They may not understand that none of what they like about the Internet Archive would've been possible without a bold willingness to probe the boundaries of copyright law.

If you'd asked any mainstream copyright law authority in the 1990s, they'd have likely said the entire Wayback Machine was illegal under the letter-of-the-law, and advised against even trying it. "Reckless!"

Only by IA actually doing it – & demonstrating the indispensibility of such a historical record to academics, policymakers, culture, & the courts – were people's mental models gradually upgraded. Now, even with little change to statutory law, most see that the best interpretation of the various traditional categories, exceptions, & affordances of copyright law is the one that finds legal space for a Wayback Machine.

Bulk-scanning books-still-in-copyright, even for private preservation/use? Was legally iffy when Google & IA started doing it; now better recognized as legitimate.

Accepting user/collector uploads of live concerts? Storing, serving, & providing emulated environments for old still-in-copyright retail PC/game/arcade software? Bulk-archiving & replaying TV news broadcasts? All iffy when IA started doing them, becoming accepted as reasonable over time by the demonstration-of-utility.

An Internet Archive that waited for legal clarity before starting such projects would still be waiting today – and we'd have neither the valuable projects, nor the accumulated experience/clarity, from the actual doing, about what is reasonable & beneficial.

Do you know what system they replaced robots.txt with? Email, one that is filed as a DMCA request: https://medium.com/wednesday-genius/how-to-remove-your-websi... https://jonathanwthomas.net/how-to-get-your-website-out-of-t...

Sometimes, it's probably good to not push the envelope without trying to establish consensus in good faith first.

There's examples of how this works in a healthy way. Martin Manley is one scenario that comes to mind, where he overtly opted-in to having an archive stored about him upon his death: https://martin-manley.eprci.com/

People who freely publish information, to the worldwide public, on the 'World Wide Web' should reasonably expect all sorts of entities to collect, save, analyze, & repurpose that info, unless they take specific steps to discourage such access & use.

The Archive's crawlers identify themselves, and collect things that are publicly linked, or specifically nominated-for-collection by library patrons or partners. Except in some focused specialized collection projects, they don't "log in" as any user, only visiting & collecting what's published freely to any anonymous person/organization/process.

For material needing more privacy, websites always have the option to block any and all unwanted visitors/crawlers with a wide variety of standard techniques, like requiring logins or simple challenges that automated crawlers won't pass.

And, as your linked articles report, the process for a later exclusion by request is pretty quick and simple. (The 2nd post concludes: "So, hats off to the Internet Archive for making the process smooth and relatively painless.") And, such exclusion does not require any sort of "DMCA request".

Thankfully DMCA should make the removal process easier now, especially in situations where control over the domain has been lost or being hosted by a third party. Although last I saw there were still artificial barriers, such as needing to list every single individual page needing to be taken down. But this is after the fact, after you discovered your reasonable expectations and privacy have been violated. And then you have to track down the other copies that IA illegally distributed your now-private and copyrighted information to, such as a few libraries around the world with similar projects.

Note that when the Archive shares crawled content with other libraries, those other libraries often have their own legal right to collect, preserve, and make-available that data even stronger than the Archive's rights via fair use, implied-license, library privileges, and other grounds. For example, many of the Archive's partners in government libraries, archives, & educational institutions have a statutory right & mission to collect copies of everything 'published', including via the world-wide-web, in their sphere of national interest.

As to what some unstated jurisdiction might consider "within reason", I prefer to think they'll find what's reasonable what I find to be reasonable – the IA's crawling policies – unless & until some actual governing authority finds otherwise in a clearly applicable/legible decision.

See my root post (ggggggp): in a vital, evolutionary, true-law-made-on-the-ground civilization, what actually winds up as "within reason" depends on the real implementations & multi-decade demonstrations of how things can beneficially work, as much or more than any copyright loyalist's strict reading of older statutory laws.

On the larger issues, & specific to the Internet Archive:

You should assume there are several other larger "dark" web archives, by nations and large private organizations, collected without the awareness or available-remedies of the Internet Archive's or various national library public efforts. There are also uncountable other private and ad-hoc collections. Depending on what kinds of harms you expect from retained copies of older writings, these may be far larger threats than any holdings of an open, public, correctable non-profit library.

I would emphasize that anyone (like a web host or app) who gave any authors, especially the young & net-novices, the impression that something would stay private, or recallable, after being placed on a public webserver, at a published link, and open to browsing by all, did those authors a disservice by mis-informing them of risks, and the best-practices for preserving privacy.

That the Archive's well-identified, blockable crawlers sometimes surprise people with what they collect, and then make-available for lookup, helps correct that misunderstanding, both for individuals and the wider culture. Any "chilling effect" is unfortunate, but it's inherent to the web technology & practices of many independent actors. It's moreso documented, than created, by the Archive's own activities. And further – at least with respect to the Wayback Machine – the surprise availability is then fairly straightforward to undo, and prevent from recurring.

The broader risk that anything on the web – once offered to the public – will remain available from others persists no matter what the Archive does. Those concerned about such risks should take extra privacy-preserving steps, because blocking the Archive's crawls, or correcting the Wayback Machine, only limits this one polite, above-ground actor.

A reference to one such comment in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32150193

Those are exactly what hundreds-of-years of copyright law, by explicit statute and court interpretation, have addressed. The precedents for private actors, and especially noncommercial entities like libraries & schools, to retain those copies, and to a large extent, reshare/redisplay them, are very strong.

Further, by design, every delivery of content across the web necessarily creates copies at every network node, and perhaps multiple proxies/caches, on the way to the web browser. The web browser necessarily creates & displays a copy – and normally keeps one, at least for a little while for user convenience. Anyone choosing to core web protocols has already implicitly authorized lots of necessary copying.

