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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. However, I would expect the EFF to (possibly) be good negotiators. They might be able to make a settlement that keeps the IA's website open while satisfying the publishers - or at least making the lawsuit complicated enough that the publishers won't keep going.

Without this representation, the publishers could almost certainly bankrupt the IA, even if they are given the minimum infringement fine of $200/ea.

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It is possible that this is one outcome that the EFF is hoping for by joining this particular bit of litigation, but I just do not see it working out that well. No one, outside of a small group of techies, knows about or cares about the EFF; having the EFF formally on the IA side is not going to move the needle much in terms of PR. On the other hand, having the EFF on the opposition may galvanize the publishers to not negotiate at all and go for a big win in court just for the sake of chalking up a win against the EFF (who is often supportive of causes and groups that are opposed to the publishers.)

Make no mistake here, the IA _will_ lose this case and the publishers _will_ bankrupt the IA. There are few things that I can say are almost certainly a foregone conclusion, and the IA losing this case is one of them.

In a just world the destruction of the Wayback machine should be a much bigger crime than some copyright violation. Sadly our world is not just, content conglomerates have bought themselves the most draconian laws possible to protect their profits above all other benefits to humanity. They must be stopped!

What prevents them from selling/giving the data of the wayback machine to another curator?

The wayback machine is an asset of the IA. The courts tend to take a dim view of obvious attempts to hide assets from judgements.

In this case, I don't think the "asset" has any monetary value though.

In a just world, the management team that decided to risk the future of the Wayback machine so that they could take advantage of a global pandemic to strike a blow against copyright would go to jail. They must be stopped and prevented from doing more damage to IA!

No good deed goes unpunished.

Why is knowledge artificially limited by all these paywalls and people holding literature and books hostage to their financial interest? What is better a world where a poor kid can read any book ever published or a world where you can only read the books that you can afford. Most technical books are expensive.

When I was a kid I depended on public libraries to learn about computers. I know college students who simply can't afford textbooks, so they pirate them. But that enabled me to find a career that lifted me out of the rural community I grew up in. Now I buy every book I read, on paper, and pay for expensive software.

Digital lending and the National Emergency Library would never have appealed to me. It doesn't reduce sales of books, because those who can buy, will. I'd much rather support the author and have a physical artifact in my hands than an inconvenient digital scan. But for anyone not in that position, the NEL could be a lifesaver to ride out the pandemic.

IA made the right call morally and ethically. It's only the parasites of society who would tear them down for helping disadvantaged people out during an unprecedented planet-wide crisis, because their actions help the disadvantaged without harming the market potential of authors.

> the publishers could almost certainly bankrupt the IA

They do that and they will find themselves with a Napster/sci-hub problem.

If it weren't so destructive, the chronic inability of legacy industries to learn would be funny.

To note, bankrupting IA doesn't make digital copies of these books go away. It'll just accelerate Library Genesis [1] while burning down a cultural archive.

The Internet Archive needs to be reasonable, as they operate within US jurisdiction. Other projects need not (LibGen, SciHub, etc). If operating outside of the US (and other countries that are a party to the Berne Convention) is required due to publishers continuing to embrace overly restrictive copyright law, that is what will be done by those interested in this sort of work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis ("As of 28 July 2019, Library Genesis claims to have more than 2.4 million non-fiction books, 80 million science magazine articles, 2 million comics files, 2.2 million fiction books, and 0.4 million magazine issues.")

contrast with IA's OpenLibrary corpus (with Controlled Lending):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Library ("In total, the Open Library offers over 1.4 million books for digital lending.")

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