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Belgium bans Internet Archive's ‘Open Library’
- conartist6 1y ago[flagged]
- betaby 1y ago> podunk hyperconservative What exactly does it mean in simple terms?
- jennyholzer 1y ago[flagged]
- barry-cotter 1y agoWhat it means is this, if you are from a polity that has less than 10% of the global population nothing you will ever do matters. You are irrelevant.
- bevr1337 1y agoPodunk people are indigenous to present-day Connecticut. The Podunk were thought to live far away, so living in Podunk grew to mean living in a remote, uninteresting place. Originally, it may not have been used kindly. I wonder if Podunk could be thought of as an Americanization of the Roman's barbarians. (The others.)
- FredPret 1y agoThe problem isn't conservatism / liberalism, it's authoritarianism. I'm conservative and I feel exactly as you do about this type of judge and judgement.
- jeroenhd 1y agoBelgian courts can't decide what an American company does in Chile. However, they can decide what an American company can do in Belgium. Akamai and friends won't shut down their Belgian contracts for one bad ruling. Their financial incentives (combined with laws that put serving stakeholders' interests above basic human decency) simply don't align. If it weren't for modern capitalism making all companies part of giant megaconglomerates, the Internet Archive wouldn't have a problem if BelgiAkamai and PayBel stopped serving them. Unfortunately, almost everything you can do or buy online and offline now belongs to maybe 20 or 30 megacorporations which means any court in a reasonably well-off country can have worldwide consequences.
- MaxPock 1y agoThey'll soon ban books in Europe
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Nemo_bis 1y agoAlready happening. The UK is confiscating books for not being aligned with the government's foreign policy. https://www.monbiot.com/2025/08/01/legal-limbo/ https://www.monbiot.com/2025/08/01/legal-limbo/
- yorwba 1y agoIt sounds like the books were collected as evidence during a search. All kinds of things can serve as evidence, even if they're not themselves illegal.
- kmfrk 1y agoThat's crazy, I just use Open Library as a free and open alternative to Goodreads for reading lists, reviews, and book indexing, but apparently even that wouldn't be possible in Belgium anymore.
- piokoch 1y agoWell, apparently Western Europe is not only buying Russian oil and gas, but they decided to buy some ideas from Wowa Putin. Who cares... until European Union will try to make that their regulation.
- ajsnigrutin 1y agoFor us europeans, that's nothing new... point the finger at putin/china and then do worse at home, while acting you support democracy and freedoms. UK already did their "prove your age" act, EU is well on the way of doing it, every year they try a new chat control law, and sooner or later they'll force some kind of "real name" online, requiring identifying yourself when registering an account. And that's just the new stuff, france was pushing key escrow for many years, UK can jail you if you forget (or not give) your passwords, germany can fine you you if you use nasty words against a politician, etc.
- ghusto 1y ago> they'll force some kind of "real name" online All of this is terrible, obviously, but this one has a silver lining. The web will be such a nicer place when people can't hide behind anonymity.
- ajsnigrutin 1y agoYep,... no one will be able to criticize their employers anymore, nor the local government, police, etc. I mean well. .or risk losing a job or worse. Yay! /s
- ghusto 1y agoThat could easily work the same as in real life. Most interactions are not anonymous, but in the cases where anonymity is a requirement, that can be provided. If we can do that in real life, it's even easier online.
- 1y ago
- buyucu 1y agofor anyone in Belgium who needs a decent VPN, I recommend Mullvad: https://mullvad.net/ https://mullvad.net/
- tsumnia 1y agoI really enjoyed their article on the EU's Chat Control legislation [1]. I'm so sorry to hear that your privacy is being scrutinized y'all. [1] https://mullvad.net/en/chatcontrol/stop-chatcontrol https://mullvad.net/en/chatcontrol/stop-chatcontrol
- johnisgood 1y ago> Mullvad is a Swedish VPN company, and our business isn’t directly affected by a possible Chat Control regulation. Sweden is in favor of Chat Control. And this is total bullshit. E2EE instant messaging software will remain encrypted and private. OMEMO and OTR, too.
