What people need to be working on is to create a peer&#x2F;successor organization that can take a copy of its archive and carry on its core functions, not just a static archive on a server somewhere.

I&#x27;d rather have &quot;IA preserved as it was in 2023&quot; than no IA at all. If we have a gap in the collection between tomorrow and when someone sets up a new IA in a few years, that&#x27;s very different than losing most things collected about the inception of the Internet.

There are people working on this, but &quot;IA preserved as it was when it was killed in 2023&quot; is nowhere near as valuable as IA as it would be in 2033 if it survives.
IA is constantly adding new content. (&quot;New&quot; meaning &quot;not-yet-archived stuff from the past century&quot;, in addition to up-to-date web snapshots.)

WebServer + Scraper + Storage in essence.The main issues are storage, centrialisation, moderation and copyright; that if you wished, rebel and ignore these with a distrbuted model like BitTorrent, or IPFS.If an library burns to the ground you loose everything, so you will have to decentrialise. That then causes moderation issues as if you were to truely go decentrialised; what&#x27;s stopping a bad actor uploading icky stuff? It would resolve the take-down from copyright, as they couldn&#x27;t kill all nodes. But all sounds like a lot of work for a very little return.

So, how do we create an Internet Archive Archive?

Every dollar donated here will end up going to the book publishers.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;donate&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;donate&#x2F;</a>

&gt; US runs on money not culturefortunately, someone saying that does not make it real. Think of a &quot;soup&quot; and of &quot;experiment&quot; and you will get more detail. Resolving an entire nation to a 1 or 0 classification is not defensible, right?

The USA&#x27;s biggest export is our culture...like it or not. Think of movies, music, etc. Some of it is intangible.

It was built on entrepreneurship that made Silicon Valley and Hacker News.Now it&#x27;s arguably a culture of attention and tribal identity.

The US runs on rule of law, and copyright law has been around for centuries. Many sites that violate copyright laws would be fine if left alone. That doesn’t mean they should be immune from lawsuits.Everyone was telling the internet archive that this was a dumb idea because it opened them to lawsuits with ruinous fines. Now the chickens are coming home to roost and IA is crying foul.It can be true that the internet archive is an invaluable store of history while also being true that they made an embarrassing own-goal.

Shit on the US all you like, but any country could step up to save the IA…This isn’t an American problem, it’s a drawback to the economic system the globe has adopted.

&gt;&gt; I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a repository of digital or physical artifacts is &quot;too big to fail&quot; because of the negative cultural impact their failure would have.You can wonder all you like, and call me a cynic, but the US runs on money not culture. The American identity is built on money and wealth and excess, not on anything you might describe as &quot;culture&quot;.The IA would not &quot;fail&quot; if it was just left alone, but business never saw a nickel they didn&#x27;t want to grab, so the law suits are not exactly surprising. And I expect the courts to lean towards the publishers.

Too big to fail comes from the fear of popular unrest (btw, this also works in non-democratic countries, albeit is weaker). There will be no popular unrest here.

&gt; Yeah, especially since the Internet Archive (as an organization) has proven itself to be irresponsible.I think the archive made a bad decision. I do not think it is generally irresponsible.

Internet Archive is likely the only memory of the digital world. They may or may not have made a mistake during the covid pandemic by extending their book lending program, but in the age of IA where many text and images are going to lack any source of truth, they may be one of the very few ways to document modern history.

&gt; certain weird technology and library subcultures, but few people outside of them would even notice it if disappearedIt&#x27;s pretty much indispensible to anybody who&#x27;s a researcher.It&#x27;s very frequent that you&#x27;re tracking down citations to webpages that don&#x27;t exist anymore, and the IA is the only way to find sources.Not to mention that it&#x27;s also often the only way to quickly get access to non-bestseller books that are more than a couple of decades old, which is also commonly needed for research purposes. Many of these books are only otherwise available in the country&#x27;s largest research libraries. (Google has copies too, but nobody can view them.)It&#x27;s not weird or a subculture unless you think those labels apply to researchers. And there are a lot of researchers out there, across academics, non-fiction authors, and journalists.

&gt; Lots of people want to turn the publishers into the villainsI mean, they are the villains here. They’re sueing the IA over something that is less than a footnote in their balance book.They’re purely doing this for the chilling effect it will have on other people that might be impertinent enough to try and share their books with others.

&gt; but few people outside of them would even notice it if disappeared.Um... I don&#x27;t get the impression that you are speaking from any sort of authorityLook up any of their stats and tell me that&#x27;s librarians and &quot;weird technologists&quot;.Small example: 600,000 new users per month are niche technologists?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;stats.php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;stats.php</a>More ppl in every town prob use IA than their local library. It&#x27;s important (albeit overly central, but they are working on resolving that via IPFS and other technologies)

&gt; If they shut down, the story wouldn&#x27;t even be able to muscle it&#x27;s way onto the front page of the New York TimesWhat do New York Times reporters use to check web history when researching for their stories? Do they just make stuff up?

I can&#x27;t disagree about the irresponsibility of the IA when it comes to the Emergency Library stuff. But I for one would be pretty heartbroken to lose access to the absolutely enormous catalog of live shows from a ton of bands that IA hosts completely legally.

&gt; If they shut down, the story wouldn&#x27;t even be able to muscle it&#x27;s way onto the front page of the New York Times: it would loose to whatever the latest Trump drama is and the Nth repetition of the standard mass shooting media package.That is not a good metric. If the louvre burned, that would make headlines everywhere, but it would be nowhere near as disasterous as if the internet archive was destroyed.

&gt; Yeah, it&#x27;s super important in certain weird technology and library subcultures, but few people outside of them would even notice it if disappeared.A service can be important even if few people use it directly. The service can have downstream effects that are beneficial to a lot of people because the people who do use it are creating and disseminating other content that filters its way down.An analogy would be the US National Weather Service (NOAA). Few people look directly at an NOAA feed, but it&#x27;s used by news channels, apps, airlines, scientists, etc. and becomes content and services that most people have benefited from.A robust archive lowers the cost&#x2F;time of doing research. It enables fact checking and investigation, particularly of an historical or obscure nature. It services the long tail of less frequently accessed content that many of us will, at some time, want access to. Basically all the reasons a research library is useful.

Just because most people may not have heard of it, it doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s not critically important.I&#x27;m sure most people in the US hadn&#x27;t heard of many of the banks involved in the 2008 financial crisis, but many of them, after that fact, might agree that they were indeed too big to fail.

&gt; I know the government has viewed certain companies as &quot;too big to fail,&quot; because of the negative financial impact we would experience if they were to do so.&gt; I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a repository of digital or physical artifacts is &quot;too big to fail&quot; because of the negative cultural impact their failure would have.If there is, the Internet Archive isn&#x27;t it.Yeah, it&#x27;s super important in certain weird technology and library subcultures, but few people outside of them would even notice it if disappeared. If they shut down, the story wouldn&#x27;t even be able to muscle it&#x27;s way onto the front page of the New York Times: it would loose to whatever the latest Trump drama is and the Nth repetition of the standard mass shooting media package.&gt; In the absence of that, anyone who sees high cultural value to the preservation of these digital artifacts should, counterintuitively, not treat the Internet Archive as having some special status, but should treat it as a liability. It has become the custodian of too much, and too much is on the line if it fails.&gt; Rather than trying to constantly shore up the IA so it can&#x27;t fail financially, we should be looking at ways to preserve those artifacts redundantly, so that even if the IA fails, it&#x27;s not a calamity.Yeah, especially since the Internet Archive (as an organization) has proven itself to be irresponsible.Lots of people want to turn the publishers into the villains, for ideological reasons as well as a bias towards the Internet Archive, but the it&#x27;s the IA that fucked up here. They imperiled their core mission for some unnecessary grandstanding. They either need to fire whatever lawyers OK&#x27;d the &quot;Emergency Library&quot; or the leaders that refused to listen to sane legal advice telling them not to do it.

I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a repository of digital or physical artifacts is &quot;too big to fail&quot; because of the negative cultural impact their failure would have.Here it is: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;loc.gov" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;loc.gov</a>

A distributed, highly resilient digital museum. The internet archive meets S3 meets BitTorrent. We’re most of the way there, just need improvements around durability, rebalancing around geographies, and the identity and metadata (item inventory) planes.(no association with IA, just an active contributor)

With regards to &quot;too big to fail&quot;, one side that doesn&#x27;t get talked about as much is that &quot;too big to fail&quot; banks get more regulatory scrutiny and how much risk they are allowed to take on is regulated.If the Internet Archive is &quot;too big to fail&quot; then there should be more scrutiny of their actions and the avoidance of risky behavior.Anybody with any legal sense could have told you that the &quot;National Emergency Library&quot; was a risky move.