Why wouldn't the recipients of such display-copies, and especially non-profit libraries, have on the web the same assumed right to keep/transfer/format-shift/redisplay that freely-delivered copy, in the same way they've always had the right to do with copyrighted books/magazines/newspapers/newsletters/pamphlets/flyers?

If copyright maximalists & DRM fans want a new right to remotely recall/destroy such copies – indefinitely, retroactively, and unlike the traditional copyright balancing-of-interests – they should make the case to lawmakers & courts for that, or use the technical measures already built-into the web for expressing such limits, and opting-out of the web's and copyright's defaults. You shouldn't let them simply assert that right without reasoning or a case for why it's better than tradition. Nor, allege criminality or 'bad-faith' against people just using the worldwide-web as it was designed, and enjoying readers' rights as they've been traditionally interpreted.

Because they're comparing an individuals blog or Twitter profile to those things, of which they are not analogous. Not to mention you use rhetoric like this:

> If copyright maximalists & DRM fans

It just goes to show the juvenile nature that some people will stoop to in order to prove their point. In this case, "some people" is you. Not everybody out here are the little demons you've dreamed up in your soul; most of the people responding on this thread are just privacy advocates who have seen how these policies go wrong, often first-hand. A little further down the thread someone makes a very salient point about the queer community and how these tools are used in unmasking.

> Nor, allege criminality or 'bad-faith' against people just using the worldwide-web as it was designed, and enjoying readers' rights as they've been traditionally interpreted.

The internet as a technological invention did not arrive with legalities already paved. They were very much in flux and have been in flux. It's okay if you don't like that, but asserting that the internet was created with commons as the default is junk; that's a very US-American law that has dominated cultural perception. Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, we have countries figuring out nuanced ways to implement the right to be forgotten - notice none of that legislation is geared towards large corporations, it's focused on individuals.

---

Getting to the rest of your argument that wasn't distastefully written: I do agree that it shouldn't be a copyright free for all, but you can't have the Internet Archive and other folks creating weapons. There should be limits on both ends and I don't think those exist.

One really obvious limit is stop treating government entities and individuals the same. Stop treating large publishers and individuals the same. The former have immense resources to coordinate their communication and undergo thorough review processes, so their publications are more well thought out. Most blogs and social media posts are not nor do they have the same level of impact. Privacy advocates wouldn't need a copyright crutch if people could summon enough humanity and empathy to understand that. That would separate privacy advocates from copyright trolls on this issue.

---

Another edit

This is rich: https://twitter.com/gojomo http://xavvy.com/

You used to work for archive.org? That might be a thing you should call out in discussion.

Some posts:

- http://gojomo.blogspot.com/2001/01/

- http://gojomo.blogspot.com/2000/08/

- http://gojomo.blogspot.com/2002/07/

- http://news.oreilly.com/2008/06/gordon-mohr-takes-us-inside-... (This link looks dead)

- http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,42438,00.html (This link looks dead, but was summarized by you as, "about the tug-of-war between personal privacy and copyright enforcement, March, 2001.")

You've not made a case that personal writings should be treated any differently, on either copyright or privacy grounds, nor that the law does treat them any differently.

You've made unsupportable allegations of "flaunting privacy" or "direct attack on individual privacy", and accused those who simply reason from copyright-history as making "bad faith" arguments. And, you are asking for the roughly the same level of expansive copyright interpretation – not at all a feature of the jurisdictions where the Internet Archive primarly operates – that copyright maximalists and DRM advocates do.

Just as you misrepresented the Archive's process for exclusion as requiring a DMCA request – even though your own links complimented the Archive's "straightforward" process – you're now confusing an imaginary claim of "commons" (no rights) versus my narrower claim of traditional balance, fair use, and implied licenses.

And if you think the straightforward, sympathetic, norm-respecting noncommercial policies of the San Francisco' based Internet Archive are a threat to queer and other often-persecuted lifestyles – rather than the opaque data-collection efforts of hundreds of other unobserved entities, platforms, apps, & persistent threats, up to and including actual nation-states – I believe you've made a dangerous category error. The Wayback Machine is a friendly canary reminding people of the risk and responsive to their concerns; others represent the fatal dangers of privacy blowback.

Thanks for promoting my Twitter & old blog posts!

My current & former affiliations are well-disclosed across my web presences - and I often mention my once-upon-a-time Archive involvement here on HN if more directly commenting on Archive details, as opposed to broad principles involved.

But I've not been full-time there for about a decade – and the specific blogspot posts you've chosen to highlight actually predate my tenure at IA. I don't speak for IA nowadays, only myself, as myself.

Yes, my work history is congruent with my beliefs about privacy & copyright on the internet, and prominently disclosed. (My jobs don't dictate my views; my views dictate my jobs.)

Your broken links are, thankfully, available at the Wayback Machine:

2008 "Gordon Mohr Takes Us Inside the Internet Archives" https://web.archive.org/web/20080619045327/http://news.oreil...

2001 "Security Fears for Peers" https://web.archive.org/web/20010331094133/http://www.wired....

How heavenly it might be if only every paid employee (and potentially, compensated advocate) of big tech, big copyright, big nation-state, big regulation, and big ideologies – as they pile-on the votes & comments here & elsewhere – were similarly open about their affiliations!

Luckily I'm not paid to talk about privacy. While there's probably some people who monetize privacy they're usually looked at negatively. Apple is a good case study of that. The closest you could get to saying that I'm paid to talk about privacy is my work on cryptography orchestration, but that was not built to be monetized - it was built to protect information and put users in control.

> My current & former affiliations are well-disclosed across my web presences...

> But I've not been full-time there for about a decade

> Yes, my work history is congruent with my beliefs about privacy & copyright on the internet, and prominently disclosed. (My jobs don't dictate my views; my views dictate my jobs.)

