If We Lose the Internet Archive, We're Screwed - Slashdot

Posted by msmash

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  A judge ruled in favor of corporate control of information? SHOCK! OUTRAGE! SHAME!

  Except, it's just another day, another deal. This is what happens when we hand all control over to the people with the most money. It would be shameful, but the United States passed shame by with a rocket booster on her ass decades ago. In fact, I'm pretty sure we lapped shame in the last six years or so, with both middle fingers in the air screaming like Lieutenant Dan hanging onto the mast during the storm on his sailboat. Possibly multiple times.

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  • Re:

    Mod FP Funny under Sad and entire story deserves a "sad, sad, sad" moderation. With "shame" seasoning?

    I increasingly see the Fermi Paradox as a kind of death spiral. I used to believe that there must be a few civilizations that survived the low odds, but I'm losing that hope. The power of stupidity is too great. In a discussion yesterday, I felt reason to cite the old quote attributed to Einstein: "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."

    But if there a

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      In a way the human race is a real race. We're racing greed against stupidity and seeing which one can kill us off first. It's entirely possible they'll decide to be a team and take us out together in the end.

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        Sure would be reassuring if we knew of a single proof-of-concept for long-term survival by "intelligence".

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    In 2020, the IA introduced the National Emergency Library, which made copyrighted books available for free during the COVID-19 pandemic. The publishers behind the lawsuit alleged that this entailed copyright infringement. The judge, who was hostile from the beginning, decided to rule in the publishers' favor.

    If that's all there is to it, the Emergency Library is no different than the Pirate Bay. Is there some key fact that the article is omitting? Just handing out copyrighted materials to everybody and

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    • In 2020, the IA introduced the National Emergency Library, which made copyrighted books available for free during the COVID-19 pandemic. The publishers behind the lawsuit alleged that this entailed copyright infringement. The judge, who was hostile from the beginning, decided to rule in the publishers' favor.

      If that's all there is to it, the Emergency Library is no different than the Pirate Bay. Is there some key fact that the article is omitting? Just handing out copyrighted materials to everybody and saying, 'well, there's Covid19! And we're an "archive", so...??' doesn't see like an actual defense.

      Except first, the emergency library loaned out DRM'd copies of ebooks. They expire, usually within an hour. The thinking behind this was simple - the books exist in real libraries throughout the United States. But because of COVID, those books are inaccessible. This creates an unequal situation because those who can, buy the books, those who can't, are locked out of knowledge. To counter this, the IA simply stopped enforcing the lending limits - they know how many copies were loaned out at any one time, and I'm sure if ti got to brass tacks they could ask all the libraries that were closed at that time how many copies of that book were on the shelf, inaccessible.

      Of course, the publishers didn't want to argue this, so they argued that the IA archiving books and making them available online was illegal.

      It's one of those copyright things where the future is literally in our hands. This case may be a battle you lose in order to win the war - because it suddenly makes the press and people know about it, who can potentially demand changes to copyright. After all, publishers want to loan out ebooks but the rates they charge libraries is rather extortionate and the current laws mean they can do that.

      Given the cost of living right now, perhaps the demand at the library is greater than ever so people might feel more willing to defend their library against greedy publishers.

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        I got e-mail from my local library system this morning. They're indefinitely suspending Sunday hours at four branches at the end of the month. Nobody is willing to work for them, let alone defend their reason for existing. America's library system is doomed to go out with a whimper, and the corporations take all.

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      yeah, well, the real issue is that copyright law doesn't seem like actual justice either, plus is regressive in a broad sense.

      no, my hopes that this case might make a dent in that are zero. so, getting back on topic: yes, we're screwed, but this is just one of multiple reasons.

  • • Re: this is where hollywood democrats lose votes

      Heck, one party offers you Hollywood and the other offers the NRA. Vote wisely.

      • Re: this is where hollywood democrats lose votes

        Hollywood created modern gun culture, and they continue to inspire it. Most people's idea of what the wild west was like is almost completely fiction. The idea that cowboys were lawmen with guns is just as absurd as having today's pizza delivery boys being lawmen with guns.

        Despite being very much pro-second amendment myself, the only country that I think does it (mostly) right is Switzerland.

• When it came to this whole emergency library thing they really seem to be over the handle bars.

  I don't have to like or agree with the law to understand and interpret it, but like everyone else I do have to follow it until it can be changed, so does IA.

  I read a good portion of the decision and frankly its difficult to see how the judge could reached any other conclusion. if you don't like - talk to your CongressCritter! - Seriously do it, our current copyright law is bonkers.