Interestingly, IA partners with the modern Bibliotecha Alexandria to warehouse some of the archival material<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bibliotheca_Alexandrina#Internet_Archive_partnership" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bibliotheca_Alexandrina#Intern...</a>

An order of magnitude more expensive than HDD (let alone tape), but doesn&#x27;t M-Disc offer a solution here?

Destroying things over copyright will eventually be seen as absurd as ancient religious beliefs.The future will laugh at us as some primitive ignorant culture with our heads shoved up our asses dismantling society because of some imaginary oh so sacred legal fiction called copyright.Why do some hoarding rent seekers hold every key here and get to indiscriminately burn down our global village on a whim like a feudal lord and all we can say is &quot;please sire, spare the library, can you burn it more slowly than the rest?&quot;We overthrew monarchies 200 years ago so we wouldn&#x27;t have to deal with this anymore. Having these assholes sneak back in through some courtier backdoor via an institution where people still wear wigs and robes to make us all renters from (intellectual) property lords, it needs to go.

&gt; we should be looking at ways to preserve those artifacts redundantly, so that even if the IA fails, it&#x27;s not a calamityIts 212 petabytes as of december 2021[1], that alone would be a bit less than 12 thousand 18 TB HDDs or LTO-9&#x27;s. We&#x27;ve made virtually zero significant progress in long-term storage technology.Its like if they are getting burned like the library of alexandria because of some copyright vampires, I wouldn&#x27;t even be angry, just sad, its just what we deserve.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;petabox.php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;petabox.php</a>

You mean like this one - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bl.uk&#x2F;collection-guides&#x2F;uk-web-archive" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bl.uk&#x2F;collection-guides&#x2F;uk-web-archive</a>Or this one? - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;netpreserve.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;netpreserve.org&#x2F;</a>

UNESCO Cultural Heritage Sites are basically this in spirit.But “too big to fail” is bad policy no matter what you apply it to. That we have practiced this bad policy does not mean we should continue doubling down on it.

Which in the grand scheme of things almost nothing is deposited to since the US aligned with Berne Convention lack of explicit copyright notification requirements.

&gt; I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a repository of digital or physical artifacts is &quot;too big to fail&quot; because of the negative cultural impact their failure would have.In the US that would be the Library of Congress with its Mandatory Deposit requirement.

No profit in that for lobbyists and corporations. They are the only voices that matter in the current system.

&gt; IA could simply extend their middle-finger and move to ...Unfortunately, the US government directly expands the reach of (US) copyright, patents, and trademarks with the &quot;Free Trade&quot; agreements they&#x27;ve managed to get countries around the world to sign up to.If Sealand had an effective army ;), and could thereby say &quot;Thanks, but no&quot; then that might be an option. Until then though...

&gt; we should be looking at ways to preserve those artifacts redundantly, so that even if the IA fails, it&#x27;s not a calamity.We don&#x27;t need to look too far. IA could simply extend their middle-finger and move to Mexico, Spain, Thailand, or Sealand. Frankly, IA should be mirrored in every country that does not respect the West&#x27;s initiative of blocking access and unresolvable takedown notices. Fuck US copyright anti-information bullshit. Publishers represent themselves and their own greed, not the authors and artists that created the content. There are rare success stories[1], but how many other works have been looted by publishers at the expense of the long dead content creator&#x27;s family?[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;2006&#x2F;jun&#x2F;14&#x2F;books.booksnews1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;2006&#x2F;jun&#x2F;14&#x2F;books.booksnew...</a>

The Library of Congress is open to the public. Visitors can freely read most of the books and other materials in the collection. You will generally have to travel to the actual library; only a limited subset of their collection is available online.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.loc.gov&#x2F;visit&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.loc.gov&#x2F;visit&#x2F;</a>

Isn&#x27;t this kind of the point of the Library of Congress, though their content isn&#x27;t generally available to the public afaik.

I think we need a PBS for the web, and the Internet Archive should be one of the cornerstones of such an organization.Add to it other educational materials that would otherwise show up on youtube or elsewhere with advertisements, and you have a decent basis for the 21st century and beyond.

Great idea. I&#x27;ll note that archivearchive.org is currently available.

I know the government has viewed certain companies as &quot;too big to fail,&quot; because of the negative financial impact we would experience if they were to do so.I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a repository of digital or physical artifacts is &quot;too big to fail&quot; because of the negative cultural impact their failure would have.In the absence of that, anyone who sees high cultural value to the preservation of these digital artifacts should, counterintuitively, not treat the Internet Archive as having some special status, but should treat it as a liability. It has become the custodian of too much, and too much is on the line if it fails.Rather than trying to constantly shore up the IA so it can&#x27;t fail financially, we should be looking at ways to preserve those artifacts redundantly, so that even if the IA fails, it&#x27;s not a calamity.

Even after complying with the court&#x27;s decision and shutting down unlimited digital lending?

It&#x27;s at least at risk of being blocked by ISPs in the us and pressured&#x2F;shutdown if hosting is by  a provider in the US.

This is pretty confusing... is the Internet Archive at risk from this legal decision?

Yeah everyone pretty much said when they announced the National Emergency Library, they were risking everything. Sure enough, that&#x27;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.

if you like the product, you can&#x27;t pick and choose the traits of the origin.. source-- rock and roll biz

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.

A fight against IP is a fight against capital

I hope the project can be kept afloat in ways that the US government can&#x27;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&#x27;re purchased it:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;04&#x2F;04&#x2F;arts&#x2F;dahl-christie-stine-kindle-edited.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;04&#x2F;04&#x2F;arts&#x2F;dahl-christie-stine-...</a>Until yesterday, I used to sync my music library with Apple Music. Not anymore. Apple responding to the Times reporter with a big fat &quot;no comment&quot; tells me that it thinks it&#x27;s OK to change things on my computer without my knowledge.

Archiving is typically protected. Lending of currently available works is not archiving.

&gt; ensuring that the powerful can&#x27;t rewrite historyThat overstates IA&#x27;s influence. People still think Elon started Tesla.

They&#x27;re doing us all a favor is what they&#x27;re doing. Intellectual property is just not that important when compared with ensuring that the powerful can&#x27;t rewrite history.If they lose their case, I hope the project can be kept afloat in ways that the US government can&#x27;t interfere with.

Ehh.I&#x27;m not really buying the Robinhood theory. This feels like some techies thinking their above the law and getting a reality check.It&#x27;s not like actual libraries don&#x27;t offer digital lending. You might need to wait a week for Gane of Thrones, but it&#x27;ll be OK.IA decided the world was unfair and with a bit of arrogance decided to &#x27;correct&#x27; it. Let&#x27;s hope IA is able to just stop lending books and still exist.

It&#x27;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.

&gt; I&#x27;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&#x27;t need to run both operations out of the same business entity.&gt; 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.

&gt; If it is true, then maybe IA should be run by somebody with better judgement.I&#x27;m skeptical that you even get the IA without someone like these folks running it. Imagine you&#x27;re the type of crazy person who starts and runs the IA, the pandemic starts and libraries and schools shut down, and there&#x27;s a big button in front of you saying &quot;give people access to knowledge that was just removed from them&quot;. 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&#x27;m not angry at them for doing what felt right.

Librarians are a pain in the ass to litigate against would be my guess.We&#x27;re very detail oriented, we&#x27;re organized, and we&#x27;re very good at following procedures. We&#x27;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.

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&#x2F;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.

I have in the past, but I&#x27;m also holding off until this lawsuit nonsense is done with. Don&#x27;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&#x27;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.

I don&#x27;t donate to them because they&#x27;re mismanaged like this.

It&#x27;s a reasonable question. I don&#x27;t get to call myself an archive or museum and assemble a website of what I consider &quot;culturally important&quot; cartoons or comic strips or whatever. The Wayback Machine basically operates in the zone of most people don&#x27;t care that they do this.

The wayback machine has much MUCH better arguments (it&#x27;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 &quot;technically this is illegal, but the law is wrong&quot; type.

Wouldn’t someone with better judgement have shut down the wayback machine as too much of a risk of a copyright infringement lawsuit?

