If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed
sbstatesman.com
sbstatesman.com
I see a lot of comments in this thread with what about-isms or "I don't care, we wouldn't miss anything", but these people are short-sighted. And to be honest the hacker news community is frequently the community I loathe to engage in these topics with. Because they are always looking forward with very little respect for the past as well as very little respect for domains outside of technology.
The internet archive is a huge boon in intangible value for communities and the world. It represents a huge cultural fountain that is accessible for anyone so long as they have the ability to access a computer.
A great example of this is that the Internet Archive was the ONLY place where I could enjoy a completely random piece of lost media from a children's television show called Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. There was a lost episode where OJ Simpson was in it and it never aired because of obvious issues. BUT there was a book published from the production called "White Rabbits Can't Jump"
https://archive.org/details/whiterabbitscant00varl
I can't imagine being able to go to any publisher or paid streaming service or god forbid Amazon to find this book, and I sure as shit don't believe in this community to help create ecosystems to support finding things like this.
I am so sick and tired of the copyright laws that play counter to productive creation and stymying efforts to preserve anything. The fact that I have to wait until people die until copyright is up is god awful. And the fact that I have to read people in this community who sound like boot-lickers for corporate oligarchs and their shitty value adds to the world drives me so fucking insane.
I'm only commenting here because I feel it's important to articulate that there are people out there who care, and that the vocal a-holes on this site really miss the point and the intangible value of what the internet archive provides.
If congress passes a copyright law, and that law can't demonstrate that it actually MEASURABLY does promote the useful arts and sciences, (but rather hinders them, as is often the case), then that law should be overturned, desecrated, and posted on a wall-of-shame as an example to others of what doesn't work.
I think that would solve 90% of our problems with copyright law. But that's just me. I'm not typically a "Constitutional Originalist" but I think this kind of thinking here could help.
Do you really think that someone like archive.org can do a better job of proving the negative than DisneyDiscoveryWarnerComcast will do producing volumes and reams of information demonstrating how they can only afford to keep making new content and supporting small creators if copyright lifetime is extended to 500 years?
IMO compulsory licensing is the way.
The Constitution does not require that IP laws actually or measurably promote the "useful arts and sciences" because the Constitution does not require the promotion of the useful arts and sciences but rather the progress of such. Moreover, the second half of the statement, says how Congress is Constitutionally supposed to accomplish that.
The idea is protecting even the stupid stuff is what lets the actual innovation proceed, the same way protecting Larry Flynch and flag burning protects other forms of speech.
Don't worry, 50 years was only close to the median amount of time that it takes for old laws and old court rulings to be overturned
So it wont undermine your brand to support, ironically, what might be seen as a rogue court outcome nowadays
You're not alone in thinking this way. And kudos for investing the Time to write this up -- the sophists are all-too-often over-represented here, and I'm never really sure that they're always arguing in Good Faith, or if they are, they're often being so short-sighted that it's simultaneously funny and sad.
There is a severe lack of appreciation for culture or even an understanding of what constitutes our culture, especially here on HN (which is why I hate discussing these topics here). It's not just a handful books that happen to turn into literature in 100 years. Our culture consists of every medium we interact with today. Allowing corporations to monopolize nearly all of it in perpetuity is quite simply immoral and severely damaging to our continued cultural development.
If you think about how cruel it is to make illegal the way human culture has worked for millenia, to listen to the storys you hear, retell them, remix them and make them your own in a new context. That is against the law now.
Perfectly legal.
Oh, you want to "retell" it and make money off of it? Yeah, that's something else.
The HN community can also be out of touch with technology. If you are an AI researcher this becomes plainly obvious the moment you visit any of the AI threads (if it isn't obvious already from the 6 to 12 month delay on the posting of cutting edge developments here). Sometimes it's hard to argue with zwj.org's assessment [0].
I’ve never been less impressed with the supposed elite class of Ivy League “hackers” than when I’m on this site. Get over yourself. You didn’t just solve AI with your “recursive LLM”. No one with ADHD is going to benefit from your pomodoro app that is…slightly more visible than the other thousands of pomodoro apps? Also - half of you don’t have ADHD. Believe it or not - coding is an attention drain and taking stimulants to gain an advantage so that you can ship in 3 months instead of 12 is toxic as fuck.
Don’t get me started on LessWrong.
FWIW, while I agree with the sentiment - not everyone is prepared to see an unsolicited photoshop of a testicle in a wine glass. Might want to edit a warning in if you still can.
