Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we still read/watch it in a century?
Not really. Both Shakespeare and Dickens were pretty mainstream culture at the time.
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If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
581–590 of 614 posts
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#582Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're not in court for the emergency library. They're in court for the 1-1 CDL lending they did. I'm tired of seeing this "well IA shouldn't have done the emergency library" line. Do you honestly believe the only reason publishers went after IA is the emergency library? I think this would have happened eventually, so pointing to the emergency library does nothing but tell everyone that you were right all along. The…
Siblings of this comment piling on to point out the timing: yes, yes. I don't suppose proximate or triggering causes can coexist alongside ultimate or long-term causes by any chance? Like hey did the last straw break your camel's back or was it all the previous straws? Couldn't possibly be both, so let's argue about it.
The "straw that broke the camels back" analogy is perfect and I should have included.
It's my stance that while yes the NEL was the final straw that prompted the case, that straw would have been something eventually.
What's the point of arguing over what caused the final straw, their mission statement(free access to knowledge) is incompatible with the publishers(limit access to knowledge for profit). This was going to happen eventually, the only bad thing about the IAs decision to create the NEL is how much it's dominating these discussions instead of the actual issues.
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#583The hilarious bit is that what kicked off this particular shitshow was Chuck Wendig who I personally regard as a two-bit hack "writer", perhaps best known for his god-awful Star Wars books. So glad to see nerd culture basically beating itself in the nads with a baseball bat over, frankly, petty bullshit.
Although he has spent a lot of time backtracking, it's his whining that kicked this charade off initially, so I hold him personally accountable for it.
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#584Earlier quoted context omitted.
> On the other hand: why are these public goods services still hosted in infra/protocols exposed to western/us legal arm? Because you can't host them on thoughts and wishes alone. The capitalist system with its legal constraints is what created it, funded it and runs it. And yes, hosting incurs costs, but hosting copies of content isn't "retelling" or "remixing", it's copying. And since we want cultural output, we're…
A lot of the internet was created at public universities with public money for public benefit. A lot of the best of the internet is hosted on and by community groups, with various kinds of funding.
Yes, universities played a big role in the foundations, but they don't play a big role in running int, and they didn't play a big role in the democratization and commercialization, that is: in allowing everyone to participate, not just a chosen few.
I know, many people feel nostalgic for the internet of old before the unwashed masses joined and they wish to return to that time. I don't, I find today's internet much better, I welcome the technological progress and I'm happy that it is serving all of society and is no longer an elite-only thing. Sure, I get annoyed by Spam, Google flooding its index with SEO nonsense and people screeching on Reddit, but I find those to be minor issues compared to the advantages that we get from the internet. And I do believe that commercialization is responsible for most of the development since then.
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#585Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But what IA did infringes even on a hypothetically repaired copyright system where the maximum age of copyright was something like 10-20 years, and where DMCA take-downs were hard to abuse. In that world, IA would be able to make available any 20+ year book via their program. In that world, I think it’s _much_ less likely that they feel any pressure to lend out copyright covered books, and if they did I would be ou…
If they had extended this program only to 20+ year old books (or whatever they deem fair), I would agree with you, but the sharing program included any book they had archived whatsoever, as far as I have read about this.
Right, but I'm saying their choices and actions might have been _different_ in a world where the state of copyright law has been entirely upended.
It seems crazy to me to make up a hypothetical world that is almost totally different in the key facts, then apply their choices from *this* world, and judge them for that. Their choices seem, at least to me, to be a pretty direct *response to the existing* broken copyright system.
I think "it would've been a more fair choice, if they had only put books into their collection that were 20+ years old" is an entirely fair criticism. "I think the current action they took, if taken in a repaired copyright system, would be unethical, therefore this action was unethical" is a mostly irrelevant statement.
It's like saying "movie ticket stand-in" anti-segregation protests were unreasonable, because in a hypothetical world where there wasn't segregation it would just prevent a fair theater from operating. It might be true, but it's not relevant because that's not the world that the protests were taking place in!
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#586Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've heard of the trope of the "starving artist", but mainly in the context of the art world Vincent Van Gogh and his contemporaries lived in. I do not have any data to corroborate it as a true representation of any significant population that exists in reality today. Can you point to examples of any small creators who would be better off if they had no legal copyright over their works?