  The head line is also hyperbolic. IA having shut down their emergency library does not impact the Gutenberg project, or the wayback machine. We are talking about literature and software where its the case much of is still in print, likely in the catalog of your local library, and very possible in stock at the bookstore. It isnt as if this is material that will be lost or out of reach of anyone with more than a passing interest.

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  • I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed the author conflating the lending library part of the Internet Archive with the Wayback Machine, Prelinger Archives, etc. that are not part of the lawsuit.

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    Well, you don't ACTUALLY have to follow the laws. If you aren't caught, you don't actually pay any penalty after all. This is especially true in digital space where a copy of something hasn't really deprived anyone of anything tangible. Sure, you potentially cost someone something but you haven't deprived them of something they actually have in their possession.

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      And then there's the Uber model... get the law changed by breaking it.
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  • It's not the only questionable thing IA has done, either. In general, I love what they do but they allow a lot of straight up piracy on their platform too - ISOs of software, full movies that are still under copyright, etc.

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      I don't believe you. Please post links to these items so that I can verify this myself.

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      True, but publishers like Warner are happy to throw content away as a simple tax write-off, leading to the people who put all those hard earned effort into it being more than willing to throw it out there for the pirates. So, I don't know. One side is legally in the wrong, while the other is morally.

  • Re: Generlly a big fan of what IA has done but..

    But doesn't this mean getting sued for damages? That's untenable for a non-profit

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    How does Google books get a pass?

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      Deep pockets & vast influence

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      They didn't "get a pass", what they were doing was ruled fair use.

• We're already screwed. Look at Thomas... payola-meister himself. I've never studied more than a semester of law ("Computers and Law" - how copyright, trademark, and patents impact the IT industry)... I could have written better opinions *for* what he's arguing than he did - and I disagree with almost every one of his opinions. He stretches his reasoning well beyond incredulity.

  I didn't like Scalia's opinions either - but at least they made sense.

  I do NOT believe Thomas when he says that he and his wife's

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    of course you could, you internet warrior you....

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• • Seem more like a right thing to do. Can have all that info contradicting those in power and the bible.
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    • • Re:

        So both groups are idiots.
        Why are people still identifying as Republican or Democrat when they both are the issue.
        Why do we keep electing the same idiots over and over again, hoping something will change.
        
        This is why I gave up voting. Doesn't matter what I do, people will just elect the same idiots. My vote is valueless. I wish I could sell it for $20. I could get a dinner at least.

      • Re:

        The Right is saying adults cannot want to be another gender, the Left is saying 8-year old children can begin irreversible processes to look as if they are another gender.
        The Right is supporting measures to oppress minorities and women, the Left is denying jobs to white men.
        The Right is giving us demented old Trump again, the Left is giving us demented old Biden again ( or Sanders... ).
        
        The tiny, normal, decent center is the only sane part of the world any more.

        • Re:

          The Right is saying adults cannot want to be another gender

          That's a lie. The Right is saying they aren't another gender, regardless of what they want. This is just reality.

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            The problem is that the Right has a very limited knowledge of biology and therefore *thinks* 1. All humans are either "male" or "female" AND 2. There is a good way to determine a human's gender. Right-wingers are like a bunch of idiots living on a planet where the objects most people encounter are either green or red. Since they haven't bothered with any exploration or scientific analysis, they have never seen or even theorized any other color. All their laws are predicated on whether something is green or

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          Score: 3, Flamebait. If that's not an achievement, it should be. Well done.

          • Re:

            "Score: 3, Flamebait. If that's not an achievement, it should be. Well done."
            
            Not there any more, but I will take your word for it. And the achievement badge.
            Thanks!
            
            And I will continue to be a voice in the center, fighting off the loons of Left and Right!

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        One of your statements is true. Who's editing books and pretending the original never existed?

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        Gonna need a citation for that, champ.

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    I think you've confused your left and your right

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      That's the American education system for you.

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      Remind us again which side was coordinating a massive Covid coverup scheme under the guise of "fighting disinformation"?

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        It depending on which day of the week it was. It changed constantly.

      • Re:

        Oh, this ought to be good.

      • Re:

        The most transparent event in history and you claim there was a cover up.

        But why am I taking to you like you're sane...

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        • Re:

          The information surrounding the possibility of a leak of Covid from the Wuhan lab is anything but transparent.

  • Re:

    You can't be serious. I don't know what I'd call myself - maybe an alt-moderate libertarian democratic-socialist somewhat to the left of Bernie on most issues, but this ruling REALLY pisses me off. PLEASE - contact officers of respective companies. You can get email addresses and some phone numbers at rocketreach. I'd suggest starting with just one from each company, though. You only get a few free searches. After that it's something like 49.95/month.

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      Cool spam bro. I'll take 4 rocketreacharounds please.

