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We need to preserve data. The FBI is trying to kill data. We can not allow the FBI to work for Evil here. I actually think there should be a human right to dat

We need to preserve data. The FBI is trying to kill data. We can not allow the FBI to work for Evil here. I actually think there should be a human right to data. With that I mean, primarily, knowledge, not to data about a single human being as such (e. g. "doxxing" or any such crap - I mean knowledge). Knowledge itself should become a human right. I understand that the current law is very favourable to mega-corporations milking mankind dry, but the law should also be changed. (I am not anti-business per se, mind you - I just think the law should not become a tool to contain human rights, including access to knowledge and information at all times.) Wikipedia is somewhat ok, but it also misses a TON of stuff, and unfortunately it only has one primary view, whereas many things need some explanation before one can understand it. When I read up on a (to me) new topic, I try to focus on simple things and master these first. Some wikipedia articles are so complicated that even after staring at them for several minutes, and reading it, I still haven't the slightest clue what this is about. This is also a problem of wikipedia - as so many different people write things, it is sometimes super-hard to understand what wikipedia is trying to convey here.

baxtr 11mo ago
I agree. Knowledge should belong to all of humanity. But then also don’t be angry at big corporations when they scrape the entire internet.
- foofoo12 11mo ago
  Big corporations aren't humans.
  - exe34 11mo ago
    they are persons under US law.
    - JadeNB 11mo ago
      But US law isn't even the law of the world, let alone the definition of reality.
      - lazide 11mo ago
        How are you planning on doing anything about it?
        deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
      - exe34 11mo ago
        Does it need to be? Trump has been assasinating people in boats with no evidence whatsoever.
    - JohnFen 11mo ago
      Only in a couple of very specific and narrow ways. They are not considered persons generally under US law. They are legal fictions that have been granted a subset of rights that people have.
      - nobodyandproud 11mo ago
        And that subset of rights keeps expanding.
    - bossyTeacher 11mo ago
      US law only applies in the US. Plus, the company in question seems to be based in Canada, so outside the FBI jurisdiction
      - adventured 11mo ago
        So was Kim Dot Com. Biden went after him anyway at the behest of big media.
        vel0city 11mo ago
        I mean, its not like it was just Biden. His extradition proceedings took place during three different US presidential administrations. You might as well include Trump and Obama in there as well.
      - exe34 11mo ago
        that's just wishful thinking. US law applies world wide as long as Trump is willing to reach out and nab you. ask the Venezuelan fishermen.
        dashundchen 11mo ago
        That's not even US law, it's straight up murder outside of the law.
      - dragonwriter 11mo ago
        > US law only applies in the US. Where US law applies varies by which law it is; there are US laws that apply only outside of the US [0], as well as US laws which have application both inside and outside the US. [0] e.g., the federal torture statute, 18 U.S. Code § 2340A(a), “Whoever outside the United States commits or attempts to commit torture shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and if death results to any person from conduct prohibited by this subsection, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life.” https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2340A https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2340A
      - 11mo ago
    - mrweasel 11mo ago
      It would solve a lot if that was taken to the extreme. Sorry Amazon, but your working conditions killed five people. Your business licens is going to jail for 40 years, good luck getting contracts with other companies with murder on your records when you get out.
    - hamdingers 11mo ago
      If you're looking to US law to discern who is a person and who is not you are deeply lost.
      - exe34 11mo ago
        the argument really wasn't about human persons, it was about legal persons. the distinction was only brought up to derail the conversation.
    - modo_mario 11mo ago
      Then one should be able to put them on death row under US law.
    - wartywhoa23 11mo ago
      I imagine there's a whole lot of snarky epitaphs which the remnants of the humankind could place on this civilization's gravestone, but citing this exact law might make for the best one.
  - wang_li 11mo ago
    Corporations large and small don't do anything. It's always a person. The question you are answering, even if you don't think you are, is whether a few people can get together and act in concert and still retain their rights.
- capitainenemo 11mo ago
  While it's true people are upset at AI companies profiting off of artist creations with no compensation, I know a lot of people are also reacting to how the recent AI companies have been scraping the web. The reason folks are using Anubis and other methods is because unlike Google which did have archiving of sites for a long time (which was actually a great service), these new companies do not respect robots.txt, do not crawl at a reasonable rate (for us, thousands of hits a minute from their botnets - usually baidu/tencent, but also plenty of US IPs), hit the same resource repeatedly, ignoring headers intended to give cache hints, stupidly hitting thousands of variations of a page when crawling search results with no detection that they are getting basically the same thing... And when you ban them, they then switch to residential ranges. It really is malicious.
  - gilfoy 11mo ago
    > AI companies profiting Are they?
    - johneth 11mo ago
      If you boil it down to the AI companies are making money (subscriptions, etc.) based on content they did not pay to produce, then they are profiting from someone else's hard work.
      - BigTTYGothGF 11mo ago
        Revenue is not profit.
        smarf 11mo ago
        'stealing is fine if you lose money when reselling'
        BigTTYGothGF 11mo ago
        I don't believe I wrote anything of the sort.
- HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
  A lot of the outrage isn't at scraping, it is at the disruptive techniques used to do so. Like web-scraping whole websites that already provide convenient images of their content for download.
  - pbae 11mo ago
    Feels like now we're just redefining our rules so that the people we don't like are out and the people we like are in. Does the content creator have the right to determine how their work is used or not?
