11 ms·

Someone needs to save the Internet Archives from the lawyers and I have an idea

221 points by goplayoutside 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
laurex 3y ago
While I think it's an interesting idea to have the LOC 'acquire' the Internet Archive, it's not addressing the more fundamental questions around copyright, fair use, public access, and ownership. If we actually tried to create a system, in the context of today's technology, globalism, and ways of creating work, that 'incentivised innovation' or, as it originally was framed, 'Encouragement of Learning' we would not come up with the copyright system we have. That's the conversation I would like to see.
- pipo234 3y ago
  Very good point, but not at odds. Let's have both: 1. An organization like LoC (or UN sponsored "government" organization) take over the Internet Archive. Let curators curate and conserve. 2. A discussion about reform of copyright, public domain, "intellectual property", incentivizing innovation, etc. [EDIT] And while we're at it: 3. Let's also have a discussion about the legitimacy and desirability of tools and tricks used to enforce corporate lawyer whims (ie.: DRM, 20 page EULAs, cookie banners, terms of service, etc.)
  - singleshot_ 3y ago
    As to 3: We have been having that discussion in the courts for decades. The consensus is that the tools we have are at least part of why eight of the top ten global websites are run by American companies. To the extent you want to have a thriving marketplace to ply (what I assume is) your trade, these tools are at least desirable. I do agree that the existence of law that supports these techniques is a choice, and that it’s entirely possible that avoidance of these techniques might win in the marketplace.
    - PhasmaFelis 3y ago
      > The consensus is that the tools we have are at least part of why eight of the top ten global websites are run by American companies. Might be some part of that. I suspect that "richest nation in the world" and "had widespread Internet access years ahead of anyone else" are larger parts.
pipo234 3y ago
TLDR; the idea he has: > My thinking is that frequent partner The Library of Congress can put a stop to this by buying the Internet Archive. Make it a government body and protect all that digital content.
- formerly_proven 3y ago
  The guberment is not exempt from acts of congress.
  - ncallaway 3y ago
    It can be, with an act of Congress…
    - HideousKojima 3y ago
      Which can be undone by yet another act of Congress.
    - vel0city 3y ago
      I'm not allowed to eat this candy bar. I wrote a sticky note that says I'm not allowed to eat it. Its not like I can just ignore or rewrite the sticky note whenever I want. Congress passing a law saying it can't do X doesn't mean they can't just come back a few years later and decide to remove that rule, assuming its not unconstitutional.
oofbey 3y ago
“The World Wide Web … is arguably roughly 40 years old.” 1993 was 30 years ago not 40. I see no valid argument that there was any WWW in the early 1980s.
- reacweb 3y ago
  before http (ncsa mosaic is march 1993), I was using gopher, newsgroups and xarchie. When you saw a reference to a program in a newsgroup, it was often easy with xarchie to find a public ftp mirror where you could download it. I remember reading CERT advisories on gopher and having noticed that at my school, the vulnerable command xloadmodule was present (sunOS 4.3). I warned the admin and after 15 days of no reaction and no answer, I became root of all the servers. Good old days ;-)
  - oofbey 3y ago
    The internet is of course much older than the WWW. And the internet had and still has many non-WWW ways to communicate and publish content. But applying the term "WWW" to any non-HTML non-HTTP technologies is revisionist, and I'd argue just wrong.
- IAmGraydon 3y ago
  That's correct. The World Wide Web became available to the broader public 30 years ago On April 30, 1993.
lincon127 3y ago
Where's the idea?
- permo-w 3y ago
  the page is poorly coded and later paragraphs load and unload making it seem as if the article prematurely finishes, which explains why you might have missed it. the idea is for the Library of Congress to buy the Internet Archive to protect it from legal action my thoughts on this are that it's a good idea, but it can't be the only solution. moving from a single point of failure to a more secure single point of failure is okay, but a better solution would be for the Library of Congress and similar public bodies around the world to be able to buy/obtain a copy of the archive and the protocols it uses to do the archiving. this would practically guarantee the permanency of the data and, if it was deemed legally viable, provide a decent revenue source
  - iraqmtpizza 3y ago
    Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. There is no enumerated power which gives the federal government the authority to manage an internet archive. So this isn't just crazy and dangerous, it's illegal as well. It's alway funny to see people suggest things the federal government should do without considering its deliberately limited nature and why that should go out the window with a constitutional amendment. This isn't the UK where we can just make up the law however we want. 10th amendment anyone? Enumerated powers?
    - permo-w 3y ago
      this is a patently bizarre comment. so the library of congress too is illegal? perhaps the federal government shouldn't be able to take photos, or tell the time or keep records
      - iraqmtpizza 3y ago
        Every creation of the federal government is presumptively unlawful unless and until it is rooted reasonably within one of the enumerated powers. The federal government has speech rights, obviously. It can pick up a camera and take photos like anyone else. It can keep records only in keeping with the constitution (e.g. 4th amendment) and statutory authorization. E.g. no national gun registry and no cell phone location data without a warrant. Only to the extent that the library of congress is necessary and proper to regulating interstate commerce are its activities authorized. As soon as it strays from that, it must find another enumerated power with which to justify its actions. For instance, if the library of congress were to begin deporting illegal aliens, that would be incontrovertibly within the enumerated powers. To say nothing of the will of Congress. A centralized copyright register is obviously something important to interstate commerce. Existing internet archives do not keep track of whose copyright is whose. So to transfer ownership of such a thing to the library of congress would not serve any copyright function related to interstate commerce. Surely even you can see that. So you're going to have to get real fucking creative, buddy!
mensetmanusman 3y ago
The simple solution is a compromise, let them archive, but they must wait some amount of years before it is available publicly. Hundred year copyright is certainly too long, that is much longer than ideas are protected in a patent which costs far more in research and development.
- RecycledEle 3y ago
  Are you suggesting we compromise with lawyers?? Lawyers claim they own the copyright to Shakespeare because "someone has to make money off it." Never compromise with cops, lawyers, or judges. Read Shakespeare.
henvic 3y ago
Wanting to have a government organization buy something like the Internet Archives sounds like a terrible idea for me. It's not like you'd keep lobbyists away from it. A great alternative is to build the Internet Archive so that after something is there "for a while", it is archived in a way that anyone can efficiently distribute it (thinking about long-term resiliency) and even survive a conspiracy to destroy it.
- jancsika 3y ago
  An open research problem isn't what I'd call a great alternative. Both the history of takedowns of large private music trackers and the current state of Sci-hub show that nobody knows how to build such a thing.
sp332 3y ago
We already have a Library of Congress. If they want a copy of the Internet Archive, they can just download one. (The raw WARC files from the web crawls are not publicly available, but I'm sure they could work something out.)
bhartzer 3y ago
