Live data from Hacker News

Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site

decrypt.co

1–10 of 409 posts

Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site

#2
> The Internet Archive removed waitlists for books in its "National Emergency Library" so that multiple readers could simultaneously download the same digital copy.

>Four major book publishers have responded by suing the Internet Archive. If successful, they could bankrupt the nonprofit.

>The publishers take issue not only with the National Emergency Library, but with the Internet Archive as a whole.

Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site

#5
post #3

Is there any easy way to download large chunks of the Internet Archive? Maybe IPFS mirror?

Their is already a distributed web version running here https://dweb.archive.org/details/home

Not sure how it works though and IPFS shows red status?

Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site

#8
post #4
post #3

Is there any easy way to download large chunks of the Internet Archive? Maybe IPFS mirror?

"Let's Say You Wanted to Back Up The Internet Archive" by Jason Scott https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/h02jl4/lets_sa...

Very interesting discussion here. Apparently can get 16TB drives at $100 each on enterprise bulk pricing. An entire backup would be 3,125 drives for $312,500.

But apparently the wayback machine itself is only about 2 Petabytes.. so if you don't need the collections perhaps only 125 drives needed, or $12,500.

Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site

#9
post #8
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Let's Say You Wanted to Back Up The Internet Archive" by Jason Scott https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/h02jl4/lets_sa...

Very interesting discussion here. Apparently can get 16TB drives at $100 each on enterprise bulk pricing. An entire backup would be 3,125 drives for $312,500. But apparently the wayback machine itself is only about 2 Petabytes.. so if you don't need the collections perhaps only 125 drives needed, or $12,500.

Disclaimer: I run the infrastructure/ops team at the Internet Archive.

Unfortunately none of those numbers are really even close to correct (the discussion is always fun, but the folks in r/datahoarder are often not correctly informed. textfiles has more patience for it than I do). It would probably cost around 1.5M in drives, even at reasonable current enterprise volume pricing, to back up the 60+ PB of unique data in the Internet Archive (plus, as someone does note in that thread, the cost of running them -- even if it were a static backup to cold disks, you still need chassis to run them in for the backup process, space and infra for them, electricity, people, &c). I don't know offhand how much space the contents of the Wayback currently take up, but it's definitely an order of magnitude more than that number as well.

Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site

#10
The publishers should stop now that they've taken them down, but this was grossly irresponsible of the Internet Archive to do this, and they brought it on themselves. Releasing all of these copyrighted books for free hurt authors who rely on royalties to live, and it was inevitable that publishers would sue. I honestly don't understand why they did it. They have a responsibility as custodians of the archive to not put it at risk of destruction.
Post reply on HN