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Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site

822 points by KANahas 6y ago

pixxel 6y ago
> The Internet Archive removed waitlists for books in its "National Emergency Library" so that multiple readers could simultaneously download the same digital copy. >Four major book publishers have responded by suing the Internet Archive. If successful, they could bankrupt the nonprofit. >The publishers take issue not only with the National Emergency Library, but with the Internet Archive as a whole.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  I'm not sure why they thought this would be OK without getting permission from rights holders.
  - themodelplumber 6y ago
    It seems more like they thought it was worth a try, for prospective reasons. From that perspective I find it hard to fault them based on the potential reward ratio for opening such knowledge, much of it no longer in stores or libraries at all, to all of society. The Internet Archive is broadly improving on the library concept by leveraging their technology to push for innovation in intersecting areas of law and culture that are far from settled. While traveling this course, they have made day-to-day life and future prospects better for ordinary people who lack a voice in this domain in the first place. For this bold approach among other things they have what meager donation money I can give.
    - AmericanChopper 6y ago
      This reward ratio concept that you invented to frame this only accounts for one side of the transaction. For starters, to give something away for free, you have to own it first. There no moral high ground in deciding to give away other people’s things. But if you want to only focus on the potential for public good, then where would you put the “reward ratio” for the authors who’s work was given away by the internet archive? They struggle enough as it is to make money without a global financial crisis, and without large organisations taking it upon themselves to give their content away. What’s the “reward ratio” for all the book retails going out of business at the moment, and all the staff they’re laying off? Even if you hate publishers, and for some reason think they’re not entitled to property rights, what’s the “reward ratio” for their employees, or the people who’s retirements are invested in their publicly traded companies? It’s easy to sympathise with the motivation behind the decision, but really their decision was to summarily strip people of their rights, and the payoff for their hard work. It wasn’t a noble decision, because they didn’t own what they were giving away, and an attempt to rationalize the deprivation it contributed to is really just sad. It was truly a monumentally stupid decision on their part, and they’ve jeopardized their entire mission because of it.
      - matheusmoreira 6y ago
        > There no moral high ground in deciding to give away other people’s things. Copyright does not have the moral high ground either. The fact is most books should already have entered the public domain. However, the public was cheated out of its rights due to ever increasing copyright durations. Why should authors and publishers retain monopoly rights to works for over a hundred years? It should be a few years at most and that's being exceptionally generous. There's absolutely nothing moral about copyright. When properly constrained to a reasonable duration, it could be considered a necessary evil at best. In its current form, it is equivalent to rent seeking and should be straight up abolished.
        AmericanChopper 6y ago
        Copyright is neither moral nor immoral. It simply gives people who create content the ability to exercise certain property rights over that content for a certain period of time. There would be nothing immoral about abolishing copyright, but if you did then you could be sure that a lot less people would be willing to spend years writing the books you enjoy reading, or millions of dollars creating the TV shows and movies you enjoy watching. Whether or not you think the existing copyright laws have exceeded their purpose is a completely different discussion, and one that is not at all related to this particular topic at all. Because the Internet Archive did not only violate copyright for content benefiting from whatever your opinion of excessive copyright is, they violated it for all the content they had.
        som33 6y ago
        >Copyright is neither moral nor immoral. Except you're wrong, idea's are not rivalrous goods. Imagine if someone copyrighted the alphabet and we had to pay $5 a word. Rent seeking puts a damper on global productivity by allowing people to take information hostage. It can also be used as a tool for censorship. Right now copyright is censoring culture and I'm watching videogame history being destroyed on the PC due to bs copyright and software licensing laws. We should have gotten full property rights transfer for software. It's allowed mass invasion of privacy and theft of software on a mass scale by PC game companies. You haven't been paying attention to how monopoly rights have been used or abused. http://www.free-culture.cc/ http://www.free-culture.cc/ https://www.lessig.org/books/ https://www.lessig.org/books/
csense 6y ago
Is there any easy way to download large chunks of the Internet Archive? Maybe IPFS mirror?
- rohan1024 6y ago
  Their is already a distributed web version running here https://dweb.archive.org/details/home https://dweb.archive.org/details/home Not sure how it works though and IPFS shows red status?
- Maxious 6y ago
  "Let's Say You Wanted to Back Up The Internet Archive" by Jason Scott https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/h02jl4/lets_say_you_wanted_to_back_up_the_internet/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/h02jl4/lets_sa...
  - fouc 6y ago
    Very interesting discussion here. Apparently can get 16TB drives at $100 each on enterprise bulk pricing. An entire backup would be 3,125 drives for $312,500. But apparently the wayback machine itself is only about 2 Petabytes.. so if you don't need the collections perhaps only 125 drives needed, or $12,500.
    - jonah-archive 6y ago
      Disclaimer: I run the infrastructure/ops team at the Internet Archive. Unfortunately none of those numbers are really even close to correct (the discussion is always fun, but the folks in r/datahoarder are often not correctly informed. textfiles has more patience for it than I do). It would probably cost around 1.5M in drives, even at reasonable current enterprise volume pricing, to back up the 60+ PB of unique data in the Internet Archive (plus, as someone does note in that thread, the cost of running them -- even if it were a static backup to cold disks, you still need chassis to run them in for the backup process, space and infra for them, electricity, people, &c). I don't know offhand how much space the contents of the Wayback currently take up, but it's definitely an order of magnitude more than that number as well.
bosswipe 6y ago
Losing the Wayback Machine alone as a free resource would be a tragedy of bigger magnitude than the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. It must be saved!
- jariel 6y ago
  "would be a tragedy of bigger magnitude than the destruction of the Library of Alexandria." No, it would not even be close to that scale.
  - jakeogh 6y ago
    I suspect so too, but please; if you know more please elaborate.
  - Ygg2 6y ago
    Well yes, the library was smaller.
    - readarticle 6y ago
      And it was hardly the only one around at the time, many other libraries in many other Greek cities with Pergamum probably being the most notable.
      - kalium-xyz 6y ago
        The same can be said about the internet archive though.
        drngdds 6y ago
        Can it? I don't know of any other public internet archive anywhere near the scale of the Wayback Machine.
        kalium-xyz 6y ago
ascorbic 6y ago
The publishers should stop now that they've taken them down, but this was grossly irresponsible of the Internet Archive to do this, and they brought it on themselves. Releasing all of these copyrighted books for free hurt authors who rely on royalties to live, and it was inevitable that publishers would sue. I honestly don't understand why they did it. They have a responsibility as custodians of the archive to not put it at risk of destruction.
- MrStonedOne 6y ago
  >I honestly don't understand why they did it. Its right there in the article. >In March, as the COVID-19 pandemic led to the shutdown of public libraries, the Internet Archive created the National Emergency Library and temporarily suspended book waitlists Public libraries got shut down, they opened a replacement. Makes perfect sense to me.
  - ascorbic 6y ago
    Most public libraries have ebook lending, and there are lots of free sources that don't pose an existential threat to the archive
    - efreak 6y ago
      I know only a comparatively small number of people who own library cards. You cannot check out an ebook from the library without a library card. You cannot get a lovely card without physically entering the library. If you did not have a library card when the library closed, or you left it unused until it expired, then you cannot check out ebooks from the public library. Last I checked, there was, I think, 3 public libraries in California that allowed you to get a library card without being present. One of them required verification in some other method (fax? I can't remember), the other two had a second level card that didn't give access to ebooks or other library resources.
      - vinay427 6y ago
        A tangent, but I'm really glad California allows any state resident to use any public library in the state. In the state where I grew up, I was fortunate to live in a town with excellent library resources, but it was not something everyone in the state could enjoy even if they were willing to travel to another town. There's still a very noticeable difference between the library systems in different towns in CA, but at least one can still register and utilize online resources (assuming they visit in-person once if that's needed to register).
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
> In doing so, it essentially allowed for a single copy of a book to be downloaded an infinite number of times. The publishers response to doing this was completely predictable. Maybe the leadership needs more diversity of background. Having someone who has been in the publishing business in that meeting when this was deemed a good idea maybe could have prevented this disaster.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  I used to work for Spotify, and pretty much everything we did with music, lyrics, or album art had to go through legal, and projects often had to get label approval. This is just how you do things when you're working with IP. It is a bit surprising that a non-profit dedicated to archiving knowledge doesn't have more experience with IP law. Not even lawyer-level, just enough to know when CC general counsel.
  - abiogenesis 6y ago
