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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

#531

Post by Latty »

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.

Very much this. Copyright was a hack that was meant to encourage creation. I feel like it often does the reverse, and is robbing us of our public domain and making it harder for people to create.

Yes, while we have a capitalist society we need to enable creating things that can be copied somehow, but I think currently copyright law hurts that as much as it helps.

Creating silos of IP owned by giant companies that rent seek over things made ages ago, encouraged to sit on them and extract value by remaking them, rereleasing old works in new forms to get people to pay again, and stopping anyone else from exploring the ideas without pointlessly recreating the scenarios to avoid copyright violation.

We need to be able to preserve works, to share, to build off others' work, and to explore ideas further after the original creators put them out there. It feels like copyright works for giant companies that can hoarde IP, and the lucky few who make huge amounts from something that blows up, but it sucks for actually encouraging most creators, making living off creation viable for normal people, and most of all: it is terrible for building on other's work.

I think copyright length needs to be way shorter, ideally with some provision requiring source for code being submitted to a copyright office to be released after the duration runs out, as patents require explanation. (In an ideal world also stems for music and stuff, but that becomes really hard to prove and enforce).

I don't think there are easy answers, but I worry we are locked into a system that makes us worse off as a whole.

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

#532

Post by graderjs »

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…

Another approach that may be less at risk of the vicissitudes of legal trajectory on the copyright issue is a mass-scale decentralized archive: in other words, a democratization of archiving.

One "organized" way to do it would be to have "Internet Archive" run a SETI-at-home type of daemon on your computer to use a bit of idle time and disk to store blocks (obviously there's a rich literature of decentralized file sharing which I'm not apprentice to and so please be suspicious of my suggestions as the "best" method~~but you get the idea).

A "disorganized" way could be to have a "federation" of personal archives, comprised by tools like SingleFile^0, ArchiveBox^1, and my own DiskerNet^2 -- which all in various ways make it possible for you to save web content to your own device, and. It can be then shared with others.

I think in general, aside from any legal perturbations, one should not as a general rule rely on such a single point of failure for something (to some at least) so critical. Probably humanity (or at least netizenry) needs to embrace some form (or mish-mash of various forms) of truly dcentralized archiving.

^0: https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile

^1: https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox

^2: https://github.com/dosyago/DiskerNet

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

#533

Post by Bluecobra »

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…

Internet Archive not only has lost episodes, but whole lost seasons of shows. For example, Little Britain has been “cancelled” on streaming/digital purchases. The DVDs are out of print so third party sellers jack up the price. Internet Archive provides a way of enjoying these out of print works.

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

#534

Post by Robotbeat »

halostatue wrote: post #529
Robotbeat wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, there is no such moral right. It’s an artificial right we created (actually mostly taking away the natural right for people to free copy whatever). And then through corruption, ended up expanding to absurdity and locking it in via treaties and all the propaganda that the vast majority of people swallow whole and take it for granted like fish take water for granted.

The European Union disagrees with your assertion, as do I.

By that you mean the government of the EU. Who have the same problems with corruption as our own.

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

#535

Post by yesco »

halostatue wrote: post #529
Robotbeat wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, there is no such moral right. It’s an artificial right we created (actually mostly taking away the natural right for people to free copy whatever). And then through corruption, ended up expanding to absurdity and locking it in via treaties and all the propaganda that the vast majority of people swallow whole and take it for granted like fish take water for granted.

The European Union disagrees with your assertion, as do I.

You aren't going to win many arguments by appealing to the European Union's authority of all things

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

#536

Post by vel0city »

astraloverflow wrote: post #354
int_19h wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish we ditched the name "copyright" altogether because of its unfortunate implications. It's not actually a right - it's a privilege . The system is entirely artificial and wouldn't exist without active social and legal enforcement. And if the privilege is abused in ways that don't benefit society, then it can and should be curtailed or even revoked.

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.

Real estate isn't property it's just a government granted monopoly.

