331–340 of 614 posts
I'm so sick of modern businesses and their vampire approach on creativity and intelligent property. I see a lot of comments in this thread with what about-isms or "I don't care, we wouldn't miss anything", but these people are short-sighted. And to be honest the hacker news community is frequently the community I loathe to engage in these topics with. Because they are always looking forward with very little respect f…
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It's an argument for the separation of library and archival work. Access to knowledge and preservation of knowledge are separate things, even if they have a lot in common. It might be wise for someone to consider a truly archival only organization.
IANAL, but in fact copyright law has been abundantly clear that copying something strictly for archival purposes is legal, too. It really is the (re)distribution of archived materials that is in the wrong here. IA could go and archive every single bit of digitized data, copyrighted or otherwise, and if that's all they do then nobody will or can complain.
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8...
The title implies that losing this lawsuit is threatening the existence of the Internet Archive. Is that really the case? If it is true, then maybe IA should be run by somebody with better judgement. This was a project with a massive chance of failure (how could anyone think that this wasn't just blatantly infringing?) and a low payoff. If it's also an existential risk, then wtf are they doing running it?
Depends on what they’re looking at in terms of statutory damages. Looking at their Form 990s they bring in roughly in the neighborhood of $15-20M/year in contributions. That isn’t really a lot, and makes me wonder how they ever defend themselves in court but somehow they’ve survived this long.
We're very detail oriented, we're organized, and we're very good at following procedures. We're just as good at drawing things out as lawyers and burying us under tons of paperwork does nothing. Basically a lot of the tactics used to get big lawsuits over with quickly are much harder to execute against librarians. It becomes a war of attrition.
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> 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…
> If they shut down, the story wouldn't even be able to muscle it's way onto the front page of the New York Times What do New York Times reporters use to check web history when researching for their stories? Do they just make stuff up?
I'm so sick of modern businesses and their vampire approach on creativity and intelligent property. I see a lot of comments in this thread with what about-isms or "I don't care, we wouldn't miss anything", but these people are short-sighted. And to be honest the hacker news community is frequently the community I loathe to engage in these topics with. Because they are always looking forward with very little respect f…
I really wish we ditched the name "copyright" altogether because of its unfortunate implications. It's not actually a right - it's a privilege . The system is entirely artificial and wouldn't exist without active social and legal enforcement. And if the privilege is abused in ways that don't benefit society, then it can and should be curtailed or even revoked.
In other words, it's a right.
I'm so sick of modern businesses and their vampire approach on creativity and intelligent property. I see a lot of comments in this thread with what about-isms or "I don't care, we wouldn't miss anything", but these people are short-sighted. And to be honest the hacker news community is frequently the community I loathe to engage in these topics with. Because they are always looking forward with very little respect f…
Same for me with Le roi et l'oiseau and Peter and the Wolf by Disney.
> If you’ve ever researched anything online, you’ve probably used the Internet Archive (IA). Wow, pretentious much. The Wayback machine is an interesting passing curiosity that with great luck sometimes saves a webpage that isn't completely broken. The average person has never heard of its existence. Sure it's fun looking at how web pages used to look like and laugh at terrible designs but it's not exactly part of an…
I've used IA to research things I would not have been able to any other way, the information is _no where_ else!
* Finding missing YouTube videos from playlists. It's usually enough to get the title as YouTube doesnt care to show you the title of what's been deleted, privated, etc.
* A large university deleted all their "website builder" pages including a lot of research and news about certain projects. I used IA to find information on a building I bought from them.
* Looking at the origins/roots of companies like Unity3D. Have you seen their website in 1999? It's pretty cool!
* Old tutorials on websites that don't exist anymore.
There is so much use to IA when those that store our information would gladly pull it out from under us to save a few dollars.
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…
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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?
The answer is no. You wouldn't. Some people put things on the internet but don't want them slurped up by some mindless machine, and some people post both public content and content which they don't want handled by a machine. It's a fair ask that the IA respect long-trodden patterns of the web.
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Seems to me like the Internet Archive can determine for itself what it's job is, and they've determined that this is in fact part of their core mission. Your perception that their purpose is solely to archive the Internet is at odds with their actual demonstrated activities for many years (the home page says: "Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and m…
> Seems to me like the Internet Archive can determine for itself what it's job is And commenters on HN can point out that they've made a huge, and obvious, mistake that risks their entire mission.