6 ms·

The title implies that losing this lawsuit is threatening the existence of the Internet Archive. Is that really the case? If it is true, then maybe IA should b

by jsnell 4y ago

The title implies that losing this lawsuit is threatening the existence of the Internet Archive. Is that really the case? If it is true, then maybe IA should be run by somebody with better judgement. This was a project with a massive chance of failure (how could anyone think that this wasn't just blatantly infringing?) and a low payoff. If it's also an existential risk, then wtf are they doing running it?

ocdtrekkie 4y ago
Yeah everyone pretty much said when they announced the National Emergency Library, they were risking everything. Sure enough, that's what happened. Giving money to the current Internet Archive is pretty much just giving money to the book publishers. Instead we should be funding someone new to buy the assets off in the auction, and keep the previous decisionmakers far from the new entity.
zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
I use IA all the time and love the website and most of what they do. But some of the stuff that they do that risks getting it all shut down is why I stopped donating.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  if you like the product, you can't pick and choose the traits of the origin.. source-- rock and roll biz
  - zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
    Nah, why would I give them money when they do blatantly illegal stuff?
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      It seems like a reasonably thing, to stop giving the Internet Archive money if you think they might be a bad steward of it. The comparison to rockstars is kind of interesting though, they often engaged in behavior that was criminal, and sometime pretty odious. We gave them money because we liked their cultural output, and they wouldn’t give it away for free. The Internet Archive doesn’t demand money, produces stuff with much arguably greater social value, and doesn’t really do anything odious (just illegal). In the end I have a streaming subscription and don’t give money to charities (maybe when I get a good job I will). Funny to think about, though.
      - vorpalhex 4y ago
        > In the end I have a streaming subscription and don’t give money to charities (maybe when I get a good job I will). Most people won't. When you get the better job, you still won't. If you were buying your first yacht, you still won't. Pick a percent, maybe 1%, of your income. Donate it. If it's literally $1, you are at least giving a dollar. Do it today. If you don't want to pick charities directly, there are charitable funds you can give to instead.
__MatrixMan__ 4y ago
They're doing us all a favor is what they're doing. Intellectual property is just not that important when compared with ensuring that the powerful can't rewrite history. If they lose their case, I hope the project can be kept afloat in ways that the US government can't interfere with.
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  A fight against IP is a fight against capital
  - __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
    [flagged]
- reaperducer 4y ago
  I hope the project can be kept afloat in ways that the US government can't interfere with. The U.S. government, oddly, is the least of my fears when it comes to rewriting history. Private enterprise is already doing it, even going to far as to reach into your private library of books and music to change them after you're purchased it: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/arts/dahl-christie-stine-kindle-edited.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/arts/dahl-christie-stine-... Until yesterday, I used to sync my music library with Apple Music. Not anymore. Apple responding to the Times reporter with a big fat "no comment" tells me that it thinks it's OK to change things on my computer without my knowledge.
  - __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
    I'm not sure Apple really thinks of it as "your" computer either.
  - acomjean 4y ago
    Dahl (or his publisher) changed his own book , the initial back story of the oompa-loompas being problematic. This was 10 years after publishing when someone pointed out it wasn't a great depiction. https://www.roalddahlfans.com/dahls-work/books/charlie-and-the-chocolate-factory/politically-correct-oompa-loompa-evolution/ https://www.roalddahlfans.com/dahls-work/books/charlie-and-t... But it is weird that they can go into your device and change it now. Don't love it. If they made Version 2 available at the same time.... I have Body Count's first Music CD. I got the day it was released. It has a song that was considered problematic and thus removed in future editions.. But they can't change it on the one I have. The big stink they made about it probably sold a bunch copies. On release day they had one copy on CD and one on tape and I had to ask the person working at the store if they had it. (as opposed to dozen of Bruce Springstein albums released that day). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_Count_(album) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_Count_(album) They're were a other examples of CDs cover art being modified because naked people.. https://janesaddiction.org/discography/janes-addiction/albums/ritual-de-lo-habitual/ https://janesaddiction.org/discography/janes-addiction/album...
coldpie 4y ago
> If it is true, then maybe IA should be run by somebody with better judgement. I'm skeptical that you even get the IA without someone like these folks running it. Imagine you're the type of crazy person who starts and runs the IA, the pandemic starts and libraries and schools shut down, and there's a big button in front of you saying "give people access to knowledge that was just removed from them". I dunno man, I can understand the type of person who creates the IA also feeling compelled to push that button under those circumstances. Was it a bad decision? I dunno, probably, I guess. It was a weird and hard time. I'm not angry at them for doing what felt right.
- 999900000999 4y ago
  Ehh. I'm not really buying the Robinhood theory. This feels like some techies thinking their above the law and getting a reality check. It's not like actual libraries don't offer digital lending. You might need to wait a week for Gane of Thrones, but it'll be OK. IA decided the world was unfair and with a bit of arrogance decided to 'correct' it. Let's hope IA is able to just stop lending books and still exist.
  - faeranne 4y ago
    There's a seperation between a library and a pirate site, so it's kinda a bad faith argument, but even going on the merits of your argument, I am pressed to point out that, yes, other libraries have digital lending. It's called Controlled Digital Lending. CDL. The thing that this current lawsuit is trying to remove. So this isn't just an argument against IA's library wing, but a move to remove all library and archive efforts. Penguin has come out and said they are against libraries hosting any of their books at all. US law makes this something they can't fight in physical print, but this is their attempt to start destroying these services.