Calling it property allows for this bizarre concept of a form of "theft" that still leaves you with the thing "stolen" from you.
In other words, it's a right.
The original idea was to promote creative works by authors by providing a limited term right to be the sole publisher of a work. This was important in the days where it actually cost money to publish and distribute things, as it ensured you wouldn't eat the cost of that only to have someone else make all the money by doing it cheaper.
Thing is, it doesn't cost money to publish and distribute anything anymore. I think the large number of free and fan works that exist are proof enough that creativity need not be incentivized by money, and to the extent that we want to monetarily reward works we find meaningful, there are mechanisms like Patreon or Github sponsorship to do that.
Will the production quality suffer without large corporations spending ludicrous amounts of money? Yeah, probably. But I don't see how that's something worthy of preserving for all the bullshit that copyright inflicts on our culture.
The emergency library lending seemed questionable, but the current system they're doing—they have a physical copy of the book and lend out a single scanned copy to one patron at a time—sounds legal, and certainly should be legal. Doubly so when it's out of print.
[0] https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=3145733862...
Long lost episodes of local shows (super local) are being uploaded by their actors and creators.
So what's the right way to balance the need to preserve artistic/creative works and the rights of the creator to monitize or permit usage of their works? It seems rather gross to just say that the creator has no right to sell their work or object to some source copying their work and distributing it in a way that deprives the creator of profit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...
Sure, it's certainly debatable what the "correct" term length should be, but I think most people could be convinced to value the commons a bit more and agree that it should be significantly shorter than the current "life of creator + 70 years" (or for works-for-hire, 95 years from publishing or 120 years from creation, whichever comes earlier).
For copyright owned by individuals, why should a creator's children and grandchildren (and great-grandchildren?) be allowed to continue to profit off their ancestor's work, depriving the commons of history and culture? For corporate ownership, why should the company be able to profit for longer than the lifetime of anyone around when it was created or published? Hell, most companies aren't even around that long, so ultimately the copyright ends up being passed to several other companies that have no relation to the original owner.
But really... 14 years sounds reasonable to me. I would even say 25 or 30 years would be ok, if the consensus is that 14 years is too short.
We could also go with a limited renewal system, like is used for patents. Say you get 14 years, and if, after those 14 years, the work is still important to you, you can renew the copyright for another 14 years, or something like that. People and companies who still actively gain economic benefits from their work 14 years later will go to the effort to renew it, but otherwise -- what is probably the majority of cases -- it'll fall into the public domain.
Of course, copyright isn't just governed by US law: the Berne Convention, at least, attempts to govern and harmonize copyright to some extent, and it requires minimums of 50 years after the creators death for most types of copyrightable works. But this is all doable, with political will behind it. As usual, that's always the problem.
To speak to why we need this sort of thing I would have to harken back to a fun talk that Paul Heald gave back in 2012[0] where he showed this fantastic chart[1] that shows the number of titles for sale on amazon by publish year.
The only thing I can assume from the chart is that either the publishing industry in the mid 1900s suddenly found itself publishing the same amount of books as they did in the 1830, no one cares about the books written between 1920 and 1990, or copyright has caused the loss of an enormous amount culture. According to the chart, and the talk, there are 7 times as many books published in the 1910s than are available from 1930s-1950s.
[0]: https://youtu.be/-DpfZcftI00 [1]: https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/mt/science/Amazon%20pub%20...
Ideally copyright would be eliminated and people who choose to create will choose to create. There is development in lots of areas that aren't copyrightable.
If you want to keep copyright, then it should be reduced to the bear minimum to incentivize creative works - that could be on the order of 20 - 30 years.
Encourage more creative work by exchanging a temporary government granted monopoly now for the promise of it becoming available to society's benefit later.
Current copyright terms are too long. Not everything needs to be monetizable to the nth degree in perpetuity in order for sustainable livelihoods to exist.
In a world where content producers were financed anyway, because we understood as a society that this is valuable, this waste wouldn’t be necessary and we probably would have less “Avengers Nth the movie”. That was the norm and how the likes of Da Vinci and others got to do their work that are now so much appreciated, so I don’t think it’s that utopian.
On this specific issue, there was very much a fully compliant way to dramatic increase the number of copies in circulation - which was to reach out to all the libraries which were closed, get their catalogues all of which is electronic anyway and administer lending with a much expanded collection. It is just extra work - which likely would have gotten funded. Instead the management irresponsibily tried to score political points.
We need to have the right governance & KPIs in the charters of these critical organizations to prevent extreme people from grabbing their agenda
A truly cursed book cover!
