10 ms·

Internet Archive's legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost

224 points by thinkcontext 11mo ago

bobsmooth 11mo ago
That's what happens when you practically beg book publishers to sue you.
- choo-t 11mo ago
  The fact that giving free access to books during a pandemic, in a format that doesn't need physical contact, when libraries were shut down or hard to access for a lot of people should have been praised, not pursued by legal action from rent seeking entities. The copyright system as a whole should by torn up. At least it give a clear signal to anyone with a ounce of moral which publisher to avoid at all cost.
  - alex1138 11mo ago
    I worry 'hacker' news is going to become more and more 'normie' steadily moving farther and farther away from Barlow's declaration of independence of cyberspace cypherpunk ethos It's easier to make money when you comply with The Man
    - zokier 11mo ago
      you realize that HN has always been deeply business oriented, with it's root in the startup scene through the connection with YC? the hackers I believe is reference to pgs essay Hackers and Painters: https://paulgraham.com/hp.html https://paulgraham.com/hp.html
      - throwanem 11mo ago
        Yes, but from a much older coinage, as documented in (the not entirely uncontroversial) "The New Hacker's Dictionary" compiled by (the likewise) Eric Raymond: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3008/3008-h/3008-h.htm#hacker https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3008/3008-h/3008-h.htm#hacke... I'm old enough to recall the term in active use, and to have received the appellation from one who'd had it likewise handed down. I regard both as epiphenomena of the Internet's frontier or "Wild West" days, of which California has proven as terminal as it was for the nominate example after the US Civil War - not wholly for dissimilar reasons, if we take Vietnam, for the Internet, as the war whose loss would spur the migration.
        pessimizer 11mo ago
        The site used to be called "Startup News." https://news.ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html https://news.ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html
        throwanem 11mo ago
        That's good background, but I'm not sure where I'm meant to understand it to disagree with the idea that the "hacker" in "Hacker News" is the same one discussed in TNHD.
  - rcxdude 11mo ago
    Copyright needs torn up or at the very least significant reform but if you're going to be skirting around the edges of it to try to do a good thing it's probably a good idea to not just straight up obviously and blatently break the letter and spirit of the law. CDL is an awkward and dubious workaround but if you drop the 'C' you're just doing copyright infringment and that would be much better left to entities like Anna's Archive. The criticism of IA in this regard is usually that it was a bad strategy, not that the goals were bad.
    - edgineer 11mo ago
      There may be newer laws with different spirits, but I thought the original copyright spirit was "other people can't sell your work without permission" and not at all about preventing free sharing.
      - DoctorOW 11mo ago
        Common misconception. The original spirit is "Others can't copy your work without permission", hence why piracy is a violation.
  - briandear 11mo ago
    So how do authors make money? Going on concert tours? The copyright system needs reform (Mickey Mouse for example) — but the system protects creators. If there were no copyrights, no author would make any money.
    - eikenberry 11mo ago
      > If there were no copyrights, no author would make any money. Cory Doctorow showed that this isn't true.
      - EvanAnderson 11mo ago
        Cory Doctorow's works that were released under more permissive licensing still reserved some rights for the author. I believe he used some flavor of a Creative Commons non-commercial license, if memory serves. Point being that the method of licensing his works was still fundamentally based on copyright. (I think the US copyright system is hugely broken and the social contract needs to be re-negotiated, but I comment here in the interests of facts, not in support of the broken system.)
      - criddell 11mo ago
        Are Cory Doctorow's newest books permissively licensed? I thought he stopped doing that.
    - HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
      More and more authors of nonfiction today make money from a number of channels other than actual book sales. The book only serves as a promotional tool for their personal brand, and is only a collection of previously published blog posts or magazine pieces. This already started due to changing consumer behaviors and declining interest in books, so by the time piracy has come on the scene, the shift had already largely occurred.
    - WalterBright 11mo ago
