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Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site

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Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site

#151

Post by arkades »

echelon wrote: post #25

Could the Internet Archive donate its holdings to a new nonprofit? If the servers were transferred to a new custodian and the anticipated bandwidth charges were paid forward, then what would they have to lose?

The plaintiff would have seven years in which to have the court claw back the transferred assets and, as there's no way that it would come close to looking like an ordinary course-of-business transfer, it would not only make them more likely to lose the suit (by making them look even more like law-flouting criminals), but it would likely add a criminal charge to the mix (bankruptcy fraud).

Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site

#152

Post by bart_spoon »

mimi89999 wrote: post #143
ascorbic wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you think there were no people at all who downloaded for free rather than paying, then it cost authors royalty payments.

I think that this reasoning is quite naive. The most basic counterexample I can give is a person who downloaded the content, but wasn't able to afford it. If that content was not accessible on IA, that person wouldn't be able to access is. The publisher would still not earn anything.

I think it is your reasoning that is naive. Of course there are people using IA to access a book that, were it not free, would not buy the book. These people are neither plus nor minus in terms of revenue. But for your point to hold, everyone who downloaded the content would have to fall into this category. Almost certainly a large number of users would be those who might potentially buy the book but will simply download it if its free. These people would be lost revenue.

You can argue about the size of this group, but the counter argument would be that there is a valid fear that if it is normalized and allowed to continue, this group will grow larger and larger over time. You can argue by trying to compare this to libraries, but libraries still buy their copies of the book, and checking a book out from a library comes with restrictions that don't exist here. There really isn't a way to spin this where it doesn't result in some amount of lost royalties for the author.

Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site

#153

Post by mkl »

andromeduck wrote: post #51
Santosh83 wrote: post #29

As for saving their data, well, about 60 million people need to donate 1 Gb of their hard drive space, or just 6 million people, 10 Gb of their HDDs. Or more soberingly, any one of the world's millions of multi-millionaires could write a single cheque to back up all their info, but will anyone do so? Probably not, as collective resources and knowledge are of no benefit to them, indeed even detrimental.

If I did the math right, it actually only costs about 72k per year to archive 6PB on Google cloud. Thats well within the range of one Googler's annual discretionary income.

I'm not sure that's right. It's 60PB [1], not 6PB. According to https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing Google's cheapest (?) non-redundant archive storage seems to be USD $0.0012/GB/month. 60 PB = 60e6 GB, so 1 year would cost 1260e6.0012 = 864e3 = USD $864 thousand. That's not counting the cost of getting the data in or getting any of it out to use.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23485594

Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site

#154

Post by DelightOne »

jakeogh wrote: post #41
ComputerGuru wrote: post #27

I warned about this very outcome when they announced the initiative [0]. The Internet Archive is too big and too important to gamble on this short term of a win (giving everyone free and unlimited access to all books for a few months at most). Assuming the organization continues to exist after this ordeal, their entire board should step down for putting at risk one of the most invaluable archives in existence. I’m an…

archive.org is a primary target for the book burners. As with any big thorn; they dont need coordination to attack it; it's practically a law of nature. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20623177 Archive team: is there a 101 on getting pages? I struggle to archive the things I want because of the JS interface and the generated data. I just want the links to the original GET 's and source files. Torrents for the lo…

Is there a different way than downloading the displayed page from the wayback machine again? It seems to support raw html download but I haven't found a way to get the accompanying JS/CSS easily.

I saw some API to manage ones' own collections but that seems to be only for owners...

Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site

#155

Post by bart_spoon »

basilgohar wrote: post #54
ascorbic wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you think there were no people at all who downloaded for free rather than paying, then it cost authors royalty payments.

By exactly this same line of reasoning, don't libraries present a loss of revenue for publishers because people can borrow a book that they otherwise would have to pay for and purchase? One book may be borrowed hundreds, if not thousands of times.

Libraries still buy their books. And the fact that there are limited, physical copies means that access to the book is still controlled in a way that free online copies are not. There is no permanent ownership. A single person can use each copy at a time. That's a vastly different circumstance than the book simply being freely available to everyone everywhere, permanently.

Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site

#156

Post by matwood »

sergeykish wrote: post #33

> Libraries pay three-to-five times more than retail price for eBook access. If an individual is charged $15 for an eBook license, a library often pays $50 or even $84 for one license. Why? I should be able to donate book to the library. Is it possible with eBook?

The problem is libraries got into the game of paying for first run titles. They started measuring themselves on checkouts and not what they provide for the community. Is the library really helping the community by overpaying for 50 Shades of Gray the week it comes out so all the soccer moms can read it for 'free'?

I'm not saying libraries shouldn't provide access to all types of books, but they could cut their costs considerably by waiting 6-12 months to stock the hot new book. Then they can use that money to provide other community services.

Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site

#157

Post by rbanffy »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #145
rbanffy wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bittorrent would require the totality of the archive to be preserved in multiple copies. I can't have a copy of that ledger here at home. We'd need a distributed highly redundant filesystem for that.

44 million items in the Internet Archive are available as torrents. It's pretty straightforward to enumerate them, download them, and serve them up in a swarm.

That doesn't make it sure the torrented data is always available. The index is important, but the data and its metadata are much more important.

Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site

#159

Post by sergeykish »

manigandham wrote: post #64
matheusmoreira wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Libraries should be enabled to digitally lend their physical holdings and not have to rely on these eBook licenses, and CDL is a great model to that effect. Why must we come up with increasingly complicated ways to hide the fact unlimited copies are available? The right thing to do is to abolish copyright. It's time to stop pretending copyright makes sense in the 21st century.

Just because the marginal cost of a copy is zero does not mean there's no value in the information, and it's perfectly reasonable to gate access to that value. Copying a video file is free too but I'm sure you wouldn't argue that anyone can watch a movie for free just because someone else made it. People have a right to own and control the distribution of their works that they invested in creating.

Interestingly a lot of films (like Transformers and Fast and Furious franchises) cost a lot, yet are incredibly boring. Pulp Fiction, Blade Runner had much smaller budget. And Youtube rocks on modest earnings.

It is like AAA vs indie games - Undertale is incredible (as many AAA games are).

I do not argue against ownership. Just of ability of big money to hide lack of story. It happens that books live in most open (paper) and most close (DRM hardware) variants. Somehow reminds Elsevier and arXiv. I'm glad I don't have to run DRM hardware for software development and this conversation.

Re: Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site

#160

Post by blurbleblurble »

cygx wrote: post #86
basilgohar wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By exactly this same line of reasoning, don't libraries present a loss of revenue for publishers because people can borrow a book that they otherwise would have to pay for and purchase? One book may be borrowed hundreds, if not thousands of times.

Hence the existence of Public Lending Right programs[1] in some countries. In Germany for example, libaries do need to pay a fee per loan (3-4 cent according to Wikipedia). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Lending_Right

That's a lot different than 250k per loan!
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