You don't own a car, you have a title that gives you a government granted monopoly over that hunk of metal.

You don't really "own" most things without society agreeing you do.

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

#537

Post by gcanyon »

DamnInteresting wrote: post #378
0xfffafaCrash wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d argue that copyright and intellectual property more broadly shouldn’t exist. That wouldn’t lead to the end of culture but a cultural explosion as people became able to remix and propagate ideas more freely without the fear of punishment for violating artificial state-enforced monopolies. No one is obligated to create a work and no one is obligated to share their created works with others. There’s no inherent righ…

Copyright and intellectual property exist because we've decided as a society that we want people to spend serious time and energy making these worthwhile things. Absent protections, the upfront investment of time and effort aren't worth it. If one cannot control the use of one's original works, only the wealthy can afford to chase that sense of accomplishment. I am an author who is able to earn a modest income from m…

Thanks for the thoughtful response. And congrats! I've written several novels, mostly for fun, but even if I wanted to publish them now that self-publishing is such a thing: two are lost on a DOS floppy, one is lost on a Zip drive, and one is lost on a MacBook hard drive. And one is still around in hardcopy form, but I'd never be able to re-type it without getting sucked into editing it.

If you're willing to share, do you have a sense of how your income balances between newer and older works?

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

#538

Post by VonGuard »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #285
VonGuard wrote: post #259

Honest question: what is stopping Brewster from filing for bankruptcy and transferring all assets to another non-profit. CA law specifically states that dissolved non-profits have to donate everything to another non-profit. All the hardware and data would be considered their core product. They could donate all of that to a new non-profit, and leave some token staff and office equipment behind for the bankruptcy to ch…

I’d imagine there are laws preventing that kind of behaviour. If a court is ordering you to pay something and you then hide all your assets to avoid paying then that’s pretty serious. Would you be happy if a chemical plant donated its facility to a new company “Chemical Plant 2” in order to avoid paying compensation for chemical spills?

Happy? No. But if they do it before the verdict, it's all in the clear. Happens ALL the time. Businesses constantly sell their assets to other shell companies to avoid liability. Alex Jones is doing this right now AFTER the verdict.

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

#539

Post by boomboomsubban »

alephnerd wrote: post #525
boomboomsubban wrote: post #141

So if I'm reading the law[1] right, which I'm probably not, the damages for the 127 books should be around $3.8 million, with ~$20 million the absolute max? Neither of those amounts seem high enough to destroy the IA. [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/504

Their operating expenses in 2020 hit almost $20mil [0] and they only raise around $21mil in donations. In addition they only have $9mil in assets. That means they could potentially shut down if a hardline litigation strategy is persued. In addition, this opens the gate to additional litigation to any other potential claimant (eg. Warez copyright owners or video copyright owners - there is a lot of pirated material ho…

The revenue on Wikipedia was from 2019, when for some reason they got double their usual revenue, so I may have overestimated their cash reserves. Still seems like something they could recover from.

>In addition, this opens the gate to additional litigation to any other potential claimant (eg. Warez copyright owners or video copyright owners - there is a lot of pirated material hosted on IA).

I don't see how. This ruling is specifically about CDL, something the rest of their archived content doesn't follow, and all those warez and video copyright holders already have the option to DMCA claim any content on the IA.

I do worry this could allow other publishers to sue over past CDL practices.

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

#540

Post by fsflover »

groby_b wrote: post #401
slim wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a game. It's resistance by every mean available against corporations that want control over what knowledge we have access to. He did an unexpected and courageous move for the benefit of humanity. The Internet Archive is a huge responsibility because if not exhaustive, it could falsify history. It's leaders mandate is to preserve history, not to preserve what they let him preserve

This is, frankly, hot air. The IA resisted nothing, achieved nothing, made nobody's life better, and created an opportunity for bad precedent. It was an utterly boneheaded move. (It has also nothing to do with "exhaustive preservation")

Giving access to knowledge to people is the opposite of nothing.
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