    - cestith 11mo ago
      I have a right to my copyrighted work, and I also have a right to set and enforce access rules to a server I operate to grant people access to it.
- wat10000 11mo ago
  It's not that they're scraping the internet, it's that they're scraping the internet, profiting off the data they take, and still using the copyright regime to go after others who do unto them.
- hooverd 11mo ago
  Well, as long as they pursue a "copyright for me but not for thee" regime, you can.
- dclowd9901 11mo ago
  One thing is not the other. A corporation is not a human (and no I don't care what Citizens United says). A corporation has no inherent rights.
- TrueDuality 11mo ago
  This is a false equivalency I'm surprised no one else has brought up. An archive of a site preserves attribution inherently, the scraping and training are not.
  - kulahan 11mo ago
    Is it? I thought it was ridiculous at first, but the more I think of it... both are scenarios where a corporation is scraping billions of webpages. We like the reason archive.is does it, but unless it's some kind of charity, I think it's a reasonable comparison.
    - didibus 11mo ago
      archive.is is a charity no? Or at least they take donations, it seems the legal entity behind it is nebulous, but they don't have ads and have no paid product or offering.
      - hoistbypetard 11mo ago
        They sure as shit do have ads. Have you ever accidentally followed a link using a browser profile that has no ad blocking enabled? I only rarely browse without some form of content blocking (usually privacy-focused... that takes care of enough ads for me, most of the time). I keep a browser profile that's got no customizations at all, though, for verifying that bugs I see/want to report are not related to one of my extensions. Every once in a while, I'll accidentally open a link to a news site (or to an archive of such a site) in that vanilla profile. I'm shocked at how many ads you see if you don't take some counter measures. I just confirmed in that profile: archive.is definitely puts ads around the sites they've archived.
        didibus 11mo ago
        I stand corrected, maybe it's because I have ad-blocks that I never noticed. And arguably I used to think it was the Internet Archive. It does make this case seem problematic now that I know the details.
- phantasmish 11mo ago
  There's no contradiction in wanting an abolition (or at least substantial curtailment) of copyright while also being upset that mass violations of copyright magically become legal if you've got enough money. Enforcement being unjustly balanced in favor of the rich & powerful is a separate issue from whether there should be enforcement in the first place—"if we must do this, it should at least be fair, and if it's not going to be fair, it at least shouldn't be unfair in favor of the already-powerful" is a totally valid position to hold, while also believing, "however, ideally, we should just not do this in the first place".
  - warkdarrior 11mo ago
    > There's no contradiction in wanting an abolition (or at least substantial curtailment) of copyright while also being upset that mass violations of copyright magically become legal if you've got enough money. Why can't you just be happy for those few who are lucky enough to be able to violate copyright with no consequences? Yes, I know you'd want everyone to be able to violate copyright, but we're not there yet.
    - mindslight 11mo ago
      You're assuming way too much with "not there yet". The point is the corpos will violate copyright with impunity today, and then in a few years sign a bunch of settlement agreements and pull the ladder up behind them. I'd love to see copyright slowly become irrelevant, but even with that goal we should expect to see large corpos being the last to stop respecting it.
    - collinmcnulty 11mo ago
      Because we’d like the powerful to feel the crunch from bad law rather than get a backdoor, so they have to use their power to change things for everyone instead of just getting it changed for themselves.
      - mothballed 11mo ago
        More often than not the rich just codify the "backdoor" for themselves in such case. A rich man can buy the $30,000 registered machinegun and pay the $200 NFA stamp and be 100% legal, the poor man who 3d prints a $0.50 of plastic to do the same thing goes to jail for 15 years.
- didibus 11mo ago
  That's a bad take, just like open source code is available to all, it's not the case you can always resell it or repackage it for your own profit. Information can be made available to all, and at the same time, we can make it so others cannot resell or repackage it for profit like what AI companies are doing.
  - 1gn15 11mo ago
    You can sell open source code for profit. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html
    - didibus 11mo ago
      You linked to the meaning of free software. I said open source.
- pkilgore 11mo ago
  Hot take here, I know, but some of us believe the law should treat large corporations differently than it treats individuals when it comes to their rights and privileges.
- FractalParadigm 11mo ago
  This seems like an incredible disingenuous take. There's a marked difference between collecting information to freely share with the rest of humanity, and collecting information to feed into algorithms under the guise of "artificial intelligence" with the pretense of enriching their finances and putting others out of work.
  - baxtr 11mo ago
    Anyone on this planet can access ChatGPT (and other for profit LLMs) for free to answer any question they might have. This is true knowledge socialism.
    - GuinansEyebrows 11mo ago
      we (all of us) do not own chatgpt; we (all of us) do not share in the profit from chatgpt; this is not what socialism is.
    - watwut 11mo ago
      - ChatGPT is not about knowledge. - ChatGPT is in the "bait" phase of "bait and switch" plan. It is trying to make us dependent on it, so that it can extract maximum profit later.
- scotty79 11mo ago
  > But then also don’t be angry at big corporations when they scrape the entire internet. I'm only angry with them when they pay hush money to IP extortionists.
- PaulDavisThe1st 11mo ago
  I don't care that they scrape my website. I DO care that nearly 2M different IPs are used to try to pull 42k commits out of a git repo one by one when they could just git clone it ...
  - macintux 11mo ago
    I wish the companies would just pay a few technically-competent companies to do the scraping. Pay two so you can check their work, maybe, but let's get past the point in time when dozens (or more?) of companies are all simultaneously hammering the web.
    - nehal3m 11mo ago
      There’s perfectly good LLM’s built specifically to shit out swaths of mediocre code to do that, why would you pay anyone?
