Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
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Circumstances around the COVID-19 lockdowns have been very unusual. If you consider the hundreds of millions (+?) of books in libraries around the world that were temporarily inaccessible to people, including children and students, I feel the IA's actions were somewhat justified, perhaps not legally, but at least morally. Young people losing months worth of time that could have been spent reading and learning constitutes an emergency in my mind, and the IA stepped up to help lessen the societal damages.
You could consider that because these many millions of book licenses were temporarily "invalidated" by circumstance, the Internet Archive simply rebalanced the scales by providing the same people who would have been deprived of books at their local/school library a similar means to access them. Such a scenario probably never even crossed the mind of anyone involved in IP law before COVID-19, but if it had there might be some provisions on the books for cases like this.
On another note, I would actually expect publishers' sales to increase during the lockdowns for the above reasons of books being held in purgatory at libraries. That publishers should profit from a global crisis in this way seems wrong.
Again, none of this is to say that the Internet Archive's actions were legally justified, but I think to equate them to pure piracy is ignoring the nuance and context of this extraordinary situation.
I desperately hope the publishers drop the suit and come to an agreement with the IA that doesn't result in the loss of this treasure trove of knowledge or the end of the organization.
IA's decision was apparently done with good intentions and under extraordinary circumstances. The "open sharing" was not meant to be permanent, and anyway has been discontinued. IA never sold the content for profit so any "harm" should be similarly limited.
Publishers would generate nothing but good karma by dropping their lawsuit. As an author it is more valuable to me to know my words and ideas are being preserved so they can be read and absorbed by future generations. Trying to extract every last dollar from such works undermines the pursuit of knowledge and human potential.
Whoever thought this was a good idea should own up to it and step down, this was a dumb move if there ever was one and risking one of the prime - and very fragile - properties on the web like this was highly irresponsible. Keep in mind that IA already has plenty of enemies who are continuously monitoring it and hoping to find a way to shut them down, then hand them this sort of thing on a golden platter. Beyond stupid, really.
They’re a DRM encumbered pile of JPEGs. The ebooks available at a local library via OverDrive are Kindle ebooks with all the searching and bookmarking enabled.
I've contributed heavily to IA in the past and would never stick up for traditional publishing in a fight like this one. But turning themselves into a modern-day Pirate Bay was a suicidal tactic on their part. I can only hope they're playing some kind of long game that outsiders can't yet appreciate.
The only guess I can make is that there are people with power at the IA that fail to appreciate the value of the unique services the organization provides, and would rather be running a traditional library instead. Once the dust has settled, I would be interested in reading an account of how this happened.
If they somehow prevail on that aspect and set a legal precedent there, that would resolve a lot of issues for a lot of companies.
For example, Netflix could stream every movie ever, as long as they bought enough DVDs for peak demand. Or those companies that would set up 1000 TV antennas in a datacenter and then stream the signal.
I just hope the IA doesn't get CDL shot down because of this and ruin it for everyone.
I believe Aereo tried just that and failed - https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/06/25/325488386...
The Supreme Court ruling is here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/13pdf/13-461_l537.pdf
They had a product that involved giving away other people's stuff. Yes, copyright terms are too long. But I'm pretty sure that a vanishingly small amount of that stuff they were giving away would be out of copyright even with a copyright term of 20 years.
So no, I would not be annoyed. Intellectual property restrictions increase the cost of everything and stand in the way of providing a better world for all.
Intellectual property restrictions raise costs and keep people poor. 3D printers were $50,000+ until the patents expired, and now you can get a decent printer for $300. And books of course could be distributed for free. Every person on earth could be born in to great wealth if we simply allowed it.
Of course I do not advocate that we take income from hard working artists. Instead I advocate for a world where we make living so cheap that artists need little in the way of income for survival. Reducing intellectual property restrictions is one important factor in lowering the cost of living for all, and would make it easier for billions to benefit from the technologies people like me in the USA enjoy.
Supporting copyright means supporting the idea that we do not build a comprehensive library of all books accessible to all people. In contrast to the idea that every child born on earth should have access to a complete library of the written word, intellectual property advocates push for the impoverishment of the billions on earth who cannot pay tithing to book publishers and movie studios. It's quite the bold position to take.
May your works act as a seed to a tree whose shade you may one day enjoy.
Your suggestion that we outlaw business is clearly meant to be inflammatory, but it's unnecessary. Businesses like Prusa seem to be just fine without using IP restrictions.
> Why would a dr want to work on a solution for cancer instead of just treating people if the value gain is the same?
I would put it to you that you've misunderstood why people do things that they do. I am making a 3D printable off road robot and associated computer vision stack completely open source because I want to. It feels good to make something I think others will benefit from. I am able to cover my material needs with part time work, and I put a huge amount of effort in to my computer vision research so I can help contribute to solving tough robotics problems. The endeavor has cost me thousands of dollars in supplies and truly hundreds of hours of my own time. But it's worth doing.
You mentioned a desire to "protect your work". Well your work is not under attack when someone observes what you've done and reproduces it. Your work is still there, it's fine. But to advocate for IP restrictions is to say that you think I should collaborate with you to stop anyone else from copying your work. And I think that's a bad idea. Closed source technology is a big unchanging black box that stops up the works. We can make the cost of living dramatically cheaper for all people on Earth, but not with thousands of little black boxes everywhere. Imagine a huge open source software project that relies on a bunch of closed source modules. Developing improvements would be a pain. Why should we tolerate the same for the very means of reproduction of our society?
I’m aware what you do on your Github, I looked it up. Interestingly I have many more public/oss repos than you.
You have failed to address the point and gave one example of a company based around 3d printers. I challenge you to think about this across all industries and how a company making something of great value can protect this thing so another company cannot just take it and get all the research for free.
Further I put it to you that YOU don’t understand why people do what they do. Most of us enjoy an intelectual challenge but that is not all we enjoy.
I gave you a perfectly fine example of a company that works even in the current climate without needing such restrictions on competition. I believe it would work the same with washing machines and automobiles and farming equipment. Can you tell me why it would work for 3D printers and not washing machines?
Of course huge adjustments would need to be made. But we would find a balance.
You mentioned curing cancer. Why did the inventor of human made insulin sell the rights for $1? Because he wanted all to have access. It is only intellectual property that has made the price so high many are dying in America because of it. Is that the world you would prefer?
My actual software contributions are smaller, though I did design an arduino compatible frequency hopping wireless networking library and associated open licensed hardware designs, some of which is under my failed company's github account.
My computer vision stack is under development and I don't have much on github at the moment. But the point was not that I am so great for making a bunch of open source contributions. The question (which someone else asked) was whether I would open source my own code. The answer is yes.