Doesn't really matter, disclose your affiliations - especially for the kind of wild statements you make (eg: comparing thread commenters to "big tech, big copyright, big nation-state, big regulation, and big ideologies".)

> Just as you misrepresented the Archive's process for exclusion as requiring a DMCA request – even though your own links complimented the Archive's "straightforward" process –

I didn't misrepresent it. https://medium.com/wednesday-genius/how-to-remove-your-websi... Quite literally, the most expedient way to get them to remove content is to frame it as a DMCA. Just because the changed process is "easy" or "straight forward" right now, doesn't mean that won't change on a dime. I already noted they removed a web norm and replaced it with email.

> you're now confusing an imaginary claim of "commons" (no rights) versus my narrower claim of traditional balance, fair use, and implied licenses.

I agree, commons is the wrong term, "fair use" is what IA legally rides on.

> And if you think the straightforward, sympathetic, norm-respecting noncommercial policies of the San Francisco' based Internet Archive are a threat to queer and other often-persecuted lifestyles

IA is part of the larger problem, I'm not playing whackamole with giant businesses acting badly, or as you put it pushing boundaries for some imaginary libertarian-esque greater good. Regulation will solve anyone who wants to host or do business on US soil.

> The Wayback Machine is a friendly canary reminding people of the risk and responsive to their concerns; others represent the fatal dangers of privacy blowback.

I am literally speechless at this logic. The idea that doing harm is somehow a canary for larger potential harm and is worth continuing to do is awful reasoning. IA can make their services less harmful without harming their larger mission, I've also proposed ways to do that that you have not responded to.

> You've made unsupportable allegations of "flaunting privacy" or "direct attack on individual privacy"...

I supported both of those statements. They took a self-service, automated system that is a web norm (which you apparently like) and replaced it with emails for DMCA takedowns. You can disagree with me, but they're not unsupported.

> ...accused those who simply reason from copyright-history as making "bad faith" arguments

I reasoned that people like you know that your comparison to organized, for-profit publishers are not cogent. Every time you respond I become more confident of that assertion, especially when you accuse me of being a shill for some "big copyright" conspiracy.

Lastly, probably the most salient point I've ever heard:

> "Copyright holders aren't going to be happy with Freenet and Gnutella," Mohr said. "They are going to want to start monitoring people at the ISP level, and that means there is going to be a coming war between individual privacy versus network security."

Ironically, years later you went to work on what would end up becoming a privacy eroding tool. I wish I was talking to the gojomo of back then, I think there'd been a much more productive conversation than this has been.

> Doesn't really matter, disclose your affiliations - especially for the kind of wild statements you make (eg: comparing thread commenters to "big tech, big copyright, big nation-state, big regulation, and big ideologies".)

My current & prior affiliations are well-disclosed – better than yours, it seems.

And I wasn't "comparing" commenters to those things, I was pointing out: many pseudonymous voters, & commenters, here are often in the employ of, & de facto advocates for, the very topics of contentious discussion – such as Google, the US federal government, the entertainment industry, activist organizations, etc – with no disclosure.

So to harp on my open book of work history is again odd.

> I agree, commons is the wrong term, "fair use" is what IA legally rides on.

Indeed, it was unfair of you to characterize my arguments, or separately any rationales used by the Internet Archive, as involving a simplistic 'commons' assertion.

> I've also proposed ways to [make their services less harmful] that you have not responded to.

I've not noticed these proposals, just vague platitudes about "trying to establish consensus in good faith first" – what does that mean? – or an example of one person (Manley) who consciously chose to publish a life-archive along with their suicide note (!). How exactly does that outlier case convert to actionable policies for a web library, that legitimately seeks to be as comprehensive about publicly-published web materials as traditional printed-material libraries?

> Regulation will solve anyone who wants to host or do business on US soil.

No, it can't 'solve', and barely even helps, because the most serious threats are from government who themselves use regulations to force the violation of privacy – as with KYC rules, or demands for intercept capabilities – and from aggressive sub-state actors whose activites are largely invisible to regulators.

You're still alleging non-specific "harm" from the Archive without examples or magnitudes.

If the Archive helps makes people aware that what they've published persists in the public record unless they take conscious other steps, and lets them both correct the storage that surprised them, and leads them towards the truly-reliable practices for avoiding unwanted disclosure/persistence, it's done a better job than those promising safety from superficial 'regulation' that doesn't actually limit most threats.

Archiving publically-offered web pages isn't a "privacy-eroding tool" no matter how many times you repeat that allegation - it's a tool for cultural memory, honest history, and teaching people the ground realities of privacy (or lack thereof) in these new media. Directing ire at the Archive's well-behaved collection activities is getting angry at the smoke alarm, not the fire.

If anything, the IA should be more reluctant to remove information without a court decision.

And that's a good thing in the vast majority of cases. Unless we're talking about sensitive information that was published without the consent of the person in question, all public information should remain public forever.

But there's some absolutely essential priceless diamonds hidden in the crap. And they can't be found/known at the time of collection: only with the future development of other events & knowledge do they become retroactively evident. So you've got to collect & preserve as much as you practically can, or else great things are lost forever.

Further, even the mounds/magnitudes of crap can turn out to be important for understanding the past. Ads that annoyed readers at the time help communicate how people, & businesses, & technology were really operating – not just the self-serving stories people craft later. The most-fumbling and awkward early uses of a new medium – hypertext, or RealAudio, or Shockwave Flash, or whatever – reveal enduring lessons about the evolution of technology & culture, including roads-not-taken that could still hold promise.

This shouldn't surprise us. Much of what we know of past civilizations comes from archeologists studying trash dumps that, via dumb luck, were well-preserved.

