The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41447758 - Sept 2024 (783 comments)
I think the fact a lot of sites are SPA or similar, and have bot blockers like Cloudflare is slowly killing their usefulness.
Um ... no. The ones putting The Internet Archive in danger are the copyright cartels and the laws that enable them. If you "love the internet archive", you should oppose the current copyright regime.
If you think that the Internet Archive is their own worst enemy and anyone who thinks differently is wrong, then you don't actually support the work of The Internet Archive. Sure, you may like parts of it. But you oppose its core mission.
I support changing the law to allow the The Internet Archive to operate. I am sad that the current laws (apparently) may not allow it to operate. I am not dunking on everyone who thought they have a reasonable legal case. Why? Because I "love the internet archive".
The risky stuff needs to be done via cut-aways that, if defeated, don't wipe out all the other good.
And even these cut-aways need to be used with discretion: better to choose favorable cases to fight first, instead of likely losses.
Supporting the mission doesn't mean one needs to bet everything on maximalist success in the first go-round.
Sure. I guess I do. I stopped giving after this fiasco, so my money is where my mouth is.
I still think the Wayback Machine and several of their projects are worthwhile. Perhaps the best outcome is this organisation fails and new one, with a new core mission, takes over. Because risking the entire organisation on an ideological boobdoggle and then doubling down practically ensures failure.
This is where I stand.
One can support the mission of the Internet Archive (in archiving the public internet) and still express concern over more legally questionable ventures that may threaten their existence (e.g digitising and redistributing owned copies of books) and may be more of a challenge being justified under the first-sale doctrine.
Trying to "change the law" by not actually changing the law and instead convincing the courts to ignore the law is delusional. And entirely within "own worst enemy" territory.
> then you don't actually support the work of The Internet Archive
> But you oppose its core mission.
"You're either with us or against us" is also solidly within "own worst enemy" territory.
You mean "living authors who would like to be paid for their work", right?
Hey, how do you make a living, jampekka?
Currently doing research. I've also done software development and some of our household's income comes from literature copyright royalties, though it's largely a pittance.
I would download, and upload, a car.
People who create stuff should have an exclusive right to publish their work-- for awhile. But not forever; our culture should not end up locked behind a paywall. And even in the shorter term, we shouldn't have a reigning oligopoly involved in distribution of cultural artifacts.
Or there should be some other ways of providing livelihood for people who create stuff. Preferably something that doesn't artificially limit the availability of their work. E.g. in Finland authors can get more income from library loans (paid from public funds) than what pittance the publishers allow for them from sales. Such system could be quite easily extended.
But in any case, very few authors really make a living from book proceedings. "Think of the authors" is mostly a narrative pushed by the industry that does their best to exploit the authors and minimize their share of the income.
Sure, but there's very few notable authors, too.
> industry that does their best to exploit the authors
Granted.
There's a lot of creative works that are very, very expensive to make (feature films, AAA video games, etc). Paying for them from proceeds makes sense-- hence the Constitution didn't really get it wrong with "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Likewise, writing a book takes a great degree of personal time and effort at risk.
> some other ways of providing livelihood for people who create stuff.
I do think that, even if we don't go all the way to a full basic income, it would still be good to have policy that somewhat lowers personal risk in creative, entrepreneurial, and inventive pursuits, as well as career changes. But still, that's not going to get the job done on its own.
I do not see anything that "question[s] whether authors and editors deserve to make a living for their work."
I am unsure whether you misread the thread we're in or are deliberately mischaracterizing what was said.
You might think that following policies they advocate will put authors in an even worse position. That would be a worthy point of discussion-- in good faith, instead of deliberately misreading and trolling.
Given: 1. It may require a login, for which I already have a cookie in my everyday browser. 2. It may require complex Javascript, e.g. React applications. 3. It may require dismissing popups for: cookie consent, newsletters, optional logins or signup, etc. 4. It may require solving a captcha. I have no problem letting the script run in the background and grabbing my attention when a captcha is required.
The 2nd Court wasn't quite this bad, but if we want to write headlines, how about: "With more trash rulings, how long before the copyright system collapses?"
As ever, Mike Masnick/Techdirt have strongly polarized but great coverage. https://www.techdirt.com/2024/09/05/second-circuit-says-libr...
* Given an annually compounding 30% linkrot, 99.92% of all the content ever published on the Internet is no longer available.
* This has been litigated, see Field v. Google Inc., 412 F (2006), and held to be "fair use" due to safe harbor of Section 512(b) of the DMCA
* This exemption does not apply to books, music, videos, or any of the other pirated material.
The IA doesn't appear to buy many books or CDs or DVDs (it has donation drives for second-hand copies). It doesn't do any controls over the number of copies "out". It resembles MegaUpload or other piracy sites more than a library.
This is untrue; under normal circumstances it had matching numbers "out" in the commercial book collection. It was madness in early 2020 when they temporarily abandoned this control in response to COVID.
https://archive.org/details/statisticaltherm0000stid/page/n4...
You can look at a few pages of this book; you can log in and check it out, if no one else has it.