I am also the lead engineer on a farming robot, which has lots of software I wrote myself. I am pushing hard for us to become a non profit and release all of our IP with an unrestricted license. So yes to the other commenter's question, I am very willing to follow my words with actions.
If Aereo was in the wrong than the cable industry probably should never have existed.
Aereo lost their case at the SCOTUS level. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo
IANAL, but I have trouble believing that the number of antennas matters. (And I assume Aereo tried every workaround they could think of. Although I believe there's another case at the moment with another organization trying a non-profit loophole.)
But, yes, at the moment it seems as if the IA has let the genie out of the bottle and may well force a ruling on something that the publishers were willing to let slide given the limited impact.
If they simply streamed the undecoded TV signals to their customers, they would have been fine. The Supreme Court decision constantly compared the Aereo service to previously litigated cases involving "antenna on top of hill really far from house as a service" (deemed to be legal).
Though CDL would seem (IANAL) to be more analogous to the DVR in that it's transforming the original product in some manner rather than just boosting a signal.
ADDED: Would it actually be fine to stream an OTA channel? I don't actually know. I'm not sure it would be a business model for anyone but would that be considered a public performance?
The answer is no, and that's why Aereo lost their case.
It is important to note that Aereo lost their case under a specific carve-out for broadcast transmission. Back in the 70s there were a few cases around CATV operators doing the exact same thing Aereo did. The end result was a series of regulations that made rebroadcasting in the fashion you describe an act that required licensing from the original broadcaster.
This is also why the Slingbox back in the day survived legal challenges (if there even were any.) The Customer had to have their own physical hardware at the location receiving the signals.
So could areo sell the physical hardware to the customer and then buy it back at the end of the billing cycle?
Those cases were Fortnightly and Teleprompter and were overturned by Congress in 1976. If those cases were litigated again today the the CATV providers would have been shut down.
No they didn't! In fact the opinion specifically calls out that the technical details of how Aereo transmitted the work didn't matter one way or another.
> If they simply streamed the undecoded TV signals to their customers, they would have been fine.
It would not have. After the cable companies won their case about the antenna on a hill Congress amended the Copyright Act to make it illegal.
The main reason for the original cable companies to pay is a loophole about 'distribution' because they're taking one antenna and boosting+splitting the result. Having separate antennas is a way to remove a loophole, IMO.
Nothing about splitting or saving to disk or private copies or dedicated lines -- nothing about how the work is reproduced and transmitted mattered at all. You can't technical jiu-jitsu around a very human court.
An interesting work around might be leasing physical shelf space, playback hardware, and then having someone physically move the disks. But I seriously doubt that would work.
It is metered, you can lend max 5 book for max of 1 month.
>Note also that physical books face physical wear and usually have to be retired after 25–40 (at most) lends
Is that something positive? Should we go back to DVD because publishers would love that, or is streaming still ok?
I live in San Francisco, whose library participates in a digital ebook lending program through Libby. They have a certain number of copies of each ebook available, and allow each copy to be checked out by one person at a time. As a consequence, i've had to wait 7 or 8 weeks for popular books to become available, something which works the same way as physical books at the library. The library buys or is given a copy of a book (whether physical or digital) and then can loan out that copy of the book.
Notably, this is how IA's lending program worked BEFORE the pandemic. They just decided unilaterally to change it to loan out unlimited copies of books. It is this change that the lawsuit is about.
While that endeavor certainly has value, the risks - exactly these risks - are so large & obvious that it really should have been done as a separate corporate organization. That is what the corporate structure is for - to separate liability.
Now, the entire, and very valuable, core mission is threatened by this one project.
>Four major book publishers have responded by suing the Internet Archive. If successful, they could bankrupt the nonprofit.
>The publishers take issue not only with the National Emergency Library, but with the Internet Archive as a whole.
The Internet Archive is broadly improving on the library concept by leveraging their technology to push for innovation in intersecting areas of law and culture that are far from settled. While traveling this course, they have made day-to-day life and future prospects better for ordinary people who lack a voice in this domain in the first place. For this bold approach among other things they have what meager donation money I can give.
It’s easy to sympathise with the motivation behind the decision, but really their decision was to summarily strip people of their rights, and the payoff for their hard work. It wasn’t a noble decision, because they didn’t own what they were giving away, and an attempt to rationalize the deprivation it contributed to is really just sad. It was truly a monumentally stupid decision on their part, and they’ve jeopardized their entire mission because of it.
Copyright does not have the moral high ground either. The fact is most books should already have entered the public domain. However, the public was cheated out of its rights due to ever increasing copyright durations. Why should authors and publishers retain monopoly rights to works for over a hundred years? It should be a few years at most and that's being exceptionally generous.
There's absolutely nothing moral about copyright. When properly constrained to a reasonable duration, it could be considered a necessary evil at best. In its current form, it is equivalent to rent seeking and should be straight up abolished.
Whether or not you think the existing copyright laws have exceeded their purpose is a completely different discussion, and one that is not at all related to this particular topic at all. Because the Internet Archive did not only violate copyright for content benefiting from whatever your opinion of excessive copyright is, they violated it for all the content they had.
I would agree that copyright has many problems. But "rule of law" also matters.
Perhaps more importantly, the Internet Archive has chosen to take actions that are likely illegal, and do that in ways that threaten its very existence. Any court in the world might rule against the IA with a financial punishment that would permanently shut it down AND hand all its resources to its enemies. And those rules will be enforced by trained policemen with guns, tear gas, and bulletproof vests.
The IA is very important, and in general I really like the IA. The Wayback machine is a critical resource today. The IA's decision to risk the existence of itself and all its archives, by taking this step, was extremely unwise. I'm disappointed in the IA, I expected smarter decisions.
I hope they get some excellent lawyers that might salvage them so they can at least exist in some form. Right now, the IA and all it archived is at risk of being destroyed, with nothing good to come from it. If they stay in existence, I hope that they get some good lawyers to keep them away from such horrendously bad legal decisions in the future.
However, whatever you think of such an idea, the people who created the content in question did so under conditions where the state had offered them copyright protection. To remove that protection from people who have already invested their time and money into creating content under those conditions, is simply to defraud them of that time and money, which for a lot of people could amount to their lives work.
No. Laws can change unilaterally and society does not owe them anything. If they created something today and the law changed tomorrow thereby destroying the economic value of their investment, too bad. That's life.
