Amazing how reckless IA is with their library program while at the same time being extremely cautions with Wayback Archive to the point of retroactively applying robots.txt and removing website archives because "they can't afford even the smallest risk of being sued".
If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
211–220 of 614 posts
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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…
I mean, their mission statement is "universal access to all knowledge". They had to push these boundaries because it's their purpose. The boundaries themselves are dumb and arbitrary (see e.g. https://www.npr.org/2022/11/09/1135639385/libraries-publishe... ). Maybe the publishers are deserving of more criticism than the Archive here?
I mean if I poke an angry drunk and he beats the tar out of me, the angry drunk certainly deserves criticism but all of my friends will be "WTF why did you go and poke him?"
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#213I recently (in the last 2 weeks) used Wayback Machine to miraculously restore an old static site where the backups had also been lost.
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#214which 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…
Totally agree with the first part. > Controlled digital lending had a chance of getting off the ground. The IA's Emergency Library's unlimited digital lending burned it to the ground and stomped on the ashes. One of the problems libraries face is that many publishers will not sell them "real" licenses, but only "quota licenses" that allow a total of n borrows and m concurrent borrows. Once the total number of borrows…
This was not always the case because libraries weren't seen as a threat. Renting a digital book from a library was significantly harder than buying one from Amazon. The "Libby" app was a major motivator, at least in the US, because it made checking out digital books about as easy as just using the Kindle store. Usage went way up, and publishers panicked.
Publishers aren't necessarily the villains here, except in the regular way all middle men are the villains. Authors want to make money, and they make money by selling books. If a library can digitally loan the book an unlimited number of times in parallel, it's a bad deal for the author.
The "this book automatically explodes after 2 years or 10 rentals" system is a stupid compromise, but any solution is gonna be some sort of system to send money from libraries to companies based on how many people read the book.
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#215which 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…
> Whether it's legally permissible to copy a printed material and distribute that copy as though it were the printed material was/is unresolved.
That's what IA wants to believe. But it's just not the case that legal points aren't "resolved" or "tested" unless exactly the same situation shows up in court and gets ruled on. The law works in large part by analogy. Strong enough analogies can be predicted.
Here's from the trial court's summary judgment opinion against IA:
> Even full enforcement of a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio, however, would not excuse IA's reproduction of the Works in Suit.
Then there's the citation so many saw coming to a case called ReDigi, about a system for reselling authorized digital music downloads by ensuring there was only ever one digital copy. They lost, too.
There's another case out there, Aereo, about a company offering a warehouse full of TV tuners subscribers could stream from on a one-to-one basis. For technical legal reasons, that involved different aspects of the copyright law. But the case didn't go well for Aereo, either. Or for any of its competitors pursuing essentially the same business model.
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#216which 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…
> Controlled digital lending had a chance of getting off the ground. sure, it may have worked, but fuck me if that's what we get. controlled digital lending means we throw away[1] the great advantage brought by digital technology. controlled digital lending is a very stupid thing to do. I saw megaupload. it showed us all that we can all share it all; we just don't seem to want to, or rather, the American government p…
Might be interesting to start a large "online library" that does physical books by mail. Similar to Netflix original dvd model, but for books. An annual membership fee of like $20/yr to help maintain storage infrastructure. Then ship those books to/from people in reusable boxes for bigger/unwieldy books or padded envelopes if that's sufficient for less expensive paperback.
Small per-lend fee to cover the shipping cost, with a return window or followup fee per N days... days determined based on the size/pages in the book/volume.
With efforts to work with various local libraries to handle some of the distribution closer to the people.
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#217I 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…
Isn't this kind of the point of the Library of Congress, though their content isn't generally available to the public afaik.
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#218Someone needs to start a competing Internet Archive, which only archives, you know, THE INTERNET, and not xbox games, warez, movies, music, books, etc.
The overreach at IA is much bigger than it looks on the surface. Go look at the things people are uploading there.
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#219> When Julius Caesar burned the Library of Alexandria, it was harder to imagine a greater destruction of scholarship.
Dude. We're not talking about losing secret ancient knowledge. We're talking about losing pictures of cats.
There is nothing on the internet that's so valuable that we couldn't live without it. Real research, real knowledge, makes its way out of the internet. And besides, most of the internet that we can actually discover is cached in search engines.
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#220Copyright 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 belie…
I don't think I agree with this. Novels can take years to write, and to have their copyright expire after only a few years may not be enough for the author to write another book. What would be the motivation to write a series if the series isn't worth printing after only a few books? It goes doubly if the novel might be up for a movie or a TV adaptation: the game of thrones tv adaptation didn't happen until much later after the first book... does this mean George R R Martin should be paid 0 while HBO makes a killing on the first few seasons? How would any artist retire ever if they cannot make money off their existing body of work?