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The situation with IA is one thing, but the general negative attitude of libraries and archives to public access is something I've observed too, and it's depres

The situation with IA is one thing, but the general negative attitude of libraries and archives to public access is something I've observed too, and it's depressing. For instance, they can spend a lot of effort digitizing an archive they got from a business active from 1890 to 1970 - and then put it all in a single collection, which the public won't get access to until 2070. There's no reason to think the business handled sensitive personal information, but it's too much work to check, so they assume it did. They could classify individual documents according to whether they were actually from before 1920, but that's too much work too.

ghaff 2y ago
That’s the case with so much of this sort of thing. You also see it in cases like open sourcing proprietary software. You need to pay someone competent to do a thorough audit or you end up with headlines about so and so releasing PII or otherwise confidential information.
- notpushkin 2y ago
  I think it could be a great charity btw. Get donations from public, talk companies into releasing their old software, hire auditors for them and maybe developers to get the result running without all the proprietary third-party components.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Personally I’d rather see maintainers getting better compensated for creating new and widely useful software in cases where they don’t have a corporate sponsor. Most abandoned proprietary software is just old.
    - notpushkin 2y ago
      I’d love that too, of course. But some old things are great for their historical value – personally, I would be thrilled to see Winamp released properly, for example.
acdha 2y ago
One thing to keep in mind is that libraries and archives have been budget starved for decades. You can often get a grant to acquire or digitize something but fewer donors are interested in paying lawyers to evaluate copyright exposure, which leads to conservative policies. All of the actual librarians and archivists I know hate this situation - it’s not a job you take if you don’t want people to access things – but that tends to translate into requests for copyright exemptions. A really big one is orphan works where they have things like digitized music which can’t even be linked to a known copyright holder because it’s unclear who owns it after decades of contract shuffles and acquisitions, where you could potentially solve the problem by changing copyright law to require periodic payments to maintain protected status so someone at, say, Sony would have to cut a check every year to say that they still want to protect some obscure old blues track from 1952 which they don’t even offer for sale any more. I especially liked the proposals linking that to availability for mainstream sale: say that there’s no charge for anything which is normally available on iTunes, Play, Amazon, etc. but you need to pay a fee for works which aren’t available.

ghaff 2y ago

That’s the case with so much of this sort of thing. You also see it in cases like open sourcing proprietary software. You need to pay someone competent to do a thorough audit or you end up with headlines about so and so releasing PII or otherwise confidential information.

notpushkin 2y ago
I think it could be a great charity btw. Get donations from public, talk companies into releasing their old software, hire auditors for them and maybe developers to get the result running without all the proprietary third-party components.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Personally I’d rather see maintainers getting better compensated for creating new and widely useful software in cases where they don’t have a corporate sponsor. Most abandoned proprietary software is just old.
  - notpushkin 2y ago
    I’d love that too, of course. But some old things are great for their historical value – personally, I would be thrilled to see Winamp released properly, for example.

acdha 2y ago

One thing to keep in mind is that libraries and archives have been budget starved for decades. You can often get a grant to acquire or digitize something but fewer donors are interested in paying lawyers to evaluate copyright exposure, which leads to conservative policies. All of the actual librarians and archivists I know hate this situation - it’s not a job you take if you don’t want people to access things – but that tends to translate into requests for copyright exemptions. A really big one is orphan works where they have things like digitized music which can’t even be linked to a known copyright holder because it’s unclear who owns it after decades of contract shuffles and acquisitions, where you could potentially solve the problem by changing copyright law to require periodic payments to maintain protected status so someone at, say, Sony would have to cut a check every year to say that they still want to protect some obscure old blues track from 1952 which they don’t even offer for sale any more. I especially liked the proposals linking that to availability for mainstream sale: say that there’s no charge for anything which is normally available on iTunes, Play, Amazon, etc. but you need to pay a fee for works which aren’t available.