    Interesting. Do you have any insider information regarding this? https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files-some-from-pirate-bay-170509/ https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files...
  - atemerev 6y ago
    If you work for Spotify, you probably know _where_ Spotify has got its initial music collection. ;)
  - zucker42 6y ago
    https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/20/spotify-settles-the-1-6b-copyright-lawsuit-filed-by-music-publisher-wixen/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/20/spotify-settles-the-1-6b-c... > The complaint had alleged that “Spotify brazenly disregards United States Copyright law and has committed willful, ongoing copyright infringement,” it said. Note that I'm not saying Spotify did anything wrong in this case, but it does show two things. 1. Big companies can manipulate the system better than nonprofits or individuals. 2. Publishers sue to exploit the unreasonable monopoly the law gives them.
mikequinlan 6y ago
I would love to support the Internet Archive but the people behind it deliberately took steps that were guaranteed to bankrupt them once the publishers filed their (inevitable) lawsuit. Why would I support an organization that is determined to commit suicide?
- Scientificx 6y ago
  > I would love to support the Internet Archive but the people behind it deliberately took steps that were guaranteed to bankrupt them once the publishers filed their (inevitable) lawsuit. Why would I support an organization that is determined to commit suicide? Because they hold a part of our digital history.
  - shard 6y ago
    You make it sound like this is the tech version of "too big too fail".
    - polytely 6y ago
      Well it's the only place of its kind, it's more like it's too important to allow to be destroyed. Because you know that these copyright holder do not actually care about history or culture. Look what happened to what.cd, they will burn down everything to protect their profits
      - s1artibartfast 6y ago
        Maybe someone can buy their assets when they go trough bankruptcy
        vulcan01 6y ago
        The fear is that the "someone" will be the selfsame publisher companies.
        6y ago
sxates 6y ago
I've got a synology NAS with at least 10TB spare capacity I could donate... If only there were a way to use it, and thousands more, to back up important projects like this in a decentralized way.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  I keep thinking that the Bittorrent protocol would be an ideal fit for this; specifically, it would need a way to have all peers agree on what chunks of a file they themselves host and share to ensure the most complete copies available. And it would need a system for keeping it updated. I wouldn't mind hosting a NAS in my closet and some bandwidth + storage to donate to the IA. I also think cloud providers - all of them - have the capacity to host backups of the IA; I'd prefer if companies like Amazon, Google would donate their storage and bandwidth capacity to the IA instead of just money.
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    Bittorrent would require the totality of the archive to be preserved in multiple copies. I can't have a copy of that ledger here at home. We'd need a distributed highly redundant filesystem for that.
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      44 million items in the Internet Archive are available as torrents. It's pretty straightforward to enumerate them, download them, and serve them up in a swarm.
      - rbanffy 6y ago
        That doesn't make it sure the torrented data is always available. The index is important, but the data and its metadata are much more important.
        toomuchtodo 6y ago
linuxhansl 6y ago
"Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and Wiley [...] sued the organization." Noted. I'll spend my money elsewhere.
- Ensorceled 6y ago
  Well, you were not spending money there anyway if you were downloading your books from IA ...
  - shervinafshar 6y ago
    Ad hominem; Not everyone standing in support of IA in this case is even a user of their emergency library.
    - Ensorceled 6y ago
      I guess it's an ad hominem, except the original comment made no argument, just implied they were boycotting those publishers going forward. I made no argument, just implied their boycott would probably be infective because they probably weren't buying books anyway. Ad hominem is a logical fallacy where the debaters character is attacked rather than their point addressed. There is no argument being made here on either side.
      - shervinafshar 6y ago
        I beg to differ. I see at least two main arguments here: Argument 1: Since these publishers are suing IA (premise), I find it justified for myself to boycott them (conclusion) Argument 2: Well, you were not spending money there anyway (conclusion) if you were downloading your books from IA (premise). Why did I feel that Argument 2 was unsubstantiated and ad hominem? I asked myself, how did the person making Argument 2 know that the OP... (a) ...has used IA National Emergency Library at all? may be they are just unhappy with these publishers bullying an NGO? (b) ...has used IA NEM to download books from these particular publishers? may be they are buying everything Penguin publishes, but enjoyed using NEM for reading other books from other publishers? Assuming things about the characters and actions of the person you are discussing with and making your argument about those rather than the topic of discussion, is a sign of a logical fallacy to me.
echelon 6y ago
Could the Internet Archive donate its holdings to a new nonprofit? If the servers were transferred to a new custodian and the anticipated bandwidth charges were paid forward, then what would they have to lose?
- Santosh83 6y ago
  The legal system in most of the bigger countries is not that naive. They probably cannot do a thing with their assets when a court case is pending...
- jacquesm 6y ago
  Adding bankruptcy fraud to the list of items on the docket is likely not the best way forward.
  - mindslight 6y ago
    The data stored on the disk drives is what the world values, but it actually has very little economic value. Internet Archive should start selling off the storage/server setup to a different nonprofit at fair market value ("Internet Cloud"), and renting continued access. If some eventual creditor wants to claim that the specific data collection on the disks had a value that was improperly sheltered from bankruptcy, they would be free to make a copy.
- arkades 6y ago
  The plaintiff would have seven years in which to have the court claw back the transferred assets and, as there's no way that it would come close to looking like an ordinary course-of-business transfer, it would not only make them more likely to lose the suit (by making them look even more like law-flouting criminals), but it would likely add a criminal charge to the mix (bankruptcy fraud).
ComputerGuru 6y ago
I warned about this very outcome when they announced the initiative [0]. The Internet Archive is too big and too important to gamble on this short term of a win (giving everyone free and unlimited access to all books for a few months at most). Assuming the organization continues to exist after this ordeal, their entire board should step down for putting at risk one of the most invaluable archives in existence. I’m an executive board member for a much smaller IRL non-profit and could never imagine opening us up to such liabilities. I honestly cannot fathom how this came to pass. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22732640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22732640
- beebmam 6y ago
  For me, I can't help but place blame on the actual agents of its potential demise: the plaintiffs of this lawsuit
  - raxxorrax 6y ago
    Yes, I think that perspective is actually more relevant, even if the IA might have made a mistake. But I see only victims in this conflict. Most authors today don't really eat with golden spoons and to have an organisation that helps them get their fair share of the work they put into the books is certainly necessary in the internet age. On the other hand the internet archive is an extremely valuable service. I hope some form of agreement can be reached that doesn't end in even more dysfunctional laws or judgments around copyright or the end of business for any participant.
    - cmiles74 6y ago
      Personally, I find it hard to be sympathetic to the publishers and authors when they are so over-the-top. Painting the Internet Archive as "vile" and claiming they don't provide any valuable service strikes me as so far from the truth as to be insulting. It feels like they are targeting people who don't really know much about what IA is or what they do... That makes me wonder if it's really about more than IA and their emergency lending program, but now I'm probably starting to sound paranoid. I'm sure that some authors lost some dollars to this program, but is it really all that much? The coverage on the lawsuit doesn't mention how much injury the publishers (and, to a much lesser degree, their authors) have suffered.
Santosh83 6y ago
As for saving their data, well, about 60 million people need to donate 1 Gb of their hard drive space, or just 6 million people, 10 Gb of their HDDs. Or more soberingly, any one of the world's millions of multi-millionaires could write a single cheque to back up all their info, but will anyone do so? Probably not, as collective resources and knowledge are of no benefit to them, indeed even detrimental.
- andromeduck 6y ago
  If I did the math right, it actually only costs about 72k per year to archive 6PB on Google cloud. Thats well within the range of one Googler's annual discretionary income.
  - alwayseasy 6y ago
    sounds cheap! is bandwidth included?
    - zucker42 6y ago
      0.01/GB
      - RNCTX 6y ago
        Not on google cloud, more like tree fitty.
        zucker42 6y ago
        Oops, I thought this was in reply to the Backblaze comments :/
  - mkl 6y ago
    I'm not sure that's right. It's 60PB [1], not 6PB. According to https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing Google's cheapest (?) non-redundant archive storage seems to be USD $0.0012/GB/month. 60 PB = 60e6 GB, so 1 year would cost 1260e6.0012 = 864e3 = USD $864 thousand. That's not counting the cost of getting the data in or getting any of it out to use. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23485594 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23485594
sergeykish 6y ago
> Libraries pay three-to-five times more than retail price for eBook access. If an individual is charged $15 for an eBook license, a library often pays $50 or even $84 for one license. Why? I should be able to donate book to the library. Is it possible with eBook?
- zozbot234 6y ago
  Because an eBook is not at all like a physical book. It's more like a service that interacts with DRM to provide an illusion of physicality. Libraries should be enabled to digitally lend their physical holdings and not have to rely on these eBook licenses, and CDL is a great model to that effect.
  - matheusmoreira 6y ago
