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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

#421

Post by uni_rule »

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.

US IP law was written far before the scale of indie digital content or the mere concept of sampling was a blip in lawmakers' eyes. It was made for broadcasters and publishers to go after industrial scale bootlegging of books and movies.

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

#422

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#423

Post by bombcar »

PuppyTailWags wrote: post #315
bombcar wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the other side of copyrights where you can irrevocably sign over your rights (which may be more of a US thing, UK seems to have some inalienable ones) is a significant issue (as mentioned, the Foster thing where Disney wasn't even paying him because they argued they'd acquired assets without liabilities - https://winteriscoming.net/2021/04/23/disney-star-wars-autho... ). It's hard to fully balance. Another ex…

Alan Dean Foster's situation was not an irrevocably signing over his rights; he signed a specific business agreement that Disney tried to renege on dubious claims that would totally change corporate law if it was made valid precedent. Don Rosa's situation doesn't really have much to do with the original advocacy to do away with copyright altogether, so I don't understand your point here. Are you arguing that copyrigh…

I'm just pointing out that our current system of copyright doesn't really do enough to protect the authors and artists that create the works we enjoy; there's certainly room for improvement.

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

#424

Post by matwood »

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…

> what the IA did here is absolutely the right thing > I don't understand the backlash in the comments here

I support CDL, and copyright change. IA may have poisoned the well by not actually doing CDL and trying to profit off of the claimed CDL books. So the backlash is understandable.

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

#425

Post by kitsunesoba »

Pokepokalypse wrote: post #417
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 overtur…

Fully agree. Copyright was originally conceived as a scalpel, but has been turned into a bludgeon. Its current scope and power is far too great.

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

#426

Post by pgalvin »

Aachen wrote: post #131
dumbotron wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't donate to them because they're mismanaged like this.

I have in the past, but I'm also holding off until this lawsuit nonsense is done with. Don't need to fatten the lawyer industry with my money for their own mistakes. Running the wayback machine and things like flash emulation is what I want them to do: y'know, archiving stuff and making it available to current systems. I should really look into whether this books lending branch has a chance of taking the web archive…

There is no decentralised backup of the IA. They’re using 100-200 petabytes of storage. The wayback machine alone is still in the tens of petabytes.

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

#427

Post by MilnerRoute »

zargon wrote: post #309
MilnerRoute wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My issue is with the headline: "If we lose the internet archive, we're screwed." But no one is saying we're in danger of losing the entire Internet Archive. They do many many things - most of which are not in any way affected by this lawsuit. The judge even specified that the Internet Archive can still scan and publish copies of books in the public domain.

If the publishers seek statutory damages then yes, the entire archive is in critical danger.

I'll admit I didn't consider statutory damages. But the judge addresses that in his opinion. The Internet Archive argues that as a nonprofit, statutory damages shouldn't apply. Tbe judge says it's just the wrong phase of the trial for that argument altogether.

You can say there's some potential there for a worst-case scenario - but even then, we don't "lose" the Internet Archive unless they also lose on that specific point, are fined heavy statutory damages, can't pay them off or raise the money, and then cease to exist. Sure that's a bad what-if scenario. But I think it's just too early to have it in headlines.

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

#429

Post by boredumb »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #36
boredumb wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Essentially a digital museum?

A distributed, highly resilient digital museum. The internet archive meets S3 meets BitTorrent. We’re most of the way there, just need improvements around durability, rebalancing around geographies, and the identity and metadata (item inventory) planes. (no association with IA, just an active contributor)

I could imagine something like IPFS and a strong community of volunteers hosting nodes with different partitions. I'm not sure how IPFS would scale to IA sized storage, if for nothing else there would have to be a good way to segment and balance data across volunteers nodes.

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

#430

Post by infinite8s »

DesiLurker wrote: post #385
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…

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 thin…

We don't need to eliminate it, just go back to the original 14 yr term, with a renewal only allowed to the original creator (as an inalienable right so it can't be sold away).
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