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 for the past as well as very little respect for domains outside of technology.
The internet archive is a huge boon in intangible value for communities and the world. It represents a huge cultural fountain that is accessible for anyone so long as they have the ability to access a computer.
A great example of this is that the Internet Archive was the ONLY place where I could enjoy a completely random piece of lost media from a children's television show called Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. There was a lost episode where OJ Simpson was in it and it never aired because of obvious issues. BUT there was a book published from the production called "White Rabbits Can't Jump"
I can't imagine being able to go to any publisher or paid streaming service or god forbid Amazon to find this book, and I sure as shit don't believe in this community to help create ecosystems to support finding things like this.
I am so sick and tired of the copyright laws that play counter to productive creation and stymying efforts to preserve anything. The fact that I have to wait until people die until copyright is up is god awful. And the fact that I have to read people in this community who sound like boot-lickers for corporate oligarchs and their shitty value adds to the world drives me so fucking insane.
I'm only commenting here because I feel it's important to articulate that there are people out there who care, and that the vocal a-holes on this site really miss the point and the intangible value of what the internet archive provides.
Frankly, at least in the context of US Copyright Law, we need to go back to Article I of the Constitution that defines copyright. The very first sentence is "To promote the useful arts and sciences..."
If congress passes a copyright law, and that law can't demonstrate that it actually MEASURABLY does promote the useful arts and sciences, (but rather hinders them, as is often the case), then that law should be overturned, desecrated, and posted on a wall-of-shame as an example to others of what doesn't work.
I think that would solve 90% of our problems with copyright law. But that's just me. I'm not typically a "Constitutional Originalist" but I think this kind of thinking here could help.
You can blame brain-dead case law and precedent for that, no doubt bought and paid for by corporations who can afford great lawyers to keep stretching the definition until it's completely unrecognizable.
> You can blame brain-dead case law and precedent for that, no doubt bought and paid for by corporations who can afford great lawyers to keep stretching the definition until it's completely unrecognizable.
How important is precedent..? Roe v Wade was overturned despite decades of precedent. Law right now seems to be as dynamic as tech.
The problem with that approach is that it would be trivial for companies to produce volumes of work and information demonstrating that it does.
Do you really think that someone like archive.org can do a better job of proving the negative than DisneyDiscoveryWarnerComcast will do producing volumes and reams of information demonstrating how they can only afford to keep making new content and supporting small creators if copyright lifetime is extended to 500 years?
The full quote is: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
The Constitution does not require that IP laws actually or measurably promote the "useful arts and sciences" because the Constitution does not require the promotion of the useful arts and sciences but rather the progress of such. Moreover, the second half of the statement, says how Congress is Constitutionally supposed to accomplish that.
The idea is protecting even the stupid stuff is what lets the actual innovation proceed, the same way protecting Larry Flynch and flag burning protects other forms of speech.
Pretty sure that 'useful' has been defined as 'make someone ridiculous amounts of money' and is part of the 'constitution' that lobbyists imprint on their marks.
I don't disagree until your ending qualification. Being picky and choosy on when it's good to be a Constitutional Originalist means you might as well not be. If the Consitution is a dynamic living document beyond just amendments on one topic, then an originality argument loses weight even on another topic
Constitutional originalism is a rather recent construct. Its just that no one points out it was something mostly crafted by antonin scalia and friends that we think its some idea someone like Thomas Jefferson came up with.
Isn't it, really, a counter to Woodrow Wilson's, then, new idea of the Constitution being a "living" document?
And it's funny you bring up Thomas Jefferson, who wrote it as a static document with a mechanism to change it (Amendments). Add to that the fact that he said it should be scrapped every generation so it would better reflect the current times. Neither of these approaches argue for it being a "dynamic living document".
It would be funny if I didn’t think you were actually serious. It may be a recent term, but only because so many have arrayed against the Constitution and all the freedom and liberty it provides. It is solely a function of the enemies of freedom and self-governance that we even require such a ludicrous category as constitutional originalist, aka abiding by the Constitution.
That's how one should primarily live - the middle way, the narrow path, but without being lukewarm.
I'm pointing out that being an originalist is also a sort of appeal to authority to the Constitution. If the authority is then wrong on another topic, it undermines the point of the respect of the authority.
That's why saying "I'm not always an Originalist" while literally making an Originalist argument makes no sense. It would've been better to simply not make that qualification.
You're not alone in thinking this way. And kudos for investing the Time to write this up -- the sophists are all-too-often over-represented here, and I'm never really sure that they're always arguing in Good Faith, or if they are, they're often being so short-sighted that it's simultaneously funny and sad.
> 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 for the past as well as very little respect for domains outside of technology.
There is a severe lack of appreciation for culture or even an understanding of what constitutes our culture, especially here on HN (which is why I hate discussing these topics here). It's not just a handful books that happen to turn into literature in 100 years. Our culture consists of every medium we interact with today. Allowing corporations to monopolize nearly all of it in perpetuity is quite simply immoral and severely damaging to our continued cultural development.
I find this a very diverse space with many points of view, many which I do not agree with, and also a place I find people who are rational, cultured and thoughtful.
It's not a full discussion without disagreements.
> I am so sick and tired of the copyright laws that play counter to productive creation and stymying efforts to preserve anything.
If you think about how cruel it is to make illegal the way human culture has worked for millenia, to listen to the storys you hear, retell them, remix them and make them your own in a new context.
That is against the law now.
I agree with your statement in isolation, but this is in the context of preserving stories (and heck, history) so they can be retold at all.
---
Unrelated tangent, I really miss the distinction of "story" ("estória") and "history" ("história") in the Portuguese language, it makes speaking about topics involving but not exclusively fiction very hard.
The IA isn't, but the argument was that copyright is dumb, not that a nonprofit like the IA should have exception. Archiving and making publicly available are different things though, so I don't think an exception for archiving should extend to distribution. The archiving also clashes with individual privacy rights and the "right to be forgotten" (which I'm not a big fan of in its depth, but totally agree with in principle).
Perhaps not having distinct terms isn't the worst thing: it reminds us that history is largely fictional, both on the personal and the society level, and its truthiness and usefulness is derived from our shared belief in it.
Its a vacuous argument: it's very obvious that any domain hosting such content for free incurs in costs of hosting and handling legal threats for doing so. So any income received would be another excuse for legal threats.
On the other hand: why are these public goods services still hosted in infra/protocols exposed to western/us legal arm?
> 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 incentivizing the production by giving you exclusive rights to benefit from your creations.
If you believe that the terms are ridiculously long and should be drastically shortened, I agree. But rejecting the idea of copyright will just remove much of what is created. I don't think we'd be better off in that case.
You might argue that that which wouldn't have been created had there not been the promise of potential profit isn't worth much culturally, but in that case you shouldn't be worried about the copyright restricting access to it, much like you shouldn't be worried about a locked door denying access to an empty room.
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.
> very little respect for domains outside of technology.
The HN community can also be out of touch with technology. If you are an AI researcher this becomes plainly obvious the moment you visit any of the AI threads (if it isn't obvious already from the 6 to 12 month delay on the posting of cutting edge developments here). Sometimes it's hard to argue with zwj.org's assessment [0].
Not just misinformed and outdated, but people here seem to have think _very_ highly of their own intelligence - often being dismissive of frankly incredible ideas because “why didn’t they just…”
I’ve never been less impressed with the supposed elite class of Ivy League “hackers” than when I’m on this site. Get over yourself. You didn’t just solve AI with your “recursive LLM”. No one with ADHD is going to benefit from your pomodoro app that is…slightly more visible than the other thousands of pomodoro apps? Also - half of you don’t have ADHD. Believe it or not - coding is an attention drain and taking stimulants to gain an advantage so that you can ship in 3 months instead of 12 is toxic as fuck.
Don’t get me started on LessWrong.
FWIW, while I agree with the sentiment - not everyone is prepared to see an unsolicited photoshop of a testicle in a wine glass. Might want to edit a warning in if you still can.
I'm entirely out of the loop with the LessWrong crowd. Could you explain what you mean by your comment? I saw the interview between Friedman and Yudlowski and was less than impressed.
Uh, well I will admit to some ignorance there as well. Mostly it just seems like alignment researchers in general read a bunch of Asimov books and thought - “I know! I’ll invent the laws of robotics and be firmly established in the history books, ignored by the mainstream scientists of the times who were too shortsighted to understand my 12-dimensional thought experiments”.
That’s not to undermine the role of the thought experiment, more to suggest that they are more concerned about “peak rationality” than they are about having a useful discourse with other researchers in the field.
I’ve seen others suggest it mildly resembles a cult. It is also apparently strongly associated with the “effective altruism” movement and so clearly caters to the ultra wealthy.
I’m unsure if you were trying to be intentionally ironic, but the tone of your comment seems to me to fit right in with exactly what you are complaining about. . .
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.
Property on anything beyond that which you're immediately using or occupying is a monopoly granted by social convention (from which laws are then derived). As Jefferson said,
"It is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all... It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society."
So in that sense I don't think it's an altogether misleading analogy, although of course the ability to copy without taking makes it very different from tangible property. But both are ultimately social conventions, and both exist supposedly for the common good. If that common good cannot be demonstrated, and even moreso if there's demonstrable harm, the conventions can change.
> Personally I find the term "intellectual property" to be more messed up. It isn't property, it's a government granted monopoly...
So, in other words, it's property.
There's nothing that guarantees a particular lump of atoms are "yours" besides a government-granted monopoly to control that lump. The atoms don't care.
How about calling it Copyrent? Isn't iut more descriptive of what it actually is, while "right" makes it more sympathetic to the liberties and freedoms they're actually reigning in.
> 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 think copyright itself is a completely unnecessary concept in the information age.
The original idea was to promote creative works by authors by providing a limited term right to be the sole publisher of a work. This was important in the days where it actually cost money to publish and distribute things, as it ensured you wouldn't eat the cost of that only to have someone else make all the money by doing it cheaper.
Thing is, it doesn't cost money to publish and distribute anything anymore. I think the large number of free and fan works that exist are proof enough that creativity need not be incentivized by money, and to the extent that we want to monetarily reward works we find meaningful, there are mechanisms like Patreon or Github sponsorship to do that.
Will the production quality suffer without large corporations spending ludicrous amounts of money? Yeah, probably. But I don't see how that's something worthy of preserving for all the bullshit that copyright inflicts on our culture.
I feel like we have a relatively strong copyright regime, lots of works being created, creators have trouble eating with the current regime, and they had trouble eating before it, and unless the next regime makes something like "feed creators" as its primary goal, they'll have trouble eating under that one too.
I agree that it would be great if creators get to eat. Right now though many people don't get to eat (enough) no matter what, many other people don't get to make use of creative work, and a small number of big players walk away with all the money.
IMO pretty much literally anything else would probably put us in a better situation. At this point after several decades of experience, I think even just outright abolishing copyright law could possibly actually be a net improvement (give or take). But surely it should be possible to come up with a better system by now!
How would abolishing copyright law not make everyone (but the content creator) basically the equivalent of a vampire AI corporation slurping up what they please? Why would anyone create when everyone instantly gets to use their hard work in any way they want? It's like abolishing all property rights.
I'm saying that even abolishing copyright law might be an improvement. I didn't imply that that was the best idea (definitely not). Preferably copyright should be replaced by something that better promotes the arts and sciences.
===
Even so: to respond to who would create even if copyright law would be abolished:
A lot of people create with the intent of letting everyone instantly get to use their hard work. This is actually rather common. Huge amounts of fan-art, original art, original fiction and original fiction get created every day. Scientific articles get written every day. Wikipedia gets written every day. Open source software gets written every day. And let's not start about AI art and AI text (which currently is all PD) . 90% of this all might be crap, but then 90% of everything is crap. There are definitely gems among the 10%, just like everywhere else. And due to the sheer volume: there are a lot of gems.
Much of this activity would still happen without copyright law. There is clearly sufficient incentive at least. Fun is a common incentive. Sharing back is a common incentive too. Advancing the course of science. Earning fame.
Or you can just earn money. People earn money this way. I earn money this way. In this kind of situation, you pay the bills by "making things that don't exist yet".
Current copyright law has actually often gotten in the way more than that it has helped, I feel. I can tell you stories if you like! This does differ a bit per field and profession, of course.
===
But really copyright law should be replaced:
If you actually want to earn money by depending on copyright law, I feel you're getting short-changed at the moment. AI will "steal" your style; youtube, spotify and amazon will pay you mere pennies, of which apple might will pinch a percentage, your publisher will pinch a percentage, and you get left with ... very little.
Copyright frankly isn't helping many people right now. I don't think anyone is happy. Unless you know a bevy of small creators now living in mansions in Beverly Hills? I'd love to hear of it!
> Unless you know a bevy of small creators now living in mansions in Beverly Hills?
Per a google search, it seems that mainly very famous actors, actresses, and generally people who've contributed significantly to our culture live in Beverly Hills. The google results are definitely biased towards celebrities, but Beverly Hills seems to be a very odd example to choose when trying to point out how copyright isn't helping creators. It's natural to expect some proportionality between a creator's audience and the profit the can make monetizing their work.
The story goes that many people in the creative professions earn very little or even can't make ends meet; thus mansions in Beverly Hills are only available to the few.
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?
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 borrow ideas sooner and more often?
This does happen in eg. open source and open content. More traditionally, scientists also reference each other's papers. Sometimes there's also times like eg. when sampling first became popular: this lead to a period of creative bloom in music.
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).
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, but I do have to check for a minute!
In the case where you have allegedly stolen my car: can I walk out of the house next morning half asleep, put my keys in the ignition, and drive the <stolen> car to $customer without noticing much?
If so, then you have redefined "stealing" beyond my Overton Window and I shall be forced to make rude noises at you.
==
Otherwise: obviously I want to be able to drive my car. Depriving me of my property is bad. Where do you want to go with this?
edit/note: possibly I'm misremembering and people were still using the "you wouldn't steal a car" argument in the very early 2000s?
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?
The answer to your question depends on the field in question. Plenty of areas have no or little copyright protection and still have thriving creativity: cooking, fashion, comedy routines, etc. It can be a first mover advantage, social conventions, or other reasons.
Protecting specific jobs at the expense of society at large is just socialism with extra steps. Might as well admit that that's what you are doing and feed people directly without neutering our ability to share and advance our culture.
I don't know what you're talking about. White Rabbits Can't Jump is available for purchase right now on Abe Books for the low, low price of $222.22 ($4.25 shipping, US only, only one copy available)[0].
The emergency library lending seemed questionable, but the current system they're doing—they have a physical copy of the book and lend out a single scanned copy to one patron at a time—sounds legal, and certainly should be legal. Doubly so when it's out of print.
> I am so sick and tired of the copyright laws that play counter to productive creation and stymying efforts to preserve anything. The fact that I have to wait until people die until copyright is up is god awful.
So what's the right way to balance the need to preserve artistic/creative works and the rights of the creator to monitize or permit usage of their works? It seems rather gross to just say that the creator has no right to sell their work or object to some source copying their work and distributing it in a way that deprives the creator of profit.
Various treaties that have been signed and approved prevent that. Copyright longer than 14–28 years is not a bad thing, but copyright for longer than ~50 years is IMO questionable.
I’d love to see some of those treaties renegotiated to limit copyright duration for Works for Hire (e.g., most software out there), but also to reduce the overall length of protection…BUT. I’d also love to see RAND compulsory licensing on copyright materials over a certain age…BUT.
In Europe (not really recognized in the U.S., AIUI), there’s the moral right of the creator in addition to the copyright of the creator. This can be used by an author to prevent their work from being published (say, an author’s private letters that came into a publisher‘s hands) at least while they are alive. I think that’s important.
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 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 civilizational convention/construct, whereas nature conspicuously ignores such "rights" (as do humans for the most part when it comes to other species)
> 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.
An idea I’ve always liked is increasing fees over time. Make it renewable in, say, 5 years terms after an initial ten year period. Double the price for each.
So, everything has some prot cation, and valuable stuff can be protected for a long time (at a a cost).
This would seem to strike a good balance… obscure stuff will enter the PD quickly, because the publisher isn’t going to pay even $100 for something they’ve forgotten about, while not kneecapping someone who has a massive breakout success.
Fees that scale on a linear, quadratic, or exponential schedule (or any other above-unity schedule) is a regressive tax. It would disproportionately harm smaller creators. I would run out of money for my IP far before Disney. Unless this scaling was also based on the amount of revenue produced thus far, it wouldn't achieve equitable aims. Even that proposition is dubious since Disney can afford better lawyers to parse the revenue streams to their benefit.
Note that I'm not for the proposition of revenue-based scaling. That would just be a tax on success.
You're presenting a false dichotomy. The alternative to our current system isn't solely "no copyright at all". It's pretty simple: reduce copyright terms to something much more reasonable. I believe the original copyright term in the US was 14 years. I'm sure we can guess why that has been raised several times since then: greedy corporate interests.
Sure, it's certainly debatable what the "correct" term length should be, but I think most people could be convinced to value the commons a bit more and agree that it should be significantly shorter than the current "life of creator + 70 years" (or for works-for-hire, 95 years from publishing or 120 years from creation, whichever comes earlier).
