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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

#81

Post by digging »

TylerE wrote: post #53
Apreche wrote: post #17

We already have laws for historical landmarks. These laws ensure the protection of things of societal significance, even to the point of restricting the rights of their private owners. We need such laws for the digital realm. If we had them we wouldn't have to worry about Internet Archive, dpreview, etc. Imagine if we had such laws in place long ago. We could be living in a world where Geocities and MySpace still exi…

Why should tax dollars be used for this?

> Why should tax dollars be used for this?

Because:

> We already have laws for historical landmarks. These laws ensure the protection of things of societal significance

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

#82

Post by misnome »

birdyrooster wrote: post #69
misnome wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you honestly believe the only reason publishers went after IA is the emergency library? I mean, they did so right after IA did it, specifically citing IA doing it as why. Maybe they would have come after it eventually anyway but the Emergency Library specifically marked IA as an organisation that couldn't be trusted; even if they would have come after CDL, IA didn't have to hand them a slam-dunk case. In all the…

What is the EA?

Flubbed their emergency lending library acronym in my head into -> EA. Edited to clarify.

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

#83

Post by birdyrooster »

tristor wrote: post #56

Frankly, what the IA did here is absolutely the right thing. Copyright in the US is horribly fundamentally broken, and the idea that factual information about our history and world should not be referenceable and accessible for free is a pretty heinous one. Information wants to be free, and the work that IA did for "digital lending" during the pandemic was an essential move in the direction of ensuring that people ca…

I agree we ought to reject the premise of copyright primacy over educational need for people. People with willpower are motivated to create without copyright, but without education they are stunted. Now let’s get some copyleft laws on the books. Stallman clearly has too many skeletons to lead a political campaign or he would have already done it.

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

#84

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #46
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're doing us all a favor is what they're doing. Intellectual property is just not that important when compared with ensuring that the powerful can't rewrite history. If they lose their case, I hope the project can be kept afloat in ways that the US government can't interfere with.

A fight against IP is a fight against capital

[flagged]

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

#85

Post by tablespoon »

lkbm wrote: post #37
jonesnc wrote: post #2

So, how do we create an Internet Archive Archive?

There are people working on this, but "IA preserved as it was when it was killed in 2023" is nowhere near as valuable as IA as it would be in 2033 if it survives. IA is constantly adding new content. ("New" meaning "not-yet-archived stuff from the past century", in addition to up-to-date web snapshots.)

What people need to be working on is to create a peer/successor organization that can take a copy of its archive and carry on its core functions, not just a static archive on a server somewhere.

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

#86

Post by YeezyMode »

Assuming the scenario where ISPs end up blocking access to the archive, the fact that this is happening alongside rapid advances in LLMs is pretty insane. Comparisons with historical snapshots of the web is probably one of the best ways to combat disinformation and misinformation generated using AIs. There are of course other risks and dangers that people have talked about re: restricted access to knowledge and precedents for future publications, but this one in particular seems very dangerous in a timely manner - almost like a setup for very clear and obvious disasters surrounding propaganda, memes, and social chaos.

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

#88

Post by carapace »

netr0ute wrote: post #57
tablespoon wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> You can wonder all you like, and call me a cynic, but the US runs on money not culture. The American identity is built on money and wealth and excess, not on anything you might describe as "culture". > The USA's biggest export is our culture...like it or not. Think of movies, music, etc. Some of it is intangible. Yeah, but that's not high culture. It's mass-market culture that makes a lot of money. I think what th…

What's the definition of high culture?

If we still read/watch it in a century?

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

#89

Post by tablespoon »

breck wrote: post #77

I'd extend this to say, if we don't abolish (c)opywrong, we're screwed. Does anyone want to go back to the closed source software development model of the 1990's? Then why do we not push for the open source model not only in software, but across news, academia, music, film, databases, et cetera? How many of your hard earned tax dollars go to pay for Microsoft's and Oracle's technical debt? How much of your tax dollar…

> I'd extend this to say, if we don't abolish (c)opywrong, we're screwed.

Then consider us "screwed," because what you propose has a snowball's chance in hell of actually happening.

Also, too many software engineers overreact to some reformable problems with the IP system with burn-it-all down radicalism. I think your proposals would cause more harm than good. They'd likely stop most media creation that you're used to*, and what's left with either be cheap (think fanfiction) or under tighter lockdown than any DRM you've ever seen.

* Tell me, who's going to invest 10-200 million dollars to make a movies or TV shows on a regular basis, without copyright?

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

#90

Post by crazygringo »

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…

> certain weird technology and library subcultures, but few people outside of them would even notice it if disappeared

It's pretty much indispensible to anybody who's a researcher.

It's very frequent that you're tracking down citations to webpages that don't exist anymore, and the IA is the only way to find sources.

Not to mention that it's also often the only way to quickly get access to non-bestseller books that are more than a couple of decades old, which is also commonly needed for research purposes. Many of these books are only otherwise available in the country's largest research libraries. (Google has copies too, but nobody can view them.)

It's not weird or a subculture unless you think those labels apply to researchers. And there are a lot of researchers out there, across academics, non-fiction authors, and journalists.

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