the
| emergency library" line."
|
| I appreciate that.
|
| However, as a long-time, regular, sustaining financial
| benefactor of IA, I was annoyed that they strayed into this
| set of activities in the first place _and then dismayed_ when
| they pushed the envelope on it during C19 quarantines.
|
| I, and others, predicted this trouble and even if there is
| not direct causation _why do they have to tickle this dragon
| in the first place_ ?
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| I mean, their mission statement is "universal access to all
| knowledge". They had to push these boundaries because it's
| their purpose. The boundaries themselves are dumb and
| arbitrary (see e.g.
| https://www.npr.org/2022/11/09/1135639385/libraries-
| publishe...). Maybe the publishers are deserving of more
| criticism than the Archive here?
| bdw5204 wrote:
| Just because something is in your organization's mission
| statement does not require you to make imprudent and
| likely suicidal decisions in pursuit of it. That is not a
| means to accomplish your cause but rather a means to harm
| it.
|
| But in our time it seems like there is no such thing as a
| prudent leader of any organization who understands just
| how high you can fly without pulling an Icarus and flying
| into the sun. Even those who know better fear the
| fanatics enough that they cannot tell them no since those
| who recommend moving with caution are branded as enemies
| of the cause and marginalized by the fanatics. And then
| people wonder why everything seems to end in disaster.
| The Internet Archive is far from the only institution to
| make this particular category of error.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I mean if I poke an angry drunk and he beats the tar out
| of me, the angry drunk certainly deserves criticism but
| all of my friends will be "WTF why did you go and poke
| him?"
| downrightmike wrote:
| Publishers acting as angry dunks, checks out.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I mean, in a way poking an angry drunk makes _more_ sense
| given that the angry drunk might get arrested for
| battery.
|
| In my estimation, there is zero chance that any positive
| change that IA might want out of the publishing company
| will come from the emergency lending program, and there's
| a non-zero chance that the IA will get shutdown because
| of it.
| flangola7 wrote:
| Sounds like it's time for a team of burly armed men to
| subdue the angry drunk by force.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Have the risky stuff done by another legal entity
| perhaps?
| jtode wrote:
| Creating proxy entities to protect oneself is only
| available to people who hold a lot of capital.
| dmonitor wrote:
| The IA easily could have done it.
| jtode wrote:
| Perhaps they're attempting to relate to the world that
| everyone has to live in, rather than the reality of
| capital.
| z0r wrote:
| In the same boat. Haven't stopped donating as a result,
| which is a sentiment I've seen repeated elsewhere. It was
| still upsetting to see the organization I support put so
| much of why I donate to them at risk for something with so
| little upside.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > why do they have to tickle this dragon in the first place
|
| I find that doing worthwhile things and tickling the dragon
| go hand in hand most of the time.
| rdiddly wrote:
| Siblings of this comment piling on to point out the timing:
| yes, yes. I don't suppose proximate or triggering causes can
| coexist alongside ultimate or long-term causes by any chance?
| Like hey did the last straw break your camel's back or was it
| all the previous straws? Couldn't possibly be both, so let's
| argue about it.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| I actually wondered initially, even if CDL was legal, how are
| they going to enforce the actual _Controlled_ part? What 's the
| standard for that?
|
| Is simply not having a download button sufficient? Do you need
| to prevent people from right-clicking and choose "Save Image"?
| Or do you need to run the book through a video stream encrypted
| with Widevine L3 so screenshots don't work? Or heck, why not
| Widevine L1 which requires hardware not found on Windows
| because L3 will always be exploitable?
| schroeding wrote:
| Adobe Digital Editions DRM and watermarking appear to be
| popular. It's definitely breakable (e.g. with Calibre and
| DeDRM, this is even required if you use an obscure E-Reader
| which does not support it), but secure enough that the
| publishers are happy.
| legitimayzer wrote:
| > Controlled digital lending had a chance of getting off the
| ground.
|
| sure, it may have worked, but fuck me if that's what we get.
| controlled digital lending means we throw away[1] the great
| advantage brought by digital technology.
|
| controlled digital lending is a very stupid thing to do. I saw
| megaupload. it showed us all that we can all share it all; we
| just don't seem to want to, or rather, the American government
| pursued them into extinction.
|
| [1] looking at this even more closely, it's not that this
| 'digital advantage' is wasted, it is merely captured by
| authoritative powers who only understand markets, trade, and
| exclusive properties (exclusive due to being physical/material
| in nature unlike digital assets). e.g. Microsoft's billionaire
| business is made from capturing this digital boon as I called
| it.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Might be interesting to start a large "online library" that
| does physical books by mail. Similar to Netflix original dvd
| model, but for books. An annual membership fee of like $20/yr
| to help maintain storage infrastructure. Then ship those
| books to/from people in reusable boxes for bigger/unwieldy
| books or padded envelopes if that's sufficient for less
| expensive paperback.
|
| Small per-lend fee to cover the shipping cost, with a return
| window or followup fee per N days... days determined based on
| the size/pages in the book/volume.
|
| With efforts to work with various local libraries to handle
| some of the distribution closer to the people.
| legitimayzer wrote:
| > _Might be interesting to start a large "online library"
| that does physical books by mail._
|
| but this changes everything. My whole point (which you seem
| to have ignored) is that when dealing with physical goods,
| then the systems (traditions, institutions) already in
| place work fine.
|
| But why would I do that when I can give the PDF version to
| everybody due to ZERO distribution costs? (not marginal
| costs, even less. zero costs once the PDFs are made).
| causi wrote:
| I don't see how the shipping costs could ever be low enough
| for that to make sense. Even after my organization's
| massive UPS discounts, shipping a paperback one state over
| still costs $4.30. Would you rather spend five bucks to
| rent a used book or fifteen to buy a new one?
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| USPS offers media and library rates, which goes as low as
| $2.20 for any zone. That'd still be $4.40 round trip
| though.
| jhbadger wrote:
| Everything old is new again. That's literally how for-
| profit subscription libraries (which often used to also
| ship books to people too far away to visit the physical
| library) used to work in the 18th and 19th century prior to
| widespread public libraries. The existence of these
| libraries even influenced the style of novels at the time.
| Because each volume was treated as a separate rental,
| novels became longer and longer so that they could be split
| across multiple volumes (most typically 3).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subscription_library
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-volume_novel
| reisse wrote:
| > Controlled digital lending had a chance of getting off the
| ground.
|
| Fuck it. It should never get off the ground, really. We, as a
| society, don't need controlled lending for something that can
| be copied for free.
|
| What we need is a fair mechanism to keep authors whole while
| keeping digital copies available for all, free of charge. And
| the system slowly changes by itself, discovering multiple such
| mechanisms. Like, for example, making physical books
| collectibles; or paying for early access (not for the access
| per se).
| causi wrote:
| Agreed. Patron-based funding if not necessarily Patreon is
| the best way of paying for the creation of intellectual
| works.
| MilnerRoute wrote:
| My issue is with the headline: "If we lose the internet
| archive, we're screwed." But no one is saying we're in danger
| of losing the entire Internet Archive.
|
| They do many many things - most of which are not in any way
| affected by this lawsuit. The judge even specified that the
| Internet Archive can still scan and publish copies of books in
| the public domain.
| zargon wrote:
| If the publishers seek statutory damages then yes, the entire
| archive is in critical danger.
| MilnerRoute wrote:
| I'll admit I didn't consider statutory damages. But the
| judge addresses that in his opinion. The Internet Archive
| argues that as a nonprofit, statutory damages shouldn't
| apply. Tbe judge says it's just the wrong phase of the
| trial for that argument altogether.
|
| You can say there's some potential there for a worst-case
| scenario - but even then, we don't "lose" the Internet
| Archive unless they also lose on that specific point, are
| fined heavy statutory damages, can't pay them off or raise
| the money, and then cease to exist. Sure that's a bad what-
| if scenario. But I think it's just too early to have it in
| headlines.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| That's a pretty good analogy, but not quite.
|
| This has been a hostage/terrorist situation from the beginning.
| The Internet Archive has been holding the Wayback Machine
| hostage, essentially saying "let us break copyright, or this
| critical piece of internet history goes down as well".
| modzu wrote:
| good sir, the pandemic magically nullified the idea of _basic
| human rights_.
| jahsome wrote:
| I appreciate your passion!
|
| Unsolicited advice: IME I've found being angry because I was
| right serves no one, least of all myself. I would recommend you
| soften your language. Harshness, even if warranted, turns
| people off, especially those who could learn most from what you
| have to say.
| [deleted]
| schroeding wrote:
| Totally agree with the first part.
|
| > Controlled digital lending had a chance of getting off the
| ground. The IA's Emergency Library's unlimited digital lending
| burned it to the ground and stomped on the ashes.
|
| One of the problems libraries face is that many publishers will
| not sell them "real" licenses, but only "quota licenses" that
| allow a total of _n_ borrows and _m_ concurrent borrows. Once
| the total number of borrows is exceeded, the license expires.
| _n_ can be _very_ low.
|
| This was not always the case. 10 years ago, most licenses were
| unrestricted licenses that allowed an unlimited number of total
| borrows, but only limited the number of _m_ concurrent borrows
| at a time - just like it would be if the library bought _m_
| real books.
|
| The argument is that real books wear out - digital books don't.
| However, my local librarian vehemently disagrees with this
| statement, as many books survive more than 100 borrows,
| something the new e-book licenses will never manage.
|
| Additionally, those "quota" licenses are still way more
| expensive than an equal amount of _m_ real, physical books. It
| 's insanity. My local library could, by their own account, not
| survive if the number of digital lends permanently increased
| significantly (like it did in 2020).
|
| So if controlled digital lending had a chance for the
| mainstream, the publishers killed it many years ago, when many
| of them decided to just not sell libraries unrestricted
| licenses anymore, but only "quota" licenses. :/
|
| (Disclaimer: Not the US, Europe)
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| This was not always the case because libraries weren't seen
| as a threat. Renting a digital book from a library was
| significantly harder than buying one from Amazon. The "Libby"
| app was a major motivator, at least in the US, because it
| made checking out digital books about as easy as just using
| the Kindle store. Usage went way up, and publishers panicked.
|
| Publishers aren't necessarily the villains here, except in
| the regular way all middle men are the villains. Authors want
| to make money, and they make money by selling books. If a
| library can digitally loan the book an unlimited number of
| times in parallel, it's a bad deal for the author.
|
| The "this book automatically explodes after 2 years or 10
| rentals" system is a stupid compromise, but any solution is
| gonna be some sort of system to send money from libraries to
| companies based on how many people read the book.
| EleanorKonik wrote:
| Honestly, in these days of the google play store taking its
| cut from Amazon, using Libby is actually _easier_ than
| using the kindle app to buy books. Every time I hit that
| "you can't buy books from inapp" button I remember that I
| can use Libby instead and go there instead of the browser
| to buy my book, tbh.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| >Publishers aren't necessarily the villains here, except in
| the regular way all middle men are the villains.
|
| Except that in this case, their role as the middle man is
| effectively pointless, since their normal role (printing
| physical books) is literally not happening here, and they
| are contributing _nothing_ to the author except litigation.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Publishers manage a whole lot of tasks, notably the
| editing (up to and often including picking the book's
| title) and the design. Most important, though, is
| managing the marketing and sales. They get books into
| stores, they get interviews for the author, they get the
| book reviewed on websites, etc. For e-books, they're
| primarily a marketing firm. Whether that's worth the
| author giving half of their revenue to the publisher is
| another issue.
| shagie wrote:
| Some of the information on how libraries in the US deal with
| digital books:
|
| NPR : Planet Money : The Indicator - The surprising economics
| of digital lending -
| https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1118289764
|
| That's from August of 2022 and the lawsuit against the
| internet archive was just starting to gain steam.
|
| And more recently (November 2022):
|
| NPR : Planet Money - The E-Book Wars
| https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1135639385
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| I keep seeing this really bad take repeated on this site in the
| absence of more nuanced, informed legal opinions.
|
| Whether CDL is legal under Fair Use or not was/is legally
| unresolved. Whether it's legally permissible to copy a printed
| material and distribute that copy as though it were the printed
| material was/is unresolved.
|
| Lots of organizations have been skating along under one
| interpretation of Fair Use as a workaround for the burdensome
| licensing fees and absurd lending limits that publishers expect
| _libraries_ to pay. Libraries being, y 'know, super well-funded
| by that VC honey and all.
|
| And it's not like publishers get less litigious over time.
| Whether the NEL prompted this or not is irrelevant; it was
| going to be tested, and IA are exactly the right organization
| to test it, and it wasn't going to become "more legal" if
| everyone just kept doing the same thing but more quietly.
|
| Now that it's being tested, the right thing to do is to figure
| out if CDL is something we as a society want to enable for our
| libraries or not.
| pasquinelli wrote:
| > Now that it's being tested, the right thing to do is to
| figure out if CDL is something we as a society want to enable
| for our libraries or not.
|
| that's a nice idea, but it's hard to see how we as a society
| have a say.
| causi wrote:
| _it was going to be tested, and IA are exactly the right
| organization to test it_
|
| CDL being legalized is dependent on the concept that it
| respects copyright and is only a digital version of rights
| and practices that already exist. The NEL proved that as far
| as the IA is concerned, CDL is nothing of the sort and is in
| actuality just a method of keeping rightsholders from suing
| them and what they'd really rather be doing is copying every
| work in existence and giving it away to everybody. They
| proved they don't _want_ to be a library. They have destroyed
| their credibility. Other than the operator of Z-Library there
| is no _worse_ entity to be litigating this.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Not wanting to be a library isn't illegal. The actions of
| IA don't have any bearing on the legality of CDL. You've
| made it clear that you don't like what they did with NEL
| and that's reasonable enough, I think extrapolation from
| there is unwarranted.
| causi wrote:
| They _shouldn 't_ have any bearing. In the real world
| lawyers and judges are flawed human beings whose
| decisions are influenced by emotion and impression. If
| being hungry can drop a judge's parole granting rate from
| 65% to zero, an organization showing they'd really rather
| be totally flouting the law can certainly influence the
| outcome of a case.
| Y_Y wrote:
| then again maybe that wasn't what was happening with
| those poor undernourished judges -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14701328
| twblalock wrote:
| It's not the Internet Archive's job to be the first one to
| try to resolve fair use questions like this, and attempting
| to do so put the organization's orginal core mission at risk.
|
| They should have let someone else take the risk, and
| continued archiving the internet. That is all that most of
| their supporters expected of them, for good reason. Their
| attempt to pivot toward being a generic, universal library
| was bad scope creep and should have been stopped when it
| started.
| boucher wrote:
| Seems to me like the Internet Archive can determine for
| itself what it's job is, and they've determined that this
| is in fact part of their core mission.
|
| Your perception that their purpose is solely to archive the
| Internet is at odds with their actual demonstrated
| activities for many years (the home page says: "Internet
| Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books,
| movies, software, music, websites, and more"), as well as
| their public mission statement: "Our mission is to provide
| Universal Access to All Knowledge."
|
| I've talked to the founder of the IA who told me he doesn't
| believe the lawsuit puts the IA at risk of having to shut
| down.
| piperswe wrote:
| I think people are getting confused by the name - it's an
| archive _on_ the Internet, not just an archive _of_ the
| Internet.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > Seems to me like the Internet Archive can determine for
| itself what it's job is
|
| And commenters on HN can point out that they've made a
| huge, and obvious, mistake that risks their entire
| mission.
| boucher wrote:
| They can, but that doesn't mean they are right.
| Controlled Digital Lending is not an "obvious" mistake,
| and contrary to what people on HN keep saying, the
| emergency library program is not what this case is about.
| It also does it seem to be the situation that their
| entire mission is at risk.