I know websites (and some of my clients) who are actually actively REMOVING copies of their website from the Internet Archive. There's a specific process for getting all of the content removed, and asking them to not archive the website. For some ecommerce websites, they're removing copies from Internet Archive because there's pricing data that's getting archived. I've also had clients remove copies because they've had a big problem with scrapers who are scraping the copies of the site in Internet Archive. They've been able to (mostly) stop scrapers on the site, but having archived copies of the site allows scrapers to scrape the Internet Archive.
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  Heh. What’s nuts is that, stripped of other copyright-bearing context, it’s my understanding that they’d not have a (legal, but policy, maybe) leg to stand on asking for pricing data to be removed. That’s supposed to be free (as in freedom) to anyone who finds a way to get ahold of it. Sucks that they’re killing the entire archive over something they have no actual claim to.
  - bhartzer 3y ago
    I agree, now that you pointed it out, there probably isn't a legal leg to stand on. IANAL, though--would be interested in hearing from an attorney about that. Regardless, if you can prove you're the website owner, then Internet Archive will remove all of your content and stop archiving your site if you ask them.
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      Right, by IA policy they can ask to have the site taken down. What’s unfortunate about it is that they’re doing it over data that they aren’t supposed to be able to restrict, and the rest of the site (which I doubt they much mind being on IA) is caught in the crossfire, as the means by which they’re getting the part they care about taken down. Like, they probably wouldn’t bother except that the archive happens to contain data that isn’t supposed to be restricable anyway but de facto is, if they take the whole archive of the site down.
mkl95 3y ago
> My thinking is that frequent partner The Library of Congress can put a stop to this by buying the Internet Archive. Make it a government body and protect all that digital content. I think these lawyers may be less inclined to sue the US Federal government. This is the opposite approach of what I would consider a potential solution. The information should be stored in a system expensive enough to sabotage that no government will consider it. Data should be replicated as many times as possible and replicas should be as physically distributed as possible.
- jancsika 3y ago
  Unfortunately, that's the opposite of what I would consider a practical solution. The system you describe doesn't exist. If it did then Sci-hub would already be using it. Instead, Sci-hub is subject to essentially the same risks of takedown as IA.
  - asrsgiaonionio 3y ago
    [dead]
  - fatfingerd 3y ago
    I think they should focus more on signing structured data and indexes so people can just exchange IA content however they like and know it hasn't been tampered with. There's not much a state will be able to do as long as they rotate keys, etc, so there are just state demanded revocations which can be ignored.
- Pannoniae 3y ago
  Or... host it in a country which doesn't care about this kind of stuff.
  - masfuerte 3y ago
    If the US cares enough (and they have a long track record of being irrationally overprotective of IP) then the IA becomes a bargaining chip for whatever shithole it's hosted in. It's not a long term solution.
causi 3y ago
My thinking is that frequent partner The Library of Congress can put a stop to this by buying the Internet Archive. Make it a government body and protect all that digital content. So instead of losing all the copyrighted content piece by piece we lose access to it all at once? Someone needs to save the Internet Archives from the lawyers and I have an idea More like someone needs to save the Internet Archive from Brewster Kahle. He and all of us knew the rules of the game: the IA was allowed to illegally host copyrighted content that wasn't making them money as long as it wasn't being exploited by the copyright holders and they paid lip service to IP law with things like controlled borrowing. Then they kicked the anthill with the emergency library. We pulled our hair out warning them not to and they did it anyway. Maybe their actions were morally justified but they were just so blisteringly stupid that it's hard not to feel betrayed.
- snapetom 3y ago
  > More like someone needs to save the Internet Archive from Brewster Kahle. Can't vote this enough. As flawed as the rules are, you know them. The rules should be changed, but you don't change them by blatantly breaking them in the most flagrant way possible.
  - causi 3y ago
    Right. If IA wants to spin off a legally-separate "Red Team" of radical activists to demonstrate how ignoring copyright laws enriches us all, I'll be happy to donate. Using the IA for this is reckless and doomed to failure. Do you think Sci-Hub would've survived if they'd started flouting the law as a California-based nonprofit with hundreds of employees? Hell no.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  None of you guys built this. Brewster Kahle did. Everyone fantasizes about how they would have sold at the top. But you won't. Ultimately, the Internet Archive took balls. That was the defining attribute. And the guy with balls was always going to take it farther than just that. That's what it means to have balls. All the guys who fantasize that they would have stopped at the perfect stopping point would have never started. You can run a mirror now. You can run a crawler now. Heritrix is free software. The IA dump is retrievable. What's stopping you from making The Compliant Internet Archive? Nothing really except for the fact that none of the armchair quarterbacks have even seen what a ball looks like.
mattnewton 3y ago
Rights holders have managed to wring perpetual copyright and things like the DMCA from congress, there is no way they won’t just hire different lawyers good at influencing the government and shut it down there. In fact this might even get administrative regulations made that make any private attempts illegal too.
- shiftpgdn 3y ago
  Most rights holders were happy to look past it until Chuck Wendig started crying about people being able to read his pulp sci-fi too easily.
someguy7250 3y ago
Frankly I say we let them delete all public backups of internet culture. Eventually there would be a backlash when this goes too far. Lots of games, websites and TV shows would be gone. Let them. Don't make local backups either. Or at least encrypt the backups and make sure they will be lost when we die. *Let DRM and Copyright become the modern equivalent of book burning.* Let people forget. Let it be the government's problem to preserve knowledge and history. And let it decide when the cost is higher than whatever benefits we get from strict authoritarian levels of Copyright protections
- stuartjohnson12 3y ago
  This seems oxymoronic. There shouldn't be backlash against deletionism because deletionism will cease once there's enough backlash against it.
  - someguy7250 3y ago
    Yes but book burning had backlash, too. And frankly if we are really that stupid then we didn't deserve tech and culture in the first place. Might as well delete wikipedia. Let people forget everything, then evolution will take over. /s
    - stuartjohnson12 3y ago
      I don't understand your point.
      - someguy7250 3y ago
        My point is book burning can cause backlash. Therefore so can deletionism. When the backlash happens, it's often already too late. But people are aware something was gone, that's why there is a backlash. I know this because it happened in the past with the Cultural Revolution. Not saying it will happen in the same way here. Maybe the only backlash we'll ever get is against my stupid comments. Lol.
bityard 3y ago
I agree that the Internet Archive needs help, but I don't agree that it should get absorbed into the Library of Congress. Let's say it happens and now the LoC is running the IA. Others have already made the point that lobbyists and politicians can more easily erode its functionality much more easily and silently, and that's a good point. But what I fear the most is that it would mean the actual existence of the IA would be at the whim of congressional budget planning (which is frankly a shitshow) rather than being funded by those who actually CARE about it. If you really want to help the Internet Archive survive, the very best thing any of us can do is donate directly to the IA so that they can afford good legal council to fight back against the music and book publishers who want to shut them down: https://archive.org/donate?origin=iawww-TopNavDonateButton https://archive.org/donate?origin=iawww-TopNavDonateButton