Same for me with Le roi et l'oiseau and Peter and the Wolf by Disney.
Very much this. Copyright was a hack that was meant to encourage creation. I feel like it often does the reverse, and is robbing us of our public domain and making it harder for people to create.
Yes, while we have a capitalist society we need to enable creating things that can be copied somehow, but I think currently copyright law hurts that as much as it helps.
Creating silos of IP owned by giant companies that rent seek over things made ages ago, encouraged to sit on them and extract value by remaking them, rereleasing old works in new forms to get people to pay again, and stopping anyone else from exploring the ideas without pointlessly recreating the scenarios to avoid copyright violation.
We need to be able to preserve works, to share, to build off others' work, and to explore ideas further after the original creators put them out there. It feels like copyright works for giant companies that can hoarde IP, and the lucky few who make huge amounts from something that blows up, but it sucks for actually encouraging most creators, making living off creation viable for normal people, and most of all: it is terrible for building on other's work.
I think copyright length needs to be way shorter, ideally with some provision requiring source for code being submitted to a copyright office to be released after the duration runs out, as patents require explanation. (In an ideal world also stems for music and stuff, but that becomes really hard to prove and enforce).
I don't think there are easy answers, but I worry we are locked into a system that makes us worse off as a whole.
"bUt tHaTs SoCiAlIsM" whined the masses
For some reason it's ok with extra steps that fuck over everyone else and mainly lead profit towards few middle men though.
I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a repository of digital or physical artifacts is "too big to fail" because of the negative cultural impact their failure would have.
In the absence of that, anyone who sees high cultural value to the preservation of these digital artifacts should, counterintuitively, not treat the Internet Archive as having some special status, but should treat it as a liability. It has become the custodian of too much, and too much is on the line if it fails.
Rather than trying to constantly shore up the IA so it can't fail financially, we should be looking at ways to preserve those artifacts redundantly, so that even if the IA fails, it's not a calamity.
In the US that would be the Library of Congress with its Mandatory Deposit requirement.
> I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a repository of digital or physical artifacts is "too big to fail" because of the negative cultural impact their failure would have.
If there is, the Internet Archive isn't it.
Yeah, it's super important in certain weird technology and library subcultures, but few people outside of them would even notice it if disappeared. If they shut down, the story wouldn't even be able to muscle it's way onto the front page of the New York Times: it would loose to whatever the latest Trump drama is and the Nth repetition of the standard mass shooting media package.
> In the absence of that, anyone who sees high cultural value to the preservation of these digital artifacts should, counterintuitively, not treat the Internet Archive as having some special status, but should treat it as a liability. It has become the custodian of too much, and too much is on the line if it fails.
> Rather than trying to constantly shore up the IA so it can't fail financially, we should be looking at ways to preserve those artifacts redundantly, so that even if the IA fails, it's not a calamity.
Yeah, especially since the Internet Archive (as an organization) has proven itself to be irresponsible.
Lots of people want to turn the publishers into the villains, for ideological reasons as well as a bias towards the Internet Archive, but the it's the IA that fucked up here. They imperiled their core mission for some unnecessary grandstanding. They either need to fire whatever lawyers OK'd the "Emergency Library" or the leaders that refused to listen to sane legal advice telling them not to do it.
It's pretty much indispensible to anybody who's a researcher.
It's very frequent that you're tracking down citations to webpages that don't exist anymore, and the IA is the only way to find sources.
Not to mention that it's also often the only way to quickly get access to non-bestseller books that are more than a couple of decades old, which is also commonly needed for research purposes. Many of these books are only otherwise available in the country's largest research libraries. (Google has copies too, but nobody can view them.)
It's not weird or a subculture unless you think those labels apply to researchers. And there are a lot of researchers out there, across academics, non-fiction authors, and journalists.
Um... I don't get the impression that you are speaking from any sort of authority
Look up any of their stats and tell me that's librarians and "weird technologists".
Small example: 600,000 new users per month are niche technologists?
https://archive.org/about/stats.php
More ppl in every town prob use IA than their local library. It's important (albeit overly central, but they are working on resolving that via IPFS and other technologies)
What do New York Times reporters use to check web history when researching for their stories? Do they just make stuff up?
I think the archive made a bad decision. I do not think it is generally irresponsible.
A service can be important even if few people use it directly. The service can have downstream effects that are beneficial to a lot of people because the people who do use it are creating and disseminating other content that filters its way down.