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| Ah, I see, there seems to be a misunderstanding of what the
| Archive is about. They have been doing a lot more than just
| "archiving the internet" for a long time. Their blog posts
| from 2013 (https://blog.archive.org/2013/) for example
| include writeups about magazines they had digitized, tv
| news they had recorded, and music. Montana State Library
| was uploading to the Archive in 2010
| (https://blog.archive.org/2010/12/30/how-montana-state-
| librar...) in addition to the Archive's own digitization
| efforts (https://blog.archive.org/2010/12/10/internet-
| archive-needs-y...). Book digitization goes back to at
| least 2005
| (https://blog.archive.org/2005/11/08/bookscanning-launch-
| and-...).
|
| According to Wikipedia, you'd have to go back to 1999 to
| find an Internet Archive that was solely the Wayback
| Machine.
| twblalock wrote:
| I'd bet that most people who care about this issue are
| primarily worried about losing the Wayback Machine. If
| that goes away, a lot of internet history will be lost
| forever. All those copyrighted works that IA was lending
| out won't disappear in the same fashion -- they will
| still be available from other sources.
|
| IMO the Wayback Machine has always been the primary
| product, and most valuable part, of the Internet Archive.
| If IA wanted to do other things they should have done
| them via a separate legal entity to protect the Wayback
| Machine.
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| You'd be betting wrong. Even a casual skim of the
| Archive's blog will show that the Wayback Machine isn't
| their primary focus, and hasn't been for ~20 years. It
| may be their most important aspect _to you_ , but the
| Archive is comprised of a large network of people working
| together to make all kinds of information available on
| the internet that wouldn't otherwise be accessible. To
| _those_ people, those repositories are far, far more
| valuable than the Wayback Machine (and I promise they
| care a lot about this issue -- possibly more than HN
| does, given the timbre this topic has received here).
|
| There is nowhere else that you can browse for example a
| Byte Magazine from 1984
| (https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-12/).
| _This_ is what the Archive is about, from their
| perspective -- along with music, video (including
| broadcast video), and a whole lot of other projects:
| https://archive.org/projects/
| twblalock wrote:
| What I'm saying is that the things the people who work at
| Internet Archive care about may not be the same as what
| _end users_ care about. I think the end users care mainly
| about the Wayback Machine.
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| The Wayback Machine accounts for about half of
| archive.org's pageviews.
|
| You think most other people mainly care about the thing
| you mainly care about. Happens all the time.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| They're an archive on the internet, not an archive of the
| internet. I disagree with your gradualist approach, because
| while you complain about scope creep private capital
| subjects itself to no such restraints. The IA is an
| institution, not a tool.
| kemitchell wrote:
| > Whether it's legally permissible to copy a printed material
| and distribute that copy as though it were the printed
| material was/is unresolved.
|
| That's what IA wants to believe. But it's just not the case
| that legal points aren't "resolved" or "tested" unless
| exactly the same situation shows up in court and gets ruled
| on. The law works in large part by analogy. Strong enough
| analogies can be predicted.
|
| Here's from the trial court's summary judgment opinion
| against IA:
|
| > Even full enforcement of a one-to-one owned-to-loaned
| ratio, however, would not excuse IA's reproduction of the
| Works in Suit.
|
| Then there's the citation so many saw coming to a case called
| ReDigi, about a system for reselling authorized digital music
| downloads by ensuring there was only ever one digital copy.
| They lost, too.
|
| There's another case out there, Aereo, about a company
| offering a warehouse full of TV tuners subscribers could
| stream from on a one-to-one basis. For technical legal
| reasons, that involved different aspects of the copyright
| law. But the case didn't go well for Aereo, either. Or for
| any of its competitors pursuing essentially the same business
| model.
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| I listened in on the opening arguments. Judge Koeltl asked
| repeatedly for examples of prior cases analogous to the
| current one. ReDigi came up then, as did HathiTrust, but
| neither are exactly analogous to Controlled Digital
| Lending. The most similar case _might_ be Author 's Guild
| v. Google Inc., which was well covered by The Atlantic (htt
| ps://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t..
| .), but even that case presents some differences in terms
| of commercialization. Hachette et. al. are arguing that the
| Internet Archive is a commercial entity because lending
| books increases the Archive's popularity online (that is a
| nearly verbatim quote from the publishers' arguments).
|
| There is a whitepaper on Controlled Digital Lending that
| should be required reading for anyone wading in to this
| discussion:
| https://controlleddigitallending.org/whitepaper/
| kemitchell wrote:
| > exactly analogous
|
| This isn't a combo I think I've seen or read from other
| lawyers. Does it mean "identical"? Again, that's not
| what's required to make a point "settled"...or an outcome
| predictable.
|
| The trial court opinion distinguishes _Authors Guild_ ,
| _Google Books_ , _Sony_ , and _TV Eyes_ very explicitly
| in its opinion, starting on page 19. It 's hindsight now,
| so worth fewer points, but I'm not the only one who
| thought distinctions based on "not giving out full
| copies" and "providing equipment" were coming.
|
| The trial court did _not_ say the Internet Archive isn 't
| a nonprofit, a charity, or tax-exempt organization. The
| question under fair use analysis isn't whether _the
| infringer_ is commercial or not, but whether _the use_
| is. It also comes up under other factors, such as effect
| on market.
|
| The first and only mandatory piece of reading for
| discussing this case right now is the trial court
| opinion. Summary judgment was only possible procedurally
| because the two sides of the lawsuit _agreed_ on the
| facts, only differing on how law applies to them.
| criddell wrote:
| > Whether it's legally permissible to copy a printed material
| and distribute that copy as though it were the printed
| material was/is unresolved.
|
| A lot of IA supporters wish they would have gone about
| discovering this in a way that protected the actual internet
| archive. Maybe I don't understand the actual risks to the IA,
| but it feels like a reckless move.
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| This could be tricky. As I understand it (not a lawyer,
| etc.), whether an organization believes it is operating
| within the confines of the law can impact the outcome of a
| legal dispute. The important distinction here is that these
| are competing _interpretations_ of Fair Use; there 's no
| case law (as far as I'm aware) that settles this one way or
| the other.
|
| So, for the Archive to go, "well, let's set up a shell
| corporation and do this thing through some structure that
| might shield us from harm" would require that they believed
| they were doing something illegal. See for example para. 3
| in https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-
| national-eme...
| anotherman554 wrote:
| I don't think anyone is suggesting the archive create a
| shell corporation. If archive leadership desperately
| wanted to get sued by publishers, they could have
| resigned from working at the archive and formed a
| different organization.
| HNlurker777 wrote:
| https://www.battleforlibraries.com/
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| I agree. And I told my friends at the IA from the beginning that
| their plan was very, very foolish. People can look the other way
| at copyright infringement of web sites when it's just used for
| archival work. But when you're directly destroying an artist's
| livelihood by undercutting their income stream, well, you
| shouldn't be surprised if they'll be upset.
| boucher wrote:
| Are they really "directly destroying" anyone's livelihood? Are
| authors actually upset? [1][2]
|
| [1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/author-coalition-
| bl... [2] https://www.authorsalliance.org/2021/08/17/library-
| lending-a...
| majormajor wrote:
| > This is fundamentally a strike against taxpayer-funded public
| services by corporations and private individuals.
|
| Wait what?
|
| That's not how the Internet Archive is paid for.
|
| And because it's private, it could have private
| replacements/competitors.
|
| If another group were to clone all the stuff the Internet Archive
| _doesn 't_ get into hot water for, and not make the obviously
| hugely risky move that got them in trouble here, does that solve
| the problem? Are there potential issues re: the Internet Archive
| suing a second archive that copied them or such?
|
| Seems like an opportunity for some rich folks to make a big
| philanthropic gesture in support of archiving information and
| making it available.
| teh_klev wrote:
| I think the notion here is that the corporations will be coming
| for the public lending libraries next, and it's not beyond the
| realms of imagination.
| nmstoker wrote:
| Are there any efforts to boycott the publishers pushing this?
|
| I happen to think they're technically correct with the IA in the
| wrong here, but even so I think they should back down - they can
| take a big picture view that it's hardly dealt them a serious
| blow, it was the pandemic and the IA serves a useful purpose for
| society (though I suspect many publishers besides more
| enlightened ones would disagree with that due to self-interest!)
| GenericDev wrote:
| I'm so sick of modern businesses and their vampire approach on
| creativity and intelligent property.
|
| I see a lot of comments in this thread with what about-isms or "I
| don't care, we wouldn't miss anything", but these people are
| short-sighted. And to be honest the hacker news community is
| frequently the community I loathe to engage in these topics with.
| Because they are always looking forward with very little respect
| for the past as well as very little respect for domains outside
| of technology.
|
| The internet archive is a huge boon in intangible value for
| communities and the world. It represents a huge cultural fountain
| that is accessible for anyone so long as they have the ability to
| access a computer.
|
| A great example of this is that the Internet Archive was the ONLY
| place where I could enjoy a completely random piece of lost media
| from a children's television show called Alice's Adventures in
| Wonderland. There was a lost episode where OJ Simpson was in it
| and it never aired because of obvious issues. BUT there was a
| book published from the production called "White Rabbits Can't
| Jump"
|
| https://archive.org/details/whiterabbitscant00varl
|
| I can't imagine being able to go to any publisher or paid
| streaming service or god forbid Amazon to find this book, and I
| sure as shit don't believe in this community to help create
| ecosystems to support finding things like this.
|
| I am so sick and tired of the copyright laws that play counter to
| productive creation and stymying efforts to preserve anything.
| The fact that I have to wait until people die until copyright is
| up is god awful. And the fact that I have to read people in this
| community who sound like boot-lickers for corporate oligarchs and
| their shitty value adds to the world drives me so fucking insane.
|
| I'm only commenting here because I feel it's important to
| articulate that there are people out there who care, and that the
| vocal a-holes on this site really miss the point and the
| intangible value of what the internet archive provides.
| Pokepokalypse wrote:
| Frankly, at least in the context of US Copyright Law, we need
| to go back to Article I of the Constitution that defines
| copyright. The very first sentence is "To promote the useful
| arts and sciences..."
|
| If congress passes a copyright law, and that law can't
| demonstrate that it actually MEASURABLY does promote the useful
| arts and sciences, (but rather hinders them, as is often the
| case), then that law should be overturned, desecrated, and
| posted on a wall-of-shame as an example to others of what
| doesn't work.
|
| I think that would solve 90% of our problems with copyright
| law. But that's just me. I'm not typically a "Constitutional
| Originalist" but I think this kind of thinking here could help.
| AwaAwa wrote:
| Pretty sure that 'useful' has been defined as 'make someone
| ridiculous amounts of money' and is part of the
| 'constitution' that lobbyists imprint on their marks.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > I'm not typically a "Constitutional Originalist" but
|
| Don't worry, 50 years was only close to the median amount of
| time that it takes for old laws and old court rulings to be
| overturned
|
| So it wont undermine your brand to support, ironically, what
| might be seen as a rogue court outcome nowadays
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| I don't disagree until your ending qualification. Being picky
| and choosy on when it's good to be a Constitutional
| Originalist means you might as well not be. If the
| Consitution is a dynamic living document beyond just
| amendments on one topic, then an originality argument loses
| weight even on another topic
| 7speter wrote:
| Constitutional originalism is a rather recent construct.
| Its just that no one points out it was something mostly
| crafted by antonin scalia and friends that we think its
| some idea someone like Thomas Jefferson came up with.
| theonlybutlet wrote:
| There's an in-between. The spirit of the law.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Fully agree. Copyright was originally conceived as a scalpel,
| but has been turned into a bludgeon. Its current scope and
| power is far too great.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| You can blame brain-dead case law and precedent for that,
| no doubt bought and paid for by corporations who can afford
| great lawyers to keep stretching the definition until it's
| completely unrecognizable.
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| The problem with that approach is that it would be trivial
| for companies to produce volumes of work and information
| demonstrating that it does.
|
| Do you really think that someone like archive.org can do a
| better job of proving the negative than
| DisneyDiscoveryWarnerComcast will do producing volumes and
| reams of information demonstrating how they can only afford
| to keep making new content and supporting small creators if
| copyright lifetime is extended to 500 years?
|
| IMO compulsory licensing is the way.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| If it makes you feel better, just skimming the top reply
| threads on here, the most upvoted replies seem to be ones in
| support of your argument. And FWIW, I'm right there with you.
| But I also don't have all the energy I need to be pissed off
| all the time. Right now, a lot of that anger is directed at the
| gun lobby since I have a young child in school.
| int_19h wrote:
| I really wish we ditched the name "copyright" altogether
| because of its unfortunate implications. It's not actually a
| _right_ - it 's a _privilege_. The system is entirely
| artificial and wouldn 't exist without active social and legal
| enforcement. And if the privilege is abused in ways that don't
| benefit society, then it can and should be curtailed or even
| revoked.
| astraloverflow wrote:
| Personally I find the term "intellectual property" to be more
| messed up. It isn't property, it's a government granted
| monopoly on reproduction and distribution.
|
| Calling it property allows for this bizarre concept of a form
| of "theft" that still leaves you with the thing "stolen" from
| you.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Personally I find the term "intellectual property" to be
| more messed up. It isn't property, it's a government
| granted monopoly...
|
| So, in other words, it's property.
|
| There's nothing that guarantees a particular lump of atoms
| are "yours" besides a government-granted monopoly to
| control that lump. The atoms don't care.
| [deleted]
| int_19h wrote:
| Property on anything beyond that which you're immediately
| using or occupying is a monopoly granted by social
| convention (from which laws are then derived). As Jefferson
| said,
|
| "It is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of
| property is derived from nature at all... It is agreed by
| those who have seriously considered the subject that no
| individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an
| acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed,
| whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men
| equally and in common is the property for the moment of him
| who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation,
| the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of
| social law, and is given late in the progress of society."
|
| So in that sense I don't think it's an altogether
| misleading analogy, although of course the ability to copy
| without taking makes it very different from tangible
| property. But both are ultimately social conventions, and
| both exist supposedly for the common good. If that common
| good cannot be demonstrated, and even moreso if there's
| demonstrable harm, the conventions can change.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Personally, I think copyright itself is a completely
| unnecessary concept in the information age.
|
| The original idea was to promote creative works by authors by
| providing a limited term right to be the sole publisher of a
| work. This was important in the days where it actually cost
| money to publish and distribute things, as it ensured you
| wouldn't eat the cost of that only to have someone else make
| all the money by doing it cheaper.