- sangnoir 3y ago
  > If you really want to help the Internet Archive survive, the very best thing any of us can do is donate directly to the IA so that they can afford good legal council to fight back against the music and book publishers who want to shut them down I thought you were going in a different direction until your last sentence. The IA needs donations to afford good counsel to advise them on the law before they make boneheaded decisions that put their mission in legal jeopardy. Preserving online content is one thing, "lending" in-print books is rather far from the core mission IMO. Even authors who are anti-DRM were outraged by the ill-advised lending scheme on book copies the IA didn't even pay for. Paraphrasing Desmond Tutu: at some point, we have to stop continually rescuing people out of the river and go upstream to find out who keeps throwing them in there.
tb_technical 3y ago
[flagged]
- patja 3y ago
  Lawyers, tax advisors, sales & marketing...all are "necessary" evils that would never exist in a perfect world. We should be looking for methods of limiting and discouraging the "need" for these professions wherever possible.
- nameandshame 3y ago
  [dead]
- ThrowAway1922A 3y ago
  What are you gonna do, order them a pizza? Or are you suggesting people try to ruin their lives? The lawyers and their families have done nothing illegal, unlike the IA who very well might have after being blinded by ideology. If the IA broke the law, or violated IP, copyright, etc than why should they not be taken to court?
  - tb_technical 3y ago
    "They were just doing their job" is not a response we accept when police and soldiers brutalize people. Why should it be the same for lawyers when they attack publicly accessible archives? IMHO, publicly accessible archives can uplift large groups of the disadvantaged. Attacking them is equivalent to cutting public services for the poor.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > "They were just doing their job" is not a response we accept when police and soldiers brutalize people. Unfortunately, it is a response that we, collectively, mostly do accept. We shouldn't, and occasionally we don't, but...
    - ThrowAway1922A 3y ago
      The archives have to follow the laws and this isn't a case of the IA simply making a mistake, it was them intentionally crossing the line and assuming they'd get away with it. I don't want the IA lost, but they are the ones responsible for their current legal situation. Fwiw I wouldn't target the family of the police either, I think this targeting of innocent uninvolved people is sick.
pseingatl 3y ago
Great idea. Or a state library in another country that has the same status. The British Library, or hell, even the Lenin Library or whatever it's called these days.
permo-w 3y ago
2023 - 1993 != 40
- TheRealPomax 3y ago
  I think you forgot to account for Covid, which adds 10 year.
- masfuerte 3y ago
  And the author claims to have had 35 years in the industry so he should have some kind of intuition of when 30 years ago was. Or maybe he miscalculated 25 years experience.
pessimizer 3y ago
Sounds at first listen like a way to make it easier to destroy the IA. If the LoC copies it and continues to archive the web, it would be a lot easier to make the argument in court that the IA wasn't even necessary. The LoC would have no obligation to open up the archive to the public - maybe instead access would be provided through a single computer in a DC building after filling out a form, having that form approved, and they search you for thumb drives and take away your phone before you go in. Eventually the entire thing could be accidentally deleted, or the budget for it could be cut. Somebody needs to save all of us from the control of the government and its justice system by corporate special interests.
withinrafael 3y ago
I see IA used more and more frequently as a free file host for new copyrighted content (e.g., custom hacked up Windows ISOs), which is incredibly frustrating. Without changes, perhaps active curation like a normal library, I fear the site will get forced off the Internet soon.
TheRealPomax 3y ago
tl;dr: the idea is to have the US Library of Congress to buy the internet archive.
earthboundkid 3y ago
I applied for a job at the Library of Congress once. By the time they got around to contacting me, I was already a couple of months into another job. Then my info got stolen in the USAJobs data breach. None of that is their fault per se, but it's a limitation of the position. You end up with people who want stability above all else. It actually could be a good thing for the Internet Archive which basically just needs to continue existing forever.
alex_young 3y ago
Why not both? Can't the LOC start maintaining a copy of the Internet Archive? The IA should exist independently, but there's no reason we should keep the archive in one place.
retrocryptid 3y ago
I like the internet archive, but the web sucks.
jancsika 3y ago
Someone got rightly flagged for making a call for vigilantism. I'd like to respond to them in a non-flagged comment. To the person apparently so frustrated that they were brainstorming vigilantism-- I'd suggest first at least trying the one thing that HN is allergic to-- getting engaged with politics. Few to none of the respondents here who are vaguely complaining about lobbyists (at the Library of Congress, of all places!) have any experience whatsoever organizing politically. There is a pair-- literally, two humans-- who were able to get legislation passed in a state that is of general benefit to a) an industry where they weren't big players, and b) to society in general. They weren't oligarchs or billionaires or whoever HN thinks controls the keys to the kingdom. They were just interested and diligent enough to attempt the work. (Well, one of them had enough free time to go and meet with nearly every representative-- I'm not saying it's easy or quick.) Think about the number of times a bugfix can fail to compile before you finally get it to work. If you apply that discipline and focus to find real, lasting legislative protections to projects like the IA or Sci-hub, you're way more likely to end up making positive changes than through vigilantism. And of course if you're successful, HN will still criticize you for failing to solve the problem with a fast, homomorphically-encrypted, decentralized, statically-linked, non-Electron, portable executable. I guess you'll just have to accept the tragic ending that the most intelligent people in the world won't understand what you achieved. :(
- Pannoniae 3y ago
  I don't see how this applies here. This is a zero-sum game - you are fighting against the money of IP interests, and they have way more money than you. How would anything positive happen out of this? Vigilantism is immoral, and is not likely to work, but that is still more plausible to do something than trying to out-spend large corporations in lobbying. Or, move the whole operations to a country which doesn't give a damn about all of this, that's also a way of solving the lawsuit problems.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - kevinpet 3y ago
    Politics is not decided by money. Money is a huge factor, and you can't do much without at least some money, but it's not the final word. Politics is determined in large part by how politicians read the mood of their voters, how they personally feel about an issue, and whether what the lobbyists are saying seems to make sense.
zokier 3y ago
Personally I consider IA having all the eggs in basket unreasonably risky move. If IA did the basic sane segregation, the legitimate and truly valuable parts would not be facing such high existential risks. For example one way of dividing would be 1) wayback machine 2) public domain collections 3) non-pd collections 4) user-provided content. Having those firewalled into separate services and separate legal entities would protect 1) and 2) when its 3) and 4) that are drawing these attacks. This lack of separation is also hurting IA in other ways; I think Wayback Machine and PD archives are really important and valuable, but right now I can not support or even endorse IA because their poor leadership playing with fire and putting those services under unnecessary risk.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Is the Library of Congress still preserving tweets? Seems like that's probably gone to the wayside with all the API restrictions and what not?