An analogy would be the US National Weather Service (NOAA). Few people look directly at an NOAA feed, but it's used by news channels, apps, airlines, scientists, etc. and becomes content and services that most people have benefited from.
A robust archive lowers the cost/time of doing research. It enables fact checking and investigation, particularly of an historical or obscure nature. It services the long tail of less frequently accessed content that many of us will, at some time, want access to. Basically all the reasons a research library is useful.
That is not a good metric. If the louvre burned, that would make headlines everywhere, but it would be nowhere near as disasterous as if the internet archive was destroyed.
I'm sure most people in the US hadn't heard of many of the banks involved in the 2008 financial crisis, but many of them, after that fact, might agree that they were indeed too big to fail.
I mean, they are the villains here. They’re sueing the IA over something that is less than a footnote in their balance book.
They’re purely doing this for the chilling effect it will have on other people that might be impertinent enough to try and share their books with others.
Its 212 petabytes as of december 2021[1], that alone would be a bit less than 12 thousand 18 TB HDDs or LTO-9's. We've made virtually zero significant progress in long-term storage technology.
Its like if they are getting burned like the library of alexandria because of some copyright vampires, I wouldn't even be angry, just sad, its just what we deserve.
The future will laugh at us as some primitive ignorant culture with our heads shoved up our asses dismantling society because of some imaginary oh so sacred legal fiction called copyright.
Why do some hoarding rent seekers hold every key here and get to indiscriminately burn down our global village on a whim like a feudal lord and all we can say is "please sire, spare the library, can you burn it more slowly than the rest?"
We overthrew monarchies 200 years ago so we wouldn't have to deal with this anymore. Having these assholes sneak back in through some courtier backdoor via an institution where people still wear wigs and robes to make us all renters from (intellectual) property lords, it needs to go.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliotheca_Alexandrina#Intern...
We don't need to look too far. IA could simply extend their middle-finger and move to Mexico, Spain, Thailand, or Sealand. Frankly, IA should be mirrored in every country that does not respect the West's initiative of blocking access and unresolvable takedown notices. Fuck US copyright anti-information bullshit. Publishers represent themselves and their own greed, not the authors and artists that created the content. There are rare success stories[1], but how many other works have been looted by publishers at the expense of the long dead content creator's family?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/jun/14/books.booksnew...
Unfortunately, the US government directly expands the reach of (US) copyright, patents, and trademarks with the "Free Trade" agreements they've managed to get countries around the world to sign up to.
If Sealand had an effective army ;), and could thereby say "Thanks, but no" then that might be an option. Until then though...
But “too big to fail” is bad policy no matter what you apply it to. That we have practiced this bad policy does not mean we should continue doubling down on it.
Add to it other educational materials that would otherwise show up on youtube or elsewhere with advertisements, and you have a decent basis for the 21st century and beyond.
Or this one? - https://netpreserve.org/
If the Internet Archive is "too big to fail" then there should be more scrutiny of their actions and the avoidance of risky behavior.
Anybody with any legal sense could have told you that the "National Emergency Library" was a risky move.
Here it is: https://loc.gov
You can wonder all you like, and call me a cynic, but the US runs on money not culture. The American identity is built on money and wealth and excess, not on anything you might describe as "culture".
The IA would not "fail" if it was just left alone, but business never saw a nickel they didn't want to grab, so the law suits are not exactly surprising. And I expect the courts to lean towards the publishers.
Everyone was telling the internet archive that this was a dumb idea because it opened them to lawsuits with ruinous fines. Now the chickens are coming home to roost and IA is crying foul.
It can be true that the internet archive is an invaluable store of history while also being true that they made an embarrassing own-goal.
This isn’t an American problem, it’s a drawback to the economic system the globe has adopted.
Now it's arguably a culture of attention and tribal identity.
fortunately, someone saying that does not make it real. Think of a "soup" and of "experiment" and you will get more detail. Resolving an entire nation to a 1 or 0 classification is not defensible, right?
(no association with IA, just an active contributor)
Back in the day, a copyright measured in decades made sense, because it took that long to promote and distribute a work and derive reasonable profit from it.
Today that process takes days, maybe months (apart from the rare work that languishes, only to be "discovered" later).
Copyright should be much shorter -- a couple years at most -- with renewal available if the creator really believes the work has yet to find its audience.
The standard for abandoned works still protected under the existing system should default against the (potential) holder of the original copyright as long as a good-faith effort was made to reach them, and damages should amount to some sort of split of the profits.