|
| Thing is, it doesn't cost money to publish and distribute
| anything anymore. I think the large number of free and fan
| works that exist are proof enough that creativity need not be
| incentivized by money, and to the extent that we want to
| monetarily reward works we find meaningful, there are
| mechanisms like Patreon or Github sponsorship to do that.
|
| Will the production quality suffer without large corporations
| spending ludicrous amounts of money? Yeah, probably. But I
| don't see how that's something worthy of preserving for all
| the bullshit that copyright inflicts on our culture.
| modriano wrote:
| Creators still need to eat, even if publishing and
| distribution costs have dropped to nearly nothing.
| monknomo wrote:
| I feel like we have a relatively strong copyright regime,
| lots of works being created, creators have trouble eating
| with the current regime, and they had trouble eating
| before it, and unless the next regime makes something
| like "feed creators" as its primary goal, they'll have
| trouble eating under that one too.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| I agree that it would be great if creators get to eat.
| Right now though many people don't get to eat (enough) no
| matter what, many other people don't get to make use of
| creative work, and a small number of big players walk
| away with all the money.
|
| IMO pretty much literally anything else would probably
| put us in a better situation. At this point after several
| decades of experience, I think even just outright
| abolishing copyright law could possibly actually be a net
| improvement (give or take). But surely it should be
| possible to come up with a better system by now!
| UberFly wrote:
| How would abolishing copyright law not make everyone (but
| the content creator) basically the equivalent of a
| vampire AI corporation slurping up what they please? Why
| would anyone create when everyone instantly gets to use
| their hard work in any way they want? It's like
| abolishing all property rights.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| A lot of people create with the intent of letting
| everyone instantly get to use their hard work. This is
| actually rather common. Huge amounts of fan-art, original
| art, original fiction and original fiction get created
| every day. Scientific articles get written every day.
| Wikipedia gets written every day. Open source software
| gets written every day. And let's not start about AI art
| and AI text (which currently is all PD) . 90% of this all
| might be crap, but then 90% of everything is crap. There
| are definitely gems among the 10%, just like everywhere
| else. And due to the sheer volume: there are a lot of
| gems.
|
| Much of this activity would still happen without
| copyright law. There is clearly sufficient incentive at
| least. Fun is a common incentive. Sharing back is a
| common incentive too. You can also earn money. People
| earn money this way. _I_ earn money this way. You can pay
| the bills by "making things that don't exist yet".
|
| Current copyright law has actually often gotten in the
| way more than that it has helped, I feel. I can tell you
| stories if you like! This does differ a bit per field and
| profession, of course.
|
| ===
|
| But perhaps I get ahead of myself. If you actually want
| to earn money by depending on copyright law, I feel
| you're getting short-changed at the moment. AI will
| "steal" your style; youtube, spotify and amazon will pay
| you mere pennies, of which apple will pinch a percent,
| your publisher will pinch a percent, and you get left
| with ... very little.
|
| Copyright frankly isn't helping many people right now. I
| don't think _anyone_ is happy. Unless you know a bevy of
| small creators now living in mansions in Beverly Hills? I
| 'd love to hear of it!
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| This is just the broken window fallacy.
|
| Creators can still get paid for their work through
| Patreon if people find it valuable.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > It's not actually a right - it's a privilege. The system is
| entirely artificial and wouldn't exist without active social
| and legal enforcement. And if the privilege is abused in ways
| that don't benefit society, then it can and should be
| curtailed or even revoked.
|
| In other words, it's a right.
| eecc wrote:
| How about calling it Copyrent? Isn't iut more descriptive of
| what it actually is, while "right" makes it more sympathetic
| to the liberties and freedoms they're actually reigning in.
| rhtgrg wrote:
| > very little respect for domains outside of technology.
|
| The HN community can also be out of touch with technology. If
| you are an AI researcher this becomes plainly obvious the
| moment you visit any of the AI threads (if it isn't obvious
| already from the 6 to 12 month delay on the posting of cutting
| edge developments here). Sometimes it's hard to argue with
| zwj.org's assessment [0].
|
| [0] https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2016/hn.png
| Gerard0 wrote:
| Great post! Beautifully said!
| jlpom wrote:
| > Internet Archive was the ONLY place where I could enjoy a
| completely random piece of lost media from a children's
| television show called Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
|
| Same for me with Le roi et l'oiseau and Peter and the Wolf by
| Disney.
| cassepipe wrote:
| If you are looking for rare things in french or with frech
| subs like le Roi et l'oiseau, I also recommend checking the
| private torrent tracker called ygg
| (https://mamot.fr/@YggTorrent - you may have to change your
| DNS, check this page regularly as they move around a lot) The
| idea behind private tracker is that you are supposed to store
| as much content as you take from the network and you are
| actually incentivized to keep old rare stuff you like for
| people like you out there.
| disqard wrote:
| Thank you _so much_ for speaking up!
|
| You're not alone in thinking this way. And kudos for investing
| the Time to write this up -- the sophists are all-too-often
| over-represented here, and I'm never really sure that they're
| always arguing in Good Faith, or if they are, they're often
| being so short-sighted that it's simultaneously funny and sad.
| modriano wrote:
| > I am so sick and tired of the copyright laws that play
| counter to productive creation and stymying efforts to preserve
| anything. The fact that I have to wait until people die until
| copyright is up is god awful.
|
| So what's the right way to balance the need to preserve
| artistic/creative works and the rights of the creator to
| monitize or permit usage of their works? It seems rather gross
| to just say that the creator has no right to sell their work or
| object to some source copying their work and distributing it in
| a way that deprives the creator of profit.
| Bjartr wrote:
| You return to the original concept of (American) copyright.
|
| Encourage more creative work by exchanging a _temporary_
| government granted monopoly now for the promise of it
| becoming available to society 's benefit later.
|
| Current copyright terms are too long. Not everything needs to
| be monetizable to the nth degree in perpetuity in order for
| sustainable livelihoods to exist.
| shagie wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention
|
| > The Berne Convention states that all works except
| photographic and cinematographic shall be protected for at
| least 50 years after the author's death, but parties are
| free to provide longer terms, as the European Union did
| with the 1993 Directive on harmonising the term of
| copyright protection.
|
| This is _not_ an American thing.
|
| And the Berne convention was four decades before Disney was
| founded.
| qyph wrote:
| From your article: > The United States became a party in
| 1989.
|
| The person you are responding to is writing about
| American Copyright. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyrig
| ht_law_of_the_United_St.... The first american copyright
| law is from 1790, which does in fact predate the bern
| convention, and our life of the author plus 50 years rule
| is from the copyright act of 1976, 13 years before the US
| ratified the bern convention.
|
| So yes, it is an 'American thing' as are all issues of
| law in the US. And if you think that this kind of
| convention is meaningfully binding, just checkout the
| history of the US and other major powers with regards to
| various other international treaties, like the ICC https:
| //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court.
| kelnos wrote:
| Kinda irrelevant if it's an American thing or not. The US
| didn't become a party to the Berne Convention treaty
| until 1989, over 100 years later, but had been increasing
| copyright terms long before that[0]. We (and others)
| could just as easily withdraw from it, and make our own
| rules for works that originate in the US. We could even
| be nice and honor the copyright terms placed on works
| that originate in Berne Convention countries.
|
| I think the original terms of American copyright are fine
| to use as a model: 14 years for all works, period. And
| certainly that's open for debate; even 25 or 50 years
| would be much more kind to the commons than what we have
| now. We could even do like we do for patents, and have a
| relatively short term, with a one-time renewal option for
| creators who continue to benefit from a work and still
| care to keep it protected.
|
| [0] https://www.arl.org/copyright-timeline/
| shagie wrote:
| > We could even do like we do for patents, and have a
| relatively short term, with a one-time renewal option for
| creators who continue to benefit from a work and still
| care to keep it protected.
|
| The US is part of the WTO and thus a signatory to the
| TRIPS agreement (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPS_Agreement )
|
| > TRIPS requires member states to provide strong
| protection for intellectual property rights. For example,
| under TRIPS:
|
| > Copyright terms must extend at least 50 years, unless
| based on the life of the author. (Art. 12 and 14)
|
| > Copyright must be granted automatically, and not based
| upon any "formality", such as registrations, as specified
| in the Berne Convention. (Art. 9)
|
| Changing that to a "short term and renewable" would
| involve leaving or renegotiating the WTO. That is likely
| a non-starter.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| >(American) copyright
|
| this is important since in developing countries e.g. India,
| China with regards to DMCA it is commonplace to pirate
| Americanly-copyrighted media. so much so that it is not
| even frowned upon. relatively speaking, imagine a choice
| between paying tensfold what you pay in developed nations
| vs paying nothing
|
| similarly, for 'freer' countries e.g. France, Sweden,
| Netherlands - it is very difficult to enforce a law not
| created by the state whose laws you do obide by
| justinpombrio wrote:
| How about copyright reverts to its original duration of 14
| years with an opt-in renewal for an additional 14 years?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St.
| ..
| halostatue wrote:
| Various treaties that have been signed and approved prevent
| that. Copyright longer than 14-28 years is not a bad thing,
| but copyright for longer than ~50 years is IMO
| questionable.
|
| I'd love to see some of those treaties renegotiated to
| limit copyright duration for Works for Hire (e.g., most
| software out there), but also to reduce the overall length
| of protection...BUT. I'd also love to see RAND compulsory
| licensing on copyright materials over a certain age...BUT.
|
| In Europe (not really recognized in the U.S., AIUI),
| there's the moral right of the creator in addition to the
| copyright of the creator. This can be used by an author to
| _prevent_ their work from being published (say, an author's
| private letters that came into a publisher's hands) at
| least while they are alive. I think that's important.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Nope, there is no such moral right. It's an artificial
| right we created (actually mostly taking away the natural
| right for people to free copy whatever). And then through
| corruption, ended up expanding to absurdity and locking
| it in via treaties and all the propaganda that the vast
| majority of people swallow whole and take it for granted
| like fish take water for granted.
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| Capitalism causes some contradictions, this is one of those:
| you need a complicated/expensive scheme to lawfully defend
| the rights of content creators because the only possible
| incentive for producing content is monetary return from
| selling artificially scarce copies of this content.
|
| In a world where content producers were financed _anyway_ ,
| because we understood as a society that this is valuable,
| this waste wouldn't be necessary and we probably would have
| less "Avengers Nth the movie". That was the norm and how the
| likes of Da Vinci and others got to do their work that are
| now so much appreciated, so I don't think it's that utopian.
| kelnos wrote:
| You're presenting a false dichotomy. The alternative to our
| current system isn't solely "no copyright at all". It's
| pretty simple: reduce copyright terms to something much more
| reasonable. I believe the original copyright term in the US
| was 14 years. I'm sure we can guess why that has been raised
| several times since then: greedy corporate interests.
|
| Sure, it's certainly debatable what the "correct" term length
| should be, but I think most people could be convinced to
| value the commons a bit more and agree that it should be
| significantly shorter than the current "life of creator + 70
| years" (or for works-for-hire, 95 years from publishing or
| 120 years from creation, whichever comes earlier).
|
| For copyright owned by individuals, why should a creator's
| children and grandchildren (and great-grandchildren?) be
| allowed to continue to profit off their ancestor's work,
| depriving the commons of history and culture? For corporate
| ownership, why should the company be able to profit for
| longer than the lifetime of anyone around when it was created
| or published? Hell, most companies aren't even _around_ that
| long, so ultimately the copyright ends up being passed to
| several other companies that have no relation to the original
| owner.
|
| But really... 14 years sounds reasonable to me. I would even
| say 25 or 30 years would be ok, if the consensus is that 14
| years is too short.
|
| We could also go with a limited renewal system, like is used
| for patents. Say you get 14 years, and if, after those 14
| years, the work is still important to you, you can renew the
| copyright for another 14 years, or something like that.
| People and companies who still actively gain economic
| benefits from their work 14 years later will go to the effort
| to renew it, but otherwise -- what is probably the majority
| of cases -- it'll fall into the public domain.
|
| Of course, copyright isn't just governed by US law: the Berne
| Convention, at least, attempts to govern and harmonize
| copyright to some extent, and it requires minimums of 50
| years after the creators death for most types of
| copyrightable works. But this is all doable, with political
| will behind it. As usual, that's always the problem.
| modriano wrote:
| >For copyright owned by individuals, why should a creator's
| children and grandchildren (and great-grandchildren?) be
| allowed to continue to profit off their ancestor's work,
| depriving the commons of history and culture?
|
| If the copyrighted works were still relevant enough to the
| culture that the creator's descendants are still profiting
| off of the work, I don't see how it could be lost to the
| commons. If the commons and culture no longer care enough
| about the work to offer any money for it, I don't see how
| the descendants could still be profiting from the work.
|
| I don't have a dog in this fight (outside of me bristling
| at people acting entitled to disregard terms of GPL
| copylefts), I just what whatever system will optimize the
| quantity+quality of creative works, and I want creators to
| get paid adequate value for their work, even if that means
| they can sell the rights to their work to another entity.
| shagie wrote:
| To go to anything less than 50 years after the death of the
| creator would require leaving the Berne convention and the
| TRIPS agreement... and the WTO (since the TRIPS agreement
| is part of the founding set of agreements in for the WTO).
|
| The political will to change that in 164 countries for for
| the US to leave the WTO would need to be quite substantial.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Good. We should.
| [deleted]
| faeranne wrote:
| There's a fine line that could exist, but doesn't right now.
| Archiving content is a concept that goes back to the first
| cave paintings, and one tactic that has been proposed is to
| archive silently (meaning don't publish the archive
| immediately), then publish when the original source is lost.
| Archive.org did at one point do this, but given how often the
| internet changes, and the difficulty of tracking published
| and unpublished content, this eventually went away. We could
| create a robots.txt-like standard to indicated published and
| unpublished content, but there is actual money being made by
| destroying content and siloing everything. Till we accept
| that destroying history is bad, no attempt to solve this
| problem will be considered. We can have both, but the people
| fighting archive.org don't want both.
| [deleted]
| zehaeva wrote:
| One would think that this should be in the hands of our
| elected officials, however historically they have been more
| sympathetic to the idea that we need longer and stronger
| copyright than weaker.
|
| To speak to why we need this sort of thing I would have to
| harken back to a fun talk that Paul Heald gave back in
| 2012[0] where he showed this fantastic chart[1] that shows
| the number of titles for sale on amazon by publish year.
|
| The only thing I can assume from the chart is that either the
| publishing industry in the mid 1900s suddenly found itself
| publishing the same amount of books as they did in the 1830,
| no one cares about the books written between 1920 and 1990,
| or copyright has caused the loss of an enormous amount
| culture. According to the chart, and the talk, there are 7
| times as many books published in the 1910s than are available
| from 1930s-1950s.
|
| [0]: https://youtu.be/-DpfZcftI00 [1]: https://cdn.theatlanti
| c.com/media/mt/science/Amazon%20pub%20...