peter_d_sherman 3y ago
>"Someone needs to save the Internet Archives from the lawyers and I have an idea" >"My thinking is that frequent partner The Library of Congress can put a stop to this by buying the Internet Archive. Make it a government body and protect all that digital content. I think these lawyers may be less inclined to sue the US Federal government." The US Federal government -- is primarily composed of lawyers... So let me get this straight... the author's idea, broadly understood, would be: To take the Internet Archive away from lawyers -- and give it to other lawyers? ? (Or do I not understand the author's viewpoint correctly?) ?
omnibrain 3y ago
I understand the function of the Internet Archives as an Archive of the internet. But I don't understand why they think their function is to influence legislation by activism in other fields. First they poked a bear with their "free library" of books. Now they are poking another bear with their music library. And in the process they endanger their "core function" of being the Internet archives.
- CydeWeys 3y ago
  The Internet Archive absolutely should be engaged in activism to expand fair use, protect archivist work, reduce copyright term, etc. What they shouldn't be doing is risking their existence by doing things with shaky legal standing.
  - InSteady 3y ago
    Sure, and MLK should have stuck to marches instead of organizing strikes and other highly effective but risky forms of direct action. Kahle has stated from the outset that he wants to build a digital Library of Alexandria. He wants all media, including books, movies, music, etc to be freely available to anyone curious enough to come and look for it. Sounds like they are continuing to do exactly what they set out to do. Maybe what they shouldn't be doing is staying in some arbitrary lane that 3rd parties have decided they belong in, and instead continue fighting for freedom and universal access in whatever way they see fit.
    - ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
      The IA should stick to it's goal of actually being an archive first https://archive.org/post/1126216/kiwi-farms-removed-from-wayback-machine-why https://archive.org/post/1126216/kiwi-farms-removed-from-way...
      - flangola7 3y ago
        The KF pages are not deleted, only hidden from public view. Something they do for anyone or any domain on request. They are still accessible through request by researchers and will be there for future historians, they're just not open where they can be used to further doxxing and other harmful campaigns. I donate to IA on a monthly recurring basis and I'm glad to see them be ethically conscious about their service and prevent it from being weaponized.
dahwolf 3y ago
I'm on IA's side here but I do take issue with the lack of introspection. We frame this story by defining some villains, like lawyers and Google, whilst no fault is upon us. We're victims even. And yet the typical internet user doesn't pay a dime for most things. Blocks ads. Works around Paywalls. Piggybacks on the neighbors' Netflix and then Tweets how they fully support the writer's strike. What I'm saying is that we're not that great either, us internet citizens. We very much have the internet we deserve.
IX-103 3y ago
I think it makes sense for the library of Congress to archive the Internet, but I think that should be independent of the Internet Archive. We really should go back to requiring items that want copyright protection to send a copy to the library of Congress. That would mean that those interested in copyright protection (which limits the ability of the public to share and retain copies for posterity) to actively act to ensure they are available due posterity.
A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
Cyberpunk and technothriller literature has anticipated this, going all the way back to the 1980s -- but most prominently in Neal Stephenson's 1999 novel Cryptonomicon, where the main characters work to set up an underground data haven in the fictional SE-Asian Sultanate of Kinakuta. Back then, it was naturally assumed that large databases and archives would need to be hosted in secure offshore locations, for obvious legal reasons. (IIRC, Cryptonomicon has an amusing segment where the characters describe the US legal system's discovery processes. "Never, ever send anything in email" was the gist of it.) Fast forward to today, and there are two great data havens -- SciHub and Libgen -- which, by design, are correctly and appropriately difficult for the US Government and its loathsome civil legal apparatus to grasp. The third great data haven is the Internet Archive, which was unwisely based in the US and managed as though it were a legitimate tech company. The lawyers smell the blood in the water and I fear it's not long for this world. What the world needs is a pared-down distributed version that's more slippery and totally unresponsive to legal complaints.
- cbozeman 3y ago
  Sounds more like what we need are less lawyers, and less rent-seeking.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
janalsncm 3y ago
It’s very interesting to me that copyright lawsuits in the US may end up resulting in a lot of content restrictions which have some similarity to Chinese censorship laws. Zooming in they are different of course, but it is certainly a reflection of values. In the US it is very possible we could end up with a neutered ChatGPT due to ongoing copyright suits. OpenAI easily can’t prevent its chatbot from regurgitating copyrighted material. Although not the same, it is reminiscent of Chinese censorship of political topics, since it’s also not possible to prevent the bot from authoring a pro-democracy screed. In the same way the West doesn’t mind ChatGPT’s political musings, China is unlikely to care about any potential copyright infringements. Maybe it’s obvious, but I find it interesting how a chatbot which is trained on all online text pushes the boundaries of societies differently. In China, it’s you can’t say a thing because it is transgressive but in the West it’s you can’t say a thing because it has been privatized. And in the West, copyright is again coming for free expression by suing IA. Perhaps the logical conclusion of this is the US National Anthem somehow being copyrighted and the only place it can be legally played is in China.
ocdtrekkie 3y ago
There's a drastically simpler way to save the Internet Archive: Get Brewster Kahle out. He doesn't believe in copyright, keeps flaunting his utter disregard for it, and ignoring the advice of his supporters telling him not to do stupid stuff that irks big copyright entities. A good steward of the Internet Archive would strike agreements with organizations like the RIAA, which would likely even financially support a preservation mission if not directly coupled to infringement. Notice how museums often broadcast and showcase copyrighted works without issue? It's because they work in tandem with copyright holders instead of claiming they don't have to. Copyright holders can't abide infringement, but they can rubber stamp behavior that complements them instead of fights them: I suspect the RIAA would pay for record archival if the IA had an agreement for what works were abandoned enough they could publicly distribute and if there were terms for researcher access to the whole library.
tomcam 3y ago
tl;dr The Library of Congress should buy Internet Archive
FounderBurr 3y ago
Internet archive could have stuck to not intentionally violating copyright law but choose not to. They made this bed, let them sleep in it.
sph 3y ago
I have three issues with this: 1. The author is obviously American, as they didn't even question for a second why would one country's government be the steward of what is an archive of worldwide importance. 2. The author, with all due respect, must have been living under a rock to believe a government to be a good steward of pretty much anything. The Internet Archive also contains a great deal of pornography, and rightly so. Can't wait to see it "curated" by the most Puritan Western government. 3. Mostly a joke, but do you remember what happened last time we decided to put all of humanity's knowledge in a single library?