Copyright and its practically infinite duration defrauds the public out of works that by any reasonable estimate should already be in the public domain. Did Disney worry about that before spending its intellectual property profits on lobbyists in order to get the government to extend the duration of copyright? No. These creators and companies have already made an obscene amount of money, many times over their initial investment. Are we supposed to feel guilty about "defrauding" this industry by changing the laws that enable it?
> Whether or not you think the existing copyright laws have exceeded their purpose is a completely different discussion, and one that is not at all related to this particular topic at all. Because the Internet Archive did not only violate copyright for content benefiting from whatever your opinion of excessive copyright is, they violated it for all the content they had.
> No. Laws can change unilaterally and society does not owe them anything.
Technically this is correct. The state is generally able to set whatever laws it likes. It was be a bit difficult in the USA as copyright is enshrined in the constitution. But there are examples in history of governments stripping all sorts of property rights from their citizens. It tends to go quite poorly though, for many reasons, but at least in part because people in that situation tend to view the government as stealing from them.
If the government sets the law in such a way that people who do X will be entitled to Y, then people who did X would be rightly upset if the government summarily decided they were no longer entitled to Y. The only thing that would seperate such a scenario from legally actionable fraud is sovereign immunity.
Most of the anti-copyright comments I’ve seen in this tread seem to really just be thinly veiled anti-private-property comments. So why not just come out and state your case if that’s what you’re getting at?
People being upset isn't a reason to remove a rule.
No, it's not. Like letters of marque and reprisal, copyright is something Congress is authorized to grant in the Constitution, but, also like letters of marque and reprisal, it's not something the Constitution gives anyone a right to expect Congress will grant them.
Also, the objection downthread about you posting repetitively is not without a point. Please don't do that; it's bad for curious conversation, and it lowers the signal/noise ratio of the thread.
The publishers response to doing this was completely predictable. Maybe the leadership needs more diversity of background. Having someone who has been in the publishing business in that meeting when this was deemed a good idea maybe could have prevented this disaster.
It is a bit surprising that a non-profit dedicated to archiving knowledge doesn't have more experience with IP law. Not even lawyer-level, just enough to know when CC general counsel.
https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files...
> The complaint had alleged that “Spotify brazenly disregards United States Copyright law and has committed willful, ongoing copyright infringement,” it said.
Note that I'm not saying Spotify did anything wrong in this case, but it does show two things.
1. Big companies can manipulate the system better than nonprofits or individuals.
2. Publishers sue to exploit the unreasonable monopoly the law gives them.
IIRC, the problem was that Spotify didn't know who to pay because there isn't a list of song to song writer, unlike song to label. Apple Music had the same problem.
I wouldn't mind hosting a NAS in my closet and some bandwidth + storage to donate to the IA.
I also think cloud providers - all of them - have the capacity to host backups of the IA; I'd prefer if companies like Amazon, Google would donate their storage and bandwidth capacity to the IA instead of just money.
The Pirate Bay is all magnet links. A model to be considered.
A solution should be one where whoever hosts the data can't pick which pieces they want to host. Otherwise content that's not popular will disappear.
https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE....
and
Torrents also seem like a perfect way to donate bandwidth and storage, and the IA already uses those.
The only problem with these approaches or generally any distributed file store is that someone will have to share a copy, so you'll mostly be donating bandwidth by storing a redundant copy of data that they likely have to store themselves as well to guarantee accessibility.
And digital downloading is a communication framework, developed by technology experts, where an unlimited number of readers can read the same digital library book at the same time.
Or more soberingly, any one of the world's millions of multi-millionaires could write a single cheque to back up all their info, but will anyone do so? Probably not, as collective resources and knowledge are of no benefit to them, indeed even detrimental.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/h02jl4/lets_sa...
Why? I should be able to donate book to the library. Is it possible with eBook?
Why must we come up with increasingly complicated ways to hide the fact unlimited copies are available? The right thing to do is to abolish copyright. It's time to stop pretending copyright makes sense in the 21st century.
Copying a video file is free too but I'm sure you wouldn't argue that anyone can watch a movie for free just because someone else made it. People have a right to own and control the distribution of their works that they invested in creating.
It's also perfectly reasonable to distribute that information widely and without limits. The fact information is valuable to someone doesn't make it scarce. The harsh reality that creators need to face is that only the first copy need be paid for.
> I'm sure you wouldn't argue that anyone can watch a movie for free just because someone else made it
I would. Instead of charging money for copies of a movie, film makers need to figure out how to get paid before the movie is made. Creation must act like an investment, not a product. Maybe the answer is crowdfunding? Whatever it is, it needs to pay the creators before they start working so that the final result can be released into the public domain immediately.
> People have a right to own and control the distribution of their works that they invested in creating.
That's nothing but an illusion. Once the information is out there, it can no longer be controlled. People will copy it, distribute it, edit it, create derivative works, memes... And there's next to nothing creators can do to stop it. The work becomes part of mankind's culture. People infringe copyright every day without even realizing it.
"Creators have the right to control..." sounds like a neat idea on paper but it completely breaks down when put into practice. When authors try to "exercise control over their content", we end up with websites which disable right click and create annoying pop ups when we try to copy paste. It's completely ineffective and serves only to annoy people.
The only way to control information is to control all the computers that process it. Currently, it's impossible but not for lack of trying. In order to prevent infringement, the copyright industry is prepared and willing to sacrifice computing freedom: their ultimate goal is to prevent us from running "unauthorized" software. Programs that do subversive things like copy movies or play movies without checking for a valid license first would not be signed by the authorities and the processor would then refuse to execute such code. Therefore, the copyright industry is an existential threat to hackers and the free and open source software community. I'd rather sacrifice the entire copyright industry than computing freedom.
This is exactly how it works today, and then the investors (people who either gave money or time) hope to get their investment back plus some profit through distribution.
Just because you can do something does not give you the right or permission to do so. You can drive all over the road, or ride the train without a ticket, or walk out of the store without paying. But you wouldn't because it's against the law.
As far as crowdfunding, some projects have already taken that route but the results have shown that it doesn't really support the AAA content that consumers demand. If you think you can convince millions of people to pay upfront for content, and enough to outweigh all the free consumers, then I'm sure the industry would be very happy to hear from you.
Because the content wouldn't get created unless they do pay. That's why worthwhile Kickstarter projects tend to reach their funding threshold, even when they're to be released for no added cost.
I don't agree. People should be paid for the work they do, yes, but look at all the crap we've had to put up with for trying to restrict an infinite supply. The right model is to pay people to do work, not to pay them for having done work. Yes, it's hard to transition from one model to the other, but the inability to control copying in the Internet age is a simple fact. Gravity makes flying airplanes hard, too. Deal with it.