For copyright owned by individuals, why should a creator's children and grandchildren (and great-grandchildren?) be allowed to continue to profit off their ancestor's work, depriving the commons of history and culture? For corporate ownership, why should the company be able to profit for longer than the lifetime of anyone around when it was created or published? Hell, most companies aren't even around that long, so ultimately the copyright ends up being passed to several other companies that have no relation to the original owner.
But really... 14 years sounds reasonable to me. I would even say 25 or 30 years would be ok, if the consensus is that 14 years is too short.
We could also go with a limited renewal system, like is used for patents. Say you get 14 years, and if, after those 14 years, the work is still important to you, you can renew the copyright for another 14 years, or something like that. People and companies who still actively gain economic benefits from their work 14 years later will go to the effort to renew it, but otherwise -- what is probably the majority of cases -- it'll fall into the public domain.
Of course, copyright isn't just governed by US law: the Berne Convention, at least, attempts to govern and harmonize copyright to some extent, and it requires minimums of 50 years after the creators death for most types of copyrightable works. But this is all doable, with political will behind it. As usual, that's always the problem.
>For copyright owned by individuals, why should a creator's children and grandchildren (and great-grandchildren?) be allowed to continue to profit off their ancestor's work, depriving the commons of history and culture?
If the copyrighted works were still relevant enough to the culture that the creator's descendants are still profiting off of the work, I don't see how it could be lost to the commons. If the commons and culture no longer care enough about the work to offer any money for it, I don't see how the descendants could still be profiting from the work.
I don't have a dog in this fight (outside of me bristling at people acting entitled to disregard terms of GPL copylefts), I just what whatever system will optimize the quantity+quality of creative works, and I want creators to get paid adequate value for their work, even if that means they can sell the rights to their work to another entity.
To go to anything less than 50 years after the death of the creator would require leaving the Berne convention and the TRIPS agreement... and the WTO (since the TRIPS agreement is part of the founding set of agreements in for the WTO).
The political will to change that in 164 countries for for the US to leave the WTO would need to be quite substantial.
One would think that this should be in the hands of our elected officials, however historically they have been more sympathetic to the idea that we need longer and stronger copyright than weaker.
To speak to why we need this sort of thing I would have to harken back to a fun talk that Paul Heald gave back in 2012[0] where he showed this fantastic chart[1] that shows the number of titles for sale on amazon by publish year.
The only thing I can assume from the chart is that either the publishing industry in the mid 1900s suddenly found itself publishing the same amount of books as they did in the 1830, no one cares about the books written between 1920 and 1990, or copyright has caused the loss of an enormous amount culture. According to the chart, and the talk, there are 7 times as many books published in the 1910s than are available from 1930s-1950s.
The entire concept of copyright is problematic - it limits what you can do with property that you own. It's a government granted monopoly.
Ideally copyright would be eliminated and people who choose to create will choose to create. There is development in lots of areas that aren't copyrightable.
If you want to keep copyright, then it should be reduced to the bear minimum to incentivize creative works - that could be on the order of 20 - 30 years.
> The entire concept of copyright is problematic - it limits what you can do with property that you own.
People can own guns. Is it problematic for the government to limit what people can do with their own guns? I would argue that it's not problematic at all, and I bet you would, too.
I'm open to other systems than copyright to make it possible for creators to afford to create and sell their creations. I think Patreon is fantastic, but I don't think it would work well for things like code (or situations where people don't really care about the creator and just want the product).
Everything will have second,third,fourth order effects.
The fundamental problem of intellectual property is that it protects the interests of large corporations far more than those of small creators. IP only matters if you have the resources to defend it in court or if your content isn't worth the effort to steal.
US IP law was written far before the scale of indie digital content or the mere concept of sampling was a blip in lawmakers' eyes.
It was made for broadcasters and publishers to go after industrial scale bootlegging of books and movies.
That sounds more like an implementation/enforcement problem than of the concept of IP.
If [
1) disputes were decided on the merits and
2) costs of dispute resolution were
2.a) deferred until decision-time,
2.b) born by the decided-against party, and
2.c) made the decided-for party whole and then some
], I bet either
A) an industry would spring up to identify wronged creators and fund defenses of their IP, or
B) industry would just pay to license the copyrighted work.
TBH I think the tech-bro fantasy of eliminating copyright is a non-starter for the larger business ecosystem. I mean see how long it took us to decide smoking is bad for us. IMO the we can do is incrementally reduce the copyright period length and let the industry adapt around it.
But In my experience once money starts to flow in any entity its much harder to dismantle it without sortof letting bleed out. I dont think disney would give up its claim on the works anytime soon. we need to slay the beast by a thousand cuts.
We don't need to eliminate it, just go back to the original 14 yr term, with a renewal only allowed to the original creator (as an inalienable right so it can't be sold away).
I agree, but your "just" in that sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I think the parent poster describes a more realistic scenario where the term is reduced incrementally over a fairly long time.
If a politician suggested changing the current term (often over 100 years, depending on the details of creation, publication, and ownership) so drastically, they'd be laughed out of office. Or, rather, defunded out of office by their corporate donors.
You return to the original concept of (American) copyright.
Encourage more creative work by exchanging a temporary government granted monopoly now for the promise of it becoming available to society's benefit later.
Current copyright terms are too long. Not everything needs to be monetizable to the nth degree in perpetuity in order for sustainable livelihoods to exist.
> The Berne Convention states that all works except photographic and cinematographic shall be protected for at least 50 years after the author's death, but parties are free to provide longer terms, as the European Union did with the 1993 Directive on harmonising the term of copyright protection.
This is not an American thing.
And the Berne convention was four decades before Disney was founded.
From your article:
> The United States became a party in 1989.
The person you are responding to is writing about American Copyright. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St.... The first american copyright law is from 1790, which does in fact predate the bern convention, and our life of the author plus 50 years rule is from the copyright act of 1976, 13 years before the US ratified the bern convention.
So yes, it is an 'American thing' as are all issues of law in the US. And if you think that this kind of convention is meaningfully binding, just checkout the history of the US and other major powers with regards to various other international treaties, like the ICC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court.
Kinda irrelevant if it's an American thing or not. The US didn't become a party to the Berne Convention treaty until 1989, over 100 years later, but had been increasing copyright terms long before that[0]. We (and others) could just as easily withdraw from it, and make our own rules for works that originate in the US. We could even be nice and honor the copyright terms placed on works that originate in Berne Convention countries.
I think the original terms of American copyright are fine to use as a model: 14 years for all works, period. And certainly that's open for debate; even 25 or 50 years would be much more kind to the commons than what we have now. We could even do like we do for patents, and have a relatively short term, with a one-time renewal option for creators who continue to benefit from a work and still care to keep it protected.
> We could even do like we do for patents, and have a relatively short term, with a one-time renewal option for creators who continue to benefit from a work and still care to keep it protected.
As qyph mentions, I am referencing the American Copyright Act of 1790. It described itself as
"An Act for the encouragement of learning, by securing the copies of maps, Charts, And books, to the authors and proprietors of such copies, during the times therein mentioned."
or, in more modern english
"This is a law that aims to encourage learning by granting authors and owners of maps, charts, and books exclusive rights to their copies for a specified period."
this is important since in developing countries e.g. India, China with regards to DMCA it is commonplace to pirate Americanly-copyrighted media. so much so that it is not even frowned upon. relatively speaking, imagine a choice between paying tensfold what you pay in developed nations vs paying nothing
similarly, for 'freer' countries e.g. France, Sweden, Netherlands - it is very difficult to enforce a law not created by the state whose laws you do obide by
We should be more discerning with where we allow copyright to be enforced. In my view, copyright's only legitimate purpose is to prevent someone else from selling your work as their own in order to make money. If the person or entity distributing your work is doing so with no direct recompense and only has the aim of making the work widely accessible mostly for education, scholarship and to the impoverished who would not otherwise purchase your work, then there should be no case to be tried. You wouldn't make any money off of these uses anyways. The people with enough disposable income to buy your book or software along with dozens of other copyright protected works they may purchase in a year aren't (generally) the same people who spend hours scouring IA or torrent sites for a freebie, their time is worth too much for that when they can just click Buy Now on Amazon and be done with it. Those are the people, whales in gaming industry parlance, that are paying your bills. Fighting legal battles against librarians and pirates won't win you any customers, it'll just reduce your publicity and sour what's left of it.
> The people with enough disposable income to buy your book or software along with dozens of other copyright protected works they may purchase in a year aren't (generally) the same people who spend hours scouring IA or torrent sites for a freebie, their time is worth too much for that when they can just click Buy Now on Amazon and be done with it.
I fully concede that wouldn't go to IA to read any full work (it's too slow and the interface isn't nearly as nice as O'Reilly Online or a physical book), I think copyright made it possible for the current highly-convenient distribution models (of spotify, Amazon, and to a diminishing extent paid video streamers) to develop. In the early 2000s, people who had the money were still extensively using Napster/Kazaa/Limewire/etc to get content because buying an entire CD when you wanted one song sucked (although paying $0.99 for a song on itunes also sucked).
I think there should be a carveout for IA as IA is a uniquely valuable resource, I'm just not sure how to make that into a general rule.
Pretty much everyone I knew who used to torrent music owned very few actual CDs, the few who did own a lot of CDs seemed to only download rare or hard to find tracks and would go on endlessly about the shitty audio quality of downloaded music.
There's a fine line that could exist, but doesn't right now. Archiving content is a concept that goes back to the first cave paintings, and one tactic that has been proposed is to archive silently (meaning don't publish the archive immediately), then publish when the original source is lost. Archive.org did at one point do this, but given how often the internet changes, and the difficulty of tracking published and unpublished content, this eventually went away. We could create a robots.txt-like standard to indicated published and unpublished content, but there is actual money being made by destroying content and siloing everything. Till we accept that destroying history is bad, no attempt to solve this problem will be considered. We can have both, but the people fighting archive.org don't want both.
The "rights of the creator to monitize or permit usage of their works" are only something we as a society grant in order to incentivize more creation. There is nothing that needs to be balanced. The creators also have no "right" to make a profit either.
Capitalism causes some contradictions, this is one of those: you need a complicated/expensive scheme to lawfully defend the rights of content creators because the only possible incentive for producing content is monetary return from selling artificially scarce copies of this content.
In a world where content producers were financed anyway, because we understood as a society that this is valuable, this waste wouldn’t be necessary and we probably would have less “Avengers Nth the movie”. That was the norm and how the likes of Da Vinci and others got to do their work that are now so much appreciated, so I don’t think it’s that utopian.
Part of the problem is that there is a natural tendency for people taking extreme positions to begin dominating non-profit, academic etc types of organizations. This results in unnecessary risk taking or alienating different groups in the society that risks the organisation's core deliverable. In this case, management adventurism in an area they were widely advised as legally risky has led to existential risk.
On this specific issue, there was very much a fully compliant way to dramatic increase the number of copies in circulation - which was to reach out to all the libraries which were closed, get their catalogues all of which is electronic anyway and administer lending with a much expanded collection. It is just extra work - which likely would have gotten funded. Instead the management irresponsibily tried to score political points.
We need to have the right governance & KPIs in the charters of these critical organizations to prevent extreme people from grabbing their agenda
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.
> Internet Archive was the ONLY place where I could enjoy a completely random piece of lost media from a children's television show called Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Same for me with Le roi et l'oiseau and Peter and the Wolf by Disney.
If you are looking for rare things in french or with frech subs like le Roi et l'oiseau, I also recommend checking the private torrent tracker called ygg (https://mamot.fr/@YggTorrent - you may have to change your DNS, check this page regularly as they move around a lot)
The idea behind private tracker is that you are supposed to store as much content as you take from the network and you are actually incentivized to keep old rare stuff you like for people like you out there.
I would argue that the aspects of culture that shape the culture are inherently recorded by the culture. The loss of one specific work known by very few can hardly be reason to panic, because there are petabytes of this content which I'm pretty sure no one will remember ever existed in the future, except the AIs that are trained on them. Now if the work that was lost was something of value, like a mathematical paper that wasn't realized for its benefit, that would be a counter argument, but those are stored in other vaults of provenance. I'm in the camp that the internet archive is for nostalgia and curiosity enthusiasts.
> 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.
If it makes you feel better, just skimming the top reply threads on here, the most upvoted replies seem to be ones in support of your argument. And FWIW, I'm right there with you. But I also don't have all the energy I need to be pissed off all the time. Right now, a lot of that anger is directed at the gun lobby since I have a young child in school.
Pushing the idea that software is copyrightable is going to be Bill Gate's lasting legacy and history will eventually look back at it as one of humanities worse policies.
There is way more pros than cons for just scratching Copyright as it is. Patents are another insanity. Money should be a mean not the goal. We are literally living in a dystopia and most of us are so mired in it we can't see it.
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 preservation of these digital artifacts should, counterintuitively, not treat the Internet Archive as having some special status, but should treat it as a liability. It has become the custodian of too much, and too much is on the line if it fails.
Rather than trying to constantly shore up the IA so it can't fail financially, we should be looking at ways to preserve those artifacts redundantly, so that even if the IA fails, it's not a calamity.
> 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 US that would be the Library of Congress with its Mandatory Deposit requirement.
Which in the grand scheme of things almost nothing is deposited to since the US aligned with Berne Convention lack of explicit copyright notification requirements.
Maybe indie games aren't, but anything touched by a major publisher will be. You have a copyright without registering now, but you still have to register the copyright before you can sue anybody for infringement and unless you register it before infringement you only get actual damages, which are nearly impossible to prove.
> 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 important in certain weird technology and library subcultures, but few people outside of them would even notice it if disappeared. If they shut down, the story wouldn't even be able to muscle it's way onto the front page of the New York Times: it would loose to whatever the latest Trump drama is and the Nth repetition of the standard mass shooting media package.
> In the absence of that, anyone who sees high cultural value to the preservation of these digital artifacts should, counterintuitively, not treat the Internet Archive as having some special status, but should treat it as a liability. It has become the custodian of too much, and too much is on the line if it fails.
> Rather than trying to constantly shore up the IA so it can't fail financially, we should be looking at ways to preserve those artifacts redundantly, so that even if the IA fails, it's not a calamity.
Yeah, especially since the Internet Archive (as an organization) has proven itself to be irresponsible.
Lots of people want to turn the publishers into the villains, for ideological reasons as well as a bias towards the Internet Archive, but the it's the IA that fucked up here. They imperiled their core mission for some unnecessary grandstanding. They either need to fire whatever lawyers OK'd the "Emergency Library" or the leaders that refused to listen to sane legal advice telling them not to do it.
> 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.
I do wonder if we're rapidly entering a world where finding sources, doing research, etc is going to only be interesting to weird subcultures and everyone else will be satisfied with whatever the first Google result says, or a confident bot's fabrication.
It was always this way. Replace Google with your neighbor who owns an encyclopedia, or the local priest. Caring about research, truth, and sources has always been something that only a minority cares about.
> 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.
I do think the label applies to researchers. And except for the case of "tracking down citations to webpages that don't exist anymore," researchers can continue to do all those things using traditional methods (which may be a harder, but still easy enough, especially if it's your job).
In fairness, a lot of content created over the past 25 years or so only exists in ephemeral digital form. Some is captured in sources that libraries subscribe to but a lot of it isn't. (Of course, libraries also subscribe to content that was never on the open web.)
It's also the case that pre-web, a lot of that sort of content was pretty much lost to time. Per a discussion, a little while back, relatively little from the BBS era is preserved because it was mostly a distributed group of hobbyists.
More ppl in every town prob use IA than their local library. It's important (albeit overly central, but they are working on resolving that via IPFS and other technologies)
Internet Archive is likely the only memory of the digital world. They may or may not have made a mistake during the covid pandemic by extending their book lending program, but in the age of IA where many text and images are going to lack any source of truth, they may be one of the very few ways to document modern history.
I'm not saying it's not valuable, I'm saying not that many people would even notice, let alone care, if it disappeared.
You may personally be one of the people who cares about the IA, or know a lot of people who care, but if you go to a shopping mall six months after the IA shuts down and ask people about it at random, you'd find that level of knowledge and caring is unusual. It's not the kind of too-big-to-fail that the government would take interest in.
Sorry, but this is a reductionist argument. There are any number of things that could disappear without mall visitors knowing about it (NOAA, Earth's magnetic field, etc) but that doesn't mean they are not important for researchers, students, and others all over the world.
You're missing the point. The question isn't "is it important for someone," it's "is it too big to fail" (i.e. does the government think it's sooo important that it must swoop in and save it).
If the Internet Archive shuts down and its archive lost, the economy will keep humming, masses of people won't lose their jobs let alone be inconvenienced, etc. Sure, some paper about Geocities culture cira 1997 won't get written, some researcher won't be able to access some old dead link, and I won't be able to access the download the PDF manual for some old product from a company that went out-of-business. Life will go on with almost no disruption, and no one will lose an election because they failed to act to save it.
> and no one will lose an election because they failed to act to save it.
At the very least in a just world, I think the ability to reference historical data from the web probably would influence some elections.
In the unjust world we actually live in, access to historical data can be used as a tool (or weapon!) by journalists, pacs, candidates, etc. to find strengths and weaknesses, and to influence elections.