    > Libraries should be enabled to digitally lend their physical holdings and not have to rely on these eBook licenses, and CDL is a great model to that effect. Why must we come up with increasingly complicated ways to hide the fact unlimited copies are available? The right thing to do is to abolish copyright. It's time to stop pretending copyright makes sense in the 21st century.
    - manigandham 6y ago
      Just because the marginal cost of a copy is zero does not mean there's no value in the information, and it's perfectly reasonable to gate access to that value. Copying a video file is free too but I'm sure you wouldn't argue that anyone can watch a movie for free just because someone else made it. People have a right to own and control the distribution of their works that they invested in creating.
      - deleted 6y ago
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      - matheusmoreira 6y ago
        > it's perfectly reasonable to gate access to that value It's also perfectly reasonable to distribute that information widely and without limits. The fact information is valuable to someone doesn't make it scarce. The harsh reality that creators need to face is that only the first copy need be paid for. > I'm sure you wouldn't argue that anyone can watch a movie for free just because someone else made it I would. Instead of charging money for copies of a movie, film makers need to figure out how to get paid before the movie is made. Creation must act like an investment, not a product. Maybe the answer is crowdfunding? Whatever it is, it needs to pay the creators before they start working so that the final result can be released into the public domain immediately. > People have a right to own and control the distribution of their works that they invested in creating. That's nothing but an illusion. Once the information is out there, it can no longer be controlled. People will copy it, distribute it, edit it, create derivative works, memes... And there's next to nothing creators can do to stop it. The work becomes part of mankind's culture. People infringe copyright every day without even realizing it. "Creators have the right to control..." sounds like a neat idea on paper but it completely breaks down when put into practice. When authors try to "exercise control over their content", we end up with websites which disable right click and create annoying pop ups when we try to copy paste. It's completely ineffective and serves only to annoy people. The only way to control information is to control all the computers that process it. Currently, it's impossible but not for lack of trying. In order to prevent infringement, the copyright industry is prepared and willing to sacrifice computing freedom: their ultimate goal is to prevent us from running "unauthorized" software. Programs that do subversive things like copy movies or play movies without checking for a valid license first would not be signed by the authorities and the processor would then refuse to execute such code. Therefore, the copyright industry is an existential threat to hackers and the free and open source software community. I'd rather sacrifice the entire copyright industry than computing freedom.
maddyboo 6y ago
I'm surprised and disappointed that the IA ever thought this would go over well, though I do respect the reasons for which they took these actions. Circumstances around the COVID-19 lockdowns have been very unusual. If you consider the hundreds of millions (+?) of books in libraries around the world that were temporarily inaccessible to people, including children and students, I feel the IA's actions were somewhat justified, perhaps not legally, but at least morally. Young people losing months worth of time that could have been spent reading and learning constitutes an emergency in my mind, and the IA stepped up to help lessen the societal damages. You could consider that because these many millions of book licenses were temporarily "invalidated" by circumstance, the Internet Archive simply rebalanced the scales by providing the same people who would have been deprived of books at their local/school library a similar means to access them. Such a scenario probably never even crossed the mind of anyone involved in IP law before COVID-19, but if it had there might be some provisions on the books for cases like this. On another note, I would actually expect publishers' sales to increase during the lockdowns for the above reasons of books being held in purgatory at libraries. That publishers should profit from a global crisis in this way seems wrong. Again, none of this is to say that the Internet Archive's actions were legally justified, but I think to equate them to pure piracy is ignoring the nuance and context of this extraordinary situation. I desperately hope the publishers drop the suit and come to an agreement with the IA that doesn't result in the loss of this treasure trove of knowledge or the end of the organization.
- deleted 6y ago
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- gigama 6y ago
  My thoughts exactly, thanks for summing up so nicely. (upvoted) IA's decision was apparently done with good intentions and under extraordinary circumstances. The "open sharing" was not meant to be permanent, and anyway has been discontinued. IA never sold the content for profit so any "harm" should be similarly limited. Publishers would generate nothing but good karma by dropping their lawsuit. As an author it is more valuable to me to know my words and ideas are being preserved so they can be read and absorbed by future generations. Trying to extract every last dollar from such works undermines the pursuit of knowledge and human potential.
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swiley 6y ago
At least the internet archive usually follows the law. When IA is gone everyone will just go to libgen which actively opposes copyright. Not only that but a bunch of history will be lost and source links on Wikipedia will break. IMO: most publishers are worthless anyway. I feel bad for authors but it’s hard to sympathize with publishers.
jacquesm 6y ago
I have three favorite properties on the web: Wikipedia, the Khan Academy and the Internet Archive. Whoever thought this was a good idea should own up to it and step down, this was a dumb move if there ever was one and risking one of the prime - and very fragile - properties on the web like this was highly irresponsible. Keep in mind that IA already has plenty of enemies who are continuously monitoring it and hoping to find a way to shut them down, then hand them this sort of thing on a golden platter. Beyond stupid, really.
- Vinnl 6y ago
  That's a good list, but OpenStreetMaps should really be added to it :)
  - kick 6y ago
    I like OSM as much as anyone, but out of those four, it'd be fourth by a mile or two in terms of usefulness. The English Wikipedia (especially if including other Wikimedia projects) on its own would be practically enough to get humanity back to the current day if things were set back a few hundred years. The Internet Archive would be, too, and probably a bit further. OSM would just get you a slightly better map. That said, 'jacquesm's comment is beyond stupid, really.
    - AsyncAwait 6y ago
      I'd swap Khan Academy for OSM any day.
    - CivBase 6y ago
      > That said, 'jacquesm's comment is beyond stupid, really. Name calling is not constructive.
      - 411111111111111 6y ago
        I'm not the person you responded to, but that comment was just reacting considering how jacquesms comment ended. He (jacquesm) is always judgemental to a silly degree, despite not actually knowing even close to enough to form a useful opinion. That does get tiresome considering how often he comments and can end in snippish comments like the one before.
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mosburger 6y ago
Sorry for my ignorance on this matter, but why do safe harbor provisions not apply to the Internet Archive? Shouldn't they have been served a DMCA takedown request bu the publishers, and then been in violation of those rules and paid the applicable penalties had they not complied and removed the offending content?
- watwut 6y ago
  Safe harbor applies when other people upload books on your service and you are taking it down as you go. It does not apply when you publish books on your service.
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slim 6y ago
I stand behind Internet Archive on this. It was the right opportunity to try and push our freedoms forward. Internet Archive is political by design, it's very existence is merely tolerated by the Intellectual Property Feudalists. It was the good fight to fight.
- nix23 6y ago
  Same here! That is a digital lending system like every other public-library does it...
  - dhosek 6y ago
    No, it really isn't. Library contracts for digital lending vary based on publisher and service provider, but aside from some very small publishers (if that), there is no publisher that allows for unlimited unmetered lending of e-books and certainly not for the price of a print book. Note also that physical books face physical wear and usually have to be retired after 25–40 (at most) lends.
    - nix23 6y ago
      >allows for unlimited unmetered lending of e-books It is metered, you can lend max 5 book for max of 1 month. >Note also that physical books face physical wear and usually have to be retired after 25–40 (at most) lends Is that something positive? Should we go back to DVD because publishers would love that, or is streaming still ok?
      - dhosek 6y ago
        It's an observation that points out that physical books are not being lent out hundred or thousands of times so the physical book argument (or the digitized physical book argument) don't hold water.
        nix23 6y ago
        I never said anything about physical book's, many public-library have already e-books, like research-papers and so on.
cmiles8 6y ago
The archive is a valuable resource, but what they did here was very short sighted. I'm certainly know copyright monger and broadly believe in the free exchange of information, but what they did here is pretty clear cut stealing of IP from others. They don't have to 'make money' from it to cause significant damage in the process. For better or worse the revenue streams associated with that IP generation is a large driver for the IP to be created in the first place.
toss1 6y ago
I had not realized that the Internet Archive had 'expanded' into archiving & re-publishing books While that endeavor certainly has value, the risks - exactly these risks - are so large & obvious that it really should have been done as a separate corporate organization. That is what the corporate structure is for - to separate liability. Now, the entire, and very valuable, core mission is threatened by this one project.
- Ensorceled 6y ago
  This was my first thought when this whole thing erupted ... why wasn't this a separate not-for-profit corporation. The publishers may still try to pierce the corporate veil but that's a whole 'nother matter.
- sp332 6y ago
  They already had 20,000,000 books (yes that's a real number) available. The ones with Controlled Digital Lending allowed a single DRM-encrusted copy to be loaned out for each physical copy that they owned. This isn't explicitly allowed by any law but publishers hadn't challenged its claim of fair use and a lot of libraries use this technique. What was new with the NEL was just removing the one-copy-at-a-time limit. But the lawsuit is challenging the whole concept, including what other libraries are doing.
