Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site (2020)

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56 pointsddtaylor32 comments

Those bastards, violating copyright like it was nothing. Have they no shame? “For the sake of the children” they say. “It’s an emergency” they say. Well, tell you what Internet Snarchive, I say we all boycott making donations to you at this link:

https://archive.org/donate

My sarcams detector failed to reach a reliable evaluation of this comment.

Was good, right? I donated $100 right after posting, if that helps.

I have written to penguin and the other publishers on social media. Who knows, maybe it helps. I told them that the internet archive is important for research and academia and that I would not buy any books from them ever again if this lawsuit ends up damaging the internet archive. Maybe they will communicate that to someone in sales or marketing, who knows.

Their Instagram accounts are: @penguinrandomhouse @harpercollins @hachetteromans

What I learned from this article is that libraries PAY PUBLISHERS to access their content at a premium. "Won't someone think of the publishers?"

"these Libraries have improved the general Conversation of Americans, made the common Tradesman and Farmers as intelligent as most Gentlemen from other Countries, and perhaps have contributed in some Degree to the Stand so generally made throughout the Colonies in Defence of their Privileges." -- B. Franklin

Bias note: I am a backer of IA, I believe in their mission. When I'm done in industry, I would dedicate my life to them. They have preserved innumerable media that would have been lost in our high turnover world. They are a gem of internet culture, democratizer of knowledge, and Brewster Kahle is a genuine good dude.

> if librarians face large demand for popular titles, they may have to buy multiple licenses—otherwise readers might face a very long wait.

Artificial scarcity really annoys me, because it's just pure greed. I understand paying multiple fees for multiple physical objects - there's a real cost to manufacturing & distributing a physical object. But duplicating & distributing digital information is so cheap as to almost be free, but pricing doesn't reflect that.

But it's not greed. It's an attempt to spread out the development costs among all of the users. Here's an assignment: spend 6-24 months writing a book. Then watch someone give away copies for free. In the past, book writing was a good way for society to fund information synthesis and research.

Some authors may feel that way. Personally, I'm glad to see my non-fiction work made widely available (thinking globally) and preserved forever in the media commons of the Internet Archive.

They also only allow single-copy checkouts of currently copyrighted works for very brief periods of time, like a few hours at a time. Suitable for researchers and public reference.

Sure. THat's you're choice. I'm all for authors making the choice that's right for them. But I personally know many authors of non-fiction works who would not be able to find the time to write them if they weren't getting paid. It's not just a hobby for rich kids and people with bosses who want their employees to write books as publicity. It's also a job.

So it's nice that you want to give yours away for free. But don't ruin the business for the people who need to work for a living.

Q: should the publishers work with IA to get a particular dollar amount per use from the federal government based on the public benefit of positive media consumption?

I can't believe how little visibility this has gotten. If these publishers manage to take down the Internet Archive, it'll be one of the worst things to ever happen to the internet.

This also shows the vulnerability of any centralized archive to legal action. To have a truly durable archive we have to find a way to make it distributed and censorship-resistant.

Would IPFS make it globally distributed and censorship-resistant?

HN may have finally found the use case for Web3 ;)

So looks like the internet archive is still running. Anyone know what came out of this?

The lawsuit is still ongoing. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17211300/hachette-book-...

Thanks for that link. The documents listed under June 9 and 10 present the positions of the two sides clearly and in detail.

I have no idea how the case will be resolved, though my personal sympathies are with the Internet Archive.

That handwriting took quite some effort to decipher,

> The defendant may proceed with The Summary Judgement on the schedule set by [M.D.?] Wang and with the word count requested, although The Court [senoudy*] questions whether the requested word count is necessary. / So ordered / John G Koeltl [US D.J?] / 6/10/22

> The plaintiffs may proceed with a motion for summary judgement on the same schedule and with the same word count that The Court has afforded the defendant, and with the same [accusation?] that The Court doubts the need for such lengthy [jargon? japers?]. / so ordered / John G Koeltl / [U SD. 5??] / 6/10/22

Why was the first "plaintiffs" in the typed text underlined? Because it isn't uppercase (“the Plaintiffs”)?

*I just couldn't figure out what "senoudy" was supposed to be until I looked it up and got results for documents where the word "seriously" had been mutated by OCR in the same way that I'd misread it here.

My sympathies are split. I think the kind of infringement that the archive does by keeping timestamped copies is a great service. But the kind of infringement that competes with bookstores and publishers is a terrible insult to the writers and editors who work long and hard on a project. During the pandemic, bookstores like Powells were still in service and looking to support employees. There was no reason to hurt them under some argument that books were somehow unaccessable.

> a terrible insult to the writers and editors

Would love to hear from them.

I'm a writer. I was pretty insulted by their view that they could just give away books. The book stores were open. The digital delivery systems like Kindle were open.

What do you write? Do you have any books in other libraries? I’m curious about the “insult”

I have other problems with libraries, mainly because of the overhead, but I rarely spend much time arguing about them. They're a compromise that evolved over time and I think that, overall, they're great for society.

But what the IA was doing was different. They were acquiring one copy of a book and lending it infinitely often. In this model, all books only sell one copy. This is bad for society because we lose the feedback loop that rewards great authors and publishers. It's also just a sophistry. At least the folks at Pirate Bay are honest about what they're doing. It was a horrible scheme to destroy the business model of writers and publishers.

What do you write?

I think arrangements could be made to ensure that writers get financial support. I think there are plenty of people that don’t flinch to purchase books— maximizing diversity and intensity of consumption doesn’t necessarily follow a fully market driven model. A dominant market model can be enhanced through access-oriented provisions for those who don’t afford.

The database of court documents behind that page is https://free.law/recap. Hilariously,

> Once installed, every docket or PDF you purchase on district and bankruptcy court PACER websites will be added to the RECAP Archive. Anything somebody else has added to the archive will be available to you for free — right in PACER itself.

> Thanks to our users and our data consulting projects, the RECAP Archive contains tens of millions of PACER documents, including every free opinion in PACER. Everything in the archive is fully searchable, including millions of pages that were originally scanned PDFs.

> Everything that is in the RECAP Archive is also regularly uploaded to the Internet Archive, where it has a lasting home. This amounts to thousands of liberated documents daily.

Strange, ironic loop.

Does anyone have sufficient knowledge of these things to have a sense of how it is going?

No official knowledge but the whole thing looks like a premeditated plan to eventually shut down the Internet Archive.

simple fix: switch to .ru tld and server in russia. Also, take donations in cryptocurrency. You are immune from the globalist american empire in Russia.

Considering the current situation, it's also a sure way of getting less donations as people would think it's based in Russia (which, if they move their huge amount of servers there, it would be). I'm not sure Brewster Kahle would want to have that kind of association.

Move to the Library of Alexandria instead?

https://web.archive.org/web/0/http://archive.org/about/bibal...

Hosting in Egypt would be a problem for the same reason hosting in Russia would be a problem. There's a lot of stuff on there that would be illegal.

Russia has banned whole Internet archive few times for the content they host, imagined giving the whole controller through domain to them. You sound like being a contrarian just for the sake of it.

I'm sure there are plenty of less-risky alternatives - Iceland? Switzerland? Estonia?

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