161–170 of 409 posts
I stand behind Internet Archive on this. It was the right opportunity to try and push our freedoms forward. Internet Archive is political by design, it's very existence is merely tolerated by the Intellectual Property Feudalists. It was the good fight to fight.
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Yes, I think that perspective is actually more relevant, even if the IA might have made a mistake. But I see only victims in this conflict. Most authors today don't really eat with golden spoons and to have an organisation that helps them get their fair share of the work they put into the books is certainly necessary in the internet age. On the other hand the internet archive is an extremely valuable service. I hope…
Personally, I find it hard to be sympathetic to the publishers and authors when they are so over-the-top. Painting the Internet Archive as "vile" and claiming they don't provide any valuable service strikes me as so far from the truth as to be insulting. It feels like they are targeting people who don't really know much about what IA is or what they do... That makes me wonder if it's really about more than IA and the…
9 fantasy novels, 1 sci-fi novel, 2 history books, 2 TV shows, 1 comic series, 1 day job, 0 sleep
The guy has published 12 books and STILL needs a day job.
I've got a synology NAS with at least 10TB spare capacity I could donate... If only there were a way to use it, and thousands more, to back up important projects like this in a decentralized way.
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…
https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE....
and
"Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and Wiley [...] sued the organization." Noted. I'll spend my money elsewhere.
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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.
untrue, you would also have to think that noone went out after reading what they received for free and bought supplemental material from the author. Also it would a balance of what was free / what was purchased that would determine the net impact.
1. There actually is other material available from the author to buy. If there isn't, it's simply a loss. 2. If there is other material by the author, you have to assume the reader was not going to read any of the author's material without having access to the free book first. 2. If additional material exists, and the person would have never engaged with the authors work without a free "trial" of their work, less than 100% of people who access the free material will go on to buy additional material. Some because they are uninterested, some because they don't want to or can't purchase it for the same reason they couldn't purchase the original. In the former case, thats a net loss. In the latter, its a wash. 3. Even if there is additional material to buy, and even if the reader only becomes interested in the author's work through the free book, and even if the reader is inspired to go out and buy it after reading it, it only offsets the original lost revenue of the first, free book (assuming they are priced similarly). So its only if a reader is inspired to go out and buy at least 2 more works by the author that they would actually become a net positive for the publisher/author.
Clearly the number of people accessing the free material who would actually be a net positive for the author/publisher is quite small, and the free book in general would almost certainly be a net negative. You can do all the mental gymnastics you want, but at the end of the day, its still theft. People will argue that publishers are all rich and so we shouldn't care, but thats a different argument, and doesn't apply to the majority of authors who don't actually make that much money.
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No, that's for a single raw copy (it could go lower based on implementation -- the sweet spot on $/bit pricing is around 8TB/disk right now, but that would actually be more expensive for us in total cost because of the increased infra/space/power necessary to run them). We could probably get a relatively trivial 20-30% savings on space for Wayback contents via compression, maybe more with work (various projects are u…
By unique data, that excluding generated data? Can you please estimate the space for just the wayback machine? It's the actual target. What's the wayback machine with and without images? Is it possible that we could distribute the ASCII/Unicode content now?
It may be your target, but I would not be so dismissive of the other data in the Archive. The Software Library, the tens of millions of scanned books, the music, etc etc. On top of that, the raw scrape data driving the Wayback Machine is not currently made available to download from the archive. It's stored in WARC files, which would include both the images and text of all scrapes and would not be trivial to disentangle.
I had not realized that the Internet Archive had 'expanded' into archiving & re-publishing books 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 projec…
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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?
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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…
> 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. Are yo…
Well, at least there's an implicit admission justice is bought by the highest bidder.