"back in 2026, the candidate enacted XYZ, as proven by [1][2][3] (all ia links). Ten years later this ended in <great victory|terrible disaster> therefore you <should|shouldn't> vote for them"
...
Also, eg. Wikipedia often uses IA links for references to deal with link rot, which happens a lot more than you'd think. I won't say WP would shut down completely, but it's effectiveness would definitely be degraded.
Same probably for a lot of professions and jobs that require research. (including eg. secretaries, special librarians, political assistants, etc...)
Just because you personally can't imagine the impact on society, doesn't mean it doesn't have an impact on society.
I agree with tablespoon that the demise of IA would not even be a footnote for the commons. So what if an archive of the internet goes away? Most people aren't going to care, and that's the brutal and apathetic reality.
I agree that many people might not directly care if IA goes away. But obviously the destruction of such a large amount of knowledge would not be without consequences (including to courts themselves)
If earth’s magnetic field disappeared then the solar wind would begin to strip away the atmosphere. It’d be the beginning of the extinction of all life on the surface of the planet. It would also interfere with communications and knock out power grids everywhere. People would be bombarded with radiation and begin to get cancer at ever increasing rates. We’d also be able to see the aurorae at lower latitudes.
Just on the defense of NOAA, I think most people would notice if they couldn’t get a weather forecast or couldn’t fly a plane in stormy weather. NOAA is a major collector of weather data, and provides half of the world’s GCM initial conditions … the European models would get worse with a huge data hole.
This is just more libertarian bullshit that entire government departments could disappear without anyone noticing. But if NOAA disappeared it would wreck the economy. What a terrible example.
Eh, if all nuclear research would disappear overnight less than 0.001% of the world population would be impacted. I’m still inclined to say that a repository of that knowledge is too big to fail, simply because the knowledge is so important.
Not that that’s necessarily true for the internet archive, but…
Stop giving a shit about what "many people" care about. "Many people" are dumb, hardly aware of the world that isn't directly in front of them. Their opinion here is worthless, doubly so because of how easily they can be misled.
I can't disagree about the irresponsibility of the IA when it comes to the Emergency Library stuff. But I for one would be pretty heartbroken to lose access to the absolutely enormous catalog of live shows from a ton of bands that IA hosts completely legally.
The Internet Archive is one of the easiest-to-access source of warez right now, among other things.
Either they have a grand plan for the targets they are painting on themselves, or they are bloody irresponsible idiots; I'm inclined to bet on the latter given no further contexts.
Hmmm. When they decided to do something so boneheaded, and so obviously going-to-seriously-piss-off a bunch of famously deep pocketed litigious publishers, they crossed a whole bunch of lines.
Not just a "this was a bad decision" line, but past a few others as well. eg "reckless behaviour", "wilful disregard", and probably more. :(
Hopefully some kind of Hail Mary saves the day. But at the _very_ least the senior people at the IA who reviewed and green-lit this program should be moved to less senior roles.
They clearly needed an adult in charge to have said "No, don't do this".
The whole program fails even the most cursory risk assessment, and should have been obvious that if it went badly (and likely would) they'd risk killing their whole organisation. :(
> Hmmm. When they decided to do something so boneheaded, and so obviously going-to-seriously-piss-off a bunch of famously deep pocketed litigious publishers, they crossed a whole bunch of lines.
But if no-one pushes against the encroaching draconian copyright laws, then they will continue to get worse. The IA has a philosophy that is counter to a lot of entrenched mainstream organisation, and this move was aligned with their philosophy, if not necessarily their best interests.
It was bold, and we're talking about it, and even testing it in court. So it went against them, which is not surprising, but it's better than if they'd just been meek, battened down the hatches, and not do anything at all.
I applaud them.
And if anyone in this thread is using the IA and hasn't donated to them recently, it's a good time to do it.
> Yeah, it's super important in certain weird technology and library subcultures, but few people outside of them would even notice it if disappeared.
A service can be important even if few people use it directly. The service can have downstream effects that are beneficial to a lot of people because the people who do use it are creating and disseminating other content that filters its way down.
An analogy would be the US National Weather Service (NOAA). Few people look directly at an NOAA feed, but it's used by news channels, apps, airlines, scientists, etc. and becomes content and services that most people have benefited from.
A robust archive lowers the cost/time of doing research. It enables fact checking and investigation, particularly of an historical or obscure nature. It services the long tail of less frequently accessed content that many of us will, at some time, want access to. Basically all the reasons a research library is useful.
> If they shut down, the story wouldn't even be able to muscle it's way onto the front page of the New York Times: it would loose to whatever the latest Trump drama is and the Nth repetition of the standard mass shooting media package.
That is not a good metric. If the louvre burned, that would make headlines everywhere, but it would be nowhere near as disasterous as if the internet archive was destroyed.
Just because most people may not have heard of it, it doesn't mean it's not critically important.
I'm sure most people in the US hadn't heard of many of the banks involved in the 2008 financial crisis, but many of them, after that fact, might agree that they were indeed too big to fail.
> Lots of people want to turn the publishers into the villains
I mean, they are the villains here. They’re sueing the IA over something that is less than a footnote in their balance book.
They’re purely doing this for the chilling effect it will have on other people that might be impertinent enough to try and share their books with others.
> we should be looking at ways to preserve those artifacts redundantly, so that even if the IA fails, it's not a calamity
Its 212 petabytes as of december 2021[1], that alone would be a bit less than 12 thousand 18 TB HDDs or LTO-9's. We've made virtually zero significant progress in long-term storage technology.
Its like if they are getting burned like the library of alexandria because of some copyright vampires, I wouldn't even be angry, just sad, its just what we deserve.
Destroying things over copyright will eventually be seen as absurd as ancient religious beliefs.
The future will laugh at us as some primitive ignorant culture with our heads shoved up our asses dismantling society because of some imaginary oh so sacred legal fiction called copyright.
Why do some hoarding rent seekers hold every key here and get to indiscriminately burn down our global village on a whim like a feudal lord and all we can say is "please sire, spare the library, can you burn it more slowly than the rest?"
We overthrew monarchies 200 years ago so we wouldn't have to deal with this anymore. Having these assholes sneak back in through some courtier backdoor via an institution where people still wear wigs and robes to make us all renters from (intellectual) property lords, it needs to go.
> we should be looking at ways to preserve those artifacts redundantly, so that even if the IA fails, it's not a calamity.
We don't need to look too far. IA could simply extend their middle-finger and move to Mexico, Spain, Thailand, or Sealand. Frankly, IA should be mirrored in every country that does not respect the West's initiative of blocking access and unresolvable takedown notices. Fuck US copyright anti-information bullshit. Publishers represent themselves and their own greed, not the authors and artists that created the content. There are rare success stories[1], but how many other works have been looted by publishers at the expense of the long dead content creator's family?
> IA could simply extend their middle-finger and move to ...
Unfortunately, the US government directly expands the reach of (US) copyright, patents, and trademarks with the "Free Trade" agreements they've managed to get countries around the world to sign up to.
If Sealand had an effective army ;), and could thereby say "Thanks, but no" then that might be an option. Until then though...
UNESCO Cultural Heritage Sites are basically this in spirit.
But “too big to fail” is bad policy no matter what you apply it to. That we have practiced this bad policy does not mean we should continue doubling down on it.
Too big to fail comes from the fear of popular unrest (btw, this also works in non-democratic countries, albeit is weaker). There will be no popular unrest here.
I think we need a PBS for the web, and the Internet Archive should be one of the cornerstones of such an organization.
Add to it other educational materials that would otherwise show up on youtube or elsewhere with advertisements, and you have a decent basis for the 21st century and beyond.
With regards to "too big to fail", one side that doesn't get talked about as much is that "too big to fail" banks get more regulatory scrutiny and how much risk they are allowed to take on is regulated.
If the Internet Archive is "too big to fail" then there should be more scrutiny of their actions and the avoidance of risky behavior.
Anybody with any legal sense could have told you that the "National Emergency Library" was a risky move.
The Library of Congress is open to the public. Visitors can freely read most of the books and other materials in the collection. You will generally have to travel to the actual library; only a limited subset of their collection is available online.
We've built this amazing "internet" technology to enable readers all over the world to read things, removing many of the limitations of physical books.
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.
>> 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.
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 IA would not "fail" if it was just left alone, but business never saw a nickel they didn't want to grab, so the law suits are not exactly surprising. And I expect the courts to lean towards the publishers.
>> 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 the GP is referring to as "culture" is high culture--the kind of stuff that is not popular and requires subsidies and special effort to sustain.
I don't think so at all: the IA has little to do with what is normally termed "high culture", and much more to do with "low culture" (lots and lots of internet trivia that would mostly be of interest to archeologists).
The IA is the only way to see a lot of what was written and widely read starting in the 1990s onwards.
Libraries used to keep archives of old newspapers and publications on microfilm, and anyone who needed to research something could go and look through those archives. The IA holds a similar function today - but it's the only one with its breadth and age. If we lose the IA, we lose a lot of important historical information.
> Libraries used to keep archives of old newspapers and publications on microfilm, and anyone who needed to research something could go and look through those archives. The IA holds a similar function today - but it's the only one with its breadth and age.
Newspapers very frequently maintain and provide public access to their own online archives now. That's also not a function the IA is even especially good at--its coverage is spotty, and unless you have an old URL, it's very hard to find stuff in the IA.
The one unique thing the IA does is have is a broad and deep collection of internet ephemera.
> The one unique thing the IA does is have is a broad and deep collection of internet ephemera.
That's what I was referring to. Blogs especially are an important source of historical information from this period that will not exist in newspaper archives -- and many of those have appeared and disappeared in the last 20 years. IA is the only record we have of much of that.
High culture, like theatre, classical music, architecture - sure,thats one line of thought here. There are isolated examples that exist, supported by patronage, but that's not entirely what I meant.
If we look to the mainstream,the movies,music etc are all commercial. There's a reason a studio would rather make another Marvel movie than something more meaningful. That's not to say that -only- Marvel movies are made, and they are very entertaining, but the -reason- they are made at all us economic.
For software we celebrate money-raised, MRR, user numbers and engagement. We dont celebrate programs for their life-impact. We don't celebrate the software used yo design the James Webb telescope. Or the software in an MRI machine. We don't throw VC levels of funding at prosthetics, things that have value beyond just ygr monetary, even more so when the monetary value is near-nil, just like the IA.
I say all this not to change it, at a fundamental level it can't be changed, bug rather to understand it.
It's also one of those phrases where people insist that's not what it means. You can see this bizzare battle playing out on its wikipedia page:
> In popular usage, the term high culture identifies the culture either of the upper class (an aristocracy) or of a status class (the intelligentsia); high culture also identifies a society’s common repository of broad-range knowledge and tradition (folk culture) that transcends the social-class system of the society.
you don't export culture, you export stuff. it sounds like you're disgreeing with "america runs on money, not culture", but the fact you conflate culture with, like, movies sold internationally proves the point: american culture is in the form of market transactions. given that, how do you end up with "culturally too big to fail?"
and i'd dispute that entertainment is our #1 export. not all exports are on the books; i'd bet arms is our real #1 export.
You can look this information up pretty easily.[1] If you only count physical goods, the US's biggest exports are cars, aircraft, petroleum, food, drugs, industrial machinery, and semiconductors. Even if we count the value of all the military equipment sold to allies such as the Netherlands, France, Japan, Korea, the UK, etc, and we count all the Ukraine aid, the total value last year was $205.6 billion. That's less than petroleum exports ($258.3B) or food ($208.2B).
The fiat currency is just as valuable as the lithium deposits because the fiat currency is backed by the most powerful force of military might the world has ever seen. When you trade for a dollar you're trading for that. Better than them just taking the lithium, as was the old way.
Empires that over-expand and seize too much sow the seeds of their own military destruction. Economic empires backed by ever-increasing military become overwhelming and then define any pushback as terrorism. What you end up with is a planetary-scale protection racket. Please do not construe this as an endorsement of other would-be hegemonies.
Please do not. Either write out your comment, invest the effort to condense it, or link to your blog post. I like chatGPT, but if I want an AI version I'll generate it myself.
I got you. You downvoted me.
Please stop asking me more.
Summary -intention- make the message short, easy, not time consuming. Solid good intention.
I spend 1 hour to make communication solid.
I put my intention.
I cant be the person you dictate.
Please is not the way to soften do as I -we- want.
I do not read rules, I obey them in conflict, I do not ask permission, I say sorry.
If we need rules, there need to be consensus.
Other, a carma pramit , ranks, kind a god mode thing.
I'm new in this block. We do not know each other. Talk to me privately if you seriously bothers you.
Do not Elonize -Alianite- me.
Do not make me buy this place, and sell it to my ego, I may put my every entry on
top of HN.
If you want to offend, please kindly do that.
The world "myself" bothering me -I'm not make these comments for yourself- , provoked me, changed my emotional state.
If you want to share openly argue, I already made a submission - which will never see the sun -, go there, say something.
Or say authentically what you feel - say bad things in private or openly, I do not my, because I'm reflecting my pure emotions right now.
And yes. My intention is not to offend you but, I need to say a big NO to you.
Sorry if you emotionally offend. I do not know you, and you are a candidate - in a real community- of new friend to me.
And please think:
You should thank me for my 1 hour effort to make my comment solid, understandable, for the sake of quality.
Thanks my downvote. It made me some kind of joke "Do not Elonize me"
And sorry for my emotional, instant, Chinglish - People mock my English like that-. I cant use tools we build because of haters, ignorants, paranoids, unwarenes - I can easily take all those words to me and look at that mirror -
I passed this way on SO. Argue with people - yes I'm emotional sometimes-,
I felt kicked there, not a place for me, ....
Idea was simple - I cant rich my upper brain because of emotional state so even I would like to share that post -
Put a badge to people's profile Not a Native speaker.
Because as we can see currently my English is not enough for higher communication. I'm old. Not live in English speaking country - so not use it -.
My grammar rusty. Mockers were right it is Chinglish :) - I'm not Chinese by the way-.
Some advised Google Translate, which I was already trying and not getting the way I want to say. So, knowing or not knowing do not alienize me, please welcome me,
no need to hug. Just smile. Think pure, I now you can summarize but , one of my downvoted - suspicious- comments about has had a quote like " I do not find time to make it short, please forgive me"
I'm doing what they apology.
It is your karma, it is your self sufficiency to generate summaries,
Please continue to punish me if you like it.
As I said, It make me productive - yes aggressive-
Look at I wrote lots of human words - not AI , synthetic -
And it is my naked poor English community could easily mock.
Yes It is USA, I need to talk in your language.
Yes It is yourself, you don't me to summarize my post for you.
Thanks. Apologies. PLUR -< if you know what this mean
The US runs on rule of law, and copyright law has been around for centuries. Many sites that violate copyright laws would be fine if left alone. That doesn’t mean they should be immune from lawsuits.
Everyone was telling the internet archive that this was a dumb idea because it opened them to lawsuits with ruinous fines. Now the chickens are coming home to roost and IA is crying foul.
It can be true that the internet archive is an invaluable store of history while also being true that they made an embarrassing own-goal.
fortunately, someone saying that does not make it real. Think of a "soup" and of "experiment" and you will get more detail. Resolving an entire nation to a 1 or 0 classification is not defensible, right?
Resolving the statement to a 1/0 classification isn't necessary. If the US ran on culture, the archive would be considered a jewel; but the US runs on money so it's seen as an underoptimization. If you're predicting what a group would do in a specific case and decision, it really is correct to apply generalizations.
In this case though, the question is what underlying motivator dominates. The claim doesn't need to be as strong as 'the us is money, no culture' and can just be 'in the US, money accounts for more willpower and political capital than culture in a head to head'
A distributed, highly resilient digital museum. The internet archive meets S3 meets BitTorrent. We’re most of the way there, just need improvements around durability, rebalancing around geographies, and the identity and metadata (item inventory) planes.
(no association with IA, just an active contributor)
I could imagine something like IPFS and a strong community of volunteers hosting nodes with different partitions. I'm not sure how IPFS would scale to IA sized storage, if for nothing else there would have to be a good way to segment and balance data across volunteers nodes.
My personal opinion is that they’re going about this the wrong way, with IPFS, anything blockchain, etc. They can support this entire model with a DHT (supporting PKI for identity) and torrent advertising, the latest version of BitTorrent (which has great support for cross swarm file serving by hash), and RSS or other feeds for advertising the corpus or chunks of it.
I maintain a copy in Cloudflare R2 of all IA item metadata, and would love to work on the ArchiveTeam equivalent of a Warrior appliance: appliance or container starts, consumes an RSS feed to request the least seeded items, downloads them up to disk space allowed, and then serve downloaded item files to the swarm.
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 believes the work has yet to find its audience.
The standard for abandoned works still protected under the existing system should default against the (potential) holder of the original copyright as long as a good-faith effort was made to reach them, and damages should amount to some sort of split of the profits.
I don't think I agree with this. Novels can take years to write, and to have their copyright expire after only a few years may not be enough for the author to write another book. What would be the motivation to write a series if the series isn't worth printing after only a few books? It goes doubly if the novel might be up for a movie or a TV adaptation: the game of thrones tv adaptation didn't happen until much later after the first book... does this mean George R R Martin should be paid 0 while HBO makes a killing on the first few seasons? How would any artist retire ever if they cannot make money off their existing body of work?
