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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

#281

Post by Ekaros »

ejb999 wrote: post #233
ernopp wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The case for doing what they did is that it helped a lot of people access books (eg school curriculum ones) in the middle of Covid (not everyone knows how to pirate things). Not saying it was the right move but you can see where they're coming from, they wanted to help people.

what if they did it with all of netflix's movies instead of books? would you feel differently? (I am sure netflix would).

Or maybe if they distributed newest version of software with certain parts removed. Maybe even non saas-software made by startups...

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

#282

Post by LordDragonfang »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #214
schroeding wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Publishers aren't necessarily the villains here, except in the regular way all middle men are the villains.

Except that in this case, their role as the middle man is effectively pointless, since their normal role (printing physical books) is literally not happening here, and they are contributing nothing to the author except litigation.

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

#283

Post by Kim_Bruning »

tablespoon wrote: post #206
breck wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * Tell me, who's going to invest 10-200 million dollars to make a movies or TV shows on a regular basis, without copyright? We can have a world where: - Every child has access to humanity's best information - We cure cancer - 90% of American's media is controlled by 6,000, not 6, corporations - College tuition costs drop dramatically - Lower taxes - More income equality - No more opioid pandemics - Making the world…

>> * Tell me, who's going to invest 10-200 million dollars to make a movies or TV shows on a regular basis, without copyright? > We can have a world where: > - Every child has access to humanity's best information > - We cure cancer > - 90% of American's media is controlled by 6,000, not 6, corporations > - College tuition costs drop dramatically > - Lower taxes > - More income equality > - No more opioid pandemics >…

> LOL. The thing preventing us from curing cancer is copyright?

Outright preventing might be slight hyperbole, but it's definitely not helping, no.

See the scientific publishing model, which charges scientists twice for their articles (once to publish, once to view). Open Science and Scihub are two approaches to fixing this issue.

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

#284

Post by abdullahkhalids »

PuppyTailWags wrote: post #220
gcanyon wrote: post #193

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 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 late…

For what it is worth, Cory Doctorow used to license his books with Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs. You can even find direct and free downloads to his books on his website [1]. At the same time, his publishers were selling hardcopies.

Unfortunately, at some point he stopped doing it. He explains

> There is also the fact that, in the time since Creative Commons licenses were negotiated, publishers have entered into agreements with the large ebook retailers that allow for price matching. This is in part an artifact of anti-trust litigation, but it means that if someone somewhere offers the book at $0, it technically allows all of the other ebook stores to offer the book at $0 as well.

> Thus far my publishers have been good about grandfathering in the CC-licensed books that I already had, but for the last couple of books I haven’t done CC licensing, in part because of the real fear that Amazon could set the price at $0 and there would be no recourse for my publishers—not even the recourse of not letting Amazon sell the book, because of deals ensuring that if Amazon sells one book of a publisher’s, they have to sell the whole catalog.

[1] https://craphound.com/pc/download/

[2] https://www.authorsalliance.org/2017/05/09/a-good-guy-offeri...

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

#285

Post by MagicMoonlight »

VonGuard wrote: post #259

Honest question: what is stopping Brewster from filing for bankruptcy and transferring all assets to another non-profit. CA law specifically states that dissolved non-profits have to donate everything to another non-profit. All the hardware and data would be considered their core product. They could donate all of that to a new non-profit, and leave some token staff and office equipment behind for the bankruptcy to ch…

I’d imagine there are laws preventing that kind of behaviour. If a court is ordering you to pay something and you then hide all your assets to avoid paying then that’s pretty serious.

Would you be happy if a chemical plant donated its facility to a new company “Chemical Plant 2” in order to avoid paying compensation for chemical spills?

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

#286

Post by joshuaissac »

TylerE wrote: post #257
anthonypasq wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

have you heard of the idea of a museum by chance?

Yes, they involve this thing called curation, not bulk archiving.

Bulk archival is cheaper than hiring a curator. It uses up less of the taxpayer's money.

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

#287

Post by sekai »

misnome wrote: post #75
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…

IA losing and getting shut down because "information wants to be free, man" is completely detrimental to trying to move that agenda forwards. "First principles" means jack shit if your company to build that world gets wiped off the map because you did something incredibly obviously stupidly illegal and handed the "MAFIAA lawyers" your own ass on a silver platter.

> IA losing and getting shut down because "information wants to be free, man" is completely detrimental to trying to move that agenda forwards.

Shutting down? Let's not jump to conclusions here, they would not shut down even if they lost.

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

#288

Post by majormajor »

> This is fundamentally a strike against taxpayer-funded public services by corporations and private individuals.

Wait what?

That's not how the Internet Archive is paid for.

And because it's private, it could have private replacements/competitors.

If another group were to clone all the stuff the Internet Archive doesn't get into hot water for, and not make the obviously hugely risky move that got them in trouble here, does that solve the problem? Are there potential issues re: the Internet Archive suing a second archive that copied them or such?

Seems like an opportunity for some rich folks to make a big philanthropic gesture in support of archiving information and making it available.

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

#289

Post by RGamma »

LinuxBender wrote: post #185
RGamma wrote: post #109

We need an IA backup project right now :/

How many PB is their entire site? I assume they could enable native read-only rsyncd easily enough on some caching nodes. Anyone re-publishing their library would be at legal risk but private mirrors should be safe .

According to https://archive.org/web/petabox.php it's 99 PB unique data and 212 PB total storage on 28k HDDs as of Dec. 2021 (3.2M USD at 15 USD/TB for the 212 PB, not sure if the price is realistic). It's quite something for a private initiative...

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

#290

Post by gkbrk »

kodah wrote: post #170
Xelynega wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Frankly, this isn't out of character for the IA. They want to be treated as a global system of record, but then started hostile initiatives like ignoring robots.txt. They've somewhat rectified this now, but their blog post about brazenly doing this is still up. It's good insight to how they think about themselves. They want protection but none of the regulation that will come with it. The proof of their character has…

> hostile initiatives like ignoring robots.txt

Why would an organization with the goal of being a digital "library" care about robots.txt?

Would you expect public and private libraries to discard arbitrary books of a publisher from their collection because the author put a file called libraries.txt on their website?

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