10 ms·

I know the government has viewed certain companies as "too big to fail," because of the negative financial impact we would experience if they were to do so. I

by jawns 4y ago

I know the government has viewed certain companies as "too big to fail," because of the negative financial impact we would experience if they were to do so. I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a repository of digital or physical artifacts is "too big to fail" because of the negative cultural impact their failure would have. In the absence of that, anyone who sees high cultural value to the preservation of these digital artifacts should, counterintuitively, not treat the Internet Archive as having some special status, but should treat it as a liability. It has become the custodian of too much, and too much is on the line if it fails. Rather than trying to constantly shore up the IA so it can't fail financially, we should be looking at ways to preserve those artifacts redundantly, so that even if the IA fails, it's not a calamity.

bruce511 4y ago
>> I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a repository of digital or physical artifacts is "too big to fail" because of the negative cultural impact their failure would have. You can wonder all you like, and call me a cynic, but the US runs on money not culture. The American identity is built on money and wealth and excess, not on anything you might describe as "culture". The IA would not "fail" if it was just left alone, but business never saw a nickel they didn't want to grab, so the law suits are not exactly surprising. And I expect the courts to lean towards the publishers.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  > US runs on money not culture fortunately, someone saying that does not make it real. Think of a "soup" and of "experiment" and you will get more detail. Resolving an entire nation to a 1 or 0 classification is not defensible, right?
  - lanternfish 4y ago
    In this case though, the question is what underlying motivator dominates. The claim doesn't need to be as strong as 'the us is money, no culture' and can just be 'in the US, money accounts for more willpower and political capital than culture in a head to head'
  - hyperhello 4y ago
    Resolving the statement to a 1/0 classification isn't necessary. If the US ran on culture, the archive would be considered a jewel; but the US runs on money so it's seen as an underoptimization. If you're predicting what a group would do in a specific case and decision, it really is correct to apply generalizations.
    - splitstud 4y ago
      [dead]
    - Zetice 4y ago
      Er, no. Culture isn’t one specific thing, of which you either have or lack. Our culture can be a rich one and also not value the things the IA represent.
- Fr3ck 4y ago
  The USA's biggest export is our culture...like it or not. Think of movies, music, etc. Some of it is intangible.
  - wahnfrieden 4y ago
    You can find positive effect with it only being an indirect and fragile benefit of the system
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    >> You can wonder all you like, and call me a cynic, but the US runs on money not culture. The American identity is built on money and wealth and excess, not on anything you might describe as "culture". > The USA's biggest export is our culture...like it or not. Think of movies, music, etc. Some of it is intangible. Yeah, but that's not high culture. It's mass-market culture that makes a lot of money. I think what the GP is referring to as "culture" is high culture--the kind of stuff that is not popular and requires subsidies and special effort to sustain.
    - netr0ute 4y ago
      What's the definition of high culture?
      - carapace 4y ago
        If we still read/watch it in a century?
        ghaff 4y ago
        Not really. Both Shakespeare and Dickens were pretty mainstream culture at the time.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - 4y ago
- misssocrates 4y ago
  It was built on entrepreneurship that made Silicon Valley and Hacker News. Now it's arguably a culture of attention and tribal identity.
- chroma 4y ago
  The US runs on rule of law, and copyright law has been around for centuries. Many sites that violate copyright laws would be fine if left alone. That doesn’t mean they should be immune from lawsuits. Everyone was telling the internet archive that this was a dumb idea because it opened them to lawsuits with ruinous fines. Now the chickens are coming home to roost and IA is crying foul. It can be true that the internet archive is an invaluable store of history while also being true that they made an embarrassing own-goal.
  - arvindhmani 4y ago
    >The US runs on rule of law Oh you sweet summer child.
- Zetice 4y ago
  Shit on the US all you like, but any country could step up to save the IA… This isn’t an American problem, it’s a drawback to the economic system the globe has adopted.
H8crilA 4y ago
Too big to fail comes from the fear of popular unrest (btw, this also works in non-democratic countries, albeit is weaker). There will be no popular unrest here.
tablespoon 4y ago