For what it is worth, Cory Doctorow used to license his books with Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs. You can even find direct and free downloads to his books on his website [1]. At the same time, his publishers were selling hardcopies.
Unfortunately, at some point he stopped doing it. He explains
> There is also the fact that, in the time since Creative Commons licenses were negotiated, publishers have entered into agreements with the large ebook retailers that allow for price matching. This is in part an artifact of anti-trust litigation, but it means that if someone somewhere offers the book at $0, it technically allows all of the other ebook stores to offer the book at $0 as well.
> Thus far my publishers have been good about grandfathering in the CC-licensed books that I already had, but for the last couple of books I haven’t done CC licensing, in part because of the real fear that Amazon could set the price at $0 and there would be no recourse for my publishers—not even the recourse of not letting Amazon sell the book, because of deals ensuring that if Amazon sells one book of a publisher’s, they have to sell the whole catalog.
Cory Doctorow's license on his books is explicitly Noncommercial, No derivative. The person I was disagreeing with would disagree even with that permissive license! And it would also go along with my argument, that Cory Doctorow is still retaining rights to demand payment if people make a killing selling his work in other markets or adapting his work. I have no issues with creatives willingly picking which rights they choose and which rights they keep. But you can see even with more permissive licensing, Cory Doctorow is still retaining the most salient and potentially profitable ones for himself.
That is exactly the point. Copyright is not a single right. We need to expand the discussion to talk about the validity and duration of each of those rights.
I'm completely comfortable talking about those things! :) I just disagree with the notion that copyright should just magically go away without any serious consideration of its consequences to creatives. I'm more than happy with some hypothetical solution that both prevents inaccessibility to creative works and also enforces that creatives should be compensated for their labor.
Fair arguments, thanks for the thoughts. I think all of it needs to be taken in the context that "helping" creators is a secondary goal in service to the prime goal of maximizing creative output overall.
That said, I'm sympathetic to creators; I've written several (unpublished) novels myself.
Most novels don't support the authors that write them. There's no argument to be made that Jane Doe's 20,000th-ranked novel makes her nothing in the third year instead of three dollars.
At the other end of the scale you have George R.R. Martin. I'm sure he would be fine with or without the revenue from HBO's GoT. That said, in that particular case I think it's likely that HBO would want his blessing in any case -- especially since he hadn't written the ending yet. Without his cooperation, would people have been as likely to watch knowing the ending was made up by someone else?
So then you have the mid-tier authors -- a misnomer since really you're talking about the 99.9th percentile, where GRRM is the 99.9999th. But in any case, I still think that the vast majority of the revenue from a novel generally comes in the first 2-3 years. If losing that last, let's say 5%, makes the difference between success and starvation, that seems like a rare case to me -- even for authors who write slowly.
As for retirement, I'm not sure how to answer except to say let's pick an author who is clearly self-supporting, but not GRRM: Piers Anthony. He's still cranking out Xanth novels (last I checked). Do you suppose sales from his Battle Circle books (published in the '60s and '70s) are contributing materially to his retirement? Ha, I just checked and he's up to 45 books in the Xanth series. :-)
I'm not asking whether or not George R.R. Martin would or wouldn't be fine: I'm asking whether or not it's reasonable for HBO to make a killing off his work without him being paid at all as an example of how it doesn't seem reasonable on its face that smaller authors should just get shafted if someone makes a huge profit off their work.
Since we want to talk about mid-tier authors, I think you'd be surprised how long and how well royalty can still pay authors. Cassandra Khaw has repeatedly commented on how Hammers On Bone (published 2016) is still making them significant revenue. And this isn't at all covering the nuances of UK/US markets, where books can make it big in the UK and only years later publish in the US and vice versa (where I know for certain make significant income for authors)! I'm sure Susanna Clarke, who has Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, is still immensely grateful for how well Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell continued to sell (and then she came out with another banger, Piranesi!). Victor LaVelle is still making money off The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) to the point of producing a re-release hardcover of the book due to popular demand! And I know Nnedi Okorafor is still earning excellent royalties from Who Fears Death (2011) even though her more profitable works (Binti, Akata series) are getting more attention nowadays.
The argument that books primarily sell 95% of all they'll ever sell in the first 2-3 years is a total misunderstanding of the book market. It may look like that for current-events nonfiction or celebrity bibliographical works, but fiction markets don't work like that at all-- the backlist makes a huge chunk of the stable income of an author. This is true also for indie and self-pub markets (I can't name specific examples because I haven't done heavy research into this, but I know from panels and talks from other romance authors that self-publishing romance heavily relies on voracious readers who will buy your entire backlist.)
But should any of those authors become sick, disabled, or otherwise no longer able to produce, should they end up never making another cent of any of their works? How would they support themselves 5, 10, 15, 20 years?
> But should any of those authors become sick, disabled, or otherwise no longer able to produce, should they end up never making another cent of any of their works? How would they support themselves 5, 10, 15, 20 years?
Isn't this an issue about social security or income insurance or pensions.. why should this be specifically different for an author than a bricklayer?
> But should any of those authors become sick, disabled, or otherwise no longer able to produce, should they end up never making another cent of any of their works? How would they support themselves 5, 10, 15, 20 years?
> In spring 2000 I was well into Wiz 6: The Wizardry Capitalized when I went into the hospital for emergency heart surgery. The surgery saved my life but a combination of medical problems and the effects of the drugs I take has pretty much ended my fiction career. (Non-fiction I still manage very nicely, thank you.)
I've seen this happen to others. Something about the heart medicine prevents some spark of creativity. Its another example of an author who needed to support himself for another 20 years off the royalties from books he wrote a decade before.
>I'm asking whether or not it's reasonable for HBO to make a killing off his work
The difference is that in this case, everybody would be free to adapt it as they see fit. HBO doesn't get the exclusive rights. Under the current system, only very big producers can afford to license well known properties. Under a more permissive system, anybody can do it.
No, because HBO has more than license: they also have audience and money to pay for actors, animators, script writers and, most importantly, a marketing campaign. They could still make a ton of money off of it, just that George R.R. Martin wouldn't see a single cent of it! That's what I'm saying would suck terribly. [See: All the lovecraft works in public domain-- big productions based on the mythos are still making toooons of money!]
Again, I think it's a mistake to hold up GRRM as representative of someone who would be "shafted" if HBO were able to make GoT without his participation. That ignores the other side of the coin: all the works that could be made into other media but aren't because: the author doesn't want someone else to sully their work; the author wants too much money; no one can find the copyright holder.
It's interesting that none of the works you cite as being vulnerable are more than 12 years old. If we could agree on 12 years with a 12 year renewal, I'd happily compromise on that compared to what we have now.
Looking at Cassandra Khaw: the book you mention, Hammers On Bone, is just seven years old. So under my scheme (I allowed for the idea of renewals) maybe she'd be on her second renewal? Certainly nothing like the current system, where that book will conservatively be under copyright well into the 2100s.
But to your point: U.S. publishers sell almost a billion books per year. I'm not sure how much authors get, since the numbers seem to be different for professionally published books vs. self-published, but let's take it as $1 per copy. HoB is currently ranked 560,000th on Amazon. If we take any kind of reasonable distribution of book sales, that would have her selling <= 1,000 books per year. That means she's clearing up to $1,000 per year on that book -- certainly enough to call it "significant revenue," but also not enough to keep body and soul together on its own.
And again, I'll point out that current copyright goes far beyond the death of the author. Should we be similarly sympathetic to the children (or even grandchildren) of the author?
And as an aside: Cassandra Khaw is actually similar to Piers Anthony: the very first book in the Xanth series is currently ranked 48,000th at Amazon, but the 20th book is ranked over 1 millionth. Interestingly, the most recent book is ranked 280,000th, so better than the middle of the series, but not as good as the first book. This speaks more directly to your point than any of the examples you gave, since A Spell for Chameleon came out almost fifty years ago. And the Battle Circle omnibus edition (it was a trilogy originally) is ranked 180,000th, so better than the most recent Xanth novel.
But all of this ignores the point I originally made, which is that copyright is only secondarily for the benefit of authors. If you really want to argue for longer copyright, you have to support the idea that fewer authors would write, or write less, if copyright were shorter. That's the only justification that speaks to the intent in the constitution.
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 right to anything once you put an idea out there and the legal constructs are just novel artificial ways to keep the have-nots from competing with the haves.
Culture existed well before notions of intellectual property and if anything today we have far better means of both producing works ourselves and collectively funding works that might not exist without compensation.
Rewarding the top 0.0001% of lucky creators with huge compensation isn’t worth the broad societal damage that is done by preventing people from sharing or making use of ideas.
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 my body of work, but only because I have spent almost 20 years creating a diverse collection of writings, and copyright law mostly protects me from having to compete with other people selling my writings. I say "mostly" because I find my work plagiarized once in a while (often with the word-for-word copies of my work earning more money for the plagiarizers than it does for me).
On a surface level, I understand the critics of intellectual property. I concede that all art is derivative to some degree, and nothing springs from a vacuum. I acknowledge that even greater art can be achieved if something can be iterated upon by a diversity of artists. But the harsh reality is that most of the people who want to repurpose art aren't doing it to create something new and distinct, they just want to profit from hard work without doing any themselves.
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?
Plagiarism done for profiting from book sales is a symptom of copyright in this form (punishment over monetary loss, not lack of attribution).
Having consumers of the artworks (if they aren't commissioned) donate to the author along with severe enforcement of attribution requirements (especially bans on claiming other's work as one's own, so the donations wouldn't go to the plagiarizer), doesn't require bans on copying/reproduction.
Yes, it would change what art gets the funding: e.g. less Marvel Avengers (dominated by casual consumers), more art house cinema (say, something like "Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri").
Less autotune'd popstars, more "Nirvana"/"Taylor Swift"/"Marina and the Diamonds".
But in the realm of the "useful arts ", we're talking more about commissioned works, be it the way an architect is commissioned by a bank that needs a new HQ, or be it the way a fan base causes so many sales of the new Final Fantasy that the creators make a sequel (the commissioning tactic would be one exhibited by, for example, "Dropkick on My Devil! X" (the third season of a splatter (in the way Doom is) comedy anime, which reached its crowdfunding goal in 33 hours)).
I strongly believe that for useful arts, like, say, engineering reference books and ISO standard documents, crowdfunding could sufficiently cover cost of creation, using for example selling of voting power in the ISO standard creation process for individual standards as the incentive to coax industry into paying up-front instead of afterwards for their paper/digital copies.
Or have that industry's guild/association sponsor the standard writing.
After all, IETF RFCs prove that standards don't need to be paywalled to continuously be created.
Then how should any artists make any income at all from their work? I'm not talking about 0.0001% lucky creators with huge compensation. I mean the 70 year old with cancer who cannot write anymore. I mean the 35 year old disabled artist who cannot work a "normal" salaried job. I mean the artist from an underdeveloped country who became popular and now the "wealthy" countries want to translate and publish their work in their relatively wealthy markets. [These are all real cases I'm familiar with, as a person who actually is in community regularly with working-class authors.]
The world in which you speak of where art existed outside of notions of intellectual property meant only the wealthy and well-connected could be artists, whereas with copyright a cancer-fighting, aging, midlist author can still demand royalty payments if Disney bought his books and are still selling them for profit (Alan Dean Foster, specifically). Peter S. Beagle (The Last Unicorn author) was put through elder abuse and lived in poverty, and only many years later was he able to regain rights to his work back as well as force recompense for harm committed to him- this wouldn't work if the rights to his work expired while he was being abused.
We have the technology now to balance copyright - simply put - if an item is not available for a reasonable price, then the copyright expires or becomes "cannot be sold except by original author" or something. Needing to keep things like books that are currently in print protected shouldn't prevent people from obtaining works that have fallen out of print, apparently irrevocably.
Print-on-demand and digital copies means that even a small author can keep their works available "for pay" easily now.
I'm completely comfortable with a "if no one's making it available reasonably, it should be made so" policy. I'm only concerned for living creators to retain rights to their work and be compensated for their creations while they are still actively using their work to give themselves a living, so I would be fine with ensuring work isn't irrevocably lost due to lack of copies.
I think the other side of copyrights where you can irrevocably sign over your rights (which may be more of a US thing, UK seems to have some inalienable ones) is a significant issue (as mentioned, the Foster thing where Disney wasn't even paying him because they argued they'd acquired assets without liabilities - https://winteriscoming.net/2021/04/23/disney-star-wars-autho... ).
It's hard to fully balance. Another example would be Don Rosa's McDuck comics - he had to fully assign all copyright on them to Disney when making them, so the way the reprinters get him some money is by having him write forwards/commentary, those he can retain the copyright on - https://career-end.donrosa.de has more
Alan Dean Foster's situation was not an irrevocably signing over his rights; he signed a specific business agreement that Disney tried to renege on dubious claims that would totally change corporate law if it was made valid precedent.
Don Rosa's situation doesn't really have much to do with the original advocacy to do away with copyright altogether, so I don't understand your point here. Are you arguing that copyright is bad because it's sellable under unfair terms, and therefore no one should be able to sell their work?
I'm just pointing out that our current system of copyright doesn't really do enough to protect the authors and artists that create the works we enjoy; there's certainly room for improvement.
> I mean the 70 year old with cancer who cannot write anymore. I mean the 35 year old disabled artist who cannot work a "normal" salaried job. I mean the artist from an underdeveloped country who became popular and now the "wealthy" countries want to translate and publish their work in their relatively wealthy markets.
You can apply all those scenarious to other jobs that don't earn effectively-perpetual income from their work. They generally have to rely on the government to keep them alive. Why should "creatives" get a better deal?
I'm all for making sure that artists (and everyone else) has enough to live so that they can make a positive contribution to society. But out of all the different possible ways to accomplish that, infringing on the basic rights of everyone to share and build on their culture has got to be one of the worst.
Frankly, I'm comfortable with the copyright holder being responsible to pay for the continued ownership of the copyright beyond its registration fees. It would allow them to determine whether or not a work is worth the continued investment to them, and presumably authors who are in a tight spot these days engage in mutual aid to assist each other. [#DisneyMustPay is a truly impressive mass cooperative event against an existential threat!]
I'm merely against the notion that we should do away with the few ways a working-class artist can earn a living and continue making more work with their labor. I'd even be happy to do away with copyright if all creators had a guarantee of income/recompense proportional to the broader cultural dissemination of their work.
So what, like ten years free then ten year renewals each costing ten percent of total attributable revenue to date (probably with some minimum fee for extension)?
Oh please, lots of great cultural creations had a profit motive. You think "Blade Runner" was made without any desire for profit? Or "2001: A Space Odyssey"? Or Peter Jackson's LotR movies? Those were enormously profitable.
And Rings of Power was not that bad. It's not as great as the LotR movies, sure, but it's better than the Hobbit movies. (But not as good as some of the Hobbit fan edits.) And it's a LOT better than the new Netflix show "The Ark". What a turd, and a huge disappointment coming from some of the people behind Stargate.
Minor correction: "The Ark" is a SyFy/Peacock show, not Netflix. My apologies to Netflix for naming them as having made what's probably the worst sci-fi show ever.
Interestingly, I found the show that "The Ark" is loosely based on, a 70s show called "The Starlost". It's available on YouTube for free. Anyway, it was widely panned too, even named on someone's "worst sci-fi shows of all time" list. I've only seen one episode but it's already notably better than "The Ark" despite being 50 years old now (and not because "The Starlost" is great either).
Currently the copyright term in the US is life-of-author plus 70 (edit: corrected from 90) years. Life of author has some reasonable basis. Past death it's understandable that descendants would want the estate to be worth something, if an author was unable to capitalize upon their work in their lifetime, but supporting an author's family for 3 generations is ridiculous.
There isn't a political solution to this. Because the US has a territorial electoral system, no politician is ever going to be representing a constituency who will care about the diminution of copyright terms as their primary issue, and building a legislative coalition to advance a nebulous public interest is hard, massively more so when countered by politicians who are bankrolled by large concentrations of capital.
In this country, any attempt to advance the current and future public interest over private gain is loudly denounced as tyranny by people who are awash in wealth and power. Those who try to undermine the foundations of capital from below are denounced as thieves and terrorists. That's why you get an endless ratchet effect.
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.
The title implies that losing this lawsuit is threatening the existence of the Internet Archive. Is that really the case?
If it is true, then maybe IA should be run by somebody with better judgement. This was a project with a massive chance of failure (how could anyone think that this wasn't just blatantly infringing?) and a low payoff. If it's also an existential risk, then wtf are they doing running it?
> If it is true, then maybe IA should be run by somebody with better judgement.
I'm skeptical that you even get the IA without someone like these folks running it. Imagine you're the type of crazy person who starts and runs the IA, the pandemic starts and libraries and schools shut down, and there's a big button in front of you saying "give people access to knowledge that was just removed from them". I dunno man, I can understand the type of person who creates the IA also feeling compelled to push that button under those circumstances. Was it a bad decision? I dunno, probably, I guess. It was a weird and hard time. I'm not angry at them for doing what felt right.
It's an argument for the separation of library and archival work. Access to knowledge and preservation of knowledge are separate things, even if they have a lot in common.
It might be wise for someone to consider a truly archival only organization.
