9 ms·

How to participate in Monday’s oral arguments re: Internet Archive

221 points by gigama 4y ago

nonbirithm 4y ago
I really hope this isn't the end of the Wayback Machine. The IA being a centralized entity with an agenda not everyone agrees with was a problem not explored enough until it was too late.
- datapolitical 4y ago
  Someone would spin up a nonprofit and buy the assets and keep it going
  - themitigating 4y ago
    Would it be more difficult to get funding during harash economic times?
  - Kye 4y ago
    It's already a nonprofit. The shell game works for for-profit corporations. I don't think it'll work when the kind of companies that usually play that game are the ones after them.
    - mistrial9 4y ago
      specific assets of a non-profit must be transferred to another non-profit, with some oversight about costs. It is possible and does happen.
      - mdale 4y ago
        The internet archive does facilitate mirrors under the LOCKSS (lots of copies keeps stuff safe) philosophy.
  - samdcbu 4y ago
    If it was shut down due to a civil injunction for copyright violation, I don’t think the Internet Archive would be able to transfer the Wayback Machine’s data to anyone else without defying that injunction and risk being held in contempt. Someone would need to immediately begin trying to mirror the entire Wayback Machine’s archive, ideally hosting the mirror in Luxembourg or the Netherlands.
    - password4321 4y ago
      Archive Team Archive Team, assemble!
    - brutusurp 4y ago
      Hopefully this is already happening...
- robinsonb5 4y ago
  Indeed, the Wayback Machine is an invaluable resource, more and more so as older sites drop off the net. But hosting, for example, multiple complete MAME ROM sets (and the existence of turnkey - albeit non-commercial - products which download them automatically) is in a completely different category from the Wayback Machine - and it would be a shame if the former was endangered by the latter.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    I think there is quite a bit difference between archiving stuff. And making it publicly available. The first one make lot of sense, even if technically the content does not follow copyright laws. But there is important cultural history with it that should be considered. But on other side, maybe access should be limited in someways.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      The problem is that an Internet Archive where you you have to show up at some building in the Bay Area during office hours to access the archive is quite a bit less valuable than the archive in its current form.
      - Ekaros 4y ago
        I'm not saying in person, but at least some type of vouching before sharing the material.
        ghaff 4y ago
        The details don't really matter. Having to say present research credentials from some university, even if virtually, isn't a whole lot more inclusive.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  how would this painstaking work be performed by a decentralised entity? Human beings have agendas, I am not sure why you expect them to be machines or politically neutral. This is normally understood when one donates to a charity.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jl6 4y ago
As a strong supporter of the Internet Archive’s primary mission, I am saddened to say that the prosecution appears to have a strong case here. Controlled Digital Lending is a controversial legal theory, not something that has any clear statutory basis. The IA must now hope for some creative judicial interpretation to save them. It’s doubly frustrating because I think the publishers would have let the IA fly under the radar had they stuck to lending on a strictly one-digital-loan for one-physical-copy basis. The National Emergency Library was a serious lapse of judgement - a moment of madness amongst a backdrop of widespread Covid madness. They poked the hornet’s nest. IMHO they should have immediately apologised, leant into it being an honest mistake during a unique historical event, and come to some minor financial settlement. Instead, they and the EFF are doubling down and risk being flattened with a severe bill for compensation. I absolutely would support legislation to properly recognize CDL as a lawful function of libraries. Instead, all our hopes are pinned on the judicial branch doing the job of the legislative branch. P.S. Donate to the IA here: https://archive.org/donate/ https://archive.org/donate/
- ghaff 4y ago
  Very little of what the IA does is strictly kosher under current law more or less anywhere in the world. They've mostly gotten away with it because, for example, they've mirrored websites that the owners put out in public and generally respect even retroactive requests to take them down. And, as you say, lending out 1 digital for 1 physical is reasonable enough that it's easy enough to believe publishers would overlook. (And, yes, they're a library/archive but that basically means nada in the digital world.)
- tssva 4y ago
  > I am saddened to say that the prosecution appears to have a strong case here. This is a civil case so plaintiff not prosecution. This comment made me double check that there wasn't an associated criminal case I was unaware of.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  > is a controversial legal theory, not something that has any clear statutory basis let the court decide that, you are essentially pronouncing judgement. Maybe "internet" or "digital" has changed the situation? The post asked people to support IA
politician 4y ago
I wonder how much of the LLM training content came from IA.
- ronsor 4y ago
  I wonder what an LLM trained on the entire Wayback Machine would be like
- gwern 4y ago
  As far as is known, IA is poorly represented in existing LLM datasets. They don't allow indexing or scraping, so they don't show up in Common Crawl which is the starting point. (The occasional link to IA might show up, and someone processing CC might choose to follow it, but that's relatively unusual, aside from image links: most people focus on the text inside CC itself.) And their servers are quite slow & overloaded, so if you targeted them manually, your scrapers will be rate-limited, banned, or just incredibly flaky. They contain a lot of highly redundant snapshots, so they're a hassle to post-process. And much of what they contain is implied or covered by easier to get datasets. I also haven't seen any hints in either randomly-generated samples or prompted samples from GPT-3, ChatGPT, GPT-4, or other LLMs of signatures of IA snapshots like their book OCR or their HTML headers. So... yeah, it's possible, and I wouldn't be surprised if data-hungry LLMs like GPT-4 have or will start tapping into IA, but right now there's no real reason to think that.
misnome 4y ago
> against our library and the longstanding library practice of controlled digital lending Isn’t this… deliberately misleading? As I understand it there wasn’t really a problem until they decided to embark on “Uncontrolled” digital lending.
- duxup 4y ago
