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Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site

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

#51

Post by andromeduck »

Santosh83 wrote: post #29

As for saving their data, well, about 60 million people need to donate 1 Gb of their hard drive space, or just 6 million people, 10 Gb of their HDDs. Or more soberingly, any one of the world's millions of multi-millionaires could write a single cheque to back up all their info, but will anyone do so? Probably not, as collective resources and knowledge are of no benefit to them, indeed even detrimental.

If I did the math right, it actually only costs about 72k per year to archive 6PB on Google cloud. Thats well within the range of one Googler's annual discretionary income.

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

#52

Post by matheusmoreira »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #42
themodelplumber wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems more like they thought it was worth a try, for prospective reasons. From that perspective I find it hard to fault them based on the potential reward ratio for opening such knowledge, much of it no longer in stores or libraries at all, to all of society. The Internet Archive is broadly improving on the library concept by leveraging their technology to push for innovation in intersecting areas of law and cultu…

This reward ratio concept that you invented to frame this only accounts for one side of the transaction. For starters, to give something away for free, you have to own it first. There no moral high ground in deciding to give away other people’s things. But if you want to only focus on the potential for public good, then where would you put the “reward ratio” for the authors who’s work was given away by the internet a…

> There no moral high ground in deciding to give away other people’s things.

Copyright does not have the moral high ground either. The fact is most books should already have entered the public domain. However, the public was cheated out of its rights due to ever increasing copyright durations. Why should authors and publishers retain monopoly rights to works for over a hundred years? It should be a few years at most and that's being exceptionally generous.

There's absolutely nothing moral about copyright. When properly constrained to a reasonable duration, it could be considered a necessary evil at best. In its current form, it is equivalent to rent seeking and should be straight up abolished.

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

#53

Post by kyledrake »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #49
ComputerGuru wrote: post #27

I warned about this very outcome when they announced the initiative [0]. The Internet Archive is too big and too important to gamble on this short term of a win (giving everyone free and unlimited access to all books for a few months at most). Assuming the organization continues to exist after this ordeal, their entire board should step down for putting at risk one of the most invaluable archives in existence. I’m an…

If you want to establish a legal precedent, you can't just go to a court and ask them to. Courts only hear "cases and controversies" -- to establish what the law is, you have to get somebody to sue you. The reason this could bankrupt them is mostly because they don't have a lot of money. Their net assets are only a couple million dollars. They have to raise more than that every year just to keep operating. But it's a…

Could you site your source for "their net assets are only a couple million dollars"? Knowing the scope of the organization, that number would surprise me.

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

#54

Post by basilgohar »

ascorbic wrote: post #32
Beldin wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Releasing all of these copyrighted books for free hurt authors who rely on royalties to live Do you have any data on that?

Unless you think there were no people at all who downloaded for free rather than paying, then it cost authors royalty payments.

By exactly this same line of reasoning, don't libraries present a loss of revenue for publishers because people can borrow a book that they otherwise would have to pay for and purchase? One book may be borrowed hundreds, if not thousands of times.

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

#55

Post by jakeogh »

jonah-archive wrote: post #20
schoen wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't Jason Scott work for the Archive? Couldn't he just ask you for better numbers or something? :-)

Oh, Jason's numbers are fine. He's not the one asserting that you can buy storage for 20PB).

What would a representative file size historgam look like?

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

#56

Post by AnthonyMouse »

kyledrake wrote: post #53
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to establish a legal precedent, you can't just go to a court and ask them to. Courts only hear "cases and controversies" -- to establish what the law is, you have to get somebody to sue you. The reason this could bankrupt them is mostly because they don't have a lot of money. Their net assets are only a couple million dollars. They have to raise more than that every year just to keep operating. But it's a…

Could you site your source for "their net assets are only a couple million dollars"? Knowing the scope of the organization, that number would surprise me.

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943...

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

#57

Post by readarticle »

Ygg2 wrote: post #50
jariel wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"would be a tragedy of bigger magnitude than the destruction of the Library of Alexandria." No, it would not even be close to that scale.

Well yes, the library was smaller.

And it was hardly the only one around at the time, many other libraries in many other Greek cities with Pergamum probably being the most notable.

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

#58

Post by andromeduck »

jonah-archive wrote: post #9
fouc wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Google offers archival storage at $14.4 /TB/a so about $1mm/a + access costs.

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

#59

Post by RobertoG »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #42
themodelplumber wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems more like they thought it was worth a try, for prospective reasons. From that perspective I find it hard to fault them based on the potential reward ratio for opening such knowledge, much of it no longer in stores or libraries at all, to all of society. The Internet Archive is broadly improving on the library concept by leveraging their technology to push for innovation in intersecting areas of law and cultu…

This reward ratio concept that you invented to frame this only accounts for one side of the transaction. For starters, to give something away for free, you have to own it first. There no moral high ground in deciding to give away other people’s things. But if you want to only focus on the potential for public good, then where would you put the “reward ratio” for the authors who’s work was given away by the internet a…

This idea, implied in your comment, that information should have the same legal treatment that a physical object it's not so obvious to me.

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

#60

Post by AmericanChopper »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #52
AmericanChopper wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reward ratio concept that you invented to frame this only accounts for one side of the transaction. For starters, to give something away for free, you have to own it first. There no moral high ground in deciding to give away other people’s things. But if you want to only focus on the potential for public good, then where would you put the “reward ratio” for the authors who’s work was given away by the internet a…

> There no moral high ground in deciding to give away other people’s things. Copyright does not have the moral high ground either. The fact is most books should already have entered the public domain. However, the public was cheated out of its rights due to ever increasing copyright durations. Why should authors and publishers retain monopoly rights to works for over a hundred years? It should be a few years at most…

Copyright is neither moral nor immoral. It simply gives people who create content the ability to exercise certain property rights over that content for a certain period of time. There would be nothing immoral about abolishing copyright, but if you did then you could be sure that a lot less people would be willing to spend years writing the books you enjoy reading, or millions of dollars creating the TV shows and movies you enjoy watching.

Whether or not you think the existing copyright laws have exceeded their purpose is a completely different discussion, and one that is not at all related to this particular topic at all. Because the Internet Archive did not only violate copyright for content benefiting from whatever your opinion of excessive copyright is, they violated it for all the content they had.

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