    - tpmoney 11mo ago
      My pie in the sky pitch is the US Government (and others) should solve this, the legality and the compensation problems in a single swoop. Make submission of your work to a federal model data set a requirement for obtaining copyright protection. License the data set (and heck maybe even charge for making custom models) for nominal fees to anyone who want it, with indemnification against copyright lawsuits for works deriving from the licensed model. Pay copyright owners a limited time royalty from these licensing fees. Everyone wins and we can stop needing a billion bots scraping a billion sites billion times a day.
      - econ 11mo ago
        While I would like to see it abolished entirely (including patents) I do have to compliment how you've described a formula that is actually possible to implement. To deny people access to things is one thing, wanting to do it by impossible means is quite something else. Who even has time to scavage the universe looking for possible infringement on their works and also the money to deal with it?
- mapontosevenths 11mo ago
  Copyright exists to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." Anything which does that should be legal, and anything that stifles those advances should not.
zahlman 11mo ago
> Wikipedia is somewhat ok, but it also misses a TON of stuff, and unfortunately it only has one primary view, whereas many things need some explanation before one can understand it. Last I checked, they had archive.is blacklisted; the people with power there had (as far as I can tell) come to the conclusion that people using that site to prove that websites had stated X on date Y were the bad guys. Of course, they still have archive.org sources everywhere, so the objection is not actually to archiving page content. Tons of claims also seem to be sourced ultimately to thinly-disguised promotional material (e.g. claims of the prevalence of a problem backed up by the sites of companies offering products to combat the problem) and opinion pieces that happen to mention an objective (but not verified) claim in passing.
- mzajc 11mo ago
  Where did you check this? While neither are listed on WP:RSP, I know many cites are changed into web.archive.org links once they go down.
- throw0101d 11mo ago
  > Last I checked, they had archive.is blacklisted; the people with power there had (as far as I can tell) come to the conclusion that people using that site to prove that websites had stated X on date Y were the bad guys. Or they're worried about the paywall by-passing functionality (which is probably what a good portion of people use it for) and copyright claims against archive.today potentially having it taken down and thus breaking a lot of links.
- heisgone 11mo ago
  I heard stories of incriminating stuff for higher-ups disappearing from archive.org.
  - layman51 11mo ago
    I heard stories about a potential Oracle data breach (I think mainly affecting their customers) being removed from Archive.org too. It’s because in general, they comply with requests to remove stuff, which is understandable from an ethical perspective. But do they at least try to explain the reason for the takedown? Is it just not feasible to do that?
otterley 11mo ago
> I actually think there should be a human right to data. With that I mean, primarily, knowledge, not to data about a single human being as such How do you suggest we fund the difficult work needed to investigate, research, and produce such data? Remember that facts are not copyrightable, and as such, can't be restricted by copyright. Creative expression of those facts, on the other hand, can be.
pessimizer 11mo ago
> We can not allow the FBI to work for Evil here. It's not up to us to tell the FBI what to do, that's a fatal misunderstanding about how power works. You can demand to see the FBI's manager, but I doubt it will get you anywhere. You can choose between two candidates offered by the privately owned and run political parties for whom the FBI works, but I don't think that will help either. > Knowledge itself should become a human right. Human rights are created by legislation. Unless you own a legislator (or rather, many legislators), you will not be involved in this. The people who own (and parcel out) knowledge itself, however, will be involved. It would be better if we stopped making pronouncements about what people more powerful than us should be doing. It's like prisoners talking about what the jail should be doing. You should talk about what you should be doing. And don't mistake demanding for doing, or walking in the street with your friends for activism (unless you're violating curfew and are prepared to defend yourselves.) Be brave. Put forward a program that might fail. Ask people to help you with it, ask them to follow you, tell them where to show up. Join someone else and help with their program. Don't demand, then whine when they say "of course not." The FBI is not your daddy, and the people running it are not running it on your behalf. I don't mean to be personal, but this type of talk is empty. The way how to do things is decided is through power; and the way weak people exercise power is collectively, through discussion and coordinated action. Anybody can talk about what they would do if they were dictator of the world.
BigTTYGothGF 11mo ago
> We can not allow the FBI to work for Evil here Historically speaking I can't see this as even being in the top 100 evil things the FBI has done.
- throw0101d 11mo ago
  > Historically speaking I can't see this as even being in the top 100 evil things the FBI has done. Perhaps, but we can't change the past: we can only fight against what is happening in the present to try to get a better future.
  - isr 11mo ago
    Ok then. This, while bad, is not even in the top 50 of evil deeds the FBI is CURRENTLY doing ...
    - pegasus 11mo ago
      List not fifty, but just ten of those, I'd like to know.
      - isr 11mo ago
        If you're in public denial about the FBI not being the righteous force for "peace, justice & the american way (whatever the heck that is)", despite the copious publically available evidence & reporting (by independent journalists) to the contrary, then ... no, you really don't want to know. (all this, over what was mostly a tongue in cheek response anyway ...)
        pegasus 11mo ago
        I think neither "righteous" nor "evil" are appropriate words in this context. It's a real-world institution with the expected biases, missteps of authority, episodes of getting embroiled in political machination, etc. Demonizing it is just as naive as idealizing it. And there's probably much more of the former than the latter today, when a lot of unearned, easy cynicism is either unconsciously performative, or even worse, the outcome of a caricatural conspirative worldview.
chemotaxis 11mo ago