Unfortunately, at some point he stopped doing it. He explains
> There is also the fact that, in the time since Creative Commons licenses were negotiated, publishers have entered into agreements with the large ebook retailers that allow for price matching. This is in part an artifact of anti-trust litigation, but it means that if someone somewhere offers the book at $0, it technically allows all of the other ebook stores to offer the book at $0 as well.
> Thus far my publishers have been good about grandfathering in the CC-licensed books that I already had, but for the last couple of books I haven’t done CC licensing, in part because of the real fear that Amazon could set the price at $0 and there would be no recourse for my publishers—not even the recourse of not letting Amazon sell the book, because of deals ensuring that if Amazon sells one book of a publisher’s, they have to sell the whole catalog.
[1] https://craphound.com/pc/download/
[2] https://www.authorsalliance.org/2017/05/09/a-good-guy-offeri...
That said, I'm sympathetic to creators; I've written several (unpublished) novels myself.
Most novels don't support the authors that write them. There's no argument to be made that Jane Doe's 20,000th-ranked novel makes her nothing in the third year instead of three dollars.
At the other end of the scale you have George R.R. Martin. I'm sure he would be fine with or without the revenue from HBO's GoT. That said, in that particular case I think it's likely that HBO would want his blessing in any case -- especially since he hadn't written the ending yet. Without his cooperation, would people have been as likely to watch knowing the ending was made up by someone else?
So then you have the mid-tier authors -- a misnomer since really you're talking about the 99.9th percentile, where GRRM is the 99.9999th. But in any case, I still think that the vast majority of the revenue from a novel generally comes in the first 2-3 years. If losing that last, let's say 5%, makes the difference between success and starvation, that seems like a rare case to me -- even for authors who write slowly.
As for retirement, I'm not sure how to answer except to say let's pick an author who is clearly self-supporting, but not GRRM: Piers Anthony. He's still cranking out Xanth novels (last I checked). Do you suppose sales from his Battle Circle books (published in the '60s and '70s) are contributing materially to his retirement? Ha, I just checked and he's up to 45 books in the Xanth series. :-)
That wouldn’t lead to the end of culture but a cultural explosion as people became able to remix and propagate ideas more freely without the fear of punishment for violating artificial state-enforced monopolies.
No one is obligated to create a work and no one is obligated to share their created works with others. There’s no inherent right to anything once you put an idea out there and the legal constructs are just novel artificial ways to keep the have-nots from competing with the haves.
Culture existed well before notions of intellectual property and if anything today we have far better means of both producing works ourselves and collectively funding works that might not exist without compensation.
Rewarding the top 0.0001% of lucky creators with huge compensation isn’t worth the broad societal damage that is done by preventing people from sharing or making use of ideas.
when cultural creations are prompted by a profit motive, we get "masterpieces" like the rings of power.
There isn't a political solution to this. Because the US has a territorial electoral system, no politician is ever going to be representing a constituency who will care about the diminution of copyright terms as their primary issue, and building a legislative coalition to advance a nebulous public interest is hard, massively more so when countered by politicians who are bankrolled by large concentrations of capital.
In this country, any attempt to advance the current and future public interest over private gain is loudly denounced as tyranny by people who are awash in wealth and power. Those who try to undermine the foundations of capital from below are denounced as thieves and terrorists. That's why you get an endless ratchet effect.
One "organized" way to do it would be to have "Internet Archive" run a SETI-at-home type of daemon on your computer to use a bit of idle time and disk to store blocks (obviously there's a rich literature of decentralized file sharing which I'm not apprentice to and so please be suspicious of my suggestions as the "best" method~~but you get the idea).
A "disorganized" way could be to have a "federation" of personal archives, comprised by tools like SingleFile^0, ArchiveBox^1, and my own DiskerNet^2 -- which all in various ways make it possible for you to save web content to your own device, and. It can be then shared with others.
I think in general, aside from any legal perturbations, one should not as a general rule rely on such a single point of failure for something (to some at least) so critical. Probably humanity (or at least netizenry) needs to embrace some form (or mish-mash of various forms) of truly dcentralized archiving.
^0: https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile
If it is true, then maybe IA should be run by somebody with better judgement. This was a project with a massive chance of failure (how could anyone think that this wasn't just blatantly infringing?) and a low payoff. If it's also an existential risk, then wtf are they doing running it?