This is, frankly, hot air.The IA resisted nothing, achieved nothing, made nobody&#x27;s life better, and created an opportunity for bad precedent.It was an utterly boneheaded move. (It has also nothing to do with &quot;exhaustive preservation&quot;)

It&#x27;s not a game. It&#x27;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&#x27;s leaders mandate is to preserve history, not to preserve what they let him preserve

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&#x27;t just blatantly infringing?) and a low payoff. If it&#x27;s also an existential risk, then wtf are they doing running it?

I agree the sourcing isn&#x27;t something ipfs is magically solving. It is specifically to reduce the weakness of more centralised data store&#x2F;serving which are easier targets.Even in term of resilience ipfs isn&#x27;t bullet proof. Decentralising helps. Pinning needs to exist somewhere as a hard rive and a network connection, ideally with multiple replication, and held with serving as such for extended periods, across every single file.

ipfs might be a hosting solution, but that&#x27;s a small part of the challenge. You also have to source the data.I recently used some online periodical archive access from my local library to find sources about 1940s musicians protesting recorded music...couldn&#x27;t find anything. Then I tried IA, and boom, they&#x27;ve got it[0] — someone had to source and scan all these.I recently wanted to revisit some 1980s-era computer games from when I was a kid. Internet Archive. How&#x27;d they get there? Someone there pulled them from 5.25&quot; floppies.A few weeks ago, I remembered 3-2-1 Contact magazine, which I enjoyed as a kid. No problem: IA has source and scanned them.I could store all the DOS games in the world on my hard drive without noticing the space usage at all, but step one is acquiring copies of them. When it comes to the long tail of obscure 1940s periodicals or 1980s advertisements[0].[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;lkbm&#x2F;status&#x2F;1608480435691995137" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;lkbm&#x2F;status&#x2F;1608480435691995137</a>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;textfiles&#x2F;status&#x2F;1643781181568327681" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;textfiles&#x2F;status&#x2F;1643781181568327681</a>

Also, I&#x27;m mentioning ipfs as a rescue solution more so than the internet archive served by ipfs necessarily, that&#x27;s probably a longer line away from feasible I would guess, operationally etc.

This is a college newspaper, I’m surprised it made it here. I cut them some slack, they’re still learning.

Pretty much &quot;everything&quot; (other than public domain) on the IA is on shaky ground. It&#x27;s been mostly OK because very few people object to the archiving of their public web pages (especially given the IA respects robots.txt even retroactively) and, as you say, old magazines that basically have zero commercial value.

It was prompted by the unrestricted lending, but it&#x27;s pretty clear that the fight is now about lending at all.[0]That may still only be the OpenLibrary, but it&#x27;s not just the unrestricted lending, and I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised it it also has a chilling effect on other scans. I&#x27;m curious how letting people view scans of obscure 1940s magazines is legal if doing it for books is not. They&#x27;re not even restricted to one &quot;borrower&quot; at a time per physical copy with periodicals.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;authorsguild.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;ag-celebrates-resounding-win-in-internet-archive-infringement-lawsuit&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;authorsguild.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;ag-celebrates-resounding-win-i...</a>

The article is extremely misleading.It makes it seem like the 4 publishers are against Internet Archive as a whole, when all they sued for was for the unrestricted publication of copyrighted books during the start of the pandemic.

Because government, and the tax dollars that support it, are how we, as a society, take collective action?

&gt; Why should tax dollars be used for this?Because:&gt; We already have laws for historical landmarks. These laws ensure the protection of things of societal significance

have you heard of the idea of a museum by chance?

What&#x27;s been preserved of the earlier web will always be a little more precious because so much was lost, I suppose.Back in the day, I assumed anything I did online would be saved in some way unless explicitly stated otherwise. I also assumed the same of my software environments. I was, of course, painfully disabused of these notions multiple times before the lesson was fully drilled into me.I&#x27;d like to live in a world where everyone was more aware of the value of making special efforts to preserve certain kinds of data (see also: having more control over it)-- like where it&#x27;s part of our deeper culture. I think we&#x27;re steadily moving in that direction in some ways, but it would&#x27;ve been nice if it had been more thoughtfully considered by both companies and governments 25+ years ago. I suspect if they&#x27;d known how much cheaper storage was going to get, they would have done a lot more.

Laws are only as good as people&#x27;s willingness to defend them. They are not real. Resource mobilization is a much better long-term strategy than agreements backed by the threat of force, because legislative capture is a real thing and your precious laws can done away with by fiat. It has happened over and over. Please, do not put your faith in process.

We already have laws for historical landmarks. These laws ensure the protection of things of societal significance, even to the point of restricting the rights of their private owners.We need such laws for the digital realm. If we had them we wouldn&#x27;t have to worry about Internet Archive, dpreview, etc. Imagine if we had such laws in place long ago. We could be living in a world where Geocities and MySpace still existed, even if only in a read-only form.

&gt; They&#x27;re not in court for the emergency library.They are in court for the &quot;emergency library&quot;. The emergency library is a key part of the case. It&#x27;s just inevitable that the lawsuit would also hinge on if 1 - 1 CDL is legally permissible and the case will inevitably have to rule on that.And yes, timing wise, and from the letters the publishes sent to the IA, they are explicitly about the &quot;emergency library&quot;.

&gt; Do you honestly believe the only reason publishers went after IA is the emergency library?I mean, they did so right after IA did it, specifically citing IA doing it as why. Maybe they would have come after it eventually anyway but the Emergency Library specifically marked IA as an organisation that couldn&#x27;t be trusted; even if they would have come after CDL, IA didn&#x27;t have to hand them a slam-dunk case.In all their comms about this IA is desperate to reframe it as nothing to do with Emergency Library, probably because they know how it undermines their case completely.Edit: EA -&gt; Emergency Library

They were only sued after they launched the Emergency Library. Also, Koeltl&#x27;s current ruling applies in particular to lending without the waitlist restriction is legal. CDL in general isn&#x27;t yet ruled on. IA&#x27;s actions with the NEL not only prompted the lawsuit in the first place but have almost certainly poisoned the well with regards to the final ruling on CDL.

The lawsuit was filed three months after NEL was launched. Controlled Digital Lending has been around for years and is used by public libraries. Publishers didn’t like it CDL, but they lived with it.There absolutely is a correlation between NEL and the lawsuit. It’s a small part of the lawsuit, but it’s clear it pushed them to go to war against IA.

The “emergency library” was a gift on a silver platter for the publishers. It was a reckless and stupid action that made the worst case scenario that the publishers wouldn’t have been taken seriously about a reality.Obviously the 1-1 lending was an issue to the publishers, but higher risk from a litigation perspective.

Siblings of this comment piling on to point out the timing: yes, yes. I don&#x27;t suppose proximate or triggering causes can coexist alongside ultimate or long-term causes by any chance? Like hey did the last straw break your camel&#x27;s back or was it all the previous straws? Couldn&#x27;t possibly be both, so let&#x27;s argue about it.

&quot;I&#x27;m tired of seeing this &quot;well IA shouldn&#x27;t have done the emergency library&quot; line.&quot;I appreciate that.However, as a long-time, regular, sustaining financial benefactor of IA, I was annoyed that they strayed into this set of activities in the first place and then dismayed when they pushed the envelope on it during C19 quarantines.I, and others, predicted this trouble and even if there is not direct causation why do they have to tickle this dragon in the first place ?

Frankly, this isn&#x27;t out of character for the IA. They want to be treated as a global system of record, but then started hostile initiatives like ignoring robots.txt. They&#x27;ve somewhat rectified this now, but their blog post about brazenly doing this is still up. It&#x27;s good insight to how they think about themselves. They want protection but none of the regulation that will come with it. The proof of their character has been in the pudding the whole time.