So if you tell me, "the Wayback Machine is a giant unedited trash heap of the internet", my response is: "Yes! That's the point! You get it!"

If you've taken no self-help measures to limit access, then bad actors, unobservable to you and regulators, will still be doing whatever they would like to do and can get away with.

But you may be lulled into a false sense of security by the false promise of a 'solution' via regulations.

> If you've taken no self-help measures to limit access...

robots.txt was a nice self-help measure.

> ... then bad actors, unobservable to you and regulators, will still be doing whatever they would like to do and can get away with.

Regulators still have to follow regulations. You are right that I can't stop someone from creating offline archives - but they're not really who I am worried about. Nor am I worried about the small servers that keep copies of documents during transmission, unless of course they're doing so for criminal reasons.

For any who are more curious about a commenters' background than their current words, my profile already links to copious resources on my work history, & writings, beyond what's typical of contributors here.

If you're writing messaging systems and working on cryptocurrency you can figure out Algolia: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

You didn't need me to do that.

My "self-interest" in the Archive is exactly the agreement-with-its-mission that is self-evident by my strong opinions. The post words themselves are a stronger disclosure-of-interest than any extra mention of previous employment would be.

And further, all sorts of extensive details of my projects & work history – and not just with respect to the current topic! – are described a couple clicks away.

Have you disclosed anything about your "reputational, monetary, etc" "self-interest", here or on any other topic? Show me how you do it, inquistor. Or, do you somehow manage to only ever comment on things in which you have no personal interest, nor related professional involvements?

Note that I fully support your right not to declare such things.

It's just rich to criticize someone like myself – with neither hidden opinions nor a hidden work history – from your perch of obfuscation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23379775

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23998115

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23691297

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23485182

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23391662

Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31703394 - June 2022 (32 comments)

Help preserve the internet with Archiveteam's warrior - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30524842 - March 2022 (51 comments)

Internet Archive responds to publishers’ lawsuit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23998115 - July 2020 (348 comments)

My thoughts in response to the lawsuit against the Internet Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23931183 - July 2020 (232 comments)

EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23691297 - June 2020 (263 comments)

Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23485182 - June 2020 (393 comments)

Lawsuit over online book lending could bankrupt Internet Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23391662 - June 2020 (260 comments)

Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23379775 - June 2020 (346 comments)

Internet Archive responds: Why we released the National Emergency Library - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22731472 - March 2020 (145 comments)

Internet Archive’s National Emergency Library Harms Authors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22716923 - March 2020 (48 comments)

What I'd love to see improved is the ability to be less "fragile". Currently it's all located in the US and they have a huge focus on the US, both technically and politically.

But why not try to replicate it all over the world? There seems to have been some smaller efforts inside the Internet Archive to make it more decentralized, but it feels like it should be a much bigger focus on it.

- https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/the-internet-archiv... (Jun 16, 2022)

- On HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31774608 (219 points | 64 comments)

But it seems like a strange location. Why not really branch out and meet the world instead of just sticking around North America?

[1] https://www.bibalex.org/isis/frontend/archive/archive_web.as...

Hardly any of that content would exist at the quality level you are accustomed to, without copyright.

I say that as a producer of such content. If anyone could legally copy and distribute my work without my permission, I would not produce it, because there would be minimal financial incentive for me to do so.

The current level of such unauthorized distribution - by which I primarily refer to the republication of my work by others, in its entirety, for their own profit - is staggering. And that is with the existence of copyright law.

And it’s a huge disincentive from publishing more content. Both economically and because it’s demoralizing.

It’s also a huge waste of time, as in order to be able to pay my employees and myself, I have to dedicate time to combating infringement-as-a-business.

If copyright ceased to exist, I and nearly every other producer that I know, would find another line of work.

Fortunately, copyright ceasing to exist is unlikely to happen.

For starters, the wholesale abolition of copyright would violate the United States Constitution.

not really no, I like stand up comedy, music, indie films, art that people make because they feel compelled to make art, not because they've done the math on the best return-on-investment

My ideal funding model is kickstarteresque, raise X amount and then publish

I consider copyright contradictory to free speech, I can say whatever I want unless it's already been said? what?

> the wholesale abolition of copyright would violate the United States Constitution.

That's what amendments are for.

See also, "copyright is brain damage":

https://youtu.be/XO9FKQAxWZc

How do you think such people buy food and heat their homes.

- Crowdfunding

- Other forms of payment for creation rather than distributing copies

- Government grants

- UBI

Those are just the super obvious ones. Generally when something is considered valuable, society finds ways to pay for it. Not allowing copyright and patent parasites collect as much means there is more that can be spread to actual creators.

Or they could work on something else that is not as easily copied - there will always be others driven to create art.

That there are business models profiting from certain laws should not exclude those laws from being reconsidered. In a way, copyright is like pollution: externalizing the costs to everyone else for your own profit.

How would you know? Yes these all require funding but the idea that we as a society can only fund big creative works by giving up everyones right to freely share and enjoy them is absurd. Copyright is an effective(ish) way of funding things in a world built around copyright but it is not the only one and there is no reason to believe that there could not be better ones in a world without copyright.

It's a sad world we live in when creators are upset that their creation is shared.

Let's also not forget that the need to commercialize creative content using copyright can also negatively influence those works themselves as what is profitable under this scheme is not neccesarily what is best.

> It’s also a huge waste of time, as in order to be able to pay my employees and myself, I have to dedicate time to combating infringement-as-a-business.

Good news: without copyright you would not have to spend any time to combat infringement since there would be no infringement.

> For starters, the wholesale abolition of copyright would violate the United States Constitution.

Does it? I'm certainly not an expert of the matter but AFAII the constitution only ALLOWS the government to create laws like copyright but does not require it.