I'm skeptical that you even get the IA without someone like these folks running it. Imagine you're the type of crazy person who starts and runs the IA, the pandemic starts and libraries and schools shut down, and there's a big button in front of you saying "give people access to knowledge that was just removed from them". I dunno man, I can understand the type of person who creates the IA also feeling compelled to push that button under those circumstances. Was it a bad decision? I dunno, probably, I guess. It was a weird and hard time. I'm not angry at them for doing what felt right.
It might be wise for someone to consider a truly archival only organization.
Isolating business ventures from each other is common practice. They didn't need to run both operations out of the same business entity.
> I dunno man, I can understand the type of person who creates the IA also feeling compelled to push that button under those circumstances. Was it a bad decision? I dunno, probably, I guess.
The operation may have been a risky decision, but doing it under the umbrella of the Internet Archive made it a terrible decision.
I'm not really buying the Robinhood theory. This feels like some techies thinking their above the law and getting a reality check.
It's not like actual libraries don't offer digital lending. You might need to wait a week for Gane of Thrones, but it'll be OK.
IA decided the world was unfair and with a bit of arrogance decided to 'correct' it. Let's hope IA is able to just stop lending books and still exist.
If they lose their case, I hope the project can be kept afloat in ways that the US government can't interfere with.
The U.S. government, oddly, is the least of my fears when it comes to rewriting history.
Private enterprise is already doing it, even going to far as to reach into your private library of books and music to change them after you're purchased it:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/arts/dahl-christie-stine-...
Until yesterday, I used to sync my music library with Apple Music. Not anymore. Apple responding to the Times reporter with a big fat "no comment" tells me that it thinks it's OK to change things on my computer without my knowledge.
That overstates IA's influence. People still think Elon started Tesla.
Giving money to the current Internet Archive is pretty much just giving money to the book publishers. Instead we should be funding someone new to buy the assets off in the auction, and keep the previous decisionmakers far from the new entity.
We're very detail oriented, we're organized, and we're very good at following procedures. We're just as good at drawing things out as lawyers and burying us under tons of paperwork does nothing. Basically a lot of the tactics used to get big lawsuits over with quickly are much harder to execute against librarians. It becomes a war of attrition.
I should really look into whether this books lending branch has a chance of taking the web archive stuff down with it and, if so, buy a hard drive and start seeding this torrent that is iirc out there as a decentralized backup of the IA. This data being lost would be similar in proportion to losing GitHub or Wikipedia.
The IA resisted nothing, achieved nothing, made nobody's life better, and created an opportunity for bad precedent.
It was an utterly boneheaded move. (It has also nothing to do with "exhaustive preservation")
The wayback machine arguments are good enough that they could receive a Supreme Court decision along the lines of "technically this is illegal, but the law is wrong" type.
“Despite the widespread modern belief that the Library of Alexandria was burned once and cataclysmically destroyed, the Library actually declined gradually over the course of several centuries. This decline began with the purging of intellectuals from Alexandria in 145 BC during the reign of Ptolemy VIII Physcon, which resulted in Aristarchus of Samothrace, the head librarian, resigning from his position and exiling himself to Cyprus...The Library, or part of its collection, was accidentally burned by Julius Caesar during his civil war in 48 BC, but it is unclear how much was actually destroyed and it seems to have either survived or been rebuilt shortly thereafter; the geographer Strabo mentions having visited the Mouseion in around 20 BC and the prodigious scholarly output of Didymus Chalcenterus in Alexandria from this period indicates that he had access to at least some of the Library's resources.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliotheca_Alexandrina#Intern...
with the info destroyed in that fire we became 'disconnected' from the real historical jesus; thereby enabling the rise of the mythical figure tweaked to allow easier control of the masses. "what would jesus do?"
Why jeopardize those functions to do something brick and mortar libraries already did better, and legally? Other libraries do virtual lending.
We will continue our work as a library. This case does not challenge many of the services we provide with digitized books including interlibrary loan, citation linking, access for the print-disabled, text and data mining, purchasing ebooks, and ongoing donation and preservation of books.
I don't understand the backlash in the comments here, it seems to all come from a perspective of people being so downtrodden they just accept the current status quo crafted by MAFIAA lawyers, rather than looking at it holistically from first-principles.
"First principles" means jack shit if your company to build that world gets wiped off the map because you did something incredibly obviously stupidly illegal and handed the "MAFIAA lawyers" your own ass on a silver platter.
The fact that a corporate entity is allowed to take action against the IA in this case and be supported by the government in doing so is a symptom of our broken system, it's not evidence that the IA did anything wrong in any moral or social sense. The fact our society is held hostage, and that information is imprisoned, by entities like the MAFIAA is not a justification for this outcome.