&gt; Do you honestly believe the only reason publishers went after IA is the emergency library?Yes, it&#x27;s even mentioned a few times in the judgement. Publishers didn&#x27;t like the CDL, but were mostly ignoring it. The NEL forced their hand, even if the lawsuit was not about that directly.&gt; They operate in a country where precedent is set in a court of law, how did you expect CDL to &quot;get off the ground&quot; if not challenged in a court of law?If the IA really set up the CDL to have a plausible challenge they would not have shot themselves in the foot with complete lack of implementation controls, and clearly setting up a profit motive. Everyone should be furious at the IA for poisoning the CDL well.I highly recommend reading the judgement, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;storage.courtlistener.com&#x2F;recap&#x2F;gov.uscourts.nysd.537900&#x2F;gov.uscourts.nysd.537900.188.0.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;storage.courtlistener.com&#x2F;recap&#x2F;gov.uscourts.nysd.53...</a>

They&#x27;re not in court for the emergency library. They&#x27;re in court for the 1-1 CDL lending they did.I&#x27;m tired of seeing this &quot;well IA shouldn&#x27;t have done the emergency library&quot; line. Do you honestly believe the only reason publishers went after IA is the emergency library? I think this would have happened eventually, so pointing to the emergency library does nothing but tell everyone that you were right all along.They operate in a country where precedent is set in a court of law, how did you expect CDL to &quot;get off the ground&quot; if not challenged in a court of law?

Might be interesting to start a large &quot;online library&quot; that does physical books by mail. Similar to Netflix original dvd model, but for books. An annual membership fee of like $20&#x2F;yr to help maintain storage infrastructure. Then ship those books to&#x2F;from people in reusable boxes for bigger&#x2F;unwieldy books or padded envelopes if that&#x27;s sufficient for less expensive paperback.Small per-lend fee to cover the shipping cost, with a return window or followup fee per N days... days determined based on the size&#x2F;pages in the book&#x2F;volume.With efforts to work with various local libraries to handle some of the distribution closer to the people.

&gt; Controlled digital lending had a chance of getting off the ground.sure, it may have worked, but fuck me if that&#x27;s what we get. controlled digital lending means we throw away[1] the great advantage brought by digital technology.controlled digital lending is a very stupid thing to do. I saw megaupload. it showed us all that we can all share it all; we just don&#x27;t seem to want to, or rather, the American government pursued them into extinction.[1] looking at this even more closely, it&#x27;s not that this &#x27;digital advantage&#x27; is wasted, it is merely captured by authoritative powers who only understand markets, trade, and exclusive properties (exclusive due to being physical&#x2F;material in nature unlike digital assets). e.g. Microsoft&#x27;s billionaire business is made from capturing this digital boon as I called it.

&gt; Whether it&#x27;s legally permissible to copy a printed material and distribute that copy as though it were the printed material was&#x2F;is unresolved.A lot of IA supporters wish they would have gone about discovering this in a way that protected the actual internet archive. Maybe I don&#x27;t understand the actual risks to the IA, but it feels like a reckless move.

&gt; Now that it&#x27;s being tested, the right thing to do is to figure out if CDL is something we as a society want to enable for our libraries or not.that&#x27;s a nice idea, but it&#x27;s hard to see how we as a society have a say.

It&#x27;s not the Internet Archive&#x27;s job to be the first one to try to resolve fair use questions like this, and attempting to do so put the organization&#x27;s orginal core mission at risk.They should have let someone else take the risk, and continued archiving the internet. That is all that most of their supporters expected of them, for good reason. Their attempt to pivot toward being a generic, universal library was bad scope creep and should have been stopped when it started.

it was going to be tested, and IA are exactly the right organization to test itCDL being legalized is dependent on the concept that it respects copyright and is only a digital version of rights and practices that already exist. The NEL proved that as far as the IA is concerned, CDL is nothing of the sort and is in actuality just a method of keeping rightsholders from suing them and what they&#x27;d really rather be doing is copying every work in existence and giving it away to everybody. They proved they don&#x27;t want to be a library. They have destroyed their credibility. Other than the operator of Z-Library there is no worse entity to be litigating this.

&gt; Whether it&#x27;s legally permissible to copy a printed material and distribute that copy as though it were the printed material was&#x2F;is unresolved.That&#x27;s what IA wants to believe. But it&#x27;s just not the case that legal points aren&#x27;t &quot;resolved&quot; or &quot;tested&quot; unless exactly the same situation shows up in court and gets ruled on. The law works in large part by analogy. Strong enough analogies can be predicted.Here&#x27;s from the trial court&#x27;s summary judgment opinion against IA:&gt; Even full enforcement of a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio, however, would not excuse IA&#x27;s reproduction of the Works in Suit.Then there&#x27;s the citation so many saw coming to a case called ReDigi, about a system for reselling authorized digital music downloads by ensuring there was only ever one digital copy. They lost, too.There&#x27;s another case out there, Aereo, about a company offering a warehouse full of TV tuners subscribers could stream from on a one-to-one basis. For technical legal reasons, that involved different aspects of the copyright law. But the case didn&#x27;t go well for Aereo, either. Or for any of its competitors pursuing essentially the same business model.

I keep seeing this really bad take repeated on this site in the absence of more nuanced, informed legal opinions.Whether CDL is legal under Fair Use or not was&#x2F;is legally unresolved. Whether it&#x27;s legally permissible to copy a printed material and distribute that copy as though it were the printed material was&#x2F;is unresolved.Lots of organizations have been skating along under one interpretation of Fair Use as a workaround for the burdensome licensing fees and absurd lending limits that publishers expect libraries to pay. Libraries being, y&#x27;know, super well-funded by that VC honey and all.And it&#x27;s not like publishers get less litigious over time. Whether the NEL prompted this or not is irrelevant; it was going to be tested, and IA are exactly the right organization to test it, and it wasn&#x27;t going to become &quot;more legal&quot; if everyone just kept doing the same thing but more quietly.Now that it&#x27;s being tested, the right thing to do is to figure out if CDL is something we as a society want to enable for our libraries or not.

Not only that, but the logic of the whole thing was weak anyway and I&#x27;d argue it didn&#x27;t achieve any of its goals.There are plenty of places to torrent books online. If people are desperate for a book and savvy enough to know about the Internet Archive, chances are they would have found an available copy online anyway. It&#x27;s also not as though downloading an illegal copy from IA put the user at any less legal risk than downloading from elsewhere (other than giving publishers a bigger target to go after, which is exactly what happened).It&#x27;s a shame, because IA felt like a true public good on the Internet, and now it looks like it&#x27;s going away. Sigh.

That&#x27;s a pretty good analogy, but not quite.This has been a hostage&#x2F;terrorist situation from the beginning. The Internet Archive has been holding the Wayback Machine hostage, essentially saying &quot;let us break copyright, or this critical piece of internet history goes down as well&quot;.

This was not always the case because libraries weren&#x27;t seen as a threat. Renting a digital book from a library was significantly harder than buying one from Amazon. The &quot;Libby&quot; app was a major motivator, at least in the US, because it made checking out digital books about as easy as just using the Kindle store. Usage went way up, and publishers panicked.Publishers aren&#x27;t necessarily the villains here, except in the regular way all middle men are the villains. Authors want to make money, and they make money by selling books. If a library can digitally loan the book an unlimited number of times in parallel, it&#x27;s a bad deal for the author.The &quot;this book automatically explodes after 2 years or 10 rentals&quot; system is a stupid compromise, but any solution is gonna be some sort of system to send money from libraries to companies based on how many people read the book.

Some of the information on how libraries in the US deal with digital books:NPR : Planet Money : The Indicator - The surprising economics of digital lending - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;transcripts&#x2F;1118289764" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;transcripts&#x2F;1118289764</a>That&#x27;s from August of 2022 and the lawsuit against the internet archive was just starting to gain steam.And more recently (November 2022):NPR : Planet Money - The E-Book Wars <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;transcripts&#x2F;1135639385" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;transcripts&#x2F;1135639385</a>

Totally agree with the first part.&gt; Controlled digital lending had a chance of getting off the ground. The IA&#x27;s Emergency Library&#x27;s unlimited digital lending burned it to the ground and stomped on the ashes.One of the problems libraries face is that many publishers will not sell them &quot;real&quot; licenses, but only &quot;quota licenses&quot; that allow a total of n borrows and m concurrent borrows. Once the total number of borrows is exceeded, the license expires. n can be very low.This was not always the case. 10 years ago, most licenses were unrestricted licenses that allowed an unlimited number of total borrows, but only limited the number of m concurrent borrows at a time - just like it would be if the library bought m real books.The argument is that real books wear out - digital books don&#x27;t. However, my local librarian vehemently disagrees with this statement, as many books survive more than 100 borrows, something the new e-book licenses will never manage.Additionally, those &quot;quota&quot; licenses are still way more expensive than an equal amount of m real, physical books. It&#x27;s insanity. My local library could, by their own account, not survive if the number of digital lends permanently increased significantly (like it did in 2020).So if controlled digital lending had a chance for the mainstream, the publishers killed it many years ago, when many of them decided to just not sell libraries unrestricted licenses anymore, but only &quot;quota&quot; licenses. :&#x2F;(Disclaimer: Not the US, Europe)

Adobe Digital Editions DRM and watermarking appear to be popular. It&#x27;s definitely breakable (e.g. with Calibre and DeDRM, this is even required if you use an obscure E-Reader which does not support it), but secure enough that the publishers are happy.