221 points by goplayoutside 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

While I think it's an interesting idea to have the LOC 'acquire' the Internet Archive, it's not addressing the more fundamental questions around copyright, fair use, public access, and ownership. If we actually tried to create a system, in the context of today's technology, globalism, and ways of creating work, that 'incentivised innovation' or, as it originally was framed, 'Encouragement of Learning' we would not come up with the copyright system we have. That's the conversation I would like to see.

pipo234 3y ago
Very good point, but not at odds. Let's have both: 1. An organization like LoC (or UN sponsored "government" organization) take over the Internet Archive. Let curators curate and conserve. 2. A discussion about reform of copyright, public domain, "intellectual property", incentivizing innovation, etc. [EDIT] And while we're at it: 3. Let's also have a discussion about the legitimacy and desirability of tools and tricks used to enforce corporate lawyer whims (ie.: DRM, 20 page EULAs, cookie banners, terms of service, etc.)
- singleshot_ 3y ago
  As to 3: We have been having that discussion in the courts for decades. The consensus is that the tools we have are at least part of why eight of the top ten global websites are run by American companies. To the extent you want to have a thriving marketplace to ply (what I assume is) your trade, these tools are at least desirable. I do agree that the existence of law that supports these techniques is a choice, and that it’s entirely possible that avoidance of these techniques might win in the marketplace.
  - PhasmaFelis 3y ago
    > The consensus is that the tools we have are at least part of why eight of the top ten global websites are run by American companies. Might be some part of that. I suspect that "richest nation in the world" and "had widespread Internet access years ahead of anyone else" are larger parts.

pipo234 3y ago

TLDR; the idea he has: > My thinking is that frequent partner The Library of Congress can put a stop to this by buying the Internet Archive. Make it a government body and protect all that digital content.

formerly_proven 3y ago
The guberment is not exempt from acts of congress.
- ncallaway 3y ago
  It can be, with an act of Congress…
  - HideousKojima 3y ago
    Which can be undone by yet another act of Congress.
  - vel0city 3y ago
    I'm not allowed to eat this candy bar. I wrote a sticky note that says I'm not allowed to eat it. Its not like I can just ignore or rewrite the sticky note whenever I want. Congress passing a law saying it can't do X doesn't mean they can't just come back a few years later and decide to remove that rule, assuming its not unconstitutional.

oofbey 3y ago

“The World Wide Web … is arguably roughly 40 years old.” 1993 was 30 years ago not 40. I see no valid argument that there was any WWW in the early 1980s.

reacweb 3y ago
before http (ncsa mosaic is march 1993), I was using gopher, newsgroups and xarchie. When you saw a reference to a program in a newsgroup, it was often easy with xarchie to find a public ftp mirror where you could download it. I remember reading CERT advisories on gopher and having noticed that at my school, the vulnerable command xloadmodule was present (sunOS 4.3). I warned the admin and after 15 days of no reaction and no answer, I became root of all the servers. Good old days ;-)
- oofbey 3y ago
  The internet is of course much older than the WWW. And the internet had and still has many non-WWW ways to communicate and publish content. But applying the term "WWW" to any non-HTML non-HTTP technologies is revisionist, and I'd argue just wrong.
IAmGraydon 3y ago
That's correct. The World Wide Web became available to the broader public 30 years ago On April 30, 1993.

lincon127 3y ago

Where's the idea?

permo-w 3y ago
the page is poorly coded and later paragraphs load and unload making it seem as if the article prematurely finishes, which explains why you might have missed it. the idea is for the Library of Congress to buy the Internet Archive to protect it from legal action my thoughts on this are that it's a good idea, but it can't be the only solution. moving from a single point of failure to a more secure single point of failure is okay, but a better solution would be for the Library of Congress and similar public bodies around the world to be able to buy/obtain a copy of the archive and the protocols it uses to do the archiving. this would practically guarantee the permanency of the data and, if it was deemed legally viable, provide a decent revenue source
- iraqmtpizza 3y ago
  Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. There is no enumerated power which gives the federal government the authority to manage an internet archive. So this isn't just crazy and dangerous, it's illegal as well. It's alway funny to see people suggest things the federal government should do without considering its deliberately limited nature and why that should go out the window with a constitutional amendment. This isn't the UK where we can just make up the law however we want. 10th amendment anyone? Enumerated powers?
  - permo-w 3y ago
    this is a patently bizarre comment. so the library of congress too is illegal? perhaps the federal government shouldn't be able to take photos, or tell the time or keep records
    - iraqmtpizza 3y ago
      Every creation of the federal government is presumptively unlawful unless and until it is rooted reasonably within one of the enumerated powers. The federal government has speech rights, obviously. It can pick up a camera and take photos like anyone else. It can keep records only in keeping with the constitution (e.g. 4th amendment) and statutory authorization. E.g. no national gun registry and no cell phone location data without a warrant. Only to the extent that the library of congress is necessary and proper to regulating interstate commerce are its activities authorized. As soon as it strays from that, it must find another enumerated power with which to justify its actions. For instance, if the library of congress were to begin deporting illegal aliens, that would be incontrovertibly within the enumerated powers. To say nothing of the will of Congress. A centralized copyright register is obviously something important to interstate commerce. Existing internet archives do not keep track of whose copyright is whose. So to transfer ownership of such a thing to the library of congress would not serve any copyright function related to interstate commerce. Surely even you can see that. So you're going to have to get real fucking creative, buddy!

mensetmanusman 3y ago

The simple solution is a compromise, let them archive, but they must wait some amount of years before it is available publicly. Hundred year copyright is certainly too long, that is much longer than ideas are protected in a patent which costs far more in research and development.

RecycledEle 3y ago
Are you suggesting we compromise with lawyers?? Lawyers claim they own the copyright to Shakespeare because "someone has to make money off it." Never compromise with cops, lawyers, or judges. Read Shakespeare.

henvic 3y ago

Wanting to have a government organization buy something like the Internet Archives sounds like a terrible idea for me. It's not like you'd keep lobbyists away from it. A great alternative is to build the Internet Archive so that after something is there "for a while", it is archived in a way that anyone can efficiently distribute it (thinking about long-term resiliency) and even survive a conspiracy to destroy it.

jancsika 3y ago
An open research problem isn't what I'd call a great alternative. Both the history of takedowns of large private music trackers and the current state of Sci-hub show that nobody knows how to build such a thing.

sp332 3y ago

We already have a Library of Congress. If they want a copy of the Internet Archive, they can just download one. (The raw WARC files from the web crawls are not publicly available, but I'm sure they could work something out.)