      Put it another way - how many authors are making money off of books they wrote >10 years ago? And how many actually make a living off of writing books? The authors I know all have jobs.
  - tptacek 11mo ago
    During the pandemic, they created the "National Emergency Library", where they allowed users copies of books without caps, without any connection to holdings of the Archive itself, something that was black-letter proscribed by copyright law, and as a result they managed to sabotage the legal case for controlled digital lending too.
  - dangus 11mo ago
    The copyright system should perhaps be torn up (or maybe not…) but you can’t just blatantly violate it at massive scale and expect to face zero consequences. And anyway, why is it unreasonable for copyright holders to expect to be able to get paid for their work rather than have a massive library loophole where they just never get paid as long as you're a nonprofit? Here you go, you can steal beer from my store as long as you’re a nonprofit organization. > For a decade, the Archive had loaned out individual e-books to one user at a time without triggering any lawsuits. That changed when IA decided to temporarily lift the cap on loans from its Open Library project So stupid. They had a working system that they blew up through their own actions and now the library is dead. IMO the only two reform the copyright system needs are DCMA takedown abuse and copyright term length. All the other concepts of copyright make perfect sense. If I create something I should be able to consent to giving or not giving it to someone. A lot of the software engineers on this forum wouldn’t like what happens to their profession without copyright.
- TMWNN 11mo ago
  When I made this criticism before of IA, I was told that that was ridiculous since the publishers had it out for IA before the COVID-19 emergency library. That may or may not have been true, but the publishers did not sue IA despite OpenLibrary existing for years before COVID-19. Publishers didn't pull the trigger because they were afraid of losing. It was a MAD situation, and IA unnecessarily triggered a nuclear war that they lost.
mzs 11mo ago
Is the feature gone, the one where I use my local library card to access an online book for 2 weeks if no one else has it currently?
- TimorousBestie 11mo ago
  Most of the IA’s ebook collection still supports controlled digital lending, just like every other library that operates an ebook lending system with CDL.
- dylan604 11mo ago
  From TFA: In the end, the fight led to more than 500,000 books being removed from the Archive’s “Open Library.” Good chance the book you wanted is gone at the least
  - exe34 11mo ago
    I hope Anna's Archive kept a copy.
  - layman51 11mo ago
    That sounds right. I checked on some listings of books that I thought would be cool to check out, but it still keeps saying how borrow in unavailable except for patrons with print disabilities. For the books I'm interested in, at least we can see scans of the front and back covers, and also a little bit of the table of contents.
- gjs278 11mo ago
  [dead]
zokier 11mo ago
> Kahle thinks “the world became stupider” when the Open Library was gutted—but he’s moving forward with new ideas > The lawsuits haven’t dampened Kahle’s resolve to expand IA’s digitization efforts, though. Moving forward, the group will be growing a project called Democracy’s Library please just stop. let IA be what it is. or rather, nothing wrong in doing new projects but don't tie them to IA, just start them as completely separate things. IA is too important as-is to be a playground for random kooky ideas playing with fire.
- TimorousBestie 11mo ago
  > let IA be what it is IA is the eccentric, untamed idealism. You can’t have the Wayback Machine without the National Emergency Library and the Great 78 Project.
  - tedunangst 11mo ago
    Why not? The Wayback Machine predates the National Emergency Library by many years, suggesting it is possible for one to exist without the other.
    - convolvatron 11mo ago
      And Brewster Kahle's notions about culture and information sharing start well before the Internet Archive. In theory one could pick and choose, but this is Brewster's life-long passion project. The man even outfitted a van with a printer and a binder to distribute physical books for free. It's very strange to insist that he _not_ push the boundaries of copyright law for the common good. without that you wouldn't have had the Wayback machine in the first place.
      - zokier 11mo ago
        > It's very strange to insist that he _not_ push the boundaries of copyright law for the common good He as an individual can keep pushing whatever he wants. Just keep IA out of it.
    - 11mo ago
tototrains 11mo ago
Remember: If OpenAI/Google does it for $$$, it's not illegal. If idealists do it for public access, full force of the law. Information wants to be free. Oblige it. Fools with temporary power trying to extract from the work of others will be a blip in the history books if we make them.
