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The "National Emergency Library" was obviously a huge mistake, and I'm surprised that IA continues to defend it. The problem is, their online book lending is fa
by LeoPanthera 3y ago
The "National Emergency Library" was obviously a huge mistake, and I'm surprised that IA continues to defend it. The problem is, their online book lending is far from the most important part of the Internet Archive, and by continuing to fight for it, they risk losing everything, including the entire rest of the archive which seems to me to be far more important.
The Internet Archive has become the de-facto default location to upload anything rare, important, or valuable, and a terrifyingly large amount of history would suddenly blink from existence if it were brought down.
- ideamotor 3y agoWell said
- idle_zealot 3y agoWhile I agree that the book lending is only a small portion of the value provided by the IA, it makes sense that they're making a stand here. Losing this battle would establish precedent that format-shifting legally aquired copies of media is not protected under fair use, which would be disastrous to preservation efforts of all kinds going forward.
- bombcar 3y agoI think they're intentionally tying it all together because they know that the "emergency library" was a heap of shit (you can't argue you can digitally lend the same document multiple times simultaneously, it makes no sense). They're basically holding the Internet Archive hostage to try to force this thing through.
- jprete 3y agoI think it's a serious mistake that they allowed unlimited borrowers at a time, because that shifts from fair-use format shifting to effectively making multiple copies of the format-shifted document. That said, IANAL and I don't know what actual legal conclusions were arrived at from the trial or appeals.
- account42 3y agoI think it's a serious mistake that they used DRM at all. That positions them right along the publisher narrative which is exactly where they should not be.
- LeoPanthera 3y agoThis has nothing to do with format shifting at all. The IA's normal book-lending service works that way, but the "emergency library" allowed more copies of a book to be "borrowed" than they actually physically owned. This is straight-up piracy, and there's a 0% chance of it being legally justified.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- toomuchtodo 3y agoThis might kill the Internet Archive as a legal entity in the US if the outcome is particularly unfavorable, but LibGen, Scihub, Z-Library, Anna's Archive etc aren't going away. > This is straight-up piracy, and there's a 0% chance of it being legally justified. Agree to disagree. Copyright has worn out its welcome when it is locking up culture for life + 70 years at a time [1] [2]. The Internet Archive could archive and maintain these works in cold storage (both physical and digital), only to make them public again 100-200 years from now, but that would not be keeping with "Universal Access to All Knowledge." Disk and bandwidth is cheap, and the planet is big. [1] https://www.copyright.gov/history/copyright-exhibit/lifecycle/ https://www.copyright.gov/history/copyright-exhibit/lifecycl... [2] https://www.princeton.edu/news/2003/02/21/lessig-were-copyright-war https://www.princeton.edu/news/2003/02/21/lessig-were-copyri... (no affiliation, but a fan and a supporter, and believe in defending public goods)
- forgetfreeman 3y agoIt may indeed kill the project and it's a tragic example of play stupid games win stupid prizes. There have been enough decades of lost lawsuits now that any thinking person ought to know better than to go sticking a fork in the outlet that is distributing copyrighted materials.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- coldpie 3y ago
- bombcar 3y agoIf the IA is a single point of failure, better we learn that now instead of later.
- ggjkvcxddd 3y agoThat doesn't make sense. Of course it's a "single point of failure". I don't think anyone could have ever thought otherwise. A competing archive service would undoubtedly be great for humanity.
- vgkjfhwebfk 3y agohttps://archive.ph/ https://archive.ph/
- bombcar 3y agoThis one is even more frightening, as it's (as far as I know) a one-man show that could disappear at any time.
- vgkjfhwebfk 3y agoYes, it could, but IA, which - up to now - looked more professional and reliable could, too. And, unexpectedly, that's what's happening now. Maybe archive.ph will also surprise us, by being more resilient. Anyway, it's an alternative, for now.
- rbanffy 3y agoThis is NOT anywhere near what the IA provides.