bhartzer 3y ago

I know websites (and some of my clients) who are actually actively REMOVING copies of their website from the Internet Archive. There's a specific process for getting all of the content removed, and asking them to not archive the website. For some ecommerce websites, they're removing copies from Internet Archive because there's pricing data that's getting archived. I've also had clients remove copies because they've had a big problem with scrapers who are scraping the copies of the site in Internet Archive. They've been able to (mostly) stop scrapers on the site, but having archived copies of the site allows scrapers to scrape the Internet Archive.

hotnfresh 3y ago
Heh. What’s nuts is that, stripped of other copyright-bearing context, it’s my understanding that they’d not have a (legal, but policy, maybe) leg to stand on asking for pricing data to be removed. That’s supposed to be free (as in freedom) to anyone who finds a way to get ahold of it. Sucks that they’re killing the entire archive over something they have no actual claim to.
- bhartzer 3y ago
  I agree, now that you pointed it out, there probably isn't a legal leg to stand on. IANAL, though--would be interested in hearing from an attorney about that. Regardless, if you can prove you're the website owner, then Internet Archive will remove all of your content and stop archiving your site if you ask them.
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    Right, by IA policy they can ask to have the site taken down. What’s unfortunate about it is that they’re doing it over data that they aren’t supposed to be able to restrict, and the rest of the site (which I doubt they much mind being on IA) is caught in the crossfire, as the means by which they’re getting the part they care about taken down. Like, they probably wouldn’t bother except that the archive happens to contain data that isn’t supposed to be restricable anyway but de facto is, if they take the whole archive of the site down.

mkl95 3y ago

> My thinking is that frequent partner The Library of Congress can put a stop to this by buying the Internet Archive. Make it a government body and protect all that digital content. I think these lawyers may be less inclined to sue the US Federal government. This is the opposite approach of what I would consider a potential solution. The information should be stored in a system expensive enough to sabotage that no government will consider it. Data should be replicated as many times as possible and replicas should be as physically distributed as possible.

jancsika 3y ago
Unfortunately, that's the opposite of what I would consider a practical solution. The system you describe doesn't exist. If it did then Sci-hub would already be using it. Instead, Sci-hub is subject to essentially the same risks of takedown as IA.
- asrsgiaonionio 3y ago
  [dead]
- fatfingerd 3y ago
  I think they should focus more on signing structured data and indexes so people can just exchange IA content however they like and know it hasn't been tampered with. There's not much a state will be able to do as long as they rotate keys, etc, so there are just state demanded revocations which can be ignored.
Pannoniae 3y ago
Or... host it in a country which doesn't care about this kind of stuff.
- masfuerte 3y ago
  If the US cares enough (and they have a long track record of being irrationally overprotective of IP) then the IA becomes a bargaining chip for whatever shithole it's hosted in. It's not a long term solution.

causi 3y ago

My thinking is that frequent partner The Library of Congress can put a stop to this by buying the Internet Archive. Make it a government body and protect all that digital content. So instead of losing all the copyrighted content piece by piece we lose access to it all at once? Someone needs to save the Internet Archives from the lawyers and I have an idea More like someone needs to save the Internet Archive from Brewster Kahle. He and all of us knew the rules of the game: the IA was allowed to illegally host copyrighted content that wasn't making them money as long as it wasn't being exploited by the copyright holders and they paid lip service to IP law with things like controlled borrowing. Then they kicked the anthill with the emergency library. We pulled our hair out warning them not to and they did it anyway. Maybe their actions were morally justified but they were just so blisteringly stupid that it's hard not to feel betrayed.

snapetom 3y ago
> More like someone needs to save the Internet Archive from Brewster Kahle. Can't vote this enough. As flawed as the rules are, you know them. The rules should be changed, but you don't change them by blatantly breaking them in the most flagrant way possible.
- causi 3y ago
  Right. If IA wants to spin off a legally-separate "Red Team" of radical activists to demonstrate how ignoring copyright laws enriches us all, I'll be happy to donate. Using the IA for this is reckless and doomed to failure. Do you think Sci-Hub would've survived if they'd started flouting the law as a California-based nonprofit with hundreds of employees? Hell no.
renewiltord 3y ago
None of you guys built this. Brewster Kahle did. Everyone fantasizes about how they would have sold at the top. But you won't. Ultimately, the Internet Archive took balls. That was the defining attribute. And the guy with balls was always going to take it farther than just that. That's what it means to have balls. All the guys who fantasize that they would have stopped at the perfect stopping point would have never started. You can run a mirror now. You can run a crawler now. Heritrix is free software. The IA dump is retrievable. What's stopping you from making The Compliant Internet Archive? Nothing really except for the fact that none of the armchair quarterbacks have even seen what a ball looks like.

mattnewton 3y ago

Rights holders have managed to wring perpetual copyright and things like the DMCA from congress, there is no way they won’t just hire different lawyers good at influencing the government and shut it down there. In fact this might even get administrative regulations made that make any private attempts illegal too.

shiftpgdn 3y ago
Most rights holders were happy to look past it until Chuck Wendig started crying about people being able to read his pulp sci-fi too easily.

someguy7250 3y ago

Frankly I say we let them delete all public backups of internet culture. Eventually there would be a backlash when this goes too far. Lots of games, websites and TV shows would be gone. Let them. Don't make local backups either. Or at least encrypt the backups and make sure they will be lost when we die. *Let DRM and Copyright become the modern equivalent of book burning.* Let people forget. Let it be the government's problem to preserve knowledge and history. And let it decide when the cost is higher than whatever benefits we get from strict authoritarian levels of Copyright protections

stuartjohnson12 3y ago
This seems oxymoronic. There shouldn't be backlash against deletionism because deletionism will cease once there's enough backlash against it.
- someguy7250 3y ago
  Yes but book burning had backlash, too. And frankly if we are really that stupid then we didn't deserve tech and culture in the first place. Might as well delete wikipedia. Let people forget everything, then evolution will take over. /s
  - stuartjohnson12 3y ago
    I don't understand your point.
    - someguy7250 3y ago
      My point is book burning can cause backlash. Therefore so can deletionism. When the backlash happens, it's often already too late. But people are aware something was gone, that's why there is a backlash. I know this because it happened in the past with the Cultural Revolution. Not saying it will happen in the same way here. Maybe the only backlash we'll ever get is against my stupid comments. Lol.