How do you pay people to "do work" instead of "done work"? What's that mean exactly?
Your arguments seem to be based on the assumption that content should be free. That's the fundamental issue, and I don't agree. I doubt many creators and producers would either, not without some alternative answer to monetization. Do you have a solution for that?
Actually, most of the UX problems only show up if you did pay. The people who download the content for free get the better product: an unrestricted file that they can use pretty much anywhere. Subscribers taking the legal route are stuck dealing with a bunch of different services, each with its own special blend of UX issues on top of the poor UX from the fragmentation itself.
> Your arguments seem to be based on the assumption that content should be free.
Not content should be free per se but rather content should be freely redistributed. Many people producing new content will still want to be paid for their work, and that's fine. They just need to ensure that they get paid before the content is out in public where anyone can copy it, since they will no longer have a legal monopoly on distribution after that point.
Patreon, Kickstarter, and others offer one model for funding the production of creative works for public distribution. Others would include sponsorship and donations. Open source development is another option which can be applied to more than just software—just look at the various Blender open movie projects[1], all of which are distributed to the public for free and were funded with a combination of donations, sponsorship, and volunteer contributions.
It is like AAA vs indie games - Undertale is incredible (as many AAA games are).
I do not argue against ownership. Just of ability of big money to hide lack of story. It happens that books live in most open (paper) and most close (DRM hardware) variants. Somehow reminds Elsevier and arXiv. I'm glad I don't have to run DRM hardware for software development and this conversation.
I mean can it be that current system is not fair to the customer? We compare ownership with physical object. What if movie is not good? Can I get a refund? File is in perfect condition. Companies spent a lot on advertisement, some products I would consider fraud. Trailers usually the only good parts of the movie. Yet it is aired from every corner.
Part of book store experience is reading. I have a lot of child books, I like them all, we read again and again. When kid grown up he can present them, donate or sell.
In my mind Internet Archive made mistake. Not better than cracking Windows or jailbraking iPhone. These should become niche products, no need to advertise them, better help other communities.
Books should be in a digital format that has at least all of the the properties of a physical good. I agree that if one has a physical (or digital copy) of a work, that there is no-issue renting or temporarily transferring it for as many ownership tokens as you possess.
If the publishers want copy right protection from the government, they must use open formats, unencrypted, non-executable, bits I can copy/sell/rent/etc. If they want to use DRM, they get no copy right protection.
And it run on DRM hardware only...
oh my, we live in the future https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
I've thought about this quite a bit in the past, and I don't think that would really make sense. A well designed digital library system operating under those restrictions would be nearly identical to one which didn't have to adhere to copyright at all. All you'd have to do is build a system which transparently "checks out" materials when the user accesses them and automatically "checks them in" after a minute or two of inactivity, and you'd be able to reduce the number of materials the digital library needs to purchase by a couple orders of magnitude over a traditional library. Add a few more orders of magnitude if they're allowed to tear individual pages out of books or split scenes out of movies and lend those out separately. You could probably put Netflix out of business with only about a hundred physical copies of every popular movie. (Which is practically nothing when you're operating on that scale.)
Publishers could, of course, increase the cost of physical copies of their works by several orders of magnitude to compensate (making them completely unaffordable for consumers in the process), but barring that I think the whole "you can only lend out one digital copy for every physical copy you own" thing would be more of a charade than an actual meaningful restriction over just abolishing copyright.
In some jurisdictions they are even taxed differently. Just to highlight to morose creeping evil that is VAT. Paper book is a necessity. eBook is a luxury. Apparently
I'm not saying libraries shouldn't provide access to all types of books, but they could cut their costs considerably by waiting 6-12 months to stock the hot new book. Then they can use that money to provide other community services.
Because they hold a part of our digital history.
That collection should stand above Copyrights and IP.
Doing a right thing doesn't grant you immunity when you do a wrong thing. And there was no question that what they did was illegal. Many thousands of people told them that the moment they announced they were planning to do it, they didn't even need legal counsel to point that out. They did it anyway.
So here we are now. Progress is hampered by the old farts, the author's guilds, the Enslaviers,(intentional typo on Elsevier) who want us to be in permanent economic thralldom to them. They are mere pebbls in the rivers of progress, so we pay them to go away, or break them up. MIT has the right idea. I wish the Nobel Committee would announce that they will only consider openly published knowledge for future prizes. I wish all governmental other funders of research would mandate open publication. I wish all past published work was declared open NOW!!
A blockchain? Oy, vey.
But apparently the wayback machine itself is only about 2 Petabytes.. so if you don't need the collections perhaps only 125 drives needed, or $12,500.
Unfortunately none of those numbers are really even close to correct (the discussion is always fun, but the folks in r/datahoarder are often not correctly informed. textfiles has more patience for it than I do). It would probably cost around 1.5M in drives, even at reasonable current enterprise volume pricing, to back up the 60+ PB of unique data in the Internet Archive (plus, as someone does note in that thread, the cost of running them -- even if it were a static backup to cold disks, you still need chassis to run them in for the backup process, space and infra for them, electricity, people, &c). I don't know offhand how much space the contents of the Wayback currently take up, but it's definitely an order of magnitude more than that number as well.
What's the wayback machine with and without images? Is it possible that we could distribute the ASCII/Unicode content now?
It may be your target, but I would not be so dismissive of the other data in the Archive. The Software Library, the tens of millions of scanned books, the music, etc etc. On top of that, the raw scrape data driving the Wayback Machine is not currently made available to download from the archive. It's stored in WARC files, which would include both the images and text of all scrapes and would not be trivial to disentangle.
Please, consider making a subscription service for the warc files, let us pay to get access to a query interface. archive.org could raise significant defense funds.
Can you ping me by email?
This is the kind of radical demonstration I expect out of some fly-by-night startup, not a twenty-four year old nonprofit with less annual revenue than the lawyers who're suing them.
As an extremely rough calculation, I've seen figures that it would be about 1.2 million dollars of hard drives. Built into 4U size, 36-drive servers with RAIDZ2 arrays, it could be $8 to $10 million of hardware. And then you need a place to put it and keep it powered up and running, let's say that's a million dollars a year for datacenter space.
That's a tiny amount of money compared to some of the other nonprofit initiatives various billionaires have funded.
Not sure how it works though and IPFS shows red status?
Its right there in the article.
>In March, as the COVID-19 pandemic led to the shutdown of public libraries, the Internet Archive created the National Emergency Library and temporarily suspended book waitlists
Public libraries got shut down, they opened a replacement. Makes perfect sense to me.
