So if I'm reading the law[1] right, which I'm probably not, the damages for the 127 books should be around $3.8 million, with ~$20 million the absolute max? Neither of those amounts seem high enough to destroy the IA.
If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
141–150 of 614 posts
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#142Could they mirror it to Filecoin or Arweave?
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#143Frankly, what the IA did here is absolutely the right thing. Copyright in the US is horribly fundamentally broken, and the idea that factual information about our history and world should not be referenceable and accessible for free is a pretty heinous one. Information wants to be free, and the work that IA did for "digital lending" during the pandemic was an essential move in the direction of ensuring that people ca…
It's really not. The copyright system essentially has two serious issues: the extraordinary length, and DMCA takedown notices that are too easy to abuse.
But what IA did infringes even on a hypothetically repaired copyright system where the maximum age of copyright was something like 10-20 years, and where DMCA take-downs were hard to abuse. There's just no reason to allow any random entity to distribute books that it doesn't own.
We have already seen in the software industry that there is no way for any but the biggest companies to survive in a world without copyright [which open source is similar to] (I am referring to how Mongo, Elastic, Grafana and others have all had to give up on up-selling open source software and move closer to a closed license; while only Microsoft, Amazon, Google, IBM etc. are thriving by giving away free software).
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hope the project can be kept afloat in ways that the US government can't interfere with. The U.S. government, oddly, is the least of my fears when it comes to rewriting history. Private enterprise is already doing it, even going to far as to reach into your private library of books and music to change them after you're purchased it: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/arts/dahl-christie-stine-... Until yesterday, I…
Dahl (or his publisher) changed his own book , the initial back story of the oompa-loompas being problematic. This was 10 years after publishing when someone pointed out it wasn't a great depiction. https://www.roalddahlfans.com/dahls-work/books/charlie-and-t... But it is weird that they can go into your device and change it now. Don't love it. If they made Version 2 available at the same time.... I have Body Count's…
Yea, I think the argument about publishers choosing to release new, edited versions of older books is a silly one. We should let the marketplace and the marketplace of ideas sort it out.
But, the fact that they changed digital copies that were previously purchased is insane. The companies that do that should be pilloried and shamed for such an action.
Frankly, I’m no longer participating in digital purchases for music, books, or video, unless it’s DRM free and I can move the file to my own storage. I’d rather just rip a CD/DVD and take on the burden of managing that data myself.
Jellyfin/Plex has been super super helpful in making sure I don’t even lose out that significantly on the user experience front.
I am terrified of the world we’re entering where lots of new media will be digital/steaming only, and there will be no way to purchase and archive the “as-released” version of songs and movies.
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#145Frankly, what the IA did here is absolutely the right thing. Copyright in the US is horribly fundamentally broken, and the idea that factual information about our history and world should not be referenceable and accessible for free is a pretty heinous one. Information wants to be free, and the work that IA did for "digital lending" during the pandemic was an essential move in the direction of ensuring that people ca…
> I don't understand the backlash in the comments here, it seems to all come from a perspective of people being so downtrodden they just accept the current status quo crafted by MAFIAA lawyers, rather than looking at it holistically from first-principles. People do not understand that the IA want to go to court as part of their strategy, or else they think they understand what constitutes an effective legal strategy…
If this was a strategy from the IA, it has all but failed, hasn't it? And given that the vast majority predicted it would fail, I wouldn't even call this hindsight being 20/20.
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was prompted by the unrestricted lending, but it's pretty clear that the fight is now about lending at all.[0] That may still only be the OpenLibrary, but it's not just the unrestricted lending, and I wouldn't be surprised it it also has a chilling effect on other scans. I'm curious how letting people view scans of obscure 1940s magazines is legal if doing it for books is not. They're not even restricted to one "b…
Pretty much "everything" (other than public domain) on the IA is on shaky ground. It's been mostly OK because very few people object to the archiving of their public web pages (especially given the IA respects robots.txt even retroactively) and, as you say, old magazines that basically have zero commercial value.
IA stopped respecting robots.txt in 2017. I had to issue a DCMA takedown to get my sites delisted. They are arrogant and think themselves above normal netiquette. They deserve to lose.
https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#147We 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 exi…
Why should tax dollars be used for this?
have you heard of the idea of a museum by chance?
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#148It contains a lot of copyrighted content, especially ebooks and software. This could be avoided if they would just follow the rules like everyone else.
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
> certain weird technology and library subcultures, but few people outside of them would even notice it if disappeared It's pretty much indispensible to anybody who's a researcher. It's very frequent that you're tracking down citations to webpages that don't exist anymore, and the IA is the only way to find sources. Not to mention that it's also often the only way to quickly get access to non-bestseller books that ar…
> It's not weird or a subculture unless you think those labels apply to researchers. And there are a lot of researchers out there, across academics, non-fiction authors, and journalists. I do think the label applies to researchers. And except for the case of "tracking down citations to webpages that don't exist anymore," researchers can continue to do all those things using traditional methods (which may be a harder,…
In fairness, a lot of content created over the past 25 years or so only exists in ephemeral digital form. Some is captured in sources that libraries subscribe to but a lot of it isn't. (Of course, libraries also subscribe to content that was never on the open web.)
It's also the case that pre-web, a lot of that sort of content was pretty much lost to time. Per a discussion, a little while back, relatively little from the BBS era is preserved because it was mostly a distributed group of hobbyists.
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#150Could they mirror it to Filecoin or Arweave?
Filecoin & siaskynet have not been reliabile to me