  I agree. I don’t understand why they took this risk. The internet archive is a great resource, why did they pick this digital lending hill to die / risk all that on? It seems irresponsible.
  - misnome 4y ago
    Lying about it comes across badly. As though they think their best chance of success is to pretend it’s about something else. I support the IA mission generally but this came across as exceedingly dumb when they did it. Maybe they are right and this existential gamble will work and it’ll clarify an area of ambiguity that means it was legal - I’d love to be wrong. But I’m not placing any bets on that.
    - duxup 4y ago
      > Lying about it comes across badly. I agree 100%. It makes me wonder about the leadership that they made this decision, are going through with this legal situation, and keep trying to push this story.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    The IA has basically existed because they did stuff that, for the most part, publishers/companies didn't care about or even secretly appreciated. Storing old web pages, magazines, millions of bits of other ephemera that would otherwise only have existed on musty library shelves if at all. And they would even take something down if some owner wanted some bit of history to disappear. The idea that because COVID, in a world with the Internet along with also massive quantities of public domain works on Gutenberg and elsewhere, the IA just had to triple down on digital lending just makes no sense.
SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
Does anyone know what the legal basis was for uncontrolled online Lending was in the first place that caused this mess? I don’t understand why IA is continuing to double down that this was legitimate behavior.
- ghaff 4y ago
  There isn't even a legal basis for "controlled" online lending (or indeed much of what the IA does) But they've mostly always managed to keep things sufficiently non-provocative that it hasn't been a problem.
- boomboomsubban 4y ago
  Their justification was that the lockdown removed far more copies of the books from public library circulation than were ever checked out from the IA library. Something their checkout records easily confirm is true. However this lawsuit isn't really about the lockdown period, it's about CDL as a whole.
  - sp332 4y ago
    They joined up with a specific group of other libraries, so they're not just arguing in general that circulation was down, but that there were enough copies of books in the group to cover the online lending.
    - boomboomsubban 4y ago
      That is how their general CDL works, but for the pandemic they removed the restrictions because libraries they did not have a partnership with were closed. The brief says this, but it's sort of confusing as it's blended in with discussing their general policy.
photochemsyn 4y ago
Good background here: https://slate.com/technology/2022/09/internet-archive-national-emergency-library-lawsuit.html https://slate.com/technology/2022/09/internet-archive-nation... I have this suspicion that the college textbook publishers in particular want to block CDL.
AlbertCory 4y ago
Without taking a position on the legal arguments: "How to participate in Monday’s oral arguments" is a deeply offensive thing to say. Once something reaches SCOTUS, it's strictly about matters of law. It's not a question of the merits or whether you like IA or not, and rooting is definitely inappropriate.
- eynsham 4y ago
  > SCOTUS ‘…the Southern District of New York will hear…’ > question of merits whether you like IA or not Whether the court ‘likes IA or not’ may be a relevant question in respect of public policy considerations. > rooting is definitely inappropriate First, participating (well IA really mean listening which is even weaker) does not amount to rooting. Second, there’s nothing wrong with having a view on what the judgment should be, unless writing an article in a law journal disputing a judgment would be ‘inappropriate’.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    Days until someone does an audience meter like this during a live SCOTUS debate: I give it 14. https://www.imediaethics.org/its-entertainment-not-polling/ https://www.imediaethics.org/its-entertainment-not-polling/ We have a rule of law, not a mobocracy.
    - eynsham 4y ago
      I’ll make sure to remind my friends doing legal research that their informed opinion in fact amounts to ‘mobocracy’.
- sqs 4y ago
  Why is it deeply offensive? "Participate" here just means to follow, kind of like a Steve Jobs keynote liveblog. "Rooting" for one side of a legal case is absolutely appropriate for a defendant (or plaintiff) in our adversarial legal system. A defendant with a weak legal case but a strong public policy argument /needs/ to rally public support for their cause, so that if/when the court rules against them, they can push for the law to change.
MagicMoonlight 4y ago
Why do companies always sue the goodies as if that’s somehow going to save their failing business. Spoiler: children are morons now. The book industry is dead. Their parents can barely read so they sure as hell aren’t going to teach their children to. Everything is iPads. Suing random people won’t change that. Books will live on, but as a niche product rather than a major industry.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  so, no. fortunately the last five hundred years of printing is not subject to a binary declaration of ALIVE|DEAD.. I will agree it is a SPOILER to say it like that, like, go ahead SPOIL my day !
anarticle 4y ago
On one hand, we can keep acting like companies are good stewards of digital information or we can look at the reality that the industry (books, movies, media, etc) does a reliably bad job at keeping sources around. Now it is possible to keep media around longer as a primary source which seems extremely valuable given the technology that exists. Copyright laws are due for an overhaul, and maybe we'll see something that embraces the fact that we have a new Gutenberg press capable of spreading information. Anecdotally, I'm a bit tired of subscription services add/removing videos or books from their catalog. I have cancelled, since I don't want to pay to be gaslit that I saw something that "doesn't exist". I know, I'm not paying to have everything forever, I'm renting etc. However, whatever their licensing problem is, it is Not My Problem (tm), and so I voted with my wallet. I don't like when companies exploit object permanence in a way that makes me feel like I'm the crazy one. Lend like print is a good model, but that creates more DRM, which on the long haul has not panned out in the technology world as a good thing. There has to be a balance, but what of the long view? Publishers need less execs/admin, as publishing costs are dropping very deeply. I think Brewster Kahle and team are doing a great work, and I hope they win.
sacnoradhq 4y ago
DRM, copyright, and the concept of lending online are impediments to access. And, indefinite rent-seeking is ridiculous. Let old data be archived and free.

