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Comment by Scientificx | Hacker News Reader

> I would love to support the Internet Archive but the people behind it deliberately took steps that were guaranteed to bankrupt them once the publishers filed their (inevitable) lawsuit. Why would I support an organization that is determined to commit suicide?

Because they hold a part of our digital history.

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That's a tricky precedent to set though, isn't it? If you do sufficiently good work elsewhere in your organization, you can break the law without penalty? That's like McDonalds claiming that they should be allowed to mistreat their workers because they also run a children's charity.

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.

Rather, if you do sufficiently good work in the process of breaking the law (as the IA has done here), you should be able to break that law without penalty.

So... If I smash in the windows of a Nike shop, steal all the shoes, then give them to homeless people, I'm excused? No crime here?

If your doing so somehow has no adverse effect on the shop, sure! That's why copyright infringement is laudable, and stealing is wrong: the latter means the person stolen from no longer has any of the shoes.

You make it sound like this is the tech version of "too big too fail".

Well it's the only place of its kind, it's more like it's too important to allow to be destroyed. Because you know that these copyright holder do not actually care about history or culture. Look what happened to what.cd, they will burn down everything to protect their profits

Maybe someone can buy their assets when they go trough bankruptcy

The fear is that the "someone" will be the selfsame publisher companies.

Why would they want 30 years of archived websites?

To sell them $1 per page?

To prevent others from buying it, causing another lawsuit?

Why would there be another lawsuit? Book publishers dont care about archived websites. They care about IAs side activity of digitizing books and ignoring copyright. I can see them bankrupting the IA to stop their copyright infringement, but I don't think they have an interest is stopping the sale of the archive. They may not even have a legal ability to stop a sale during bankruptcy.

It isn't "tech", it is our collective human history.

Thank you very much! You are so right about that.

That collection should stand above Copyrights and IP.

No, all archive collections should stand above Copyrights and IP.

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