> I know the government has viewed certain companies as "too big to fail," because of the negative financial impact we would experience if they were to do so. > I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a repository of digital or physical artifacts is "too big to fail" because of the negative cultural impact their failure would have. If there is, the Internet Archive isn't it. Yeah, it's super important in certain weird technology and library subcultures, but few people outside of them would even notice it if disappeared. If they shut down, the story wouldn't even be able to muscle it's way onto the front page of the New York Times: it would loose to whatever the latest Trump drama is and the Nth repetition of the standard mass shooting media package. > In the absence of that, anyone who sees high cultural value to the preservation of these digital artifacts should, counterintuitively, not treat the Internet Archive as having some special status, but should treat it as a liability. It has become the custodian of too much, and too much is on the line if it fails. > Rather than trying to constantly shore up the IA so it can't fail financially, we should be looking at ways to preserve those artifacts redundantly, so that even if the IA fails, it's not a calamity. Yeah, especially since the Internet Archive (as an organization) has proven itself to be irresponsible. Lots of people want to turn the publishers into the villains, for ideological reasons as well as a bias towards the Internet Archive, but the it's the IA that fucked up here. They imperiled their core mission for some unnecessary grandstanding. They either need to fire whatever lawyers OK'd the "Emergency Library" or the leaders that refused to listen to sane legal advice telling them not to do it.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > Yeah, especially since the Internet Archive (as an organization) has proven itself to be irresponsible. I think the archive made a bad decision. I do not think it is generally irresponsible.
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    The Internet Archive is one of the easiest-to-access source of warez right now, among other things. Either they have a grand plan for the targets they are painting on themselves, or they are bloody irresponsible idiots; I'm inclined to bet on the latter given no further contexts.
reaperducer 4y ago
I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a repository of digital or physical artifacts is "too big to fail" because of the negative cultural impact their failure would have. Here it is: https://loc.gov https://loc.gov
boredumb 4y ago
Essentially a digital museum?
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  A distributed, highly resilient digital museum. The internet archive meets S3 meets BitTorrent. We’re most of the way there, just need improvements around durability, rebalancing around geographies, and the identity and metadata (item inventory) planes. (no association with IA, just an active contributor)
  - zachh 4y ago
    Do you know if the IA is working on such projects / is there a way to get involved? Or is it mostly third parties doing so?
    - toomuchtodo 4y ago
      http://blog.archive.org/tag/distributed-web/ http://blog.archive.org/tag/distributed-web/ My personal opinion is that they’re going about this the wrong way, with IPFS, anything blockchain, etc. They can support this entire model with a DHT (supporting PKI for identity) and torrent advertising, the latest version of BitTorrent (which has great support for cross swarm file serving by hash), and RSS or other feeds for advertising the corpus or chunks of it. I maintain a copy in Cloudflare R2 of all IA item metadata, and would love to work on the ArchiveTeam equivalent of a Warrior appliance: appliance or container starts, consumes an RSS feed to request the least seeded items, downloads them up to disk space allowed, and then serve downloaded item files to the swarm.
      - zachh 4y ago
        Agreed! Super helpful, thanks.
  - boredumb 4y ago
    I could imagine something like IPFS and a strong community of volunteers hosting nodes with different partitions. I'm not sure how IPFS would scale to IA sized storage, if for nothing else there would have to be a good way to segment and balance data across volunteers nodes.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
With regards to "too big to fail", one side that doesn't get talked about as much is that "too big to fail" banks get more regulatory scrutiny and how much risk they are allowed to take on is regulated. If the Internet Archive is "too big to fail" then there should be more scrutiny of their actions and the avoidance of risky behavior. Anybody with any legal sense could have told you that the "National Emergency Library" was a risky move.
RobotToaster 4y ago
Culture doesn't pay for lobbying.
lyu07282 4y ago
> we should be looking at ways to preserve those artifacts redundantly, so that even if the IA fails, it's not a calamity Its 212 petabytes as of december 2021[1], that alone would be a bit less than 12 thousand 18 TB HDDs or LTO-9's. We've made virtually zero significant progress in long-term storage technology. Its like if they are getting burned like the library of alexandria because of some copyright vampires, I wouldn't even be angry, just sad, its just what we deserve. [1] https://archive.org/web/petabox.php https://archive.org/web/petabox.php