> We need to preserve data. ... I actually think there should be a human right to data. I'm not going to simp for the FBI here, but come on: do you have a human right to preserve my private photos leaked by a stalker or a hacker? Because archive.is is famously unwilling to play nice here. I don't know if this case is about that, or about pirated content, or about the administration trying to scrub something embarrassing off the internet. But the fact that archive.is cheerfully enables all three "use cases" should probably give you a pause. It's a delicate line to walk because takedown processes can be abused to do things we don't like. But "lol, tough luck, information wants to be free" is not a sensible blanket response in a polite society.
HardCodedBias 11mo ago
"I actually think there should be a human right to data." Interesting tagline, but probably has far too many side effects. If it were me, I would try to boil this down to some negative right, those usually have less side effects, and even then I would be very careful.
tekbruh9000 11mo ago
All you are guarding against here is some bits in a machine. Knowledge can be embedded in other substrate, other medium. Acquired by more actions than reading social media. IMO what you really mean is "I should be free to sit and surf the web secure in my belief others are acting properly, while subsisting on externalized labor that props up my biology". Asimov and countless others highlight this difference between being a passive reader of others ideas as orthogonal to knowledge acquisition. If you aren't conducting the experiments you acquired nothing but memory of someone else telling a story. 4% in the US hunt now. So to get people living rather than acquiescing, all you office drones are going to have to learn your way out of helplessness. Go acquire knowledge of how to grow a potato. You won't because you don't want to acquire knowledge. You want the world to gift you knowledge and experience through as little effort of your own as possible. Typical American capitalist. 8 billion across the globe aren't that impressed by 300 millions obvious grift.
saurik 11mo ago
I just wish the default way people used archive.is was to generate their long form link instead of their short link, as, if the site ever goes down, all of the links people have posted where they don't change the setting and thereby paste the default inscrutable code link will be destroyed... building a service with a pernicious behavior like that is ALSO not okay in its own way.
- jrochkind1 11mo ago
  where can you change the setting? I was not aware of this.
  - saurik 11mo ago
    At the top click "share" and then select the "long link". http://archive.today/2023.11.30-020758/https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/29/23981802/software-applications-inc-workflow-shortcuts-apple-employees-startup http://archive.today/2023.11.30-020758/https://www.theverge....
- econ 11mo ago
  This actually seems like a big design flaw in resource locators. Perhaps someone here can make an alt DNS that resolves to new homes for content when the Canary dies.
basisword 11mo ago
We tried making knowledge free and available to every online. Capitalists came and gobbled it up to sell back to us as "AI". Unfortunately we can't have nice things with people taking advantage of it.
andai 11mo ago
I've been thinking the Library of Congress should buy Archive.org It should become part of an entity that is very difficult to kill, and will exist for a long time. Although I guess that's a function of culture, and I think respect for libraries is rapidly declining.
- CookieCrisp 11mo ago
  I’d rather not rely on a government owning it that has been very open about their desire to control what people perceive as true
- tdumitrescu 11mo ago
  If the last 9 months have shown us anything, it's that long-running government institutions are a lot easier to kill than we thought. And the idea of archive.org being under the control an administration like the current one in the US is pretty frightening. They would have absolutely zero qualms about deleting and changing that data.
  - elzbardico 11mo ago
    Ditto for the other side of the aisle. We still don't know who was really the president, while everyone pretended Biden was not a dementia patient.
    - daveidol 11mo ago
      Totally agreed. They are just less obvious about it.
      - elzbardico 11mo ago
        Frankly, I envy people who still have sides and that don't see the world as cynically as I do. For me, Clinton, Obama, Bush, Trump, don't matter, just different slave masters for the same system.
- herbst 11mo ago
brikym 11mo ago
> The FBI is trying to kill data. For you. I'm sure they love data as long as only they can access it.
wyldfire 11mo ago
> Knowledge itself should become a human right. IMO the natural right is for humans to share what they've learned up to and including verbatim reproductions of works by others. I also think that abridging this right to grant some exclusivity for artists (the broader "art" meaning scientists/writers/authors/musicians/coders/etc) is suitable. Copyright is/was a good idea. Its fair use clause is a good idea. The duration of exclusivity under current laws, however, seems excessive and beyond mere encouraging art.
- mapontosevenths 11mo ago
  Per the constitution copyright was meant to encourage the progress of the arts and sciences. Whenever and if ever it does the opposite it has failed. Many rights holders would very much like us to forget this.
  - lotsofpulp 11mo ago
    That happened when Congress made copyrights last more than 10 years.
billy99k 11mo ago
[flagged]
- bigyabai 11mo ago
  > I no longer support the freedom of speech for people That's fine, but your opinion is just a fraction of what people feel and a stark minority at that.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
airhangerf15 11mo ago
Archive dot org deleted a lot of stuff during their "hack" a while back. I'm convinced it's already been compromised. The US/EU/every government wants the ability to rewrite history. Look up the article "Who Archives the Archivist?" (it's difficult to find. Use quotes. Don't link it; the site is banned here).
npodbielski 11mo ago
> We can not allow the FBI to work for Evil here. The whole US is evil.
Cthulhu_ 11mo ago
"Knowledge", for the most part is. What I see archive.is get used for most frequently is circumventing paywalls on paid-for media websites, which is journalism. And while freedom of the press is a constitutional right in functioning democracies, freedom of access isn't enshrined as much. But most of the things are background articles, the actual news is freely available to all still. I'm all for archiving open webpages though. And I'm honestly surprised the Internet Archive is still standing. Their decision to opening up their book library was a dangerous mistake.