• • Re:

    Of course you can, if you rely on, or use, said repository.

    Comprehension failure I fancy.

    • Re:

      Okay, I suppose if you hang your entire hat on the idea that one thing persists indefinitely, I'll concede you're screwed. But you were totally screwed anyway, just in general.

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    I bet everyone under the age of 27 would disagree!

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    Internet Archive joins the 27 Club. Film at 11.

• Oh Noes! We'll lose the archives of the Twilight fanfic forums!!! haLP!!!

• Eventually the corporations and government will take over the internet, it is just a matter of time. The only companies allowed to host pirated content will be companies like Google on YouTube.

  • Re:

    They pretty much have it.
    Its just that ISPs make money off of sites like 4chan so those are still around. As soon as that stuff is profitable anymore, gone.
• Years ago in the journal of irreproducible results there was an article foretelling the end of the world. A world in which everyone saves their National Geographic magazines. A world that collapses under the weight

  We have become a very narcissistic people. Every tweet, tik toc, post has to be preserved to perpetuity. Can you image what our world would be like if nothing every went away? Sure, I like most people wish that every doctor who episode was preserved, but take that to the logical extreme and thi

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    I hope I don't. I hope I am one of the first taken out.

• The IA isn't as complete as it makes it out to be.
  Barely anyone cares. I don't. Those who do should already have had a plan in place.
  Remember folks, copyright is whatever the corporation want it to be, regardless of what the law says.

• by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Monday April 10, 2023 @03:36PM (#63439046)

  Seriously, move it to a saner country, it just ain't safe anymore in the USA.

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    The US can seize the domain names.

    Like they did for Z Library.

    No where on the internet is safe from US copyright law.

    • Re:

      Takes 5 minutes before the new domain name becomes public knowledge.

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    Move it to the Smithsonian. Make it part of a new Department of the Internet. It's a perfect start.

• Elon can you launch a backup copy of it into Space? We need the corpus of knowledge from the raw internet. Otherwise the only records of the internet will be elite BS. We need to secure the archive of all that was said on the internet. That includes the slashdot archives. I will will tell your why. I have recently noticed that I said some pretty insightful things like 20+ years ago and there is no way to search the archives. I figure when the internet becomes sentient the AI/SkyNet may need some of that rea

• In fact, I'm hoping the entire Internet goes down for a week or so. The mass confusion and sheer panic from the younger people will be worth it.

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    Then your kids will knock on your door and bother you, just like the "good old days".

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  • • Re:

      Really? You have the same access I have so your collection should pertain to you.

      I make sure I keep up with revisions of stuff so I can use whatever version I may need at the time.

      Books are books. They don't change. When part 2 comes out then I will grab it.

• The job of the judge is to make sure all the rights of people, freedom of speech, religion, association and the second amendments are protected.

  Corporations are people, my friend

  The job of the judge is make sure the right of people to, say fly in private jet flight to a private island and cruise for a fortnight hopping islands, is protected. It is not the Court's responsibility to make sure people have the means to exercise that right

  We will protect right of people to own guns. But if police shoot some

  • Re:

    And therein lies the problem. Can you throw a corporation in jail? No? Then it's not really a person. And when was the last time you saw a corporation executed for having killed flesh-and-blood people? Never? Then I rest my case.

    Job One of reforming Western civilization is to dispense with the made-from-fairy-dust legislative fiction that a corporation is equivalent to a person. Seriously, that shit needs to just die. Its death would make the survival of IA and other knowledge-and-culture-sharing initiative

    • Re:

      Limited liability of corporation, (corpus = body, incorporation= the act of creating a body) has been the law since the mid 1800s.

      By itself this is not a problem.

      But the recent activist radical zealot courts are giving these corporations rights that should never be given to a soul less heart less lifeless "body".

      Corporations should not have first amendment level free speech protections. Corporations should not be able to extend it by calling "money is speech". Corporations should not be able to make

• This lawsuit specifically focuses on the internet archive's choice to scan paper copies of copyrighted works to digital copies and then lend those digital copies out.

  If you have a long memory, there was a company that did the same thing. they'd rip your cd collection and allow others to listen to your CDs. It was deemed a copyright violation, and that precedent hasn't changed.

  I can make an ethical, not legal, argument that the above should be permitted. It is analogous to book sharing. That ethical argument falls apart for IA's "Emergency" library during the pandemic. As part of that program they removed the one-person-at-a-time limit and lent unlimited simultaneous copies of books. I can't defend that. It was a mistake, and that choice gave the publishers a case they could win in court without looking like the bad guys.

  Another ethically marginal practice is partnering with libraries to, based on the ISBNs of books in their collection, allow multiple lending. The justification for this is libraries agree to remove those books from circulation while in practice the books remained in circulation or available as reference works. Again, we're flirting with the one book to one person at a time limit.