- johnisgood 1y agoI just tried Mullvad again on Android. It says "out of time" and that I have no more VPN time left on the account. I would have to "add time" (i.e. buy it). I thought Mullvad was free. I am not going to pay for it. Why would I when there are many free ones out there?
- fn-mote 1y agoIf you are not the customer, you are the product. Pay for a VPN if you don’t want the VPN company to be complicit in tracking you. And no, Mullvad is not free.
- johnisgood 1y agoWhat guarantees do I have? Any free VPNs could make it pay-to-use without changing a thing. Having to pay for a VPN does not mean that it is more secure or whatever it is you are thinking. I could be a customer AND product at the same time.
- paulyy_y 1y agoHumanity just doesn't ever learn. Europe will end up having draconian oversight and censorship that will be abused beyond belief by fascists. When some central entity--subject to the whims of political temperature--controls what you can access, there can be no trust in the durability and integrity of information. Same as in the US really, except there being executed to support the nascent regime without any liberal auspices.
- Xeoncross 1y ago> draconian oversight and censorship This is just human nature. Any place where humans live in close proximity for hundreds of years suffers the same fate until a revolution or power restructure resets the counter through the removal of the previous structures vestiges. Thanks to technology, it just keeps getting easier. Less time to put restrictive measures in place and a tighter feedback loop. Oh joy.
- Santosh83 1y agoI think you may have got it backwards? Technology seems to be greatly facilitating fascist control rather than weakening them...
- mystraline 1y agoI think you hit the nail on the head. The original problem with The Panopticon was that it was 1 person in the center observing X amount of people. And at best, was a probabilistic 'am I being watched right now? ' with the answer of very low probability. For complete surveillance, you'd need a surveiller per watched. Enter technology. Now the surveillance isn't a person, but a set of computer programs. And, optimizing and analyzing the limited data flow out of a user is doable. And you then have computational spies everywhere. Most of them are limited to specific usecases. However the more data is shared, the tighter fascist control can be maintained. Then it just comes to 'detected event' and 'summon the secret police'.
- bratwurst3000 1y ago
- Insanity 1y agoAs a Belgian, sad to see this. I rarely follow any news from Belgium (not living there anymore) so I'm somewhat unaware of what's happening in the tech landscape, but this does surprise me. Curiously - I tried to find any news on this from Belgian sources, but couldn't find it (in my quick search).
- somethingsome 1y agoBelgium is worse and worse, news laws all the time, very oppressing ones, much more surveillance and way less liberties.
- Insanity 1y agoAh I see. Tbh, I don’t miss it
- amelius 1y agoThey should ban AI too then, because most of them have been trained on pirated content. If you deny civilians access to content but grant AI the access, what are you trying to accomplish?
- kordlessagain 1y ago"but it's just a bunch of floating point numbers, Your Honor"
- jeroenhd 1y agoOne Dutch-language AI project was actually shut down by the copyright lobby exactly for that reason. They did it voluntarily (knowing they'd probably lose in a lawsuit plus pay a fine to boot) but it shows that these people are perfectly fine attacking AI projects. The big ones, though, they don't dare to go up against those. You can't bully OpenAI into submission and threats of spurious lawsuits, you have to actually win, and they don't have an interest in taking that risk.
- RamblingCTO 1y agoHot take: it's the right decision. Why? I'm scoping my opinion on copyrighted material only. A state that is a lawful state follows its own laws. That includes copyright laws most of us don't like. So yes, I think that was the right decision for this court (as it's not the constitutional court of Belgium afaict) as it holds up the laws of Belgium and defends the rights of copyright holders (which can be individuals as well, not only evil corporation extortionists). I know that there is a slippery slope here, but we need to change laws and make systems that are resilient against censorship. That's the only long term solution imho. Let's be honest: it's piracy. They are not banning books. They're fighting illegal distribution. Just use a VPN and pirate the books. We gotta be honest to ourselves here.
