Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed

sbstatesman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 614 posts

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

#381

Post by cassepipe »

jlpom wrote: post #336
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…

> Internet Archive was the ONLY place where I could enjoy a completely random piece of lost media from a children's television show called Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Same for me with Le roi et l'oiseau and Peter and the Wolf by Disney.

If you are looking for rare things in french or with frech subs like le Roi et l'oiseau, I also recommend checking the private torrent tracker called ygg (https://mamot.fr/@YggTorrent - you may have to change your DNS, check this page regularly as they move around a lot) The idea behind private tracker is that you are supposed to store as much content as you take from the network and you are actually incentivized to keep old rare stuff you like for people like you out there.

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

#382

Post by nrbernard »

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…

> https://archive.org/details/whiterabbitscant00varl

A truly cursed book cover!

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

#383

Post by snapetom »

thebooktocome wrote: post #121
snapetom wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lawsuit was filed three months after NEL was launched. Controlled Digital Lending has been around for years and is used by public libraries. Publishers didn’t like it CDL, but they lived with it. There absolutely is a correlation between NEL and the lawsuit. It’s a small part of the lawsuit, but it’s clear it pushed them to go to war against IA.

> Publishers didn’t like it CDL, but they lived with it. Publishers spent millions of dollars developing digital lending platforms with fewer features and worse ROI than CDL, and then bullied libraries into adopting them. This is a reasonable summary of their pre-IA activities: https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti... > There absolutely is a correlation between NEL and the lawsuit. As many comm…

> As many comments point out in this thread, legally the trial and the judicial decision had little to do with the NEL.

That's not in dispute.

> Therefore, in the counterfactual where the NEL had not been part of the dispute, the publishers would have still won their case

That fact that they brought the case does have a lot to do with NEL. Timeline-wise, it's clear NEL triggered the case. The HN crowd breeds a binary "yes/no" mentality, but real world businesses decisions, especially legal ones, take many things into account.

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

#384

Post by PuppyTailWags »

TremendousJudge wrote: post #373
PuppyTailWags wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not asking whether or not George R.R. Martin would or wouldn't be fine: I'm asking whether or not it's reasonable for HBO to make a killing off his work without him being paid at all as an example of how it doesn't seem reasonable on its face that smaller authors should just get shafted if someone makes a huge profit off their work. Since we want to talk about mid-tier authors, I think you'd be surprised how long…

>I'm asking whether or not it's reasonable for HBO to make a killing off his work The difference is that in this case, everybody would be free to adapt it as they see fit. HBO doesn't get the exclusive rights. Under the current system, only very big producers can afford to license well known properties. Under a more permissive system, anybody can do it.

No, because HBO has more than license: they also have audience and money to pay for actors, animators, script writers and, most importantly, a marketing campaign. They could still make a ton of money off of it, just that George R.R. Martin wouldn't see a single cent of it! That's what I'm saying would suck terribly. [See: All the lovecraft works in public domain-- big productions based on the mythos are still making toooons of money!]

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

#385

Post by DesiLurker »

dantheman wrote: post #364
modriano wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am so sick and tired of the copyright laws that play counter to productive creation and stymying efforts to preserve anything. The fact that I have to wait until people die until copyright is up is god awful. So what's the right way to balance the need to preserve artistic/creative works and the rights of the creator to monitize or permit usage of their works? It seems rather gross to just say that the creator ha…

The entire concept of copyright is problematic - it limits what you can do with property that you own. It's a government granted monopoly. Ideally copyright would be eliminated and people who choose to create will choose to create. There is development in lots of areas that aren't copyrightable. If you want to keep copyright, then it should be reduced to the bear minimum to incentivize creative works - that could be…

TBH I think the tech-bro fantasy of eliminating copyright is a non-starter for the larger business ecosystem. I mean see how long it took us to decide smoking is bad for us. IMO the we can do is incrementally reduce the copyright period length and let the industry adapt around it.

But In my experience once money starts to flow in any entity its much harder to dismantle it without sortof letting bleed out. I dont think disney would give up its claim on the works anytime soon. we need to slay the beast by a thousand cuts.

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

#386

Post by abdullahkhalids »

PuppyTailWags wrote: post #310
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Cory Doctorow's license on his books is explicitly Noncommercial, No derivative. The person I was disagreeing with would disagree even with that permissive license! And it would also go along with my argument, that Cory Doctorow is still retaining rights to demand payment if people make a killing selling his work in other markets or adapting his work. I have no issues with creatives willingly picking which rights the…

That is exactly the point. Copyright is not a single right. We need to expand the discussion to talk about the validity and duration of each of those rights.

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

#387

Post by slim »

jsnell wrote: post #7

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?

It's not a game. It's resistance by every mean available against corporations that want control over what knowledge we have access to. He did an unexpected and courageous move for the benefit of humanity. The Internet Archive is a huge responsibility because if not exhaustive, it could falsify history. It's leaders mandate is to preserve history, not to preserve what they let him preserve

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

#388

Post by zehaeva »

modriano wrote: post #357
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 am so sick and tired of the copyright laws that play counter to productive creation and stymying efforts to preserve anything. The fact that I have to wait until people die until copyright is up is god awful. So what's the right way to balance the need to preserve artistic/creative works and the rights of the creator to monitize or permit usage of their works? It seems rather gross to just say that the creator ha…

One would think that this should be in the hands of our elected officials, however historically they have been more sympathetic to the idea that we need longer and stronger copyright than weaker.

To speak to why we need this sort of thing I would have to harken back to a fun talk that Paul Heald gave back in 2012[0] where he showed this fantastic chart[1] that shows the number of titles for sale on amazon by publish year.

The only thing I can assume from the chart is that either the publishing industry in the mid 1900s suddenly found itself publishing the same amount of books as they did in the 1830, no one cares about the books written between 1920 and 1990, or copyright has caused the loss of an enormous amount culture. According to the chart, and the talk, there are 7 times as many books published in the 1910s than are available from 1930s-1950s.

[0]: https://youtu.be/-DpfZcftI00 [1]: https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/mt/science/Amazon%20pub%20...

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

#389

Post by CobrastanJorji »

LordDragonfang wrote: post #282
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Publishers manage a whole lot of tasks, notably the editing (up to and often including picking the book's title) and the design. Most important, though, is managing the marketing and sales. They get books into stores, they get interviews for the author, they get the book reviewed on websites, etc. For e-books, they're primarily a marketing firm. Whether that's worth the author giving half of their revenue to the publisher is another issue.
Post reply on HN