- noir_lord 11mo ago
  internetarchive.ai It's a training set not an archive.
- charcircuit 11mo ago
  You are being intentionally misleading. Public access AI models are not being taken down either. There is a big, transformative, difference with freely giving out books to read compared with using them to train an ML model.
  - fsckboy 11mo ago
    > There is a big, transformative, difference with freely giving out books to read on a small, measured in human reading pace, scale compared with using them at a massive scale at internet and computer memory speeds to train an ML model even if the intellectual property used to train the ML was from unlicensed copies, and which the model regularly and with some frequency regurgitates verbatim. not wanting you to be intentially misleading, FTFY.
    - Permit 11mo ago
      > some frequency This is a weasel word you've inserted to be intentionally misleading.
      - wtfwhateven 11mo ago
        Saying "some frequency" instead of "often" doesn't mean their overall point is wrong. You know that, you're just being intentionally deceitful.
nekusar 11mo ago
What capitalism continues to show us: proof that public libraries, if created in the last 10 years, would be deemed illegal and sued out of existence. It's only because the late 1800's billionaires wanted to leave legacies and made pay-to-enter and free libraries, and migrated them to free, or public libraries. Thats why so many of them are (John) Carnegie Libraries. Only legal when billionaires do it.
- throwanem 11mo ago
  What I hear you say is that Brewster's time would be more wisely spent making friends of billionaires.
  - nekusar 11mo ago
    Possibly, yeah. Make a "Deal" <spit> with AI companies to have back-end access to all the Archive org's content. Get 'permission' to copy EVERYTHING and have billionaires run interference. The AI companies already got blank checks to do that. Anthropic is paying what, like $3000 per book? I remember when the fucks at the RIAA were suing 12 year olds for $10000 for Britney Spears albums. Or better yet, if it's just $3k a book, can we license every book and have that added into Archive.org? Oh wait, deals for thee, not for me.
    - throwanem 11mo ago
      Eh. If patronage was good enough for da Vinci...
- gdulli 11mo ago
  A lower stakes but still illustrative example I see is that the DVR is an invention that wouldn't be allowed to succeed today. All power is being wielded to its fullest in order to prevent skipping ads. Cable to streaming took us from skippable to unskippable ads. Search results to LLM results will result in invisible/undisclosed ads. Each successive generation of technology will increase the power of advertising and strip rights we used to have. Another example, physical to digital media ownership, we lost resale rights. We need to understand that we've passed a threshold after which innovation is hurting us more than helping us. That trumps everything else.
HelloUsername 11mo ago
Previously posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45798283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45798283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45809870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45809870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45806643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45806643
endgame 11mo ago
It was an absolutely bone-headed poke-the-bear move and we should count ourselves lucky that it was only a chunk of the library and not the whole archive that got nuked. IA holds priceless and irreplaceable data, and while the library initiative was a well-intentioned move during the pandemic it was way too radical for the keepers of our shared digital history.
- MarsIronPI 11mo ago
  And this is why I respect Anna's Archive. If we want information to be free, I think we should consider intentionally violating copyright as an act of civil disobedience. I'm not sure I'm ready to go that far, but I respect the people at AA who are.
  - ls612 11mo ago
    I mean I suspect most people on HN have used torrent sites at least a little bit so we are already there.
- PeaceTed 11mo ago
  I am just hoping they get on top of the massive trove of game ROM's before Nintendo's lawyers have a field day. Personally, I say they should be free for everyone, the lawyers however think the complete opposite and they have the means of enforcing this.
  - extraduder_ire 11mo ago
    Don't they still have safe harbour protections if they remove those in response to a DMCA? Those were all uploaded by users unrelated to IA.
- wkat4242 11mo ago