I actually wondered initially, even if CDL was legal, how are they going to enforce the actual Controlled part? What&#x27;s the standard for that?Is simply not having a download button sufficient? Do you need to prevent people from right-clicking and choose &quot;Save Image&quot;? Or do you need to run the book through a video stream encrypted with Widevine L3 so screenshots don&#x27;t work? Or heck, why not Widevine L1 which requires hardware not found on Windows because L3 will always be exploitable?

Agreed. Patron-based funding if not necessarily Patreon is the best way of paying for the creation of intellectual works.

&gt; Controlled digital lending had a chance of getting off the ground.Fuck it. It should never get off the ground, really. We, as a society, don&#x27;t need controlled lending for something that can be copied for free.What we need is a fair mechanism to keep authors whole while keeping digital copies available for all, free of charge. And the system slowly changes by itself, discovering multiple such mechanisms. Like, for example, making physical books collectibles; or paying for early access (not for the access per se).

If the publishers seek statutory damages then yes, the entire archive is in critical danger.

My issue is with the headline: &quot;If we lose the internet archive, we&#x27;re screwed.&quot; But no one is saying we&#x27;re in danger of losing the entire Internet Archive.They do many many things - most of which are not in any way affected by this lawsuit. The judge even specified that the Internet Archive can still scan and publish copies of books in the public domain.

I appreciate your passion!Unsolicited advice: IME I&#x27;ve found being angry because I was right serves no one, least of all myself. I would recommend you soften your language. Harshness, even if warranted, turns people off, especially those who could learn most from what you have to say.

good sir, the pandemic magically nullified the idea of basic human rights.

which made copyrighted books available for free during the COVID-19 pandemic. The publishers behind the lawsuit alleged that this entailed copyright infringement.Along with everybody with two brain cells to rub together. We all screamed &quot;Hey, you idiots are going to ruin everything if you act like the pandemic has magically nullified the concept of copyright&quot; and they fucking did it anyway, and now exactly what we said would happen is happening. It&#x27;s like you found a landmine in your front yard and your buddy said &quot;That landmine shouldn&#x27;t be there so I&#x27;m gonna go step on it&quot; and you told him not to and then had to watch him throw himself onto it while declaring it would be morally wrong for it to blow his stupid ass up.Controlled digital lending had a chance of getting off the ground. The IA&#x27;s Emergency Library&#x27;s unlimited digital lending burned it to the ground and stomped on the ashes.

I am. I&#x27;m an author.And you&#x27;re a fool if you think that free copies at the IA don&#x27;t cut into sales. Oh sure, some percentage of the people wouldn&#x27;t have picked up a copy in the first place if they had to pay, but there&#x27;s going to be some that skipped paying. It&#x27;s the author and publisher&#x27;s decision to give things away for free. Not anyone else&#x27;s.Here&#x27;s a challenge to you: tell your boss that you think your company should let a free version of your service be available online. A free version with no restrictions. Now, perhaps you work at a fully open source company and your boss would say, &quot;Great.&quot; But you probably don&#x27;t because those are going out of business. How&#x27;s MariaDB working out these days?

Are they really &quot;directly destroying&quot; anyone&#x27;s livelihood? Are authors actually upset? [1][2][1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;legal&#x2F;litigation&#x2F;author-coalition-blasts-publishers-legal-fight-with-internet-archive-2022-09-29&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;legal&#x2F;litigation&#x2F;author-coalition-bl...</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.authorsalliance.org&#x2F;2021&#x2F;08&#x2F;17&#x2F;library-lending-author-incomes-and-controlled-digital-lending&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.authorsalliance.org&#x2F;2021&#x2F;08&#x2F;17&#x2F;library-lending-a...</a>

I agree. And I told my friends at the IA from the beginning that their plan was very, very foolish. People can look the other way at copyright infringement of web sites when it&#x27;s just used for archival work. But when you&#x27;re directly destroying an artist&#x27;s livelihood by undercutting their income stream, well, you shouldn&#x27;t be surprised if they&#x27;ll be upset.

Is the premise of this opinion that if something is good, then courts should invent interpretations of laws to pretend the good thing is legal?The birthplace of the national park system took place through preservation acts passed by Congress, not wishful thinking.If IA is so amazing, why don&#x27;t we codify and protect its existence through new law and not hope that a judge will squint favorably at copyright law?

Yes I love the idea and I want it to be legal. Perhaps it is even worth someone testing the law here intentionally to get the courts to rule.The Internet Archive&#x27;s mission, imo, should be to protect and steward their archives and ability to continue to maintain them above all though. Putting that at risk for a morally righteous additional cause is not worth it. This was a leadership failure

what if they did it with all of netflix&#x27;s movies instead of books? would you feel differently? (I am sure netflix would).

The case for doing what they did is that it helped a lot of people access books (eg school curriculum ones) in the middle of Covid (not everyone knows how to pirate things).Not saying it was the right move but you can see where they&#x27;re coming from, they wanted to help people.

Maybe they shouldn&#x27;t have done something that moronic? If people wanted free books they could always pirate them, openly infringing by hosting copyrighted books for a few people to slightly more easily read them for free... How could they possibly think that was a good idea?

This right here! The Internet archive had a really good thing going, I&#x27;ve been donating, digitizing, and uploading to IA for years. They were playing with fire, we all this coming, and I&#x27;m very frustrated with them over this.

It doesn&#x27;t legally challenge those activities, but I&#x27;m worried about a situation where they get their proverbial pants sued off.

None of those things are on the line.We will continue our work as a library. This case does not challenge many of the services we provide with digitized books including interlibrary loan, citation linking, access for the print-disabled, text and data mining, purchasing ebooks, and ongoing donation and preservation of books.<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.archive.org&#x2F;2023&#x2F;03&#x2F;25&#x2F;the-fight-continues&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.archive.org&#x2F;2023&#x2F;03&#x2F;25&#x2F;the-fight-continues&#x2F;</a>

The internet archive served two distinct but important functions: one as a backup of the web which was important for accountability and history, and the other as a repository for archiving the world&#x27;s non-web digital information. I personally scanned a whole bunch of ephemera and IA was the obvious place to put it.Why jeopardize those functions to do something brick and mortar libraries already did better, and legally? Other libraries do virtual lending.

Indeed so. It&#x27;s only limited if you subtract out the human experience from policymaking. Given that the average lifespan in the US is 77 years, the reality is that you have to wait until you&#x27;re almost at the end of your life for legally unrestricted access and use of material by someone who died the same year you were born.The cake is a lie.

Ignoring fair use and countries other than the US we see that Copyright in the COnstitution said to promote science and useful arts, works should have protection for a limited time.  Shortly after COngress defined &quot;limited&quot; as 14 years plus a renewal for 14.  Then it was 28. plus a renewal and after more lobbying it reached today&#x27;s time of the Authors lifetime plus 70 years.  And since Mickey Mouse protection expires next year, we will probably see another extension.  How life of the author plus 70  can be considered &quot;limited time&quot; just shows how the courts have trampled our Constitution.

College newspaper from the burbs. Kudos to them getting some visibility, but I cut them some slack as young people still learning.

F copyright, specially perpetual copyright used by big corporations as a weapon against poor people.
Tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty.

Maybe my viewpoint on this is informed by long-standing desire to basically start something like IA but in a way which is protected from the acts of nation-states. The fundamental problem with human society is that the power structures are always co-opted by elites for their own purposes rather than the purposes of society as a whole, it doesn&#x27;t matter what the system of those power structures is, in all cases they get co-opted.The fact that a corporate entity is allowed to take action against the IA in this case and be supported by the government in doing so is a symptom of our broken system, it&#x27;s not evidence that the IA did anything wrong in any moral or social sense. The fact our society is held hostage, and that information is imprisoned, by entities like the MAFIAA is not a justification for this outcome.

&gt; IA losing and getting shut down because &quot;information wants to be free, man&quot; is completely detrimental to trying to move that agenda forwards.Shutting down? Let&#x27;s not jump to conclusions here, they would not shut down even if they lost.