downerending 6y ago
Seems like a good week to be erasing history.
zatel 6y ago
I wonder if this rhymes with whatever happened to the library of Alexandria.
jroseman93 6y ago
This wasn't the smartest move on behalf of the Internet Archive. One could argue they were pushing boundaries to get courts to rule in their favor but in the process they are putting the whole project in jeopardy. Taking current copyrighted works and just giving them away en-mass is obviously not going to be seen favorably by many.
6510 6y ago
Yeah, its only 10 PB, why don't we p2p a copy? 1000 people with 10 TB to spare wouldn't work but 50 000 storing 100-400 GB each would be managable. 50 k pp is ofc nothing and probably not even enough to get it done before everyone gets bored. (you know who you are) Tubing it into the boxes would be the hard part. Most wouldn't need to do much more than contribute bandwidth and temp storage. Why isn't file coin done?
- kempbellt 6y ago
  The archive is closer to 60PB - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23485594 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23485594 So, more like 300,000 people storing 200GB, which is quite a tall order to fill.
  - myself248 6y ago
    > There are 237,000 members of this subreddit. > If each of us on average contributed 1TB (I know many people, myself included, would give a more than that for IA), we'd have 237PB, which feels like it's the right ballpark of raw storage to host 30PB in a reasonable, redundant, "not ideal but at least functional" manner. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/h02jl4/lets_say_you_wanted_to_back_up_the_internet/ftk6p59/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/h02jl4/lets_sa... I'm small-potatoes for a datahoarder, but I could chip in a couple tens of TB to a project like this. If only I knew what button to push to make it do the thing.
jborichevskiy 6y ago
I really don't know much about the intersection of IP and legal entities, but in the worst case scenario would IA be able to move its web captured assets to a separate company instead of tanking the whole thing? In other words, just leave the "library" division to tank and take the heat while everything else remains safe elsewhere?
headalgorithm 6y ago
See announcement: https://blog.archive.org/2020/06/10/temporary-national-emergency-library-to-close-2-weeks-early-returning-to-traditional-controlled-digital-lending/ https://blog.archive.org/2020/06/10/temporary-national-emerg...
xhkkffbf 6y ago
To appease publishers? How about so they can do right by the many authors out there who are still able to sell books through Powell's, Amazon or other local book sellers?
- intopieces 6y ago
  When America fixes copyright to be life of the author only, I will agree with your concerns.
  - JoshTriplett 6y ago
    How many books written today would not be written at all if copyright lasted, say, 20 years? 10? "life of the author" is far too long; all culture is built atop other culture. Copyright is a limited exclusive grant in exchange for the expectation of having more works written/created/painted/drawn/designed. We should not just ratchet up the duration or scope of that exclusive grant without the expectation that we'll get more value out of it (more works) in the trade.
  - miles 6y ago
    Life of the author seems potentially too short. What if an author is struck down early? Shouldn't their family left behind be able to enjoy some of the profits for a period of time?
    - JoshTriplett 6y ago
      Indeed. A fixed duration would be preferable for that and many other reasons.
      - votepaunchy 6y ago
        The constitutional requirement is for “limited times”, and current law is not.
    - musicale 6y ago
      Copyright is a temporary monopoly granted to incentivize the creation of new works, for the benefit of the public. As you suggest, a time-based copyright term (such as the original Copyright Act term of 14 years with a single renewal) would preserve this incentive even for authors who expect they might die before the end of the term.
notatoad 6y ago
Good. the internet archive does important work, and i'd hate to see a stupid idea like this put their larger mission at risk. i'm not sure how they ever thought they could get away with giving away other people's property, just because pandemic.
mcguire 6y ago
"Many open-Internet activists have been discussing how to back up the archive and make it more resilient for years. The temptation would be to employ a distributed system, such as a blockchain, that would be censorship-resistant and couldn’t be legally shut down." A blockchain? Oy, vey.
- rodiger 6y ago
  Enjoy the multi-petabyte full node :)
jedberg 6y ago
The more interesting thing here is the "controlled digital lending" test case that will almost certainly come of all of this. If they somehow prevail on that aspect and set a legal precedent there, that would resolve a lot of issues for a lot of companies. For example, Netflix could stream every movie ever, as long as they bought enough DVDs for peak demand. Or those companies that would set up 1000 TV antennas in a datacenter and then stream the signal. I just hope the IA doesn't get CDL shot down because of this and ruin it for everyone.
- wriq 6y ago
  "Or those companies that would set up 1000 TV antennas in a datacenter and then stream" I believe Aereo tried just that and failed - https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/06/25/325488386/tech-firm-aereo-performs-an-illegal-service-supreme-court-says https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/06/25/325488386...
  - jedberg 6y ago
    They did. But this could set a new precedent.
  - JoshTriplett 6y ago
    They didn't fail, they were sued out of business. They had a good, innovative product that people wanted, and they got killed by a lawsuit. This is the tradeoff we're making when we grant more exclusive privileges over works: we kill innovations like these, and we get...probably not any more creative works than we would have gotten otherwise.
    - MR4D 6y ago
      But they did fail. The Supreme Court ruling is here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/13pdf/13-461_l537.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/13pdf/13-461_l537.pdf
    - ghaff 6y ago
      >They had a good, innovative product They had a product that involved giving away other people's stuff. Yes, copyright terms are too long. But I'm pretty sure that a vanishingly small amount of that stuff they were giving away would be out of copyright even with a copyright term of 20 years.
hnaccy 6y ago
Not sure why IA thought it was smart to do unlimited lending and risk the organization. Did they just get caught up wanting to do something during virus stuff?
musicale 6y ago
> Controlled digital lending is a legal framework, developed by copyright experts, where one reader at a time can read a digitized copy of a legally owned library book. And digital downloading is a communication framework, developed by technology experts, where an unlimited number of readers can read the same digital library book at the same time.
- arpa 6y ago
  One of the benefits of the press was decreased price of a copy and increased availability of printed material. Look where it got us. Digital medium is no different from the press, but of course, papyrus industry is going to fight it, because profits are more important, always.
jwilk 6y ago
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23491229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23491229
- dang 6y ago
  That appears to mostly overlap with the current story, so we'll merge the threads. Thanks!
CaliforniaKarl 6y ago
I wish that the Internet Archive had tried to work around this by reaching out to public libraries, and having those public libraries agree to "loan" their still-on-the-shelf books to the Internet Archive. That might not cover all the copies that were simultaneously checked out by people (I don't know the numbers involved), but it would have helped.
EamonnMR 6y ago
I'd be disappointed if they end up dying on this particular hill.
slaymaker1907 6y ago
I’m a big supporter of IA, but they really goofed on this one. I donated after this incident but mostly because I don’t want this lawsuit to shut them down.
ulfatufo 6y ago
Hello
kazinator 6y ago
The Internet Archive should do the lawful thing and remove all the content that the publishers want removed, to prevent the collateral damage to the important resource for those who just want to see old versions of pages that have changed or disappeared. Leave the books and whatever to pirate torrent sites and just do the Wayback Machine thing.
sebow 6y ago
This would be a huge loss for the internet, and dare i say for humanity and our way of preserving raw, uncensored history. Whoever is behind shutting down IA should be looked down upon by everybody who respects freedom and knowledge.
omginternets 6y ago
I wonder if there’s a turnkey(ish) way to crowdsource a back-up the archive on IPFS. IPFS seems ideally suited for two reasons: - it has decent censorship-resistant properties - content addressing is ideal for partial backups because individuals can mirror as little (or as much) as they want. I’m guessing the simplest approach would be to somehow get access to the archive’s database? Is this something they’d be willing to consider?
- erk__ 6y ago
  There is probably not enough people on IPFS to store all of it in a safe way that makes it always aviable. I think all the items on the page already have torrents so it would likely be better to share them around.
  - omginternets 6y ago
    How many people are on IPFS?
aurizon 6y ago
Remember (the few that are over ~~600 years old might??:) ) Gutenberg invented movable type and a publication explosion followed. Heretofore books were hand copied, with errors etc. A medieval ~Xerox room was full of scribes - hard at work. A Xerox salesman who promised to double the speed of your copying - he walked in a hulking slave with a whip - all the monks visibly and hurriedly sped up. Back to Gutenberg, https://www.livescience.com/2569-gutenberg-changed-world.html https://www.livescience.com/2569-gutenberg-changed-world.htm... the Authors fought printing presses, they fought even lending libraries. Books were often chained to the shelves to limit access as well as theft. https://www.amusingplanet.com/2015/04/the-last-surviving-chained-libraries.html https://www.amusingplanet.com/2015/04/the-last-surviving-cha... So here we are now. Progress is hampered by the old farts, the author's guilds, the Enslaviers,(intentional typo on Elsevier) who want us to be in permanent economic thralldom to them. They are mere pebbls in the rivers of progress, so we pay them to go away, or break them up. MIT has the right idea. I wish the Nobel Committee would announce that they will only consider openly published knowledge for future prizes. I wish all governmental other funders of research would mandate open publication. I wish all past published work was declared open NOW!!