- cosinetau 4y ago
  Interestingly, IA partners with the modern Bibliotecha Alexandria to warehouse some of the archival material https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliotheca_Alexandrina#Internet_Archive_partnership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliotheca_Alexandrina#Intern...
- ummonk 4y ago
  An order of magnitude more expensive than HDD (let alone tape), but doesn't M-Disc offer a solution here?
- kristopolous 4y ago
  Destroying things over copyright will eventually be seen as absurd as ancient religious beliefs. The future will laugh at us as some primitive ignorant culture with our heads shoved up our asses dismantling society because of some imaginary oh so sacred legal fiction called copyright. Why do some hoarding rent seekers hold every key here and get to indiscriminately burn down our global village on a whim like a feudal lord and all we can say is "please sire, spare the library, can you burn it more slowly than the rest?" We overthrew monarchies 200 years ago so we wouldn't have to deal with this anymore. Having these assholes sneak back in through some courtier backdoor via an institution where people still wear wigs and robes to make us all renters from (intellectual) property lords, it needs to go.
Mindwipe 4y ago
You mean like this one - https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/uk-web-archive https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/uk-web-archive Or this one? - https://netpreserve.org/ https://netpreserve.org/
SllX 4y ago
UNESCO Cultural Heritage Sites are basically this in spirit. But “too big to fail” is bad policy no matter what you apply it to. That we have practiced this bad policy does not mean we should continue doubling down on it.
beojan 4y ago
> I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a repository of digital or physical artifacts is "too big to fail" because of the negative cultural impact their failure would have. In the US that would be the Library of Congress with its Mandatory Deposit requirement.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Which in the grand scheme of things almost nothing is deposited to since the US aligned with Berne Convention lack of explicit copyright notification requirements.
  - mminer237 4y ago
    Maybe indie games aren't, but anything touched by a major publisher will be. You have a copyright without registering now, but you still have to register the copyright before you can sue anybody for infringement and unless you register it before infringement you only get actual damages, which are nearly impossible to prove.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
paradoxyl 4y ago
No profit in that for lobbyists and corporations. They are the only voices that matter in the current system.
Maursault 4y ago
> we should be looking at ways to preserve those artifacts redundantly, so that even if the IA fails, it's not a calamity. We don't need to look too far. IA could simply extend their middle-finger and move to Mexico, Spain, Thailand, or Sealand. Frankly, IA should be mirrored in every country that does not respect the West's initiative of blocking access and unresolvable takedown notices. Fuck US copyright anti-information bullshit. Publishers represent themselves and their own greed, not the authors and artists that created the content. There are rare success stories[1], but how many other works have been looted by publishers at the expense of the long dead content creator's family? [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/jun/14/books.booksnews1 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/jun/14/books.booksnew...
- justinclift 4y ago
  > IA could simply extend their middle-finger and move to ... Unfortunately, the US government directly expands the reach of (US) copyright, patents, and trademarks with the "Free Trade" agreements they've managed to get countries around the world to sign up to. If Sealand had an effective army ;), and could thereby say "Thanks, but no" then that might be an option. Until then though...
tracker1 4y ago
Isn't this kind of the point of the Library of Congress, though their content isn't generally available to the public afaik.
- nradov 4y ago
  The Library of Congress is open to the public. Visitors can freely read most of the books and other materials in the collection. You will generally have to travel to the actual library; only a limited subset of their collection is available online. https://www.loc.gov/visit/ https://www.loc.gov/visit/
  - musicale 4y ago
    We've built this amazing "internet" technology to enable readers all over the world to read things, removing many of the limitations of physical books. We should make better use of it.
    - TremendousJudge 4y ago
      But think of the lost copyright fees!
hinkley 4y ago
I think we need a PBS for the web, and the Internet Archive should be one of the cornerstones of such an organization. Add to it other educational materials that would otherwise show up on youtube or elsewhere with advertisements, and you have a decent basis for the 21st century and beyond.
xnx 4y ago
Great idea. I'll note that archivearchive.org is currently available.