I don't think that is a fair description of what I have a problem with.

>Let's also not forget that the need to commercialize creative content using copyright can also negatively influence those works themselves as what is profitable under this scheme is not neccesarily what is best.

This is a huge problem, though it's not really related to copyright.

I think a more accurate statement, using your words, would be something like:

"Let's also not forget that the commercialization of creative content can also negatively influence those works themselves as what is profitable under this scheme is not necessarily what is best."

HUGE problem.

The content you see on YouTube today is determined, in large part, by what advertisers are and are not willing to have their brands associated with.

Huge, huge, problem. Particularly since viewers are typically unaware of it.

> Does it? I'm certainly not an expert of the matter but AFAII the constitution only ALLOWS the government to create laws like copyright but does not require it.

I believe that it does. Abolishing copyright would be a 'taking' of intellectual property, and would violate the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment.

> If copyright ceased to exist, I and nearly every other producer that I know, would find another line of work.

I guess that means you should start looking :)

Not really, since these "abolish copyright" fantasies will never, ever happen, thankfully.

No, because they would get laughed out of the room.

What were they expecting? How can they possibly expect to win this lawsuit? I hate copyright with all my soul but this is just stupid. You can't just decide to take the law into your own hand. This is just a waste of money and effort.

The time has come to consider changing the laws to allow for truly fair use, especially for physical items scanned to digital (e.g. books), old video games, and more.

It's about selecting for the common good over the extremely low-value proposition of helping rent-seekers preserve an infinite zero-effort stream of income.

TIA is one of the best things to emerge from tech, all thanks to the tireless and complete dedication of the founder: Brewster Kahle.

I don't know if they still do it, but pre-pandemic they offered tours of their HQ in San Francisco. It was really cool to meet the team and see their setup, and an amazing opportunity to meet Brewster and hear the conviction in his voice as he described his vision for The Internet Archive. It's a very special thing.. imagine if it didn't exist? I am feeling tears coming just considering such a possible reality.

How much do you think you personally pay for libraries? 1 cent a year? Half a cent a year?

And it's not "many publishers support <a proprietary thing>", it's "libraries are obliged to have all books, and in many countries publishers are made by law to provide libraries with copies of their books".

> But it's important to note that copyright holders are coming up with many new and innovative ways to help readers get books and authors get paid.

None of those ways are innovative.

More on the order of $40/yr.

https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/public-life/pub...

Still three times less than a Kindle Unlimited subscription :)

Plus one can put their own content on Kindle, thereby taking lots of titles on trips or elsewhere.

The natural state of copyright is that it doesn't exist, it's only created because governments believe there is a benefit in enforcing it, be that benefit a greater production and distribution of works or more money in politicians pockets from lobbyists.

Implying that there is any legal copyright piracy is ridiculous as by it's definition the copyright does not extend to that area so there is no piracy. The closest you can come to the concept of legal piracy would be copyright privateering across legal jurisdictions.

In most countries around the world libraries pay a license for loaned out books, so not really.

To be honest, I'm having a hard time getting upset over this lawsuit. As best I can tell, IA isn't getting sued over having scanned the books. They're not even getting sued over lending them out. Instead, they're getting sued over lending out more digital copies than the number of physical copies they had purchased.

The books would be no less well preserved if IA had not decided to do this. Access would have gone down, temporarily. The pandemic would have sucked that one little bit more (though honestly, a drop in the bucket for what the people most impacted were already experiencing). And... that's it. It really has no long-term ramifications, aside from whatever legal precedent it sets (if any).

I really like being able to write open source code in my day job, and I appreciate information freedom. But I don't think those principles apply here. I really do think this is just a straightforward case of an organization overstepping their bounds and getting slapped down for it.

OK, well enough.

But TIA then does something that clearly violates copyright. And the fig leaf that is "But COVID" really doesn't make a difference.

And, yes, copyright terms are too long etc. but I'd actually be willing to bet that most extra lending TIA did was for recent works.

The lack of legal foundation for CDL is not entirely an accident, however. First sale and similar copyright exhaustion doctrines are hard-fought and won rights of the reader. But these rights rely on the fact that no actual copying is taken place. When you interact with any copyrighted work using a computer, there is an almost gratuitous amount of copying going on. If you so much as cough on the work, you are breaching copyright. Publishers know this, and they have been very successful ramming "licensed and not sold" language through the court system.

The funny thing is, while pirates have been stereotyped as waving their hands in the air and shouting "technology" to opt out of the law, publishers have been way more successful at doing the same, even though they fought tooth and nail against digital distribution.

[0] In the ReDigi case the "digital resale" software was even specifically engineered to erase parts of the file as they were sent to the new owner so that the number of duplicate bits floating around would be negligible at any particular time.

A decade and change later when Intel started asking for hardware copyright[1], Congress actually realized their mistake and created a sui generis right for integrated circuit designs ("maskwork rights"). We never complain about maskwork cases because they are incredibly limited, have a 10 year lifespan, and basically only cover direct copying. Software would have been no different had Congress not made the mistake of handing the full enchilada of copyright monopoly protection - including all those pesky questions about derivative works - to software companies.

[0] e.g. is linking infringement? can you copyright interfaces?

[1] Fun fact: before this, it was entirely legal to X-ray chips and reproduce them. In fact, the NES famously shipped with a bootleg 6502 that only had decimal mode missing because that was the only thing MOS could patent.

This just doesn't work, even if there's a rich person who is willing to pay quite a bit for the first copy. The rest of the people get excluded from the decision making and the rich person is the only one who decides which books are worthy of being rewarded.

>And... that's it. It really has no long-term ramifications, aside from whatever legal precedent it sets (if any).

No that's not it.

