The title implies that losing this lawsuit is threatening the existence of the Internet Archive. Is that really the case?
If it is true, then maybe IA should be run by somebody with better judgement. This was a project with a massive chance of failure (how could anyone think that this wasn't just blatantly infringing?) and a low payoff. If it's also an existential risk, then wtf are they doing running it?
> If it is true, then maybe IA should be run by somebody with better judgement.
I'm skeptical that you even get the IA without someone like these folks running it. Imagine you're the type of crazy person who starts and runs the IA, the pandemic starts and libraries and schools shut down, and there's a big button in front of you saying "give people access to knowledge that was just removed from them". I dunno man, I can understand the type of person who creates the IA also feeling compelled to push that button under those circumstances. Was it a bad decision? I dunno, probably, I guess. It was a weird and hard time. I'm not angry at them for doing what felt right.
It's an argument for the separation of library and archival work. Access to knowledge and preservation of knowledge are separate things, even if they have a lot in common.
It might be wise for someone to consider a truly archival only organization.
IANAL, but in fact copyright law has been abundantly clear that copying something strictly for archival purposes is legal, too.
It really is the (re)distribution of archived materials that is in the wrong here. IA could go and archive every single bit of digitized data, copyrighted or otherwise, and if that's all they do then nobody will or can complain.
I and many other librarians have private 'pirate' libraries of various materials, particularly ephemera that aren't covered by mandatory deposit or digital content. We're just not allowed to distribute them.
Do we abuse this? Oh hell yes - most of us are archiving according to our personal interests. Which is the main concern about the IA going offline: We shouldn't need to rely on some of us personally saving things (and we can confirm each other's provenance - in order to trust my archive is what I say it is, you need to trust me).
The purpose of copyright law is to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" [1] . It stands to reason that deleting or allowing everything to bit-rot is probably not conducive to the promotion of progress. We need libraries and archives.
Perhaps we could let the publishing industry operate the turnstiles and collect a small but increasingly large fee from people trying to use it, until the public commons was indistinguishable from private property?
> I'm skeptical that you even get the IA without someone like these folks running it.
Isolating business ventures from each other is common practice. They didn't need to run both operations out of the same business entity.
> I dunno man, I can understand the type of person who creates the IA also feeling compelled to push that button under those circumstances. Was it a bad decision? I dunno, probably, I guess.
The operation may have been a risky decision, but doing it under the umbrella of the Internet Archive made it a terrible decision.
There's a seperation between a library and a pirate site, so it's kinda a bad faith argument, but even going on the merits of your argument, I am pressed to point out that, yes, other libraries have digital lending. It's called Controlled Digital Lending. CDL. The thing that this current lawsuit is trying to remove. So this isn't just an argument against IA's library wing, but a move to remove all library and archive efforts. Penguin has come out and said they are against libraries hosting any of their books at all. US law makes this something they can't fight in physical print, but this is their attempt to start destroying these services.
Now you can argue if this is fair or not, but this is how Ebook lending is legally done. CDL, where you lend out one Ebook per physical copy was never established as legal.
It was tolerated, until IA decided to allow for unlimited lending.
I don't see how books are special here. If I buy a bunch of DVDs off eBay, I can't set up a streaming service tomorrow hosting this content.
Even if only one person can watch a movie at a time, I've no right to redistribute that content. If CDL is legal, then why limit it to books. Why not movies, games, TV shows ?
See the problem here, the laws of physics and basic wear and tear create a fundamental difference between physical media and digital media.
They're doing us all a favor is what they're doing. Intellectual property is just not that important when compared with ensuring that the powerful can't rewrite history.
If they lose their case, I hope the project can be kept afloat in ways that the US government can't interfere with.
I hope the project can be kept afloat in ways that the US government can't interfere with.
The U.S. government, oddly, is the least of my fears when it comes to rewriting history.
Private enterprise is already doing it, even going to far as to reach into your private library of books and music to change them after you're purchased it:
Until yesterday, I used to sync my music library with Apple Music. Not anymore. Apple responding to the Times reporter with a big fat "no comment" tells me that it thinks it's OK to change things on my computer without my knowledge.
