Tell HN: Internet Archive is facing a Big 4 Publishers lawsuit • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell HN: Internet Archive is facing a Big 4 Publishers lawsuit

#161

Post by SpelingBeeChamp » Tue, Jul 19, 2022, 2:20 AM UTC

jazzyjackson wrote: post #88

capableweb wrote: post #2

I love the Internet Archive and frequently donate to them (2 times so far this year). What I'd love to see improved is the ability to be less "fragile". Currently it's all located in the US and they have a huge focus on the US, both technically and politically. But why not try to replicate it all over the world? There seems to have been some smaller efforts inside the Internet Archive to make it more decentralized, b…

is there any group lobbying for the abolishment of all copyright? I'd like to donate to them.

Do you enjoy feature films? Video games? Television shows?

Hardly any of that content would exist at the quality level you are accustomed to, without copyright.

I say that as a producer of such content. If anyone could legally copy and distribute my work without my permission, I would not produce it, because there would be minimal financial incentive for me to do so.

The current level of such unauthorized distribution - by which I primarily refer to the republication of my work by others, in its entirety, for their own profit - is staggering. And that is with the existence of copyright law.

And it’s a huge disincentive from publishing more content. Both economically and because it’s demoralizing.

It’s also a huge waste of time, as in order to be able to pay my employees and myself, I have to dedicate time to combating infringement-as-a-business.

If copyright ceased to exist, I and nearly every other producer that I know, would find another line of work.

Fortunately, copyright ceasing to exist is unlikely to happen.

For starters, the wholesale abolition of copyright would violate the United States Constitution.

Re: Tell HN: Internet Archive is facing a Big 4 Publishers lawsuit

#162

Post by SpelingBeeChamp » Tue, Jul 19, 2022, 2:30 AM UTC

randomhodler84 wrote: post #157

xhkkffbf wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rent is the basis for all forms of savings through investment. It allows people to work hard for a time and then take some time off. Yes, some will be rent seeking while drinking rum at the beach bar, but so will the sick people and the retired people. Rent makes it possible for society to offer disability insurance and retirement savings.

And Usury was well known to the ancients as one way to destroy a society. Rent is not the basis of savings through investment, yield is; of which rent is one kind. Renting a movie at blockbuster made sense in the 90s as plastic shells of magstripe were a scarce good. Today, literally millions of devices could stream their entire lib for free via ad supported streaming apps. We live in different times. Holding on to a…

Those “ad supported streaming apps” are still reliant on copyright.

Without it, why would anyone choose to view the movie with ads when they can just download it and watch it with no ads?

(Legally, since in this hypothetical, copyright doesn’t exist.)

Or are you just arguing for ad-supported viewing of content? Which is what currently exists for an enormous body of material. See, for example, YouTube.

Re: Tell HN: Internet Archive is facing a Big 4 Publishers lawsuit

#163

Post by SpelingBeeChamp » Tue, Jul 19, 2022, 2:32 AM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #158

orev wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not knowing anything about you, I’m going to assume you mean code that you created and chose to release as OSS. That’s your choice, and publishers have the same right to release their works under different terms (through agreements with the authors they have signed, etc). You don’t have any say over what other creators choose to do with their works, and if they choose terms you don’t like, you can’t just ignore them.…

> I’m going to assume you mean code that you created and chose to release as OSS. It doesn't matter how the output is licensed; I'm paid for the process of creating that output, not for the perpetual profiting over that finite output. That's the point you're missing.

Only because you agreed to that. No?

Re: Tell HN: Internet Archive is facing a Big 4 Publishers lawsuit

#164

Post by randomhodler84 » Tue, Jul 19, 2022, 2:36 AM UTC

SpelingBeeChamp wrote: post #162

randomhodler84 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Usury was well known to the ancients as one way to destroy a society. Rent is not the basis of savings through investment, yield is; of which rent is one kind. Renting a movie at blockbuster made sense in the 90s as plastic shells of magstripe were a scarce good. Today, literally millions of devices could stream their entire lib for free via ad supported streaming apps. We live in different times. Holding on to a…

Those “ad supported streaming apps” are still reliant on copyright. Without it, why would anyone choose to view the movie with ads when they can just download it and watch it with no ads? (Legally, since in this hypothetical, copyright doesn’t exist.) Or are you just arguing for ad-supported viewing of content? Which is what currently exists for an enormous body of material. See, for example, YouTube.

Why indeed, I know how I consume media.

I support a wide range of monetization strategies and access to content by the most amount of people.

Re: Tell HN: Internet Archive is facing a Big 4 Publishers lawsuit

#165

Post by gojomo » Tue, Jul 19, 2022, 4:10 AM UTC

_ktx2 wrote: post #156

rasz wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isnt that a response to companies buying old unused domains, slapping robots on it and thus killing whole archive of this domain going back 20 years?

Could be! However, making a direct attack on individual privacy should never have been an option. To make matters worse, the logic of, "We did this to government and military websites, so now we're going to roll it out everywhere" was quite broken for the time and remains so. There's examples of how this works in a healthy way. Martin Manley is one scenario that comes to mind, where he overtly opted-in to having an a…

Neiher 'flaunting privacy' nor 'direct attack on individual privacy' are fair descriptions of any of the Archive's web collection policies.