by jawns 4y ago

bruce511 4y ago

>> I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a repository of digital or physical artifacts is "too big to fail" because of the negative cultural impact their failure would have. You can wonder all you like, and call me a cynic, but the US runs on money not culture. The American identity is built on money and wealth and excess, not on anything you might describe as "culture". The IA would not "fail" if it was just left alone, but business never saw a nickel they didn't want to grab, so the law suits are not exactly surprising. And I expect the courts to lean towards the publishers.

mistrial9 4y ago
> US runs on money not culture fortunately, someone saying that does not make it real. Think of a "soup" and of "experiment" and you will get more detail. Resolving an entire nation to a 1 or 0 classification is not defensible, right?
- lanternfish 4y ago
  In this case though, the question is what underlying motivator dominates. The claim doesn't need to be as strong as 'the us is money, no culture' and can just be 'in the US, money accounts for more willpower and political capital than culture in a head to head'
- hyperhello 4y ago
  Resolving the statement to a 1/0 classification isn't necessary. If the US ran on culture, the archive would be considered a jewel; but the US runs on money so it's seen as an underoptimization. If you're predicting what a group would do in a specific case and decision, it really is correct to apply generalizations.
  - splitstud 4y ago
    [dead]
  - Zetice 4y ago
    Er, no. Culture isn’t one specific thing, of which you either have or lack. Our culture can be a rich one and also not value the things the IA represent.
Fr3ck 4y ago
The USA's biggest export is our culture...like it or not. Think of movies, music, etc. Some of it is intangible.
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  You can find positive effect with it only being an indirect and fragile benefit of the system
- tablespoon 4y ago
  >> You can wonder all you like, and call me a cynic, but the US runs on money not culture. The American identity is built on money and wealth and excess, not on anything you might describe as "culture". > The USA's biggest export is our culture...like it or not. Think of movies, music, etc. Some of it is intangible. Yeah, but that's not high culture. It's mass-market culture that makes a lot of money. I think what the GP is referring to as "culture" is high culture--the kind of stuff that is not popular and requires subsidies and special effort to sustain.
  - netr0ute 4y ago
    What's the definition of high culture?
    - carapace 4y ago
      If we still read/watch it in a century?
      - ghaff 4y ago
        Not really. Both Shakespeare and Dickens were pretty mainstream culture at the time.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - 4y ago
misssocrates 4y ago
It was built on entrepreneurship that made Silicon Valley and Hacker News. Now it's arguably a culture of attention and tribal identity.
chroma 4y ago
The US runs on rule of law, and copyright law has been around for centuries. Many sites that violate copyright laws would be fine if left alone. That doesn’t mean they should be immune from lawsuits. Everyone was telling the internet archive that this was a dumb idea because it opened them to lawsuits with ruinous fines. Now the chickens are coming home to roost and IA is crying foul. It can be true that the internet archive is an invaluable store of history while also being true that they made an embarrassing own-goal.
- arvindhmani 4y ago
  >The US runs on rule of law Oh you sweet summer child.
Zetice 4y ago
Shit on the US all you like, but any country could step up to save the IA… This isn’t an American problem, it’s a drawback to the economic system the globe has adopted.