- vgkjfhwebfk 3y agoYes, it's an alternative, not a copy. For example, it doesn't provide "emergency library" style borrowing, and maybe this missing feature is a pro, not a con.
- ranger_danger 3y agoMy problem with the "rest of the archive" is that it's arguably 98% unchecked mass piracy that their own people seem to be ok with, in the form of "we're not copyright police, so just upload whatever you want and let companies deal with it later." which is exactly what Jason Scott has said.
- hackernudes 3y agoCould it be that the alternative is losing stuff forever?
- leotravis10 3y agoSadly, yes. It's more of a reason why you should download the stuff you want and need before it's too late: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39908676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39908676
- ghaff 3y agoYes. If there is something you think you might personally want in the future and you can download it today you probably should. But it’s probably not terabytes.
- ghaff 3y agoThe vast bulk of content is lost forever and given how much is created I’m not even sure that’s a bad thing. And if literally everything were magically siphoned up I’m also not sure that’s a good thing.
- idle_zealot 3y agoOf course it is piracy. This coloring of "bad" piracy with "good" things like libraries and preservation is an important step in dispelling the broadly pro-copyright culture we live in. It draws a clear picture of what copyright robs us of by presenting a case were violating it has a sense of moral righteousness.
- leotravis10 3y ago> The Internet Archive has become the de-facto default location to upload anything rare, important, or valuable, and a terrifyingly large amount of history would suddenly blink from existence if it were brought down. Here's the related discussion: Stop using the Internet Archive as the sole host for preservation projects | 87 points by yours truly | 27 days ago | 27 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39908676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39908676
- coldpie 3y agoYou are directing your ire at the wrong party. Hachette has nothing to gain from continuing to pursue this lawsuit, the only possible outcome (as you correctly state) is the world becomes a worse place. The behavior they object to has already stopped, and they've got a judgment to prevent it happening again. Hachette could drop enforcement of the judgment, both parties can dismiss the appeal, and no one loses anything. Hachette's owners see an opportunity here to destroy a public good, and they are taking it. Hachette are the bad actors trying to destroy what you find valuable, not the IA.
- justinclift 3y ago> Hachette has nothing to gain from continuing to pursue this lawsuit ... They're probably just making sure that the next place that wants to pull something funny, doesn't. Ye old "lets make an example out of them" thing.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Dalewyn 3y ago>Hachette has nothing to gain from continuing to pursue this lawsuit They do: Legal precedent. IA made themselves into an easy, prominent target by doing something everyone else agreed to not do via Gentlemens' Agreements(tm) and precedents set by lesser transgressions, so now they're reaping what they sowed. The book publishers stand to gain legal precedent that doing what IA did can and will result in legal consequences severe enough to ruin you.
- sangnoir 3y ago> You are directing your ire at the wrong party. Hachette has nothing to gain from continuing to pursue this lawsuit, the only possible outcome (as you correctly state) is the world becomes a worse place. Hachette obviously benefits from teaching would-be unlimited "lenders" a lesson. Even anti-DRM, "buy my books only if you can afford" authors were against this hare-brained lending scheme because the IA didn't even bother to buy a single copy of the books they were "lending". The blame squarely falls at the IA's feet; being an idealist doesn't give you the rights to delve into illegal behavior, regardless of the righteousness of your cause or the depth of your conviction. If the world is better with an org in it, and it jeopardizes it's own ability to remain a going concern, it's clear to me who is culpable. "Too good to die" doesn't exist.
- tithe 3y ago> a terrifyingly large amount of history would suddenly blink from existence One response to that is the "The Offline Internet Archive" [0], which includes software to crawl Internet Archive collections and store them to a local server [1]. [0] https://archive.org/about/offline-archive https://archive.org/about/offline-archive [1] https://github.com/internetarchive/dweb-mirror https://github.com/internetarchive/dweb-mirror
- xingped 3y agoHow much data does the IA store? If only storage were cheaper, I'd be way more of a digital hoarder.
- RobotToaster 3y agoAccording to their about page, 145+ Petabytes.