    - 999900000999 4y ago
      Other libraries actually pay for a license to to lend out Ebooks. And they need to comply with different terms depending on the publisher. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/libraries/article/77904-penguin-random-house-changes-its-library-e-book-terms.html https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/l... Now you can argue if this is fair or not, but this is how Ebook lending is legally done. CDL, where you lend out one Ebook per physical copy was never established as legal. It was tolerated, until IA decided to allow for unlimited lending. I don't see how books are special here. If I buy a bunch of DVDs off eBay, I can't set up a streaming service tomorrow hosting this content. Even if only one person can watch a movie at a time, I've no right to redistribute that content. If CDL is legal, then why limit it to books. Why not movies, games, TV shows ? See the problem here, the laws of physics and basic wear and tear create a fundamental difference between physical media and digital media.
SllX 4y ago
Depends on what they’re looking at in terms of statutory damages. Looking at their Form 990s they bring in roughly in the neighborhood of $15-20M/year in contributions. That isn’t really a lot, and makes me wonder how they ever defend themselves in court but somehow they’ve survived this long.
- Mezzie 4y ago
  Librarians are a pain in the ass to litigate against would be my guess. We're very detail oriented, we're organized, and we're very good at following procedures. We're just as good at drawing things out as lawyers and burying us under tons of paperwork does nothing. Basically a lot of the tactics used to get big lawsuits over with quickly are much harder to execute against librarians. It becomes a war of attrition.
  - SllX 4y ago
    I never thought of it that way before, but that tracks.
    - Mezzie 4y ago
      We also don't need to bill the lawyers for everything that most clients do. A lawyer for the IA can probably give them exact specifications for things like delivery of discovery documents and what they'd be looking for in them and get exactly what they need. So way fewer billable hours used for administrative tasks.
  - Mindwipe 4y ago
    That's not the case here. The IA lost the case because the testified in court they didn't actually check and had never built a mechanism to check that the libraries involved weren't letting out the physical books at the same time. They didn't do even the very basic of legal scholarship on the copyright situation for uncontrolled lending.
    - Mezzie 4y ago
dumbotron 4y ago
I don't donate to them because they're mismanaged like this.
- Aachen 4y ago
  I have in the past, but I'm also holding off until this lawsuit nonsense is done with. Don't need to fatten the lawyer industry with my money for their own mistakes. Running the wayback machine and things like flash emulation is what I want them to do: y'know, archiving stuff and making it available to current systems. I should really look into whether this books lending branch has a chance of taking the web archive stuff down with it and, if so, buy a hard drive and start seeding this torrent that is iirc out there as a decentralized backup of the IA. This data being lost would be similar in proportion to losing GitHub or Wikipedia.
  - pgalvin 4y ago
    There is no decentralised backup of the IA. They’re using 100-200 petabytes of storage. The wayback machine alone is still in the tens of petabytes.
    - pncnmnp 4y ago
      In 2020, the estimated number was around 50 petabytes. I came across an interesting discussion on r/datahoarder regarding this: https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/h02jl4/lets_say_you_wanted_to_back_up_the_internet/ https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/h02jl4/lets_sa...
ncallaway 4y ago
Wouldn’t someone with better judgement have shut down the wayback machine as too much of a risk of a copyright infringement lawsuit?
- ghaff 4y ago
  It's a reasonable question. I don't get to call myself an archive or museum and assemble a website of what I consider "culturally important" cartoons or comic strips or whatever. The Wayback Machine basically operates in the zone of most people don't care that they do this.
  - ncallaway 4y ago
    I mean, they were sued for copyright infringement and settled out of court at least once, so it’s not a negligible risk. I guess my question is largely “Does someone with ‘better judgement’ even start the internet archive?” I don’t have the answer, but I think it’s at least plausible that the answer is “no”.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      I assume any competent IP lawyer would have told them that there was no law allowing them to do what they wanted to do. (IANAL) On the other hand, to the degree that you can operate in a zone that involves poking as few sleeping lions as you can (and deal with the odd copyright infringement suit or complaint), that's maybe OK. The problem I see here is that the IA seems to have incrementally tried "ooching" more and more things some of which were almost certainly less central to their mission and harder lion pokes.
    - renewiltord 4y ago
      Ultimately, the Internet Archive is the Man in the Arena. Everyone else didn't choose the right position on what copyright infringement is okay and what isn't. They didn't choose a position at all until post facto they choose the position that was right up against the margin of being sued - which they would never had known if the IA hadn't done the work. As always, HN commenters would have picked the perfect trade-off every time in the past and yet they somehow never pick the right one in the future. You're being overly kind to everyone here since it's obvious what the truth is: this is wholesale armchair quarterbacking from a bunch of people who would never have built this.
slim 4y ago
It's not a game. It's resistance by every mean available against corporations that want control over what knowledge we have access to. He did an unexpected and courageous move for the benefit of humanity. The Internet Archive is a huge responsibility because if not exhaustive, it could falsify history. It's leaders mandate is to preserve history, not to preserve what they let him preserve
- groby_b 4y ago
  This is, frankly, hot air. The IA resisted nothing, achieved nothing, made nobody's life better, and created an opportunity for bad precedent. It was an utterly boneheaded move. (It has also nothing to do with "exhaustive preservation")
  - fsflover 4y ago
    Giving access to knowledge to people is the opposite of nothing.
    - groby_b 4y ago
      That knowledge was readily available through numerous other legal channels. Libraries do virtual lending. What the IA did in that instance was a reckless gesture that did not change actual ability to access. That's worse than nothing, it's a net negative. You seem to somehow conflate this instance with everything else the IA does. I'm not debating that their overall purpose is good and necessary. I'm saying this particular action was a spectacularly bad idea.