H8crilA 4y ago

Too big to fail comes from the fear of popular unrest (btw, this also works in non-democratic countries, albeit is weaker). There will be no popular unrest here.

tablespoon 4y ago

> I know the government has viewed certain companies as "too big to fail," because of the negative financial impact we would experience if they were to do so. > I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a repository of digital or physical artifacts is "too big to fail" because of the negative cultural impact their failure would have. If there is, the Internet Archive isn't it. Yeah, it's super important in certain weird technology and library subcultures, but few people outside of them would even notice it if disappeared. If they shut down, the story wouldn't even be able to muscle it's way onto the front page of the New York Times: it would loose to whatever the latest Trump drama is and the Nth repetition of the standard mass shooting media package. > In the absence of that, anyone who sees high cultural value to the preservation of these digital artifacts should, counterintuitively, not treat the Internet Archive as having some special status, but should treat it as a liability. It has become the custodian of too much, and too much is on the line if it fails. > Rather than trying to constantly shore up the IA so it can't fail financially, we should be looking at ways to preserve those artifacts redundantly, so that even if the IA fails, it's not a calamity. Yeah, especially since the Internet Archive (as an organization) has proven itself to be irresponsible. Lots of people want to turn the publishers into the villains, for ideological reasons as well as a bias towards the Internet Archive, but the it's the IA that fucked up here. They imperiled their core mission for some unnecessary grandstanding. They either need to fire whatever lawyers OK'd the "Emergency Library" or the leaders that refused to listen to sane legal advice telling them not to do it.

pessimizer 4y ago
> Yeah, especially since the Internet Archive (as an organization) has proven itself to be irresponsible. I think the archive made a bad decision. I do not think it is generally irresponsible.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  The Internet Archive is one of the easiest-to-access source of warez right now, among other things. Either they have a grand plan for the targets they are painting on themselves, or they are bloody irresponsible idiots; I'm inclined to bet on the latter given no further contexts.

reaperducer 4y ago

I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a repository of digital or physical artifacts is "too big to fail" because of the negative cultural impact their failure would have. Here it is: https://loc.gov https://loc.gov

boredumb 4y ago

Essentially a digital museum?

toomuchtodo 4y ago
A distributed, highly resilient digital museum. The internet archive meets S3 meets BitTorrent. We’re most of the way there, just need improvements around durability, rebalancing around geographies, and the identity and metadata (item inventory) planes. (no association with IA, just an active contributor)
- zachh 4y ago
  Do you know if the IA is working on such projects / is there a way to get involved? Or is it mostly third parties doing so?
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    http://blog.archive.org/tag/distributed-web/ http://blog.archive.org/tag/distributed-web/ My personal opinion is that they’re going about this the wrong way, with IPFS, anything blockchain, etc. They can support this entire model with a DHT (supporting PKI for identity) and torrent advertising, the latest version of BitTorrent (which has great support for cross swarm file serving by hash), and RSS or other feeds for advertising the corpus or chunks of it. I maintain a copy in Cloudflare R2 of all IA item metadata, and would love to work on the ArchiveTeam equivalent of a Warrior appliance: appliance or container starts, consumes an RSS feed to request the least seeded items, downloads them up to disk space allowed, and then serve downloaded item files to the swarm.
    - zachh 4y ago
      Agreed! Super helpful, thanks.
- boredumb 4y ago
  I could imagine something like IPFS and a strong community of volunteers hosting nodes with different partitions. I'm not sure how IPFS would scale to IA sized storage, if for nothing else there would have to be a good way to segment and balance data across volunteers nodes.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

With regards to "too big to fail", one side that doesn't get talked about as much is that "too big to fail" banks get more regulatory scrutiny and how much risk they are allowed to take on is regulated. If the Internet Archive is "too big to fail" then there should be more scrutiny of their actions and the avoidance of risky behavior. Anybody with any legal sense could have told you that the "National Emergency Library" was a risky move.