- Den_VR 1y agoLibraries are not piracy. You’re correct about the need to change laws, but the change goes beyond the Open Library and is more fundamental to citizen rights in the context of digital ownership. This is just as pivotal to Right-to-Repair as it is to expecting digital assets that have been “bought” not to brick themselves after some arbitrary period.
- RamblingCTO 1y agoI know. But they're not banning libraries. They're banning access to an entity they can't enforce local laws for. I think we need law changes around digital ownership for sure, but I don't think this applies here. PS: big fan of the internet archive. I'm just arguing that we need to do things correctly. And we need to let the authors be able to make a living from their work.
- Den_VR 1y agoOh yes, “think of the authors.” That’s propaganda, an idyllic myth. Literary output and quality have never been solely contingent on authors making a living from their work. The necessity of authors making their livelihood writing is the idyllic myth. Literature can, and has, bloomed from both the pen of the pauper and the privileged. Jane Austen made perhaps £600 from her writing. Kafka kept a full-time day job and saw zero literary income in his lifetime. Not to say there’s not people that haven’t made fortunes from those examples, but it sure wasn’t the author.
- anonzzzies 1y agoRight so who wants to work on this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44746016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44746016 it is time to finish this as govs won't learn. And even china hasn't managed to block that traffic: the eu/us probably wont go that far. But if they do, it wont probably work. We must have p2p , decentralized application frameworks with strong encryption. A framework I can write my next saas on and no, not blockchain.
- drdaeman 1y ago> We must have p2p , decentralized application frameworks with strong encryption. A framework I can write my next saas on and no, not blockchain. If you want a serverless network, there's at least this: https://zeronet.io/docs/site_development/getting_started/ https://zeronet.io/docs/site_development/getting_started/
- visarga 1y agoOnce a book is sold publishers would do anything to limit its use. No scanning, no online lending, no training LLMs on it, no reusing of protected style or abstractions for fan fiction. If the author is not to be found, the book itself becomes "orphaned", attempting preservation is infringement. I personally find little attraction installing in my brain furniture I can't sit on. If I can't freely reuse the ideas in the book to create anything, it is a net loss to read it.
- Ekaros 1y agoShould same apply to software, games, movies and music? Say I license single copy of software and then set up online library where unlimited copies can be downloaded from. Would that be okay? Or maybe a employee could license a copy of company's software to themselves and then share it online?
- visarga 1y ago1:1 lending is not unlimited copying, I don't advocate sharing copyrighted data like that.
- the_biot 1y agoThe article is a little wide-eyed about how new this kind of censorship is. Belgium broadly has a duopoly, with the first two ISPs listed having the vast majority of the market. Both of them have been doing blocking of pirate sites for decades, with at least one of them actually resolving + blocking by IP address, not just DNS blocking. Needless to say, both have video on demand services to protect.
- xeiotos 1y agoI always wonder if we didn’t get democracy totally backwards. As a Belgian, how could I have let my voice be heard that this is: - a waste of time and resources - not what I want It sure is galling that government appears to be mostly an ever-growing and ever-more-costing pile of legacy rules, regulations and institutions, which through sheer complexity can be navigated only by big corporations or the mega-rich, who can lobby the monstrosity into doing whatever they want. And meanwhile I’m paying upwards of 60% effective tax to support it all.
- PeterStuer 1y agoIt's the law of concentrated benefits vs distributed burdens. In theory you as the person(s) on the receiving end of the burdens could counterlobby, but you will face the cost of organizing a large group (vs the much simpler structure of the solo or the few benefactors), as well as the lack of insentive on the people you are trying to organise because for each individual the cost/benefit does not add up. So laws and regulation in practice most often end up benefiting the ones with concentrated wealth extraction, and disadvantage those from which that wealth will be extracted in agregate.