Dahl (or his publisher) changed his own book , the initial back story of the oompa-loompas being problematic. This was 10 years after publishing when someone pointed out it wasn't a great depiction.
But it is weird that they can go into your device and change it now. Don't love it. If they made Version 2 available at the same time....
I have Body Count's first Music CD. I got the day it was released. It has a song that was considered problematic and thus removed in future editions.. But they can't change it on the one I have. The big stink they made about it probably sold a bunch copies. On release day they had one copy on CD and one on tape and I had to ask the person working at the store if they had it. (as opposed to dozen of Bruce Springstein albums released that day).
Yea, I think the argument about publishers choosing to release new, edited versions of older books is a silly one. We should let the marketplace and the marketplace of ideas sort it out.
But, the fact that they changed digital copies that were previously purchased is insane. The companies that do that should be pilloried and shamed for such an action.
Frankly, I’m no longer participating in digital purchases for music, books, or video, unless it’s DRM free and I can move the file to my own storage. I’d rather just rip a CD/DVD and take on the burden of managing that data myself.
Jellyfin/Plex has been super super helpful in making sure I don’t even lose out that significantly on the user experience front.
I am terrified of the world we’re entering where lots of new media will be digital/steaming only, and there will be no way to purchase and archive the “as-released” version of songs and movies.
Digital copies are subject to many hundreds of revisions/changes that you may never notice (most are typo fixing). Even print editions have these types of changes, and some are even substantial (famously, the Lord of the Rings has various changes made between editions by Tolkien himself, mostly fixing typos and minor inconsistencies; but he also accidentally got a revision of the Hobbit that was a major plot change still referenced in LotR itself: https://sweatingtomordor.wordpress.com/2018/05/17/were-tolki...
Some publishers maintain a list of "corrections" - some only update a digital copy on a new edition of a print copy, and some update them as they go. I've done a print-on-demand book at it technically has something like 50 revisions but only one is marked in the book itself as 'significant' - because why not update the source PDF when you can just click a button?
A similar thing is happening with software; DooM has had people carefully inspect the various different versions and patches released; but now massive games are mostly online and version differences are lost to time; even if you know the changelog you can't ever actually experience the old version anymore.
This is different, though. They don’t break into your house, find the book on your shelf, and update it with a sharpie.
The digital corrections and changes are _fine_ if they are opt in. It’s when they are automatically applied, and there is no (legal, tos abiding) way to keep the original file and reject updates that’s… horrifying.
Imagine somebody had the option to 1984 some datum for political advantage, but stopped because they were afraid they'd get caught. Isn't IA the first thing that comes to mind?
Yeah everyone pretty much said when they announced the National Emergency Library, they were risking everything. Sure enough, that's what happened.
Giving money to the current Internet Archive is pretty much just giving money to the book publishers. Instead we should be funding someone new to buy the assets off in the auction, and keep the previous decisionmakers far from the new entity.
Depends on what they’re looking at in terms of statutory damages. Looking at their Form 990s they bring in roughly in the neighborhood of $15-20M/year in contributions. That isn’t really a lot, and makes me wonder how they ever defend themselves in court but somehow they’ve survived this long.
Librarians are a pain in the ass to litigate against would be my guess.
We're very detail oriented, we're organized, and we're very good at following procedures. We're just as good at drawing things out as lawyers and burying us under tons of paperwork does nothing. Basically a lot of the tactics used to get big lawsuits over with quickly are much harder to execute against librarians. It becomes a war of attrition.
The IA lost the case because the testified in court they didn't actually check and had never built a mechanism to check that the libraries involved weren't letting out the physical books at the same time.
They didn't do even the very basic of legal scholarship on the copyright situation for uncontrolled lending.
Legally, the IA is in the wrong here. (I hate it because morally I side with the IA but yeah the courts aren't going to.)
I was just addressing the 'how did they survive this long'? part. It's basically the flip side of places that leverage their superior legal resources to draw out lawsuits to get the other side to drop them/make them not worth the time. "We're going to be such a pain in the ass you're just going to quit out of sheer frustration."
Personally, I think the IA fucked up really hard here.