baxtr 11mo ago

I agree. Knowledge should belong to all of humanity. But then also don’t be angry at big corporations when they scrape the entire internet.

foofoo12 11mo ago
Big corporations aren't humans.
- exe34 11mo ago
  they are persons under US law.
  - JadeNB 11mo ago
    But US law isn't even the law of the world, let alone the definition of reality.
    - lazide 11mo ago
      How are you planning on doing anything about it?
      - deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
    - exe34 11mo ago
      Does it need to be? Trump has been assasinating people in boats with no evidence whatsoever.
  - JohnFen 11mo ago
    Only in a couple of very specific and narrow ways. They are not considered persons generally under US law. They are legal fictions that have been granted a subset of rights that people have.
    - nobodyandproud 11mo ago
      And that subset of rights keeps expanding.
  - bossyTeacher 11mo ago
    US law only applies in the US. Plus, the company in question seems to be based in Canada, so outside the FBI jurisdiction
    - adventured 11mo ago
      So was Kim Dot Com. Biden went after him anyway at the behest of big media.
      - vel0city 11mo ago
        I mean, its not like it was just Biden. His extradition proceedings took place during three different US presidential administrations. You might as well include Trump and Obama in there as well.
    - exe34 11mo ago
      that's just wishful thinking. US law applies world wide as long as Trump is willing to reach out and nab you. ask the Venezuelan fishermen.
      - dashundchen 11mo ago
        That's not even US law, it's straight up murder outside of the law.
    - dragonwriter 11mo ago
      > US law only applies in the US. Where US law applies varies by which law it is; there are US laws that apply only outside of the US [0], as well as US laws which have application both inside and outside the US. [0] e.g., the federal torture statute, 18 U.S. Code § 2340A(a), “Whoever outside the United States commits or attempts to commit torture shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and if death results to any person from conduct prohibited by this subsection, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life.” https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2340A https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2340A
    - 11mo ago
  - mrweasel 11mo ago
    It would solve a lot if that was taken to the extreme. Sorry Amazon, but your working conditions killed five people. Your business licens is going to jail for 40 years, good luck getting contracts with other companies with murder on your records when you get out.
  - hamdingers 11mo ago
    If you're looking to US law to discern who is a person and who is not you are deeply lost.
    - exe34 11mo ago
      the argument really wasn't about human persons, it was about legal persons. the distinction was only brought up to derail the conversation.
  - modo_mario 11mo ago
    Then one should be able to put them on death row under US law.
  - wartywhoa23 11mo ago
    I imagine there's a whole lot of snarky epitaphs which the remnants of the humankind could place on this civilization's gravestone, but citing this exact law might make for the best one.
- wang_li 11mo ago
  Corporations large and small don't do anything. It's always a person. The question you are answering, even if you don't think you are, is whether a few people can get together and act in concert and still retain their rights.
capitainenemo 11mo ago
While it's true people are upset at AI companies profiting off of artist creations with no compensation, I know a lot of people are also reacting to how the recent AI companies have been scraping the web. The reason folks are using Anubis and other methods is because unlike Google which did have archiving of sites for a long time (which was actually a great service), these new companies do not respect robots.txt, do not crawl at a reasonable rate (for us, thousands of hits a minute from their botnets - usually baidu/tencent, but also plenty of US IPs), hit the same resource repeatedly, ignoring headers intended to give cache hints, stupidly hitting thousands of variations of a page when crawling search results with no detection that they are getting basically the same thing... And when you ban them, they then switch to residential ranges. It really is malicious.
- gilfoy 11mo ago
  > AI companies profiting Are they?
  - johneth 11mo ago
    If you boil it down to the AI companies are making money (subscriptions, etc.) based on content they did not pay to produce, then they are profiting from someone else's hard work.
    - BigTTYGothGF 11mo ago
      Revenue is not profit.
      - smarf 11mo ago
        'stealing is fine if you lose money when reselling'
        BigTTYGothGF 11mo ago
        I don't believe I wrote anything of the sort.
HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
A lot of the outrage isn't at scraping, it is at the disruptive techniques used to do so. Like web-scraping whole websites that already provide convenient images of their content for download.
- pbae 11mo ago
  Feels like now we're just redefining our rules so that the people we don't like are out and the people we like are in. Does the content creator have the right to determine how their work is used or not?
  - cestith 11mo ago
    I have a right to my copyrighted work, and I also have a right to set and enforce access rules to a server I operate to grant people access to it.
wat10000 11mo ago
It's not that they're scraping the internet, it's that they're scraping the internet, profiting off the data they take, and still using the copyright regime to go after others who do unto them.
hooverd 11mo ago
Well, as long as they pursue a "copyright for me but not for thee" regime, you can.
dclowd9901 11mo ago
One thing is not the other. A corporation is not a human (and no I don't care what Citizens United says). A corporation has no inherent rights.
TrueDuality 11mo ago
This is a false equivalency I'm surprised no one else has brought up. An archive of a site preserves attribution inherently, the scraping and training are not.
- kulahan 11mo ago
  Is it? I thought it was ridiculous at first, but the more I think of it... both are scenarios where a corporation is scraping billions of webpages. We like the reason archive.is does it, but unless it's some kind of charity, I think it's a reasonable comparison.
  - didibus 11mo ago
    archive.is is a charity no? Or at least they take donations, it seems the legal entity behind it is nebulous, but they don't have ads and have no paid product or offering.
    - hoistbypetard 11mo ago