IANAL, but in fact copyright law has been abundantly clear that copying something strictly for archival purposes is legal, too.
It really is the (re)distribution of archived materials that is in the wrong here. IA could go and archive every single bit of digitized data, copyrighted or otherwise, and if that's all they do then nobody will or can complain.
I and many other librarians have private 'pirate' libraries of various materials, particularly ephemera that aren't covered by mandatory deposit or digital content. We're just not allowed to distribute them.
Do we abuse this? Oh hell yes - most of us are archiving according to our personal interests. Which is the main concern about the IA going offline: We shouldn't need to rely on some of us personally saving things (and we can confirm each other's provenance - in order to trust my archive is what I say it is, you need to trust me).
The purpose of copyright law is to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" [1] . It stands to reason that deleting or allowing everything to bit-rot is probably not conducive to the promotion of progress. We need libraries and archives.
Perhaps we could let the publishing industry operate the turnstiles and collect a small but increasingly large fee from people trying to use it, until the public commons was indistinguishable from private property?
> I'm skeptical that you even get the IA without someone like these folks running it.
Isolating business ventures from each other is common practice. They didn't need to run both operations out of the same business entity.
> I dunno man, I can understand the type of person who creates the IA also feeling compelled to push that button under those circumstances. Was it a bad decision? I dunno, probably, I guess.
The operation may have been a risky decision, but doing it under the umbrella of the Internet Archive made it a terrible decision.
There's a seperation between a library and a pirate site, so it's kinda a bad faith argument, but even going on the merits of your argument, I am pressed to point out that, yes, other libraries have digital lending. It's called Controlled Digital Lending. CDL. The thing that this current lawsuit is trying to remove. So this isn't just an argument against IA's library wing, but a move to remove all library and archive efforts. Penguin has come out and said they are against libraries hosting any of their books at all. US law makes this something they can't fight in physical print, but this is their attempt to start destroying these services.
Now you can argue if this is fair or not, but this is how Ebook lending is legally done. CDL, where you lend out one Ebook per physical copy was never established as legal.
It was tolerated, until IA decided to allow for unlimited lending.
I don't see how books are special here. If I buy a bunch of DVDs off eBay, I can't set up a streaming service tomorrow hosting this content.
Even if only one person can watch a movie at a time, I've no right to redistribute that content. If CDL is legal, then why limit it to books. Why not movies, games, TV shows ?
See the problem here, the laws of physics and basic wear and tear create a fundamental difference between physical media and digital media.
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.
I hope the project can be kept afloat in ways that the US government can't interfere with.
The U.S. government, oddly, is the least of my fears when it comes to rewriting history.
Private enterprise is already doing it, even going to far as to reach into your private library of books and music to change them after you're purchased it:
Until yesterday, I used to sync my music library with Apple Music. Not anymore. Apple responding to the Times reporter with a big fat "no comment" tells me that it thinks it's OK to change things on my computer without my knowledge.
Dahl (or his publisher) changed his own book , the initial back story of the oompa-loompas being problematic. This was 10 years after publishing when someone pointed out it wasn't a great depiction.
But it is weird that they can go into your device and change it now. Don't love it. If they made Version 2 available at the same time....
I have Body Count's first Music CD. I got the day it was released. It has a song that was considered problematic and thus removed in future editions.. But they can't change it on the one I have. The big stink they made about it probably sold a bunch copies. On release day they had one copy on CD and one on tape and I had to ask the person working at the store if they had it. (as opposed to dozen of Bruce Springstein albums released that day).
Yea, I think the argument about publishers choosing to release new, edited versions of older books is a silly one. We should let the marketplace and the marketplace of ideas sort it out.
But, the fact that they changed digital copies that were previously purchased is insane. The companies that do that should be pilloried and shamed for such an action.
Frankly, I’m no longer participating in digital purchases for music, books, or video, unless it’s DRM free and I can move the file to my own storage. I’d rather just rip a CD/DVD and take on the burden of managing that data myself.
Jellyfin/Plex has been super super helpful in making sure I don’t even lose out that significantly on the user experience front.
I am terrified of the world we’re entering where lots of new media will be digital/steaming only, and there will be no way to purchase and archive the “as-released” version of songs and movies.
Digital copies are subject to many hundreds of revisions/changes that you may never notice (most are typo fixing). Even print editions have these types of changes, and some are even substantial (famously, the Lord of the Rings has various changes made between editions by Tolkien himself, mostly fixing typos and minor inconsistencies; but he also accidentally got a revision of the Hobbit that was a major plot change still referenced in LotR itself: https://sweatingtomordor.wordpress.com/2018/05/17/were-tolki...
Some publishers maintain a list of "corrections" - some only update a digital copy on a new edition of a print copy, and some update them as they go. I've done a print-on-demand book at it technically has something like 50 revisions but only one is marked in the book itself as 'significant' - because why not update the source PDF when you can just click a button?
A similar thing is happening with software; DooM has had people carefully inspect the various different versions and patches released; but now massive games are mostly online and version differences are lost to time; even if you know the changelog you can't ever actually experience the old version anymore.
This is different, though. They don’t break into your house, find the book on your shelf, and update it with a sharpie.
The digital corrections and changes are _fine_ if they are opt in. It’s when they are automatically applied, and there is no (legal, tos abiding) way to keep the original file and reject updates that’s… horrifying.
Imagine somebody had the option to 1984 some datum for political advantage, but stopped because they were afraid they'd get caught. Isn't IA the first thing that comes to mind?
Yeah everyone pretty much said when they announced the National Emergency Library, they were risking everything. Sure enough, that's what happened.
Giving money to the current Internet Archive is pretty much just giving money to the book publishers. Instead we should be funding someone new to buy the assets off in the auction, and keep the previous decisionmakers far from the new entity.
Depends on what they’re looking at in terms of statutory damages. Looking at their Form 990s they bring in roughly in the neighborhood of $15-20M/year in contributions. That isn’t really a lot, and makes me wonder how they ever defend themselves in court but somehow they’ve survived this long.
Librarians are a pain in the ass to litigate against would be my guess.
We're very detail oriented, we're organized, and we're very good at following procedures. We're just as good at drawing things out as lawyers and burying us under tons of paperwork does nothing. Basically a lot of the tactics used to get big lawsuits over with quickly are much harder to execute against librarians. It becomes a war of attrition.
The IA lost the case because the testified in court they didn't actually check and had never built a mechanism to check that the libraries involved weren't letting out the physical books at the same time.
They didn't do even the very basic of legal scholarship on the copyright situation for uncontrolled lending.
Legally, the IA is in the wrong here. (I hate it because morally I side with the IA but yeah the courts aren't going to.)
I was just addressing the 'how did they survive this long'? part. It's basically the flip side of places that leverage their superior legal resources to draw out lawsuits to get the other side to drop them/make them not worth the time. "We're going to be such a pain in the ass you're just going to quit out of sheer frustration."
Personally, I think the IA fucked up really hard here.
We also don't need to bill the lawyers for everything that most clients do. A lawyer for the IA can probably give them exact specifications for things like delivery of discovery documents and what they'd be looking for in them and get exactly what they need. So way fewer billable hours used for administrative tasks.
I have in the past, but I'm also holding off until this lawsuit nonsense is done with. Don't need to fatten the lawyer industry with my money for their own mistakes. Running the wayback machine and things like flash emulation is what I want them to do: y'know, archiving stuff and making it available to current systems.
I should really look into whether this books lending branch has a chance of taking the web archive stuff down with it and, if so, buy a hard drive and start seeding this torrent that is iirc out there as a decentralized backup of the IA. This data being lost would be similar in proportion to losing GitHub or Wikipedia.
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
That knowledge was readily available through numerous other legal channels. Libraries do virtual lending.
What the IA did in that instance was a reckless gesture that did not change actual ability to access. That's worse than nothing, it's a net negative.
You seem to somehow conflate this instance with everything else the IA does. I'm not debating that their overall purpose is good and necessary. I'm saying this particular action was a spectacularly bad idea.
The wayback machine has much MUCH better arguments (it's copies of public content at a point in time by definition), even the DMCA has carve outs for preservation and scholarly works, many use it for real things and not just piracy, etc.
The wayback machine arguments are good enough that they could receive a Supreme Court decision along the lines of "technically this is illegal, but the law is wrong" type.
It's a reasonable question. I don't get to call myself an archive or museum and assemble a website of what I consider "culturally important" cartoons or comic strips or whatever. The Wayback Machine basically operates in the zone of most people don't care that they do this.
I mean, they were sued for copyright infringement and settled out of court at least once, so it’s not a negligible risk.
I guess my question is largely “Does someone with ‘better judgement’ even start the internet archive?” I don’t have the answer, but I think it’s at least plausible that the answer is “no”.
I assume any competent IP lawyer would have told them that there was no law allowing them to do what they wanted to do. (IANAL)
On the other hand, to the degree that you can operate in a zone that involves poking as few sleeping lions as you can (and deal with the odd copyright infringement suit or complaint), that's maybe OK. The problem I see here is that the IA seems to have incrementally tried "ooching" more and more things some of which were almost certainly less central to their mission and harder lion pokes.
Ultimately, the Internet Archive is the Man in the Arena. Everyone else didn't choose the right position on what copyright infringement is okay and what isn't. They didn't choose a position at all until post facto they choose the position that was right up against the margin of being sued - which they would never had known if the IA hadn't done the work.
As always, HN commenters would have picked the perfect trade-off every time in the past and yet they somehow never pick the right one in the future. You're being overly kind to everyone here since it's obvious what the truth is: this is wholesale armchair quarterbacking from a bunch of people who would never have built this.
I use IA all the time and love the website and most of what they do. But some of the stuff that they do that risks getting it all shut down is why I stopped donating.
It seems like a reasonably thing, to stop giving the Internet Archive money if you think they might be a bad steward of it.
The comparison to rockstars is kind of interesting though, they often engaged in behavior that was criminal, and sometime pretty odious. We gave them money because we liked their cultural output, and they wouldn’t give it away for free.
The Internet Archive doesn’t demand money, produces stuff with much arguably greater social value, and doesn’t really do anything odious (just illegal).
In the end I have a streaming subscription and don’t give money to charities (maybe when I get a good job I will). Funny to think about, though.
> In the end I have a streaming subscription and don’t give money to charities (maybe when I get a good job I will).
Most people won't. When you get the better job, you still won't. If you were buying your first yacht, you still won't.
Pick a percent, maybe 1%, of your income. Donate it. If it's literally $1, you are at least giving a dollar. Do it today. If you don't want to pick charities directly, there are charitable funds you can give to instead.
“Despite the widespread modern belief that the Library of Alexandria was burned once and cataclysmically destroyed, the Library actually declined gradually over the course of several centuries. This decline began with the purging of intellectuals from Alexandria in 145 BC during the reign of Ptolemy VIII Physcon, which resulted in Aristarchus of Samothrace, the head librarian, resigning from his position and exiling himself to Cyprus...The Library, or part of its collection, was accidentally burned by Julius Caesar during his civil war in 48 BC, but it is unclear how much was actually destroyed and it seems to have either survived or been rebuilt shortly thereafter; the geographer Strabo mentions having visited the Mouseion in around 20 BC and the prodigious scholarly output of Didymus Chalcenterus in Alexandria from this period indicates that he had access to at least some of the Library's resources.”
the roman catholics burned it so to make their mythical "jesus" figure stick.
with the info destroyed in that fire we became 'disconnected' from the real historical jesus; thereby enabling the rise of the mythical figure tweaked to allow easier control of the masses. "what would jesus do?"
This is what I was thinking reading the part of the discussion here about IA being too big or important to fail.. Important to who, to which type of society and social order.. In a post truth antagonistic tribal world, archives are not important to society
The internet archive served two distinct but important functions: one as a backup of the web which was important for accountability and history, and the other as a repository for archiving the world's non-web digital information. I personally scanned a whole bunch of ephemera and IA was the obvious place to put it.
Why jeopardize those functions to do something brick and mortar libraries already did better, and legally? Other libraries do virtual lending.
We will continue our work as a library. This case does not challenge many of the services we provide with digitized books including interlibrary loan, citation linking, access for the print-disabled, text and data mining, purchasing ebooks, and ongoing donation and preservation of books.
This right here! The Internet archive had a really good thing going, I've been donating, digitizing, and uploading to IA for years. They were playing with fire, we all this coming, and I'm very frustrated with them over this.
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 can access this information regardless of their physical proximity and access to the base source material.
I don't understand the backlash in the comments here, it seems to all come from a perspective of people being so downtrodden they just accept the current status quo crafted by MAFIAA lawyers, rather than looking at it holistically from first-principles.
IA losing and getting shut down because "information wants to be free, man" is completely detrimental to trying to move that agenda forwards.
"First principles" means jack shit if your company to build that world gets wiped off the map because you did something incredibly obviously stupidly illegal and handed the "MAFIAA lawyers" your own ass on a silver platter.
Maybe my viewpoint on this is informed by long-standing desire to basically start something like IA but in a way which is protected from the acts of nation-states. The fundamental problem with human society is that the power structures are always co-opted by elites for their own purposes rather than the purposes of society as a whole, it doesn't matter what the system of those power structures is, in all cases they get co-opted.
The fact that a corporate entity is allowed to take action against the IA in this case and be supported by the government in doing so is a symptom of our broken system, it's not evidence that the IA did anything wrong in any moral or social sense. The fact our society is held hostage, and that information is imprisoned, by entities like the MAFIAA is not a justification for this outcome.
> it's not evidence that the IA did anything wrong in any moral or social sense. The fact our society is held hostage, and that information is imprisoned, by entities like the MAFIAA is not a justification for this outcome
I don't think that IA's position was morally or ethically wrong; I would wager a lot of people here would feel the same way.
Unfortunately, for this case, morality and ethicality aren't the law. And the law was extremely known, and predictable in which side it would fall on here. This outcome was very, very predictable. IA gambled; possibly their existence; on astronomical odds that they could force a confrontation against the backdrop of the pandemic, and win. Maybe this was the best chance that they would ever get, in which case it was worth trying.
But I don't think the anti-copyright revolution was ever going to be triggered by IA giving out free books.
You can't have a revolution without breaking any laws. Gene Sharp and the advocates of nonviolence have really done a number on a lot of people's heads, giving them the idea that fundamental changes can be accomplished without any disruption or conflict through manifesting a large but peaceful number of people in a symbolic location. The only thing that gets you is a management shakeup. Real revolutions are messy.
> You can't have a revolution without breaking any laws
I think you misinterpreted what I wrote. If you had asked me beforehand whether this specific action would trigger a copyright revolution, I'd have said no. I'm not trying to say that they should have followed the (obvious) law, I'm theorising that perhaps IA was willing to gamble their existence that this _would_ trigger that.
Sci-hub probably had a much better chance of causing change, but feels like it might also have lost that chance with the multi-year pause to appease the Indian court. Various blocks also seem to have been effective; it's hard to find a working mirror.
Does anyone know why they complied with the indian court and not the many other places where they were sued or ordered to cease operation? If anything, I would have expected india to be the last country they would comply with since their courts are known to be laughably delusional when it comes to what they consider to fall under their jurisdiction.
I mean I can see the benefit in Telegram acquiescing to their delusion (the potential of becoming a wechat in their large market is far to inciting), but I don't see what benefit it would be for scihub.
That depends entirely on what kind of monetary and non-monetary damages a court may award the plaintiffs. They could easily wind up owing enough money they have to shut down, or even being shut down entirely by a court.
It's really not. The copyright system essentially has two serious issues: the extraordinary length, and DMCA takedown notices that are too easy to abuse.
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. There's just no reason to allow any random entity to distribute books that it doesn't own.
We have already seen in the software industry that there is no way for any but the biggest companies to survive in a world without copyright [which open source is similar to] (I am referring to how Mongo, Elastic, Grafana and others have all had to give up on up-selling open source software and move closer to a closed license; while only Microsoft, Amazon, Google, IBM etc. are thriving by giving away free software).
> 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 outraged.
I think it’s a little unfair to invent a hypothetical world, and then project their actions into that world as part of your judgement of their entity.
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!
> 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.
I (mostly) agree with you, but remember the rest of the quote, "Information wants to be free, information wants to be expensive."
> What is considered the earliest recorded occurrence of the expression was at the first Hackers Conference in 1984, although the video recording of the conversation shows that what Brand actually said is slightly different. Brand told Steve Wozniak:
>> On the one hand you have—the point you’re making Woz—is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable—the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other.[3]
>Frankly, what the IA did here is absolutely the right thing.
Sometimes doing the right thing gets you killed.
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This lawsuit could be an existential risk for the IA. In a society that allows vastly different views on what is right and wrong, most people manage to navigate situations in a way that doesn't risk their existence.
Within that line of thinking, what IA did was more or less a form of civil disobedience. If we go back to one of the founders of the philosophy of civil disobedience in the US we get to Thoreau. He was of the mind that the disobedient party should recognize the possible consequences and be prepared to accept them.
None of this means that the IA shouldn't have made this choice. Just that they should have had their eyes wide open to these consequences.
Whether you support copyright or not, the Internet Archive did a dumb thing that will probably cost us having the Internet Archive. Everyone is mad because everyone saw it coming and told them not to risk it all.
