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.
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.
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.
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?
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'
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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...
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 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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
"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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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?
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).
> 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).
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.
> 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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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"""..?
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.
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".
> 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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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 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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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]
> 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.
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!
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.
>Frankly, what the IA did here is absolutely the right thing.
Sometimes doing the right thing gets you killed.
-
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 347 ms ] threadThe 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.
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.
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.
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?
Our culture can be a rich one and also not value the things the IA represent.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is actually the worst way to preserve newspapers. There are two major problems:
1. It's their own content. Sometimes they find old content embarrassing and hide it.
2. Sometimes newspapers shut down. When that happens, the archive disappears! This defeats the whole purpose of archival.
Indeed, but that’s not the definition of “high culture” as proposed a few posts up, so I don’t see how it’s relevant to the thread.
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.
They give dollars and get resources and services.
That's like saying fiat currency is just as valuable as lithium deposits. It's the hubris of the West.
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.
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.
1. See page 22-23 of https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/2023-02/trad1222.pdf
2. FY2022 had $51.9B of sales to foreign militaries and $153.7B direct commercial sales, for a total of $205.6B: https://www.state.gov/fiscal-year-2022-u-s-arms-transfers-an...
> You can look this information up pretty easily.
if you read what i wrote carefully you'll see you can't just look this information up pretty easily.
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
Now it's arguably a culture of attention and tribal identity.
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.
Oh you sweet summer child.
This isn’t an American problem, it’s a drawback to the economic system the globe has adopted.
> 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.
I think the archive made a bad decision. I do not think it is generally irresponsible.
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.
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. :(
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.
While that's true, having our custodian of archiving the internet bet the farm on stupid shit like this is outstandingly irresponsible. :(
So yeah, applaud places which do it all you want. And I'll be right there with you in a lot of cases.
But this? This was far past just stupid. :(
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.
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.
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.
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.
People would notice!
Not that that’s necessarily true for the internet archive, but…
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 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).
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.
No they can't, as I stated. Citations that point to URL's that no longer exist require IA. There's no other tool currently.
Or any other authority figure. My favorite exchange that I personally witnessed during early COVID was this one:
A, conspiratorially: You should hear what the dentist has to say about the COVID vaccine.
B: Why, does it affect my teeth?
[0] an informative article and the American College of Dentists response:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/05/the-tro...
https://www.acd.org/position-papers/the-college-responds-to-...
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.
Um... I don't get the impression that you are speaking from any sort of authority
Look up any of their stats and tell me that's librarians and "weird technologists".
Small example: 600,000 new users per month are niche technologists?
https://archive.org/about/stats.php
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)
What do New York Times reporters use to check web history when researching for their stories? Do they just make stuff up?
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.
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.
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.
Here it is: https://loc.gov
(no association with IA, just an active contributor)
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://archive.org/web/petabox.php
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliotheca_Alexandrina#Intern...
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.
Or this one? - https://netpreserve.org/
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.
In the US that would be the Library of Congress with its Mandatory Deposit requirement.
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?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/jun/14/books.booksnew...
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...
https://www.loc.gov/visit/
We should make better use of it.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
If they lose their case, 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:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/arts/dahl-christie-stine-...
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.
https://www.roalddahlfans.com/dahls-work/books/charlie-and-t...
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).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_Count_(album)
They're were a other examples of CDs cover art being modified because naked people.. https://janesaddiction.org/discography/janes-addiction/album...
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.
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.
That overstates IA's influence. People still think Elon started Tesla.
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.
I'm not really buying the Robinhood theory. This feels like some techies thinking their above the law and getting a reality check.
It's not like actual libraries don't offer digital lending. You might need to wait a week for Gane of Thrones, but it'll be OK.
IA decided the world was unfair and with a bit of arrogance decided to 'correct' it. Let's hope IA is able to just stop lending books and still exist.
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/l...
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.
It might be wise for someone to consider a truly archival only organization.
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.
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8...
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
The IA resisted nothing, achieved nothing, made nobody's life better, and created an opportunity for bad precedent.
It was an utterly boneheaded move. (It has also nothing to do with "exhaustive preservation")
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.
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].
[0] https://twitter.com/lkbm/status/1608480435691995137
[1] https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1643781181568327681
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://authorsguild.org/news/ag-celebrates-resounding-win-i...
https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...