822 points by KANahas 6y ago

> The Internet Archive removed waitlists for books in its "National Emergency Library" so that multiple readers could simultaneously download the same digital copy. >Four major book publishers have responded by suing the Internet Archive. If successful, they could bankrupt the nonprofit. >The publishers take issue not only with the National Emergency Library, but with the Internet Archive as a whole.

dehrmann 6y ago
I'm not sure why they thought this would be OK without getting permission from rights holders.
- themodelplumber 6y ago
  It seems more like they thought it was worth a try, for prospective reasons. From that perspective I find it hard to fault them based on the potential reward ratio for opening such knowledge, much of it no longer in stores or libraries at all, to all of society. The Internet Archive is broadly improving on the library concept by leveraging their technology to push for innovation in intersecting areas of law and culture that are far from settled. While traveling this course, they have made day-to-day life and future prospects better for ordinary people who lack a voice in this domain in the first place. For this bold approach among other things they have what meager donation money I can give.
  - AmericanChopper 6y ago
    This reward ratio concept that you invented to frame this only accounts for one side of the transaction. For starters, to give something away for free, you have to own it first. There no moral high ground in deciding to give away other people’s things. But if you want to only focus on the potential for public good, then where would you put the “reward ratio” for the authors who’s work was given away by the internet archive? They struggle enough as it is to make money without a global financial crisis, and without large organisations taking it upon themselves to give their content away. What’s the “reward ratio” for all the book retails going out of business at the moment, and all the staff they’re laying off? Even if you hate publishers, and for some reason think they’re not entitled to property rights, what’s the “reward ratio” for their employees, or the people who’s retirements are invested in their publicly traded companies? It’s easy to sympathise with the motivation behind the decision, but really their decision was to summarily strip people of their rights, and the payoff for their hard work. It wasn’t a noble decision, because they didn’t own what they were giving away, and an attempt to rationalize the deprivation it contributed to is really just sad. It was truly a monumentally stupid decision on their part, and they’ve jeopardized their entire mission because of it.
    - matheusmoreira 6y ago
      > There no moral high ground in deciding to give away other people’s things. Copyright does not have the moral high ground either. The fact is most books should already have entered the public domain. However, the public was cheated out of its rights due to ever increasing copyright durations. Why should authors and publishers retain monopoly rights to works for over a hundred years? It should be a few years at most and that's being exceptionally generous. There's absolutely nothing moral about copyright. When properly constrained to a reasonable duration, it could be considered a necessary evil at best. In its current form, it is equivalent to rent seeking and should be straight up abolished.
      - AmericanChopper 6y ago
        Copyright is neither moral nor immoral. It simply gives people who create content the ability to exercise certain property rights over that content for a certain period of time. There would be nothing immoral about abolishing copyright, but if you did then you could be sure that a lot less people would be willing to spend years writing the books you enjoy reading, or millions of dollars creating the TV shows and movies you enjoy watching. Whether or not you think the existing copyright laws have exceeded their purpose is a completely different discussion, and one that is not at all related to this particular topic at all. Because the Internet Archive did not only violate copyright for content benefiting from whatever your opinion of excessive copyright is, they violated it for all the content they had.
        som33 6y ago
        >Copyright is neither moral nor immoral. Except you're wrong, idea's are not rivalrous goods. Imagine if someone copyrighted the alphabet and we had to pay $5 a word. Rent seeking puts a damper on global productivity by allowing people to take information hostage. It can also be used as a tool for censorship. Right now copyright is censoring culture and I'm watching videogame history being destroyed on the PC due to bs copyright and software licensing laws. We should have gotten full property rights transfer for software. It's allowed mass invasion of privacy and theft of software on a mass scale by PC game companies. You haven't been paying attention to how monopoly rights have been used or abused. http://www.free-culture.cc/ http://www.free-culture.cc/ https://www.lessig.org/books/ https://www.lessig.org/books/

csense 6y ago

Is there any easy way to download large chunks of the Internet Archive? Maybe IPFS mirror?

rohan1024 6y ago
Their is already a distributed web version running here https://dweb.archive.org/details/home https://dweb.archive.org/details/home Not sure how it works though and IPFS shows red status?
Maxious 6y ago
"Let's Say You Wanted to Back Up The Internet Archive" by Jason Scott https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/h02jl4/lets_say_you_wanted_to_back_up_the_internet/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/h02jl4/lets_sa...
- fouc 6y ago
  Very interesting discussion here. Apparently can get 16TB drives at $100 each on enterprise bulk pricing. An entire backup would be 3,125 drives for $312,500. But apparently the wayback machine itself is only about 2 Petabytes.. so if you don't need the collections perhaps only 125 drives needed, or $12,500.
  - jonah-archive 6y ago
    Disclaimer: I run the infrastructure/ops team at the Internet Archive. Unfortunately none of those numbers are really even close to correct (the discussion is always fun, but the folks in r/datahoarder are often not correctly informed. textfiles has more patience for it than I do). It would probably cost around 1.5M in drives, even at reasonable current enterprise volume pricing, to back up the 60+ PB of unique data in the Internet Archive (plus, as someone does note in that thread, the cost of running them -- even if it were a static backup to cold disks, you still need chassis to run them in for the backup process, space and infra for them, electricity, people, &c). I don't know offhand how much space the contents of the Wayback currently take up, but it's definitely an order of magnitude more than that number as well.

bosswipe 6y ago

Losing the Wayback Machine alone as a free resource would be a tragedy of bigger magnitude than the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. It must be saved!

jariel 6y ago
"would be a tragedy of bigger magnitude than the destruction of the Library of Alexandria." No, it would not even be close to that scale.
- jakeogh 6y ago
  I suspect so too, but please; if you know more please elaborate.
- Ygg2 6y ago
  Well yes, the library was smaller.
  - readarticle 6y ago
    And it was hardly the only one around at the time, many other libraries in many other Greek cities with Pergamum probably being the most notable.
    - kalium-xyz 6y ago
      The same can be said about the internet archive though.
      - drngdds 6y ago
        Can it? I don't know of any other public internet archive anywhere near the scale of the Wayback Machine.
        kalium-xyz 6y ago

ascorbic 6y ago

The publishers should stop now that they've taken them down, but this was grossly irresponsible of the Internet Archive to do this, and they brought it on themselves. Releasing all of these copyrighted books for free hurt authors who rely on royalties to live, and it was inevitable that publishers would sue. I honestly don't understand why they did it. They have a responsibility as custodians of the archive to not put it at risk of destruction.

MrStonedOne 6y ago
>I honestly don't understand why they did it. Its right there in the article. >In March, as the COVID-19 pandemic led to the shutdown of public libraries, the Internet Archive created the National Emergency Library and temporarily suspended book waitlists Public libraries got shut down, they opened a replacement. Makes perfect sense to me.
- ascorbic 6y ago
  Most public libraries have ebook lending, and there are lots of free sources that don't pose an existential threat to the archive
  - efreak 6y ago
    I know only a comparatively small number of people who own library cards. You cannot check out an ebook from the library without a library card. You cannot get a lovely card without physically entering the library. If you did not have a library card when the library closed, or you left it unused until it expired, then you cannot check out ebooks from the public library. Last I checked, there was, I think, 3 public libraries in California that allowed you to get a library card without being present. One of them required verification in some other method (fax? I can't remember), the other two had a second level card that didn't give access to ebooks or other library resources.
    - vinay427 6y ago
      A tangent, but I'm really glad California allows any state resident to use any public library in the state. In the state where I grew up, I was fortunate to live in a town with excellent library resources, but it was not something everyone in the state could enjoy even if they were willing to travel to another town. There's still a very noticeable difference between the library systems in different towns in CA, but at least one can still register and utilize online resources (assuming they visit in-person once if that's needed to register).

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

> In doing so, it essentially allowed for a single copy of a book to be downloaded an infinite number of times. The publishers response to doing this was completely predictable. Maybe the leadership needs more diversity of background. Having someone who has been in the publishing business in that meeting when this was deemed a good idea maybe could have prevented this disaster.

dehrmann 6y ago
I used to work for Spotify, and pretty much everything we did with music, lyrics, or album art had to go through legal, and projects often had to get label approval. This is just how you do things when you're working with IP. It is a bit surprising that a non-profit dedicated to archiving knowledge doesn't have more experience with IP law. Not even lawyer-level, just enough to know when CC general counsel.
- abiogenesis 6y ago
  Interesting. Do you have any insider information regarding this? https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files-some-from-pirate-bay-170509/ https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files...
- atemerev 6y ago
  If you work for Spotify, you probably know _where_ Spotify has got its initial music collection. ;)
- zucker42 6y ago
  https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/20/spotify-settles-the-1-6b-copyright-lawsuit-filed-by-music-publisher-wixen/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/20/spotify-settles-the-1-6b-c... > The complaint had alleged that “Spotify brazenly disregards United States Copyright law and has committed willful, ongoing copyright infringement,” it said. Note that I'm not saying Spotify did anything wrong in this case, but it does show two things. 1. Big companies can manipulate the system better than nonprofits or individuals. 2. Publishers sue to exploit the unreasonable monopoly the law gives them.

mikequinlan 6y ago

I would love to support the Internet Archive but the people behind it deliberately took steps that were guaranteed to bankrupt them once the publishers filed their (inevitable) lawsuit. Why would I support an organization that is determined to commit suicide?