The amount of books some people can afford is zero. Lawsuits like this are making the general population dumber, more ignorant, poorer, it accomplish nothing besides increasing inequalities and making society worse for everyone. Libraries can be good if you're into very mainstream topics, and you're fine with brushing the surface of the subjects you're interested in or if learning outdated stuff is ok to you, and of course you still need to live somewhere where libraries are decently funded and where book banning isn't a thing. All books should be accessible freely, to anyone, at anytime, anywhere.

That genuinely may be so, but "this law i broke shouldn't exist" is not an advisable legal defense.

Also, what you call "rent seeking" others would call "return on investment". I do think there is a grey area here, "fair use" being one example, but i think summarily discounting distributors and publishers wholesale doesn't help your stance.

It may or may not succeed in courts, because our "justice" system is anything but. Even if it doesn't succeed in court, it's still a worthwhile stance and it may succeed in other ways. Especially if enough people who recognize where justice actually lies stand up to support those taking the risk to point it out.

The line between "rent seeking" and "return on investment" lies at the spot past which those who produced a work have been fairly compensated for their time and effort, past that, it's rent seeking. If you want a good metric, break the return down to an hourly wage for each participant in producing the work. Does it seem obscene? That's because it is.

Rent is not the basis of savings through investment, yield is; of which rent is one kind. Renting a movie at blockbuster made sense in the 90s as plastic shells of magstripe were a scarce good. Today, literally millions of devices could stream their entire lib for free via ad supported streaming apps.

We live in different times. Holding on to artificial constraints for old-times business model nostalgia will look so quaint in a few decades.

Without it, why would anyone choose to view the movie with ads when they can just download it and watch it with no ads?

(Legally, since in this hypothetical, copyright doesn’t exist.)

Or are you just arguing for ad-supported viewing of content? Which is what currently exists for an enormous body of material. See, for example, YouTube.

I support a wide range of monetization strategies and access to content by the most amount of people.

The courts are the most efficient way to repeal something you don’t like. There are hundreds of legislators, you need teams of lobbyists to influence them, and there’s no guarantee that they will take up your issue in their agenda. Furthermore, if you want to change one thing, everything gets thrown on the table as being liable to change. You may win in one area but lose in a lot of others, and sometimes you will lose in non-obvious ways.

The judges don’t want to rock the boat as much as politicians do. If they make a decision that makes precedent, it will be very focused and very specific. But, if you want to take an issue up in the courts, you need to sue, or be sued. Courts are not hypothetical in the way that legislatures are.

I think fair use is a perfectly valid legal defense. Grey area is one way to put it, another way to put it is a legal area lacking precedent. If it were not for fair use, copyright law would violate your right to free speech. Fair use let’s you use copyrighted material for criticism, parody, and education. Covid created a situation where people’s access to works was restricted, with the only reason being legal limitations (copyright law). IA sought to educate people irrespective of the limitation. I don’t know how IAs legal team is planning to defend their client, but fair use would provide a defense. This case could end up with a precedent that says that under exceptional circumstances, the scope of what activities are covered under fair is expanded.

It actually happens more often than you might think.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification

[1] https://www.rcfp.org/court-finds-right-jury-trial-copyright-...

Which they've largely already enjoyed many times over. I have precisely zero sympathy for the poor widdle publishing corporations.

/s

It puts the extreme absurdity of modern copyright law in context. 20 years is extreme. The modern "standard" is the entire life of the author + 70 years on top. This is indefensible.

Contrast with publishers, where it's the other way around.

Without strong copyright laws, the choice you make is just as enforceable as the choice they make.

It doesn't matter how the output is licensed; I'm paid for the process of creating that output, not for the perpetual profiting over that finite output. That's the point you're missing.

Your argument would make sense if developers got paid per run of their code, instead of only for new code they write.

If you think it would be nice to get paid per run, then you should have gone into mainframe programming, because that is (more or less) how it works (licensing fee based on how many units the code could process, which would go up if you upgraded the CPU). Moving away from that was one of the innovations of UNIX and PC style licensing.

There is no end to the greed. Fuck 'em.

That depends entirely on the level of support for the defense, and is precisely the only way unjust laws ever change.

> i think summarily discounting distributors and publishers wholesale doesn't help your stance

I don't think anyone's discounting anyone here: there's a big difference between discounting and challenging.

Wrong. Ultra-vires laws can be challenged after the fact that they were broken. If the law in itself was invalid, that is a valid legal defence.

The Internet Archive does a lot of good things, most clearly legal, others gray areas that I think should be legal. This stunt was different.

If the nation was founded today people would never build a single library and they would be deeded evil.

Requiring libraries to buy books is an evil practice. As a function of copyright you should have to donate a book for every 10 numbers sold. Libraries create readers who are necessary for writers/publishers.

Taking a copyright infringement case before one of the most textualist and conservative courts we have had in decades is not a good plan for people who want a right to whatever it is that the IA was doing read into the Constitution.

Just look at the body of unelected officials that, as a whole, are hell-bent at dismantling precedents in the name of constitutionalism, allowing for states to pass inane laws restricting rights under the guise of morals.

There is cancer in our society and it begins with our swill laws that are selectively enforced, are never revisited, and likely do not reflect the will of the people, and ends with legislative incumbents that do not represent modern progressive values.

If you want access to these works, which you seem to be arguing for, then you are saying these works do have value.

I suspect you are just misusing the term.

I think what happened is the term "rent seeking" entered the zeitgeist, and a lot of people didn't bother to look it up but rather just tried to infer the meaning through context, and arrived at "somebody who rents things out" which can easily morph into "the software company that makes you have a subscription rather than just purchase it" or something like that.

People come by it honestly as for most people that's how they learn the words, and certainly the vast majority of human history language and meaning has been transmitted that way.

