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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

#411

Post by faeranne »

Wanna throw in a small, but hopefully important story here. About 5 years ago, IA managed to recover a nearly decade long lost card game. It wasn't a huge deal, and the original creator had assumed it permanently lost when his website crashed. It wasn't even a great game tbh. The author was focused mostly on webcomics, so it was considered an inconvenience. Thing is, this was a game he made back in high school, so while it wasn't a huge financial loss, it was an emotional loss for him. He had even partially used IA to try and recover it. Turned out there were multiple steps needed to navigate to the right page, since the link IA had actually grabbed was different from the link the page it pointed to had. I received an incredibly heartfelt message from him talking about years of nostalgia I had unlocked by returning that page to the public. Mind you, this was a web comic artist, so he would have fully been within his right to tell IA to purge all his copyrighted content, but had he done that, this card game would be gone. forever. So, there's a clear balance that could be struck. Or... you could look at it the way he did: "I distribute my content in a way that makes advertisers happy. IA makes sure if I fuck up it's not gone forever. No one is using IA to read my comics unless my site is down. If it's down... well, I'm not making any money off of them anyways."

So... yeah, there are right ways to do things, and the thing is, IA is not a place people generally point to for piracy. Its a place to point to when the worst happens. When the original creator isn't making money on something anyways. Or when they've ensured a group of people can't pay them for something.

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

#412

Post by modriano »

chelical wrote: post #394
modriano wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That sounds more like an implementation/enforcement problem than of the concept of IP.

If [

    1) disputes were decided on the merits and

    2) costs of dispute resolution were

        2.a) deferred until decision-time,

        2.b) born by the decided-against party, and

        2.c) made the decided-for party whole and then some
], I bet either

A) an industry would spring up to identify wronged creators and fund defenses of their IP, or

B) industry would just pay to license the copyrighted work.

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

#413

Post by _the_inflator »

Internet Archive is hugely important for me. I found a lot of antic books regarding technical specifications from vintage computers like Commodores VC 20, C64, C128, Amiga series as well as Atari ST and 286/386. Manuals, magazines, construction plans, whatever you want to search for.

A lot of software references for long gone C compilers, Turbo Pascal whatever was popular during the 80th - if you cannot find it in the IA, it didn't happen, so to paraphrase.

I love the IA for its effort, to deliver high quality material in a digitized format.

While I understand, that there might be copyright, I opt against a right to be forgotten. To me these books are classics, like any other literature. Preserve this heritage. You can donate to IA.

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

#414

Post by Bjartr »

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…

You return to the original concept of (American) copyright.

Encourage more creative work by exchanging a temporary government granted monopoly now for the promise of it becoming available to society's benefit later.

Current copyright terms are too long. Not everything needs to be monetizable to the nth degree in perpetuity in order for sustainable livelihoods to exist.

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

#415

Post by shagie »

PuppyTailWags wrote: post #305
gcanyon wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair arguments, thanks for the thoughts. I think all of it needs to be taken in the context that "helping" creators is a secondary goal in service to the prime goal of maximizing creative output overall. That said, I'm sympathetic to creators; I've written several (unpublished) novels myself. Most novels don't support the authors that write them. There's no argument to be made that Jane Doe's 20,000th-ranked novel ma…

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…

> But should any of those authors become sick, disabled, or otherwise no longer able to produce, should they end up never making another cent of any of their works? How would they support themselves 5, 10, 15, 20 years?

Rick Cook (who wrote the Wizardy Complied series - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Cook_(writer) )... back in 2007 wrote: http://rickcooks.blogspot.com/2007/12/wiz-6-wizard-uncomplet...

> In spring 2000 I was well into Wiz 6: The Wizardry Capitalized when I went into the hospital for emergency heart surgery. The surgery saved my life but a combination of medical problems and the effects of the drugs I take has pretty much ended my fiction career. (Non-fiction I still manage very nicely, thank you.)

I've seen this happen to others. Something about the heart medicine prevents some spark of creativity. Its another example of an author who needed to support himself for another 20 years off the royalties from books he wrote a decade before.

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

#416

Post by [deleted] »

anigbrowl wrote: post #313
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…

Currently the copyright term in the US is life-of-author plus 70 (edit: corrected from 90) years. Life of author has some reasonable basis. Past death it's understandable that descendants would want the estate to be worth something, if an author was unable to capitalize upon their work in their lifetime, but supporting an author's family for 3 generations is ridiculous. There isn't a political solution to this. Becau…

[deleted]

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

#417

Post by Pokepokalypse »

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…

Frankly, at least in the context of US Copyright Law, we need to go back to Article I of the Constitution that defines copyright. The very first sentence is "To promote the useful arts and sciences..."

If congress passes a copyright law, and that law can't demonstrate that it actually MEASURABLY does promote the useful arts and sciences, (but rather hinders them, as is often the case), then that law should be overturned, desecrated, and posted on a wall-of-shame as an example to others of what doesn't work.

I think that would solve 90% of our problems with copyright law. But that's just me. I'm not typically a "Constitutional Originalist" but I think this kind of thinking here could help.

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

#418

Post by thfuran »

int_19h wrote: post #338
PuppyTailWags wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Let them maintain copyright for longer, then, so long as they're willing to pay property taxes on it.

So what, like ten years free then ten year renewals each costing ten percent of total attributable revenue to date (probably with some minimum fee for extension)?

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

#419

Post by faeranne »

999900000999 wrote: post #114
coldpie wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it is true, then maybe IA should be run by somebody with better judgement. I'm skeptical that you even get the IA without someone like these folks running it. Imagine you're the type of crazy person who starts and runs the IA, the pandemic starts and libraries and schools shut down, and there's a big button in front of you saying "give people access to knowledge that was just removed from them". I dunno man, I c…

Ehh. I'm not really buying the Robinhood theory. This feels like some techies thinking their above the law and getting a reality check. It's not like actual libraries don't offer digital lending. You might need to wait a week for Gane of Thrones, but it'll be OK. IA decided the world was unfair and with a bit of arrogance decided to 'correct' it. Let's hope IA is able to just stop lending books and still exist.

There's a seperation between a library and a pirate site, so it's kinda a bad faith argument, but even going on the merits of your argument, I am pressed to point out that, yes, other libraries have digital lending. It's called Controlled Digital Lending. CDL. The thing that this current lawsuit is trying to remove. So this isn't just an argument against IA's library wing, but a move to remove all library and archive efforts. Penguin has come out and said they are against libraries hosting any of their books at all. US law makes this something they can't fight in physical print, but this is their attempt to start destroying these services.

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

#420

Post by monknomo »

tablespoon wrote: post #117
crazygringo wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> certain weird technology and library subcultures, but few people outside of them would even notice it if disappeared It's pretty much indispensible to anybody who's a researcher. It's very frequent that you're tracking down citations to webpages that don't exist anymore, and the IA is the only way to find sources. Not to mention that it's also often the only way to quickly get access to non-bestseller books that ar…

> It's not weird or a subculture unless you think those labels apply to researchers. And there are a lot of researchers out there, across academics, non-fiction authors, and journalists. I do think the label applies to researchers. And except for the case of "tracking down citations to webpages that don't exist anymore," researchers can continue to do all those things using traditional methods (which may be a harder,…

What is the traditional method for finding a webpage that does not exist anymore?
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