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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

#441

Post by halostatue »

justinpombrio wrote: post #370
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…

How about copyright reverts to its original duration of 14 years with an opt-in renewal for an additional 14 years? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...

Various treaties that have been signed and approved prevent that. Copyright longer than 14–28 years is not a bad thing, but copyright for longer than ~50 years is IMO questionable.

I’d love to see some of those treaties renegotiated to limit copyright duration for Works for Hire (e.g., most software out there), but also to reduce the overall length of protection…BUT. I’d also love to see RAND compulsory licensing on copyright materials over a certain age…BUT.

In Europe (not really recognized in the U.S., AIUI), there’s the moral right of the creator in addition to the copyright of the creator. This can be used by an author to prevent their work from being published (say, an author’s private letters that came into a publisher‘s hands) at least while they are alive. I think that’s important.

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

#442

Post by Mike_12345 »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #219

> When Julius Caesar burned the Library of Alexandria, it was harder to imagine a greater destruction of scholarship. Dude. We're not talking about losing secret ancient knowledge. We're talking about losing pictures of cats. There is nothing on the internet that's so valuable that we couldn't live without it. Real research, real knowledge, makes its way out of the internet. And besides, most of the internet that we…

Internet Archive stores much more than pictures of cats. Books, magazines, technical manuals, documents, software, movies, music, images, documentaries, concerts, etc. These are files that users upload. The web crawler is just one part of it.

You will find the most obscure things that practically cannot be found anywhere else. Stuff that would otherwise be permanently lost.

https://archive.org/

"Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more."

"As of January 1, 2023, the Internet Archive holds over 36 million books and texts, 11.6 million movies, videos and TV shows and clips, 950 thousand software programs, 15 million audio files, 4.5 million images, 251 thousand concerts, and 780 billion web pages in its Wayback Machine."

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

#443

Post by throwaway4aday »

modriano wrote: post #432
throwaway4aday wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Pretty much everyone I knew who used to torrent music owned very few actual CDs, the few who did own a lot of CDs seemed to only download rare or hard to find tracks and would go on endlessly about the shitty audio quality of downloaded music.

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

#444

Post by shagie »

kelnos wrote: post #440
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'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…

To go to anything less than 50 years after the death of the creator would require leaving the Berne convention and the TRIPS agreement... and the WTO (since the TRIPS agreement is part of the founding set of agreements in for the WTO).

The political will to change that in 164 countries for for the US to leave the WTO would need to be quite substantial.

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

#445

Post by kelnos »

shagie wrote: post #431
Bjartr wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bef…

Kinda irrelevant if it's an American thing or not. The US didn't become a party to the Berne Convention treaty until 1989, over 100 years later, but had been increasing copyright terms long before that[0]. We (and others) could just as easily withdraw from it, and make our own rules for works that originate in the US. We could even be nice and honor the copyright terms placed on works that originate in Berne Convention countries.

I think the original terms of American copyright are fine to use as a model: 14 years for all works, period. And certainly that's open for debate; even 25 or 50 years would be much more kind to the commons than what we have now. We could even do like we do for patents, and have a relatively short term, with a one-time renewal option for creators who continue to benefit from a work and still care to keep it protected.

[0] https://www.arl.org/copyright-timeline/

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

#446

Post by jahsome »

rPlayer6554 wrote: post #262
jahsome wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

E-A Books... It's on the Page!

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What, no battle pass?!

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

#447

Post by kelnos »

infinite8s wrote: post #430
DesiLurker wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I agree, but your "just" in that sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I think the parent poster describes a more realistic scenario where the term is reduced incrementally over a fairly long time.

If a politician suggested changing the current term (often over 100 years, depending on the details of creation, publication, and ownership) so drastically, they'd be laughed out of office. Or, rather, defunded out of office by their corporate donors.

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

#448

Post by kelnos »

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…

Just because most people may not have heard of it, it doesn't mean it's not critically important.

I'm sure most people in the US hadn't heard of many of the banks involved in the 2008 financial crisis, but many of them, after that fact, might agree that they were indeed too big to fail.

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

#449

Post by qyph »

shagie wrote: post #431
Bjartr wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bef…

From your article: > The United States became a party in 1989.

The person you are responding to is writing about American Copyright. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St.... The first american copyright law is from 1790, which does in fact predate the bern convention, and our life of the author plus 50 years rule is from the copyright act of 1976, 13 years before the US ratified the bern convention.

So yes, it is an 'American thing' as are all issues of law in the US. And if you think that this kind of convention is meaningfully binding, just checkout the history of the US and other major powers with regards to various other international treaties, like the ICC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court.

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

#450

Post by jtode »

dmonitor wrote: post #232
jtode wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating proxy entities to protect oneself is only available to people who hold a lot of capital.

The IA easily could have done it.

Perhaps they're attempting to relate to the world that everyone has to live in, rather than the reality of capital.
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