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If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed

sbstatesman.com

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Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed

#151

Post by billiam »

tablespoon wrote: post #107
drdebug wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internet Archive is likely the only memory of the digital world. They may or may not have made a mistake during the covid pandemic by extending their book lending program, but in the age of IA where many text and images are going to lack any source of truth, they may be one of the very few ways to document modern history.

I'm not saying it's not valuable, I'm saying not that many people would even notice, let alone care, if it disappeared. You may personally be one of the people who cares about the IA, or know a lot of people who care, but if you go to a shopping mall six months after the IA shuts down and ask people about it at random, you'd find that level of knowledge and caring is unusual. It's not the kind of too-big-to-fail that…

Sorry, but this is a reductionist argument. There are any number of things that could disappear without mall visitors knowing about it (NOAA, Earth's magnetic field, etc) but that doesn't mean they are not important for researchers, students, and others all over the world.

Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed

#152

Post by TimTheTinker »

simiones wrote: post #110
tablespoon wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 USA's biggest export is our culture...like it or not. Think of movies, music, etc. Some of it is intangible. Yeah, but that's not high culture. It's mass-market culture that makes a lot of money. I think what th…

I don't think so at all: the IA has little to do with what is normally termed "high culture", and much more to do with "low culture" (lots and lots of internet trivia that would mostly be of interest to archeologists).

The IA is the only way to see a lot of what was written and widely read starting in the 1990s onwards.

Libraries used to keep archives of old newspapers and publications on microfilm, and anyone who needed to research something could go and look through those archives. The IA holds a similar function today - but it's the only one with its breadth and age. If we lose the IA, we lose a lot of important historical information.

Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed

#153

Post by thaumaturgy »

causi wrote: post #19

which 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 s…

I keep seeing this really bad take repeated on this site in the absence of more nuanced, informed legal opinions.

Whether CDL is legal under Fair Use or not was/is legally unresolved. Whether it's legally permissible to copy a printed material and distribute that copy as though it were the printed material was/is unresolved.

Lots of organizations have been skating along under one interpretation of Fair Use as a workaround for the burdensome licensing fees and absurd lending limits that publishers expect libraries to pay. Libraries being, y'know, super well-funded by that VC honey and all.

And it's not like publishers get less litigious over time. Whether the NEL prompted this or not is irrelevant; it was going to be tested, and IA are exactly the right organization to test it, and it wasn't going to become "more legal" if everyone just kept doing the same thing but more quietly.

Now that it's being tested, the right thing to do is to figure out if CDL is something we as a society want to enable for our libraries or not.

Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed

#154

Post by slfnflctd »

Apreche wrote: post #17

We 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…

What's been preserved of the earlier web will always be a little more precious because so much was lost, I suppose.

Back in the day, I assumed anything I did online would be saved in some way unless explicitly stated otherwise. I also assumed the same of my software environments. I was, of course, painfully disabused of these notions multiple times before the lesson was fully drilled into me.

I'd like to live in a world where everyone was more aware of the value of making special efforts to preserve certain kinds of data (see also: having more control over it)-- like where it's part of our deeper culture. I think we're steadily moving in that direction in some ways, but it would've been nice if it had been more thoughtfully considered by both companies and governments 25+ years ago. I suspect if they'd known how much cheaper storage was going to get, they would have done a lot more.

Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed

#156

Post by rsync »

Xelynega wrote: post #49
causi wrote: post #19

which 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 s…

They're not in court for the emergency library. They're in court for the 1-1 CDL lending they did. I'm tired of seeing this "well IA shouldn't have done the emergency library" line. Do you honestly believe the only reason publishers went after IA is the emergency library? I think this would have happened eventually, so pointing to the emergency library does nothing but tell everyone that you were right all along. The…

"I'm tired of seeing this "well IA shouldn't have done the emergency library" line."

I appreciate that.

However, as a long-time, regular, sustaining financial benefactor of IA, I was annoyed that they strayed into this set of activities in the first place and then dismayed when they pushed the envelope on it during C19 quarantines.

I, and others, predicted this trouble and even if there is not direct causation why do they have to tickle this dragon in the first place ?

Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed

#158

Post by ncallaway »

simiones wrote: post #143
tristor wrote: post #56

Frankly, 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 i…

> 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.

In that world, IA would be able to make available any 20+ year book via their program. In that world, I think it’s _much_ less likely that they feel any pressure to lend out copyright covered books, and if they did I would be outraged.

I think it’s a little unfair to invent a hypothetical world, and then project their actions into that world as part of your judgement of their entity.

Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed

#159

Post by Aachen »

jmull wrote: post #97

AI was foolish and irresponsible. Republishing books without limitations would almost surely provoke a law suit that they would almost surely lose. Not only is it a waste of resources, but now that they are in court they could very easily receive a judgement that curtails access they used to provide before the rollout of the "emergency library". It's fine (and right, IMO) if you don't agree with the current copyright…

IA autocorrect?

Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed

#160

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

dumbotron wrote: post #128
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> ensuring that the powerful can't rewrite history That overstates IA's influence. People still think Elon started Tesla.

Imagine somebody had the option to 1984 some datum for political advantage, but stopped because they were afraid they'd get caught. Isn't IA the first thing that comes to mind?
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