If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by Aeolun » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 4:43 PM UTC

tablespoon wrote: post #23

jawns wrote: post #4

I 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 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. If there is, the Internet Archive isn't it. Yeah, it's super import…

> Lots of people want to turn the publishers into the villains

I mean, they are the villains here. They’re sueing the IA over something that is less than a footnote in their balance book.

They’re purely doing this for the chilling effect it will have on other people that might be impertinent enough to try and share their books with others.

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

#192

Post by Zetice » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 4:43 PM UTC

bruce511 wrote: post #6

jawns wrote: post #4

I 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…

Shit on the US all you like, but any country could step up to save the IA…

This isn’t an American problem, it’s a drawback to the economic system the globe has adopted.

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

#193

Post by gcanyon » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 4:43 PM UTC

Copyright law needs to change.

Back in the day, a copyright measured in decades made sense, because it took that long to promote and distribute a work and derive reasonable profit from it.

Today that process takes days, maybe months (apart from the rare work that languishes, only to be "discovered" later).

Copyright should be much shorter -- a couple years at most -- with renewal available if the creator really believes the work has yet to find its audience.

The standard for abandoned works still protected under the existing system should default against the (potential) holder of the original copyright as long as a good-faith effort was made to reach them, and damages should amount to some sort of split of the profits.

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

#194

Post by Zetice » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 4:44 PM UTC

hyperhello wrote: post #28

mistrial9 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Resolving the statement to a 1/0 classification isn't necessary. If the US ran on culture, the archive would be considered a jewel; but the US runs on money so it's seen as an underoptimization. If you're predicting what a group would do in a specific case and decision, it really is correct to apply generalizations.

Er, no. Culture isn’t one specific thing, of which you either have or lack.

Our culture can be a rich one and also not value the things the IA represent.

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

#195

Post by Maursault » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 4:45 PM UTC

jawns wrote: post #4

I 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…

> we should be looking at ways to preserve those artifacts redundantly, so that even if the IA fails, it's not a calamity.

We don't need to look too far. IA could simply extend their middle-finger and move to Mexico, Spain, Thailand, or Sealand. Frankly, IA should be mirrored in every country that does not respect the West's initiative of blocking access and unresolvable takedown notices. Fuck US copyright anti-information bullshit. Publishers represent themselves and their own greed, not the authors and artists that created the content. There are rare success stories[1], but how many other works have been looted by publishers at the expense of the long dead content creator's family?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/jun/14/books.booksnew...

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

#196

Post by ajdude » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 4:45 PM UTC

EamonnMR wrote: post #33

The internet archive served two distinct but important functions: one as a backup of the web which was important for accountability and history, and the other as a repository for archiving the world's non-web digital information. I personally scanned a whole bunch of ephemera and IA was the obvious place to put it. Why jeopardize those functions to do something brick and mortar libraries already did better, and legal…

This right here! The Internet archive had a really good thing going, I've been donating, digitizing, and uploading to IA for years. They were playing with fire, we all this coming, and I'm very frustrated with them over this.

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

#197

Post by thaumaturgy » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 4:45 PM UTC

criddell wrote: post #182

thaumaturgy wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 worka…

> Whether it's legally permissible to copy a printed material and distribute that copy as though it were the printed material was/is unresolved. A lot of IA supporters wish they would have gone about discovering this in a way that protected the actual internet archive. Maybe I don't understand the actual risks to the IA, but it feels like a reckless move.

This could be tricky. As I understand it (not a lawyer, etc.), whether an organization believes it is operating within the confines of the law can impact the outcome of a legal dispute. The important distinction here is that these are competing interpretations of Fair Use; there's no case law (as far as I'm aware) that settles this one way or the other.

So, for the Archive to go, "well, let's set up a shell corporation and do this thing through some structure that might shield us from harm" would require that they believed they were doing something illegal. See for example para. 3 in https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-national-eme...

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

#198

Post by Aeolun » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 4:47 PM UTC

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…

Eh, if all nuclear research would disappear overnight less than 0.001% of the world population would be impacted. I’m still inclined to say that a repository of that knowledge is too big to fail, simply because the knowledge is so important.

Not that that’s necessarily true for the internet archive, but…

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

#199

Post by twblalock » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 4:47 PM UTC

thaumaturgy wrote: post #153

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 worka…

It's not the Internet Archive's job to be the first one to try to resolve fair use questions like this, and attempting to do so put the organization's orginal core mission at risk.

They should have let someone else take the risk, and continued archiving the internet. That is all that most of their supporters expected of them, for good reason. Their attempt to pivot toward being a generic, universal library was bad scope creep and should have been stopped when it started.

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

#200

Post by nemo44x » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 4:50 PM UTC

paradoxyl wrote: post #186

Fr3ck wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The USA's biggest export is our culture...like it or not. Think of movies, music, etc. Some of it is intangible.

That's not an export, that's propaganda. That's like saying fiat currency is just as valuable as lithium deposits. It's the hubris of the West.

The fiat currency is just as valuable as the lithium deposits because the fiat currency is backed by the most powerful force of military might the world has ever seen. When you trade for a dollar you're trading for that. Better than them just taking the lithium, as was the old way.