I'm not "supporting" the cops when I tell someone they should stop their car when they get pulled over. I'm recommending someone not get themselves shot.
If the conversation ends with “be afraid of cops” and not, “let’s organize to change cops”, then you are supporting cops. Like in this instance we need to rally around copyleft politicians for the next election cycle so that something like this can’t happen again. We need to have willpower and not be so weak willed to let the rent seekers win.
"Organize" is hot air without specific plan that has a realistic chance of success. Voting for "copyleft politicians" doesn't, if only because there are so few of them, and further because a candidate has no chance of winning on this as their single issue - it's the rest of their platform that will decide the vote.
How about a pirate party? I think we could find huge amounts of people sympathetic because most consumers would stand to gain materially from it. It's realpolitik and could be effective in creating a culture support for dismantling copyright. That is what was starting to happen when the MPAA and RIAA started litigating against individuals. They didn't just stop because it was ineffective at recouping losses, it was also undermining the faith people had in copyright.
The feasibility of such a party depends greatly on the electoral system in any given country. In the USA in particular, our combination of single-member districts with FPTP means that third parties are not viable unless they run on some issue that is really resonant with most of society (to the point where it would override voting considerations on basically all other wedge issues). You have to go all the way back to mid-19th century to find a successful example.
In Europe this fared better, but as we can still see, PPs enjoy limited electoral popularity even in systems where representation is truly proportional. Same basic problem here - there are way more important issues than just this one, and a party that doesn't make any stand on those other issues will only attract those few that consider its single issue that important. But then the moment it starts taking positions on other stuff, that also turns off part of the potential electorate, and shifts it closer to a more traditional "for everything good against everything bad" kind of party.
They said “realistic”. There is zero hope of such a party gaining any traction in the US, partly because of the largely undemocratic way the political system works, but also just because the vast majority of people don’t care about this issue at all.
> If the conversation ends with “be afraid of cops” and not, “let’s organize to change cops”, then you are supporting cops.
That's an incredibly extreme take. Giving someone solid, possibly life saving advice, shouldn't need to include your favourite political sentiment in order not to count as explicit support for a unjust system.
Not informing a European or Japanese of how this is a seriously unjust system you have in place - and not just a fucked up joke as it sounds (police? shooting at people? for not stopping the car?!? Haha, nice joke, man) - could definitely threaten their lives though.
It's implicit support at worst and not that strong of support at that. This is just calling balls and strikes, not trying to impugn anyone for being a police lover. It's probably not bad that we should want for police and those they serve to feel supported to achieve good outcomes, but that takes political action.
> I don't understand the backlash in the comments here, it seems to all come from a perspective of people being so downtrodden they just accept the current status quo crafted by MAFIAA lawyers, rather than looking at it holistically from first-principles.
People do not understand that the IA want to go to court as part of their strategy, or else they think they understand what constitutes an effective legal strategy for the IA better than the IA do.
If this was a strategy from the IA, it has all but failed, hasn't it? And given that the vast majority predicted it would fail, I wouldn't even call this hindsight being 20/20.
The IA will appeal the outcome of this case. An appeal by one side or the other was probably inevitable.
I don't know as much about the law as the, ahem, "vast majority," but I wonder if the IA will, in the event of a loss, lose anything more than the ability to do something they are found to have done in violation of the law, and some legal fees. I read the decision and saw some reasons for encouragement, but hey... not a lawyer.
Libraries are given a good faith exception from statutory damages. 17 USC § 504(c)(2). I don't think any court has yet had the opportunity to interpret and apply the exception. Nonetheless, there's little reason to believe that the IA's interpretation of Fair Use wasn't in good faith. The court's recent decision deferred the question for later, but we'll find out soon enough. And then we're only just getting started--this case was always destined to be decided on appeal as it poses novel and important legal questions.
I agree with the sentiment, but not IA's risky approach. What did IA assume? That publishers would look the other way, that their actions would inspire copyright reform, that executive power would pardon them post-reform? Those are some crazy assumptions. I'd think a consumer revolt championed by IA would have been more effective while not jeopardizing the archive, i.e. "Information wants to be free, digital lending costs nothing. Contact your congressperson about copyright reform."
A consumer revolt would do better, but contacting your congressperson about copyright reform is doomed to failure. Copyright (and the de facto right to abuse and extend it) is an existential issue for publishers, but not for consumers.
Any time you have a collective action problem like that our legislative system is always going to come down in favor of the capital owners, because the entire (US) polity is built around land apportionment. It's a political system designed by and for landlords.
It's an artifact of the US' huge geography and short history. The abolition of spatial barriers by broadcast and electronic networks to the point of universal communication is fundamentally incompatible with a political system based on agrarian territoriality. You can't solve 21st century problems with 18th century political technology.
> what the IA did here is absolutely the right thing
> I don't understand the backlash in the comments here
I support CDL, and copyright change. IA may have poisoned the well by not actually doing CDL and trying to profit off of the claimed CDL books. So the backlash is understandable.
The first mistake IA made was engaging in CDL aka DRM in the first place. They should have just focused on making things available without restrictions.
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.
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 existed, even if only in a read-only form.
What's been preserved of the earlier web will always be a little more precious because so much was lost, I suppose.
Back in the day, I assumed anything I did online would be saved in some way unless explicitly stated otherwise. I also assumed the same of my software environments. I was, of course, painfully disabused of these notions multiple times before the lesson was fully drilled into me.
I'd like to live in a world where everyone was more aware of the value of making special efforts to preserve certain kinds of data (see also: having more control over it)-- like where it's part of our deeper culture. I think we're steadily moving in that direction in some ways, but it would've been nice if it had been more thoughtfully considered by both companies and governments 25+ years ago. I suspect if they'd known how much cheaper storage was going to get, they would have done a lot more.
Laws are only as good as people's willingness to defend them. They are not real. Resource mobilization is a much better long-term strategy than agreements backed by the threat of force, because legislative capture is a real thing and your precious laws can done away with by fiat. It has happened over and over. Please, do not put your faith in process.
interesting questions, but since there's no mutual exclusivity in real life, they aren't relevant to the real question, whether taxpayers believe there is value there
after all, congress could decide to cover this AND healthcare, they just don't want to do either
Individual Geocities pages are not valuable landmarks, but Geocities as a whole - the aesthetic, the community, the history - is definitely something to preserve. And the cost of saving all of Geocities is a tiny fraction of any physical monument.
What about the right to be forgotten? I certainly wouldn't want some random geocities page I made as a pre-teen, quite possibly with personal information on it, preserved and accessible for all eternity. Times were oh so much more innocent back then, putting mailing addresses and phone numbers on personal sites wasn't uncommon.
Jumping from one argument to another doesn't make for a good discussion. Either defend your initial argument, or start a different argument on the same level as the first.
That has nothing to do with it. The right to be forgotten is not mutually exclusive with public funding for the preservation of culturally valuable records. No one is saying you couldn't ask to have a specific datum removed, edited, or obscured to the public to protect your personal information.
AI was foolish and irresponsible. Republishing books without limitations would almost surely provoke a law suit that they would almost surely lose.
Not only is it a waste of resources, but now that they are in court they could very easily receive a judgement that curtails access they used to provide before the rollout of the "emergency library".
It's fine (and right, IMO) if you don't agree with the current copyright law but just ignoring them was foolish.
I think this is the right approach to take. Unless the IA went into their decision with their eyes open and knowing the huge risk they were taking with the existence of their organization. That would at least make it no more foolish than anyone else knowingly taking a huge risk.
But yes, the IA is both culturally important and significantly beneficial in everyday practical matters. I'm not sure what we can do to help IA come out of this intact though. "Write your congressman" is these days a somewhat laughable suggestion in the face of any problem, the desperate act of last resort that no one expects to actually succeed.
Maybe they shouldn't have done something that moronic? If people wanted free books they could always pirate them, openly infringing by hosting copyrighted books for a few people to slightly more easily read them for free... How could they possibly think that was a good idea?
The case for doing what they did is that it helped a lot of people access books (eg school curriculum ones) in the middle of Covid (not everyone knows how to pirate things).
Not saying it was the right move but you can see where they're coming from, they wanted to help people.
Yes I love the idea and I want it to be legal. Perhaps it is even worth someone testing the law here intentionally to get the courts to rule.
The Internet Archive's mission, imo, should be to protect and steward their archives and ability to continue to maintain them above all though. Putting that at risk for a morally righteous additional cause is not worth it. This was a leadership failure
Wanna throw in a small, but hopefully important story here. About 5 years ago, IA managed to recover a nearly decade long lost card game. It wasn't a huge deal, and the original creator had assumed it permanently lost when his website crashed. It wasn't even a great game tbh. The author was focused mostly on webcomics, so it was considered an inconvenience. Thing is, this was a game he made back in high school, so while it wasn't a huge financial loss, it was an emotional loss for him. He had even partially used IA to try and recover it. Turned out there were multiple steps needed to navigate to the right page, since the link IA had actually grabbed was different from the link the page it pointed to had. I received an incredibly heartfelt message from him talking about years of nostalgia I had unlocked by returning that page to the public. Mind you, this was a web comic artist, so he would have fully been within his right to tell IA to purge all his copyrighted content, but had he done that, this card game would be gone. forever. So, there's a clear balance that could be struck. Or... you could look at it the way he did: "I distribute my content in a way that makes advertisers happy. IA makes sure if I fuck up it's not gone forever. No one is using IA to read my comics unless my site is down. If it's down... well, I'm not making any money off of them anyways."
So... yeah, there are right ways to do things, and the thing is, IA is not a place people generally point to for piracy. Its a place to point to when the worst happens. When the original creator isn't making money on something anyways. Or when they've ensured a group of people can't pay them for something.
None of the hand wringing about covid is the least bit relevant to the question of whether the emergency library is copyright infringement. If Congress wants to set aside copyright during pandemics, that’s fine (and maybe a decent idea frankly). But in the absence of something like that, this is all just a smoke screen.
Beginning with the RIAA suing college kids and culminating the French police raiding what.cd, I have become anti-copyright. Not reformist, not 'but it's good for...'. Totally anti-copyright. Burn it all down. Share music. Scan books and upload them to libgen. The shared cultural history of humanity depends on it.
I'm always surprised by how many people will come out of the woodwork to shame IA for defying some of the most idiotic laws conceived. I have great faith that even if by some legal disaster this destroyed the IA, it would invigorate the people that work and support it... because they're right.
It makes it seem like the 4 publishers are against Internet Archive as a whole, when all they sued for was for the unrestricted publication of copyrighted books during the start of the pandemic.
It was prompted by the unrestricted lending, but it's pretty clear that the fight is now about lending at all.[0]
That may still only be the OpenLibrary, but it's not just the unrestricted lending, and I wouldn't be surprised it it also has a chilling effect on other scans. I'm curious how letting people view scans of obscure 1940s magazines is legal if doing it for books is not. They're not even restricted to one "borrower" at a time per physical copy with periodicals.
Pretty much "everything" (other than public domain) on the IA is on shaky ground. It's been mostly OK because very few people object to the archiving of their public web pages (especially given the IA respects robots.txt even retroactively) and, as you say, old magazines that basically have zero commercial value.
IA stopped respecting robots.txt in 2017. I had to issue a DCMA takedown to get my sites delisted. They are arrogant and think themselves above normal netiquette. They deserve to lose.
If anyone is arrogant it's those that think they can make information publicly available but then still control where it is shared.
You don't get to define "netiquette" to whatever you want it to be.
robots.txt in particular has been a giant mistake that only seves to entrench Google. Anyone that wants to archive or index the web as it appears to humans SHOULD ignore it.
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.
I'd rather have "IA preserved as it was in 2023" than no IA at all. If we have a gap in the collection between tomorrow and when someone sets up a new IA in a few years, that's very different than losing most things collected about the inception of the Internet.
The main issues are storage, centrialisation, moderation and copyright; that if you wished, rebel and ignore these with a distrbuted model like BitTorrent, or IPFS.
If an library burns to the ground you loose everything, so you will have to decentrialise. That then causes moderation issues as if you were to truely go decentrialised; what's stopping a bad actor uploading icky stuff? It would resolve the take-down from copyright, as they couldn't kill all nodes. But all sounds like a lot of work for a very little return.
> This is fundamentally a strike against taxpayer-funded public services by corporations and private individuals.
Wait what?
That's not how the Internet Archive is paid for.
And because it's private, it could have private replacements/competitors.
If another group were to clone all the stuff the Internet Archive doesn't get into hot water for, and not make the obviously hugely risky move that got them in trouble here, does that solve the problem? Are there potential issues re: the Internet Archive suing a second archive that copied them or such?
Seems like an opportunity for some rich folks to make a big philanthropic gesture in support of archiving information and making it available.
The issue is if the liabilities of having done this result in the organisation going bankrupt. Note that the plaintiffs have already stated that is not their aim.
Even then, the likelihood is more that someone else would take it over (though I imagine that the plaintiffs would, if they waived some proportion of their damages, that nobody currently involved in the current leadership and board was allowed anywhere near it).
I think leadership at Internet Archive was deeply irresponsible for deciding a short term stunt was worth potentially existentially threatening legal exposure.
The entire leadership there and anyone who signed off on the decision should be replaced. I am a donor but I'm pissed. They should have known better.
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.
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 hosted on IA).
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.
We're already screwed because the internet is dying. Everyone is just using phones now, all the forums are shutting down. IRC is dead. Matrix is dead. Discord lives because it's a gamer/trans rights echo chamber. but that's it. The late 90s and early 2000s was the golden era of the internet. we're living in the detritus now.
Amazing how reckless IA is with their library program while at the same time being extremely cautions with Wayback Archive to the point of retroactively applying robots.txt and removing website archives because "they can't afford even the smallest risk of being sued".
Ignoring fair use and countries other than the US we see that Copyright in the COnstitution said to promote science and useful arts, works should have protection for a limited time. Shortly after COngress defined "limited" as 14 years plus a renewal for 14. Then it was 28. plus a renewal and after more lobbying it reached today's time of the Authors lifetime plus 70 years. And since Mickey Mouse protection expires next year, we will probably see another extension. How life of the author plus 70 can be considered "limited time" just shows how the courts have trampled our Constitution.
Indeed so. It's only limited if you subtract out the human experience from policymaking. Given that the average lifespan in the US is 77 years, the reality is that you have to wait until you're almost at the end of your life for legally unrestricted access and use of material by someone who died the same year you were born.
I've donated as much as I could to Internet Archive. I really hope it helps them work through this case, and I urge everyone else to pitch in what they can, money or not, I'm sure anything could help at this point.
We're going to at some point talk about the fact that the IA decided to do the absolutely most stupid thing they could possibly do to ensure they'd create the setup for the most devastating ruling possible, yes?
Yes, our current copyright system is fucked up. This is, however, not a new fact. And the IA should've spent about 5 minutes talking to their lawyers to figure out why the idea as implemented was the worst thing they could possibly do. With pretty much no upside for them or the public.
It's the utter boneheaded waste of resources here that's just hard to comprehend. You know you work in a hostile environment. Behave accordingly.
(This does not change that Hachette et.al are positively disastrous for the public good and should, frankly, be looked at as a cartel. And treated accordingly.)
I've been reflecting a bit on how nature of the internet has changed, and how niche communities that I used to rely on all had specialty forums, mailing lists, etc, with history often stretching back years.
It seems like more and more of these old-school discussion forums are disappearing, and their modern equivalents (discord? subreddits?) just don't seem to have the same feel. DPReview is probably the most recent example, but I occasionally I will still visit specialty forums like eevblog.com for EE, or VW forums for my car. It's hard to imagine finding the same sort of expertise and years-long knowledge base on current discussion platforms.
Where do we go next? What happens when these communities are lost? Where are we to go if, for example, HN were to disappear?
Internet Archive is hugely important for me. I found a lot of antic books regarding technical specifications from vintage computers like Commodores VC 20, C64, C128, Amiga series as well as Atari ST and 286/386. Manuals, magazines, construction plans, whatever you want to search for.
A lot of software references for long gone C compilers, Turbo Pascal whatever was popular during the 80th - if you cannot find it in the IA, it didn't happen, so to paraphrase.
I love the IA for its effort, to deliver high quality material in a digitized format.
While I understand, that there might be copyright, I opt against a right to be forgotten. To me these books are classics, like any other literature. Preserve this heritage. You can donate to IA.
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 chop up and distribute. Happens all the time with for profit businesses....
Also, thumbs fucking down for society punishing Archive for doing something to help Americans during an extreme time of crisis. I feel like if an apocalypse ever happens, 10 years later, everyone left alive will be in court being sued for helping each other. America is so stupid and short sighted about EVERYTHING.
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.
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.
I agree with the title and general sentiment, but the article comes across as a diatribe and the author does not seem to be arguing completely in good faith ("There’s no evidence the borrowing program scooped up any independent writers’ income" relies entirely on the impossibility of proving a counterfactual). I want more information about the nitty gritty details of the case; the implications of the ruling on the CDL and books besides the 133 involved in the suit. It's seems like a pretty narrow case; not an existential threat to the IA itself.
The 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.
Are there any efforts to boycott the publishers pushing this?