  Agreed. It was poking the bear. The other big three grey-circuit services have nothing to lose because they never claimed to be legit. If you claim the moral high ground you have to be impeccable. It also didn't help anyone during COVID because all the stuff was out there already on less legit services. Some make it super easy with telegram bots etc. I'm sad that they screwed this up. Because the archive is a very valuable service. They've lost a lot of money, goodwill and reputation now. And gained nothing. The worst part is, it's unimaginable that this would ever have ended well. It wasn't a bad idea in principle but they should have worked to get some publishers on board, could have been a PR win for them too.
p0w3n3d 11mo ago
I am sorry to say that, but copyright protection time should vary on the subject. Programming books - 10 years maybe? 10 years is ages in computer science. TV shows? 5-7 years maybe. After that time nobody wants to pay for watching old big brother or another Fort Boyard... Nor pay for storing it in archive. And this is the culture other creations are referring to. We've run in Poland into very strange situation - Polish Public TV (TVP) paid for the great dubbing of some Disney shows. They recorded it on VHS which were overwritten by other shows. Now the translation and the dubbing is lost, found sometimes on people's home recorded VHS but in poor quality, because recorded from the aerial.
- RobotToaster 11mo ago
  Many original episodes of Dr Who were destroyed by the BBC, some have only been recovered because of "pirate" home recorded VHS, or people that "stole" tapes from the dumpster.
Aeolun 11mo ago
It baffles me how many techies are here saying we should respect our corporate overlords. Something certainly was lost in this scene in the past 20 years. Hackernews? More like Peonnews.
floxy 11mo ago
The Wayback Machine has been broken for me for about a month or so. Is that the case for everyone? Like when you stick in a URL, it just goes to a "landing page" that says: "The Wayback Machine is an initiative of the Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Other projects include Open Library & archive-it.org. Your use of the Wayback Machine is subject to the Internet Archive's Terms of Use." ...instead of taking you to the "calendar" page where you could select the version of the website you wanted to see. https://web.archive.org/web/*/news.ycombinator.com https://web.archive.org/web/*/news.ycombinator.com
- BEEdwards 11mo ago
  works for me
  - floxy 11mo ago
    Huh. Works for me at home as well. Must be something with the firewall at work or similar. Thanks!
ojr 11mo ago
a lot of it was scraped by LLMs, I asked ChatGPT about a tutorial written on a page that no longer existed from 2013 and it knew all the functions
randerson 11mo ago
The Internet Archive is to be protected at all costs. Its maybe the most important site on the Internet because of all the history that exists nowhere else. As the web is increasingly filled with AI slop, the Internet Archive has got perhaps the last pre-slop snapshot of the Internet.
cookiengineer 11mo ago
Fun fact: the only complete copy of the Internet Archive's library is in Alexandria. How's that for historic irony and "unteachability" of the human species. Honestly, now's the time to make copies of it, while we still can. Torrents need seeders and people that care, and we are the last generation that cares about knowledge. We need to prevent the following generations to grow up as mindless clickmonkeys of the digital Orwellian world.
- typpilol 11mo ago
  You're telling me they have no redundant copies at all in another location? I could see that due to the sheer size but im sure they have a robust disk pool that would take a lot for it to lose data
  - cookiengineer 11mo ago
    In my opinion redundancy in a single business entity is no redundancy at all, especially if there's legal obligations of a soon-to-be-burning-books-again regime. A better strategy would have been to found independent entities in other liberal democracies, so they can act as IP backups. There was a great vpro documentary called "Digital Amnesia" [1] where they also interviewed the lead of the library of Alexandria, who was the only bidder to buy the national KIT library of the Netherlands and its dissolved inventory at the time. Interviews with archivists, librarians, web archive and others on the topic. It's insane to see that nations don't want to preserve their history, science, and culture anymore. But here we are. [1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=NdZxI3nFVJs https://youtube.com/watch?v=NdZxI3nFVJs
    - typpilol 11mo ago
      Do we know how much data the internet archive has? Is it even viable to replicate to multiple regions if it's 1000s of PB?
      - cookiengineer 11mo ago
        Anna's archive has the metadata on it. IA was around 300TB last time I checked. libgen was around 190TB. For my own at home cluster I decided to go for 512TB but I can't host nor upload in these bandwidth requirements from here. I started to build sth like a torrent splitter tool yesterday because I realized that all torrent clients just crash when you try to open, modify, or seed those torrents. Edit: correction, the IA is ~15PB big, brewster kahle mentioned it in the documentary (2014)

