5 ms·

I agree with you about copyright, but the fact is that the IA never had a chance and we knew it years ago. The top comment on HN a week after their launch of t

• vesinisa 2y ago
  Ditto. Worth also noting is that IA lost the case by summary judgement. This usually means that the legal matter was so clear that the judge didn't even see a reason to start a trial. This judgement has now been confirmed on appeal. Just about any lawyer could have probably told them this was the inevitable outcome had they listened. I personally have donated previously to IA but now it frankly disgusts me that the project's current management has for the last few years had its focus on fighting windmills in court instead of their core mission - preserving our digital history. Hard to think I would ever donate to them again unless there's a change in leadership after this fiasco.
  • the_mitsuhiko 2y ago
    I think one has to be honest and realize that the desire of digital preservation stands in conflict with present day laws.
    • vesinisa 2y ago
      Yes, but this case was not about digital presevation but lending out scanned traditional books without proper controls, presented as some sort of a social welfare project. Choose your battles.
      • rakoo 2y ago
        What's the point of having digital preservation if noone can read the archives ? Digital access make sense, it's the logical conclusion to what IA does
        • dmonitor 2y ago
          This isn’t about access to the archives. It’s about IA giving away books in violation of a specific agreement they made with authors. The archives are legally nebulous, but the written works are clear cut obviously illegal.
        • Nevermark 2y ago
          Both copyright protection and fair use exceptions have valid but contradictory “logical conclusions” that require practical considerations, wisdom and negotiated compromise to balance. Anyone going all in on either side is not on the side of maximizing access, which legitimately depends on maximizing the production of things to access. Anyone making a crusade of only one side, without collaborating with the other, will damage both.
          • account42 2y ago
            Not really. We ha an abundance of creation long before copyright.
            • deleted 2y ago
              [deleted]
            • Nevermark 2y ago
              I have never heard anyone claim there wasn’t.
  • 71bw 2y ago
    >I personally have donated previously to IA but now it frankly disgusts me that the project's current management has for the last few years had its focus on fighting windmills in court instead of their core mission - preserving our digital history. I've never donated to them and figured it was the right choice after they started excluding websites from the WayBackMachine - the most vocal case being kiwifarms [1], where they supposedly did so after intervention of a family member of some higher-up [allegedly]. EDIT - as I remembered, the list of excluded site is a LOT larger [2], with a lot of them simply being removed on request. On one hand I understand their choice in this matter, on another - you can willingly be excluded and potentially hide archival stuff of importance... [1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/7/23341051/kiwi-farms-internet-archive-backup-removal https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/7/23341051/kiwi-farms-intern... [2] https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=List_of_websites_excluded_from_the_Wayback_Machine https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=List_of_website...
    • Y_Y 2y ago
      You make a good point about the exclusion of sites that probably deserve to be in the Wayback Machine. Would you support a complementary archive that took snaps of the excluded websites? Does anyone know of one or want to set one up? (To be clear, it's not that I'm a big fan of Kiwifarms or anything, but Byuu's tragic story is enough for me to think that the site has significant cultural and historical value, regardless of its ethical orientation.)
      • 71bw 2y ago
        Archive.is has a donation page set up on buymeacoffee [1]. I prefer to use them over web.archive.org. >Would you support a complementary archive that took snaps of the excluded websites? Now that I have looked at it, I likely will. I never was one to donate my money to anybody (especially with no income...), but now being employed I believe it's only fair to give them a little bit here and there for them to keep afloat. >To be clear, it's not that I'm a big fan of Kiwifarms or anything Neither am I. I just believe that an archive shouldn't be biased - and should keep all stuff up as long as it isn't strictly illegal, eg. CSAM or piracy. This is a blurry line though - I myself would like to be able to check out a hypothetical neo-Nazi group's website after they are all arrested for doing X to check what its contents looked like - but I am definitely in a minority here. So, essentially... >the site has significant cultural and historical value, regardless of its ethical orientation. Significant can be discussed, but I see it as a very subjective measure. [1] https://buymeacoffee.com/archive.today https://buymeacoffee.com/archive.today
  • gizmo 2y ago
    You approach this from a perspective of realism. The law is what it is and IA is wrong according to the plain interpretation of the law. Except that's not how everybody lives. Some people do what they believe is right regardless of the consequences. They will fight fights they are guaranteed to lose. Not because it makes sense but because that's who they are. The people who get mad that idealists fight losing battles tend not to be pragmatic fighters for change but people who will never fight at all because "it's just not worth it" or "the risk/reward doesn't make sense". Idealism doesn't make rational sense. Idealists mostly just lose. But the world still needs people who are not motivated by pragmatic self-interest. Your disgust is misplaced. Your disgust should be reserved for those who exploit and hurt others. Not for idealists who fight against impossible odds. Especially when the cause (challenging how copyright law works) is one you support.
