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Ask HN: Could what.cd have been considered an archive for copyright purposes?

4 points by nvarsj ↗ HN
I've been doing research into the history and demise of what.cd. If you don't know what what.cd is, it was a private bittorrent tracker that lasted for about 10 years. I find it fascinating:

- what.cd likely held the most complete digital archive of music in all of human history, surpassing any real world library archive.

- The rules of what.cd ensured high quality, bit perfect reproductions with checksum logs of the rips.

- Members of what.cd likely purchased as many, or more CDs as they downloaded, as the rules required this to remain a member.

It seems like the net cultural effects of what.cd far exceeds the economical cost. It was essentially a small club of digital archivists. If I was a librarian, it would make me very sad that it shut down and so much information was lost, likely forever. It's almost like the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria.

Given all that, would a system like what.cd be able to survive legally today, if it was defended as an archival/library? Can libraries be crowdsourced?

2 comments

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geoah
I would be very interested in reading more about this. Do you plan on publishing something based on your research?

Both what.cd and oink were amazing communities. I haven’t seen anything as involved as these projects since.

nvarsj
It's just my personal interest. I could potentially put my own research up somewhere, but it would be something fairly casual at this point. I just don't see it discussed very much, despite the ramifications for long term preservation of cultural art. There is so much music that simply doesn't exist in any library in the world. Yet it was on what.cd. How does society determine fair use? It seems to me like a clear cut case of it for archival purposes. I wonder if what.cd maintainers would have had any real legal basis as a archiver if they had gone to court.

Also, libraries are poorly resourced, and if they are the only exception allowed for archiving, how do you scale archival? It seems like if we as a society don't do something about it, then so much will be lost. It seems like the what.cd model actually worked, and I wonder if it could be replicated for other types of media in a legal sense. Like non-profit crowdsourced archival websites, something akin to Wikipedia but for digital media.