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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

#471

Post by misnome »

anigbrowl wrote: post #408
misnome wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's not evidence that the IA did anything wrong in any moral or social sense. The fact our society is held hostage, and that information is imprisoned, by entities like the MAFIAA is not a justification for this outcome I don't think that IA's position was morally or ethically wrong; I would wager a lot of people here would feel the same way. Unfortunately, for this case, morality and ethicality aren't the law. An…

You can't have a revolution without breaking any laws. Gene Sharp and the advocates of nonviolence have really done a number on a lot of people's heads, giving them the idea that fundamental changes can be accomplished without any disruption or conflict through manifesting a large but peaceful number of people in a symbolic location. The only thing that gets you is a management shakeup. Real revolutions are messy.

> You can't have a revolution without breaking any laws

I think you misinterpreted what I wrote. If you had asked me beforehand whether this specific action would trigger a copyright revolution, I'd have said no. I'm not trying to say that they should have followed the (obvious) law, I'm theorising that perhaps IA was willing to gamble their existence that this _would_ trigger that.

Sci-hub probably had a much better chance of causing change, but feels like it might also have lost that chance with the multi-year pause to appease the Indian court. Various blocks also seem to have been effective; it's hard to find a working mirror.

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

#472

Post by luckylion »

nuodag wrote: post #467
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. If you think about how cruel it is to make illegal the way human culture has worked for millenia, to listen to the storys you hear, retell them, remix them and make them your own in a new context. That is against the law now.

No it's not. Go ahead, tell your friends the book you recently read. As a matter of fact, go ahead, read that book to your friends.

Perfectly legal.

Oh, you want to "retell" it and make money off of it? Yeah, that's something else.

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

#473

Post by twblalock »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #436
twblalock wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fa…

What I'm saying is that the things the people who work at Internet Archive care about may not be the same as what end users care about. I think the end users care mainly about the Wayback Machine.

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

#474

Post by 867-5309 »

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.

>(American) copyright

this is important since in developing countries e.g. India, China with regards to DMCA it is commonplace to pirate Americanly-copyrighted media. so much so that it is not even frowned upon. relatively speaking, imagine a choice between paying tensfold what you pay in developed nations vs paying nothing

similarly, for 'freer' countries e.g. France, Sweden, Netherlands - it is very difficult to enforce a law not created by the state whose laws you do obide by

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

#475

Post by phendrenad2 »

oefrha wrote: post #279
phendrenad2 wrote: post #218

Someone needs to start a competing Internet Archive, which only archives, you know, THE INTERNET, and not xbox games, warez, movies, music, books, etc. The overreach at IA is much bigger than it looks on the surface. Go look at the things people are uploading there.

> Someone needs to start a competing Internet Archive, which only archives, you know, THE INTERNET And a faster, more reliable (in terms of percentage of 5XX responses) one would be nice. Right now Wayback Machine performance leaves a lot to be desired. I end up using archive.is whenever possible. Yes, I donate to Internet Archive, don’t chastise me.

I'm surprised there isn't a paid alternative to Wayback Machine. I'd pay for fewer 5xx errors (which are often rate limiting, I.E. "You clicked more than 10 times in 10 minutes, that's WAY TOO FAST bro")

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

#476

Post by [deleted] »

shagie wrote: post #444
kelnos wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#477

Post by hansoolo »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #276
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…

It's not just a metaphor, btw. IA actually partners with the modern Bibliotheca Alexandrina. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliotheca_Alexandrina#Intern...

Wow, this is really cool!

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

#478

Post by Kim_Bruning »

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 agree that it would be great if creators get to eat. Right now though many people don't get to eat (enough) no matter what, many other people don't get to make use of creative work, and a small number of big players walk away with all the money.

IMO pretty much literally anything else would probably put us in a better situation. At this point after several decades of experience, I think even just outright abolishing copyright law could possibly actually be a net improvement (give or take). But surely it should be possible to come up with a better system by now!

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

#479

Post by theonlybutlet »

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #463
Pokepokalypse wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't disagree until your ending qualification. Being picky and choosy on when it's good to be a Constitutional Originalist means you might as well not be. If the Consitution is a dynamic living document beyond just amendments on one topic, then an originality argument loses weight even on another topic

There's an in-between. The spirit of the law.

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

#480

Post by thaumaturgy »

twblalock wrote: post #473
thaumaturgy wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fa…

What I'm saying is that the things the people who work at Internet Archive care about may not be the same as what end users care about. I think the end users care mainly about the Wayback Machine.

The Wayback Machine accounts for about half of archive.org's pageviews.

You think most other people mainly care about the thing you mainly care about. Happens all the time.

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