Shutting down? Let's not jump to conclusions here, they would not shut down even if they lost.
But what IA did infringes even on a hypothetically repaired copyright system where the maximum age of copyright was something like 10-20 years, and where DMCA take-downs were hard to abuse. There's just no reason to allow any random entity to distribute books that it doesn't own.
We have already seen in the software industry that there is no way for any but the biggest companies to survive in a world without copyright [which open source is similar to] (I am referring to how Mongo, Elastic, Grafana and others have all had to give up on up-selling open source software and move closer to a closed license; while only Microsoft, Amazon, Google, IBM etc. are thriving by giving away free software).
In that world, IA would be able to make available any 20+ year book via their program. In that world, I think it’s _much_ less likely that they feel any pressure to lend out copyright covered books, and if they did I would be outraged.
I think it’s a little unfair to invent a hypothetical world, and then project their actions into that world as part of your judgement of their entity.
I (mostly) agree with you, but remember the rest of the quote, "Information wants to be free, information wants to be expensive."
> What is considered the earliest recorded occurrence of the expression was at the first Hackers Conference in 1984, although the video recording of the conversation shows that what Brand actually said is slightly different. Brand told Steve Wozniak:
>> On the one hand you have—the point you’re making Woz—is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable—the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other.[3]
Sometimes doing the right thing gets you killed.
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This lawsuit could be an existential risk for the IA. In a society that allows vastly different views on what is right and wrong, most people manage to navigate situations in a way that doesn't risk their existence.
Within that line of thinking, what IA did was more or less a form of civil disobedience. If we go back to one of the founders of the philosophy of civil disobedience in the US we get to Thoreau. He was of the mind that the disobedient party should recognize the possible consequences and be prepared to accept them.
None of this means that the IA shouldn't have made this choice. Just that they should have had their eyes wide open to these consequences.
I'm not "supporting" the cops when I tell someone they should stop their car when they get pulled over. I'm recommending someone not get themselves shot.
People do not understand that the IA want to go to court as part of their strategy, or else they think they understand what constitutes an effective legal strategy for the IA better than the IA do.
Any time you have a collective action problem like that our legislative system is always going to come down in favor of the capital owners, because the entire (US) polity is built around land apportionment. It's a political system designed by and for landlords.
It's an artifact of the US' huge geography and short history. The abolition of spatial barriers by broadcast and electronic networks to the point of universal communication is fundamentally incompatible with a political system based on agrarian territoriality. You can't solve 21st century problems with 18th century political technology.
I support CDL, and copyright change. IA may have poisoned the well by not actually doing CDL and trying to profit off of the claimed CDL books. So the backlash is understandable.
We need such laws for the digital realm. If we had them we wouldn't have to worry about Internet Archive, dpreview, etc. Imagine if we had such laws in place long ago. We could be living in a world where Geocities and MySpace still existed, even if only in a read-only form.
Back in the day, I assumed anything I did online would be saved in some way unless explicitly stated otherwise. I also assumed the same of my software environments. I was, of course, painfully disabused of these notions multiple times before the lesson was fully drilled into me.
I'd like to live in a world where everyone was more aware of the value of making special efforts to preserve certain kinds of data (see also: having more control over it)-- like where it's part of our deeper culture. I think we're steadily moving in that direction in some ways, but it would've been nice if it had been more thoughtfully considered by both companies and governments 25+ years ago. I suspect if they'd known how much cheaper storage was going to get, they would have done a lot more.
Because:
> We already have laws for historical landmarks. These laws ensure the protection of things of societal significance
Not only is it a waste of resources, but now that they are in court they could very easily receive a judgement that curtails access they used to provide before the rollout of the "emergency library".
It's fine (and right, IMO) if you don't agree with the current copyright law but just ignoring them was foolish.
But yes, the IA is both culturally important and significantly beneficial in everyday practical matters. I'm not sure what we can do to help IA come out of this intact though. "Write your congressman" is these days a somewhat laughable suggestion in the face of any problem, the desperate act of last resort that no one expects to actually succeed.
The birthplace of the national park system took place through preservation acts passed by Congress, not wishful thinking.
If IA is so amazing, why don't we codify and protect its existence through new law and not hope that a judge will squint favorably at copyright law?
Not saying it was the right move but you can see where they're coming from, they wanted to help people.