      They sure as shit do have ads. Have you ever accidentally followed a link using a browser profile that has no ad blocking enabled? I only rarely browse without some form of content blocking (usually privacy-focused... that takes care of enough ads for me, most of the time). I keep a browser profile that's got no customizations at all, though, for verifying that bugs I see/want to report are not related to one of my extensions. Every once in a while, I'll accidentally open a link to a news site (or to an archive of such a site) in that vanilla profile. I'm shocked at how many ads you see if you don't take some counter measures. I just confirmed in that profile: archive.is definitely puts ads around the sites they've archived.
      - didibus 11mo ago
        I stand corrected, maybe it's because I have ad-blocks that I never noticed. And arguably I used to think it was the Internet Archive. It does make this case seem problematic now that I know the details.
phantasmish 11mo ago
There's no contradiction in wanting an abolition (or at least substantial curtailment) of copyright while also being upset that mass violations of copyright magically become legal if you've got enough money. Enforcement being unjustly balanced in favor of the rich & powerful is a separate issue from whether there should be enforcement in the first place—"if we must do this, it should at least be fair, and if it's not going to be fair, it at least shouldn't be unfair in favor of the already-powerful" is a totally valid position to hold, while also believing, "however, ideally, we should just not do this in the first place".
- warkdarrior 11mo ago
  > There's no contradiction in wanting an abolition (or at least substantial curtailment) of copyright while also being upset that mass violations of copyright magically become legal if you've got enough money. Why can't you just be happy for those few who are lucky enough to be able to violate copyright with no consequences? Yes, I know you'd want everyone to be able to violate copyright, but we're not there yet.
  - mindslight 11mo ago
    You're assuming way too much with "not there yet". The point is the corpos will violate copyright with impunity today, and then in a few years sign a bunch of settlement agreements and pull the ladder up behind them. I'd love to see copyright slowly become irrelevant, but even with that goal we should expect to see large corpos being the last to stop respecting it.
  - collinmcnulty 11mo ago
    Because we’d like the powerful to feel the crunch from bad law rather than get a backdoor, so they have to use their power to change things for everyone instead of just getting it changed for themselves.
    - mothballed 11mo ago
      More often than not the rich just codify the "backdoor" for themselves in such case. A rich man can buy the $30,000 registered machinegun and pay the $200 NFA stamp and be 100% legal, the poor man who 3d prints a $0.50 of plastic to do the same thing goes to jail for 15 years.
didibus 11mo ago
That's a bad take, just like open source code is available to all, it's not the case you can always resell it or repackage it for your own profit. Information can be made available to all, and at the same time, we can make it so others cannot resell or repackage it for profit like what AI companies are doing.
- 1gn15 11mo ago
  You can sell open source code for profit. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html
  - didibus 11mo ago
    You linked to the meaning of free software. I said open source.
pkilgore 11mo ago
Hot take here, I know, but some of us believe the law should treat large corporations differently than it treats individuals when it comes to their rights and privileges.
FractalParadigm 11mo ago
This seems like an incredible disingenuous take. There's a marked difference between collecting information to freely share with the rest of humanity, and collecting information to feed into algorithms under the guise of "artificial intelligence" with the pretense of enriching their finances and putting others out of work.
- baxtr 11mo ago
  Anyone on this planet can access ChatGPT (and other for profit LLMs) for free to answer any question they might have. This is true knowledge socialism.
  - GuinansEyebrows 11mo ago
    we (all of us) do not own chatgpt; we (all of us) do not share in the profit from chatgpt; this is not what socialism is.
  - watwut 11mo ago
    - ChatGPT is not about knowledge. - ChatGPT is in the "bait" phase of "bait and switch" plan. It is trying to make us dependent on it, so that it can extract maximum profit later.
scotty79 11mo ago
> But then also don’t be angry at big corporations when they scrape the entire internet. I'm only angry with them when they pay hush money to IP extortionists.
PaulDavisThe1st 11mo ago
I don't care that they scrape my website. I DO care that nearly 2M different IPs are used to try to pull 42k commits out of a git repo one by one when they could just git clone it ...
- macintux 11mo ago
  I wish the companies would just pay a few technically-competent companies to do the scraping. Pay two so you can check their work, maybe, but let's get past the point in time when dozens (or more?) of companies are all simultaneously hammering the web.
  - nehal3m 11mo ago
    There’s perfectly good LLM’s built specifically to shit out swaths of mediocre code to do that, why would you pay anyone?
  - tpmoney 11mo ago
    My pie in the sky pitch is the US Government (and others) should solve this, the legality and the compensation problems in a single swoop. Make submission of your work to a federal model data set a requirement for obtaining copyright protection. License the data set (and heck maybe even charge for making custom models) for nominal fees to anyone who want it, with indemnification against copyright lawsuits for works deriving from the licensed model. Pay copyright owners a limited time royalty from these licensing fees. Everyone wins and we can stop needing a billion bots scraping a billion sites billion times a day.
    - econ 11mo ago
      While I would like to see it abolished entirely (including patents) I do have to compliment how you've described a formula that is actually possible to implement. To deny people access to things is one thing, wanting to do it by impossible means is quite something else. Who even has time to scavage the universe looking for possible infringement on their works and also the money to deal with it?
mapontosevenths 11mo ago
Copyright exists to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." Anything which does that should be legal, and anything that stifles those advances should not.

