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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

I think this does not mesh well with their mission.

They are the Internet Archive, the archive of freely (in the past) available stuff that can't be found anywhere else, in most cases. This is much more fragile than old books which likely exists in thousands of copies anyway.

I do not admire their stance, and am unhappy that they are recklessly jeopardizing their unique thing to make a case where they have a very big chance to lose, without any circumstances forcing them to do so.

This is not how you serve as a warden of a valuable archive. (I know, I know, it's their right and their choice.)

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I understand you, and vehemently disagree.

There is a real and serious risk of having ALL published material eventually fall under "licensed use" instead of ownership.

We're rapidly tipping towards a society where you pay rent to license everything, and own nothing.

In the short term, I find this model abusive. In the long I think it guarantees we will have a competitive disadvantage against countries that don't enforce this style of licensing.

IA does NOT own the books. IA is only referencing that they own some of the books to distract readers. The vast majority of books IA is “lending” come from the purported “endorsement” from 130 libraries. Yet there is no explanation if the endorsement means a general “Hey we love IA” or “a contractual relationship that allows IA to lend out copyrighted works licensed by the endorsing library”

Every book IA lent, they physically owned at least one copy of. Suspension of waitlists meant that they were lending more copies than they owned; copies physically held by partner libraries.

That was only during the Emergency event, when the libraries were closed, and which they already ended.

You make a reasonable point, so let's accept it for the sake of this discussion. Shouldn't the response then be to update copyright law, taking into account modern trends in technology and society? Surely the answer can't be to let one private organisation decide it's above the law and infringe with impunity.

Sometimes the path to legalization of something requires ongoing and widespread illegality before the question will even be considered.

That's not a strong argument, IMHO, since it would similarly condone any other law-breaking activity where the perpetrator disagrees with the law. It's not as if copyright wasn't controversial before or the IA's actions here have any realistic prospect of moving the needle.

If you're talking about civil disobedience, that's a different matter, but one of the key things about effective civil disobedience is that large numbers of people have to break the law and accept the penalty in order to overwhelm the system and thus show that the law does not have popular support.

You don't get to large numbers of people disregarding the law before first having a few.

I suspect you're glossing over the accept the penalty part of my previous comment, which is quite important.

Besides that, how many other Internet Archives do you think will follow the one we've been discussing by also flagrantly violating both the letter and the spirit of copyright law?

You'll own the things you create.

> The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge."

First sentence of the Wikipedia article.

And how will they achieve that mission when someone makes the following edit:

> The Internet Archive was an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge."

They certainly won't achieve their mission by giving up on it because someone didn't like it.

SciHub and Library Genesis still seem to be doing well enough. (To be clear, I don't think IA is even remotely comparable. I'm just directly responding to what you said.)

Let's go ahead and put to rest this theory that they're going to cease to exist. They don't have enough resources to be destroyed.

Suppose the naysayers are right and they're going to go bankrupt. What happens in bankruptcy? They sell their assets for fair market value.

To a new non-profit that uses them for the same purpose.

All that requires is that they raise an amount of money similar to what they ordinarily have to raise to continue operating regardless. They do, after all, replace all of their computers with newer ones from time to time already.

> What happens in bankruptcy? They sell their assets for fair market value.

Maybe.

The other thing that could happen is that their assets get valued by some 3rd party and the publishers own IA's assets as part of the settlement (who presumably destroy them).

Right. And furthermore, if they could be taken down, that's a bug, and it ought to be fixed. As I understand it, they're already somewhat decentralized, and it wouldn't be a huge stretch to become fully decentralized.

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