RobotToaster 4y ago

Culture doesn't pay for lobbying.

lyu07282 4y ago

> we should be looking at ways to preserve those artifacts redundantly, so that even if the IA fails, it's not a calamity Its 212 petabytes as of december 2021[1], that alone would be a bit less than 12 thousand 18 TB HDDs or LTO-9's. We've made virtually zero significant progress in long-term storage technology. Its like if they are getting burned like the library of alexandria because of some copyright vampires, I wouldn't even be angry, just sad, its just what we deserve. [1] https://archive.org/web/petabox.php https://archive.org/web/petabox.php

cosinetau 4y ago
Interestingly, IA partners with the modern Bibliotecha Alexandria to warehouse some of the archival material https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliotheca_Alexandrina#Internet_Archive_partnership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliotheca_Alexandrina#Intern...
ummonk 4y ago
An order of magnitude more expensive than HDD (let alone tape), but doesn't M-Disc offer a solution here?
kristopolous 4y ago
Destroying things over copyright will eventually be seen as absurd as ancient religious beliefs. The future will laugh at us as some primitive ignorant culture with our heads shoved up our asses dismantling society because of some imaginary oh so sacred legal fiction called copyright. Why do some hoarding rent seekers hold every key here and get to indiscriminately burn down our global village on a whim like a feudal lord and all we can say is "please sire, spare the library, can you burn it more slowly than the rest?" We overthrew monarchies 200 years ago so we wouldn't have to deal with this anymore. Having these assholes sneak back in through some courtier backdoor via an institution where people still wear wigs and robes to make us all renters from (intellectual) property lords, it needs to go.

Mindwipe 4y ago

You mean like this one - https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/uk-web-archive https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/uk-web-archive Or this one? - https://netpreserve.org/ https://netpreserve.org/

SllX 4y ago

UNESCO Cultural Heritage Sites are basically this in spirit. But “too big to fail” is bad policy no matter what you apply it to. That we have practiced this bad policy does not mean we should continue doubling down on it.

beojan 4y ago

> I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a repository of digital or physical artifacts is "too big to fail" because of the negative cultural impact their failure would have. In the US that would be the Library of Congress with its Mandatory Deposit requirement.

ghaff 4y ago
Which in the grand scheme of things almost nothing is deposited to since the US aligned with Berne Convention lack of explicit copyright notification requirements.
- mminer237 4y ago
  Maybe indie games aren't, but anything touched by a major publisher will be. You have a copyright without registering now, but you still have to register the copyright before you can sue anybody for infringement and unless you register it before infringement you only get actual damages, which are nearly impossible to prove.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

paradoxyl 4y ago

No profit in that for lobbyists and corporations. They are the only voices that matter in the current system.

Maursault 4y ago

> we should be looking at ways to preserve those artifacts redundantly, so that even if the IA fails, it's not a calamity. We don't need to look too far. IA could simply extend their middle-finger and move to Mexico, Spain, Thailand, or Sealand. Frankly, IA should be mirrored in every country that does not respect the West's initiative of blocking access and unresolvable takedown notices. Fuck US copyright anti-information bullshit. Publishers represent themselves and their own greed, not the authors and artists that created the content. There are rare success stories[1], but how many other works have been looted by publishers at the expense of the long dead content creator's family? [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/jun/14/books.booksnews1 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/jun/14/books.booksnew...

justinclift 4y ago
> IA could simply extend their middle-finger and move to ... Unfortunately, the US government directly expands the reach of (US) copyright, patents, and trademarks with the "Free Trade" agreements they've managed to get countries around the world to sign up to. If Sealand had an effective army ;), and could thereby say "Thanks, but no" then that might be an option. Until then though...

tracker1 4y ago

Isn't this kind of the point of the Library of Congress, though their content isn't generally available to the public afaik.

nradov 4y ago
The Library of Congress is open to the public. Visitors can freely read most of the books and other materials in the collection. You will generally have to travel to the actual library; only a limited subset of their collection is available online. https://www.loc.gov/visit/ https://www.loc.gov/visit/
- musicale 4y ago
  We've built this amazing "internet" technology to enable readers all over the world to read things, removing many of the limitations of physical books. We should make better use of it.
  - TremendousJudge 4y ago
    But think of the lost copyright fees!

hinkley 4y ago

I think we need a PBS for the web, and the Internet Archive should be one of the cornerstones of such an organization. Add to it other educational materials that would otherwise show up on youtube or elsewhere with advertisements, and you have a decent basis for the 21st century and beyond.

xnx 4y ago

Great idea. I'll note that archivearchive.org is currently available.