Last I checked, there was, I think, 3 public libraries in California that allowed you to get a library card without being present. One of them required verification in some other method (fax? I can't remember), the other two had a second level card that didn't give access to ebooks or other library resources.
I'm not 100% sure that this was in place before COVID-19, but I think it was.
To check out physical books, you have to visit a library in person and upgrade the virtual library card to a physical library card.
NYPL, for instance, suspended address verification for issuing new e-library cards, with the caveat that it was restricted to borrowing ebooks.
You lot realise IP law is supposed to encourage innovation for the good of society right?
Not stifle and opress it.
>Its right there in the article.
The grandparent isn't questioning the motivation for breaking the law, they are asking why the organization would possibly think it's a good idea given the likely consequences.
Q: "Why do you rob banks?" A: "Because that's where the money is."
Q: "Why did you violate that segregation law?"
A: "Because it's immoral and bad for society."
But really that's besides the point. If someone wants to argue the IA should gamble the entire organization on this issue, they should explain why rather than pretending its obvious and "right there in the article".
And they did it in the most blatantly illegal way possible, with a press release that removed any doubt as to whether the infringement was willful. Brilliant!
IA could have, for instance, reached out to local libraries to see if IA could "use" their physical copies for proxies of the digital ones IA was loaning. This would likely have been illegal, but far more palatable, justifiable, and importantly not willful infringement.
And it was a gesture that was not theirs to make. Did they ever consider just asking the publishers for permission? They might actually have gotten it. Companies were quite eager to do things to show they were trying to help back in March and April. But I've looked and found nothing saying they asked, so I'm guessing they didn't. Probably because they thought asking would look bad if they were told "no" and did it anyway.
We are a society of laws passed by representatives, not formed in one's mind on the spot.
But there are things in that response to distinguish IA actions and motives from other bête noires of Copyright law (The Pirate Bay, etc.) That would give IA and their supporters something to work with; intents, outcomes, and the limited nature of IA NEL would (hopefully) harness publishers opportunism in the view of the law.
[1]: https://www.copyright.gov/laws/hearings/Sen-Udall-Response-N...
And they will ask "why did you not put forward a good faith effort to work with publishers?"
Then they will ask "why did you not reach out to any legislators or executives to seek an exemption?"
And IA will have no answer other than "because we are a law unto ourselves".
In this country, laws have a interesting way to bend during national crises. I'll keep my fingers cross for that in this case.
The courts will understand this to effectively be "we are a law unto ourselves". Those determinations are properly made by the mayor, governor, president, or legislative body-- not some random .org.
Whatever special role you or I think it plays in the world has zero bearing on the outcome of this case.
As I said, we'll have to wait and see. I do look forward to it. In the mean time these are the tiny actions I'll be taking in support of IA (1) I double my donations to the IA and match donations of any friends and acquaintances, (2) the four conglomerate publishers are boycotted until further notice.
And remember, the Internet always finds a way, if its short history has taught us anything.
The Archive could have eliminated the two-week loan period by distributing the books without DRM.
There's a long list of national and even worldwide problems I could solve, if only I was allowed to use other people's resources without their permission and was not required to compensate them in any way for that use.
I want to tackle all of those, but they would not get past the "ask a lawyer how much legal trouble it would be" stage, and so I do not actually do them.
Do you have any data on that?
Also note that the publishers' problem is not just the 3 months of waitlist suspension (supposed to offset the closure of physical libraries during the pandemic), but the practice of controlled digital lending of books scanned from physical copies (ie handing out a digital copy for each physical copy you've got sitting on your shelf) without additional royalty payments.
Except requiring the physical book (or single book digital equivalent) controls the pace. If a standard checkout is 2 weeks, and if the book is always checked out, it will still take 4 years to hit 100 lends. And a thousand lends? Close to 40 years.
Be careful to avoid reasoning from an axiom that the way things worked when you grew up was the correct way. It's a pernicious psychological bias we all suffer from.
You over-estimate the lifespan of physical books and the physical stress of lending. 25–40 times is a more likely lifespan for a physical book. With digital lending, there are actually specific contractual limits on the number of lends and the cost per lend which vary based on the publisher. And the average number of lends per library book is probably close to 1.
The actual issue is much more complicated.
Also it would a balance of what was free / what was purchased that would determine the net impact.
1. There actually is other material available from the author to buy. If there isn't, it's simply a loss. 2. If there is other material by the author, you have to assume the reader was not going to read any of the author's material without having access to the free book first. 2. If additional material exists, and the person would have never engaged with the authors work without a free "trial" of their work, less than 100% of people who access the free material will go on to buy additional material. Some because they are uninterested, some because they don't want to or can't purchase it for the same reason they couldn't purchase the original. In the former case, thats a net loss. In the latter, its a wash. 3. Even if there is additional material to buy, and even if the reader only becomes interested in the author's work through the free book, and even if the reader is inspired to go out and buy it after reading it, it only offsets the original lost revenue of the first, free book (assuming they are priced similarly). So its only if a reader is inspired to go out and buy at least 2 more works by the author that they would actually become a net positive for the publisher/author.
Clearly the number of people accessing the free material who would actually be a net positive for the author/publisher is quite small, and the free book in general would almost certainly be a net negative. You can do all the mental gymnastics you want, but at the end of the day, its still theft. People will argue that publishers are all rich and so we shouldn't care, but thats a different argument, and doesn't apply to the majority of authors who don't actually make that much money.
You can argue about the size of this group, but the counter argument would be that there is a valid fear that if it is normalized and allowed to continue, this group will grow larger and larger over time. You can argue by trying to compare this to libraries, but libraries still buy their copies of the book, and checking a book out from a library comes with restrictions that don't exist here. There really isn't a way to spin this where it doesn't result in some amount of lost royalties for the author.
There's plenty of totally reasonable hypotheses for why giving away content can be profitable OR unprofitable, and plenty of real-life examples of both as well. The fact is, with regards to this situation, we don't know, and this conversation shouldn't center around a problem that some people have only hypothesized exists.
IA didn't release copyrighted books for free; at the very least this depends on your definition of "release" and personally after checking out a book I find that I no longer have access after ~2 weeks. This kind of timeline is much more like a library than a bookstore.
I think any smart author who cares about their craft, and knowledge in general, would much rather their publishing representative find a way to moderate and proactively track this new approach than turn the whole thing into a war, making a library--of all things--into the enemy.
Publishers repeatedly asked the IA to stop obviously breaking the law before filing the lawsuit, and were ignored.
IA now has a lot of social leverage thanks to these publishers being about as creative and flexible as a concrete patio.
That's not at all self-evident, indeed quite likely false.