We also don't need to bill the lawyers for everything that most clients do. A lawyer for the IA can probably give them exact specifications for things like delivery of discovery documents and what they'd be looking for in them and get exactly what they need. So way fewer billable hours used for administrative tasks.
I have in the past, but I'm also holding off until this lawsuit nonsense is done with. Don't need to fatten the lawyer industry with my money for their own mistakes. Running the wayback machine and things like flash emulation is what I want them to do: y'know, archiving stuff and making it available to current systems.
I should really look into whether this books lending branch has a chance of taking the web archive stuff down with it and, if so, buy a hard drive and start seeding this torrent that is iirc out there as a decentralized backup of the IA. This data being lost would be similar in proportion to losing GitHub or Wikipedia.
It's not a game. It's resistance by every mean available against corporations that want control over what knowledge we have access to. He did an unexpected and courageous move for the benefit of humanity. The Internet Archive is a huge responsibility because if not exhaustive, it could falsify history. It's leaders mandate is to preserve history, not to preserve what they let him preserve
That knowledge was readily available through numerous other legal channels. Libraries do virtual lending.
What the IA did in that instance was a reckless gesture that did not change actual ability to access. That's worse than nothing, it's a net negative.
You seem to somehow conflate this instance with everything else the IA does. I'm not debating that their overall purpose is good and necessary. I'm saying this particular action was a spectacularly bad idea.
The wayback machine has much MUCH better arguments (it's copies of public content at a point in time by definition), even the DMCA has carve outs for preservation and scholarly works, many use it for real things and not just piracy, etc.
The wayback machine arguments are good enough that they could receive a Supreme Court decision along the lines of "technically this is illegal, but the law is wrong" type.
It's a reasonable question. I don't get to call myself an archive or museum and assemble a website of what I consider "culturally important" cartoons or comic strips or whatever. The Wayback Machine basically operates in the zone of most people don't care that they do this.
I mean, they were sued for copyright infringement and settled out of court at least once, so it’s not a negligible risk.
I guess my question is largely “Does someone with ‘better judgement’ even start the internet archive?” I don’t have the answer, but I think it’s at least plausible that the answer is “no”.
I assume any competent IP lawyer would have told them that there was no law allowing them to do what they wanted to do. (IANAL)
On the other hand, to the degree that you can operate in a zone that involves poking as few sleeping lions as you can (and deal with the odd copyright infringement suit or complaint), that's maybe OK. The problem I see here is that the IA seems to have incrementally tried "ooching" more and more things some of which were almost certainly less central to their mission and harder lion pokes.
Ultimately, the Internet Archive is the Man in the Arena. Everyone else didn't choose the right position on what copyright infringement is okay and what isn't. They didn't choose a position at all until post facto they choose the position that was right up against the margin of being sued - which they would never had known if the IA hadn't done the work.
As always, HN commenters would have picked the perfect trade-off every time in the past and yet they somehow never pick the right one in the future. You're being overly kind to everyone here since it's obvious what the truth is: this is wholesale armchair quarterbacking from a bunch of people who would never have built this.
I use IA all the time and love the website and most of what they do. But some of the stuff that they do that risks getting it all shut down is why I stopped donating.
It seems like a reasonably thing, to stop giving the Internet Archive money if you think they might be a bad steward of it.
The comparison to rockstars is kind of interesting though, they often engaged in behavior that was criminal, and sometime pretty odious. We gave them money because we liked their cultural output, and they wouldn’t give it away for free.
The Internet Archive doesn’t demand money, produces stuff with much arguably greater social value, and doesn’t really do anything odious (just illegal).
In the end I have a streaming subscription and don’t give money to charities (maybe when I get a good job I will). Funny to think about, though.
> In the end I have a streaming subscription and don’t give money to charities (maybe when I get a good job I will).
Most people won't. When you get the better job, you still won't. If you were buying your first yacht, you still won't.
Pick a percent, maybe 1%, of your income. Donate it. If it's literally $1, you are at least giving a dollar. Do it today. If you don't want to pick charities directly, there are charitable funds you can give to instead.
If it is true, then maybe IA should be run by somebody with better judgement. This was a project with a massive chance of failure (how could anyone think that this wasn't just blatantly infringing?) and a low payoff. If it's also an existential risk, then wtf are they doing running it?