Scientificx 6y ago
> I would love to support the Internet Archive but the people behind it deliberately took steps that were guaranteed to bankrupt them once the publishers filed their (inevitable) lawsuit. Why would I support an organization that is determined to commit suicide? Because they hold a part of our digital history.
- shard 6y ago
  You make it sound like this is the tech version of "too big too fail".
  - polytely 6y ago
    Well it's the only place of its kind, it's more like it's too important to allow to be destroyed. Because you know that these copyright holder do not actually care about history or culture. Look what happened to what.cd, they will burn down everything to protect their profits
    - s1artibartfast 6y ago
      Maybe someone can buy their assets when they go trough bankruptcy
      - vulcan01 6y ago
        The fear is that the "someone" will be the selfsame publisher companies.
        6y ago

sxates 6y ago

I've got a synology NAS with at least 10TB spare capacity I could donate... If only there were a way to use it, and thousands more, to back up important projects like this in a decentralized way.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
I keep thinking that the Bittorrent protocol would be an ideal fit for this; specifically, it would need a way to have all peers agree on what chunks of a file they themselves host and share to ensure the most complete copies available. And it would need a system for keeping it updated. I wouldn't mind hosting a NAS in my closet and some bandwidth + storage to donate to the IA. I also think cloud providers - all of them - have the capacity to host backups of the IA; I'd prefer if companies like Amazon, Google would donate their storage and bandwidth capacity to the IA instead of just money.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  Bittorrent would require the totality of the archive to be preserved in multiple copies. I can't have a copy of that ledger here at home. We'd need a distributed highly redundant filesystem for that.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    44 million items in the Internet Archive are available as torrents. It's pretty straightforward to enumerate them, download them, and serve them up in a swarm.
    - rbanffy 6y ago
      That doesn't make it sure the torrented data is always available. The index is important, but the data and its metadata are much more important.
      - toomuchtodo 6y ago

linuxhansl 6y ago

"Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and Wiley [...] sued the organization." Noted. I'll spend my money elsewhere.

Ensorceled 6y ago
Well, you were not spending money there anyway if you were downloading your books from IA ...
- shervinafshar 6y ago
  Ad hominem; Not everyone standing in support of IA in this case is even a user of their emergency library.
  - Ensorceled 6y ago
    I guess it's an ad hominem, except the original comment made no argument, just implied they were boycotting those publishers going forward. I made no argument, just implied their boycott would probably be infective because they probably weren't buying books anyway. Ad hominem is a logical fallacy where the debaters character is attacked rather than their point addressed. There is no argument being made here on either side.
    - shervinafshar 6y ago
      I beg to differ. I see at least two main arguments here: Argument 1: Since these publishers are suing IA (premise), I find it justified for myself to boycott them (conclusion) Argument 2: Well, you were not spending money there anyway (conclusion) if you were downloading your books from IA (premise). Why did I feel that Argument 2 was unsubstantiated and ad hominem? I asked myself, how did the person making Argument 2 know that the OP... (a) ...has used IA National Emergency Library at all? may be they are just unhappy with these publishers bullying an NGO? (b) ...has used IA NEM to download books from these particular publishers? may be they are buying everything Penguin publishes, but enjoyed using NEM for reading other books from other publishers? Assuming things about the characters and actions of the person you are discussing with and making your argument about those rather than the topic of discussion, is a sign of a logical fallacy to me.

echelon 6y ago

Could the Internet Archive donate its holdings to a new nonprofit? If the servers were transferred to a new custodian and the anticipated bandwidth charges were paid forward, then what would they have to lose?

Santosh83 6y ago
The legal system in most of the bigger countries is not that naive. They probably cannot do a thing with their assets when a court case is pending...
jacquesm 6y ago
Adding bankruptcy fraud to the list of items on the docket is likely not the best way forward.
- mindslight 6y ago
  The data stored on the disk drives is what the world values, but it actually has very little economic value. Internet Archive should start selling off the storage/server setup to a different nonprofit at fair market value ("Internet Cloud"), and renting continued access. If some eventual creditor wants to claim that the specific data collection on the disks had a value that was improperly sheltered from bankruptcy, they would be free to make a copy.
arkades 6y ago
The plaintiff would have seven years in which to have the court claw back the transferred assets and, as there's no way that it would come close to looking like an ordinary course-of-business transfer, it would not only make them more likely to lose the suit (by making them look even more like law-flouting criminals), but it would likely add a criminal charge to the mix (bankruptcy fraud).

ComputerGuru 6y ago

I warned about this very outcome when they announced the initiative [0]. The Internet Archive is too big and too important to gamble on this short term of a win (giving everyone free and unlimited access to all books for a few months at most). Assuming the organization continues to exist after this ordeal, their entire board should step down for putting at risk one of the most invaluable archives in existence. I’m an executive board member for a much smaller IRL non-profit and could never imagine opening us up to such liabilities. I honestly cannot fathom how this came to pass. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22732640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22732640

beebmam 6y ago
For me, I can't help but place blame on the actual agents of its potential demise: the plaintiffs of this lawsuit
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  Yes, I think that perspective is actually more relevant, even if the IA might have made a mistake. But I see only victims in this conflict. Most authors today don't really eat with golden spoons and to have an organisation that helps them get their fair share of the work they put into the books is certainly necessary in the internet age. On the other hand the internet archive is an extremely valuable service. I hope some form of agreement can be reached that doesn't end in even more dysfunctional laws or judgments around copyright or the end of business for any participant.
  - cmiles74 6y ago
    Personally, I find it hard to be sympathetic to the publishers and authors when they are so over-the-top. Painting the Internet Archive as "vile" and claiming they don't provide any valuable service strikes me as so far from the truth as to be insulting. It feels like they are targeting people who don't really know much about what IA is or what they do... That makes me wonder if it's really about more than IA and their emergency lending program, but now I'm probably starting to sound paranoid. I'm sure that some authors lost some dollars to this program, but is it really all that much? The coverage on the lawsuit doesn't mention how much injury the publishers (and, to a much lesser degree, their authors) have suffered.

Santosh83 6y ago

As for saving their data, well, about 60 million people need to donate 1 Gb of their hard drive space, or just 6 million people, 10 Gb of their HDDs. Or more soberingly, any one of the world's millions of multi-millionaires could write a single cheque to back up all their info, but will anyone do so? Probably not, as collective resources and knowledge are of no benefit to them, indeed even detrimental.

andromeduck 6y ago
If I did the math right, it actually only costs about 72k per year to archive 6PB on Google cloud. Thats well within the range of one Googler's annual discretionary income.
- alwayseasy 6y ago
  sounds cheap! is bandwidth included?
  - zucker42 6y ago
    0.01/GB
    - RNCTX 6y ago
      Not on google cloud, more like tree fitty.
      - zucker42 6y ago
        Oops, I thought this was in reply to the Backblaze comments :/
- mkl 6y ago
  I'm not sure that's right. It's 60PB [1], not 6PB. According to https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing Google's cheapest (?) non-redundant archive storage seems to be USD $0.0012/GB/month. 60 PB = 60e6 GB, so 1 year would cost 1260e6.0012 = 864e3 = USD $864 thousand. That's not counting the cost of getting the data in or getting any of it out to use. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23485594 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23485594

sergeykish 6y ago

> Libraries pay three-to-five times more than retail price for eBook access. If an individual is charged $15 for an eBook license, a library often pays $50 or even $84 for one license. Why? I should be able to donate book to the library. Is it possible with eBook?

