If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed • Hacker News Board

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

#431

Post by shagie » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 8:28 PM UTC

Bjartr wrote: post #414

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…

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention

> The Berne Convention states that all works except photographic and cinematographic shall be protected for at least 50 years after the author's death, but parties are free to provide longer terms, as the European Union did with the 1993 Directive on harmonising the term of copyright protection.

This is not an American thing.

And the Berne convention was four decades before Disney was founded.

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

#432

Post by modriano » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 8:29 PM UTC

throwaway4aday wrote: post #410

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…

We should be more discerning with where we allow copyright to be enforced. In my view, copyright's only legitimate purpose is to prevent someone else from selling your work as their own in order to make money. If the person or entity distributing your work is doing so with no direct recompense and only has the aim of making the work widely accessible mostly for education, scholarship and to the impoverished who would…

> The people with enough disposable income to buy your book or software along with dozens of other copyright protected works they may purchase in a year aren't (generally) the same people who spend hours scouring IA or torrent sites for a freebie, their time is worth too much for that when they can just click Buy Now on Amazon and be done with it.

I fully concede that wouldn't go to IA to read any full work (it's too slow and the interface isn't nearly as nice as O'Reilly Online or a physical book), I think copyright made it possible for the current highly-convenient distribution models (of spotify, Amazon, and to a diminishing extent paid video streamers) to develop. In the early 2000s, people who had the money were still extensively using Napster/Kazaa/Limewire/etc to get content because buying an entire CD when you wanted one song sucked (although paying $0.99 for a song on itunes also sucked).

I think there should be a carveout for IA as IA is a uniquely valuable resource, I'm just not sure how to make that into a general rule.

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

#433

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 8:30 PM UTC

beojan wrote: post #132

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 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 US that would be the Library of Congress with its Mandatory Deposit requirement.

[deleted]

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

#434

Post by manoDev » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 8:30 PM UTC

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…

Capitalism causes some contradictions, this is one of those: you need a complicated/expensive scheme to lawfully defend the rights of content creators because the only possible incentive for producing content is monetary return from selling artificially scarce copies of this content.

In a world where content producers were financed anyway, because we understood as a society that this is valuable, this waste wouldn’t be necessary and we probably would have less “Avengers Nth the movie”. That was the norm and how the likes of Da Vinci and others got to do their work that are now so much appreciated, so I don’t think it’s that utopian.

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

#435

Post by HNlurker777 » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 8:30 PM UTC

https://www.battleforlibraries.com/

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

#436

Post by thaumaturgy » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 8:33 PM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #359

thaumaturgy wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, I see, there seems to be a misunderstanding of what the Archive is about. They have been doing a lot more than just "archiving the internet" for a long time. Their blog posts from 2013 ( https://blog.archive.org/2013/ ) for example include writeups about magazines they had digitized, tv news they had recorded, and music. Montana State Library was uploading to the Archive in 2010 ( https://blog.archive.org/2010/12…

I'd bet that most people who care about this issue are primarily worried about losing the Wayback Machine. If that goes away, a lot of internet history will be lost forever. All those copyrighted works that IA was lending out won't disappear in the same fashion -- they will still be available from other sources. IMO the Wayback Machine has always been the primary product, and most valuable part, of the Internet Archi…

You'd be betting wrong. Even a casual skim of the Archive's blog will show that the Wayback Machine isn't their primary focus, and hasn't been for ~20 years. It may be their most important aspect to you, but the Archive is comprised of a large network of people working together to make all kinds of information available on the internet that wouldn't otherwise be accessible. To those people, those repositories are far, far more valuable than the Wayback Machine (and I promise they care a lot about this issue -- possibly more than HN does, given the timbre this topic has received here).

There is nowhere else that you can browse for example a Byte Magazine from 1984 (https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-12/). This is what the Archive is about, from their perspective -- along with music, video (including broadcast video), and a whole lot of other projects: https://archive.org/projects/

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

#437

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 8:36 PM UTC

tablespoon wrote: post #405

astraloverflow wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I find the term "intellectual property" to be more messed up. It isn't property, it's a government granted monopoly on reproduction and distribution. Calling it property allows for this bizarre concept of a form of "theft" that still leaves you with the thing "stolen" from you.

> Personally I find the term "intellectual property" to be more messed up. It isn't property, it's a government granted monopoly... So, in other words, it's property. There's nothing that guarantees a particular lump of atoms are "yours" besides a government-granted monopoly to control that lump. The atoms don't care.

[deleted]

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

#438

Post by mminer237 » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 8:39 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #298

beojan wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 US that would be the Library of Congress with its Mandatory Deposit requirement.

Which in the grand scheme of things almost nothing is deposited to since the US aligned with Berne Convention lack of explicit copyright notification requirements.

Maybe indie games aren't, but anything touched by a major publisher will be. You have a copyright without registering now, but you still have to register the copyright before you can sue anybody for infringement and unless you register it before infringement you only get actual damages, which are nearly impossible to prove.

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

#439

Post by ineedasername » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 8:46 PM UTC

ineedasername wrote: post #352

A Most Sensible Proposal for the Absolute Perpetuation of Copyright Laws: It is a melancholy object to those who walk through this great Internet of ours when they behold the countless instances of piracy and blatant disregard for the sanctity of copyright laws. The noble and ever-vigilant lawmakers, in their infinite wisdom, have blessed us with these righteous statutes, designed to protect the creative genius of th…

No one familiar with the satire source material for this? Jonathan Swift, Modest Proposal, eating babies etc.?

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

#440

Post by kelnos » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 8:51 PM UTC

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're presenting a false dichotomy. The alternative to our current system isn't solely "no copyright at all". It's pretty simple: reduce copyright terms to something much more reasonable. I believe the original copyright term in the US was 14 years. I'm sure we can guess why that has been raised several times since then: greedy corporate interests.

Sure, it's certainly debatable what the "correct" term length should be, but I think most people could be convinced to value the commons a bit more and agree that it should be significantly shorter than the current "life of creator + 70 years" (or for works-for-hire, 95 years from publishing or 120 years from creation, whichever comes earlier).

For copyright owned by individuals, why should a creator's children and grandchildren (and great-grandchildren?) be allowed to continue to profit off their ancestor's work, depriving the commons of history and culture? For corporate ownership, why should the company be able to profit for longer than the lifetime of anyone around when it was created or published? Hell, most companies aren't even around that long, so ultimately the copyright ends up being passed to several other companies that have no relation to the original owner.

But really... 14 years sounds reasonable to me. I would even say 25 or 30 years would be ok, if the consensus is that 14 years is too short.

We could also go with a limited renewal system, like is used for patents. Say you get 14 years, and if, after those 14 years, the work is still important to you, you can renew the copyright for another 14 years, or something like that. People and companies who still actively gain economic benefits from their work 14 years later will go to the effort to renew it, but otherwise -- what is probably the majority of cases -- it'll fall into the public domain.

Of course, copyright isn't just governed by US law: the Berne Convention, at least, attempts to govern and harmonize copyright to some extent, and it requires minimums of 50 years after the creators death for most types of copyrightable works. But this is all doable, with political will behind it. As usual, that's always the problem.