And of course it contains websites that themselves are all about users sharing content without regards to copyright or even attribution.
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.
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.
Why can’t those who care about or undertake the effort? Thousands of nonprofit private historical societies exist.
after all, congress could decide to cover this AND healthcare, they just don't want to do either
Because:
> We already have laws for historical landmarks. These laws ensure the protection of things of societal significance
Random Geocities pages are not.
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.
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.
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?
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’s an entirely severable part of the decision. The publishers legally had a case against CDL without it.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.53...
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 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.
Edit: EA -> Emergency Library
That’s not the case. The decision is clearly written, and clearly about CDL.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.53...
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.
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.
There is plenty of evidence they were planning this far before the Emergency Library. Like the 2019 press push, https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/l...
> Also, Koeltl's current ruling applies in particular to lending without the waitlist restriction is legal. CDL in general isn't yet ruled on
Completely untrue. The entire judgment is about the CDL with the NEL only being mentioned as also being illegal as the CDL already was
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 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:
https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
> 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.
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.
Obviously the 1-1 lending was an issue to the publishers, but higher risk from a litigation perspective.
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
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
I find that doing worthwhile things and tickling the dragon go hand in hand most of the time.
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?
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.
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.
I highly recommend reading the judgement, https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.53...
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subscription_library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-volume_novel
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).
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.
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.
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...
that's a nice idea, but it's hard to see how we as a society have a say.
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.
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.
And commenters on HN can point out that they've made a huge, and obvious, mistake that risks their entire mission.
According to Wikipedia, you'd have to go back to 1999 to find an Internet Archive that was solely the Wayback Machine.
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.
There is nowhere else that you can browse for example a Byte Magazine from 1984 (https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-12/). This is what the Archive is about, from their perspective -- along with music, video (including broadcast video), and a whole lot of other projects: https://archive.org/projects/
You think most other people mainly care about the thing you mainly care about. Happens all the time.
[1] https://analytics1.archive.org/stats/pageviews.php
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.
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.
There is a whitepaper on Controlled Digital Lending that should be required reading for anyone wading in to this discussion: https://controlleddigitallending.org/whitepaper/
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.
Also, it seems like IA's purpose is different.
No. That is not how law works in the United States.
If you'd like to learn more, try "Common Law" and "Stare Decisis" on Wikipedia.
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.
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".
> 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. :/
(Disclaimer: Not the US, Europe)
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.
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.
NPR : Planet Money : The Indicator - The surprising economics of digital lending - https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1118289764
That's from August of 2022 and the lawsuit against the internet archive was just starting to gain steam.
And more recently (November 2022):
NPR : Planet Money - The E-Book Wars https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1135639385
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/author-coalition-bl... [2] https://www.authorsalliance.org/2021/08/17/library-lending-a...
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?
The birthplace of the national park system took place through preservation acts passed by Congress, not wishful thinking.
If IA is so amazing, why don't we codify and protect its existence through new law and not hope that a judge will squint favorably at copyright law?
Not saying it was the right move but you can see where they're coming from, they wanted to help people.
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
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.
http://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/
The cake is a lie.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Try something like https://geti2p.net for that.
Shutting down? Let's not jump to conclusions here, they would not shut down even if they lost.
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.
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.
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.
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]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free
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.
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.
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).
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.
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!
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.
Sometimes doing the right thing gets you killed.
-
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.
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.
What a poorly written article.
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:
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?
We can have a world where:
- Every child has access to humanity's best information
- We cure cancer
- 90% of American's media is controlled by 6,000, not 6, corporations
- College tuition costs drop dramatically
- Lower taxes
- More income equality
- No more opioid pandemics
- Making the world resilient against AI domination
Or a world where:
- We make sure that we don't risk disrupting new Game of Thrones spinoffs
I know what I choose.
> We can have a world where:
> - Every child has access to humanity's best information
> - We cure cancer
> - 90% of American's media is controlled by 6,000, not 6, corporations
> - College tuition costs drop dramatically
> - Lower taxes
> - More income equality
> - No more opioid pandemics
> - Making the world resilient against AI domination
LOL. The thing preventing us from curing cancer is copyright?
Sir, you have created an entertaining satire of software engineers. I congratulate you on your achievement. Good job!
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.
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.
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.