I know I've taken advantage of getting software from the IA that is still commercially sold on places like gog.com, so while overall I regard the IA to be "morally in the right", there's little doubt to me personally there is a ton of content on there that shouldn't be.

If you want to preserve human culture, you want to make it possible for the non-rich to help create it.

If you want to write books for free, go to it. But what the IA did was just plain wrong. Plenty of bookstores like Powells were operating remotely during the pandemic. Many libraries had curbside pick up. Amazon was still delivering. There was no reason to run up the pirate flag.

And any arguments along the lines that libraries actually lead to increased numbers of readers and thus overall increase book sales could also apply to this instance as well (I've even seen such arguments made about piracy in general, though I've never seen any conclusive research indicating if the argument is realistic or not).

I dunno, man. It's hard for me to imagine being in that position and not pressing the button. I imagine the archive (and their lawyers) went into the decision with eyes fully open. I doubt they had zero contingency plans for the worst case.

But if there was no malice or net harm from such technical violations – or indeed if the breaches effectively prevented greater harms – society and the courts will often find such "law-breaking" to be forgivable or even praise-worthy. For example, you are allowed to break trespassing laws to save a life, and in other situations of private or public necessity.

With regard to reading & education in early 2020, publicly-funded schools & libraries that were supposed to be operating were closed with little warning, for a potentially indefinite amount of time. Millions of purchased books that were supposed to be circulating sat idle in locked buildings. A crucial cultural & civilizational function was stopped dead in its tracks.

Against that, the Internet Archive rapidly deployed a novel technological workaround to re-enable some (but not all) of the pandemic-impaired booklending/reading activity. It did so in a way that had no more effect on the publishers' economic prospects than normal-times library operations, and was arguably within the 'fair use' & format-shifting rights well-established for book owners & libraries in the United States.

So I think IA expects to "win" the lawsuit because they did a good deed for the world's readers, as a temporary & reasonable adaptation to an extraordinary emergency situation, that caused negligible harms to the publisher plaintiffs.

Presumably, even if they are hoping to change law with the case - it’s putting up the rest of IA’s (almost irreplaceably invaluable) mission as a gamble on whatever chances they think they have here.

An example is Uber 'invents' smartphone taxi's and says the laws of employment and taxi's don't apply to them. They make a ton of money and here we are.

Maybe I am being overly cynical.

No one, who is anyone, got to where they’re at because they followed the rules. At a certain point anyone who is successful took a risk in their past and it paid off.

When you take a risk for profit, you can hire the lawyers you need to cover for the sins you committed. Most of the time it’s cheaper for parties to settle out of court and this puts you at the negotiating table and integrates your success into the existing power structures. You live long enough to become the villain.

When you take a risk and innovate for the greater good, you don’t have the profit, you can’t hire the expensive attorneys to cover you, and you get eaten alive by the parties you offended. You die the hero, which is why very few do this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_procedu...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobbs-Merrill_Co._v._Straus

The publishers lawyers will argue they are just a warez site, and use everything in their power to do such, jurisdiction, case law, confusing terms and obfuscation, etc.

Libraries/archives actually have fairly limited exceptions. And the category isn't even especially clearly defined. It's definitely not an anything goes get out of jail free card.

Just think that if people would never take the law in their hands some countries would still have legal slaves, or legal segregation.

See Uber, Lyft, AirBNB..... Just get big enough and buy enough politicians that it's not going to be a problem.

Also, the term "abandonware" is hugely overused. There are tonnes of shareware premium versions on there where it's super easy to contact the creators. I've never failed to do so.

> What were they expecting?

This concisely describes how I felt about Sci-Hub the first few times I read about the project. There are some differences, e.g. the Internet Archive chooses to operate within US jurisdiction.

Of course not! The IA lacks enough money or donations to crooked politicians to get away with that. Strict adherence to the laws is for common folks, so they should have complied.

In this case “ask for forgiveness” could mean going out of business in the process. You can only afford to “ask for forgiveness” and break the law if you’re willing to lose it all.

Why the IA did this as part of their long established archive business instead of a separate venture is beyond me.

That only works if you are capable of handling the legal trouble that results.

Right?

The Internet Archive appears to have simply decided they could break copyright law, which is a very well supported area of law unlike taxi regulations, and they made no efforts to protect themselves. Pretty stupid. I certainly would not donate to an organization that might waste my donations on stupid things like this.

Feels more like an regulation that an law.

Strange that you hold copyright laws so above all.

If they didn't realize that they'd be sued then they're hopelessly shortsighted (there's no "emergency" exemption to copyright laws, even if you can make the argument that morally there should be). If they did know that they'd be sued, the message they're projecting is that they have enough leftover money to burn that they can branch out from their core competencies and try their hand at legal activism.

Maybe they're trying to set a legal precedent, which sounds great. I don't know why but I read your comment in such a negative tone.

"Rebel"gecko indeed

Part of being a good rebel is to choose your battles wisely :) I think IA does a good job at that when they distribute abandonware or public domain materials. Trying to share unlimited copies of Harry Potter seems much more quixotic.

Being a library is their core mission and fighting what they are fighting now is one of the reasons I keep donating to them. I want them to be able to offer a digital library all over the world, this for me is the Internet Archive.

Archival institutions are allowed to make digitized copies of legitimately owned works, and to allow access to that copy on their own "premises".

In the case of an organization like the internet archive which does not have physical premises, would you accept the argument that their 'premises' is the internet?

The question that they want answered is: where exactly is the line between looking at a scanned/microfiched/non-original archival copy of copyrighted material at the library, and viewing that same material over a network connection.

They weren't just handing out unlimited copies of books. They were distributing owned copies of books for exclusive temporary use. The method of delivery is different, but the end result is the same as checking a book out and leaving the library.