- jzb 3y agoI'm gonna need a bigger NAS...
- _flux 3y agoSo apparently a 20 TB HDD can be purchased at around $250, plus perhaps $30 per hdd slot with a computer (I just recall a number of this range from calculating years ago how much it costs to have storage at home), making it 2 million dollars—without any redundancy, so maybe twice that. On the other hand you can already have 24 20TB HDDs for maybe $7000 (with required other hardware), and that's almost 0.5 petabytes. I imagine it would be able to archive all things a single person cares about. Now only if there was a way to interconnect these smaller storage pods to each other..
- speedgoose 3y agoFor the redundancy at this scale, perhaps tape storage is interesting. Though the prices for high density tape seem to not be low enough to be public, and IBM scam their customers by advertising storage capacity before compression.
- cfmcdonald 3y ago> The problem is, their online book lending is far from the most important part of the Internet Archive, I disagree. Archiving information for future researchers is valuable, but giving access to information to people right now is also very valuable. Most people's access to texts for research is very shallow, unless they are part of a research university. Google Books hosts many works that are out of copyright, but there is a century-long dead zone that is inaccessible. I write a history of technology blog and the Internet Archive lending service has saved me thousands of dollars and many hours that it would have taken to track down the same research materials on eBay. Realistically, I just wouldn't have bothered, and the material I write would be of lower quality or not get written at all. (That said I do agree that the emergency library was a strategic and legal mistake.)
- _DeadFred_ 3y agoGreat, now you get access but then the year this free access is established is the year NEW information stops being created and/or the quality goes down hill (funny how making something free stops a lot of people from doing it for a living). Now everyone's content is 'lower quality or not get written at all' because the content that makes your's not 'lower quality' is no longer produced (most people/businesses don't work for free).
- jrmg 3y agoThe lawsuit is not about the “National Emergency Library”. It’s about, as the IA calls it, “Controlled Digital Lending” - which the IA was doing before and after the “emergency”, and is still doing now. The idea that, if they have a physical copy of a book, they can lend, one-for-one, a digital copy. The “National Emergency Library” was basically uncontrolled - they were ‘lending’ digital copies of books they did not have physical copies of. But there are no lawsuits about that - presumably because they stopped and it would be bad publicity fore book companies to pursue them about it now. I do wonder if it’s what precipitated the book companies’ ire - but I also think a lawsuit about “Controlled Digital Lending” was coming sooner or later anyway.
- gojomo 3y agoNo, the publishers' lawsuit also took issue with the "NEL". It's just that the lower court's judgement didn't really focus much that issue, because they found the broader/simpler and more-foundational "can you loan a format-shifted ebook 1:1 from your physical book" issue against IA, which then makes an anti-NEL conclusion almost automatic. So NEL-related arguments haven't yet been the focus of the rulings, despite being part of the original lawsuit. Thus, also, IA's appeal is mostly about that foundational finding – though section II of the IA appeal brief says that if the appeal succeeds on "ordinary controlled digital lending", the NEL ruling should also be rejudged: >Il. THIS COURT SHOULD REMAND FOR RECONSIDERATION OF THE NATIONAL EMERGENCY LIBRARY Publishers do not deny that the district court’s NEL ruling depends entirely on its analysis of ordinary controlled digital lending. Resp.Br. 61-62. If the Court reverses the latter, then it should also reverse and remand the former. It need not address Publishers’ arguments about the justifications for NEL (Resp.Br. 62), which should be left for the district court in the first instance.
- jrmg 3y agoYou’re right - I remembered the judgement, which, to heavily paraphrase, basically said “the NEL doesn’t matter if CDL is not allowed, so we only really need to consider that”.
- darksim905 3y ago>National Emergency Library Context?
- lucb1e 3y agoContext in here: https://lunduke.locals.com/post/5556650/the-internet-archives-last-ditch-effort-to-save-itself https://lunduke.locals.com/post/5556650/the-internet-archive... (see also the discussion thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40201053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40201053 "259 points by rbanffy 4 hours ago")