zahlman 11mo ago

> Wikipedia is somewhat ok, but it also misses a TON of stuff, and unfortunately it only has one primary view, whereas many things need some explanation before one can understand it. Last I checked, they had archive.is blacklisted; the people with power there had (as far as I can tell) come to the conclusion that people using that site to prove that websites had stated X on date Y were the bad guys. Of course, they still have archive.org sources everywhere, so the objection is not actually to archiving page content. Tons of claims also seem to be sourced ultimately to thinly-disguised promotional material (e.g. claims of the prevalence of a problem backed up by the sites of companies offering products to combat the problem) and opinion pieces that happen to mention an objective (but not verified) claim in passing.

mzajc 11mo ago
Where did you check this? While neither are listed on WP:RSP, I know many cites are changed into web.archive.org links once they go down.
throw0101d 11mo ago
> Last I checked, they had archive.is blacklisted; the people with power there had (as far as I can tell) come to the conclusion that people using that site to prove that websites had stated X on date Y were the bad guys. Or they're worried about the paywall by-passing functionality (which is probably what a good portion of people use it for) and copyright claims against archive.today potentially having it taken down and thus breaking a lot of links.
heisgone 11mo ago
I heard stories of incriminating stuff for higher-ups disappearing from archive.org.
- layman51 11mo ago
  I heard stories about a potential Oracle data breach (I think mainly affecting their customers) being removed from Archive.org too. It’s because in general, they comply with requests to remove stuff, which is understandable from an ethical perspective. But do they at least try to explain the reason for the takedown? Is it just not feasible to do that?

otterley 11mo ago

> I actually think there should be a human right to data. With that I mean, primarily, knowledge, not to data about a single human being as such How do you suggest we fund the difficult work needed to investigate, research, and produce such data? Remember that facts are not copyrightable, and as such, can't be restricted by copyright. Creative expression of those facts, on the other hand, can be.

pessimizer 11mo ago

> We can not allow the FBI to work for Evil here. It's not up to us to tell the FBI what to do, that's a fatal misunderstanding about how power works. You can demand to see the FBI's manager, but I doubt it will get you anywhere. You can choose between two candidates offered by the privately owned and run political parties for whom the FBI works, but I don't think that will help either. > Knowledge itself should become a human right. Human rights are created by legislation. Unless you own a legislator (or rather, many legislators), you will not be involved in this. The people who own (and parcel out) knowledge itself, however, will be involved. It would be better if we stopped making pronouncements about what people more powerful than us should be doing. It's like prisoners talking about what the jail should be doing. You should talk about what you should be doing. And don't mistake demanding for doing, or walking in the street with your friends for activism (unless you're violating curfew and are prepared to defend yourselves.) Be brave. Put forward a program that might fail. Ask people to help you with it, ask them to follow you, tell them where to show up. Join someone else and help with their program. Don't demand, then whine when they say "of course not." The FBI is not your daddy, and the people running it are not running it on your behalf. I don't mean to be personal, but this type of talk is empty. The way how to do things is decided is through power; and the way weak people exercise power is collectively, through discussion and coordinated action. Anybody can talk about what they would do if they were dictator of the world.

BigTTYGothGF 11mo ago

> We can not allow the FBI to work for Evil here Historically speaking I can't see this as even being in the top 100 evil things the FBI has done.

throw0101d 11mo ago
> Historically speaking I can't see this as even being in the top 100 evil things the FBI has done. Perhaps, but we can't change the past: we can only fight against what is happening in the present to try to get a better future.
- isr 11mo ago
  Ok then. This, while bad, is not even in the top 50 of evil deeds the FBI is CURRENTLY doing ...
  - pegasus 11mo ago
    List not fifty, but just ten of those, I'd like to know.
    - isr 11mo ago
      If you're in public denial about the FBI not being the righteous force for "peace, justice & the american way (whatever the heck that is)", despite the copious publically available evidence & reporting (by independent journalists) to the contrary, then ... no, you really don't want to know. (all this, over what was mostly a tongue in cheek response anyway ...)
      - pegasus 11mo ago
        I think neither "righteous" nor "evil" are appropriate words in this context. It's a real-world institution with the expected biases, missteps of authority, episodes of getting embroiled in political machination, etc. Demonizing it is just as naive as idealizing it. And there's probably much more of the former than the latter today, when a lot of unearned, easy cynicism is either unconsciously performative, or even worse, the outcome of a caricatural conspirative worldview.

chemotaxis 11mo ago

> We need to preserve data. ... I actually think there should be a human right to data. I'm not going to simp for the FBI here, but come on: do you have a human right to preserve my private photos leaked by a stalker or a hacker? Because archive.is is famously unwilling to play nice here. I don't know if this case is about that, or about pirated content, or about the administration trying to scrub something embarrassing off the internet. But the fact that archive.is cheerfully enables all three "use cases" should probably give you a pause. It's a delicate line to walk because takedown processes can be abused to do things we don't like. But "lol, tough luck, information wants to be free" is not a sensible blanket response in a polite society.

