This is pretty confusing... is the Internet Archive at risk from this legal decision?
It's at least at risk of being blocked by ISPs in the us and pressured/shutdown if hosting is by a provider in the US.
If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
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Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#12I know the government has viewed certain companies as "too big to fail," because of the negative financial impact we would experience if they were to do so. I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a repository of digital or physical artifacts is "too big to fail" because of the negative cultural impact their failure would have. In the absence of that, anyone who sees high cultural value to the pres…
>> I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a repository of digital or physical artifacts is "too big to fail" because of the negative cultural impact their failure would have. You can wonder all you like, and call me a cynic, but the US runs on money not culture. The American identity is built on money and wealth and excess, not on anything you might describe as "culture". The IA would not "fail" i…
> US runs on money not culture
fortunately, someone saying that does not make it real. Think of a "soup" and of "experiment" and you will get more detail. Resolving an entire nation to a 1 or 0 classification is not defensible, right?
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#13I know the government has viewed certain companies as "too big to fail," because of the negative financial impact we would experience if they were to do so. I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a repository of digital or physical artifacts is "too big to fail" because of the negative cultural impact their failure would have. In the absence of that, anyone who sees high cultural value to the pres…
Too big to fail comes from the fear of popular unrest (btw, this also works in non-democratic countries, albeit is weaker). There will be no popular unrest here.
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#14The article is extremely misleading.
It makes it seem like the 4 publishers are against Internet Archive as a whole, when all they sued for was for the unrestricted publication of copyrighted books during the start of the pandemic.
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#15The title implies that losing this lawsuit is threatening the existence of the Internet Archive. Is that really the case? If it is true, then maybe IA should be run by somebody with better judgement. This was a project with a massive chance of failure (how could anyone think that this wasn't just blatantly infringing?) and a low payoff. If it's also an existential risk, then wtf are they doing running it?
I use IA all the time and love the website and most of what they do. But some of the stuff that they do that risks getting it all shut down is why I stopped donating.
if you like the product, you can't pick and choose the traits of the origin.. source-- rock and roll biz
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#16The title implies that losing this lawsuit is threatening the existence of the Internet Archive. Is that really the case? If it is true, then maybe IA should be run by somebody with better judgement. This was a project with a massive chance of failure (how could anyone think that this wasn't just blatantly infringing?) and a low payoff. If it's also an existential risk, then wtf are they doing running it?
They're doing us all a favor is what they're doing. Intellectual property is just not that important when compared with ensuring that the powerful can't rewrite history.
If they lose their case, I hope the project can be kept afloat in ways that the US government can't interfere with.
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#17We already have laws for historical landmarks. These laws ensure the protection of things of societal significance, even to the point of restricting the rights of their private owners.
We need such laws for the digital realm. If we had them we wouldn't have to worry about Internet Archive, dpreview, etc. Imagine if we had such laws in place long ago. We could be living in a world where Geocities and MySpace still existed, even if only in a read-only form.
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#18https://archive.org/donate/
Every dollar donated here will end up going to the book publishers.
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#19which made copyrighted books available for free during the COVID-19 pandemic. The publishers behind the lawsuit alleged that this entailed copyright infringement.
Along with everybody with two brain cells to rub together. We all screamed "Hey, you idiots are going to ruin everything if you act like the pandemic has magically nullified the concept of copyright" and they fucking did it anyway, and now exactly what we said would happen is happening. It's like you found a landmine in your front yard and your buddy said "That landmine shouldn't be there so I'm gonna go step on it" and you told him not to and then had to watch him throw himself onto it while declaring it would be morally wrong for it to blow his stupid ass up.
Controlled digital lending had a chance of getting off the ground. The IA's Emergency Library's unlimited digital lending burned it to the ground and stomped on the ashes.
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#20I agree. And I told my friends at the IA from the beginning that their plan was very, very foolish. People can look the other way at copyright infringement of web sites when it's just used for archival work. But when you're directly destroying an artist's livelihood by undercutting their income stream, well, you shouldn't be surprised if they'll be upset.