I say this as a user of the other stuff. I just built a site that relies on them to serve classic game assets (legally, because it's just the free demo)[1]. But I'd definitely prefer that they shut that down if it could keep the wayback machine on.
Wikipedia is a household brand. They could, but they don't need it for anything.
What? The IA’s book lending represented a threat to no power. The Wayback Machine does, in that it holds people accountable, but nobody is dinging them for that.
Folks are trying to pitch this as a David v Goliath situation. That’s emotionally satisfying. But it isn’t true.
Especially at EU level it doesn't matter much who sits in the parliament when it comes to business interests. Such matters are dictated by the lobbyists.
For this, and many other more important changes, we need people in the streets to bring about change... Same as always.
How many times have you called your elected?
I’ve literally added language into state and federal law because I was the only one in my district who called on a niche issue. It was a battleground bill somewhere else. But not where I was.
They are careerists politicians because thats what this system optimizes for, literally no successful politician gives a shit about constituent input beyond when it helps them.
Define material. If it’s contentious, of course not—no one party can nor should be able to dictate on something like that. But lobbyists don’t make headway on headline issues. They do so in the shadows. That’s also where private interest can have a material impact. Again, I’ve helped redraft legislation because my Congresswoman literally hadn’t read the bill, nobody—lobbyist or voter—had contacted her on it, it was a nothingburger in New York but a big deal to me.
Lobbyists are mostly paid persistence. They don’t have superpowers, and the myth of campaign donations swinging electeds’ positions on major issues (versus new entrants) is mostly untrue.
> no successful politician gives a shit about constituent input beyond when it helps them
Of course. It would be naïve to expect otherwise. If you’re saying “I want x,” that’s N=1. Useless. If you make the case, however, that there is unseen donor or voter or turnout potential in an issue they’d ignored, you can generate a win win.
It may have always been inevitable that copyright laws would burn down our modern Library of Alexandria, but they didn't have to hand out torches like this.
Technology, the great equalizer, except when it's not. Mostly not.
Lending books was to individual user accounts, so I’d guess it could be possible to reach out to users.
I’ve used IA lending one time when I wanted to check a reference in an old book and it was purely research use.
I would imagine that most of the IA use cases are research or teaching, not entertainment.
To me that sounds like even more damning evidence of conspiracy to commit mass copyright infringement.
I know there's more but here's one quick thing I found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D14y1t43FIk&t=1446s
Basically he says people ask him "why don't you ask before allowing copyrighted content to be made available" and his reply is something to the effect of "because it's too much work". Earlier in the same video he also clearly shows a huge disdain for copyright in general and laughs at people asking him to take things down.
That’s the joke. This never had a chance of changing anything. All it’s done is make publishers look reasonable, because most people don’t believe one person should be able to unilaterally override millions of authors’ preferences around their works. (To say nothing of their livelihoods.)
This is a reasonable stance! If the IA had only released books of dead authors, they’d have a point. They didn’t.
Edit: On Hacker News more people upvote subscription bypass links in articles than downvote them.
No. But most people don’t agree with the IA’s anything goes position either.
I hate our system of copyright. But I can’t think of a better defence for it than pointing to the IA and saying is that what you really want? That authors can’t demand payment for their work?
Piracy is very much anything goes. People post “commentary streams” where someone else’s YouTube video or even whole movies are shown in their entirety and there’s basically zero backlash from millions of fans. From what I can see the vast majority of Americans take no issue with what IA did.
Because nobody noticed outside a narrow slice of tech and media. When people are polled on copyright, no copyright is never more than a niche.
I’ve pirated content. That doesn’t mean I believe copyright should be eliminated.
There is widespread dissatisfaction with our current system of copyright. That doesn’t imply support for abolishment.
> I don’t think most people agree with the current copyright system even slightly.
Vocal people do not agree with current copyright. Don't confuse that for the majority - on any issue.Not doubting you. But do you have a source?
Personally I don’t pirate movies, games, shows, etc or pay for such content.
The courts can be. But you have to be strategic.
Whether IA is morally right or wrong here is completely irrelevant. They undertook an activity which had significant legal risks attached, and that might undermine their future web archiving efforts.
THe IA might believe that they are morally and legally in the right here, but they should have at least predicted that, with copyright law being what it is, the courts could be "wrong" and believe otherwise. It feels like they don't see the difference between believing that they are right and assuming that everybody else shares this belief.
decentralize their dataset, with some distributed hash table, and a minimalistic blockchain for it (yes, yawn)
provide randomized signatures by themselves AND gather them from provably randomly selected participants of each page served, in order to testify a page showed specific claims/content at a certain date / time.
and so on ...
If the internet archive comes crashing down, at least the user base that relied on such services (or whatever simulacra they appeared to manifest) can band together and make such things happen properly, whereas the network effect was all usurped by the IA we know (and love or hate).
i.e. those who secure the status quo may regret allowing some greedy "publishers" to deconstruct an excellent fata morgana, the problem with deception is that some parts of the system start believing the overt purpouse of the covert behavior of other parts of the same system.
just look at how the soviet union spontaneously imploded.
Basically, get better at what you're already best at. Don't be the next Mozilla.