224 points by thinkcontext 11mo ago

bobsmooth 11mo ago

That's what happens when you practically beg book publishers to sue you.

choo-t 11mo ago
The fact that giving free access to books during a pandemic, in a format that doesn't need physical contact, when libraries were shut down or hard to access for a lot of people should have been praised, not pursued by legal action from rent seeking entities. The copyright system as a whole should by torn up. At least it give a clear signal to anyone with a ounce of moral which publisher to avoid at all cost.
- alex1138 11mo ago
  I worry 'hacker' news is going to become more and more 'normie' steadily moving farther and farther away from Barlow's declaration of independence of cyberspace cypherpunk ethos It's easier to make money when you comply with The Man
  - zokier 11mo ago
    you realize that HN has always been deeply business oriented, with it's root in the startup scene through the connection with YC? the hackers I believe is reference to pgs essay Hackers and Painters: https://paulgraham.com/hp.html https://paulgraham.com/hp.html
    - throwanem 11mo ago
      Yes, but from a much older coinage, as documented in (the not entirely uncontroversial) "The New Hacker's Dictionary" compiled by (the likewise) Eric Raymond: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3008/3008-h/3008-h.htm#hacker https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3008/3008-h/3008-h.htm#hacke... I'm old enough to recall the term in active use, and to have received the appellation from one who'd had it likewise handed down. I regard both as epiphenomena of the Internet's frontier or "Wild West" days, of which California has proven as terminal as it was for the nominate example after the US Civil War - not wholly for dissimilar reasons, if we take Vietnam, for the Internet, as the war whose loss would spur the migration.
      - pessimizer 11mo ago
        The site used to be called "Startup News." https://news.ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html https://news.ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html
        throwanem 11mo ago
        That's good background, but I'm not sure where I'm meant to understand it to disagree with the idea that the "hacker" in "Hacker News" is the same one discussed in TNHD.
- rcxdude 11mo ago
  Copyright needs torn up or at the very least significant reform but if you're going to be skirting around the edges of it to try to do a good thing it's probably a good idea to not just straight up obviously and blatently break the letter and spirit of the law. CDL is an awkward and dubious workaround but if you drop the 'C' you're just doing copyright infringment and that would be much better left to entities like Anna's Archive. The criticism of IA in this regard is usually that it was a bad strategy, not that the goals were bad.
  - edgineer 11mo ago
    There may be newer laws with different spirits, but I thought the original copyright spirit was "other people can't sell your work without permission" and not at all about preventing free sharing.
    - DoctorOW 11mo ago
      Common misconception. The original spirit is "Others can't copy your work without permission", hence why piracy is a violation.
- briandear 11mo ago
  So how do authors make money? Going on concert tours? The copyright system needs reform (Mickey Mouse for example) — but the system protects creators. If there were no copyrights, no author would make any money.
  - eikenberry 11mo ago
    > If there were no copyrights, no author would make any money. Cory Doctorow showed that this isn't true.
    - EvanAnderson 11mo ago
      Cory Doctorow's works that were released under more permissive licensing still reserved some rights for the author. I believe he used some flavor of a Creative Commons non-commercial license, if memory serves. Point being that the method of licensing his works was still fundamentally based on copyright. (I think the US copyright system is hugely broken and the social contract needs to be re-negotiated, but I comment here in the interests of facts, not in support of the broken system.)
    - criddell 11mo ago
      Are Cory Doctorow's newest books permissively licensed? I thought he stopped doing that.
  - HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
    More and more authors of nonfiction today make money from a number of channels other than actual book sales. The book only serves as a promotional tool for their personal brand, and is only a collection of previously published blog posts or magazine pieces. This already started due to changing consumer behaviors and declining interest in books, so by the time piracy has come on the scene, the shift had already largely occurred.
  - WalterBright 11mo ago
    Put it another way - how many authors are making money off of books they wrote >10 years ago? And how many actually make a living off of writing books? The authors I know all have jobs.
- tptacek 11mo ago
  During the pandemic, they created the "National Emergency Library", where they allowed users copies of books without caps, without any connection to holdings of the Archive itself, something that was black-letter proscribed by copyright law, and as a result they managed to sabotage the legal case for controlled digital lending too.
- dangus 11mo ago
  The copyright system should perhaps be torn up (or maybe not…) but you can’t just blatantly violate it at massive scale and expect to face zero consequences. And anyway, why is it unreasonable for copyright holders to expect to be able to get paid for their work rather than have a massive library loophole where they just never get paid as long as you're a nonprofit? Here you go, you can steal beer from my store as long as you’re a nonprofit organization. > For a decade, the Archive had loaned out individual e-books to one user at a time without triggering any lawsuits. That changed when IA decided to temporarily lift the cap on loans from its Open Library project So stupid. They had a working system that they blew up through their own actions and now the library is dead. IMO the only two reform the copyright system needs are DCMA takedown abuse and copyright term length. All the other concepts of copyright make perfect sense. If I create something I should be able to consent to giving or not giving it to someone. A lot of the software engineers on this forum wouldn’t like what happens to their profession without copyright.
TMWNN 11mo ago
When I made this criticism before of IA, I was told that that was ridiculous since the publishers had it out for IA before the COVID-19 emergency library. That may or may not have been true, but the publishers did not sue IA despite OpenLibrary existing for years before COVID-19. Publishers didn't pull the trigger because they were afraid of losing. It was a MAD situation, and IA unnecessarily triggered a nuclear war that they lost.