221 points by gigama 4y ago

I really hope this isn't the end of the Wayback Machine. The IA being a centralized entity with an agenda not everyone agrees with was a problem not explored enough until it was too late.

datapolitical 4y ago
Someone would spin up a nonprofit and buy the assets and keep it going
- themitigating 4y ago
  Would it be more difficult to get funding during harash economic times?
- Kye 4y ago
  It's already a nonprofit. The shell game works for for-profit corporations. I don't think it'll work when the kind of companies that usually play that game are the ones after them.
  - mistrial9 4y ago
    specific assets of a non-profit must be transferred to another non-profit, with some oversight about costs. It is possible and does happen.
    - mdale 4y ago
      The internet archive does facilitate mirrors under the LOCKSS (lots of copies keeps stuff safe) philosophy.
- samdcbu 4y ago
  If it was shut down due to a civil injunction for copyright violation, I don’t think the Internet Archive would be able to transfer the Wayback Machine’s data to anyone else without defying that injunction and risk being held in contempt. Someone would need to immediately begin trying to mirror the entire Wayback Machine’s archive, ideally hosting the mirror in Luxembourg or the Netherlands.
  - password4321 4y ago
    Archive Team Archive Team, assemble!
  - brutusurp 4y ago
    Hopefully this is already happening...
robinsonb5 4y ago
Indeed, the Wayback Machine is an invaluable resource, more and more so as older sites drop off the net. But hosting, for example, multiple complete MAME ROM sets (and the existence of turnkey - albeit non-commercial - products which download them automatically) is in a completely different category from the Wayback Machine - and it would be a shame if the former was endangered by the latter.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  I think there is quite a bit difference between archiving stuff. And making it publicly available. The first one make lot of sense, even if technically the content does not follow copyright laws. But there is important cultural history with it that should be considered. But on other side, maybe access should be limited in someways.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    The problem is that an Internet Archive where you you have to show up at some building in the Bay Area during office hours to access the archive is quite a bit less valuable than the archive in its current form.
    - Ekaros 4y ago
      I'm not saying in person, but at least some type of vouching before sharing the material.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        The details don't really matter. Having to say present research credentials from some university, even if virtually, isn't a whole lot more inclusive.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
how would this painstaking work be performed by a decentralised entity? Human beings have agendas, I am not sure why you expect them to be machines or politically neutral. This is normally understood when one donates to a charity.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jl6 4y ago