HardCodedBias 11mo ago

"I actually think there should be a human right to data." Interesting tagline, but probably has far too many side effects. If it were me, I would try to boil this down to some negative right, those usually have less side effects, and even then I would be very careful.

tekbruh9000 11mo ago

All you are guarding against here is some bits in a machine. Knowledge can be embedded in other substrate, other medium. Acquired by more actions than reading social media. IMO what you really mean is "I should be free to sit and surf the web secure in my belief others are acting properly, while subsisting on externalized labor that props up my biology". Asimov and countless others highlight this difference between being a passive reader of others ideas as orthogonal to knowledge acquisition. If you aren't conducting the experiments you acquired nothing but memory of someone else telling a story. 4% in the US hunt now. So to get people living rather than acquiescing, all you office drones are going to have to learn your way out of helplessness. Go acquire knowledge of how to grow a potato. You won't because you don't want to acquire knowledge. You want the world to gift you knowledge and experience through as little effort of your own as possible. Typical American capitalist. 8 billion across the globe aren't that impressed by 300 millions obvious grift.

saurik 11mo ago

I just wish the default way people used archive.is was to generate their long form link instead of their short link, as, if the site ever goes down, all of the links people have posted where they don't change the setting and thereby paste the default inscrutable code link will be destroyed... building a service with a pernicious behavior like that is ALSO not okay in its own way.

jrochkind1 11mo ago
where can you change the setting? I was not aware of this.
- saurik 11mo ago
  At the top click "share" and then select the "long link". http://archive.today/2023.11.30-020758/https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/29/23981802/software-applications-inc-workflow-shortcuts-apple-employees-startup http://archive.today/2023.11.30-020758/https://www.theverge....
econ 11mo ago
This actually seems like a big design flaw in resource locators. Perhaps someone here can make an alt DNS that resolves to new homes for content when the Canary dies.

basisword 11mo ago

We tried making knowledge free and available to every online. Capitalists came and gobbled it up to sell back to us as "AI". Unfortunately we can't have nice things with people taking advantage of it.

andai 11mo ago

I've been thinking the Library of Congress should buy Archive.org It should become part of an entity that is very difficult to kill, and will exist for a long time. Although I guess that's a function of culture, and I think respect for libraries is rapidly declining.

CookieCrisp 11mo ago
I’d rather not rely on a government owning it that has been very open about their desire to control what people perceive as true
tdumitrescu 11mo ago
If the last 9 months have shown us anything, it's that long-running government institutions are a lot easier to kill than we thought. And the idea of archive.org being under the control an administration like the current one in the US is pretty frightening. They would have absolutely zero qualms about deleting and changing that data.
- elzbardico 11mo ago
  Ditto for the other side of the aisle. We still don't know who was really the president, while everyone pretended Biden was not a dementia patient.
  - daveidol 11mo ago
    Totally agreed. They are just less obvious about it.
    - elzbardico 11mo ago
      Frankly, I envy people who still have sides and that don't see the world as cynically as I do. For me, Clinton, Obama, Bush, Trump, don't matter, just different slave masters for the same system.
herbst 11mo ago

brikym 11mo ago

> The FBI is trying to kill data. For you. I'm sure they love data as long as only they can access it.

wyldfire 11mo ago

> Knowledge itself should become a human right. IMO the natural right is for humans to share what they've learned up to and including verbatim reproductions of works by others. I also think that abridging this right to grant some exclusivity for artists (the broader "art" meaning scientists/writers/authors/musicians/coders/etc) is suitable. Copyright is/was a good idea. Its fair use clause is a good idea. The duration of exclusivity under current laws, however, seems excessive and beyond mere encouraging art.

mapontosevenths 11mo ago
Per the constitution copyright was meant to encourage the progress of the arts and sciences. Whenever and if ever it does the opposite it has failed. Many rights holders would very much like us to forget this.
- lotsofpulp 11mo ago
  That happened when Congress made copyrights last more than 10 years.

billy99k 11mo ago

[flagged]

bigyabai 11mo ago
> I no longer support the freedom of speech for people That's fine, but your opinion is just a fraction of what people feel and a stark minority at that.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

airhangerf15 11mo ago

Archive dot org deleted a lot of stuff during their "hack" a while back. I'm convinced it's already been compromised. The US/EU/every government wants the ability to rewrite history. Look up the article "Who Archives the Archivist?" (it's difficult to find. Use quotes. Don't link it; the site is banned here).

npodbielski 11mo ago

> We can not allow the FBI to work for Evil here. The whole US is evil.

Cthulhu_ 11mo ago

"Knowledge", for the most part is. What I see archive.is get used for most frequently is circumventing paywalls on paid-for media websites, which is journalism. And while freedom of the press is a constitutional right in functioning democracies, freedom of access isn't enshrined as much. But most of the things are background articles, the actual news is freely available to all still. I'm all for archiving open webpages though. And I'm honestly surprised the Internet Archive is still standing. Their decision to opening up their book library was a dangerous mistake.