We had a similar discussion here a few times and content/program creators have said they made more money when their product was also available free - people tried it and bought it.
That probably only works for content creators who's stuff is good - publishers still want to sell stuff that's not good but just is packaged as if it were.
People who want free literature will find it, regardless of whether publishers consent.
As a sidenote, game publishers appear to be using a model of giving away an older game when a sequel is due out - it a similar game from the same company. Naturally one might think that this would eat in to potential profits, but I'm assuming they get more users for the new game, or at least profit more overall this way.
There's a difference between making your work free when most work is non-free and making most work free. When things are generally pay-walled, free content can get extra attention at the expense of paid content. When the expectation is that things are free, well, there isn't any more total attention to go around, so all that changes is that content creators stop being able to charge for their work.
More generally, positional goods exist, so you cannot reliably extrapolate from individual interest to group policy goals. When people want a bigger boat than their neighbors, you cannot subsidize boat-buying until everyone has the best boat on the block.
Clearly, we should shut down all the other libraries, too.
We finally have the technology to protect knowledge and culture forever and instead we are trying to invent ways to artificially limit this that could result in important literary works being lost not not mention misused for censorship and suppressing of "unwanted" information.
Not in the US.
https://stevelaube.com/will-libraries-eventually-pay-authors...
In the UK/Ireland, "the author received about 10 cents (U.S.) per use, with a max of $8,500 (U.S.) per year" but "the copyright holder must be a citizen of that country to participate".
IPFS seems ideally suited for two reasons:
- it has decent censorship-resistant properties
- content addressing is ideal for partial backups because individuals can mirror as little (or as much) as they want.
I’m guessing the simplest approach would be to somehow get access to the archive’s database? Is this something they’d be willing to consider?
Leave the books and whatever to pirate torrent sites and just do the Wayback Machine thing.
I’m an executive board member for a much smaller IRL non-profit and could never imagine opening us up to such liabilities. I honestly cannot fathom how this came to pass.
But I see only victims in this conflict. Most authors today don't really eat with golden spoons and to have an organisation that helps them get their fair share of the work they put into the books is certainly necessary in the internet age.
On the other hand the internet archive is an extremely valuable service. I hope some form of agreement can be reached that doesn't end in even more dysfunctional laws or judgments around copyright or the end of business for any participant.
I'm sure that some authors lost some dollars to this program, but is it really all that much? The coverage on the lawsuit doesn't mention how much injury the publishers (and, to a much lesser degree, their authors) have suffered.
As income goes, this is a lottery.
When I do finally finish this thing and try to get it published, I will go though a normal publisher, because I like listening to the advice of people who’ve been though things before: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/03/why-i-d...
Also, no: most authors need day jobs because sales are a generally power-law distributions.
9 fantasy novels, 1 sci-fi novel, 2 history books, 2 TV shows, 1 comic series, 1 day job, 0 sleep
The guy has published 12 books and STILL needs a day job.
Some people on here seem to make one app and kick back for years on the earnings while others churn out one after the other unprofitable software tool.
I myself have written 3 novella, 1 book of short stories, 1 movie, 2 native apps, and 4 web apps. I can't live on the royalties from any of them but I know there are people who do less and get more.
Suddenly you can get your book for free without even the legal or ethical hazards.
https://www.statista.com/topics/3928/reading-habits-in-the-u...
Likewise, unless I misunderstood, they already had a legit lending library system set up, but they broke the rules and made it infinite free copies for everyone.
I hope there is a happy ending to this story, because I like the internet archive, but at the moment it looks like they got their legal advice from the same minds who came up with Freeman Of The Land.
I'm not sure if they are only lending books that aren't for sale, but my understanding is that the overwhelming majority of the books involved are in fact not available for purchase. A book that is only available in DRM-encumbered form is not available at all.
I'm not even arguing that they would lose money.
The plaintiffs here are publishers—you know, the ones who take the vast majority of all profit from all book sales, despite massive increases in scalability over the past century.
If the plaintiffs win this, authors won't see a cent.
The publishers?
The publishers have been out for their blood for a long time, this is essentially handing them a very easy victory. They'll be very lucky if they survive - and so will we.
Assuming it is possible to copy the data I would support an effort to make an off-line backup on the off chance that they get shut down completely and lose access to their assets.
Either way, whoever gets the blame doesn't matter to the outcome. Court rulings don't have to be popular.
That's a lie, unless they are alleging that those print books were stolen, they were bought and paid for. That is how print books work, for the most part?
If IA shuts down it will technically be the courts fining them, but I have trouble pinning blame on the court or the injured party asking for relief. Nor can IA claim ignorance here.
Wouldn't that kill the organisation?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20623177
Archive team: is there a 101 on getting pages? I struggle to archive the things I want because of the JS interface and the generated data. I just want the links to the original GET 's and source files.
Torrents for the lowest level data per domain would be excellent. I would donate (again) to get priority for the ones I am interested in.
Similar experience here, the interface and, worse, the lack of built-in p2p redundancy, even on the gross level, is quite staggering considering that the Archive org has modelled itself around the protection and archival of brittle information.
Really hope the lawsuit swings in their favour but damn there's work to do for them. When they last held a fundraiser because their traffic overwhelmed their servers I had a look at their basic search front page - it came in at a staggering 7-8mb per pageload as compared to under 100kb for most regular search engines?! This frankly makes me unlikely to donate since it seems so mismanaged that one -cannot- throw enough money at that for it to work at scale.
I saw some API to manage ones' own collections but that seems to be only for owners...
The reason this could bankrupt them is mostly because they don't have a lot of money. Their net assets are only a couple million dollars. They have to raise more than that every year just to keep operating.
But it's also because the plaintiffs are vindictive. They know this is about setting a precedent. They don't like the precedent, so they're out for blood. They could have been civilized and only asked for an injunction.
> The reason this could bankrupt them is mostly because they don't have a lot of money. Their net assets are only a couple million dollars. They have to raise more than that every year just to keep operating.
Are you trying to claim that Internet Archive purposely tried to set a precedent, knowing they don't have enough money to actually do it? That sounds like a pretty damning accusation of gross incompetence.
I've looked at the complaint, and I've lived through the Napster trial. It would be one thing if they had a good case and just needed funds to make it through the trial. That's not what's going on here.
When you mix statutory copyright violation with digital technology, you get infinite fines. Any money you donate is going to the book publishers at the end of the day.
Well, at least there's an implicit admission justice is bought by the highest bidder.
It remains to be seen whether this blunder will actually destroy the Internet Archive.
In general, I think the idea that good things have to last forever is overrated. Organizations willing to compromise their values eventually drift away from those values completely, which is worse than simply ceasing to exist--such organizations can linger on and do more harm than good.