bityard 3y ago

I agree that the Internet Archive needs help, but I don't agree that it should get absorbed into the Library of Congress. Let's say it happens and now the LoC is running the IA. Others have already made the point that lobbyists and politicians can more easily erode its functionality much more easily and silently, and that's a good point. But what I fear the most is that it would mean the actual existence of the IA would be at the whim of congressional budget planning (which is frankly a shitshow) rather than being funded by those who actually CARE about it. If you really want to help the Internet Archive survive, the very best thing any of us can do is donate directly to the IA so that they can afford good legal council to fight back against the music and book publishers who want to shut them down: https://archive.org/donate?origin=iawww-TopNavDonateButton https://archive.org/donate?origin=iawww-TopNavDonateButton

sangnoir 3y ago
> If you really want to help the Internet Archive survive, the very best thing any of us can do is donate directly to the IA so that they can afford good legal council to fight back against the music and book publishers who want to shut them down I thought you were going in a different direction until your last sentence. The IA needs donations to afford good counsel to advise them on the law before they make boneheaded decisions that put their mission in legal jeopardy. Preserving online content is one thing, "lending" in-print books is rather far from the core mission IMO. Even authors who are anti-DRM were outraged by the ill-advised lending scheme on book copies the IA didn't even pay for. Paraphrasing Desmond Tutu: at some point, we have to stop continually rescuing people out of the river and go upstream to find out who keeps throwing them in there.

tb_technical 3y ago

[flagged]

patja 3y ago
Lawyers, tax advisors, sales & marketing...all are "necessary" evils that would never exist in a perfect world. We should be looking for methods of limiting and discouraging the "need" for these professions wherever possible.
nameandshame 3y ago
[dead]
ThrowAway1922A 3y ago
What are you gonna do, order them a pizza? Or are you suggesting people try to ruin their lives? The lawyers and their families have done nothing illegal, unlike the IA who very well might have after being blinded by ideology. If the IA broke the law, or violated IP, copyright, etc than why should they not be taken to court?
- tb_technical 3y ago
  "They were just doing their job" is not a response we accept when police and soldiers brutalize people. Why should it be the same for lawyers when they attack publicly accessible archives? IMHO, publicly accessible archives can uplift large groups of the disadvantaged. Attacking them is equivalent to cutting public services for the poor.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > "They were just doing their job" is not a response we accept when police and soldiers brutalize people. Unfortunately, it is a response that we, collectively, mostly do accept. We shouldn't, and occasionally we don't, but...
  - ThrowAway1922A 3y ago
    The archives have to follow the laws and this isn't a case of the IA simply making a mistake, it was them intentionally crossing the line and assuming they'd get away with it. I don't want the IA lost, but they are the ones responsible for their current legal situation. Fwiw I wouldn't target the family of the police either, I think this targeting of innocent uninvolved people is sick.

pseingatl 3y ago

Great idea. Or a state library in another country that has the same status. The British Library, or hell, even the Lenin Library or whatever it's called these days.

permo-w 3y ago

2023 - 1993 != 40

TheRealPomax 3y ago
I think you forgot to account for Covid, which adds 10 year.
masfuerte 3y ago
And the author claims to have had 35 years in the industry so he should have some kind of intuition of when 30 years ago was. Or maybe he miscalculated 25 years experience.

pessimizer 3y ago

Sounds at first listen like a way to make it easier to destroy the IA. If the LoC copies it and continues to archive the web, it would be a lot easier to make the argument in court that the IA wasn't even necessary. The LoC would have no obligation to open up the archive to the public - maybe instead access would be provided through a single computer in a DC building after filling out a form, having that form approved, and they search you for thumb drives and take away your phone before you go in. Eventually the entire thing could be accidentally deleted, or the budget for it could be cut. Somebody needs to save all of us from the control of the government and its justice system by corporate special interests.

withinrafael 3y ago

I see IA used more and more frequently as a free file host for new copyrighted content (e.g., custom hacked up Windows ISOs), which is incredibly frustrating. Without changes, perhaps active curation like a normal library, I fear the site will get forced off the Internet soon.

TheRealPomax 3y ago

tl;dr: the idea is to have the US Library of Congress to buy the internet archive.

earthboundkid 3y ago

I applied for a job at the Library of Congress once. By the time they got around to contacting me, I was already a couple of months into another job. Then my info got stolen in the USAJobs data breach. None of that is their fault per se, but it's a limitation of the position. You end up with people who want stability above all else. It actually could be a good thing for the Internet Archive which basically just needs to continue existing forever.

alex_young 3y ago

Why not both? Can't the LOC start maintaining a copy of the Internet Archive? The IA should exist independently, but there's no reason we should keep the archive in one place.

retrocryptid 3y ago

I like the internet archive, but the web sucks.

jancsika 3y ago

Someone got rightly flagged for making a call for vigilantism. I'd like to respond to them in a non-flagged comment. To the person apparently so frustrated that they were brainstorming vigilantism-- I'd suggest first at least trying the one thing that HN is allergic to-- getting engaged with politics. Few to none of the respondents here who are vaguely complaining about lobbyists (at the Library of Congress, of all places!) have any experience whatsoever organizing politically. There is a pair-- literally, two humans-- who were able to get legislation passed in a state that is of general benefit to a) an industry where they weren't big players, and b) to society in general. They weren't oligarchs or billionaires or whoever HN thinks controls the keys to the kingdom. They were just interested and diligent enough to attempt the work. (Well, one of them had enough free time to go and meet with nearly every representative-- I'm not saying it's easy or quick.) Think about the number of times a bugfix can fail to compile before you finally get it to work. If you apply that discipline and focus to find real, lasting legislative protections to projects like the IA or Sci-hub, you're way more likely to end up making positive changes than through vigilantism. And of course if you're successful, HN will still criticize you for failing to solve the problem with a fast, homomorphically-encrypted, decentralized, statically-linked, non-Electron, portable executable. I guess you'll just have to accept the tragic ending that the most intelligent people in the world won't understand what you achieved. :(

Pannoniae 3y ago
I don't see how this applies here. This is a zero-sum game - you are fighting against the money of IP interests, and they have way more money than you. How would anything positive happen out of this? Vigilantism is immoral, and is not likely to work, but that is still more plausible to do something than trying to out-spend large corporations in lobbying. Or, move the whole operations to a country which doesn't give a damn about all of this, that's also a way of solving the lawsuit problems.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- kevinpet 3y ago
  Politics is not decided by money. Money is a huge factor, and you can't do much without at least some money, but it's not the final word. Politics is determined in large part by how politicians read the mood of their voters, how they personally feel about an issue, and whether what the lobbyists are saying seems to make sense.

zokier 3y ago

Personally I consider IA having all the eggs in basket unreasonably risky move. If IA did the basic sane segregation, the legitimate and truly valuable parts would not be facing such high existential risks. For example one way of dividing would be 1) wayback machine 2) public domain collections 3) non-pd collections 4) user-provided content. Having those firewalled into separate services and separate legal entities would protect 1) and 2) when its 3) and 4) that are drawing these attacks. This lack of separation is also hurting IA in other ways; I think Wayback Machine and PD archives are really important and valuable, but right now I can not support or even endorse IA because their poor leadership playing with fire and putting those services under unnecessary risk.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Is the Library of Congress still preserving tweets? Seems like that's probably gone to the wayside with all the API restrictions and what not?