I happen to think they're technically correct with the IA in the wrong here, but even so I think they should back down - they can take a big picture view that it's hardly dealt them a serious blow, it was the pandemic and the IA serves a useful purpose for society (though I suspect many publishers besides more enlightened ones would disagree with that due to self-interest!)
Could we partially back up the Internet Archive to Filecoin?
According to https://file.app/ storing 1PB of data to Filecoin for a year would cost $2,336, that's an amount that could be crowdfunded.
Of course, IA has much more than a petabyte of data, but it wouldn't be impractical to save the most important ( however you decide that ) parts of it.
which made copyrighted books available for free during the COVID-19 pandemic. The publishers behind the lawsuit alleged that this entailed copyright infringement.
Along with everybody with two brain cells to rub together. We all screamed "Hey, you idiots are going to ruin everything if you act like the pandemic has magically nullified the concept of copyright" and they fucking did it anyway, and now exactly what we said would happen is happening. It's like you found a landmine in your front yard and your buddy said "That landmine shouldn't be there so I'm gonna go step on it" and you told him not to and then had to watch him throw himself onto it while declaring it would be morally wrong for it to blow his stupid ass up.
Controlled digital lending had a chance of getting off the ground. The IA's Emergency Library's unlimited digital lending burned it to the ground and stomped on the ashes.
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.
They operate in a country where precedent is set in a court of law, how did you expect CDL to "get off the ground" if not challenged in a court of law?
> 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 their comms about this IA is desperate to reframe it as nothing to do with Emergency Library, probably because they know how it undermines their case completely.
"I'm tired of seeing this "well IA shouldn't have done the emergency library" line."
I appreciate that.
However, as a long-time, regular, sustaining financial benefactor of IA, I was annoyed that they strayed into this set of activities in the first place and then dismayed when they pushed the envelope on it during C19 quarantines.
I, and others, predicted this trouble and even if there is not direct causation why do they have to tickle this dragon in the first place ?
I mean, their mission statement is "universal access to all knowledge". They had to push these boundaries because it's their purpose. The boundaries themselves are dumb and arbitrary (see e.g. https://www.npr.org/2022/11/09/1135639385/libraries-publishe...). Maybe the publishers are deserving of more criticism than the Archive here?
Just because something is in your organization's mission statement does not require you to make imprudent and likely suicidal decisions in pursuit of it. That is not a means to accomplish your cause but rather a means to harm it.
But in our time it seems like there is no such thing as a prudent leader of any organization who understands just how high you can fly without pulling an Icarus and flying into the sun. Even those who know better fear the fanatics enough that they cannot tell them no since those who recommend moving with caution are branded as enemies of the cause and marginalized by the fanatics. And then people wonder why everything seems to end in disaster. The Internet Archive is far from the only institution to make this particular category of error.
I mean if I poke an angry drunk and he beats the tar out of me, the angry drunk certainly deserves criticism but all of my friends will be "WTF why did you go and poke him?"
I mean, in a way poking an angry drunk makes more sense given that the angry drunk might get arrested for battery.
In my estimation, there is zero chance that any positive change that IA might want out of the publishing company will come from the emergency lending program, and there's a non-zero chance that the IA will get shutdown because of it.
In the same boat. Haven't stopped donating as a result, which is a sentiment I've seen repeated elsewhere. It was still upsetting to see the organization I support put so much of why I donate to them at risk for something with so little upside.
The “emergency library” was a gift on a silver platter for the publishers. It was a reckless and stupid action that made the worst case scenario that the publishers wouldn’t have been taken seriously about a reality.
Obviously the 1-1 lending was an issue to the publishers, but higher risk from a litigation perspective.
And it is strictly speaking not a thing that IA should be doing in the first place. They should have set up a completely different legal entity for this and kept them visibly separated on all fronts, especially online.
They really should have tried to work with the publishers to introduce maybe a reduced rate rental interface if a work wasn't available from their "digital library" as a loaned book. More work, but if they have loan mechanics worked out, then rental is just a payment above that.
Or, if Amazon had/has a rental system in place, just affiliate link through to amazon when unavailable for rent/purchase there... that could fund IA without the minefield at all
They were only sued after they launched the Emergency Library. Also, Koeltl's current ruling applies in particular to lending without the waitlist restriction is legal. CDL in general isn't yet ruled on. IA's actions with the NEL not only prompted the lawsuit in the first place but have almost certainly poisoned the well with regards to the final ruling on CDL.
Ok, that appears correct. Still, the NEL prompted the suits in the first place and, among other things, proved that when the IA says it cares about the legal rights of publishers and authors it is lying. That's tremendously influential. If CDL had more years to become a regular thing that a significant fraction of people use, it would've had a much better chance in court.
> If CDL had more years to become a regular thing that a significant fraction of people use, it would've had a much better chance in court.
Not as implemented by IA. They admit they had zero controls in place for the 'pool' libraries so they likely had books in circulation in both print and digital at the same time. The also had a side for-profit company selling used print books linked from the digital CDL. This case never had a chance.
Yeah, I agree with that. I’m not sure it would really have changed the opinion of the court though.
Personally I’d much rather the money being spent on this was spent on a campaign to change copyright law to allow things like CDL rather than implausibly shoehorning what they want to do into the crevices of the current law. It’s an uphill battle, but one that I think might be more likely to succeed in the very long term.
The lawsuit was filed three months after NEL was launched. Controlled Digital Lending has been around for years and is used by public libraries. Publishers didn’t like it CDL, but they lived with it.
There absolutely is a correlation between NEL and the lawsuit. It’s a small part of the lawsuit, but it’s clear it pushed them to go to war against IA.
> Publishers didn’t like it CDL, but they lived with it.
Publishers spent millions of dollars developing digital lending platforms with fewer features and worse ROI than CDL, and then bullied libraries into adopting them.
This is a reasonable summary of their pre-IA activities:
> There absolutely is a correlation between NEL and the lawsuit.
As many comments point out in this thread, legally the trial and the judicial decision had little to do with the NEL. Therefore, in the counterfactual where the NEL had not been part of the dispute, the publishers would have still won their case.
> As many comments point out in this thread, legally the trial and the judicial decision had little to do with the NEL.
That's not in dispute.
> Therefore, in the counterfactual where the NEL had not been part of the dispute, the publishers would have still won their case
That fact that they brought the case does have a lot to do with NEL. Timeline-wise, it's clear NEL triggered the case. The HN crowd breeds a binary "yes/no" mentality, but real world businesses decisions, especially legal ones, take many things into account.
> Do you honestly believe the only reason publishers went after IA is the emergency library?
Yes, it's even mentioned a few times in the judgement. Publishers didn't like the CDL, but were mostly ignoring it. The NEL forced their hand, even if the lawsuit was not about that directly.
> They operate in a country where precedent is set in a court of law, how did you expect CDL to "get off the ground" if not challenged in a court of law?
If the IA really set up the CDL to have a plausible challenge they would not have shot themselves in the foot with complete lack of implementation controls, and clearly setting up a profit motive. Everyone should be furious at the IA for poisoning the CDL well.
Frankly, this isn't out of character for the IA. They want to be treated as a global system of record, but then started hostile initiatives like ignoring robots.txt. They've somewhat rectified this now, but their blog post about brazenly doing this is still up. It's good insight to how they think about themselves. They want protection but none of the regulation that will come with it. The proof of their character has been in the pudding the whole time.
I don't mind their desire to slurp up all the things... my bigger/biggest issue is probably the reproduction/distribution by making what they slurp generally available (when they bypass said robots.txt as an example).
For expired works, or works that are no longer published, I'm pretty morally flexible here and lean towards making it available.
Why would an organization with the goal of being a digital "library" care about robots.txt?
Would you expect public and private libraries to discard arbitrary books of a publisher from their collection because the author put a file called libraries.txt on their website?
If your public library found your journal laying on the floor would you expect them to put it on their shelf, even if you had a message inside the cover that said "not for reproduction"? Would they eschew blame if you'd shared this journal with friends?
The answer is no. You wouldn't. Some people put things on the internet but don't want them slurped up by some mindless machine, and some people post both public content and content which they don't want handled by a machine. It's a fair ask that the IA respect long-trodden patterns of the web.
The is no mindles machine, only computers automating work for humans. If you don't want things on the public web then noone is forcing you to put them there. Once you put things online accessible to anyone then things will get archived and shared. Deal with it.
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.
They are in court for the "emergency library". The emergency library is a key part of the case. It's just inevitable that the lawsuit would also hinge on if 1 - 1 CDL is legally permissible and the case will inevitably have to rule on that.
And yes, timing wise, and from the letters the publishes sent to the IA, they are explicitly about the "emergency library".
It might be the case that it prompted publishers to file earlier, but I have a very hard time believing they’d have just let 1:1 digital-for-physical lending slide for ever if it hadn’t happened.
I read the opinion. The emergency library appears once, only insofar as CDL being found not fair use entails that emergency lending was also not fair use.
It’s an entirely severable part of the decision. The publishers legally had a case against CDL without it.
I keep seeing this really bad take repeated on this site in the absence of more nuanced, informed legal opinions.
Whether CDL is legal under Fair Use or not was/is legally unresolved. Whether it's legally permissible to copy a printed material and distribute that copy as though it were the printed material was/is unresolved.
Lots of organizations have been skating along under one interpretation of Fair Use as a workaround for the burdensome licensing fees and absurd lending limits that publishers expect libraries to pay. Libraries being, y'know, super well-funded by that VC honey and all.
And it's not like publishers get less litigious over time. Whether the NEL prompted this or not is irrelevant; it was going to be tested, and IA are exactly the right organization to test it, and it wasn't going to become "more legal" if everyone just kept doing the same thing but more quietly.
Now that it's being tested, the right thing to do is to figure out if CDL is something we as a society want to enable for our libraries or not.
It's not the Internet Archive's job to be the first one to try to resolve fair use questions like this, and attempting to do so put the organization's orginal core mission at risk.
They should have let someone else take the risk, and continued archiving the internet. That is all that most of their supporters expected of them, for good reason. Their attempt to pivot toward being a generic, universal library was bad scope creep and should have been stopped when it started.
I'd bet that most people who care about this issue are primarily worried about losing the Wayback Machine. If that goes away, a lot of internet history will be lost forever. All those copyrighted works that IA was lending out won't disappear in the same fashion -- they will still be available from other sources.
IMO the Wayback Machine has always been the primary product, and most valuable part, of the Internet Archive. If IA wanted to do other things they should have done them via a separate legal entity to protect the Wayback Machine.
You'd be betting wrong. Even a casual skim of the Archive's blog will show that the Wayback Machine isn't their primary focus, and hasn't been for ~20 years. It may be their most important aspect to you, but the Archive is comprised of a large network of people working together to make all kinds of information available on the internet that wouldn't otherwise be accessible. To those people, those repositories are far, far more valuable than the Wayback Machine (and I promise they care a lot about this issue -- possibly more than HN does, given the timbre this topic has received here).
What I'm saying is that the things the people who work at Internet Archive care about may not be the same as what end users care about. I think the end users care mainly about the Wayback Machine.
Seems to me like the Internet Archive can determine for itself what it's job is, and they've determined that this is in fact part of their core mission.
Your perception that their purpose is solely to archive the Internet is at odds with their actual demonstrated activities for many years (the home page says: "Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more"), as well as their public mission statement: "Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge."
I've talked to the founder of the IA who told me he doesn't believe the lawsuit puts the IA at risk of having to shut down.
They can, but that doesn't mean they are right. Controlled Digital Lending is not an "obvious" mistake, and contrary to what people on HN keep saying, the emergency library program is not what this case is about. It also does it seem to be the situation that their entire mission is at risk.
They're an archive on the internet, not an archive of the internet. I disagree with your gradualist approach, because while you complain about scope creep private capital subjects itself to no such restraints. The IA is an institution, not a tool.
> Whether it's legally permissible to copy a printed material and distribute that copy as though it were the printed material was/is unresolved.
That's what IA wants to believe. But it's just not the case that legal points aren't "resolved" or "tested" unless exactly the same situation shows up in court and gets ruled on. The law works in large part by analogy. Strong enough analogies can be predicted.
Here's from the trial court's summary judgment opinion against IA:
> Even full enforcement of a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio, however, would not excuse IA's reproduction of the Works in Suit.
Then there's the citation so many saw coming to a case called ReDigi, about a system for reselling authorized digital music downloads by ensuring there was only ever one digital copy. They lost, too.
There's another case out there, Aereo, about a company offering a warehouse full of TV tuners subscribers could stream from on a one-to-one basis. For technical legal reasons, that involved different aspects of the copyright law. But the case didn't go well for Aereo, either. Or for any of its competitors pursuing essentially the same business model.
I listened in on the opening arguments. Judge Koeltl asked repeatedly for examples of prior cases analogous to the current one. ReDigi came up then, as did HathiTrust, but neither are exactly analogous to Controlled Digital Lending. The most similar case might be Author's Guild v. Google Inc., which was well covered by The Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t...), but even that case presents some differences in terms of commercialization. Hachette et. al. are arguing that the Internet Archive is a commercial entity because lending books increases the Archive's popularity online (that is a nearly verbatim quote from the publishers' arguments).
This isn't a combo I think I've seen or read from other lawyers. Does it mean "identical"? Again, that's not what's required to make a point "settled"...or an outcome predictable.
The trial court opinion distinguishes Authors Guild, Google Books, Sony, and TV Eyes very explicitly in its opinion, starting on page 19. It's hindsight now, so worth fewer points, but I'm not the only one who thought distinctions based on "not giving out full copies" and "providing equipment" were coming.
The trial court did not say the Internet Archive isn't a nonprofit, a charity, or tax-exempt organization. The question under fair use analysis isn't whether the infringer is commercial or not, but whether the use is. It also comes up under other factors, such as effect on market.
The first and only mandatory piece of reading for discussing this case right now is the trial court opinion. Summary judgment was only possible procedurally because the two sides of the lawsuit agreed on the facts, only differing on how law applies to them.
"""or premised upon, certain factual scenarios, and not applied to the subsequent case because of the absence or material difference in the latter's facts"""..?
> Whether it's legally permissible to copy a printed material and distribute that copy as though it were the printed material was/is unresolved.
A lot of IA supporters wish they would have gone about discovering this in a way that protected the actual internet archive. Maybe I don't understand the actual risks to the IA, but it feels like a reckless move.
This could be tricky. As I understand it (not a lawyer, etc.), whether an organization believes it is operating within the confines of the law can impact the outcome of a legal dispute. The important distinction here is that these are competing interpretations of Fair Use; there's no case law (as far as I'm aware) that settles this one way or the other.
So, for the Archive to go, "well, let's set up a shell corporation and do this thing through some structure that might shield us from harm" would require that they believed they were doing something illegal. See for example para. 3 in https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-national-eme...
I don't think anyone is suggesting the archive create a shell corporation. If archive leadership desperately wanted to get sued by publishers, they could have resigned from working at the archive and formed a different organization.
it was going to be tested, and IA are exactly the right organization to test it
CDL being legalized is dependent on the concept that it respects copyright and is only a digital version of rights and practices that already exist. The NEL proved that as far as the IA is concerned, CDL is nothing of the sort and is in actuality just a method of keeping rightsholders from suing them and what they'd really rather be doing is copying every work in existence and giving it away to everybody. They proved they don't want to be a library. They have destroyed their credibility. Other than the operator of Z-Library there is no worse entity to be litigating this.
Not wanting to be a library isn't illegal. The actions of IA don't have any bearing on the legality of CDL. You've made it clear that you don't like what they did with NEL and that's reasonable enough, I think extrapolation from there is unwarranted.
They shouldn't have any bearing. In the real world lawyers and judges are flawed human beings whose decisions are influenced by emotion and impression. If being hungry can drop a judge's parole granting rate from 65% to zero, an organization showing they'd really rather be totally flouting the law can certainly influence the outcome of a case.
> Controlled digital lending had a chance of getting off the ground. The IA's Emergency Library's unlimited digital lending burned it to the ground and stomped on the ashes.
One of the problems libraries face is that many publishers will not sell them "real" licenses, but only "quota licenses" that allow a total of n borrows and m concurrent borrows. Once the total number of borrows is exceeded, the license expires. n can be very low.
This was not always the case. 10 years ago, most licenses were unrestricted licenses that allowed an unlimited number of total borrows, but only limited the number of m concurrent borrows at a time - just like it would be if the library bought m real books.
The argument is that real books wear out - digital books don't. However, my local librarian vehemently disagrees with this statement, as many books survive more than 100 borrows, something the new e-book licenses will never manage.
Additionally, those "quota" licenses are still way more expensive than an equal amount of m real, physical books. It's insanity. My local library could, by their own account, not survive if the number of digital lends permanently increased significantly (like it did in 2020).
So if controlled digital lending had a chance for the mainstream, the publishers killed it many years ago, when many of them decided to just not sell libraries unrestricted licenses anymore, but only "quota" licenses. :/
This was not always the case because libraries weren't seen as a threat. Renting a digital book from a library was significantly harder than buying one from Amazon. The "Libby" app was a major motivator, at least in the US, because it made checking out digital books about as easy as just using the Kindle store. Usage went way up, and publishers panicked.
Publishers aren't necessarily the villains here, except in the regular way all middle men are the villains. Authors want to make money, and they make money by selling books. If a library can digitally loan the book an unlimited number of times in parallel, it's a bad deal for the author.