mzs 11mo ago

Is the feature gone, the one where I use my local library card to access an online book for 2 weeks if no one else has it currently?

TimorousBestie 11mo ago
Most of the IA’s ebook collection still supports controlled digital lending, just like every other library that operates an ebook lending system with CDL.
dylan604 11mo ago
From TFA: In the end, the fight led to more than 500,000 books being removed from the Archive’s “Open Library.” Good chance the book you wanted is gone at the least
- exe34 11mo ago
  I hope Anna's Archive kept a copy.
- layman51 11mo ago
  That sounds right. I checked on some listings of books that I thought would be cool to check out, but it still keeps saying how borrow in unavailable except for patrons with print disabilities. For the books I'm interested in, at least we can see scans of the front and back covers, and also a little bit of the table of contents.
gjs278 11mo ago
[dead]

zokier 11mo ago

> Kahle thinks “the world became stupider” when the Open Library was gutted—but he’s moving forward with new ideas > The lawsuits haven’t dampened Kahle’s resolve to expand IA’s digitization efforts, though. Moving forward, the group will be growing a project called Democracy’s Library please just stop. let IA be what it is. or rather, nothing wrong in doing new projects but don't tie them to IA, just start them as completely separate things. IA is too important as-is to be a playground for random kooky ideas playing with fire.

TimorousBestie 11mo ago
> let IA be what it is IA is the eccentric, untamed idealism. You can’t have the Wayback Machine without the National Emergency Library and the Great 78 Project.
- tedunangst 11mo ago
  Why not? The Wayback Machine predates the National Emergency Library by many years, suggesting it is possible for one to exist without the other.
  - convolvatron 11mo ago
    And Brewster Kahle's notions about culture and information sharing start well before the Internet Archive. In theory one could pick and choose, but this is Brewster's life-long passion project. The man even outfitted a van with a printer and a binder to distribute physical books for free. It's very strange to insist that he _not_ push the boundaries of copyright law for the common good. without that you wouldn't have had the Wayback machine in the first place.
    - zokier 11mo ago
      > It's very strange to insist that he _not_ push the boundaries of copyright law for the common good He as an individual can keep pushing whatever he wants. Just keep IA out of it.
  - 11mo ago

tototrains 11mo ago

Remember: If OpenAI/Google does it for $$$, it's not illegal. If idealists do it for public access, full force of the law. Information wants to be free. Oblige it. Fools with temporary power trying to extract from the work of others will be a blip in the history books if we make them.

