31–40 of 72 posts
Chris Freeland is a menace to our library. The case was open and shut.
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I like what the internet archive is doing, but I'm saddened that many just use it as a hack to get around paywalls. I don't think that's in alignment with the internet archive's mission. I think it's important for society in the long-term to keep journalism a rewarding profession. Maybe as a compromise the internet archive could only allow access to archived journalism content after, say, a year's time. We'd be sure…
archive.is has no connection to the Internet Archive, the IA I believe does not allow the easy bypass of things like the NYT paywall.
Is it publicly known who is behind archive.is? Last time I checked about a year ago I could not find a name. But between the lines I could read they are affected by sanctions against Russia. Not individually but by the lack of international banking. So I concluded they are operating from Russia in one way or another.
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> other than not allowing some books in schools So… book bans. You saw book bans and somehow thought they weren’t that?
To be clear, I think libraries should carry whichever books are in demand by even a fringe few, regardless of how many other people those books offend. If even just one person in town is interested in a book, the local library should try to get that book (if practical, of course.) But I worry that we're devaluing the term "book ban"; what will we call it when they actually do pass laws making the possession or sale of some books illegal?
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archive.is has no connection to the Internet Archive, the IA I believe does not allow the easy bypass of things like the NYT paywall.
This drifting away for the original topic... or maybe it isn't that much if the pessimists are right in the end that IA will shut down after this lawsuit and we need other ressources when searching for something that has disappeared from the net. Is it publicly known who is behind archive.is? Last time I checked about a year ago I could not find a name. But between the lines I could read they are affected by sanction…
The specific development this post references is a proposed injunction [1] that Internet Archive and the publishers agreed on and sent to the judge. With certain exceptions (such as accessibility and fair use), IA would have to remove from its lending program any books that are commercially available from the publishers. IA wants "commercially available in electronic text format" and the publishers want "commercially…
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Not only do they still have an appeal, but the problem goes beyond the Internet Archive itself. Lobbying politicians, coordinating with other libraries, inspiring more civil disobedience, all of which can more productively happen now that we've seen what publisher's limits are as well as how we've seen that publisher profits _grew_ over the period that the National Emergency Library was available.
The appeal would be for the implementation of the restriction both parties have already agreed to. It’s a clear regression from pre Covid. They’ve lost either way.
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Libraries and schools have been adopting books that depict graphic sexual acts. These books are targeted at minors and parents are demanding their removal. Rightly so
I doubt that it has impacted my mental health, my development or anything else.
It's a fact that the US has more teenage pregnancies and more porn production than most European countries. It appears to me that the "Me too" problem is bigger in the US.
So parents asking for removal of such books don't do anything good for their children or the society they grow up in.
IMHO they were very dumb to do the emergency lending nonsense to begin with. A good example of letting ideology walk you past the cliff. Even if they’re successful against the injunction the damage has been done. Given how tenuous online lending is already, it was naive to push the boundary further. I feel a similar ideological gap is slowly growing in the treatment of data surrounding generative AI.
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Personally I find it more naive to think that tiptoeing around book publishers in fear hoping that they can slowly make small progress is the smarter move. They're not going to make serious progress in the fight against unfair online lending terms by appeasing publishers.
Agree, but the real naivety is that they did it (afaict) under the same corporate entity as the critical online Internet Archive. This means a loss on this lending issue may jeopardize the entire IA, which would be a much greater loss. They should absolutely be pushing the edges, but cleave it off so as not to put the whole enterprise at risk. I hope it doesn't come to that.
Probably it's more that we just disagree on the relative importance of digital lending; I think that digital lending is one core part of the overall ability to access archived works, and thus is core to the Internet Archive's mission and function rather than a simple extension of it. That makes it worthy of putting their full weight behind it.