zozbot234 6y ago
Because an eBook is not at all like a physical book. It's more like a service that interacts with DRM to provide an illusion of physicality. Libraries should be enabled to digitally lend their physical holdings and not have to rely on these eBook licenses, and CDL is a great model to that effect.
- matheusmoreira 6y ago
  > Libraries should be enabled to digitally lend their physical holdings and not have to rely on these eBook licenses, and CDL is a great model to that effect. Why must we come up with increasingly complicated ways to hide the fact unlimited copies are available? The right thing to do is to abolish copyright. It's time to stop pretending copyright makes sense in the 21st century.
  - manigandham 6y ago
    Just because the marginal cost of a copy is zero does not mean there's no value in the information, and it's perfectly reasonable to gate access to that value. Copying a video file is free too but I'm sure you wouldn't argue that anyone can watch a movie for free just because someone else made it. People have a right to own and control the distribution of their works that they invested in creating.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - matheusmoreira 6y ago
      > it's perfectly reasonable to gate access to that value It's also perfectly reasonable to distribute that information widely and without limits. The fact information is valuable to someone doesn't make it scarce. The harsh reality that creators need to face is that only the first copy need be paid for. > I'm sure you wouldn't argue that anyone can watch a movie for free just because someone else made it I would. Instead of charging money for copies of a movie, film makers need to figure out how to get paid before the movie is made. Creation must act like an investment, not a product. Maybe the answer is crowdfunding? Whatever it is, it needs to pay the creators before they start working so that the final result can be released into the public domain immediately. > People have a right to own and control the distribution of their works that they invested in creating. That's nothing but an illusion. Once the information is out there, it can no longer be controlled. People will copy it, distribute it, edit it, create derivative works, memes... And there's next to nothing creators can do to stop it. The work becomes part of mankind's culture. People infringe copyright every day without even realizing it. "Creators have the right to control..." sounds like a neat idea on paper but it completely breaks down when put into practice. When authors try to "exercise control over their content", we end up with websites which disable right click and create annoying pop ups when we try to copy paste. It's completely ineffective and serves only to annoy people. The only way to control information is to control all the computers that process it. Currently, it's impossible but not for lack of trying. In order to prevent infringement, the copyright industry is prepared and willing to sacrifice computing freedom: their ultimate goal is to prevent us from running "unauthorized" software. Programs that do subversive things like copy movies or play movies without checking for a valid license first would not be signed by the authorities and the processor would then refuse to execute such code. Therefore, the copyright industry is an existential threat to hackers and the free and open source software community. I'd rather sacrifice the entire copyright industry than computing freedom.

maddyboo 6y ago

I'm surprised and disappointed that the IA ever thought this would go over well, though I do respect the reasons for which they took these actions. Circumstances around the COVID-19 lockdowns have been very unusual. If you consider the hundreds of millions (+?) of books in libraries around the world that were temporarily inaccessible to people, including children and students, I feel the IA's actions were somewhat justified, perhaps not legally, but at least morally. Young people losing months worth of time that could have been spent reading and learning constitutes an emergency in my mind, and the IA stepped up to help lessen the societal damages. You could consider that because these many millions of book licenses were temporarily "invalidated" by circumstance, the Internet Archive simply rebalanced the scales by providing the same people who would have been deprived of books at their local/school library a similar means to access them. Such a scenario probably never even crossed the mind of anyone involved in IP law before COVID-19, but if it had there might be some provisions on the books for cases like this. On another note, I would actually expect publishers' sales to increase during the lockdowns for the above reasons of books being held in purgatory at libraries. That publishers should profit from a global crisis in this way seems wrong. Again, none of this is to say that the Internet Archive's actions were legally justified, but I think to equate them to pure piracy is ignoring the nuance and context of this extraordinary situation. I desperately hope the publishers drop the suit and come to an agreement with the IA that doesn't result in the loss of this treasure trove of knowledge or the end of the organization.

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gigama 6y ago
My thoughts exactly, thanks for summing up so nicely. (upvoted) IA's decision was apparently done with good intentions and under extraordinary circumstances. The "open sharing" was not meant to be permanent, and anyway has been discontinued. IA never sold the content for profit so any "harm" should be similarly limited. Publishers would generate nothing but good karma by dropping their lawsuit. As an author it is more valuable to me to know my words and ideas are being preserved so they can be read and absorbed by future generations. Trying to extract every last dollar from such works undermines the pursuit of knowledge and human potential.

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swiley 6y ago

At least the internet archive usually follows the law. When IA is gone everyone will just go to libgen which actively opposes copyright. Not only that but a bunch of history will be lost and source links on Wikipedia will break. IMO: most publishers are worthless anyway. I feel bad for authors but it’s hard to sympathize with publishers.

jacquesm 6y ago

I have three favorite properties on the web: Wikipedia, the Khan Academy and the Internet Archive. Whoever thought this was a good idea should own up to it and step down, this was a dumb move if there ever was one and risking one of the prime - and very fragile - properties on the web like this was highly irresponsible. Keep in mind that IA already has plenty of enemies who are continuously monitoring it and hoping to find a way to shut them down, then hand them this sort of thing on a golden platter. Beyond stupid, really.

Vinnl 6y ago
That's a good list, but OpenStreetMaps should really be added to it :)
- kick 6y ago
  I like OSM as much as anyone, but out of those four, it'd be fourth by a mile or two in terms of usefulness. The English Wikipedia (especially if including other Wikimedia projects) on its own would be practically enough to get humanity back to the current day if things were set back a few hundred years. The Internet Archive would be, too, and probably a bit further. OSM would just get you a slightly better map. That said, 'jacquesm's comment is beyond stupid, really.
  - AsyncAwait 6y ago
    I'd swap Khan Academy for OSM any day.
  - CivBase 6y ago
    > That said, 'jacquesm's comment is beyond stupid, really. Name calling is not constructive.
    - 411111111111111 6y ago
      I'm not the person you responded to, but that comment was just reacting considering how jacquesms comment ended. He (jacquesm) is always judgemental to a silly degree, despite not actually knowing even close to enough to form a useful opinion. That does get tiresome considering how often he comments and can end in snippish comments like the one before.

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mosburger 6y ago

Sorry for my ignorance on this matter, but why do safe harbor provisions not apply to the Internet Archive? Shouldn't they have been served a DMCA takedown request bu the publishers, and then been in violation of those rules and paid the applicable penalties had they not complied and removed the offending content?

watwut 6y ago
Safe harbor applies when other people upload books on your service and you are taking it down as you go. It does not apply when you publish books on your service.

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slim 6y ago

I stand behind Internet Archive on this. It was the right opportunity to try and push our freedoms forward. Internet Archive is political by design, it's very existence is merely tolerated by the Intellectual Property Feudalists. It was the good fight to fight.

nix23 6y ago
Same here! That is a digital lending system like every other public-library does it...
- dhosek 6y ago
  No, it really isn't. Library contracts for digital lending vary based on publisher and service provider, but aside from some very small publishers (if that), there is no publisher that allows for unlimited unmetered lending of e-books and certainly not for the price of a print book. Note also that physical books face physical wear and usually have to be retired after 25–40 (at most) lends.
  - nix23 6y ago
    >allows for unlimited unmetered lending of e-books It is metered, you can lend max 5 book for max of 1 month. >Note also that physical books face physical wear and usually have to be retired after 25–40 (at most) lends Is that something positive? Should we go back to DVD because publishers would love that, or is streaming still ok?
    - dhosek 6y ago
      It's an observation that points out that physical books are not being lent out hundred or thousands of times so the physical book argument (or the digitized physical book argument) don't hold water.
      - nix23 6y ago
        I never said anything about physical book's, many public-library have already e-books, like research-papers and so on.

cmiles8 6y ago

The archive is a valuable resource, but what they did here was very short sighted. I'm certainly know copyright monger and broadly believe in the free exchange of information, but what they did here is pretty clear cut stealing of IP from others. They don't have to 'make money' from it to cause significant damage in the process. For better or worse the revenue streams associated with that IP generation is a large driver for the IP to be created in the first place.

toss1 6y ago

I had not realized that the Internet Archive had 'expanded' into archiving & re-publishing books While that endeavor certainly has value, the risks - exactly these risks - are so large & obvious that it really should have been done as a separate corporate organization. That is what the corporate structure is for - to separate liability. Now, the entire, and very valuable, core mission is threatened by this one project.

Ensorceled 6y ago
This was my first thought when this whole thing erupted ... why wasn't this a separate not-for-profit corporation. The publishers may still try to pierce the corporate veil but that's a whole 'nother matter.
sp332 6y ago
They already had 20,000,000 books (yes that's a real number) available. The ones with Controlled Digital Lending allowed a single DRM-encrusted copy to be loaned out for each physical copy that they owned. This isn't explicitly allowed by any law but publishers hadn't challenged its claim of fair use and a lot of libraries use this technique. What was new with the NEL was just removing the one-copy-at-a-time limit. But the lawsuit is challenging the whole concept, including what other libraries are doing.

downerending 6y ago

Seems like a good week to be erasing history.

zatel 6y ago

I wonder if this rhymes with whatever happened to the library of Alexandria.

jroseman93 6y ago

This wasn't the smartest move on behalf of the Internet Archive. One could argue they were pushing boundaries to get courts to rule in their favor but in the process they are putting the whole project in jeopardy. Taking current copyrighted works and just giving them away en-mass is obviously not going to be seen favorably by many.