That is pretty unambiguous.
[1] https://archive.org/about/
EDIT: The previous version of this post was unnecessarily combative, in response to what may have been a good faith question. Sorry.
It’s not like the Archive doesn’t know what kind of people they are dealing with. They know publishers are out to stop second hand sales, ebook lending, right of resellers to set prices, and a million other things. It’s like expecting the RIAA or the MPAA to settle for an injunction when they have the chance to kill Napster/TPB/IsoTorrent/whatever. If it’s really in order to set a precedent then that’s damn short-sighted.
You're assuming the country being closed is especially relevant. The point is rather that they had physical books and weren't physically lending them out, in which case they should be able to digitally lend them out. If you're not lending more copies than you have, how is that not a reasonable argument?
> typically a single case is hand-picked to serve as the exception to the rule taking great care to make it as palatable, appealing, and free of recriminations as possible and you take that to the courts.
It's a well-loved actual library that only wants to lend out its books, what more do you want?
And if they'd only lent out a single book, would that have gotten them into court? It had to be enough for the plaintiffs to care.
> some other website or organization should gamble their entire existence that isn’t worth as much as the Archive to get this precedent
Why? It has to be a real library. You would rather some other library take the risk, or that nobody ever do it?
> It’s not like the Archive doesn’t know what kind of people they are dealing with.
And that's the point. The people they're dealing with are the bullies and the Archive is supposed to back down? Somebody has to fight the fight.
That's the crux of the problem, though. The Internet Archive originally followed that model making that very argument; that argument hasn't actually been tested in court and the legality of it isn't settled, but publishers were generally looking the other way. But in March, the IA lifted the limit, allowing an unlimited number of people to read the same book on the grounds that closing physical libraries created a national emergency.
And we still haven't heard their response, only what the plaintiffs are claiming.
Not all laws need to be followed.
And just because some people will beleive anything doesnt make this belief any less relevant or important.
Rosa Parks launched a boycott to protest a bus system that was so racist that even the horrific Jim Crow laws weren't enough for bus drivers who kicked off black people (and police officers who arrested them) who had a legal right to their seats.
Other protests broke the law with sit-ins.
I find your understanding of this rather contrived given that your constitution has nothing to do with me.
Your ip laws on the other hand, well, they stretch far and wide around countries that would rather have nothing to do with you.
I would prefer, if youre going to refute my claims, you at least acknowledge them.
Like, the fact ip law had a net benefit to society when they were conceived. But have since been twisted and applied dishonestly.
Can anyone tell me what the real damage would be if we limited copyright terms to one year? And what would be the real benefit to society at large to freely access information?
Your concerns about the effect of America's IP laws is a totally different issue. Your government presumably either believes that IP law is a net benefit today, or else wants something else that america had enough to hold their nose and make a deal. There are some political steps you can take to try to reverse that scenario but I'm afraid IA's actions here have no bearing on that. They can't possibly help you at all.
As to the rest of what you said, does it have merit? I don't know. What I do know is that IA will be worse off after this lawsuit is done.
Actual Libraries buy materials and loan them. I don't think that is what archive.org was doing. I don't think the content owners are being bad guys here.
I found this initiative really irritating, as there are almost certainly better ways to accomplish the objective legally.
I hate that whole thing about requiring people to resign because they made a mistake (if it's genuine); obviously a pattern of mistakes is different. An obvious blunder would also be different, where it was self-evidently wrong and lacked mitigation.
What that tells you is that their board does not place the sustainability and long-term availability of the archive over all other metrics and I think that’s a fundamental issue that can’t be corrected. If growth, popularity, increasing in scope, etc are more important to the archive’s board than the guaranteed existence of the content they’ve curated ten, twenty, or a hundred years from now then they are not worthy protectors of it. The archive’s worth isn’t the data they have today, it’s the fact that they promised to safekeep it for the years to come. If they can’t be trusted to do that and place that over everything else, then they are failing what the whole world has been sharing data and making donations in the name of.
I really want the service provided by IA to continue. Even though I have never used it, I recognize how valuable it is to humanity as a whole. But if the people running organization providing that service are going to jeopardize it like that, then they must take responsibility.
Most non-profits, like almost all organizations, have the primary goal of continuing to exist as an organization, not do whatever charitable ideals they purport to support.
Why isn't file coin done?
So, more like 300,000 people storing 200GB, which is quite a tall order to fill.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/h02jl4/lets_sa...
I'm small-potatoes for a datahoarder, but I could chip in a couple tens of TB to a project like this. If only I knew what button to push to make it do the thing.
Did they just get caught up wanting to do something during virus stuff?
Noted. I'll spend my money elsewhere.
Ad hominem is a logical fallacy where the debaters character is attacked rather than their point addressed. There is no argument being made here on either side.
Argument 1: Since these publishers are suing IA (premise), I find it justified for myself to boycott them (conclusion)
Argument 2: Well, you were not spending money there anyway (conclusion) if you were downloading your books from IA (premise).
Why did I feel that Argument 2 was unsubstantiated and ad hominem? I asked myself, how did the person making Argument 2 know that the OP...
(a) ...has used IA National Emergency Library at all? may be they are just unhappy with these publishers bullying an NGO?
(b) ...has used IA NEM to download books from these particular publishers? may be they are buying everything Penguin publishes, but enjoyed using NEM for reading other books from other publishers?
Assuming things about the characters and actions of the person you are discussing with and making your argument about those rather than the topic of discussion, is a sign of a logical fallacy to me.
Unfortunately, they own so many smaller publishers, that it's very hard to boycott all of their subsidiaries effectively and without harming the small fish.
But I do share your sentiment; I haven't loaned even one single book from IA emergency library and I still stand with them in support against opportunistic greed of these publishers in this case.
No, it would not even be close to that scale.
... 'size' is really not that important. What matters is the content, it's uniqueness and relative importance.
Libraries, even books (let alone literacy) during antiquity were rare and generally unique, remember, this is before the printed press.
The Library at Alexandria was a 'first-order' source of knowledge and wisdom, a place where 'intellectual luminaries' (i.e. big rabbis of the day) would have studied. Possibly every single book represented a unique bit of knowledge, and each one a historical artifact.
Losing the Library at Alexandria would be like losing 15% of all Universities, professors, all of their papers, textbooks, 15% of authors, playwrights, all of their works, 15% of all written history - basically most or all copies of their works, vanished into thin air, for all of time.
If the Library continued to exist in its fullest form, we may very well have much more of our history pieced together.