  We aren't talking about ancient books here either. The last book in the Lemony Snicket series, a work mentioned in the suit, was published in 2006.

  Opinion:
  TFS conflates the Internet Archive's physical to virtual library work with the wayback machine and other services they provide. IMHO, that's a bit disingenuous at best.

  For what it's worth, I love IA's library efforts. Ebook publishers contracts are so abusive they'd make Faust blush. We need to fix the laws that prevent reasonable digital use of physical materials, a task that requires Congress' assistance. That won't be easy.

• This is Slashdot. Despite the lapse in quality since the halcyon days of CmdrTaco, we're still a resourceful bunch of insensitive clods when we want to be. So who's helming the GeoCities-scale project to mirror the IA's various parts in case the worst should happen? I'll help if I can.
• Musk, Thiel, Bezos, Brin, Gates !
  
  The world needs you to save a large part of our accumulated wisdom!
  
  Okay maybe not Gates.
  Ach, maybe even he's changed.
  But I'm pretty sure Ellison is right now working out how to make more money from the IA shutdown.
  
  Anyway:
  The Internet Archive of Ebooks is estimated ( okay, that was on Reddit, better estimates welcome ) to require one million dollars of hard drive space to store.
  
  Billionaires, have a look in your other jacket pocket, check down the back of the sofas at your mis

• I hate to say this, but perhaps it's time for the IA to start preparing for the worst by moving/copying its archives to something more persistent than a singularly owned data center which can be taken out with a police raid.

  There are technologies which exist now which can help with this:

  IPFS
  Bittorrent
  Blockchains
  Filecoin

  None are a perfect fit for what IA needs a - distributed, free, un-cancelable archive of history - but perhaps some combination of the above could be used? For instance, integrating torrents

  • Re:

    The correct process is to have the content available on multiple independent sites. That is, Internet Archive and Archive of the Internet both have similar content. There's multiple sites for books, and each other type of media. They do risky and independent measures in a staggered fashion, thus one faltering allows the other to maintain the current level of service (until a new team comes up.)

    That's how old pirate sites survived - so many of them. They also died quickly, but another would pop up under a di

• I get having copyright protection, but resources like the IA are needed to fill the digital gaps between copyright protections and market realities. IP owners own huge blocks of copyrights, but it's not profitable for companies to keep literally EVERYTHING they own available online so a majority of works of art are lost forever while those owners sit on them as an asset (or liability) on a balance sheet.

  Study of one case in point: I recently went online to find the Rankin/Bass, animated version of The Retur

• Let me just say at the top, I love the goal of the Internet Archive. I've been to the physical place and had lunch with the staff. I've talked with the CTO about what possibilities there might be for me to work there. I like these people.

  So all that being said, I've probably only found the IA useful about 1% of the time I've looked for things. The search is horrendous in that there's such a glut of search results that are not relevant to my search beyond a shared word that finding anything is really hard.

• The System has screwed us so badly, that this is not America. Our "country" is not remotely close to being recognizable as the greatest and freest nation on Earth.

  When do we stop supporting The System that keeps screwing us?

  When does Atlas shrug and walk away, headed for Galt's Gulch?

  • Re:

    Because Atlas is fictional bullshit and Galt is a MacGuffin all part of a juvenile revenge dream by a clever but sociopath author who had some kind of daddy issue (maybe Freudian?)

    You can't escape from society and especially not the evil people who leverage society to their own ends. They'll find you on your island and then conquer you for whatever they want and you can't stop the collective power they manipulate.

    Giving up is handing power over to others who decide for you; which works as long as they just

• If they get rid of the Internet Archive, there goes essentially half the internet. We will lose terabytes upon terabytes of history, history that can't be found in a museum. All over copyright infringement. It's a dick move, and I hope somebody they fail in every conceivable way of getting rid of the Archive

• We need to preserve the existing archive, yes, but recall that IA employees have started censoring their archive.

  Some dumbass posted something to KiwiFarms last year and IA nuked the whole site from the archive.

  Yeah, they're offensive. But not as much as memory-holing reality.

• It looks like they are already rewriting history. When the fuck did Julius Caesar ever burn down any libraries!? What a rubbish article.

• The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester was serialized in it, and rousing stories like Bright Side Crossing are still thrilling adventures. OK, they're in public domain, which is different, but I still use the archive for books like Level 7.

  https://archive.org/details/ga... [archive.org]

  https://openlibrary.org/books/... [openlibrary.org]

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

• The internet archive is too important to be shutdown, they need to lock a lot of the information away until the copyright expires. The actual contents of the library is too important to lose.