People who freely publish information, to the worldwide public, on the 'World Wide Web' should reasonably expect all sorts of entities to collect, save, analyze, & repurpose that info, unless they take specific steps to discourage such access & use.

The Archive's crawlers identify themselves, and collect things that are publicly linked, or specifically nominated-for-collection by library patrons or partners. Except in some focused specialized collection projects, they don't "log in" as any user, only visiting & collecting what's published freely to any anonymous person/organization/process.

For material needing more privacy, websites always have the option to block any and all unwanted visitors/crawlers with a wide variety of standard techniques, like requiring logins or simple challenges that automated crawlers won't pass.

And, as your linked articles report, the process for a later exclusion by request is pretty quick and simple. (The 2nd post concludes: "So, hats off to the Internet Archive for making the process smooth and relatively painless.") And, such exclusion does not require any sort of "DMCA request".

Re: Tell HN: Internet Archive is facing a Big 4 Publishers lawsuit

#166

Post by jazzyjackson » Tue, Jul 19, 2022, 4:52 AM UTC

SpelingBeeChamp wrote: post #161

jazzyjackson wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is there any group lobbying for the abolishment of all copyright? I'd like to donate to them.

Do you enjoy feature films? Video games? Television shows? Hardly any of that content would exist at the quality level you are accustomed to, without copyright. I say that as a producer of such content. If anyone could legally copy and distribute my work without my permission, I would not produce it, because there would be minimal financial incentive for me to do so. The current level of such unauthorized distributio…

> Do you enjoy feature films? Video games? Television shows?

not really no, I like stand up comedy, music, indie films, art that people make because they feel compelled to make art, not because they've done the math on the best return-on-investment

My ideal funding model is kickstarteresque, raise X amount and then publish

I consider copyright contradictory to free speech, I can say whatever I want unless it's already been said? what?

> the wholesale abolition of copyright would violate the United States Constitution.

That's what amendments are for.

Re: Tell HN: Internet Archive is facing a Big 4 Publishers lawsuit

#167

Post by stubish » Tue, Jul 19, 2022, 6:05 AM UTC

daniel_reetz wrote: post #159

_ktx2 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could be! However, making a direct attack on individual privacy should never have been an option. To make matters worse, the logic of, "We did this to government and military websites, so now we're going to roll it out everywhere" was quite broken for the time and remains so. There's examples of how this works in a healthy way. Martin Manley is one scenario that comes to mind, where he overtly opted-in to having an a…

With respect, I fail to see how a public website is a privacy matter.

Information on a public website is public until it is taken down or the information changed. The Internet Archive removes an individuals control over when the information remains public. This is privacy. We might be caught naked, and we can't unsee what has been seen, but it is a basic human instinct to draw the curtains and contain further damage. Perfectly innocent individuals suffer because the IA rules are designed around edge cases where public figures try to hide misdeeds.

Re: Tell HN: Internet Archive is facing a Big 4 Publishers lawsuit

#168

Post by Veen » Tue, Jul 19, 2022, 6:17 AM UTC

jazzyjackson wrote: post #166

SpelingBeeChamp wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you enjoy feature films? Video games? Television shows? Hardly any of that content would exist at the quality level you are accustomed to, without copyright. I say that as a producer of such content. If anyone could legally copy and distribute my work without my permission, I would not produce it, because there would be minimal financial incentive for me to do so. The current level of such unauthorized distributio…

> Do you enjoy feature films? Video games? Television shows? not really no, I like stand up comedy, music, indie films, art that people make because they feel compelled to make art, not because they've done the math on the best return-on-investment My ideal funding model is kickstarteresque, raise X amount and then publish I consider copyright contradictory to free speech, I can say whatever I want unless it's alread…

> art that people make because they feel compelled to make art, not because they've done the math on the best return-on-investment

How do you think such people buy food and heat their homes.

Re: Tell HN: Internet Archive is facing a Big 4 Publishers lawsuit

#169

Post by Veen » Tue, Jul 19, 2022, 6:23 AM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #158

orev wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not knowing anything about you, I’m going to assume you mean code that you created and chose to release as OSS. That’s your choice, and publishers have the same right to release their works under different terms (through agreements with the authors they have signed, etc). You don’t have any say over what other creators choose to do with their works, and if they choose terms you don’t like, you can’t just ignore them.…

> I’m going to assume you mean code that you created and chose to release as OSS. It doesn't matter how the output is licensed; I'm paid for the process of creating that output, not for the perpetual profiting over that finite output. That's the point you're missing.

And how do the people who pay you to code make the money to pay you?

Re: Tell HN: Internet Archive is facing a Big 4 Publishers lawsuit

#170

Post by freeflight » Tue, Jul 19, 2022, 6:23 AM UTC

IA being sued out of existence would fit perfectly into this dumpster fire of a timeline.

Right now it's one of the few easily accessible places on the web that haven't completely caved in to copyright and moderation censorship, the only way to keep web "news media" somewhat accountable by having an actual historical record one can point at.

Once that's gone, misinformation serving pro-US narratives will go into complete overdrive and the web will be dead [0] for good.

[0] https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...