6510 6y ago

Yeah, its only 10 PB, why don't we p2p a copy? 1000 people with 10 TB to spare wouldn't work but 50 000 storing 100-400 GB each would be managable. 50 k pp is ofc nothing and probably not even enough to get it done before everyone gets bored. (you know who you are) Tubing it into the boxes would be the hard part. Most wouldn't need to do much more than contribute bandwidth and temp storage. Why isn't file coin done?

kempbellt 6y ago
The archive is closer to 60PB - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23485594 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23485594 So, more like 300,000 people storing 200GB, which is quite a tall order to fill.
- myself248 6y ago
  > There are 237,000 members of this subreddit. > If each of us on average contributed 1TB (I know many people, myself included, would give a more than that for IA), we'd have 237PB, which feels like it's the right ballpark of raw storage to host 30PB in a reasonable, redundant, "not ideal but at least functional" manner. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/h02jl4/lets_say_you_wanted_to_back_up_the_internet/ftk6p59/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/h02jl4/lets_sa... I'm small-potatoes for a datahoarder, but I could chip in a couple tens of TB to a project like this. If only I knew what button to push to make it do the thing.

jborichevskiy 6y ago

I really don't know much about the intersection of IP and legal entities, but in the worst case scenario would IA be able to move its web captured assets to a separate company instead of tanking the whole thing? In other words, just leave the "library" division to tank and take the heat while everything else remains safe elsewhere?

headalgorithm 6y ago

See announcement: https://blog.archive.org/2020/06/10/temporary-national-emergency-library-to-close-2-weeks-early-returning-to-traditional-controlled-digital-lending/ https://blog.archive.org/2020/06/10/temporary-national-emerg...

xhkkffbf 6y ago

To appease publishers? How about so they can do right by the many authors out there who are still able to sell books through Powell's, Amazon or other local book sellers?

intopieces 6y ago
When America fixes copyright to be life of the author only, I will agree with your concerns.
- JoshTriplett 6y ago
  How many books written today would not be written at all if copyright lasted, say, 20 years? 10? "life of the author" is far too long; all culture is built atop other culture. Copyright is a limited exclusive grant in exchange for the expectation of having more works written/created/painted/drawn/designed. We should not just ratchet up the duration or scope of that exclusive grant without the expectation that we'll get more value out of it (more works) in the trade.
- miles 6y ago
  Life of the author seems potentially too short. What if an author is struck down early? Shouldn't their family left behind be able to enjoy some of the profits for a period of time?
  - JoshTriplett 6y ago
    Indeed. A fixed duration would be preferable for that and many other reasons.
    - votepaunchy 6y ago
      The constitutional requirement is for “limited times”, and current law is not.
  - musicale 6y ago
    Copyright is a temporary monopoly granted to incentivize the creation of new works, for the benefit of the public. As you suggest, a time-based copyright term (such as the original Copyright Act term of 14 years with a single renewal) would preserve this incentive even for authors who expect they might die before the end of the term.

notatoad 6y ago

Good. the internet archive does important work, and i'd hate to see a stupid idea like this put their larger mission at risk. i'm not sure how they ever thought they could get away with giving away other people's property, just because pandemic.

mcguire 6y ago

"Many open-Internet activists have been discussing how to back up the archive and make it more resilient for years. The temptation would be to employ a distributed system, such as a blockchain, that would be censorship-resistant and couldn’t be legally shut down." A blockchain? Oy, vey.

rodiger 6y ago
Enjoy the multi-petabyte full node :)

jedberg 6y ago

The more interesting thing here is the "controlled digital lending" test case that will almost certainly come of all of this. If they somehow prevail on that aspect and set a legal precedent there, that would resolve a lot of issues for a lot of companies. For example, Netflix could stream every movie ever, as long as they bought enough DVDs for peak demand. Or those companies that would set up 1000 TV antennas in a datacenter and then stream the signal. I just hope the IA doesn't get CDL shot down because of this and ruin it for everyone.

wriq 6y ago
"Or those companies that would set up 1000 TV antennas in a datacenter and then stream" I believe Aereo tried just that and failed - https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/06/25/325488386/tech-firm-aereo-performs-an-illegal-service-supreme-court-says https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/06/25/325488386...
- jedberg 6y ago
  They did. But this could set a new precedent.
- JoshTriplett 6y ago
  They didn't fail, they were sued out of business. They had a good, innovative product that people wanted, and they got killed by a lawsuit. This is the tradeoff we're making when we grant more exclusive privileges over works: we kill innovations like these, and we get...probably not any more creative works than we would have gotten otherwise.
  - MR4D 6y ago
    But they did fail. The Supreme Court ruling is here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/13pdf/13-461_l537.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/13pdf/13-461_l537.pdf
  - ghaff 6y ago
    >They had a good, innovative product They had a product that involved giving away other people's stuff. Yes, copyright terms are too long. But I'm pretty sure that a vanishingly small amount of that stuff they were giving away would be out of copyright even with a copyright term of 20 years.

hnaccy 6y ago

Not sure why IA thought it was smart to do unlimited lending and risk the organization. Did they just get caught up wanting to do something during virus stuff?

musicale 6y ago

> Controlled digital lending is a legal framework, developed by copyright experts, where one reader at a time can read a digitized copy of a legally owned library book. And digital downloading is a communication framework, developed by technology experts, where an unlimited number of readers can read the same digital library book at the same time.

arpa 6y ago
One of the benefits of the press was decreased price of a copy and increased availability of printed material. Look where it got us. Digital medium is no different from the press, but of course, papyrus industry is going to fight it, because profits are more important, always.

jwilk 6y ago

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23491229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23491229

dang 6y ago
That appears to mostly overlap with the current story, so we'll merge the threads. Thanks!

CaliforniaKarl 6y ago

I wish that the Internet Archive had tried to work around this by reaching out to public libraries, and having those public libraries agree to "loan" their still-on-the-shelf books to the Internet Archive. That might not cover all the copies that were simultaneously checked out by people (I don't know the numbers involved), but it would have helped.

EamonnMR 6y ago

I'd be disappointed if they end up dying on this particular hill.

slaymaker1907 6y ago

I’m a big supporter of IA, but they really goofed on this one. I donated after this incident but mostly because I don’t want this lawsuit to shut them down.

ulfatufo 6y ago

Hello

kazinator 6y ago

The Internet Archive should do the lawful thing and remove all the content that the publishers want removed, to prevent the collateral damage to the important resource for those who just want to see old versions of pages that have changed or disappeared. Leave the books and whatever to pirate torrent sites and just do the Wayback Machine thing.

sebow 6y ago

This would be a huge loss for the internet, and dare i say for humanity and our way of preserving raw, uncensored history. Whoever is behind shutting down IA should be looked down upon by everybody who respects freedom and knowledge.

omginternets 6y ago

I wonder if there’s a turnkey(ish) way to crowdsource a back-up the archive on IPFS. IPFS seems ideally suited for two reasons: - it has decent censorship-resistant properties - content addressing is ideal for partial backups because individuals can mirror as little (or as much) as they want. I’m guessing the simplest approach would be to somehow get access to the archive’s database? Is this something they’d be willing to consider?

erk__ 6y ago
There is probably not enough people on IPFS to store all of it in a safe way that makes it always aviable. I think all the items on the page already have torrents so it would likely be better to share them around.
- omginternets 6y ago
  How many people are on IPFS?

aurizon 6y ago

Remember (the few that are over ~~600 years old might??:) ) Gutenberg invented movable type and a publication explosion followed. Heretofore books were hand copied, with errors etc. A medieval ~Xerox room was full of scribes - hard at work. A Xerox salesman who promised to double the speed of your copying - he walked in a hulking slave with a whip - all the monks visibly and hurriedly sped up. Back to Gutenberg, https://www.livescience.com/2569-gutenberg-changed-world.html https://www.livescience.com/2569-gutenberg-changed-world.htm... the Authors fought printing presses, they fought even lending libraries. Books were often chained to the shelves to limit access as well as theft. https://www.amusingplanet.com/2015/04/the-last-surviving-chained-libraries.html https://www.amusingplanet.com/2015/04/the-last-surviving-cha... So here we are now. Progress is hampered by the old farts, the author's guilds, the Enslaviers,(intentional typo on Elsevier) who want us to be in permanent economic thralldom to them. They are mere pebbls in the rivers of progress, so we pay them to go away, or break them up. MIT has the right idea. I wish the Nobel Committee would announce that they will only consider openly published knowledge for future prizes. I wish all governmental other funders of research would mandate open publication. I wish all past published work was declared open NOW!!