    • Shank 2y ago
      > Your disgust is misplaced. Your disgust should be reserved for those who exploit and hurt others. Not for idealists who fight against impossible odds. Especially when the cause (challenging how copyright law works) is one you support. I don't think so. IA is a valuable resource for the Wayback Machine and other endeavors which are far more seated in fair use or preservation. Choosing to sacrifice the rest of IA for a grandiose or idealized vision of how the world should work is a betrayal of those who donate to IA in hopes of funding the much more tangible goal. If he wanted to take the stance he took, he should have spun the library component out of IA and served it as a separate legal entity to take on that risk. Maybe the community trust in IA has been misplaced. The mission on their website clearly says they want to serve "All Knowledge" but I'm not alone in thinking it would be best for them to narrow their scope to just internet-related things, and specifically, things that aren't served by other archive or library sources. IA is currently used to host and distribute large quantities of software, games, and other media in a quasi-legal mindset that is truly not something that is easily justified. Is having every Xbox 360 ISO publicly available for download on IA really serving the same mission as archiving all of the random blogs people have written on the internet? Is serving in-copyright published books? I think the problem is that IA has multiple missions that all compete, and broadly, people assumed that they would act in a way that wouldn't jeopardize the rest of the archive.
  • mekarpeles 2y ago
    > it frankly disgusts me that the project's current management has for the last few years had its focus on fighting windmills in court instead of their core mission - preserving our digital history. Hi, Mek here (speaking as myself). Disclosure that I run OpenLibrary.org at the Internet Archive. I'm sad to hear you're disappointed with how things are going. I share your frustration. I wanted to join in and +1 one of your comments: the importance of preserving our digital history. Preservation is a core mission of the Internet Archive and central to the tagline, "Universal Access to All Knowledge". At the end of the day, the reason to preserve cultural heritage is so that it can be made accessible: Eventually. In ways that serve people with special accessibility needs who are otherwise left behind. In formats and environments capable of playing back materials that no longer have available runtimes. With affordances that make these materials useful and relevant to modern audiences. An important reflection is that a key role of archives and libraries is to preserve cultural heritage by building inclusive, diverse collections, which span topics and times. For decades, libraries pursued this goal by purchasing physical books and, over time, growing and preserving collections of materials that serve their patrons. Not just bestsellers. Weird, obscure, rare research materials about rollercoasters, genealogy, banned books, stories from lost voices, government records. The shift of publishing to digital [especially how it's done] fundamentally affects how [of if] material may be archived or accessed. It's not enough to assert the importance of preserving culture. One must actively advocate for a future where media can be archived. As Danny suggests (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41454990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41454990), this is something the Internet Archive has been acting on since its inception. What we're seeing today is a shift to digital, designed and led by publishers who are engineering a landscape with new rules where libraries can't own digitally accessible books. Libraries are being offered no choice, no path forward, but to lease (over and over) prohibitively expensive, fixed pool of books, that disappear after the lease period is up. This means libraries have ostensibly lost their ability (first sale doctrine rights) to own, grow, and preserve a collection of books over time... A fundamental ecosystem change that threatens the very function of preservation that you and I so strongly value. Preservation necessitates the ability to preserve. Preservation is a fight for the future and I believe a preservable future where libraries are allowed to own digitally accessible collections of books is a future worth fighting for. That doesn't mean we should only be looking into the future. Looking at today, the only permanent collections libraries do / can own and preserve are physical. So what other question is there besides: how can libraries make the materials they rightfully own, preserve, and are permitted to lend accessible to a digital society? How may libraries make the digital jump to help millions of physical books enter public discourse, which takes place ostensibly online? In my opinion, this is the discussion we're having. The Internet Archive continues to preserve millions of documents of all sorts: websites, radio, tv, books, scholarly articles, microfilm, software, etc. A very small team of staff are doing the best job possible to make sure that, not only does our cultural heritage get archived, but that in the future, archives and libraries have the right to exist, be useful, and that there are materials archives are permitted to preserve; that important research resources are made accessible to the public -- especially those who have traditionally been left behind. Someone needs to fight for the future that lets us continue preserving the past. I'm personally very open to your suggestions on how the Open Library can improve and appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts.
  • tiahura 2y ago
    Yes and no. SJ is for when the facts aren’t in dispute, just how to apply the law to the facts. In this case nobody disputed the underlying facts, the question was how to apply copyright law. Trials are for when parties disagree about the facts, e.g. was the light red or green.
• ricardobeat 2y ago
  That comment was about the Emergency Library though, not lending in general.
• alexhektor 2y ago
  outside of the content of of the comment, top comment doesn't necessarily mean the most held opinion. Especially if a comment is thoughtfully written, contains multiple aspects and might just get upvotes for reasonably looking at both sides like in this thread. Being thoughtful, mindful, respecting and trying to not see something in black and white can get upvotes just for being like that. And that's just one tiny aspect of why top comment isn't necessarily the most popular argument. Timing (resulting in more views and possibly upvotes) and other facotrs all play a role (not sure how much this is mitigated by the ranking algorithm.
  • Springtime 2y ago
    I'd add too that often on such sites the range of submitted subjects are broad enough that those voting don't necessarily have domain familiarity or expertise, so when a comment reads like it has a solid argument readers may upvote it to test the robustness of its premise by way of seeing if others make more compelling counter-arguments or strengthen/agree with it. Ie: the voters themselves may not hold any personal opinion on the matter.
  • tiahura 2y ago
    Lawyer here. IA’s position was indefensible and reeked of a personal agenda. Given the value of IA, it was deeply irresponsible.