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Internet Archive's legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost

arstechnica.com

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Re: Internet Archive's legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost

#111

Post by typpilol »

cookiengineer wrote: post #110

Fun fact: the only complete copy of the Internet Archive's library is in Alexandria. How's that for historic irony and "unteachability" of the human species. Honestly, now's the time to make copies of it, while we still can. Torrents need seeders and people that care, and we are the last generation that cares about knowledge. We need to prevent the following generations to grow up as mindless clickmonkeys of the digi…

You're telling me they have no redundant copies at all in another location?

I could see that due to the sheer size but im sure they have a robust disk pool that would take a lot for it to lose data

Re: Internet Archive's legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost

#112

Post by typpilol »

stubish wrote: post #87
alt187 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be glad to learn a number of studies (mostly commissioked by the European Union) agree on the fact that piracy doesn't hurt sales. The main consensus is that people who illegally access content wouldn't have bought it otherwise, and that they still advertise it (thus, still driving up sales). These studies have then been systematically strong-armed into silence by the EU and constituent countries' anti-pira…

Piracy does not hurt sales because it has a lot of friction. There have been zero studies on piracy in a low friction environment, because there was no need. Such as in countries where pirated Video CDs where endemic and not policed, it was completely obvious and distributors didn't even bother putting product onto the market. Or back in the days where mp3 music sharing apps became mainstream and got integrated with…

Everyone forgot about limewire and the masses installing every trojan known to man.

Limewire made it easy, so people used it.

The same would be true today if assume.

Re: Internet Archive's legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost

#113

Post by ploxiln »

Aeolun wrote: post #75
zokier wrote: post #8

> Kahle thinks “the world became stupider” when the Open Library was gutted—but he’s moving forward with new ideas > The lawsuits haven’t dampened Kahle’s resolve to expand IA’s digitization efforts, though. Moving forward, the group will be growing a project called Democracy’s Library please just stop. let IA be what it is. or rather, nothing wrong in doing new projects but don't tie them to IA, just start them as c…

And then the IA becomes the same thing it’s fighting against. The people in the wrong here are these massive corporations fighting over scraps, not the IA.

No it doesn't. It's extremely valuable with the scope it already has. These massive corporations do not operate the Wayback Machine nor the various (less controversial) public archives that IA hosts, and makes available at no cost, no login-wall, no cloudflare-infinite-captchas, etc.

Re: Internet Archive's legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost

#114

Post by tqi »

alt187 wrote: post #57
lateforwork wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Information wants to be free. Those who create information may have families to feed, house and clothe. Until those items (food/housing/clothes) are also free, information cannot be free.

You might be glad to learn a number of studies (mostly commissioked by the European Union) agree on the fact that piracy doesn't hurt sales. The main consensus is that people who illegally access content wouldn't have bought it otherwise, and that they still advertise it (thus, still driving up sales). These studies have then been systematically strong-armed into silence by the EU and constituent countries' anti-pira…

If hypothetically the study had said that piracy does hurt sales, would you change your position on piracy? Because what I'm seeing in this thread is just a bunch of people pointing to studies when they support their priors, or to limitations of studies when it doesn't...

Re: Internet Archive's legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost

#115

Post by cookiengineer »

typpilol wrote: post #111
cookiengineer wrote: post #110

Fun fact: the only complete copy of the Internet Archive's library is in Alexandria. How's that for historic irony and "unteachability" of the human species. Honestly, now's the time to make copies of it, while we still can. Torrents need seeders and people that care, and we are the last generation that cares about knowledge. We need to prevent the following generations to grow up as mindless clickmonkeys of the digi…

You're telling me they have no redundant copies at all in another location? I could see that due to the sheer size but im sure they have a robust disk pool that would take a lot for it to lose data

In my opinion redundancy in a single business entity is no redundancy at all, especially if there's legal obligations of a soon-to-be-burning-books-again regime.

A better strategy would have been to found independent entities in other liberal democracies, so they can act as IP backups.