noir_lord 11mo ago
internetarchive.ai It's a training set not an archive.
charcircuit 11mo ago
You are being intentionally misleading. Public access AI models are not being taken down either. There is a big, transformative, difference with freely giving out books to read compared with using them to train an ML model.
- fsckboy 11mo ago
  > There is a big, transformative, difference with freely giving out books to read on a small, measured in human reading pace, scale compared with using them at a massive scale at internet and computer memory speeds to train an ML model even if the intellectual property used to train the ML was from unlicensed copies, and which the model regularly and with some frequency regurgitates verbatim. not wanting you to be intentially misleading, FTFY.
  - Permit 11mo ago
    > some frequency This is a weasel word you've inserted to be intentionally misleading.
    - wtfwhateven 11mo ago
      Saying "some frequency" instead of "often" doesn't mean their overall point is wrong. You know that, you're just being intentionally deceitful.

nekusar 11mo ago

What capitalism continues to show us: proof that public libraries, if created in the last 10 years, would be deemed illegal and sued out of existence. It's only because the late 1800's billionaires wanted to leave legacies and made pay-to-enter and free libraries, and migrated them to free, or public libraries. Thats why so many of them are (John) Carnegie Libraries. Only legal when billionaires do it.

throwanem 11mo ago
What I hear you say is that Brewster's time would be more wisely spent making friends of billionaires.
- nekusar 11mo ago
  Possibly, yeah. Make a "Deal" <spit> with AI companies to have back-end access to all the Archive org's content. Get 'permission' to copy EVERYTHING and have billionaires run interference. The AI companies already got blank checks to do that. Anthropic is paying what, like $3000 per book? I remember when the fucks at the RIAA were suing 12 year olds for $10000 for Britney Spears albums. Or better yet, if it's just $3k a book, can we license every book and have that added into Archive.org? Oh wait, deals for thee, not for me.
  - throwanem 11mo ago
    Eh. If patronage was good enough for da Vinci...
gdulli 11mo ago
A lower stakes but still illustrative example I see is that the DVR is an invention that wouldn't be allowed to succeed today. All power is being wielded to its fullest in order to prevent skipping ads. Cable to streaming took us from skippable to unskippable ads. Search results to LLM results will result in invisible/undisclosed ads. Each successive generation of technology will increase the power of advertising and strip rights we used to have. Another example, physical to digital media ownership, we lost resale rights. We need to understand that we've passed a threshold after which innovation is hurting us more than helping us. That trumps everything else.

HelloUsername 11mo ago

Previously posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45798283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45798283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45809870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45809870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45806643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45806643

endgame 11mo ago

It was an absolutely bone-headed poke-the-bear move and we should count ourselves lucky that it was only a chunk of the library and not the whole archive that got nuked. IA holds priceless and irreplaceable data, and while the library initiative was a well-intentioned move during the pandemic it was way too radical for the keepers of our shared digital history.

MarsIronPI 11mo ago
And this is why I respect Anna's Archive. If we want information to be free, I think we should consider intentionally violating copyright as an act of civil disobedience. I'm not sure I'm ready to go that far, but I respect the people at AA who are.
- ls612 11mo ago
  I mean I suspect most people on HN have used torrent sites at least a little bit so we are already there.
PeaceTed 11mo ago
I am just hoping they get on top of the massive trove of game ROM's before Nintendo's lawyers have a field day. Personally, I say they should be free for everyone, the lawyers however think the complete opposite and they have the means of enforcing this.
- extraduder_ire 11mo ago
  Don't they still have safe harbour protections if they remove those in response to a DMCA? Those were all uploaded by users unrelated to IA.
wkat4242 11mo ago
Agreed. It was poking the bear. The other big three grey-circuit services have nothing to lose because they never claimed to be legit. If you claim the moral high ground you have to be impeccable. It also didn't help anyone during COVID because all the stuff was out there already on less legit services. Some make it super easy with telegram bots etc. I'm sad that they screwed this up. Because the archive is a very valuable service. They've lost a lot of money, goodwill and reputation now. And gained nothing. The worst part is, it's unimaginable that this would ever have ended well. It wasn't a bad idea in principle but they should have worked to get some publishers on board, could have been a PR win for them too.