peter_d_sherman 3y ago

>"Someone needs to save the Internet Archives from the lawyers and I have an idea" >"My thinking is that frequent partner The Library of Congress can put a stop to this by buying the Internet Archive. Make it a government body and protect all that digital content. I think these lawyers may be less inclined to sue the US Federal government." The US Federal government -- is primarily composed of lawyers... So let me get this straight... the author's idea, broadly understood, would be: To take the Internet Archive away from lawyers -- and give it to other lawyers? ? (Or do I not understand the author's viewpoint correctly?) ?

omnibrain 3y ago

I understand the function of the Internet Archives as an Archive of the internet. But I don't understand why they think their function is to influence legislation by activism in other fields. First they poked a bear with their "free library" of books. Now they are poking another bear with their music library. And in the process they endanger their "core function" of being the Internet archives.

CydeWeys 3y ago
The Internet Archive absolutely should be engaged in activism to expand fair use, protect archivist work, reduce copyright term, etc. What they shouldn't be doing is risking their existence by doing things with shaky legal standing.
- InSteady 3y ago
  Sure, and MLK should have stuck to marches instead of organizing strikes and other highly effective but risky forms of direct action. Kahle has stated from the outset that he wants to build a digital Library of Alexandria. He wants all media, including books, movies, music, etc to be freely available to anyone curious enough to come and look for it. Sounds like they are continuing to do exactly what they set out to do. Maybe what they shouldn't be doing is staying in some arbitrary lane that 3rd parties have decided they belong in, and instead continue fighting for freedom and universal access in whatever way they see fit.
  - ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
    The IA should stick to it's goal of actually being an archive first https://archive.org/post/1126216/kiwi-farms-removed-from-wayback-machine-why https://archive.org/post/1126216/kiwi-farms-removed-from-way...
    - flangola7 3y ago
      The KF pages are not deleted, only hidden from public view. Something they do for anyone or any domain on request. They are still accessible through request by researchers and will be there for future historians, they're just not open where they can be used to further doxxing and other harmful campaigns. I donate to IA on a monthly recurring basis and I'm glad to see them be ethically conscious about their service and prevent it from being weaponized.

dahwolf 3y ago

I'm on IA's side here but I do take issue with the lack of introspection. We frame this story by defining some villains, like lawyers and Google, whilst no fault is upon us. We're victims even. And yet the typical internet user doesn't pay a dime for most things. Blocks ads. Works around Paywalls. Piggybacks on the neighbors' Netflix and then Tweets how they fully support the writer's strike. What I'm saying is that we're not that great either, us internet citizens. We very much have the internet we deserve.

IX-103 3y ago

I think it makes sense for the library of Congress to archive the Internet, but I think that should be independent of the Internet Archive. We really should go back to requiring items that want copyright protection to send a copy to the library of Congress. That would mean that those interested in copyright protection (which limits the ability of the public to share and retain copies for posterity) to actively act to ensure they are available due posterity.

A_D_E_P_T 3y ago

Cyberpunk and technothriller literature has anticipated this, going all the way back to the 1980s -- but most prominently in Neal Stephenson's 1999 novel Cryptonomicon, where the main characters work to set up an underground data haven in the fictional SE-Asian Sultanate of Kinakuta. Back then, it was naturally assumed that large databases and archives would need to be hosted in secure offshore locations, for obvious legal reasons. (IIRC, Cryptonomicon has an amusing segment where the characters describe the US legal system's discovery processes. "Never, ever send anything in email" was the gist of it.) Fast forward to today, and there are two great data havens -- SciHub and Libgen -- which, by design, are correctly and appropriately difficult for the US Government and its loathsome civil legal apparatus to grasp. The third great data haven is the Internet Archive, which was unwisely based in the US and managed as though it were a legitimate tech company. The lawyers smell the blood in the water and I fear it's not long for this world. What the world needs is a pared-down distributed version that's more slippery and totally unresponsive to legal complaints.

cbozeman 3y ago
Sounds more like what we need are less lawyers, and less rent-seeking.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

janalsncm 3y ago

It’s very interesting to me that copyright lawsuits in the US may end up resulting in a lot of content restrictions which have some similarity to Chinese censorship laws. Zooming in they are different of course, but it is certainly a reflection of values. In the US it is very possible we could end up with a neutered ChatGPT due to ongoing copyright suits. OpenAI easily can’t prevent its chatbot from regurgitating copyrighted material. Although not the same, it is reminiscent of Chinese censorship of political topics, since it’s also not possible to prevent the bot from authoring a pro-democracy screed. In the same way the West doesn’t mind ChatGPT’s political musings, China is unlikely to care about any potential copyright infringements. Maybe it’s obvious, but I find it interesting how a chatbot which is trained on all online text pushes the boundaries of societies differently. In China, it’s you can’t say a thing because it is transgressive but in the West it’s you can’t say a thing because it has been privatized. And in the West, copyright is again coming for free expression by suing IA. Perhaps the logical conclusion of this is the US National Anthem somehow being copyrighted and the only place it can be legally played is in China.

ocdtrekkie 3y ago

There's a drastically simpler way to save the Internet Archive: Get Brewster Kahle out. He doesn't believe in copyright, keeps flaunting his utter disregard for it, and ignoring the advice of his supporters telling him not to do stupid stuff that irks big copyright entities. A good steward of the Internet Archive would strike agreements with organizations like the RIAA, which would likely even financially support a preservation mission if not directly coupled to infringement. Notice how museums often broadcast and showcase copyrighted works without issue? It's because they work in tandem with copyright holders instead of claiming they don't have to. Copyright holders can't abide infringement, but they can rubber stamp behavior that complements them instead of fights them: I suspect the RIAA would pay for record archival if the IA had an agreement for what works were abandoned enough they could publicly distribute and if there were terms for researcher access to the whole library.

tomcam 3y ago

tl;dr The Library of Congress should buy Internet Archive

FounderBurr 3y ago

Internet archive could have stuck to not intentionally violating copyright law but choose not to. They made this bed, let them sleep in it.

sph 3y ago

I have three issues with this: 1. The author is obviously American, as they didn't even question for a second why would one country's government be the steward of what is an archive of worldwide importance. 2. The author, with all due respect, must have been living under a rock to believe a government to be a good steward of pretty much anything. The Internet Archive also contains a great deal of pornography, and rightly so. Can't wait to see it "curated" by the most Puritan Western government. 3. Mostly a joke, but do you remember what happened last time we decided to put all of humanity's knowledge in a single library?