| amadvance wrote:
| A good compromise to me looks like twenty years from the
| first publication.
| dantheman wrote:
| The entire concept of copyright is problematic - it limits
| what you can do with property that you own. It's a government
| granted monopoly.
|
| Ideally copyright would be eliminated and people who choose
| to create will choose to create. There is development in lots
| of areas that aren't copyrightable.
|
| If you want to keep copyright, then it should be reduced to
| the bear minimum to incentivize creative works - that could
| be on the order of 20 - 30 years.
| modriano wrote:
| > The entire concept of copyright is problematic - it
| limits what you can do with property that you own.
|
| People can own guns. Is it problematic for the government
| to limit what people can do with their own guns? I would
| argue that it's not problematic at all, and I bet you
| would, too.
|
| I'm open to other systems than copyright to make it
| possible for creators to afford to create and sell their
| creations. I think Patreon is fantastic, but I don't think
| it would work well for things like code (or situations
| where people don't really care about the creator and just
| want the product).
|
| Everything will have second,third,fourth order effects.
| chelical wrote:
| The fundamental problem of intellectual property is that
| it protects the interests of large corporations far more
| than those of small creators. IP only matters if you have
| the resources to defend it in court or if your content
| isn't worth the effort to steal.
| uni_rule wrote:
| US IP law was written far before the scale of indie
| digital content or the mere concept of sampling was a
| blip in lawmakers' eyes. It was made for broadcasters and
| publishers to go after industrial scale bootlegging of
| books and movies.
| modriano wrote:
| That sounds more like an implementation/enforcement
| problem than of the concept of IP.
|
| If [ 1) disputes were decided on the
| merits and 2) costs of dispute resolution
| were 2.a) deferred until decision-time,
| 2.b) born by the decided-against party, and
| 2.c) made the decided-for party whole and then some
|
| ], I bet either
|
| A) an industry would spring up to identify wronged
| creators and fund defenses of their IP, or
|
| B) industry would just pay to license the copyrighted
| work.
| DesiLurker wrote:
| TBH I think the tech-bro fantasy of eliminating copyright
| is a non-starter for the larger business ecosystem. I mean
| see how long it took us to decide smoking is bad for us.
| IMO the we can do is incrementally reduce the copyright
| period length and let the industry adapt around it.
|
| But In my experience once money starts to flow in any
| entity its much harder to dismantle it without sortof
| letting bleed out. I dont think disney would give up its
| claim on the works anytime soon. we need to slay the beast
| by a thousand cuts.
| infinite8s wrote:
| We don't need to eliminate it, just go back to the
| original 14 yr term, with a renewal only allowed to the
| original creator (as an inalienable right so it can't be
| sold away).
| kelnos wrote:
| I agree, but your "just" in that sentence is doing a lot
| of heavy lifting. I think the parent poster describes a
| more realistic scenario where the term is reduced
| incrementally over a fairly long time.
|
| If a politician suggested changing the current term
| (often over 100 years, depending on the details of
| creation, publication, and ownership) so drastically,
| they'd be laughed out of office. Or, rather, defunded out
| of office by their corporate donors.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| We should be more discerning with where we allow copyright to
| be enforced. In my view, copyright's only legitimate purpose
| is to prevent someone else from selling your work as their
| own in order to make money. If the person or entity
| distributing your work is doing so with no direct recompense
| and only has the aim of making the work widely accessible
| mostly for education, scholarship and to the impoverished who
| would not otherwise purchase your work, then there should be
| no case to be tried. You wouldn't make any money off of these
| uses anyways. The people with enough disposable income to buy
| your book or software along with dozens of other copyright
| protected works they may purchase in a year aren't
| (generally) the same people who spend hours scouring IA or
| torrent sites for a freebie, their time is worth too much for
| that when they can just click Buy Now on Amazon and be done
| with it. Those are the people, whales in gaming industry
| parlance, that are paying your bills. Fighting legal battles
| against librarians and pirates won't win you any customers,
| it'll just reduce your publicity and sour what's left of it.
| modriano wrote:
| > The people with enough disposable income to buy your book
| or software along with dozens of other copyright protected
| works they may purchase in a year aren't (generally) the
| same people who spend hours scouring IA or torrent sites
| for a freebie, their time is worth too much for that when
| they can just click Buy Now on Amazon and be done with it.
|
| I fully concede that wouldn't go to IA to read any full
| work (it's too slow and the interface isn't nearly as nice
| as O'Reilly Online or a physical book), I think copyright
| made it possible for the current highly-convenient
| distribution models (of spotify, Amazon, and to a
| diminishing extent paid video streamers) to develop. In the
| early 2000s, people who had the money were still
| extensively using Napster/Kazaa/Limewire/etc to get content
| because buying an entire CD when you wanted one song sucked
| (although paying $0.99 for a song on itunes also sucked).
|
| I think there should be a carveout for IA as IA is a
| uniquely valuable resource, I'm just not sure how to make
| that into a general rule.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| Pretty much everyone I knew who used to torrent music
| owned very few actual CDs, the few who did own a lot of
| CDs seemed to only download rare or hard to find tracks
| and would go on endlessly about the shitty audio quality
| of downloaded music.
| nrbernard wrote:
| > https://archive.org/details/whiterabbitscant00varl
|
| A truly cursed book cover!
| Sakos wrote:
| > I see a lot of comments in this thread with what about-isms
| or "I don't care, we wouldn't miss anything", but these people
| are short-sighted. And to be honest the hacker news community
| is frequently the community I loathe to engage in these topics
| with. Because they are always looking forward with very little
| respect for the past as well as very little respect for domains
| outside of technology.
|
| There is a severe lack of appreciation for culture or even an
| understanding of what constitutes our culture, especially here
| on HN (which is why I hate discussing these topics here). It's
| not just a handful books that happen to turn into literature in
| 100 years. Our culture consists of every medium we interact
| with today. Allowing corporations to monopolize nearly all of
| it in perpetuity is quite simply immoral and severely damaging
| to our continued cultural development.
| ChancyChance wrote:
| I would argue that the aspects of culture that shape the
| culture are inherently recorded by the culture. The loss of one
| specific work known by very few can hardly be reason to panic,
| because there are petabytes of this content which I'm pretty
| sure no one will remember ever existed in the future, except
| the AIs that are trained on them. Now if the work that was lost
| was something of value, like a mathematical paper that wasn't
| realized for its benefit, that would be a counter argument, but
| those are stored in other vaults of provenance. I'm in the camp
| that the internet archive is for nostalgia and curiosity
| enthusiasts.
| RajT88 wrote:
| IA, to your point, is better than it has ever been.
|
| Long lost episodes of local shows (super local) are being
| uploaded by their actors and creators.
| nuodag wrote:
| > I am so sick and tired of the copyright laws that play
| counter to productive creation and stymying efforts to preserve
| anything.
|
| If you think about how cruel it is to make illegal the way
| human culture has worked for millenia, to listen to the storys
| you hear, retell them, remix them and make them your own in a
| new context. That is against the law now.
| luckylion wrote:
| No it's not. Go ahead, tell your friends the book you
| recently read. As a matter of fact, go ahead, read that book
| to your friends.
|
| Perfectly legal.
|
| Oh, you want to "retell" it and make money off of it? Yeah,
| that's something else.
| mrfinn wrote:
| F copyright, specially perpetual copyright used by big
| corporations as a weapon against poor people. Tyranny becomes
| law, rebellion becomes duty.
| YeezyMode wrote:
| Assuming the scenario where ISPs end up blocking access to the
| archive, the fact that this is happening alongside rapid advances
| in LLMs is pretty insane. Comparisons with historical snapshots
| of the web is probably one of the best ways to combat
| disinformation and misinformation generated using AIs. There are
| of course other risks and dangers that people have talked about
| re: restricted access to knowledge and precedents for future
| publications, but this one in particular seems very dangerous in
| a timely manner - almost like a setup for very clear and obvious
| disasters surrounding propaganda, memes, and social chaos.
| isopede wrote:
| I've been reflecting a bit on how nature of the internet has
| changed, and how niche communities that I used to rely on all had
| specialty forums, mailing lists, etc, with history often
| stretching back years.
|
| It seems like more and more of these old-school discussion forums
| are disappearing, and their modern equivalents (discord?
| subreddits?) just don't seem to have the same feel. DPReview is
| probably the most recent example, but I occasionally I will still
| visit specialty forums like eevblog.com for EE, or VW forums for
| my car. It's hard to imagine finding the same sort of expertise
| and years-long knowledge base on current discussion platforms.
|
| Where do we go next? What happens when these communities are
| lost? Where are we to go if, for example, HN were to disappear?
| FreeCodeFreak wrote:
| It contains a lot of copyrighted content, especially ebooks and
| software. This could be avoided if they would just follow the
| rules like everyone else.
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| Nearly every large service that allows user uploads contains a
| lot of copyrighted content, hence DMCA safe harbor. IA seems to
| operate in a gray area with stuff like the Console Living Room
| (which doesn't allow downloads), but as far as I've heard they
| are responsive to valid DMCA notifications. A lot of supposed
| "DMCA notifications" are bullshit, though (don't contain the
| required elements, not sent to the registered DMCA agent).
| groby_b wrote:
| We're going to at some point talk about the fact that the IA
| decided to do the absolutely most stupid thing they could
| possibly do to ensure they'd create the setup for the most
| devastating ruling possible, yes?
|
| Yes, our current copyright system is fucked up. This is, however,
| not a new fact. And the IA should've spent about 5 minutes
| talking to their lawyers to figure out why the idea as
| implemented was the worst thing they could possibly do. With
| pretty much no upside for them or the public.
|
| It's the utter boneheaded waste of resources here that's just
| hard to comprehend. You _know_ you work in a hostile environment.
| Behave accordingly.
|
| (This does not change that Hachette et.al are positively
| disastrous for the public good and should, frankly, be looked at
| as a cartel. And treated accordingly.)
| hermannj314 wrote:
| Is the premise of this opinion that if something is good, then
| courts should invent interpretations of laws to pretend the good
| thing is legal?
|
| The birthplace of the national park system took place through
| preservation acts passed by Congress, not wishful thinking.
|
| If IA is so amazing, why don't we codify and protect its
| existence through new law and not hope that a judge will squint
| favorably at copyright law?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| [flagged]
| geysersam wrote:
| The problem is our economic system doesn't support these kind of
| large scale extremely beneficial projects. (See Wikipedia etc.)
|
| How much value does Wikipedia or the IA bring compared to your
| average unicorn startup?
|
| There's a problem there we need to figure out how to solve...
| samstave wrote:
| We need a few many copies of the IA in the Seed Vault and have it
| constantly uploaded... We should also have a perma-satellite in
| LEO that can be streamed to... AND, while we are thinking out
| space, get a digital/physical seed vault on the moon - and can
| anything survive in the current Mars atmosphere? Send seed bombs
| to Mars and see what sticks? I mean, we appear to be hell-bent on
| terra farming Mars, so we may as well just throw seeds at it.
|
| https://scienceagri.com/16-most-important-plant-species-in-t...
|
| I would add bamboo to that list, though.
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| Maybe they shouldn't have done something that moronic? If people
| wanted free books they could always pirate them, openly
| infringing by hosting copyrighted books for a few people to
| slightly more easily read them for free... How could they
| possibly think that was a good idea?
| ernopp wrote:
| The case for doing what they did is that it helped a lot of
| people access books (eg school curriculum ones) in the middle
| of Covid (not everyone knows how to pirate things).
|
| Not saying it was the right move but you can see where they're
| coming from, they wanted to help people.
| ejb999 wrote:
| what if they did it with all of netflix's movies instead of
| books? would you feel differently? (I am sure netflix would).
| Ekaros wrote:
| Or maybe if they distributed newest version of software
| with certain parts removed. Maybe even non saas-software
| made by startups...
| emmp wrote:
| Yes I love the idea and I want it to be legal. Perhaps it is
| even worth someone testing the law here intentionally to get
| the courts to rule.
|
| The Internet Archive's mission, imo, should be to protect and
| steward their archives and ability to continue to maintain
| them above all though. Putting that at risk for a morally
| righteous additional cause is not worth it. This was a
| leadership failure
| rashkov wrote:
| This is pretty confusing... is the Internet Archive at risk from
| this legal decision?
| [deleted]
| hirako2000 wrote:
| It's at least at risk of being blocked by ISPs in the us and
| pressured/shutdown if hosting is by a provider in the US.
| nequo wrote:
| Even after complying with the court's decision and shutting
| down unlimited digital lending?
| Mindwipe wrote:
| That's not really going to be the issue anyway.
|
| The issue is if the liabilities of having done this result
| in the organisation going bankrupt. Note that the
| plaintiffs have already stated that is not their aim.
|
| Even then, the likelihood is more that someone else would
| take it over (though I imagine that the plaintiffs would,
| if they waived some proportion of their damages, that
| nobody currently involved in the current leadership and
| board was allowed anywhere near it).
| tristor wrote:
| Frankly, what the IA did here is absolutely the right thing.
| Copyright in the US is horribly fundamentally broken, and the
| idea that factual information about our history and world should
| not be referenceable and accessible for free is a pretty heinous
| one. Information wants to be free, and the work that IA did for
| "digital lending" during the pandemic was an essential move in
| the direction of ensuring that people can access this information
| regardless of their physical proximity and access to the base
| source material.
|
| I don't understand the backlash in the comments here, it seems to
| all come from a perspective of people being so downtrodden they
| just accept the current status quo crafted by MAFIAA lawyers,
| rather than looking at it holistically from first-principles.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Whether you support copyright or not, the Internet Archive did
| a dumb thing that will probably cost us having the Internet
| Archive. Everyone is mad because everyone saw it coming and
| told them not to risk it all.
|
| I'm not "supporting" the cops when I tell someone they should
| stop their car when they get pulled over. I'm recommending
| someone not get themselves shot.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| If the conversation ends with "be afraid of cops" and not,
| "let's organize to change cops", then you are supporting
| cops. Like in this instance we need to rally around copyleft
| politicians for the next election cycle so that something
| like this can't happen again. We need to have willpower and
| not be so weak willed to let the rent seekers win.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| > If the conversation ends with "be afraid of cops" and
| not, "let's organize to change cops", then you are
| supporting cops.
|
| That's an incredibly extreme take. Giving someone solid,
| possibly life saving advice, shouldn't need to include your
| favourite political sentiment in order not to count as
| explicit support for a unjust system.
| klibertp wrote:
| Not informing a European or Japanese of how this is a
| seriously unjust system you have in place - and not just
| a fucked up joke as it sounds (police? shooting at
| people? for not stopping the car?!? Haha, nice joke, man)
| - could definitely threaten their lives though.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| It's implicit support at worst and not that strong of
| support at that. This is just calling balls and strikes,
| not trying to impugn anyone for being a police lover.
| It's probably not bad that we should want for police and
| those they serve to feel supported to achieve good
| outcomes, but that takes political action.