The Internet Archive is not even a 'second-order' resource. It's nice to have, and useful particularly for some historical reasons, but if it were to evaporate tomorrow, civilization wouldn't skip a beat.
There is no specialized, arcane knowledge there. Parts of the IA are of course really nice to have, particularly the news which forms a kind of historical record. But old copies of 'HomeDepot.com' and 'McDonalds.com' are just not that important.
We don't use the IA as a source of science, physics, fiction, students don't go to the IA to access authors' works or textbooks on orbital physics.
If the contents of IA were seriously valuable, then quite a number of parties would be interested in maintaining it, first of all, the parties being documented (if HomeDepot.com doesn't care about their 2006 web-site, then maybe it's not so important).
I support the IA and I would hope that it was even a kind of government-sponsored agency, but it's not an 'intellectual foundation'.
(Edit: changed from 25% to 15%, it's just a number obviously, but my point being 'it's some material share of the compendium of knowledge')
>'size' is really not that important. [...] each one a historical artifact.
The uniqueness of content in the internet archive is significantly greater by virtue of there simply being more unique knowledge at this point. Knowledge which would be lost (often intentionally) if not for efforts such as the internet archive, or that of the Library at Alexandria.
The library made copies of the knowledge for the original owners rather than having the only copy. making every copy most likely non-unique. The value in its indexing is immense especially when you realize that useful information is only useful within a context where it can be applied and cannot be valued outside of it.
>Losing the Library at Alexandria would be like ...
This did not happen.
>If the Library continued to exist in its fullest form, we may very well have much more of our history [...] orbital physics.
Imagine if a similar effort to archive exists today and in a few thousand years we would be able to use it, this is how I see the internet archive. The archive and efforts like it are used as a first source of knowledge by wikipedia, students, developers, researchers, anyone needing to verify a business existing prior to the investor call. If there was not an archive of the Feynman lectures I would know nothing about orbital physics now, if the current hosts are lost I am very very glad that the internet archive has a copy.
>If the contents of IA [...] important).
Personally I would like to know if homedepot existed 14 years ago if I wanted to do business with them and they claimed so, or if they tried to censor anything (that case of the US government having honeypot sites archives with code comes to mind). Things which would be lost if not for the specific functionality you are mentioning. Also there are many many other efforts, unlike you seem to state (e.g. archive.is, ipfs, the-eye.eu).
Perhaps the most powerful argument: https://web.archive.org/web/*/news.ycombinator.com
edit: I have archived our comments for historical context for anyone studying internet discussion in the year 3020 https://web.archive.org/web/20200611105240/https://news.ycom... https://web.archive.org/web/20200611105414/https://news.ycom...
>>>>>>> the IA is not 'knowledge' it's 'information' and most of it is irrelevant to anything - more importantly: All of the important information in the IA is well documented elsewhere. We don't need the IA for much at all.
2) Losing the Library at Alexandria would be like ... This did not happen.
>>>>>>> Of course it did! Lucio Russo / "Forgotten revolution" argues that a large part of the scientific knowledge of the Hellenistic era was lost.
3) "Personally I would like to know if homedepot existed 14 years ago if I wanted to do business with them and they claimed so, or if they tried to censor anything (that case of the US government having honeypot sites archives with code comes to mind)."
>>>>>>> If that's a good example use case - then you've proven my point because there are exactly 0 people in this world using IA to see if 'some business existed 10 years ago in order that they might do business with them due to concerns of honey potting'.
4) "Imagine if a similar effort to archive exists today and in a few thousand years we would be able to use it, this is how I see the internet archive."
>>>>>> Some contents IA might be a little bit useful to a few historians, but beyond that, it will have no meaning.
The IA could be cut down to 1/1000000 it's size, and still, maintain it's historical relevance.
If the IA were vaporized today, it wouldn't really matter that much, there's nothing in there we need, and the important content is saved elsewhere. The NYT has a great archive.
The internet is mostly noise and babble, most of it is not important at all. Some of it is.
2. Sure, 15% of all academics going poof is the exact same thing as the Library at Alexandria burning down.
3. Those are two separate examples
4. You are replying in a thread about how the internet archive making copies of books and allow people access to those is getting them shut down, would you then argue that the Library at Alexandria is also largely meaningless?
What historians really need is accounts of how regular people went about their business, without a filter applied by the one recording that account. The internet archive is an excellent resource for this, but only if it is preserved.
Previous ages failed to record what was needed to properly understand that age, not because they lacked the capacity to do so, but because they didn’t consider mundane things worth recording.
The Stoics were always going to survive into the 21st century, but the graffiti on walls would tell you a lot more about the politics and culture of the time than one well-off scholar's view. All those long-gone personal sites are the graffiti on the wall, and we have a copy of a lot of it.
I learn a lot about things I was only vaguely aware of in the '90s from random magazine clippings/media people like Jason Scott and Anatoly Shashkin share.
https://twitter.com/dosnostalgic
So much of this is in the Internet Archive. Think of what it means to someone 100 years from now trying to piece together an understanding of this era. How much could you find from just 5-10 years ago without it? Most of those websites are offline, the magazines long gone, the companies absorbed into another with no interest in history.
At this point in time, there have been lots of niche websites and forums and many have shut down. In some cases, those websites housed actual practical knowledge. Example: I drive a Mazdaspeed3. There was a forum dedicated (partly) to that car, and it went down. Now that it's gone, a lot of information on how to work on it is also gone or much more difficult to come by.
http://www.bibalex.org/en/project/details?documentid=283
Mostly because the (New) Library of Alexandria hosts a copy of the Internet Archive.
IMO: most publishers are worthless anyway. I feel bad for authors but it’s hard to sympathize with publishers.
Copyright is a limited exclusive grant in exchange for the expectation of having more works written/created/painted/drawn/designed. We should not just ratchet up the duration or scope of that exclusive grant without the expectation that we'll get more value out of it (more works) in the trade.
As you suggest, a time-based copyright term (such as the original Copyright Act term of 14 years with a single renewal) would preserve this incentive even for authors who expect they might die before the end of the term.
It doesn't take copyright to make a profit off of a work. the Criterion Collection includes Charade, which is out of copyright: https://www.criterion.com/films/603-charade
I'm sure the children of the author can come up with inventive ways of selling the work.
Art takes work. It makes sense to give the artist something concrete that can be sold so the artist has a chance of earning a living. If that right is passed down to the kids, at least the artist has something to pass along, just like other laborers.
Here's a deal: go write a book. If you are overjoyed to see people pirate it, I'll personally buy a copy. But I guarantee that you'll be heartbroken to see people steal.
Have some respect for people who work long and hard.