So many assumptions in that question! I think the site rules do imply you're not supposed to go for the straw man argument that ends a debate, but rather for the steel-man argument that stimulates further curious conversation. So let's go for that then... : People often build on each other's work. Can you imagine situations where people can take inspiration from each other a whole lot earlier, or are allowed to borro…
People can't copyright a style or a vibe or inspiration, so it's not steelmanning to jump from
* "Can you point to examples of any small creators who would be better off if they had no legal copyright over their works?"
to
* "People often build on each other's work. Can you imagine situations where people can take inspiration from each other a whole lot earlier, or are allowed to borrow ideas sooner and more often?",
it's just completely removing the concept of "copyright" from the question entirely and attempting to inject the false premise that "violating a creator's copyright is the same as sparking inspiration in someone else or citing a paper" (which is, itself, a straw man).
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#587I 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…
Great idea. I'll note that archivearchive.org is currently available.
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#588Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the natural right for people to free copy whatever Practical as it may be, that's not a natural right but merely a physical possibility. More generally, the concept of natural rights - except for a very narrow niche of special subjects closely centered on the individual's own life and bodily autonomy - is a shortcut to total subjectivity at best. And even for that very narrow niche, the "rights" part is a normative…
That’s a fast track to undermining any moral right whatsoever, including especially any claim about “copyright.” Copyright and IP actually are violating individual autonomy. It restricts what you can say or write.
> That’s a fast track to undermining any moral right whatsoever
What is? If you mean the absurd idea of wanting to base those on the murky and subjective notion of "natural" rights, then I fully agree. If on the other hand you mean the reminder that such subjective notions of "natural" rights are a shitty wobbly base for any moral rights (or most other rights as well for that matter) legislation, then no, not at all, quite to the contrary:
The fact of being aware of what rights are (a civilizational norm that grants the individual the protection of their possibilities, as opposed to some inherently subjective notion that a physical possibility would somehow be more special than another because of a subjective view of "god" or "nature") is actually positive for individual autonomy… and a crucial part of enlightenment as far as the legal parts of civilization goes.
In contrast, arguing for concepts based on what they believe to be "natural" is what reactionary forces do in order to restrict individual freedoms. Not so long ago, we had lots of discriminations based on that, e.g. on the idea that black people were "naturally" below white people, that women were "naturally" to obey some role models or that being gay way an abomination against "nature". Arguments based on ideas of "natural rights" have - outside of very narrow special subgect niches directly related to the individual's life and bodily autonomy - always been a major factor against individual freedoms.
Of course that doesn't change the fact that legal systems can also come up with factors restricting individual freedoms based on totally unrelated factors.
> It restricts what you can say or write
so do laws against slander and laws against unconsented divulgation of personal data. Now don't get me wrong, I agree that the domain of copyright does need some reform. But it's clearly not as simple as just to remove everything that somehow restricts (be it copying and sharing of data or other possibilities).
Otherwise any privacy laws and laws for data sovereignty and against unconsented divulgation of personal data would fall as well. They too are based on the legal concept that everyone has an ownership of their data. And more generally, laws about rights are almost always the result of a complex balance to find between the rights and possibilities of many sides.
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#589Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your points are made from a very idealistic place, but not rooted in reality. If I steal your car and tell you that I'm just "building on your work" to better my life, are you going to feel the same?
For ideals not rooted in reality, it seems to have paid the bills ok so far. (knock on wood) . Now, I have to take you seriously because the site rules say so. So I will! But I haven't heard a "stealing a car" analogy since last century, so I may be rusty. And maybe you're taking this in a novel direction? Let's see! == So a trick people did to me in the late '90s was to redefine "to steal" and not tell me. Sorry, bu…
Absolutely weird.
Re: If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
#590Earlier quoted context omitted.
For ideals not rooted in reality, it seems to have paid the bills ok so far. (knock on wood) . Now, I have to take you seriously because the site rules say so. So I will! But I haven't heard a "stealing a car" analogy since last century, so I may be rusty. And maybe you're taking this in a novel direction? Let's see! == So a trick people did to me in the late '90s was to redefine "to steal" and not tell me. Sorry, bu…
Absolutely weird.
You're telling me!
And yet, MPAA seriously made an advertising campaign that equated copying to stealing [1] . This obviously didn't go down well. (eg: [2] ). It sounded a bit like what you were saying, hence the odd response you got.
Of course in in reality, copying isn't stealing. If you could somehow copy my car, I'd still have my car, so you wouldn't be depriving me of anything.
In general, people collaborating and building and iterating on each other's work is normally considered a good thing. Originally copyright had fairly short terms to facilitate this, but over time the original aims of copyright seem to have drifted somewhat.
Anyway, I'm still left mostly guessing where you're trying to go with your 'If I steal your car and tell you that I'm just "building on your work" to better my life, are you going to feel the same?' comment. Could you elucidate?