As a strong supporter of the Internet Archive’s primary mission, I am saddened to say that the prosecution appears to have a strong case here. Controlled Digital Lending is a controversial legal theory, not something that has any clear statutory basis. The IA must now hope for some creative judicial interpretation to save them. It’s doubly frustrating because I think the publishers would have let the IA fly under the radar had they stuck to lending on a strictly one-digital-loan for one-physical-copy basis. The National Emergency Library was a serious lapse of judgement - a moment of madness amongst a backdrop of widespread Covid madness. They poked the hornet’s nest. IMHO they should have immediately apologised, leant into it being an honest mistake during a unique historical event, and come to some minor financial settlement. Instead, they and the EFF are doubling down and risk being flattened with a severe bill for compensation. I absolutely would support legislation to properly recognize CDL as a lawful function of libraries. Instead, all our hopes are pinned on the judicial branch doing the job of the legislative branch. P.S. Donate to the IA here: https://archive.org/donate/ https://archive.org/donate/

ghaff 4y ago
Very little of what the IA does is strictly kosher under current law more or less anywhere in the world. They've mostly gotten away with it because, for example, they've mirrored websites that the owners put out in public and generally respect even retroactive requests to take them down. And, as you say, lending out 1 digital for 1 physical is reasonable enough that it's easy enough to believe publishers would overlook. (And, yes, they're a library/archive but that basically means nada in the digital world.)
tssva 4y ago
> I am saddened to say that the prosecution appears to have a strong case here. This is a civil case so plaintiff not prosecution. This comment made me double check that there wasn't an associated criminal case I was unaware of.
mistrial9 4y ago
> is a controversial legal theory, not something that has any clear statutory basis let the court decide that, you are essentially pronouncing judgement. Maybe "internet" or "digital" has changed the situation? The post asked people to support IA

politician 4y ago

I wonder how much of the LLM training content came from IA.

ronsor 4y ago
I wonder what an LLM trained on the entire Wayback Machine would be like
gwern 4y ago
As far as is known, IA is poorly represented in existing LLM datasets. They don't allow indexing or scraping, so they don't show up in Common Crawl which is the starting point. (The occasional link to IA might show up, and someone processing CC might choose to follow it, but that's relatively unusual, aside from image links: most people focus on the text inside CC itself.) And their servers are quite slow & overloaded, so if you targeted them manually, your scrapers will be rate-limited, banned, or just incredibly flaky. They contain a lot of highly redundant snapshots, so they're a hassle to post-process. And much of what they contain is implied or covered by easier to get datasets. I also haven't seen any hints in either randomly-generated samples or prompted samples from GPT-3, ChatGPT, GPT-4, or other LLMs of signatures of IA snapshots like their book OCR or their HTML headers. So... yeah, it's possible, and I wouldn't be surprised if data-hungry LLMs like GPT-4 have or will start tapping into IA, but right now there's no real reason to think that.

misnome 4y ago

> against our library and the longstanding library practice of controlled digital lending Isn’t this… deliberately misleading? As I understand it there wasn’t really a problem until they decided to embark on “Uncontrolled” digital lending.

duxup 4y ago
I agree. I don’t understand why they took this risk. The internet archive is a great resource, why did they pick this digital lending hill to die / risk all that on? It seems irresponsible.
- misnome 4y ago
  Lying about it comes across badly. As though they think their best chance of success is to pretend it’s about something else. I support the IA mission generally but this came across as exceedingly dumb when they did it. Maybe they are right and this existential gamble will work and it’ll clarify an area of ambiguity that means it was legal - I’d love to be wrong. But I’m not placing any bets on that.
  - duxup 4y ago
    > Lying about it comes across badly. I agree 100%. It makes me wonder about the leadership that they made this decision, are going through with this legal situation, and keep trying to push this story.
- ghaff 4y ago
  The IA has basically existed because they did stuff that, for the most part, publishers/companies didn't care about or even secretly appreciated. Storing old web pages, magazines, millions of bits of other ephemera that would otherwise only have existed on musty library shelves if at all. And they would even take something down if some owner wanted some bit of history to disappear. The idea that because COVID, in a world with the Internet along with also massive quantities of public domain works on Gutenberg and elsewhere, the IA just had to triple down on digital lending just makes no sense.

SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago

Does anyone know what the legal basis was for uncontrolled online Lending was in the first place that caused this mess? I don’t understand why IA is continuing to double down that this was legitimate behavior.

ghaff 4y ago
There isn't even a legal basis for "controlled" online lending (or indeed much of what the IA does) But they've mostly always managed to keep things sufficiently non-provocative that it hasn't been a problem.
boomboomsubban 4y ago
Their justification was that the lockdown removed far more copies of the books from public library circulation than were ever checked out from the IA library. Something their checkout records easily confirm is true. However this lawsuit isn't really about the lockdown period, it's about CDL as a whole.
- sp332 4y ago
  They joined up with a specific group of other libraries, so they're not just arguing in general that circulation was down, but that there were enough copies of books in the group to cover the online lending.
  - boomboomsubban 4y ago
    That is how their general CDL works, but for the pandemic they removed the restrictions because libraries they did not have a partnership with were closed. The brief says this, but it's sort of confusing as it's blended in with discussing their general policy.

photochemsyn 4y ago

Good background here: https://slate.com/technology/2022/09/internet-archive-national-emergency-library-lawsuit.html https://slate.com/technology/2022/09/internet-archive-nation... I have this suspicion that the college textbook publishers in particular want to block CDL.

AlbertCory 4y ago

Without taking a position on the legal arguments: "How to participate in Monday’s oral arguments" is a deeply offensive thing to say. Once something reaches SCOTUS, it's strictly about matters of law. It's not a question of the merits or whether you like IA or not, and rooting is definitely inappropriate.

eynsham 4y ago
> SCOTUS ‘…the Southern District of New York will hear…’ > question of merits whether you like IA or not Whether the court ‘likes IA or not’ may be a relevant question in respect of public policy considerations. > rooting is definitely inappropriate First, participating (well IA really mean listening which is even weaker) does not amount to rooting. Second, there’s nothing wrong with having a view on what the judgment should be, unless writing an article in a law journal disputing a judgment would be ‘inappropriate’.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  Days until someone does an audience meter like this during a live SCOTUS debate: I give it 14. https://www.imediaethics.org/its-entertainment-not-polling/ https://www.imediaethics.org/its-entertainment-not-polling/ We have a rule of law, not a mobocracy.
  - eynsham 4y ago
    I’ll make sure to remind my friends doing legal research that their informed opinion in fact amounts to ‘mobocracy’.
sqs 4y ago
Why is it deeply offensive? "Participate" here just means to follow, kind of like a Steve Jobs keynote liveblog. "Rooting" for one side of a legal case is absolutely appropriate for a defendant (or plaintiff) in our adversarial legal system. A defendant with a weak legal case but a strong public policy argument /needs/ to rally public support for their cause, so that if/when the court rules against them, they can push for the law to change.

MagicMoonlight 4y ago

Why do companies always sue the goodies as if that’s somehow going to save their failing business. Spoiler: children are morons now. The book industry is dead. Their parents can barely read so they sure as hell aren’t going to teach their children to. Everything is iPads. Suing random people won’t change that. Books will live on, but as a niche product rather than a major industry.

mistrial9 4y ago
so, no. fortunately the last five hundred years of printing is not subject to a binary declaration of ALIVE|DEAD.. I will agree it is a SPOILER to say it like that, like, go ahead SPOIL my day !

anarticle 4y ago

On one hand, we can keep acting like companies are good stewards of digital information or we can look at the reality that the industry (books, movies, media, etc) does a reliably bad job at keeping sources around. Now it is possible to keep media around longer as a primary source which seems extremely valuable given the technology that exists. Copyright laws are due for an overhaul, and maybe we'll see something that embraces the fact that we have a new Gutenberg press capable of spreading information. Anecdotally, I'm a bit tired of subscription services add/removing videos or books from their catalog. I have cancelled, since I don't want to pay to be gaslit that I saw something that "doesn't exist". I know, I'm not paying to have everything forever, I'm renting etc. However, whatever their licensing problem is, it is Not My Problem (tm), and so I voted with my wallet. I don't like when companies exploit object permanence in a way that makes me feel like I'm the crazy one. Lend like print is a good model, but that creates more DRM, which on the long haul has not panned out in the technology world as a good thing. There has to be a balance, but what of the long view? Publishers need less execs/admin, as publishing costs are dropping very deeply. I think Brewster Kahle and team are doing a great work, and I hope they win.

sacnoradhq 4y ago

DRM, copyright, and the concept of lending online are impediments to access. And, indefinite rent-seeking is ridiculous. Let old data be archived and free.