| int_19h wrote:
| "Organize" is hot air without specific plan that has a
| _realistic_ chance of success. Voting for "copyleft
| politicians" doesn't, if only because there are so few of
| them, and further because a candidate has no chance of
| winning on this as their single issue - it's the rest of
| their platform that will decide the vote.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| How about a pirate party? I think we could find huge
| amounts of people sympathetic because most consumers
| would stand to gain materially from it. It's realpolitik
| and could be effective in creating a culture support for
| dismantling copyright. That is what was starting to
| happen when the MPAA and RIAA started litigating against
| individuals. They didn't just stop because it was
| ineffective at recouping losses, it was also undermining
| the faith people had in copyright.
| int_19h wrote:
| The feasibility of such a party depends greatly on the
| electoral system in any given country. In the USA in
| particular, our combination of single-member districts
| with FPTP means that third parties are not viable unless
| they run on some issue that is really resonant with most
| of society (to the point where it would override voting
| considerations on basically all other wedge issues). You
| have to go all the way back to mid-19th century to find a
| successful example.
|
| In Europe this fared better, but as we can still see, PPs
| enjoy limited electoral popularity even in systems where
| representation is truly proportional. Same basic problem
| here - there are way more important issues than just this
| one, and a party that doesn't make any stand on those
| other issues will only attract those few that consider
| its single issue _that_ important. But then the moment it
| starts taking positions on other stuff, that also turns
| off part of the potential electorate, and shifts it
| closer to a more traditional "for everything good
| against everything bad" kind of party.
| simiones wrote:
| It's really not. The copyright system essentially has two
| serious issues: the extraordinary length, and DMCA takedown
| notices that are too easy to abuse.
|
| But what IA did infringes even on a hypothetically repaired
| copyright system where the maximum age of copyright was
| something like 10-20 years, and where DMCA take-downs were hard
| to abuse. There's just no reason to allow any random entity to
| distribute books that it doesn't own.
|
| We have already seen in the software industry that there is no
| way for any but the biggest companies to survive in a world
| without copyright [which open source is similar to] (I am
| referring to how Mongo, Elastic, Grafana and others have all
| had to give up on up-selling open source software and move
| closer to a closed license; while only Microsoft, Amazon,
| Google, IBM etc. are thriving by giving away free software).
| ncallaway wrote:
| > But what IA did infringes even on a hypothetically repaired
| copyright system where the maximum age of copyright was
| something like 10-20 years, and where DMCA take-downs were
| hard to abuse.
|
| In that world, IA would be able to make available any 20+
| year book via their program. In that world, I think it's
| _much_ less likely that they feel any pressure to lend out
| copyright covered books, and if they did I would be outraged.
|
| I think it's a little unfair to invent a hypothetical world,
| and then project their actions into that world as part of
| your judgement of their entity.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| I agree we ought to reject the premise of copyright primacy
| over educational need for people. People with willpower are
| motivated to create without copyright, but without education
| they are stunted. Now let's get some copyleft laws on the
| books. Stallman clearly has too many skeletons to lead a
| political campaign or he would have already done it.
| carapace wrote:
| > Copyright in the US is horribly fundamentally broken, and the
| idea that factual information about our history and world
| should not be referenceable and accessible for free is a pretty
| heinous one.
|
| I (mostly) agree with you, but remember the rest of the quote,
| "Information wants to be free, information wants to be
| expensive."
|
| > What is considered the earliest recorded occurrence of the
| expression was at the first Hackers Conference in 1984,
| although the video recording of the conversation shows that
| what Brand actually said is slightly different. Brand told
| Steve Wozniak:
|
| >> On the one hand you have--the point you're making Woz--is
| that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so
| valuable--the right information in the right place just changes
| your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be
| free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and
| lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting
| against each other.[3]
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free
| hgs3 wrote:
| I agree with the sentiment, but not IA's risky approach. What
| did IA assume? That publishers would look the other way, that
| their actions would inspire copyright reform, that executive
| power would pardon them post-reform? Those are some crazy
| assumptions. I'd think a consumer revolt championed by IA would
| have been more effective while not jeopardizing the archive,
| i.e. "Information wants to be free, digital lending costs
| nothing. Contact your congressperson about copyright reform."
| anigbrowl wrote:
| A consumer revolt would do better, but contacting your
| congressperson about copyright reform is doomed to failure.
| Copyright (and the _de facto_ right to abuse and extend it)
| is an existential issue for publishers, but not for
| consumers.
|
| Any time you have a collective action problem like that our
| legislative system is always going to come down in favor of
| the capital owners, because the entire (US) polity is built
| around land apportionment. It's a political system designed
| by and for landlords.
|
| It's an artifact of the US' huge geography and short history.
| The abolition of spatial barriers by broadcast and electronic
| networks to the point of universal communication is
| fundamentally incompatible with a political system based on
| agrarian territoriality. You can't solve 21st century
| problems with 18th century political technology.
| matwood wrote:
| > what the IA did here is absolutely the right thing > I don't
| understand the backlash in the comments here
|
| I support CDL, and copyright change. IA may have poisoned the
| well by not actually doing CDL and trying to profit off of the
| claimed CDL books. So the backlash is understandable.
| ineedasername wrote:
| >Frankly, what the IA did here is absolutely the right thing.
|
| Sometimes doing the right thing gets you killed.
|
| -
|
| This lawsuit could be an existential risk for the IA. In a
| society that allows vastly different views on what is right and
| wrong, most people manage to navigate situations in a way that
| doesn't risk their existence.
|
| Within that line of thinking, what IA did was more or less a
| form of civil disobedience. If we go back to one of the
| founders of the philosophy of civil disobedience in the US we
| get to Thoreau. He was of the mind that the disobedient party
| should recognize the possible consequences and be prepared to
| accept them.
|
| None of this means that the IA shouldn't have made this choice.
| Just that they should have had their eyes wide open to these
| consequences.
| justin66 wrote:
| > I don't understand the backlash in the comments here, it
| seems to all come from a perspective of people being so
| downtrodden they just accept the current status quo crafted by
| MAFIAA lawyers, rather than looking at it holistically from
| first-principles.
|
| People do not understand that the IA want to go to court as
| part of their strategy, or else they think they understand what
| constitutes an effective legal strategy for the IA better than
| the IA do.
| simiones wrote:
| If this was a strategy from the IA, it has all but failed,
| hasn't it? And given that the vast majority predicted it
| would fail, I wouldn't even call this hindsight being 20/20.
| justin66 wrote:
| The IA will appeal the outcome of this case. An appeal by
| one side or the other was probably inevitable.
|
| I don't know as much about the law as the, ahem, "vast
| majority," but I wonder if the IA will, in the event of a
| loss, lose anything more than the ability to do something
| they are found to have done in violation of the law, and
| some legal fees. I read the decision and saw some reasons
| for encouragement, but hey... not a lawyer.
| wahern wrote:
| Libraries are given a good faith exception from statutory
| damages. 17 USC SS 504(c)(2). I don't think any court has
| yet had the opportunity to interpret and apply the
| exception. Nonetheless, there's little reason to believe
| that the IA's interpretation of Fair Use wasn't in good
| faith. The court's recent decision deferred the question
| for later, but we'll find out soon enough. And then we're
| only just getting started--this case was always destined to
| be decided on appeal as it poses novel and important legal
| questions.
| misnome wrote:
| IA losing and getting shut down because "information wants to
| be free, man" is completely detrimental to trying to move that
| agenda forwards.
|
| "First principles" means jack shit if your company to build
| that world gets wiped off the map because you did something
| incredibly obviously stupidly illegal and handed the "MAFIAA
| lawyers" your own ass on a silver platter.
| tristor wrote:
| Maybe my viewpoint on this is informed by long-standing
| desire to basically start something like IA but in a way
| which is protected from the acts of nation-states. The
| fundamental problem with human society is that the power
| structures are always co-opted by elites for their own
| purposes rather than the purposes of society as a whole, it
| doesn't matter what the system of those power structures is,
| in all cases they get co-opted.
|
| The fact that a corporate entity is allowed to take action
| against the IA in this case and be supported by the
| government in doing so is a symptom of our broken system,
| it's not evidence that the IA did anything wrong in any moral
| or social sense. The fact our society is held hostage, and
| that information is imprisoned, by entities like the MAFIAA
| is not a justification for this outcome.
| misnome wrote:
| > it's not evidence that the IA did anything wrong in any
| moral or social sense. The fact our society is held
| hostage, and that information is imprisoned, by entities
| like the MAFIAA is not a justification for this outcome
|
| I don't think that IA's position was morally or ethically
| wrong; I would wager a lot of people here would feel the
| same way.
|
| Unfortunately, for this case, morality and ethicality
| aren't the law. And the law was extremely known, and
| predictable in which side it would fall on here. This
| outcome was very, very predictable. IA gambled; possibly
| their existence; on astronomical odds that they could force
| a confrontation against the backdrop of the pandemic, and
| win. Maybe this was the best chance that they would ever
| get, in which case it was worth trying.
|
| But I don't think the anti-copyright revolution was ever
| going to be triggered by IA giving out free books.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| You can't have a revolution without breaking any laws.
| Gene Sharp and the advocates of nonviolence have really
| done a number on a lot of people's heads, giving them the
| idea that fundamental changes can be accomplished without
| any disruption or conflict through manifesting a large
| but peaceful number of people in a symbolic location. The
| only thing that gets you is a management shakeup. Real
| revolutions are messy.
| misnome wrote:
| > You can't have a revolution without breaking any laws
|
| I think you misinterpreted what I wrote. If you had asked
| me beforehand whether this specific action would trigger
| a copyright revolution, I'd have said no. I'm not trying
| to say that they should have followed the (obvious) law,
| I'm theorising that perhaps IA was willing to gamble
| their existence that this _would_ trigger that.
|
| Sci-hub probably had a much better chance of causing
| change, but feels like it might also have lost that
| chance with the multi-year pause to appease the Indian
| court. Various blocks also seem to have been effective;
| it's hard to find a working mirror.
| sekai wrote:
| > IA losing and getting shut down because "information wants
| to be free, man" is completely detrimental to trying to move
| that agenda forwards.
|
| Shutting down? Let's not jump to conclusions here, they would
| not shut down even if they lost.
| gcanyon wrote:
| Copyright law needs to change.
|
| Back in the day, a copyright measured in decades made sense,
| because it took that long to promote and distribute a work and
| derive reasonable profit from it.
|
| Today that process takes days, maybe months (apart from the rare
| work that languishes, only to be "discovered" later).
|
| Copyright should be much shorter -- a couple years at most --
| with renewal available if the creator really believes the work
| has yet to find its audience.
|
| The standard for abandoned works still protected under the
| existing system should default against the (potential) holder of
| the original copyright as long as a good-faith effort was made to
| reach them, and damages should amount to some sort of split of
| the profits.
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| I don't think I agree with this. Novels can take years to
| write, and to have their copyright expire after only a few
| years may not be enough for the author to write another book.
| What would be the motivation to write a series if the series
| isn't worth printing after only a few books? It goes doubly if
| the novel might be up for a movie or a TV adaptation: the game
| of thrones tv adaptation didn't happen until much later after
| the first book... does this mean George R R Martin should be
| paid 0 while HBO makes a killing on the first few seasons? How
| would any artist retire ever if they cannot make money off
| their existing body of work?
| legitimayzer wrote:
| really good cultural artifacts are not created by people
| trying to make money.
|
| when cultural creations are prompted by a profit motive, we
| get "masterpieces" like the rings of power.
| int_19h wrote:
| Let them maintain copyright for longer, then, so long as
| they're willing to pay property taxes on it.
| thfuran wrote:
| So what, like ten years free then ten year renewals each
| costing ten percent of total attributable revenue to date
| (probably with some minimum fee for extension)?
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| Frankly, I'm comfortable with the copyright holder being
| responsible to pay for the continued ownership of the
| copyright beyond its registration fees. It would allow them
| to determine whether or not a work is worth the continued
| investment to them, and presumably authors who are in a
| tight spot these days engage in mutual aid to assist each
| other. [#DisneyMustPay is a truly impressive mass
| cooperative event against an existential threat!]
|
| I'm merely against the notion that we should do away with
| the few ways a working-class artist can earn a living and
| continue making more work with their labor. I'd even be
| happy to do away with copyright if all creators had a
| guarantee of income/recompense proportional to the broader
| cultural dissemination of their work.
| [deleted]
| gcanyon wrote:
| Fair arguments, thanks for the thoughts. I think all of it
| needs to be taken in the context that "helping" creators is a
| secondary goal in service to the prime goal of maximizing
| creative output overall.
|
| That said, I'm sympathetic to creators; I've written several
| (unpublished) novels myself.
|
| Most novels don't support the authors that write them.
| There's no argument to be made that Jane Doe's 20,000th-
| ranked novel makes her nothing in the third year instead of
| three dollars.
|
| At the other end of the scale you have George R.R. Martin.
| I'm sure he would be fine with or without the revenue from
| HBO's GoT. That said, in that particular case I think it's
| likely that HBO would want his blessing in any case --
| _especially_ since he hadn 't written the ending yet. Without
| his cooperation, would people have been as likely to watch
| knowing the ending was made up by someone else?
|
| So then you have the mid-tier authors -- a misnomer since
| really you're talking about the 99.9th percentile, where GRRM
| is the 99.9999th. But in any case, I still think that the
| vast majority of the revenue from a novel generally comes in
| the first 2-3 years. If losing that last, let's say 5%, makes
| the difference between success and starvation, that seems
| like a rare case to me -- even for authors who write slowly.
|
| As for retirement, I'm not sure how to answer except to say
| let's pick an author who is clearly self-supporting, but not
| GRRM: Piers Anthony. He's still cranking out Xanth novels
| (last I checked). Do you suppose sales from his Battle Circle
| books (published in the '60s and '70s) are contributing
| materially to his retirement? Ha, I just checked and he's up
| to 45 books in the Xanth series. :-)
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| I'm not asking whether or not George R.R. Martin would or
| wouldn't be fine: I'm asking whether or not it's reasonable
| for HBO to make a killing off his work without him being
| paid at all as an example of how it doesn't seem reasonable
| on its face that smaller authors should just get shafted if
| someone makes a huge profit off their work.
|
| Since we want to talk about mid-tier authors, I think you'd
| be surprised how long and how well royalty can still pay
| authors. Cassandra Khaw has repeatedly commented on how
| Hammers On Bone (published 2016) is still making them
| significant revenue. And this isn't at all covering the
| nuances of UK/US markets, where books can make it big in
| the UK and only years later publish in the US and vice
| versa (where I know for certain make significant income for
| authors)! I'm sure Susanna Clarke, who has Chronic Fatigue
| Syndrome, is still immensely grateful for how well Jonathan
| Strange & Mr Norrell continued to sell (and then she came
| out with another banger, Piranesi!). Victor LaVelle is
| still making money off The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) to
| the point of producing a re-release hardcover of the book
| due to popular demand! And I know Nnedi Okorafor is still
| earning excellent royalties from Who Fears Death (2011)
| even though her more profitable works (Binti, Akata series)
| are getting more attention nowadays.