p0w3n3d 11mo ago

I am sorry to say that, but copyright protection time should vary on the subject. Programming books - 10 years maybe? 10 years is ages in computer science. TV shows? 5-7 years maybe. After that time nobody wants to pay for watching old big brother or another Fort Boyard... Nor pay for storing it in archive. And this is the culture other creations are referring to. We've run in Poland into very strange situation - Polish Public TV (TVP) paid for the great dubbing of some Disney shows. They recorded it on VHS which were overwritten by other shows. Now the translation and the dubbing is lost, found sometimes on people's home recorded VHS but in poor quality, because recorded from the aerial.

RobotToaster 11mo ago
Many original episodes of Dr Who were destroyed by the BBC, some have only been recovered because of "pirate" home recorded VHS, or people that "stole" tapes from the dumpster.

Aeolun 11mo ago

It baffles me how many techies are here saying we should respect our corporate overlords. Something certainly was lost in this scene in the past 20 years. Hackernews? More like Peonnews.

floxy 11mo ago

The Wayback Machine has been broken for me for about a month or so. Is that the case for everyone? Like when you stick in a URL, it just goes to a "landing page" that says: "The Wayback Machine is an initiative of the Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Other projects include Open Library & archive-it.org. Your use of the Wayback Machine is subject to the Internet Archive's Terms of Use." ...instead of taking you to the "calendar" page where you could select the version of the website you wanted to see. https://web.archive.org/web/*/news.ycombinator.com https://web.archive.org/web/*/news.ycombinator.com

BEEdwards 11mo ago
works for me
- floxy 11mo ago
  Huh. Works for me at home as well. Must be something with the firewall at work or similar. Thanks!

ojr 11mo ago

a lot of it was scraped by LLMs, I asked ChatGPT about a tutorial written on a page that no longer existed from 2013 and it knew all the functions

randerson 11mo ago

The Internet Archive is to be protected at all costs. Its maybe the most important site on the Internet because of all the history that exists nowhere else. As the web is increasingly filled with AI slop, the Internet Archive has got perhaps the last pre-slop snapshot of the Internet.

cookiengineer 11mo ago

Fun fact: the only complete copy of the Internet Archive's library is in Alexandria. How's that for historic irony and "unteachability" of the human species. Honestly, now's the time to make copies of it, while we still can. Torrents need seeders and people that care, and we are the last generation that cares about knowledge. We need to prevent the following generations to grow up as mindless clickmonkeys of the digital Orwellian world.

typpilol 11mo ago
You're telling me they have no redundant copies at all in another location? I could see that due to the sheer size but im sure they have a robust disk pool that would take a lot for it to lose data
- cookiengineer 11mo ago
  In my opinion redundancy in a single business entity is no redundancy at all, especially if there's legal obligations of a soon-to-be-burning-books-again regime. A better strategy would have been to found independent entities in other liberal democracies, so they can act as IP backups. There was a great vpro documentary called "Digital Amnesia" [1] where they also interviewed the lead of the library of Alexandria, who was the only bidder to buy the national KIT library of the Netherlands and its dissolved inventory at the time. Interviews with archivists, librarians, web archive and others on the topic. It's insane to see that nations don't want to preserve their history, science, and culture anymore. But here we are. [1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=NdZxI3nFVJs https://youtube.com/watch?v=NdZxI3nFVJs
  - typpilol 11mo ago
    Do we know how much data the internet archive has? Is it even viable to replicate to multiple regions if it's 1000s of PB?
    - cookiengineer 11mo ago
      Anna's archive has the metadata on it. IA was around 300TB last time I checked. libgen was around 190TB. For my own at home cluster I decided to go for 512TB but I can't host nor upload in these bandwidth requirements from here. I started to build sth like a torrent splitter tool yesterday because I realized that all torrent clients just crash when you try to open, modify, or seed those torrents. Edit: correction, the IA is ~15PB big, brewster kahle mentioned it in the documentary (2014)