There was a great vpro documentary called "Digital Amnesia" [1] where they also interviewed the lead of the library of Alexandria, who was the only bidder to buy the national KIT library of the Netherlands and its dissolved inventory at the time.

Interviews with archivists, librarians, web archive and others on the topic. It's insane to see that nations don't want to preserve their history, science, and culture anymore.

But here we are.

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=NdZxI3nFVJs

Re: Internet Archive's legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost

#116

Post by throwuxiytayq »

Analemma_ wrote: post #38
fooqux wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, which Google won. Which was basically the point of the person you replied to I think.

“Won” in a purely symbolic sense with no practical significance. How do I access the Google Books library?

Ask Gemini to write you a story

Re: Internet Archive's legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost

#117

Post by typpilol »

cookiengineer wrote: post #115
typpilol wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're telling me they have no redundant copies at all in another location? I could see that due to the sheer size but im sure they have a robust disk pool that would take a lot for it to lose data

In my opinion redundancy in a single business entity is no redundancy at all, especially if there's legal obligations of a soon-to-be-burning-books-again regime. A better strategy would have been to found independent entities in other liberal democracies, so they can act as IP backups. There was a great vpro documentary called "Digital Amnesia" [1] where they also interviewed the lead of the library of Alexandria, wh…

Do we know how much data the internet archive has?

Is it even viable to replicate to multiple regions if it's 1000s of PB?

Re: Internet Archive's legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost

#118

Post by cookiengineer »

typpilol wrote: post #117
cookiengineer wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion redundancy in a single business entity is no redundancy at all, especially if there's legal obligations of a soon-to-be-burning-books-again regime. A better strategy would have been to found independent entities in other liberal democracies, so they can act as IP backups. There was a great vpro documentary called "Digital Amnesia" [1] where they also interviewed the lead of the library of Alexandria, wh…

Do we know how much data the internet archive has? Is it even viable to replicate to multiple regions if it's 1000s of PB?

Anna's archive has the metadata on it.

IA was around 300TB last time I checked.

libgen was around 190TB. For my own at home cluster I decided to go for 512TB but I can't host nor upload in these bandwidth requirements from here.

I started to build sth like a torrent splitter tool yesterday because I realized that all torrent clients just crash when you try to open, modify, or seed those torrents.

Edit: correction, the IA is ~15PB big, brewster kahle mentioned it in the documentary (2014)

Re: Internet Archive's legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost

#119

Post by wkat4242 »

tototrains wrote: post #14

Remember: If OpenAI/Google does it for $$$, it's not illegal. If idealists do it for public access, full force of the law. Information wants to be free. Oblige it. Fools with temporary power trying to extract from the work of others will be a blip in the history books if we make them.

It's not just that though. They pulled a stupid stunt during covid.

If you're campaigning for fair use, don't give your enemy ammunition to shoot you with by stretching said fair use too far. That was just really dumb.

Besides, for those willing to look outside official channels there's plenty of book library services available already. Just let them do what they do well and don't contaminate an above-board service with that.

Re: Internet Archive's legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost

#120

Post by wkat4242 »

endgame wrote: post #32

It was an absolutely bone-headed poke-the-bear move and we should count ourselves lucky that it was only a chunk of the library and not the whole archive that got nuked. IA holds priceless and irreplaceable data, and while the library initiative was a well-intentioned move during the pandemic it was way too radical for the keepers of our shared digital history.

Agreed. It was poking the bear. The other big three grey-circuit services have nothing to lose because they never claimed to be legit.

If you claim the moral high ground you have to be impeccable. It also didn't help anyone during COVID because all the stuff was out there already on less legit services. Some make it super easy with telegram bots etc.

I'm sad that they screwed this up. Because the archive is a very valuable service. They've lost a lot of money, goodwill and reputation now. And gained nothing.

The worst part is, it's unimaginable that this would ever have ended well.

It wasn't a bad idea in principle but they should have worked to get some publishers on board, could have been a PR win for them too.

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