|
| The argument that books primarily sell 95% of all they'll
| ever sell in the first 2-3 years is a total
| misunderstanding of the book market. It may look like that
| for current-events nonfiction or celebrity bibliographical
| works, but fiction markets don't work like that at all--
| the backlist makes a huge chunk of the stable income of an
| author. This is true also for indie and self-pub markets (I
| can't name specific examples because I haven't done heavy
| research into this, but I know from panels and talks from
| other romance authors that self-publishing romance heavily
| relies on voracious readers who will buy your entire
| backlist.)
|
| But should any of those authors become sick, disabled, or
| otherwise no longer able to produce, should they end up
| never making another cent of any of their works? How would
| they support themselves 5, 10, 15, 20 years?
| shagie wrote:
| > But should any of those authors become sick, disabled,
| or otherwise no longer able to produce, should they end
| up never making another cent of any of their works? How
| would they support themselves 5, 10, 15, 20 years?
|
| Rick Cook (who wrote the Wizardy Complied series -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Cook_(writer) )...
| back in 2007 wrote:
| http://rickcooks.blogspot.com/2007/12/wiz-6-wizard-
| uncomplet...
|
| > In spring 2000 I was well into Wiz 6: The Wizardry
| Capitalized when I went into the hospital for emergency
| heart surgery. The surgery saved my life but a
| combination of medical problems and the effects of the
| drugs I take has pretty much ended my fiction career.
| (Non-fiction I still manage very nicely, thank you.)
|
| I've seen this happen to others. Something about the
| heart medicine prevents some spark of creativity. Its
| another example of an author who needed to support
| himself for another 20 years off the royalties from books
| he wrote a decade before.
| gcanyon wrote:
| Again, I think it's a mistake to hold up GRRM as
| representative of someone who would be "shafted" if HBO
| were able to make GoT without his participation. That
| ignores the other side of the coin: all the works that
| _could_ be made into other media but aren 't because: the
| author doesn't want someone else to sully their work; the
| author wants too much money; no one can find the
| copyright holder.
|
| It's interesting that none of the works you cite as being
| vulnerable are more than 12 years old. If we could agree
| on 12 years with a 12 year renewal, I'd happily
| compromise on that compared to what we have now.
|
| Looking at Cassandra Khaw: the book you mention, Hammers
| On Bone, is just seven years old. So under my scheme (I
| allowed for the idea of renewals) maybe she'd be on her
| second renewal? Certainly nothing like the current
| system, where that book will conservatively be under
| copyright well into the 2100s.
|
| But to your point: U.S. publishers sell almost a billion
| books per year. I'm not sure how much authors get, since
| the numbers seem to be different for professionally
| published books vs. self-published, but let's take it as
| $1 per copy. HoB is currently ranked 560,000th on Amazon.
| If we take _any_ kind of reasonable distribution of book
| sales, that would have her selling <= 1,000 books per
| year. That means she's clearing up to $1,000 per year on
| that book -- certainly enough to call it "significant
| revenue," but also not enough to keep body and soul
| together on its own.
|
| And again, I'll point out that current copyright goes far
| beyond the death of the author. Should we be similarly
| sympathetic to the children (or even grandchildren) of
| the author?
|
| And as an aside: Cassandra Khaw is actually similar to
| Piers Anthony: the very first book in the Xanth series is
| currently ranked 48,000th at Amazon, but the 20th book is
| ranked over 1 millionth. Interestingly, the most recent
| book is ranked 280,000th, so better than the middle of
| the series, but not as good as the first book. This
| speaks more directly to your point than any of the
| examples you gave, since A Spell for Chameleon came out
| almost fifty years ago. And the Battle Circle omnibus
| edition (it was a trilogy originally) is ranked
| 180,000th, so better than the most recent Xanth novel.
|
| But all of this ignores the point I originally made,
| which is that copyright is only secondarily for the
| benefit of authors. If you really want to argue for
| longer copyright, you have to support the idea that fewer
| authors would write, or write less, if copyright were
| shorter. That's the only justification that speaks to the
| intent in the constitution.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| >I'm asking whether or not it's reasonable for HBO to
| make a killing off his work
|
| The difference is that in this case, everybody would be
| free to adapt it as they see fit. HBO doesn't get the
| exclusive rights. Under the current system, only very big
| producers can afford to license well known properties.
| Under a more permissive system, anybody can do it.
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| No, because HBO has more than license: they also have
| audience and money to pay for actors, animators, script
| writers and, most importantly, a marketing campaign. They
| could still make a ton of money off of it, just that
| George R.R. Martin wouldn't see a single cent of it!
| That's what I'm saying would suck terribly. [See: All the
| lovecraft works in public domain-- big productions based
| on the mythos are still making toooons of money!]
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| For what it is worth, Cory Doctorow used to license his books
| with Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs. You
| can even find direct and free downloads to his books on his
| website [1]. At the same time, his publishers were selling
| hardcopies.
|
| Unfortunately, at some point he stopped doing it. He explains
|
| > There is also the fact that, in the time since Creative
| Commons licenses were negotiated, publishers have entered
| into agreements with the large ebook retailers that allow for
| price matching. This is in part an artifact of anti-trust
| litigation, but it means that if someone somewhere offers the
| book at $0, it technically allows all of the other ebook
| stores to offer the book at $0 as well.
|
| > Thus far my publishers have been good about grandfathering
| in the CC-licensed books that I already had, but for the last
| couple of books I haven't done CC licensing, in part because
| of the real fear that Amazon could set the price at $0 and
| there would be no recourse for my publishers--not even the
| recourse of not letting Amazon sell the book, because of
| deals ensuring that if Amazon sells one book of a
| publisher's, they have to sell the whole catalog.
|
| [1] https://craphound.com/pc/download/
|
| [2] https://www.authorsalliance.org/2017/05/09/a-good-guy-
| offeri...
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| Cory Doctorow's license on his books is explicitly
| Noncommercial, No derivative. The person I was disagreeing
| with would disagree even with that permissive license! And
| it would also go along with my argument, that Cory Doctorow
| is still retaining rights to demand payment if people make
| a killing selling his work in other markets or adapting his
| work. I have no issues with creatives willingly picking
| which rights they choose and which rights they keep. But
| you can see even with more permissive licensing, Cory
| Doctorow is still retaining the most salient and
| potentially profitable ones for himself.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| That is exactly the point. Copyright is not a single
| right. We need to expand the discussion to talk about the
| validity and duration of each of those rights.
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| I'm completely comfortable talking about those things! :)
| I just disagree with the notion that copyright should
| just magically go away without any serious consideration
| of its consequences to creatives. I'm more than happy
| with some hypothetical solution that both prevents
| inaccessibility to creative works and also enforces that
| creatives should be compensated for their labor.
| 0xfffafaCrash wrote:
| I'd argue that copyright and intellectual property more
| broadly shouldn't exist.
|
| That wouldn't lead to the end of culture but a cultural
| explosion as people became able to remix and propagate ideas
| more freely without the fear of punishment for violating
| artificial state-enforced monopolies.
|
| No one is obligated to create a work and no one is obligated
| to share their created works with others. There's no inherent
| right to anything once you put an idea out there and the
| legal constructs are just novel artificial ways to keep the
| have-nots from competing with the haves.
|
| Culture existed well before notions of intellectual property
| and if anything today we have far better means of both
| producing works ourselves and collectively funding works that
| might not exist without compensation.
|
| Rewarding the top 0.0001% of lucky creators with huge
| compensation isn't worth the broad societal damage that is
| done by preventing people from sharing or making use of
| ideas.
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| Then how should any artists make any income at all from
| their work? I'm not talking about 0.0001% lucky creators
| with huge compensation. I mean the 70 year old with cancer
| who cannot write anymore. I mean the 35 year old disabled
| artist who cannot work a "normal" salaried job. I mean the
| artist from an underdeveloped country who became popular
| and now the "wealthy" countries want to translate and
| publish their work in their relatively wealthy markets.
| [These are all real cases I'm familiar with, as a person
| who actually is in community regularly with working-class
| authors.]
|
| The world in which you speak of where art existed outside
| of notions of intellectual property meant _only the wealthy
| and well-connected could be artists_ , whereas with
| copyright a cancer-fighting, aging, midlist author can
| still demand royalty payments if Disney bought his books
| and are still selling them for profit (Alan Dean Foster,
| specifically). Peter S. Beagle (The Last Unicorn author)
| was put through elder abuse and lived in poverty, and only
| many years later was he able to regain rights to his work
| back as well as force recompense for harm committed to him-
| this wouldn't work if the rights to his work expired while
| he was being abused.
| bombcar wrote:
| We have the technology now to balance copyright - simply
| put - if an item is not available for a _reasonable
| price_ , then the copyright expires or becomes "cannot be
| sold except by original author" or something. Needing to
| keep things like books that are currently in print
| protected shouldn't prevent people from obtaining works
| that have fallen out of print, apparently irrevocably.
|
| Print-on-demand and digital copies means that even a
| small author can keep their works available "for pay"
| easily now.
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| I'm completely comfortable with a "if no one's making it
| available reasonably, it should be made so" policy. I'm
| only concerned for living creators to retain rights to
| their work and be compensated for their creations while
| they are still actively using their work to give
| themselves a living, so I would be fine with ensuring
| work isn't irrevocably lost due to lack of copies.
| bombcar wrote:
| I think the other side of copyrights where you can
| irrevocably sign over your rights (which may be more of a
| US thing, UK seems to have some inalienable ones) is a
| significant issue (as mentioned, the Foster thing where
| Disney wasn't even paying him because they argued they'd
| acquired assets without liabilities -
| https://winteriscoming.net/2021/04/23/disney-star-wars-
| autho... ).
|
| It's hard to fully balance. Another example would be Don
| Rosa's McDuck comics - he had to fully assign all
| copyright on them to Disney when making them, so the way
| the reprinters get him some money is by having him write
| forwards/commentary, those he can retain the copyright on
| - https://career-end.donrosa.de has more
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| Alan Dean Foster's situation was not an irrevocably
| signing over his rights; he signed a specific business
| agreement that Disney tried to renege on dubious claims
| that would totally change corporate law if it was made
| valid precedent.
|
| Don Rosa's situation doesn't really have much to do with
| the original advocacy to do away with copyright
| altogether, so I don't understand your point here. Are
| you arguing that copyright is bad because it's sellable
| under unfair terms, and therefore no one should be able
| to sell their work?
| bombcar wrote:
| I'm just pointing out that our _current_ system of
| copyright doesn 't really do _enough_ to protect the
| authors and artists that create the works we enjoy; there
| 's certainly room for improvement.
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| Copyright and intellectual property exist because we've
| decided as a society that we want people to spend serious
| time and energy making these worthwhile things. Absent
| protections, the upfront investment of time and effort
| aren't worth it. If one cannot control the use of one's
| original works, only the wealthy can afford to chase that
| sense of accomplishment.
|
| I am an author who is able to earn a modest income from my
| body of work, but only because I have spent almost 20 years
| creating a diverse collection of writings, and copyright
| law mostly protects me from having to compete with other
| people selling my writings. I say "mostly" because I find
| my work plagiarized once in a while (often with the word-
| for-word copies of my work earning more money for the
| plagiarizers than it does for me).
|
| On a surface level, I understand the critics of
| intellectual property. I concede that all art is derivative
| to some degree, and nothing springs from a vacuum. I
| acknowledge that even greater art can be achieved if
| something can be iterated upon by a diversity of artists.
| But the harsh reality is that most of the people who want
| to repurpose art aren't doing it to create something new
| and distinct, they just want to profit from hard work
| without doing any themselves.
| [deleted]
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Currently the copyright term in the US is life-of-author plus
| 70 (edit: corrected from 90) years. Life of author has some
| reasonable basis. Past death it's understandable that
| descendants would want the estate to be worth something, if an
| author was unable to capitalize upon their work in their
| lifetime, but supporting an author's family for 3 generations
| is ridiculous.
|
| There isn't a political solution to this. Because the US has a
| territorial electoral system, no politician is ever going to be
| representing a constituency who will care about the diminution
| of copyright terms as their primary issue, and building a
| legislative coalition to advance a nebulous public interest is
| hard, massively more so when countered by politicians who are
| bankrolled by large concentrations of capital.
|
| In this country, any attempt to advance the current and future
| public interest over private gain is loudly denounced as
| tyranny by people who are awash in wealth and power. Those who
| try to undermine the foundations of capital from below are
| denounced as thieves and terrorists. That's why you get an
| endless ratchet effect.
| [deleted]
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| None of the hand wringing about covid is the least bit relevant
| to the question of whether the emergency library is copyright
| infringement. If Congress wants to set aside copyright during
| pandemics, that's fine (and maybe a decent idea frankly). But in
| the absence of something like that, this is all just a smoke
| screen.
|
| What a poorly written article.
| jsnell wrote:
| The title implies that losing this lawsuit is threatening the
| existence of the Internet Archive. Is that really the case?
|
| If it is true, then maybe IA should be run by somebody with
| better judgement. This was a project with a massive chance of
| failure (how could anyone think that this wasn't just blatantly
| infringing?) and a low payoff. If it's also an existential risk,
| then wtf are they doing running it?