IA losing and getting shut down because &quot;information wants to be free, man&quot; is completely detrimental to trying to move that agenda forwards.&quot;First principles&quot; means jack shit if your company to build that world gets wiped off the map because you did something incredibly obviously stupidly illegal and handed the &quot;MAFIAA lawyers&quot; your own ass on a silver platter.

If the conversation ends with “be afraid of cops” and not, “let’s organize to change cops”, then you are supporting cops. Like in this instance we need to rally around copyleft politicians for the next election cycle so that something like this can’t happen again. We need to have willpower and not be so weak willed to let the rent seekers win.

Whether you support copyright or not, the Internet Archive did a dumb thing that will probably cost us having the Internet Archive. Everyone is mad because everyone saw it coming and told them not to risk it all.I&#x27;m not &quot;supporting&quot; the cops when I tell someone they should stop their car when they get pulled over. I&#x27;m recommending someone not get themselves shot.

I agree we ought to reject the premise of copyright primacy over educational need for people. People with willpower are motivated to create without copyright, but without education they are stunted. Now let’s get some copyleft laws on the books. Stallman clearly has too many skeletons to lead a political campaign or he would have already done it.

&gt; Copyright in the US is horribly fundamentally broken, and the idea that factual information about our history and world should not be referenceable and accessible for free is a pretty heinous one.I (mostly) agree with you, but remember the rest of the quote, &quot;Information wants to be free, information wants to be expensive.&quot;&gt; What is considered the earliest recorded occurrence of the expression was at the first Hackers Conference in 1984, although the video recording of the conversation shows that what Brand actually said is slightly different. Brand told Steve Wozniak:&gt;&gt; On the one hand you have—the point you’re making Woz—is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable—the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other.[3]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Information_wants_to_be_free" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Information_wants_to_be_free</a>

If this was a strategy from the IA, it has all but failed, hasn&#x27;t it? And given that the vast majority predicted it would fail, I wouldn&#x27;t even call this hindsight being 20&#x2F;20.

&gt; I don&#x27;t understand the backlash in the comments here, it seems to all come from a perspective of people being so downtrodden they just accept the current status quo crafted by MAFIAA lawyers, rather than looking at it holistically from first-principles.People do not understand that the IA want to go to court as part of their strategy, or else they think they understand what constitutes an effective legal strategy for the IA better than the IA do.

&gt; But what IA did infringes even on a hypothetically repaired copyright system where the maximum age of copyright was something like 10-20 years, and where DMCA take-downs were hard to abuse.In that world, IA would be able to make available any 20+ year book via their program. In that world, I think it’s _much_ less likely that they feel any pressure to lend out copyright covered books, and if they did I would be outraged.I think it’s a little unfair to invent a hypothetical world, and then project their actions into that world as part of your judgement of their entity.

It&#x27;s really not. The copyright system essentially has two serious issues: the extraordinary length, and DMCA takedown notices that are too easy to abuse.But what IA did infringes even on a hypothetically repaired copyright system where the maximum age of copyright was something like 10-20 years, and where DMCA take-downs were hard to abuse. There&#x27;s just no reason to allow any random entity to distribute books that it doesn&#x27;t own.We have already seen in the software industry that there is no way for any but the biggest companies to survive in a world without copyright [which open source is similar to] (I am referring to how Mongo, Elastic, Grafana and others have all had to give up on up-selling open source software and move closer to a closed license; while only Microsoft, Amazon, Google, IBM etc. are thriving by giving away free software).

A consumer revolt would do better, but contacting your congressperson about copyright reform is doomed to failure. Copyright (and the de facto right to abuse and extend it) is an existential issue for publishers, but not for consumers.Any time you have a collective action problem like that our legislative system is always going to come down in favor of the capital owners, because the entire (US) polity is built around land apportionment. It&#x27;s a political system designed by and for landlords.It&#x27;s an artifact of the US&#x27; huge geography and short history. The abolition of spatial barriers by broadcast and electronic networks to the point of universal communication is fundamentally incompatible with a political system based on agrarian territoriality. You can&#x27;t solve 21st century problems with 18th century political technology.

I agree with the sentiment, but not IA&#x27;s risky approach. What did IA assume? That publishers would look the other way, that their actions would inspire copyright reform, that executive power would pardon them post-reform? Those are some crazy assumptions. I&#x27;d think a consumer revolt championed by IA would have been more effective while not jeopardizing the archive, i.e. &quot;Information wants to be free, digital lending costs nothing. Contact your congressperson about copyright reform.&quot;

&gt;Frankly, what the IA did here is absolutely the right thing.Sometimes doing the right thing gets you killed.-This lawsuit could be an existential risk for the IA. In a society that allows vastly different views on what is right and wrong, most people manage to navigate situations in a way that doesn&#x27;t risk their existence.Within that line of thinking, what IA did was more or less a form of civil disobedience. If we go back to one of the founders of the philosophy of civil disobedience in the US we get to Thoreau. He was of the mind that the disobedient party should recognize the possible consequences and be prepared to accept them.None of this means that the IA shouldn&#x27;t have made this choice. Just that they should have had their eyes wide open to these consequences.

The first mistake IA made was engaging in CDL aka DRM in the first place. They should have just focused on making things available without restrictions.

&gt; what the IA did here is absolutely the right thing
&gt; I don&#x27;t understand the backlash in the comments hereI support CDL, and copyright change. IA may have poisoned the well by not actually doing CDL and trying to profit off of the claimed CDL books. So the backlash is understandable.

Frankly, what the IA did here is absolutely the right thing. Copyright in the US is horribly fundamentally broken, and the idea that factual information about our history and world should not be referenceable and accessible for free is a pretty heinous one. Information wants to be free, and the work that IA did for &quot;digital lending&quot; during the pandemic was an essential move in the direction of ensuring that people can access this information regardless of their physical proximity and access to the base source material.I don&#x27;t understand the backlash in the comments here, it seems to all come from a perspective of people being so downtrodden they just accept the current status quo crafted by MAFIAA lawyers, rather than looking at it holistically from first-principles.

None of the hand wringing about covid is the least bit relevant to the question of whether the emergency library is copyright infringement. If Congress wants to set aside copyright during pandemics, that’s fine (and maybe a decent idea frankly). But in the absence of something like that, this is all just a smoke screen.What a poorly written article.

We are? I&#x27;m more worried about having a roof over my head in the next year.

&gt; * Tell me, who&#x27;s going to invest 10-200 million dollars to make a movies or TV shows on a regular basis, without copyright?We can have a world where:- Every child has access to humanity&#x27;s best information- We cure cancer- 90% of American&#x27;s media is controlled by 6,000, not 6, corporations- College tuition costs drop dramatically- Lower taxes- More income equality- No more opioid pandemics- Making the world resilient against AI dominationOr a world where:- We make sure that we don&#x27;t risk disrupting new Game of Thrones spinoffsI know what I choose.

&gt; I&#x27;d extend this to say, if we don&#x27;t abolish (c)opywrong, we&#x27;re screwed.Then consider us &quot;screwed,&quot; because what you propose has a snowball&#x27;s chance in hell of actually happening.Also, too many software engineers overreact to some reformable problems with the IP system with burn-it-all down radicalism. I think your proposals would cause more harm than good. They&#x27;d likely stop most media creation that you&#x27;re used to*, and what&#x27;s left with either be cheap (think fanfiction) or under tighter lockdown than any DRM you&#x27;ve ever seen.* Tell me, who&#x27;s going to invest 10-200 million dollars to make a movies or TV shows on a regular basis, without copyright?

I&#x27;d extend this to say, if we don&#x27;t abolish (c)opywrong, we&#x27;re screwed.Does anyone want to go back to the closed source software development model of the 1990&#x27;s? Then why do we not push for the open source model not only in software, but across news, academia, music, film, databases, et cetera? How many of your hard earned tax dollars go to pay for Microsoft&#x27;s and Oracle&#x27;s technical debt? How much of your tax dollars go pay for Elsevier&#x27;s and Random House&#x27;s and Wiley&#x27;s closed source databases of publications? Why do we allow this inferior model of treating ideas to exist, when we now have solid data that the open way is far superior &quot;for the progress of arts and sciences?&quot;.Write your representatives. Organize your communities. It&#x27;s time to pass a new Amendment to the Constitution:<pre><code> Section 1. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of this Constitution is hereby repealed.
 Section 2. Congress shall make no law abridging the right of the people to publish ideas.</code></pre>

Assuming the scenario where ISPs end up blocking access to the archive, the fact that this is happening alongside rapid advances in LLMs is pretty insane. Comparisons with historical snapshots of the web is probably one of the best ways to combat disinformation and misinformation generated using AIs. There are of course other risks and dangers that people have talked about re: restricted access to knowledge and precedents for future publications, but this one in particular seems very dangerous in a timely manner - almost like a setup for very clear and obvious disasters surrounding propaganda, memes, and social chaos.

