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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

#391

Post by PuppyTailWags »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #386
PuppyTailWags wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm completely comfortable talking about those things! :) I just disagree with the notion that copyright should just magically go away without any serious consideration of its consequences to creatives. I'm more than happy with some hypothetical solution that both prevents inaccessibility to creative works and also enforces that creatives should be compensated for their labor.

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

#392

Post by SllX »

Mezzie wrote: post #333
SllX wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Librarians are a pain in the ass to litigate against would be my guess. 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.

I never thought of it that way before, but that tracks.

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

#393

Post by monknomo »

modriano wrote: post #360
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I think copyright itself is a completely unnecessary concept in the information age. The original idea was to promote creative works by authors by providing a limited term right to be the sole publisher of a work. This was important in the days where it actually cost money to publish and distribute things, as it ensured you wouldn't eat the cost of that only to have someone else make all the money by doin…

Creators still need to eat, even if publishing and distribution costs have dropped to nearly nothing.

I feel like we have a relatively strong copyright regime, lots of works being created, creators have trouble eating with the current regime, and they had trouble eating before it, and unless the next regime makes something like "feed creators" as its primary goal, they'll have trouble eating under that one too.

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

#394

Post by chelical »

modriano wrote: post #380
dantheman wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The entire concept of copyright is problematic - it limits what you can do with property that you own. People can own guns. Is it problematic for the government to limit what people can do with their own guns? I would argue that it's not problematic at all, and I bet you would, too. I'm open to other systems than copyright to make it possible for creators to afford to create and sell their creations. I think Patreo…

The fundamental problem of intellectual property is that it protects the interests of large corporations far more than those of small creators. IP only matters if you have the resources to defend it in court or if your content isn't worth the effort to steal.

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

#395

Post by legitimayzer »

tracker1 wrote: post #216
legitimayzer wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cos…

> Might be interesting to start a large "online library" that does physical books by mail.

but this changes everything. My whole point (which you seem to have ignored) is that when dealing with physical goods, then the systems (traditions, institutions) already in place work fine.

But why would I do that when I can give the PDF version to everybody due to ZERO distribution costs? (not marginal costs, even less. zero costs once the PDFs are made).

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

#396

Post by ramblenode »

tablespoon wrote: post #23
jawns wrote: post #4

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. In the absence of that, anyone who sees high cultural value to the pres…

> 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…

> Yeah, it's super important in certain weird technology and library subcultures, but few people outside of them would even notice it if disappeared.

A service can be important even if few people use it directly. The service can have downstream effects that are beneficial to a lot of people because the people who do use it are creating and disseminating other content that filters its way down.

An analogy would be the US National Weather Service (NOAA). Few people look directly at an NOAA feed, but it's used by news channels, apps, airlines, scientists, etc. and becomes content and services that most people have benefited from.

A robust archive lowers the cost/time of doing research. It enables fact checking and investigation, particularly of an historical or obscure nature. It services the long tail of less frequently accessed content that many of us will, at some time, want access to. Basically all the reasons a research library is useful.

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

#398

Post by legitimayzer »

lenocinor wrote: post #140

I appreciate the metaphor with the Library of Alexandria, but TIL that it may not have burned catastrophically and may have been rebuilt after: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria “Despite the widespread modern belief that the Library of Alexandria was burned once and cataclysmically destroyed, the Library actually declined gradually over the course of several centuries. This decline began with the…

the roman catholics burned it so to make their mythical "jesus" figure stick.

with the info destroyed in that fire we became 'disconnected' from the real historical jesus; thereby enabling the rise of the mythical figure tweaked to allow easier control of the masses. "what would jesus do?"

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

#399

Post by wahern »

simiones wrote: post #145
justin66 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand the backlash in the comments here, it seems to all come from a perspective of people being so downtrodden they just accept the current status quo crafted by MAFIAA lawyers, rather than looking at it holistically from first-principles. People do not understand that the IA want to go to court as part of their strategy, or else they think they understand what constitutes an effective legal strategy…

If this was a strategy from the IA, it has all but failed, hasn't it? And given that the vast majority predicted it would fail, I wouldn't even call this hindsight being 20/20.

Libraries are given a good faith exception from statutory damages. 17 USC § 504(c)(2). I don't think any court has yet had the opportunity to interpret and apply the exception. Nonetheless, there's little reason to believe that the IA's interpretation of Fair Use wasn't in good faith. The court's recent decision deferred the question for later, but we'll find out soon enough. And then we're only just getting started--this case was always destined to be decided on appeal as it poses novel and important legal questions.

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

#400

Post by legitimayzer »

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…

really good cultural artifacts are not created by people trying to make money.

when cultural creations are prompted by a profit motive, we get "masterpieces" like the rings of power.

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