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| They're doing us all a favor is what they're doing.
| Intellectual property is just not that important when compared
| with ensuring that the powerful can't rewrite history.
|
| If they lose their case, I hope the project can be kept afloat
| in ways that the US government can't interfere with.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| A fight against IP is a fight against capital
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| [flagged]
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Archiving is typically protected. Lending of currently
| available works is not archiving.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I hope the project can be kept afloat in ways that the US
| government can 't interfere with._
|
| The U.S. government, oddly, is the least of my fears when it
| comes to rewriting history.
|
| Private enterprise is already doing it, even going to far as
| to reach into your private library of books and music to
| change them after you're purchased it:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/arts/dahl-christie-
| stine-...
|
| Until yesterday, I used to sync my music library with Apple
| Music. Not anymore. Apple responding to the Times reporter
| with a big fat "no comment" tells me that it thinks it's OK
| to change things on my computer without my knowledge.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I'm not sure Apple really thinks of it as "your" computer
| either.
| acomjean wrote:
| Dahl (or his publisher) changed his own book , the initial
| back story of the oompa-loompas being problematic. This was
| 10 years after publishing when someone pointed out it
| wasn't a great depiction.
|
| https://www.roalddahlfans.com/dahls-work/books/charlie-
| and-t...
|
| But it is weird that they can go into your device and
| change it now. Don't love it. If they made Version 2
| available at the same time....
|
| I have Body Count's first Music CD. I got the day it was
| released. It has a song that was considered problematic and
| thus removed in future editions.. But they can't change it
| on the one I have. The big stink they made about it
| probably sold a bunch copies. On release day they had one
| copy on CD and one on tape and I had to ask the person
| working at the store if they had it. (as opposed to dozen
| of Bruce Springstein albums released that day).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_Count_(album)
|
| They're were a other examples of CDs cover art being
| modified because naked people..
| https://janesaddiction.org/discography/janes-
| addiction/album...
| ncallaway wrote:
| Yea, I think the argument about publishers choosing to
| release new, edited versions of older books is a silly
| one. We should let the marketplace and the marketplace of
| ideas sort it out.
|
| But, the fact that they changed digital copies that were
| previously purchased is insane. The companies that do
| that should be pilloried and shamed for such an action.
|
| Frankly, I'm no longer participating in digital purchases
| for music, books, or video, unless it's DRM free and I
| can move the file to my own storage. I'd rather just rip
| a CD/DVD and take on the burden of managing that data
| myself.
|
| Jellyfin/Plex has been super super helpful in making sure
| I don't even lose out that significantly on the user
| experience front.
|
| I am terrified of the world we're entering where lots of
| new media will be digital/steaming only, and there will
| be no way to purchase and archive the "as-released"
| version of songs and movies.
| bombcar wrote:
| Digital copies are subject to many hundreds of
| revisions/changes that you may never notice (most are
| typo fixing). Even print editions have these types of
| changes, and some are even substantial (famously, the
| Lord of the Rings has various changes made between
| editions by Tolkien himself, mostly fixing typos and
| minor inconsistencies; but he also _accidentally_ got a
| revision of the Hobbit that was a major plot change still
| referenced in LotR itself:
| https://sweatingtomordor.wordpress.com/2018/05/17/were-
| tolki...
|
| Some publishers maintain a list of "corrections" - some
| only update a digital copy on a new edition of a print
| copy, and some update them as they go. I've done a print-
| on-demand book at it technically has something like 50
| revisions but only one is marked in the book itself as
| 'significant' - because why not update the source PDF
| when you can just click a button?
|
| A similar thing is happening with software; DooM has had
| people carefully inspect the various different versions
| and patches released; but now massive games are mostly
| online and version differences are lost to time; even if
| you know the changelog you can't ever actually experience
| the old version anymore.
| ncallaway wrote:
| > Even print editions have these types of changes
|
| This is different, though. They don't break into your
| house, find the book on your shelf, and update it with a
| sharpie.
|
| The digital corrections and changes are _fine_ if they
| are opt in. It's when they are automatically applied, and
| there is no (legal, tos abiding) way to keep the original
| file and reject updates that's... horrifying.
| dumbotron wrote:
| > ensuring that the powerful can't rewrite history
|
| That overstates IA's influence. People still think Elon
| started Tesla.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Imagine somebody had the option to 1984 some datum for
| political advantage, but stopped because they were afraid
| they'd get caught. Isn't IA the first thing that comes to
| mind?
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| [flagged]
| coldpie wrote:
| > If it is true, then maybe IA should be run by somebody with
| better judgement.
|
| I'm skeptical that you even _get_ the IA without someone like
| these folks running it. Imagine you 're the type of crazy
| person who starts and runs the IA, the pandemic starts and
| libraries and schools shut down, and there's a big button in
| front of you saying "give people access to knowledge that was
| just removed from them". I dunno man, I can understand the type
| of person who creates the IA also feeling compelled to push
| that button under those circumstances. Was it a bad decision? I
| dunno, probably, I guess. It was a weird and hard time. I'm not
| angry at them for doing what felt right.
| Mezzie wrote:
| It's an argument for the separation of library and archival
| work. Access to knowledge and preservation of knowledge are
| separate things, even if they have a lot in common.
|
| It might be wise for someone to consider a truly archival
| only organization.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| IANAL, but in fact copyright law has been abundantly clear
| that copying something strictly for archival purposes is
| legal, too.
|
| It really is the (re)distribution of archived materials
| that is in the wrong here. IA could go and archive every
| single bit of digitized data, copyrighted or otherwise, and
| if that's all they do then nobody will or can complain.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| The purpose of copyright law is to "To promote the
| Progress of Science and useful Arts" [1] . It stands to
| reason that deleting or allowing everything to bit-rot is
| probably not conducive to the promotion of progress. We
| need libraries and archives.
|
| [1] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/se
| ction-8...
| Mezzie wrote:
| Yup.
|
| I and many other librarians have private 'pirate'
| libraries of various materials, particularly ephemera
| that aren't covered by mandatory deposit or digital
| content. We're just not allowed to distribute them.
|
| Do we abuse this? Oh hell yes - most of us are archiving
| according to our personal interests. Which is the main
| concern about the IA going offline: We shouldn't need to
| rely on some of us personally saving things (and we can
| confirm each other's provenance - in order to trust my
| archive is what I say it is, you need to trust _me_ ).
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Perhaps we could let the publishing industry operate the
| turnstiles and collect a small but increasingly large fee
| from people trying to use it, until the public commons was
| indistinguishable from private property?
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Ehh.
|
| I'm not really buying the Robinhood theory. This feels like
| some techies thinking their above the law and getting a
| reality check.
|
| It's not like actual libraries don't offer digital lending.
| You might need to wait a week for Gane of Thrones, but it'll
| be OK.
|
| IA decided the world was unfair and with a bit of arrogance
| decided to 'correct' it. Let's hope IA is able to just stop
| lending books and still exist.
| faeranne wrote:
| There's a seperation between a library and a pirate site,
| so it's kinda a bad faith argument, but even going on the
| merits of your argument, I am pressed to point out that,
| yes, other libraries have digital lending. It's called
| Controlled Digital Lending. CDL. The thing that this
| current lawsuit is trying to remove. So this isn't just an
| argument against IA's library wing, but a move to remove
| _all_ library and archive efforts. Penguin has come out and
| said they are against libraries hosting any of their books
| _at all_. US law makes this something they can 't fight in
| physical print, but this is their attempt to start
| destroying these services.
| dumbotron wrote:
| I don't donate to them because they're mismanaged like this.
| Aachen wrote:
| I have in the past, but I'm also holding off until this
| lawsuit nonsense is done with. Don't need to fatten the
| lawyer industry with my money for their own mistakes. Running
| the wayback machine and things like flash emulation is what I
| want them to do: y'know, archiving stuff and making it
| available to current systems.
|
| I should really look into whether this books lending branch
| has a chance of taking the web archive stuff down with it
| and, if so, buy a hard drive and start seeding this torrent
| that is iirc out there as a decentralized backup of the IA.
| This data being lost would be similar in proportion to losing
| GitHub or Wikipedia.
| pgalvin wrote:
| There is no decentralised backup of the IA. They're using
| 100-200 petabytes of storage. The wayback machine alone is
| still in the tens of petabytes.
| slim wrote:
| It's not a game. It's resistance by every mean available
| against corporations that want control over what knowledge we
| have access to. He did an unexpected and courageous move for
| the benefit of humanity. The Internet Archive is a huge
| responsibility because if not exhaustive, it could falsify
| history. It's leaders mandate is to preserve history, not to
| preserve what they let him preserve
| groby_b wrote:
| This is, frankly, hot air.
|
| The IA resisted nothing, achieved nothing, made nobody's life
| better, and created an opportunity for bad precedent.
|
| It was an utterly boneheaded move. (It has also nothing to do
| with "exhaustive preservation")
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Yeah everyone pretty much said when they announced the National
| Emergency Library, they were risking everything. Sure enough,
| that's what happened.
|
| Giving money to the current Internet Archive is pretty much
| just giving money to the book publishers. Instead we should be
| funding someone new to buy the assets off in the auction, and
| keep the previous decisionmakers far from the new entity.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| I use IA all the time and love the website and most of what
| they do. But some of the stuff that they do that risks getting
| it all shut down is why I stopped donating.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| if you like the product, you can't pick and choose the traits
| of the origin.. source-- rock and roll biz
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| Nah, why would I give them money when they do blatantly
| illegal stuff?
| bee_rider wrote:
| It seems like a reasonably thing, to stop giving the
| Internet Archive money if you think they might be a bad
| steward of it.
|
| The comparison to rockstars is kind of interesting
| though, they often engaged in behavior that was criminal,
| and sometime pretty odious. We gave them money because we
| liked their cultural output, and they wouldn't give it
| away for free.
|
| The Internet Archive doesn't demand money, produces stuff
| with much arguably greater social value, and doesn't
| really do anything odious (just illegal).
|
| In the end I have a streaming subscription and don't give
| money to charities (maybe when I get a good job I will).
| Funny to think about, though.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| > In the end I have a streaming subscription and don't
| give money to charities (maybe when I get a good job I
| will).
|
| Most people won't. When you get the better job, you still
| won't. If you were buying your first yacht, you still
| won't.
|
| Pick a percent, maybe 1%, of your income. Donate it. If
| it's literally $1, you are at least giving a dollar. Do
| it today. If you don't want to pick charities directly,
| there are charitable funds you can give to instead.
| SllX wrote:
| Depends on what they're looking at in terms of statutory
| damages. Looking at their Form 990s they bring in roughly in
| the neighborhood of $15-20M/year in contributions. That isn't
| really a lot, and makes me wonder how they ever defend
| themselves in court but somehow they've survived this long.
| Mezzie wrote:
| Librarians are a _pain in the ass_ to litigate against would
| be my guess.
|
| We're very detail oriented, we're organized, and we're very
| good at following procedures. We're just as good at drawing
| things out as lawyers and burying us under tons of paperwork
| does nothing. Basically a lot of the tactics used to get big
| lawsuits over with quickly are much harder to execute against
| librarians. It becomes a war of attrition.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| That's not the case here.
|
| The IA lost the case because the testified in court they
| didn't actually check and had never built a mechanism to
| check that the libraries involved weren't letting out the
| physical books at the same time.
|
| They didn't do even the very basic of legal scholarship on
| the copyright situation for uncontrolled lending.
| Mezzie wrote:
| Legally, the IA is in the wrong here. (I hate it because
| _morally_ I side with the IA but yeah the courts aren 't
| going to.)
|
| I was just addressing the 'how did they survive this
| long'? part. It's basically the flip side of places that
| leverage their superior legal resources to draw out
| lawsuits to get the other side to drop them/make them not
| worth the time. "We're going to be such a pain in the ass
| you're just going to quit out of sheer frustration."
|
| Personally, I think the IA fucked up really hard here.
| SllX wrote:
| I never thought of it that way before, but that tracks.
| Mezzie wrote:
| We also don't need to bill the lawyers for everything
| that most clients do. A lawyer for the IA can probably
| give them exact specifications for things like delivery
| of discovery documents and what they'd be looking for in
| them and get exactly what they need. So way fewer
| billable hours used for administrative tasks.
| ncallaway wrote:
| Wouldn't someone with better judgement have shut down the
| wayback machine as too much of a risk of a copyright
| infringement lawsuit?
| ghaff wrote:
| It's a reasonable question. I don't get to call myself an
| archive or museum and assemble a website of what I consider
| "culturally important" cartoons or comic strips or whatever.
| The Wayback Machine basically operates in the zone of most
| people don't care that they do this.
| ncallaway wrote:
| I mean, they were sued for copyright infringement and
| settled out of court at least once, so it's not a
| negligible risk.
|
| I guess my question is largely "Does someone with 'better
| judgement' even start the internet archive?" I don't have
| the answer, but I think it's at least plausible that the
| answer is "no".
| renewiltord wrote:
| Ultimately, the Internet Archive is the Man in the Arena.
| Everyone else didn't choose the right position on what
| copyright infringement is okay and what isn't. They
| didn't choose a position at all until post facto they
| choose the position that was right up against the margin
| of being sued - which they would never had known if the
| IA hadn't done the work.
|
| As always, HN commenters would have picked the perfect
| trade-off every time in the past and yet they somehow
| never pick the right one in the future. You're being
| overly kind to everyone here since it's obvious what the
| truth is: this is wholesale armchair quarterbacking from
| a bunch of people who would never have built this.
| ghaff wrote:
| I assume any competent IP lawyer would have told them
| that there was no law allowing them to do what they
| wanted to do. (IANAL)
|
| On the other hand, to the degree that you can operate in
| a zone that involves poking as few sleeping lions as you
| can (and deal with the odd copyright infringement suit or
| complaint), that's maybe OK. The problem I see here is
| that the IA seems to have incrementally tried "ooching"
| more and more things some of which were almost certainly
| less central to their mission and harder lion pokes.
| bombcar wrote:
| The wayback machine has much MUCH better arguments (it's
| copies of public content at a point in time by definition),
| even the DMCA has carve outs for preservation and scholarly
| works, many use it for real things and not just piracy, etc.
|
| The wayback machine arguments are good enough that they could
| receive a Supreme Court decision along the lines of
| "technically this is illegal, but the law is wrong" type.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| The internet archive served two distinct but important functions:
| one as a backup of the web which was important for accountability
| and history, and the other as a repository for archiving the
| world's non-web digital information. I personally scanned a whole
| bunch of ephemera and IA was the obvious place to put it.
|
| Why jeopardize those functions to do something brick and mortar
| libraries already did better, and legally? Other libraries do
| virtual lending.
| sp332 wrote:
| None of those things are on the line.
|
| _We will continue our work as a library. This case does not
| challenge many of the services we provide with digitized books
| including interlibrary loan, citation linking, access for the
| print-disabled, text and data mining, purchasing ebooks, and
| ongoing donation and preservation of books._
|
| http://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/
| EamonnMR wrote:
| It doesn't legally challenge those activities, but I'm
| worried about a situation where they get their proverbial
| pants sued off.
| ajdude wrote:
| This right here! The Internet archive had a really good thing
| going, I've been donating, digitizing, and uploading to IA for
| years. They were playing with fire, we all this coming, and I'm
| very frustrated with them over this.
| jmull wrote:
| AI was foolish and irresponsible. Republishing books without
| limitations would almost surely provoke a law suit that they
| would almost surely lose.
|
| Not only is it a waste of resources, but now that they are in
| court they could very easily receive a judgement that curtails
| access they used to provide before the rollout of the "emergency
| library".
|
| It's fine (and right, IMO) if you don't agree with the current
| copyright law but just ignoring them was foolish.
| Aachen wrote:
| IA autocorrect?
| jmull wrote:
| lol, it could've be me, I have AI on the brain lately.
| beej71 wrote:
| I say it's fine if you think it's foolish, but we really need
| to save the fool.
| ineedasername wrote:
| I think this is the right approach to take. Unless the IA
| went into their decision with their eyes open and knowing the
| huge risk they were taking with the existence of their
| organization. That would at least make it no more foolish
| than anyone else knowingly taking a huge risk.
|
| But yes, the IA is both culturally important and
| significantly beneficial in everyday practical matters. I'm
| not sure what we can do to help IA come out of this intact
| though. "Write your congressman" is these days a somewhat
| laughable suggestion in the face of any problem, the
| desperate act of last resort that no one expects to actually
| succeed.
| marwis wrote:
| Amazing how reckless IA is with their library program while at
| the same time being extremely cautions with Wayback Archive to
| the point of retroactively applying robots.txt and removing
| website archives because "they can't afford even the smallest
| risk of being sued".
| moffkalast wrote:
| > If you've ever researched anything online, you've probably used
| the Internet Archive (IA).