I think this is the right approach to take. Unless the IA went into their decision with their eyes open and knowing the huge risk they were taking with the existence of their organization. That would at least make it no more foolish than anyone else knowingly taking a huge risk.But yes, the IA is both culturally important and significantly beneficial in everyday practical matters. I&#x27;m not sure what we can do to help IA come out of this intact though. &quot;Write your congressman&quot; is these days a somewhat laughable suggestion in the face of any problem, the desperate act of last resort that no one expects to actually succeed.

I say it&#x27;s fine if you think it&#x27;s foolish, but we really need to save the fool.

lol, it could&#x27;ve be me, I have AI on the brain lately.

AI was foolish and irresponsible. Republishing books without limitations would almost surely provoke a law suit that they would almost surely lose.Not only is it a waste of resources, but now that they are in court they could very easily receive a judgement that curtails access they used to provide before the rollout of the &quot;emergency library&quot;.It&#x27;s fine (and right, IMO) if you don&#x27;t agree with the current copyright law but just ignoring them was foolish.

it has tons of bots and dead accounts. i run a few channels with hundreds of &quot;users&quot;. they get maybe 3 posts per month.

matrix is far from dead! just hit 94M addressable users and all time high of 2M MAU on the matrix.org server (doubled in last year)

We&#x27;re already screwed because the internet is dying. Everyone is just using phones now, all the forums are shutting down. IRC is dead. Matrix is dead. Discord lives because it&#x27;s a gamer&#x2F;trans rights echo chamber. but that&#x27;s it. The late 90s and early 2000s was the golden era of the internet. we&#x27;re living in the detritus now.

I don&#x27;t know how their finances are structured but the way you solve this problem is with a big endowment.

According to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;petabox.php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;petabox.php</a> it&#x27;s 99 PB unique data and 212 PB total storage on 28k HDDs as of Dec. 2021 (3.2M USD at 15 USD&#x2F;TB for the 212 PB, not sure if the price is realistic). It&#x27;s quite something for a private initiative...

How many PB is their entire site? I assume they could enable native read-only rsyncd easily enough on some caching nodes. Anyone re-publishing their library would be at legal risk but private mirrors should be safe.

We need an IA backup project right now :&#x2F;

Are there any efforts to boycott the publishers pushing this?I happen to think they&#x27;re technically correct with the IA in the wrong here, but even so I think they should back down - they can take a big picture view that it&#x27;s hardly dealt them a serious blow, it was the pandemic and the IA serves a useful purpose for society (though I suspect many publishers besides more enlightened ones would disagree with that due to self-interest!)

We need a few many copies of the IA in the Seed Vault and have it constantly uploaded... We should also have a perma-satellite in LEO that can be streamed to... AND, while we are thinking out space, get a digital&#x2F;physical seed vault on the moon - and can anything survive in the current Mars atmosphere? Send seed bombs to Mars and see what sticks? I mean, we appear to be hell-bent on terra farming Mars, so we may as well just throw seeds at it.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scienceagri.com&#x2F;16-most-important-plant-species-in-the-world&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scienceagri.com&#x2F;16-most-important-plant-species-in-t...</a>I would add bamboo to that list, though.

I think leadership at Internet Archive was deeply irresponsible for deciding a short term stunt was worth potentially existentially threatening legal exposure.The entire leadership there and anyone who signed off on the decision should be replaced. I am a donor but I&#x27;m pissed. They should have known better.

It&#x27;s not just a metaphor, btw. IA actually partners with the modern Bibliotheca Alexandrina.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bibliotheca_Alexandrina#Internet_Archive_partnership" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bibliotheca_Alexandrina#Intern...</a>

Came here to write this. That Julius Caesar burned the library seems to be a common misconception.

This is what I was thinking reading the part of the discussion here about IA being too big or important to fail.. Important to who, to which type of society and social order.. In a post truth antagonistic tribal world, archives are not important to society

the roman catholics burned it so to make their mythical &quot;jesus&quot; figure stick.with the info destroyed in that fire we became &#x27;disconnected&#x27; from the real historical jesus; thereby enabling the rise of the mythical figure tweaked to allow easier control of the masses. &quot;what would jesus do?&quot;

It is few people and their passionate thankless decades of unpaid labour that we all heavily rely on.

I appreciate the metaphor with the Library of Alexandria, but TIL that it may not have burned catastrophically and may have been rebuilt after: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Library_of_Alexandria" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Library_of_Alexandria</a>“Despite the widespread modern belief that the Library of Alexandria was burned once and cataclysmically destroyed, the Library actually declined gradually over the course of several centuries. This decline began with the purging of intellectuals from Alexandria in 145 BC during the reign of Ptolemy VIII Physcon, which resulted in Aristarchus of Samothrace, the head librarian, resigning from his position and exiling himself to Cyprus...The Library, or part of its collection, was accidentally burned by Julius Caesar during his civil war in 48 BC, but it is unclear how much was actually destroyed and it seems to have either survived or been rebuilt shortly thereafter; the geographer Strabo mentions having visited the Mouseion in around 20 BC and the prodigious scholarly output of Didymus Chalcenterus in Alexandria from this period indicates that he had access to at least some of the Library&#x27;s resources.”

The revenue on Wikipedia was from 2019, when for some reason they got double their usual revenue, so I may have overestimated their cash reserves. Still seems like something they could recover from.&gt;In addition, this opens the gate to additional litigation to any other potential claimant (eg. Warez copyright owners or video copyright owners - there is a lot of pirated material hosted on IA).I don&#x27;t see how. This ruling is specifically about CDL, something the rest of their archived content doesn&#x27;t follow, and all those warez and video copyright holders already have the option to DMCA claim any content on the IA.I do worry this could allow other publishers to sue over past CDL practices.

Their operating expenses in 2020 hit almost $20mil [0] and they only raise around $21mil in donations. In addition they only have $9mil in assets. That means they could potentially shut down if a hardline litigation strategy is persued. In addition, this opens the gate to additional litigation to any other potential claimant (eg. Warez copyright owners or video copyright owners - there is a lot of pirated material hosted on IA).[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.causeiq.com&#x2F;organizations&#x2F;internet-archive,943242767&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.causeiq.com&#x2F;organizations&#x2F;internet-archive,94324...</a>

So if I&#x27;m reading the law[1] right, which I&#x27;m probably not, the damages for the 127 books should be around $3.8 million, with ~$20 million the absolute max? Neither of those amounts seem high enough to destroy the IA.[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.law.cornell.edu&#x2F;uscode&#x2F;text&#x2F;17&#x2F;504" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.law.cornell.edu&#x2F;uscode&#x2F;text&#x2F;17&#x2F;504</a>

Filecoin &amp; siaskynet have not been reliabile to me

Could they mirror it to Filecoin or Arweave?

Nearly every large service that allows user uploads contains a lot of copyrighted content, hence DMCA safe harbor. IA seems to operate in a gray area with stuff like the Console Living Room (which doesn&#x27;t allow downloads), but as far as I&#x27;ve heard they are responsive to valid DMCA notifications. A lot of supposed &quot;DMCA notifications&quot; are bullshit, though (don&#x27;t contain the required elements, not sent to the registered DMCA agent).

It contains a lot of copyrighted content, especially ebooks and software. This could be avoided if they would just follow the rules like everyone else.

I bet some folks from datahoarding subreddit have at least a few copies of the Internet Archive.

So they were foolish and now we&#x27;re here. But I hope we can all agree that IA still needs saving, and losing it is a disaster for all real people.

&gt; We need a new internetI totally agree.

We need a new internet archive archive just to stay safe is what I&#x27;m hearing.

&gt; Hatchette v. Internet ArchiveFreudian typo...

Does the IA own hardware? If so, I would guess the court could force the sale or transfer of those assets. In another comment somebody posted that the maximum damages could be something like $20 million which seems survivable.

Is there any chance this we would loose the Way Back Machine or the Live Music Archive because of this?