by jsnell 4y ago

ocdtrekkie 4y ago

Yeah everyone pretty much said when they announced the National Emergency Library, they were risking everything. Sure enough, that's what happened. Giving money to the current Internet Archive is pretty much just giving money to the book publishers. Instead we should be funding someone new to buy the assets off in the auction, and keep the previous decisionmakers far from the new entity.

zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago

I use IA all the time and love the website and most of what they do. But some of the stuff that they do that risks getting it all shut down is why I stopped donating.

mistrial9 4y ago
if you like the product, you can't pick and choose the traits of the origin.. source-- rock and roll biz
- zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
  Nah, why would I give them money when they do blatantly illegal stuff?
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    It seems like a reasonably thing, to stop giving the Internet Archive money if you think they might be a bad steward of it. The comparison to rockstars is kind of interesting though, they often engaged in behavior that was criminal, and sometime pretty odious. We gave them money because we liked their cultural output, and they wouldn’t give it away for free. The Internet Archive doesn’t demand money, produces stuff with much arguably greater social value, and doesn’t really do anything odious (just illegal). In the end I have a streaming subscription and don’t give money to charities (maybe when I get a good job I will). Funny to think about, though.
    - vorpalhex 4y ago
      > In the end I have a streaming subscription and don’t give money to charities (maybe when I get a good job I will). Most people won't. When you get the better job, you still won't. If you were buying your first yacht, you still won't. Pick a percent, maybe 1%, of your income. Donate it. If it's literally $1, you are at least giving a dollar. Do it today. If you don't want to pick charities directly, there are charitable funds you can give to instead.

__MatrixMan__ 4y ago

They're doing us all a favor is what they're doing. Intellectual property is just not that important when compared with ensuring that the powerful can't rewrite history. If they lose their case, I hope the project can be kept afloat in ways that the US government can't interfere with.

wahnfrieden 4y ago
A fight against IP is a fight against capital
- __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
  [flagged]
reaperducer 4y ago
I hope the project can be kept afloat in ways that the US government can't interfere with. The U.S. government, oddly, is the least of my fears when it comes to rewriting history. Private enterprise is already doing it, even going to far as to reach into your private library of books and music to change them after you're purchased it: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/arts/dahl-christie-stine-kindle-edited.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/arts/dahl-christie-stine-... Until yesterday, I used to sync my music library with Apple Music. Not anymore. Apple responding to the Times reporter with a big fat "no comment" tells me that it thinks it's OK to change things on my computer without my knowledge.
- __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
  I'm not sure Apple really thinks of it as "your" computer either.
- acomjean 4y ago
  Dahl (or his publisher) changed his own book , the initial back story of the oompa-loompas being problematic. This was 10 years after publishing when someone pointed out it wasn't a great depiction. https://www.roalddahlfans.com/dahls-work/books/charlie-and-the-chocolate-factory/politically-correct-oompa-loompa-evolution/ https://www.roalddahlfans.com/dahls-work/books/charlie-and-t... But it is weird that they can go into your device and change it now. Don't love it. If they made Version 2 available at the same time.... I have Body Count's first Music CD. I got the day it was released. It has a song that was considered problematic and thus removed in future editions.. But they can't change it on the one I have. The big stink they made about it probably sold a bunch copies. On release day they had one copy on CD and one on tape and I had to ask the person working at the store if they had it. (as opposed to dozen of Bruce Springstein albums released that day). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_Count_(album) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_Count_(album) They're were a other examples of CDs cover art being modified because naked people.. https://janesaddiction.org/discography/janes-addiction/albums/ritual-de-lo-habitual/ https://janesaddiction.org/discography/janes-addiction/album...

coldpie 4y ago

> If it is true, then maybe IA should be run by somebody with better judgement. I'm skeptical that you even get the IA without someone like these folks running it. Imagine you're the type of crazy person who starts and runs the IA, the pandemic starts and libraries and schools shut down, and there's a big button in front of you saying "give people access to knowledge that was just removed from them". I dunno man, I can understand the type of person who creates the IA also feeling compelled to push that button under those circumstances. Was it a bad decision? I dunno, probably, I guess. It was a weird and hard time. I'm not angry at them for doing what felt right.

999900000999 4y ago
Ehh. I'm not really buying the Robinhood theory. This feels like some techies thinking their above the law and getting a reality check. It's not like actual libraries don't offer digital lending. You might need to wait a week for Gane of Thrones, but it'll be OK. IA decided the world was unfair and with a bit of arrogance decided to 'correct' it. Let's hope IA is able to just stop lending books and still exist.
- faeranne 4y ago
  There's a seperation between a library and a pirate site, so it's kinda a bad faith argument, but even going on the merits of your argument, I am pressed to point out that, yes, other libraries have digital lending. It's called Controlled Digital Lending. CDL. The thing that this current lawsuit is trying to remove. So this isn't just an argument against IA's library wing, but a move to remove all library and archive efforts. Penguin has come out and said they are against libraries hosting any of their books at all. US law makes this something they can't fight in physical print, but this is their attempt to start destroying these services.
  - 999900000999 4y ago
    Other libraries actually pay for a license to to lend out Ebooks. And they need to comply with different terms depending on the publisher. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/libraries/article/77904-penguin-random-house-changes-its-library-e-book-terms.html https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/l... Now you can argue if this is fair or not, but this is how Ebook lending is legally done. CDL, where you lend out one Ebook per physical copy was never established as legal. It was tolerated, until IA decided to allow for unlimited lending. I don't see how books are special here. If I buy a bunch of DVDs off eBay, I can't set up a streaming service tomorrow hosting this content. Even if only one person can watch a movie at a time, I've no right to redistribute that content. If CDL is legal, then why limit it to books. Why not movies, games, TV shows ? See the problem here, the laws of physics and basic wear and tear create a fundamental difference between physical media and digital media.

SllX 4y ago

Depends on what they’re looking at in terms of statutory damages. Looking at their Form 990s they bring in roughly in the neighborhood of $15-20M/year in contributions. That isn’t really a lot, and makes me wonder how they ever defend themselves in court but somehow they’ve survived this long.