|
| Wow, pretentious much. The Wayback machine is an interesting
| passing curiosity that with great luck sometimes saves a webpage
| that isn't completely broken. The average person has never heard
| of its existence. Sure it's fun looking at how web pages used to
| look like and laugh at terrible designs but it's not exactly part
| of anyone's real workflow and surely violates right to delete and
| a bunch of other copyright laws.
|
| You've stolen and rehosted the world's content and now you're
| surprised people are suing you? Do these people hear themselves?
| Did they not see pirating sites being fought tooth and nail in
| the past decades? I'm frankly surprised that the FBI hasn't sized
| their domains years ago.
| [deleted]
| ineedasername wrote:
| You've almost definitely used the IA if you have spent any
| amount of time browsing articles on Wikipedia. Appropriately
| sourcing information is a fundamental (and imperfect) part of
| Wikipedia, and doing so relies extensively on the creation of
| static IA snapshots to preserve the cited information.
| cobertos wrote:
| How is that pretentious? It has so much truth to it. The
| attention span of our information stewards (large corporations,
| large universities) is so small that within 10 years you will
| have trouble finding information they once deemed critical and
| published.
|
| I've used IA to research things I would not have been able to
| any other way, the information is _no where_ else!
|
| * Finding missing YouTube videos from playlists. It's usually
| enough to get the title as YouTube doesnt care to show you the
| title of what's been deleted, privated, etc.
|
| * A large university deleted all their "website builder" pages
| including a lot of research and news about certain projects. I
| used IA to find information on a building I bought from them.
|
| * Looking at the origins/roots of companies like Unity3D. Have
| you seen their website in 1999? It's pretty cool!
|
| * Old tutorials on websites that don't exist anymore.
|
| There is so much use to IA when those that store our
| information would gladly pull it out from under us to save a
| few dollars.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Those use cases are useful, sure. But also likely illegal.
| Does that mean the laws are dumb? Also yes. But they are
| currently law.
| cobertos wrote:
| The legality has nothing do with the informations
| criticality or usefulness.
| moffkalast wrote:
| It would be also very useful for me to stroll into a
| random bank and take a few hundred thousand, but alas I
| cannot. ZLibrary and Pirate Bay are also incredibly
| useful.
|
| Sites have the right to remove content, and are sometimes
| legally required to. Sometimes even for good reason.
| textfiles wrote:
| brb Adding "Interesting Passing Curiosity" to my resume
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I'm always surprised by how many people will come out of the
| woodwork to shame IA for defying some of the most idiotic laws
| conceived. I have great faith that even if by some legal disaster
| this destroyed the IA, it would invigorate the people that work
| and support it... because they're right.
| jonesnc wrote:
| So, how do we create an Internet Archive Archive?
| lkbm wrote:
| There are people working on this, but "IA preserved as it was
| when it was killed in 2023" is nowhere near as valuable as IA
| as it would be in 2033 if it survives. IA is constantly adding
| new content. ("New" meaning "not-yet-archived stuff from the
| past century", in addition to up-to-date web snapshots.)
| Aachen wrote:
| I'd rather have "IA preserved as it was in 2023" than no IA
| at all. If we have a gap in the collection between tomorrow
| and when someone sets up a new IA in a few years, that's very
| different than losing most things collected about the
| inception of the Internet.
| tablespoon wrote:
| What people need to be working on is to create a
| peer/successor organization that can take a copy of its
| archive and carry on its core functions, not just a static
| archive on a server somewhere.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| WebServer + Scraper + Storage in essence.
|
| The main issues are storage, centrialisation, moderation and
| copyright; that if you wished, rebel and ignore these with a
| distrbuted model like BitTorrent, or IPFS.
|
| If an library burns to the ground you loose everything, so you
| will have to decentrialise. That then causes moderation issues
| as if you were to truely go decentrialised; what's stopping a
| bad actor uploading icky stuff? It would resolve the take-down
| from copyright, as they couldn't kill all nodes. But all sounds
| like a lot of work for a very little return.
| cwilby wrote:
| I recently (in the last 2 weeks) used Wayback Machine to
| miraculously restore an old static site where the backups had
| also been lost.
|
| https://github.com/alessandropellegrini/WebsiteRecovery
| hirako2000 wrote:
| ipfs?
| bethecloud wrote:
| storj
| lkbm wrote:
| ipfs might be a hosting solution, but that's a small part of
| the challenge. You also have to source the data.
|
| I recently used some online periodical archive access from my
| local library to find sources about 1940s musicians protesting
| recorded music...couldn't find anything. Then I tried IA, and
| boom, they've got it[0] -- someone had to source and scan all
| these.
|
| I recently wanted to revisit some 1980s-era computer games from
| when I was a kid. Internet Archive. How'd they get there?
| Someone there pulled them from 5.25" floppies.
|
| A few weeks ago, I remembered 3-2-1 Contact magazine, which I
| enjoyed as a kid. No problem: IA has source and scanned them.
|
| I could store all the DOS games in the world on my hard drive
| without noticing the space usage at all, but step one is
| acquiring copies of them. When it comes to the long tail of
| obscure 1940s periodicals or 1980s advertisements[0].
|
| [0] https://twitter.com/lkbm/status/1608480435691995137
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1643781181568327681
| yeeeeeee wrote:
| I'd argue we lost the Internet Archive when they started to
| remove archives of domains based on public backlash.
| emmp wrote:
| I think leadership at Internet Archive was deeply irresponsible
| for deciding a short term stunt was worth potentially
| existentially threatening legal exposure.
|
| The entire leadership there and anyone who signed off on the
| decision should be replaced. I am a donor but I'm pissed. They
| should have known better.
| [deleted]
| throwitaway222 wrote:
| We are? I'm more worried about having a roof over my head in the
| next year.
| digging wrote:
| Both can be true.
| wslh wrote:
| Could (or is) the Internet Archive be decentralized shared (e.g.
| BitTorrent)?
| butz wrote:
| I bet some folks from datahoarding subreddit have at least a few
| copies of the Internet Archive.
| 35208654 wrote:
| Beginning with the RIAA suing college kids and culminating the
| French police raiding what.cd, I have become anti-copyright. Not
| reformist, not 'but it's good for...'. Totally anti-copyright.
| Burn it all down. Share music. Scan books and upload them to
| libgen. The shared cultural history of humanity depends on it.
| frandroid wrote:
| > Hatchette v. Internet Archive
|
| Freudian typo...
| noNothing wrote:
| Ignoring fair use and countries other than the US we see that
| Copyright in the COnstitution said to promote science and useful
| arts, works should have protection for a limited time. Shortly
| after COngress defined "limited" as 14 years plus a renewal for
| 14. Then it was 28. plus a renewal and after more lobbying it
| reached today's time of the Authors lifetime plus 70 years. And
| since Mickey Mouse protection expires next year, we will probably
| see another extension. How life of the author plus 70 can be
| considered "limited time" just shows how the courts have trampled
| our Constitution.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Indeed so. It's only limited if you subtract out the human
| experience from policymaking. Given that the average lifespan
| in the US is 77 years, the reality is that you have to wait
| until you're almost at the end of your life for legally
| unrestricted access and use of material by someone who died the
| same year you were born.
|
| The cake is a lie.
| skee8383 wrote:
| We're already screwed because the internet is dying. Everyone is
| just using phones now, all the forums are shutting down. IRC is
| dead. Matrix is dead. Discord lives because it's a gamer/trans
| rights echo chamber. but that's it. The late 90s and early 2000s
| was the golden era of the internet. we're living in the detritus
| now.
| Arathorn wrote:
| matrix is far from dead! just hit 94M addressable users and all
| time high of 2M MAU on the matrix.org server (doubled in last
| year)
| skee8383 wrote:
| it has tons of bots and dead accounts. i run a few channels
| with hundreds of "users". they get maybe 3 posts per month.
| faeranne wrote:
| Wanna throw in a small, but hopefully important story here. About
| 5 years ago, IA managed to recover a nearly decade long lost card
| game. It wasn't a huge deal, and the original creator had assumed
| it permanently lost when his website crashed. It wasn't even a
| great game tbh. The author was focused mostly on webcomics, so it
| was considered an inconvenience. Thing is, this was a game he
| made back in high school, so while it wasn't a huge financial
| loss, it _was_ an emotional loss for him. He had even partially
| used IA to try and recover it. Turned out there were multiple
| steps needed to navigate to the right page, since the link IA had
| actually grabbed was different from the link the page it pointed
| to had. I received an incredibly heartfelt message from him
| talking about years of nostalgia I had unlocked by returning that
| page to the public. Mind you, this was a _web comic_ artist, so
| he would have fully been within his right to tell IA to purge all
| his copyrighted content, but had he done that, this card game
| would be gone. forever. So, there 's a clear balance that could
| be struck. Or... you could look at it the way he did: "I
| distribute my content in a way that makes advertisers happy. IA
| makes sure if I fuck up it's not gone forever. No one is using IA
| to read my comics unless my site is down. If it's down... well,
| I'm not making any money off of them anyways."
|
| So... yeah, there are right ways to do things, and the thing is,
| IA is not a place people generally point to for piracy. Its a
| place to point to when the worst happens. When the original
| creator isn't making money on something anyways. Or when they've
| ensured a group of people _can 't_ pay them for something.
| 49erfangoniners wrote:
| Well be aight
| anononaut wrote:
| We'll be stuck in Plato's cave
| VonGuard wrote:
| Honest question: what is stopping Brewster from filing for
| bankruptcy and transferring all assets to another non-profit. CA
| law specifically states that dissolved non-profits have to donate
| everything to another non-profit. All the hardware and data would
| be considered their core product. They could donate all of that
| to a new non-profit, and leave some token staff and office
| equipment behind for the bankruptcy to chop up and distribute.
| Happens all the time with for profit businesses....
|
| Also, thumbs fucking down for society punishing Archive for doing
| something to help Americans during an extreme time of crisis. I
| feel like if an apocalypse ever happens, 10 years later, everyone
| left alive will be in court being sued for helping each other.
| America is so stupid and short sighted about EVERYTHING.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| I'd imagine there are laws preventing that kind of behaviour.
| If a court is ordering you to pay something and you then hide
| all your assets to avoid paying then that's pretty serious.
|
| Would you be happy if a chemical plant donated its facility to
| a new company "Chemical Plant 2" in order to avoid paying
| compensation for chemical spills?
| kornhole wrote:
| A rally is planned on Saturday at 11 in SF.
| https://actionnetwork.org/events/dont-delete-our-books-rally...
| beej71 wrote:
| So they were foolish and now we're here. But I hope we can all
| agree that IA still needs saving, and losing it is a disaster for
| all real people.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Here here.
| icameron wrote:
| Is there any chance this we would loose the Way Back Machine or
| the Live Music Archive because of this?
| criddell wrote:
| Does the IA own hardware? If so, I would guess the court could
| force the sale or transfer of those assets. In another comment
| somebody posted that the maximum damages could be something
| like $20 million which seems survivable.
| ineedasername wrote:
| _A Most Sensible Proposal for the Absolute Perpetuation of
| Copyright Laws:_
|
| It is a melancholy object to those who walk through this great
| Internet of ours when they behold the countless instances of
| piracy and blatant disregard for the sanctity of copyright laws.
| The noble and ever-vigilant lawmakers, in their infinite wisdom,
| have blessed us with these righteous statutes, designed to
| protect the creative genius of the chosen few and ensure their
| perpetual enrichment. I shall now humbly propose my own thoughts,
| which I hope will not be liable to the least objection, for the
| enhancement of copyright laws and the merciless suppression of
| those who would dare to infringe upon them.
|
| I have been assured by a very knowing academic of my acquaintance
| that copyright infringement is a scourge upon our society,
| depriving deserving creators of their rightful earnings and
| perpetuating anarchy in the realm of intellectual property. It is
| of the utmost importance that we reinforce the importance of
| copyright, extending its reign to the furthest reaches of human
| creativity, even unto the most mundane and trivial expressions.
|
| In order to accomplish this most necessary task, I propose that
| all human utterances, expressions, and gestures, be they written,
| spoken, or signed, be henceforth copyrighted, requiring the
| payment of a modest fee for their use. This fee shall be directed
| to the original creator, or their heirs, who shall retain control
| of their intellectual property for a period not less than one
| thousand years. This, I am confident, will provide ample
| incentive for the continuation of human creativity and
| innovation.
|
| Furthermore, to prevent the heinous crime of piracy, it is
| imperative that all infants be implanted with a small monitoring
| device, connected to the great and mighty copyright database.
| This device shall track each individual's every expression,
| ensuring prompt and accurate payment to the appropriate copyright
| holder. Should any attempt be made to remove this device, or
| should an individual be found in violation of copyright laws,
| they shall be immediately and publicly flogged, that others may
| learn from their example.
|
| For those who might object that this proposal would stifle
| creativity and hinder the sharing of knowledge and ideas, I say
| that such fears are baseless and utterly without merit. After
| all, it is only through the tireless efforts of our most esteemed
| creators that we, the unworthy masses, are granted access to the
| wisdom and brilliance of human thought. Surely, it is a small
| price to pay for the privilege of partaking in such exalted
| company.
|
| I profess, in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the
| least personal interest in endeavoring to promote this necessary
| work, having no other motive than the public good of my country,
| the advancement of the arts, and the salvation of mankind from
| the hideous specter of copyright infringement. Let us embrace
| these changes, for only through the eternal protection of
| copyright can we ensure the continued flourishing of human
| creativity and the preservation of our most treasured works for
| generations to come.
| ineedasername wrote:
| No one familiar with the satire source material for this?
| Jonathan Swift, Modest Proposal, eating babies etc.?
| [deleted]
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| The article is extremely misleading.
|
| It makes it seem like the 4 publishers are against Internet
| Archive as a whole, when all they sued for was for the
| unrestricted publication of copyrighted books during the start of
| the pandemic.
| lkbm wrote:
| It was prompted by the unrestricted lending, but it's pretty
| clear that the fight is now about lending at all.[0]
|
| That may still only be the OpenLibrary, but it's not just the
| unrestricted lending, and I wouldn't be surprised it it also
| has a chilling effect on other scans. I'm curious how letting
| people view scans of obscure 1940s magazines is legal if doing
| it for books is not. They're not even restricted to one
| "borrower" at a time per physical copy with periodicals.
|
| [0] https://authorsguild.org/news/ag-celebrates-resounding-
| win-i...
| ghaff wrote:
| Pretty much "everything" (other than public domain) on the IA
| is on shaky ground. It's been mostly OK because very few
| people object to the archiving of their public web pages
| (especially given the IA respects robots.txt even
| retroactively) and, as you say, old magazines that basically
| have zero commercial value.
| kwo wrote:
| IA stopped respecting robots.txt in 2017. I had to issue a
| DCMA takedown to get my sites delisted. They are arrogant
| and think themselves above normal netiquette. They deserve
| to lose.
|
| https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-
| sea...
| tech234a wrote:
| A relevant (yet incomplete) list of exclusions: https://w
| iki.archiveteam.org/index.php/List_of_websites_excl...
| phmqk76 wrote:
| This is a college newspaper, I'm surprised it made it here. I
| cut them some slack, they're still learning.
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