141–150 of 409 posts
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You make it sound like this is the tech version of "too big too fail".
Well it's the only place of its kind, it's more like it's too important to allow to be destroyed. Because you know that these copyright holder do not actually care about history or culture. Look what happened to what.cd, they will burn down everything to protect their profits
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.
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> 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.
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I keep thinking that the Bittorrent protocol would be an ideal fit for this; specifically, it would need a way to have all peers agree on what chunks of a file they themselves host and share to ensure the most complete copies available. And it would need a system for keeping it updated. I wouldn't mind hosting a NAS in my closet and some bandwidth + storage to donate to the IA. I also think cloud providers - all of t…
Bittorrent would require the totality of the archive to be preserved in multiple copies. I can't have a copy of that ledger here at home. We'd need a distributed highly redundant filesystem for that.
For better or worse the revenue streams associated with that IP generation is a large driver for the IP to be created in the first place.
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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.
Except requiring the physical book (or single book digital equivalent) controls the pace. If a standard checkout is 2 weeks, and if the book is always checked out, it will still take 4 years to hit 100 lends. And a thousand lends? Close to 40 years.
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Most public libraries have ebook lending, and there are lots of free sources that don't pose an existential threat to the archive
I know only a comparatively small number of people who own library cards. You cannot check out an ebook from the library without a library card. You cannot get a lovely card without physically entering the library. If you did not have a library card when the library closed, or you left it unused until it expired, then you cannot check out ebooks from the public library. Last I checked, there was, I think, 3 public li…
NYPL, for instance, suspended address verification for issuing new e-library cards, with the caveat that it was restricted to borrowing ebooks.
While that endeavor certainly has value, the risks - exactly these risks - are so large & obvious that it really should have been done as a separate corporate organization. That is what the corporate structure is for - to separate liability.
Now, the entire, and very valuable, core mission is threatened by this one project.
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Just because the marginal cost of a copy is zero does not mean there's no value in the information, and it's perfectly reasonable to gate access to that value. Copying a video file is free too but I'm sure you wouldn't argue that anyone can watch a movie for free just because someone else made it. People have a right to own and control the distribution of their works that they invested in creating.
> it's perfectly reasonable to gate access to that value It's also perfectly reasonable to distribute that information widely and without limits. The fact information is valuable to someone doesn't make it scarce. The harsh reality that creators need to face is that only the first copy need be paid for. > I'm sure you wouldn't argue that anyone can watch a movie for free just because someone else made it I would. Ins…
This is exactly how it works today, and then the investors (people who either gave money or time) hope to get their investment back plus some profit through distribution.