I’d argue that copyright and intellectual property more broadly shouldn’t exist.That wouldn’t lead to the end of culture but a cultural explosion as people became able to remix and propagate ideas more freely without the fear of punishment for violating artificial state-enforced monopolies.No one is obligated to create a work and no one is obligated to share their created works with others. There’s no inherent right to anything once you put an idea out there and the legal constructs are just novel artificial ways to keep the have-nots from competing with the haves.Culture existed well before notions of intellectual property and if anything today we have far better means of both producing works ourselves and collectively funding works that might not exist without compensation.Rewarding the top 0.0001% of lucky creators with huge compensation isn’t worth the broad societal damage that is done by preventing people from sharing or making use of ideas.

Fair arguments, thanks for the thoughts. I think all of it needs to be taken in the context that &quot;helping&quot; creators is a secondary goal in service to the prime goal of maximizing creative output overall.That said, I&#x27;m sympathetic to creators; I&#x27;ve written several (unpublished) novels myself.Most novels don&#x27;t support the authors that write them. There&#x27;s no argument to be made that Jane Doe&#x27;s 20,000th-ranked novel makes her nothing in the third year instead of three dollars.At the other end of the scale you have George R.R. Martin. I&#x27;m sure he would be fine with or without the revenue from HBO&#x27;s GoT. That said, in that particular case I think it&#x27;s likely that HBO would want his blessing in any case -- especially since he hadn&#x27;t written the ending yet. Without his cooperation, would people have been as likely to watch knowing the ending was made up by someone else?So then you have the mid-tier authors -- a misnomer since really you&#x27;re talking about the 99.9th percentile, where GRRM is the 99.9999th. But in any case, I still think that the vast majority of the revenue from a novel generally comes in the first 2-3 years. If losing that last, let&#x27;s say 5%, makes the difference between success and starvation, that seems like a rare case to me -- even for authors who write slowly.As for retirement, I&#x27;m not sure how to answer except to say let&#x27;s pick an author who is clearly self-supporting, but not GRRM: Piers Anthony. He&#x27;s still cranking out Xanth novels (last I checked). Do you suppose sales from his Battle Circle books (published in the &#x27;60s and &#x27;70s) are contributing materially to his retirement? Ha, I just checked and he&#x27;s up to 45 books in the Xanth series. :-)

For what it is worth, Cory Doctorow used to license his books with Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs. You can even find direct and free downloads to his books on his website [1]. At the same time, his publishers were selling hardcopies.Unfortunately, at some point he stopped doing it. He explains&gt; There is also the fact that, in the time since Creative Commons licenses were negotiated, publishers have entered into agreements with the large ebook retailers that allow for price matching. This is in part an artifact of anti-trust litigation, but it means that if someone somewhere offers the book at $0, it technically allows all of the other ebook stores to offer the book at $0 as well.&gt; Thus far my publishers have been good about grandfathering in the CC-licensed books that I already had, but for the last couple of books I haven’t done CC licensing, in part because of the real fear that Amazon could set the price at $0 and there would be no recourse for my publishers—not even the recourse of not letting Amazon sell the book, because of deals ensuring that if Amazon sells one book of a publisher’s, they have to sell the whole catalog.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;craphound.com&#x2F;pc&#x2F;download&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;craphound.com&#x2F;pc&#x2F;download&#x2F;</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.authorsalliance.org&#x2F;2017&#x2F;05&#x2F;09&#x2F;a-good-guy-offering-a-good-product-at-a-fair-price-cory-doctorow-on-fair-trade-e-books-publishing-copyright-and-the-optimism-of-disaster&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.authorsalliance.org&#x2F;2017&#x2F;05&#x2F;09&#x2F;a-good-guy-offeri...</a>

Let them maintain copyright for longer, then, so long as they&#x27;re willing to pay property taxes on it.

really good cultural artifacts are not created by people trying to make money.when cultural creations are prompted by a profit motive, we get &quot;masterpieces&quot; like the rings of power.

I don&#x27;t think I agree with this. Novels can take years to write, and to have their copyright expire after only a few years may not be enough for the author to write another book. What would be the motivation to write a series if the series isn&#x27;t worth printing after only a few books? It goes doubly if the novel might be up for a movie or a TV adaptation: the game of thrones tv adaptation didn&#x27;t happen until much later after the first book... does this mean George R R Martin should be paid 0 while HBO makes a killing on the first few seasons? How would any artist retire ever if they cannot make money off their existing body of work?

Currently the copyright term in the US is life-of-author plus 70 (edit: corrected from 90) years. Life of author has some reasonable basis. Past death it&#x27;s understandable that descendants would want the estate to be worth something, if an author was unable to capitalize upon their work in their lifetime, but supporting an author&#x27;s family for 3 generations is ridiculous.There isn&#x27;t a political solution to this. Because the US has a territorial electoral system, no politician is ever going to be representing a constituency who will care about the diminution of copyright terms as their primary issue, and building a legislative coalition to advance a nebulous public interest is hard, massively more so when countered by politicians who are bankrolled by large concentrations of capital.In this country, any attempt to advance the current and future public interest over private gain is loudly denounced as tyranny by people who are awash in wealth and power. Those who try to undermine the foundations of capital from below are denounced as thieves and terrorists. That&#x27;s why you get an endless ratchet effect.

Another approach that may be less at risk of the vicissitudes of legal trajectory on the copyright issue is a mass-scale decentralized archive: in other words, a democratization of archiving.One &quot;organized&quot; way to do it would be to have &quot;Internet Archive&quot; run a SETI-at-home type of daemon on your computer to use a bit of idle time and disk to store blocks (obviously there&#x27;s a rich literature of decentralized file sharing which I&#x27;m not apprentice to and so please be suspicious of my suggestions as the &quot;best&quot; method~~but you get the idea).A &quot;disorganized&quot; way could be to have a &quot;federation&quot; of personal archives, comprised by tools like SingleFile^0, ArchiveBox^1, and my own DiskerNet^2 -- which all in various ways make it possible for you to save web content to your own device, and. It can be then shared with others.I think in general, aside from any legal perturbations, one should not as a general rule rely on such a single point of failure for something (to some at least) so critical. Probably humanity (or at least netizenry) needs to embrace some form (or mish-mash of various forms) of truly dcentralized archiving.^0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gildas-lormeau&#x2F;SingleFile">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gildas-lormeau&#x2F;SingleFile</a>^1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ArchiveBox&#x2F;ArchiveBox">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ArchiveBox&#x2F;ArchiveBox</a>^2: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dosyago&#x2F;DiskerNet">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dosyago&#x2F;DiskerNet</a>

Copyright law needs to change.Back in the day, a copyright measured in decades made sense, because it took that long to promote and distribute a work and derive reasonable profit from it.Today that process takes days, maybe months (apart from the rare work that languishes, only to be &quot;discovered&quot; later).Copyright should be much shorter -- a couple years at most -- with renewal available if the creator really believes the work has yet to find its audience.The standard for abandoned works still protected under the existing system should default against the (potential) holder of the original copyright as long as a good-faith effort was made to reach them, and damages should amount to some sort of split of the profits.

I don&#x27;t think they do that because they might get sued. I think they do it because they might get canceled.

Amazing how reckless IA is with their library program while at the same time being extremely cautions with Wayback Archive to the point of retroactively applying robots.txt and removing website archives because &quot;they can&#x27;t afford even the smallest risk of being sued&quot;.

I recently (in the last 2 weeks) used Wayback Machine to miraculously restore an old static site where the backups had also been lost.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;alessandropellegrini&#x2F;WebsiteRecovery">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;alessandropellegrini&#x2F;WebsiteRecovery</a>

I&#x27;m surprised there isn&#x27;t a paid alternative to Wayback Machine. I&#x27;d pay for fewer 5xx errors (which are often rate limiting, I.E. &quot;You clicked more than 10 times in 10 minutes, that&#x27;s WAY TOO FAST bro&quot;)

&gt; Someone needs to start a competing Internet Archive, which only archives, you know, THE INTERNETAnd a faster, more reliable (in terms of percentage of 5XX responses) one would be nice. Right now Wayback Machine performance leaves a lot to be desired. I end up using archive.is whenever possible.Yes, I donate to Internet Archive, don’t chastise me.

Someone needs to start a competing Internet Archive, which only archives, you know, THE INTERNET, and not xbox games, warez, movies, music, books, etc.The overreach at IA is much bigger than it looks on the surface. Go look at the things people are uploading there.

If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed