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If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed

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

#341

Post by moffkalast »

cobertos wrote: post #337
moffkalast wrote: post #318

> 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…

How is that pretentious? It has so much truth to it. The attention span of our information stewards (large corporations, large universities) is so small that within 10 years you will have trouble finding information they once deemed critical and published. 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. I…

Those use cases are useful, sure. But also likely illegal. Does that mean the laws are dumb? Also yes. But they are currently law.

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

#342

Post by eecc »

int_19h wrote: post #327
GenericDev wrote: post #308

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.

How about calling it Copyrent? Isn't iut more descriptive of what it actually is, while "right" makes it more sympathetic to the liberties and freedoms they're actually reigning in.

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

#343

Post by ChancyChance »

GenericDev wrote: post #308

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 would argue that the aspects of culture that shape the culture are inherently recorded by the culture. The loss of one specific work known by very few can hardly be reason to panic, because there are petabytes of this content which I'm pretty sure no one will remember ever existed in the future, except the AIs that are trained on them. Now if the work that was lost was something of value, like a mathematical paper that wasn't realized for its benefit, that would be a counter argument, but those are stored in other vaults of provenance. I'm in the camp that the internet archive is for nostalgia and curiosity enthusiasts.

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

#344

Post by cobertos »

moffkalast wrote: post #341
cobertos wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that pretentious? It has so much truth to it. The attention span of our information stewards (large corporations, large universities) is so small that within 10 years you will have trouble finding information they once deemed critical and published. 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. I…

Those use cases are useful, sure. But also likely illegal. Does that mean the laws are dumb? Also yes. But they are currently law.

The legality has nothing do with the informations criticality or usefulness.

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

#345

Post by anigbrowl »

hgs3 wrote: post #249
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…

I agree with the sentiment, but not IA's risky approach. What did IA assume? That publishers would look the other way, that their actions would inspire copyright reform, that executive power would pardon them post-reform? Those are some crazy assumptions. I'd think a consumer revolt championed by IA would have been more effective while not jeopardizing the archive, i.e. "Information wants to be free, digital lending…

A consumer revolt would do better, but contacting your congressperson about copyright reform is doomed to failure. Copyright (and the de facto right to abuse and extend it) is an existential issue for publishers, but not for consumers.

Any time you have a collective action problem like that our legislative system is always going to come down in favor of the capital owners, because the entire (US) polity is built around land apportionment. It's a political system designed by and for landlords.

It's an artifact of the US' huge geography and short history. The abolition of spatial barriers by broadcast and electronic networks to the point of universal communication is fundamentally incompatible with a political system based on agrarian territoriality. You can't solve 21st century problems with 18th century political technology.

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

#346

Post by RajT88 »

GenericDev wrote: post #308

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…

IA, to your point, is better than it has ever been.

Long lost episodes of local shows (super local) are being uploaded by their actors and creators.

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

#347

Post by moffkalast »

cobertos wrote: post #344
moffkalast wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those use cases are useful, sure. But also likely illegal. Does that mean the laws are dumb? Also yes. But they are currently law.

The legality has nothing do with the informations criticality or usefulness.

It would be also very useful for me to stroll into a random bank and take a few hundred thousand, but alas I cannot. ZLibrary and Pirate Bay are also incredibly useful.

Sites have the right to remove content, and are sometimes legally required to. Sometimes even for good reason.

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

#348

Post by int_19h »

birdyrooster wrote: post #98
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether you support copyright or not, the Internet Archive did a dumb thing that will probably cost us having the Internet Archive. Everyone is mad because everyone saw it coming and told them not to risk it all. I'm not "supporting" the cops when I tell someone they should stop their car when they get pulled over. I'm recommending someone not get themselves shot.

If the conversation ends with “be afraid of cops” and not, “let’s organize to change cops”, then you are supporting cops. Like in this instance we need to rally around copyleft politicians for the next election cycle so that something like this can’t happen again. We need to have willpower and not be so weak willed to let the rent seekers win.

"Organize" is hot air without specific plan that has a realistic chance of success. Voting for "copyleft politicians" doesn't, if only because there are so few of them, and further because a candidate has no chance of winning on this as their single issue - it's the rest of their platform that will decide the vote.

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

#349

Post by labster »

billiam wrote: post #151
tablespoon wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sorry, but this is a reductionist argument. There are any number of things that could disappear without mall visitors knowing about it (NOAA, Earth's magnetic field, etc) but that doesn't mean they are not important for researchers, students, and others all over the world.

Just on the defense of NOAA, I think most people would notice if they couldn’t get a weather forecast or couldn’t fly a plane in stormy weather. NOAA is a major collector of weather data, and provides half of the world’s GCM initial conditions … the European models would get worse with a huge data hole.

This is just more libertarian bullshit that entire government departments could disappear without anyone noticing. But if NOAA disappeared it would wreck the economy. What a terrible example.

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

#350

Post by Mezzie »

Dalewyn wrote: post #307
Mezzie wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup.

I and many other librarians have private 'pirate' libraries of various materials, particularly ephemera that aren't covered by mandatory deposit or digital content. We're just not allowed to distribute them.

Do we abuse this? Oh hell yes - most of us are archiving according to our personal interests. Which is the main concern about the IA going offline: We shouldn't need to rely on some of us personally saving things (and we can confirm each other's provenance - in order to trust my archive is what I say it is, you need to trust me).

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