The "this book automatically explodes after 2 years or 10 rentals" system is a stupid compromise, but any solution is gonna be some sort of system to send money from libraries to companies based on how many people read the book.
Honestly, in these days of the google play store taking its cut from Amazon, using Libby is actually easier than using the kindle app to buy books. Every time I hit that "you can't buy books from inapp" button I remember that I can use Libby instead and go there instead of the browser to buy my book, tbh.
>Publishers aren't necessarily the villains here, except in the regular way all middle men are the villains.
Except that in this case, their role as the middle man is effectively pointless, since their normal role (printing physical books) is literally not happening here, and they are contributing nothing to the author except litigation.
Publishers manage a whole lot of tasks, notably the editing (up to and often including picking the book's title) and the design. Most important, though, is managing the marketing and sales. They get books into stores, they get interviews for the author, they get the book reviewed on websites, etc. For e-books, they're primarily a marketing firm. Whether that's worth the author giving half of their revenue to the publisher is another issue.
This has been a hostage/terrorist situation from the beginning. The Internet Archive has been holding the Wayback Machine hostage, essentially saying "let us break copyright, or this critical piece of internet history goes down as well".
Not only that, but the logic of the whole thing was weak anyway and I'd argue it didn't achieve any of its goals.
There are plenty of places to torrent books online. If people are desperate for a book and savvy enough to know about the Internet Archive, chances are they would have found an available copy online anyway. It's also not as though downloading an illegal copy from IA put the user at any less legal risk than downloading from elsewhere (other than giving publishers a bigger target to go after, which is exactly what happened).
It's a shame, because IA felt like a true public good on the Internet, and now it looks like it's going away. Sigh.
> Controlled digital lending had a chance of getting off the ground.
Fuck it. It should never get off the ground, really. We, as a society, don't need controlled lending for something that can be copied for free.
What we need is a fair mechanism to keep authors whole while keeping digital copies available for all, free of charge. And the system slowly changes by itself, discovering multiple such mechanisms. Like, for example, making physical books collectibles; or paying for early access (not for the access per se).
Unsolicited advice: IME I've found being angry because I was right serves no one, least of all myself. I would recommend you soften your language. Harshness, even if warranted, turns people off, especially those who could learn most from what you have to say.
I actually wondered initially, even if CDL was legal, how are they going to enforce the actual Controlled part? What's the standard for that?
Is simply not having a download button sufficient? Do you need to prevent people from right-clicking and choose "Save Image"? Or do you need to run the book through a video stream encrypted with Widevine L3 so screenshots don't work? Or heck, why not Widevine L1 which requires hardware not found on Windows because L3 will always be exploitable?
Adobe Digital Editions DRM and watermarking appear to be popular. It's definitely breakable (e.g. with Calibre and DeDRM, this is even required if you use an obscure E-Reader which does not support it), but secure enough that the publishers are happy.
My issue is with the headline: "If we lose the internet archive, we're screwed." But no one is saying we're in danger of losing the entire Internet Archive.
They do many many things - most of which are not in any way affected by this lawsuit. The judge even specified that the Internet Archive can still scan and publish copies of books in the public domain.
I'll admit I didn't consider statutory damages. But the judge addresses that in his opinion. The Internet Archive argues that as a nonprofit, statutory damages shouldn't apply. Tbe judge says it's just the wrong phase of the trial for that argument altogether.
You can say there's some potential there for a worst-case scenario - but even then, we don't "lose" the Internet Archive unless they also lose on that specific point, are fined heavy statutory damages, can't pay them off or raise the money, and then cease to exist. Sure that's a bad what-if scenario. But I think it's just too early to have it in headlines.
> Controlled digital lending had a chance of getting off the ground.
sure, it may have worked, but fuck me if that's what we get. controlled digital lending means we throw away[1] the great advantage brought by digital technology.
controlled digital lending is a very stupid thing to do. I saw megaupload. it showed us all that we can all share it all; we just don't seem to want to, or rather, the American government pursued them into extinction.
[1] looking at this even more closely, it's not that this 'digital advantage' is wasted, it is merely captured by authoritative powers who only understand markets, trade, and exclusive properties (exclusive due to being physical/material in nature unlike digital assets). e.g. Microsoft's billionaire business is made from capturing this digital boon as I called it.
Might be interesting to start a large "online library" that does physical books by mail. Similar to Netflix original dvd model, but for books. An annual membership fee of like $20/yr to help maintain storage infrastructure. Then ship those books to/from people in reusable boxes for bigger/unwieldy books or padded envelopes if that's sufficient for less expensive paperback.
Small per-lend fee to cover the shipping cost, with a return window or followup fee per N days... days determined based on the size/pages in the book/volume.
With efforts to work with various local libraries to handle some of the distribution closer to the people.
Everything old is new again. That's literally how for-profit subscription libraries (which often used to also ship books to people too far away to visit the physical library) used to work in the 18th and 19th century prior to widespread public libraries. The existence of these libraries even influenced the style of novels at the time. Because each volume was treated as a separate rental, novels became longer and longer so that they could be split across multiple volumes (most typically 3).
I don't see how the shipping costs could ever be low enough for that to make sense. Even after my organization's massive UPS discounts, shipping a paperback one state over still costs $4.30. Would you rather spend five bucks to rent a used book or fifteen to buy a new one?
> Might be interesting to start a large "online library" that does physical books by mail.
but this changes everything. My whole point (which you seem to have ignored) is that when dealing with physical goods, then the systems (traditions, institutions) already in place work fine.
But why would I do that when I can give the PDF version to everybody due to ZERO distribution costs? (not marginal costs, even less. zero costs once the PDFs are made).
We lost a lot when live-leak went away too to be honest.. 99% of it is things I would never want to watch again, but the one that sticks out in my mind is the video footage from the phones of the korean highschool students who waited to drown to death on the instructions of the captain of the Sinking Sewol ferry.
Does the IA own hardware? If so, I would guess the court could force the sale or transfer of those assets. In another comment somebody posted that the maximum damages could be something like $20 million which seems survivable.
We need a few many copies of the IA in the Seed Vault and have it constantly uploaded... We should also have a perma-satellite in LEO that can be streamed to... AND, while we are thinking out space, get a digital/physical seed vault on the moon - and can anything survive in the current Mars atmosphere? Send seed bombs to Mars and see what sticks? I mean, we appear to be hell-bent on terra farming Mars, so we may as well just throw seeds at it.
It contains a lot of copyrighted content, especially ebooks and software. This could be avoided if they would just follow the rules like everyone else.
Nearly every large service that allows user uploads contains a lot of copyrighted content, hence DMCA safe harbor. IA seems to operate in a gray area with stuff like the Console Living Room (which doesn't allow downloads), but as far as I've heard they are responsive to valid DMCA notifications. A lot of supposed "DMCA notifications" are bullshit, though (don't contain the required elements, not sent to the registered DMCA agent).
> When Julius Caesar burned the Library of Alexandria, it was harder to imagine a greater destruction of scholarship.
Dude. We're not talking about losing secret ancient knowledge. We're talking about losing pictures of cats.
There is nothing on the internet that's so valuable that we couldn't live without it. Real research, real knowledge, makes its way out of the internet. And besides, most of the internet that we can actually discover is cached in search engines.
Internet Archive stores much more than pictures of cats. Books, magazines, technical manuals, documents, software, movies, music, images, documentaries, concerts, etc. These are files that users upload. The web crawler is just one part of it.
You will find the most obscure things that practically cannot be found anywhere else. Stuff that would otherwise be permanently lost.
"Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more."
"As of January 1, 2023, the Internet Archive holds over 36 million books and texts, 11.6 million movies, videos and TV shows and clips, 950 thousand software programs, 15 million audio files, 4.5 million images, 251 thousand concerts, and 780 billion web pages in its Wayback Machine."
>Dude. We're not talking about losing secret ancient knowledge. We're talking about losing pictures of cats.
But we're literally talking about book lending, and preserving the old knowledge of the early internet. However lofty and pretensions the analogy may seem, comparing it to the burning of the library of Alexandria actually does seem like a better analogy than "we're just losing pictures of cats"
I agree. And I told my friends at the IA from the beginning that their plan was very, very foolish. People can look the other way at copyright infringement of web sites when it's just used for archival work. But when you're directly destroying an artist's livelihood by undercutting their income stream, well, you shouldn't be surprised if they'll be upset.
And you're a fool if you think that free copies at the IA don't cut into sales. Oh sure, some percentage of the people wouldn't have picked up a copy in the first place if they had to pay, but there's going to be some that skipped paying. It's the author and publisher's decision to give things away for free. Not anyone else's.
Here's a challenge to you: tell your boss that you think your company should let a free version of your service be available online. A free version with no restrictions. Now, perhaps you work at a fully open source company and your boss would say, "Great." But you probably don't because those are going out of business. How's MariaDB working out these days?
regardless of how you feel about IA's actions, they are the only ones doing digital archiving at their scale. i hope there are attempts made to replicate the non-infringing parts of the platform for the worst case scenario.
ipfs might be a hosting solution, but that's a small part of the challenge. You also have to source the data.
I recently used some online periodical archive access from my local library to find sources about 1940s musicians protesting recorded music...couldn't find anything. Then I tried IA, and boom, they've got it[0] — someone had to source and scan all these.
I recently wanted to revisit some 1980s-era computer games from when I was a kid. Internet Archive. How'd they get there? Someone there pulled them from 5.25" floppies.
A few weeks ago, I remembered 3-2-1 Contact magazine, which I enjoyed as a kid. No problem: IA has source and scanned them.
I could store all the DOS games in the world on my hard drive without noticing the space usage at all, but step one is acquiring copies of them. When it comes to the long tail of obscure 1940s periodicals or 1980s advertisements[0].
I agree the sourcing isn't something ipfs is magically solving. It is specifically to reduce the weakness of more centralised data store/serving which are easier targets.
Even in term of resilience ipfs isn't bullet proof. Decentralising helps. Pinning needs to exist somewhere as a hard rive and a network connection, ideally with multiple replication, and held with serving as such for extended periods, across every single file.
Also, I'm mentioning ipfs as a rescue solution more so than the internet archive served by ipfs necessarily, that's probably a longer line away from feasible I would guess, operationally etc.
A Most Sensible Proposal for the Absolute Perpetuation of Copyright Laws:
It is a melancholy object to those who walk through this great Internet of ours when they behold the countless instances of piracy and blatant disregard for the sanctity of copyright laws. The noble and ever-vigilant lawmakers, in their infinite wisdom, have blessed us with these righteous statutes, designed to protect the creative genius of the chosen few and ensure their perpetual enrichment. I shall now humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection, for the enhancement of copyright laws and the merciless suppression of those who would dare to infringe upon them.
I have been assured by a very knowing academic of my acquaintance that copyright infringement is a scourge upon our society, depriving deserving creators of their rightful earnings and perpetuating anarchy in the realm of intellectual property. It is of the utmost importance that we reinforce the importance of copyright, extending its reign to the furthest reaches of human creativity, even unto the most mundane and trivial expressions.
In order to accomplish this most necessary task, I propose that all human utterances, expressions, and gestures, be they written, spoken, or signed, be henceforth copyrighted, requiring the payment of a modest fee for their use. This fee shall be directed to the original creator, or their heirs, who shall retain control of their intellectual property for a period not less than one thousand years. This, I am confident, will provide ample incentive for the continuation of human creativity and innovation.
Furthermore, to prevent the heinous crime of piracy, it is imperative that all infants be implanted with a small monitoring device, connected to the great and mighty copyright database. This device shall track each individual's every expression, ensuring prompt and accurate payment to the appropriate copyright holder. Should any attempt be made to remove this device, or should an individual be found in violation of copyright laws, they shall be immediately and publicly flogged, that others may learn from their example.
For those who might object that this proposal would stifle creativity and hinder the sharing of knowledge and ideas, I say that such fears are baseless and utterly without merit. After all, it is only through the tireless efforts of our most esteemed creators that we, the unworthy masses, are granted access to the wisdom and brilliance of human thought. Surely, it is a small price to pay for the privilege of partaking in such exalted company.
I profess, in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the least personal interest in endeavoring to promote this necessary work, having no other motive than the public good of my country, the advancement of the arts, and the salvation of mankind from the hideous specter of copyright infringement. Let us embrace these changes, for only through the eternal protection of copyright can we ensure the continued flourishing of human creativity and the preservation of our most treasured works for generations to come.
How many PB is their entire site? I assume they could enable native read-only rsyncd easily enough on some caching nodes. Anyone re-publishing their library would be at legal risk but private mirrors should be safe.
According to https://archive.org/web/petabox.php it's 99 PB unique data and 212 PB total storage on 28k HDDs as of Dec. 2021 (3.2M USD at 15 USD/TB for the 212 PB, not sure if the price is realistic). It's quite something for a private initiative...
Someone needs to start a competing Internet Archive, which only archives, you know, THE INTERNET, and not xbox games, warez, movies, music, books, etc.
The overreach at IA is much bigger than it looks on the surface. Go look at the things people are uploading there.
> Someone needs to start a competing Internet Archive, which only archives, you know, THE INTERNET
And a faster, more reliable (in terms of percentage of 5XX responses) one would be nice. Right now Wayback Machine performance leaves a lot to be desired. I end up using archive.is whenever possible.
Yes, I donate to Internet Archive, don’t chastise me.
I'm surprised there isn't a paid alternative to Wayback Machine. I'd pay for fewer 5xx errors (which are often rate limiting, I.E. "You clicked more than 10 times in 10 minutes, that's WAY TOO FAST bro")
> If you’ve ever researched anything online, you’ve probably used the Internet Archive (IA).
Wow, pretentious much. The Wayback machine is an interesting passing curiosity that with great luck sometimes saves a webpage that isn't completely broken. The average person has never heard of its existence. Sure it's fun looking at how web pages used to look like and laugh at terrible designs but it's not exactly part of anyone's real workflow and surely violates right to delete and a bunch of other copyright laws.
You've stolen and rehosted the world's content and now you're surprised people are suing you? Do these people hear themselves? Did they not see pirating sites being fought tooth and nail in the past decades? I'm frankly surprised that the FBI hasn't sized their domains years ago.
How is that pretentious? It has so much truth to it. The attention span of our information stewards (large corporations, large universities) is so small that within 10 years you will have trouble finding information they once deemed critical and published.
I've used IA to research things I would not have been able to any other way, the information is _no where_ else!
* Finding missing YouTube videos from playlists. It's usually enough to get the title as YouTube doesnt care to show you the title of what's been deleted, privated, etc.
* A large university deleted all their "website builder" pages including a lot of research and news about certain projects. I used IA to find information on a building I bought from them.
* Looking at the origins/roots of companies like Unity3D. Have you seen their website in 1999? It's pretty cool!
* Old tutorials on websites that don't exist anymore.
There is so much use to IA when those that store our information would gladly pull it out from under us to save a few dollars.
It would be also very useful for me to stroll into a random bank and take a few hundred thousand, but alas I cannot. ZLibrary and Pirate Bay are also incredibly useful.
Sites have the right to remove content, and are sometimes legally required to. Sometimes even for good reason.
You've almost definitely used the IA if you have spent any amount of time browsing articles on Wikipedia. Appropriately sourcing information is a fundamental (and imperfect) part of Wikipedia, and doing so relies extensively on the creation of static IA snapshots to preserve the cited information.
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 dollars go pay for Elsevier's and Random House's and Wiley's closed source databases of publications? Why do we allow this inferior model of treating ideas to exist, when we now have solid data that the open way is far superior "for the progress of arts and sciences?".
Write your representatives. Organize your communities. It's time to pass a new Amendment to the Constitution:
Section 1. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of this Constitution is hereby repealed.
Section 2. Congress shall make no law abridging the right of the people to publish ideas.
> 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?
> LOL. The thing preventing us from curing cancer is copyright?
Outright preventing might be slight hyperbole, but it's definitely not helping, no.
See the scientific publishing model, which charges scientists twice for their articles (once to publish, once to view). Open Science and Scihub are two approaches to fixing this issue.
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 for the past as well as very little respect for domains outside of technology.
The internet archive is a huge boon in intangible value for communities and the world. It represents a huge cultural fountain that is accessible for anyone so long as they have the ability to access a computer.
A great example of this is that the Internet Archive was the ONLY place where I could enjoy a completely random piece of lost media from a children's television show called Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. There was a lost episode where OJ Simpson was in it and it never aired because of obvious issues. BUT there was a book published from the production called "White Rabbits Can't Jump"
https://archive.org/details/whiterabbitscant00varl
I can't imagine being able to go to any publisher or paid streaming service or god forbid Amazon to find this book, and I sure as shit don't believe in this community to help create ecosystems to support finding things like this.
I am so sick and tired of the copyright laws that play counter to productive creation and stymying efforts to preserve anything. The fact that I have to wait until people die until copyright is up is god awful. And the fact that I have to read people in this community who sound like boot-lickers for corporate oligarchs and their shitty value adds to the world drives me so fucking insane.
I'm only commenting here because I feel it's important to articulate that there are people out there who care, and that the vocal a-holes on this site really miss the point and the intangible value of what the internet archive provides.