Mezzie 4y ago
Librarians are a pain in the ass to litigate against would be my guess. We're very detail oriented, we're organized, and we're very good at following procedures. We're just as good at drawing things out as lawyers and burying us under tons of paperwork does nothing. Basically a lot of the tactics used to get big lawsuits over with quickly are much harder to execute against librarians. It becomes a war of attrition.
- SllX 4y ago
  I never thought of it that way before, but that tracks.
  - Mezzie 4y ago
    We also don't need to bill the lawyers for everything that most clients do. A lawyer for the IA can probably give them exact specifications for things like delivery of discovery documents and what they'd be looking for in them and get exactly what they need. So way fewer billable hours used for administrative tasks.
- Mindwipe 4y ago
  That's not the case here. The IA lost the case because the testified in court they didn't actually check and had never built a mechanism to check that the libraries involved weren't letting out the physical books at the same time. They didn't do even the very basic of legal scholarship on the copyright situation for uncontrolled lending.
  - Mezzie 4y ago

dumbotron 4y ago

I don't donate to them because they're mismanaged like this.

Aachen 4y ago
I have in the past, but I'm also holding off until this lawsuit nonsense is done with. Don't need to fatten the lawyer industry with my money for their own mistakes. Running the wayback machine and things like flash emulation is what I want them to do: y'know, archiving stuff and making it available to current systems. I should really look into whether this books lending branch has a chance of taking the web archive stuff down with it and, if so, buy a hard drive and start seeding this torrent that is iirc out there as a decentralized backup of the IA. This data being lost would be similar in proportion to losing GitHub or Wikipedia.
- pgalvin 4y ago
  There is no decentralised backup of the IA. They’re using 100-200 petabytes of storage. The wayback machine alone is still in the tens of petabytes.
  - pncnmnp 4y ago
    In 2020, the estimated number was around 50 petabytes. I came across an interesting discussion on r/datahoarder regarding this: https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/h02jl4/lets_say_you_wanted_to_back_up_the_internet/ https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/h02jl4/lets_sa...

ncallaway 4y ago

Wouldn’t someone with better judgement have shut down the wayback machine as too much of a risk of a copyright infringement lawsuit?

ghaff 4y ago
It's a reasonable question. I don't get to call myself an archive or museum and assemble a website of what I consider "culturally important" cartoons or comic strips or whatever. The Wayback Machine basically operates in the zone of most people don't care that they do this.
- ncallaway 4y ago
  I mean, they were sued for copyright infringement and settled out of court at least once, so it’s not a negligible risk. I guess my question is largely “Does someone with ‘better judgement’ even start the internet archive?” I don’t have the answer, but I think it’s at least plausible that the answer is “no”.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I assume any competent IP lawyer would have told them that there was no law allowing them to do what they wanted to do. (IANAL) On the other hand, to the degree that you can operate in a zone that involves poking as few sleeping lions as you can (and deal with the odd copyright infringement suit or complaint), that's maybe OK. The problem I see here is that the IA seems to have incrementally tried "ooching" more and more things some of which were almost certainly less central to their mission and harder lion pokes.
  - renewiltord 4y ago
    Ultimately, the Internet Archive is the Man in the Arena. Everyone else didn't choose the right position on what copyright infringement is okay and what isn't. They didn't choose a position at all until post facto they choose the position that was right up against the margin of being sued - which they would never had known if the IA hadn't done the work. As always, HN commenters would have picked the perfect trade-off every time in the past and yet they somehow never pick the right one in the future. You're being overly kind to everyone here since it's obvious what the truth is: this is wholesale armchair quarterbacking from a bunch of people who would never have built this.

slim 4y ago

It's not a game. It's resistance by every mean available against corporations that want control over what knowledge we have access to. He did an unexpected and courageous move for the benefit of humanity. The Internet Archive is a huge responsibility because if not exhaustive, it could falsify history. It's leaders mandate is to preserve history, not to preserve what they let him preserve

groby_b 4y ago
This is, frankly, hot air. The IA resisted nothing, achieved nothing, made nobody's life better, and created an opportunity for bad precedent. It was an utterly boneheaded move. (It has also nothing to do with "exhaustive preservation")
- fsflover 4y ago
  Giving access to knowledge to people is the opposite of nothing.
  - groby_b 4y ago
    That knowledge was readily available through numerous other legal channels. Libraries do virtual lending. What the IA did in that instance was a reckless gesture that did not change actual ability to access. That's worse than nothing, it's a net negative. You seem to somehow conflate this instance with everything else the IA does. I'm not debating that their overall purpose is good and necessary. I'm saying this particular action was a spectacularly bad idea.