Just because public libraries signed shitty deals to get access to lending ebook licenses doesn't mean that the right to lend archival material over the network doesn't exist.

I would love for the courts to establish a first-sale doctrine that applies to digitized books, or that allows shifting a books format (buying a physical copy of a book and converting it to digital)

I don't think that's accurate. This lawsuit didn't happen until they stopped enforcing the constraint that (# of concurrent digital loans) ≤ (# of physical copies IA and their partner libraries have). Thats very different from a regular library, where the number of copies they loan out can't exceed the number of copies they physically posses (or ebook licenses they have, which is a whole nother rabbithole).

There's also a whole other issue around scraping copyrighted public web pages in general but between being a non-profit archive, respecting robots.txt, and (at least mostly) taking pages down on request, TIA seems to have mostly skirted legal attention in that respect.

(Though it's probably a bit legally iffy. If I create an online comics museum and start hosting all sorts of syndicated content, I'm probably going to get a letter from a lawyer.)

That would probably have triggered the same lawsuit. You cannot rent digital copies of physical works no matter how much sense it makes.

Basically: No one likes throwing the book at the heroes; if the bad guys force that, society may start rewriting the book.

How exactly?

The same way you get in touch with any other institution composed of people.

One relatively innocuous way to neutralize the hoarders of exclusive rights is a compulsory license. It was proposed in the context of the TRIPS waiver: https://www.communia-association.org/2021/03/22/communia-sup...

Ofc just wait for the case which involves some law they hate and watch the song change.

I will agree with the thought, though, that picking a fight you can't win is probably dumb. I doubt the IA would become a martyr.

From what I can tell, even buying a book and then digitally lending it out, isn't exactly a human right. Regardless, IA was doing that without issue for years.

IA then decided they were going to "lend out"as many books as they wanted. To

What exactly is surprising here ?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21012643

In that context, NEL was quite a foolish thing to do.

But wait, that's not its mission - https://archive.org/about explains how IA's mission of 'Universal Access to All Knowledge' and status as a library entail 'paying special attention to books'. That'd be the rationale for NEL, then?

I feel they should be taking steps immediately to ensure that at least the data of the Wayback Archive will outlive the whims of IA-the-organization in the coming decades/centuries, before it's too late. There's probably a lot of people willing to help out with such a replication task.

_However_, they have to operate under the same BS everyone else does, so it seems naïve for them to take reckless actions that could put them in this position

As a nonprofit and public archive/library they do have some special rights, which is why this isn't as clear cut as many think. These range from codified in law https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#108 to US Copyright Office decisions like https://www.copyright.gov/1201/2021/ and precedent.

If you did this you'd be sued into the ground and 100% lose. Now, I'm not saying the Archive will get away with what they did or that it was a good idea, just that there might be some non-obvious avenues.

If you have not used the system, spend some time and discover the gems that are included in its collection. https://archive.org Offer suggestions and get involved.

On July 15th I attended the Archive Open House and spoke with Brewster about the ambitious plans through the coming year and the next few decades. There is a lot that needs to be done.

The Archive needs your moral, political, and monetary support. To donate: https://archive.org/donate .

My opinion is that it may be difficult to find enough volunteer storage to fit the entire Archive, but if we focus on prioritizing plaintext HTML, plus perhaps graphics included in web pages constrained to a size limit, we can do it.

Right now it's one of the few easily accessible places on the web that haven't completely caved in to copyright and moderation censorship, the only way to keep web "news media" somewhat accountable by having an actual historical record one can point at.

Once that's gone, misinformation serving pro-US narratives will go into complete overdrive and the web will be dead [0] for good.

[0] https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...

Those pockets are large, and the display of the dollar does more to sway Judges than any real interpretation of the law.

It is safe to say that they will succeed in their (seemingly useless) endeavor.

Who are those corporations and how would they benefit?

News Corporation enterprise value: $11bn

Apple quarterly profit: $25bn

We live in a world where one corporation can singlehandedly change copyright for the worse for the majority of humanity, where copyright is actively being used and abused, not just for profit maximation but also for the suppression of information.

In such a world lawsuits sadly are a part of enabling to do what IA is trying to do; Set precedents for what doesn't fall under copyright, fighting for interests that are not 100% based on profits.

What if the site is simply gone, or now belongs to someone else who is not the owner of the archived content?

https://www.joshualowcock.com/guide/how-to-delete-your-site-...

You'll need to prove that you are the owner of the archived content, or were the owner of the domain.

It's a discussion that's been had for literally decades, because most tech-fluent people realized a long time ago how a copyright that's designed for physical distribution does not lend itself well to the intangible nature of the web, were replication is trivial and in many cases a mandatory necessity to enable a lot of functions in the very first place.

Sadly that discussion simply died out at some point, I think it was around 2010 when smartphones and social media started to boom, so the copyright reform that was supposed to "fix" all this never came.

Not sure if that's the specific part that lets them do what they do, or if that's from some other rule, just pointing out that this kind of rule exists.

They are also not making a profit from “copied” content, and so damages would be small. Particularly as they would immediately remove the problematic content.

If people don't want their content in such place they can always place it behind login-wall.

I for one commend them for doing a noble thing in a very turbulent time. We didn't know how the pandemic was going to play out early on in 2020 and they went ahead to help out in any way they could. Perhaps the US Federal Government will give them some kind of an exemption (if such a thing exists). I'm sure they can find a case where their action is justified in the eyes of law.

That “hacker spirit” has put years of extremely valuable internet archives at risk for an extremely insignificant gain, all due to a legal issue that anyone could see coming from a mile away.

Hacker spirit and playing fast and loose with the rules might fly when you’re a fresh startup with nothing to lose. It’s just plain irresponsible when you start putting an established business at risk in ways that were trivially avoided.