The Internet Archive's mission, imo, should be to protect and steward their archives and ability to continue to maintain them above all though. Putting that at risk for a morally righteous additional cause is not worth it. This was a leadership failure
So... yeah, there are right ways to do things, and the thing is, IA is not a place people generally point to for piracy. Its a place to point to when the worst happens. When the original creator isn't making money on something anyways. Or when they've ensured a group of people can't pay them for something.
What a poorly written article.
> the government spends the public's natural rights, on the public's behalf, as part of a deal to bring the public more published works.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.htm...
It makes it seem like the 4 publishers are against Internet Archive as a whole, when all they sued for was for the unrestricted publication of copyrighted books during the start of the pandemic.
That may still only be the OpenLibrary, but it's not just the unrestricted lending, and I wouldn't be surprised it it also has a chilling effect on other scans. I'm curious how letting people view scans of obscure 1940s magazines is legal if doing it for books is not. They're not even restricted to one "borrower" at a time per physical copy with periodicals.
[0] https://authorsguild.org/news/ag-celebrates-resounding-win-i...
The main issues are storage, centrialisation, moderation and copyright; that if you wished, rebel and ignore these with a distrbuted model like BitTorrent, or IPFS.
If an library burns to the ground you loose everything, so you will have to decentrialise. That then causes moderation issues as if you were to truely go decentrialised; what's stopping a bad actor uploading icky stuff? It would resolve the take-down from copyright, as they couldn't kill all nodes. But all sounds like a lot of work for a very little return.
Wait what?
That's not how the Internet Archive is paid for.
And because it's private, it could have private replacements/competitors.
If another group were to clone all the stuff the Internet Archive doesn't get into hot water for, and not make the obviously hugely risky move that got them in trouble here, does that solve the problem? Are there potential issues re: the Internet Archive suing a second archive that copied them or such?
Seems like an opportunity for some rich folks to make a big philanthropic gesture in support of archiving information and making it available.
The entire leadership there and anyone who signed off on the decision should be replaced. I am a donor but I'm pissed. They should have known better.
How much value does Wikipedia or the IA bring compared to your average unicorn startup?
There's a problem there we need to figure out how to solve...
[0] - https://www.causeiq.com/organizations/internet-archive,94324...
>In addition, this opens the gate to additional litigation to any other potential claimant (eg. Warez copyright owners or video copyright owners - there is a lot of pirated material hosted on IA).
I don't see how. This ruling is specifically about CDL, something the rest of their archived content doesn't follow, and all those warez and video copyright holders already have the option to DMCA claim any content on the IA.
I do worry this could allow other publishers to sue over past CDL practices.
The cake is a lie.
Yes, our current copyright system is fucked up. This is, however, not a new fact. And the IA should've spent about 5 minutes talking to their lawyers to figure out why the idea as implemented was the worst thing they could possibly do. With pretty much no upside for them or the public.
It's the utter boneheaded waste of resources here that's just hard to comprehend. You know you work in a hostile environment. Behave accordingly.
(This does not change that Hachette et.al are positively disastrous for the public good and should, frankly, be looked at as a cartel. And treated accordingly.)
It seems like more and more of these old-school discussion forums are disappearing, and their modern equivalents (discord? subreddits?) just don't seem to have the same feel. DPReview is probably the most recent example, but I occasionally I will still visit specialty forums like eevblog.com for EE, or VW forums for my car. It's hard to imagine finding the same sort of expertise and years-long knowledge base on current discussion platforms.
Where do we go next? What happens when these communities are lost? Where are we to go if, for example, HN were to disappear?
A lot of software references for long gone C compilers, Turbo Pascal whatever was popular during the 80th - if you cannot find it in the IA, it didn't happen, so to paraphrase.
I love the IA for its effort, to deliver high quality material in a digitized format.
While I understand, that there might be copyright, I opt against a right to be forgotten. To me these books are classics, like any other literature. Preserve this heritage. You can donate to IA.
Also, thumbs fucking down for society punishing Archive for doing something to help Americans during an extreme time of crisis. I feel like if an apocalypse ever happens, 10 years later, everyone left alive will be in court being sued for helping each other. America is so stupid and short sighted about EVERYTHING.
Would you be happy if a chemical plant donated its facility to a new company “Chemical Plant 2” in order to avoid paying compensation for chemical spills?
Although he has spent a lot of time backtracking, it's his whining that kicked this charade off initially, so I hold him personally accountable for it.
I happen to think they're technically correct with the IA in the wrong here, but even so I think they should back down - they can take a big picture view that it's hardly dealt them a serious blow, it was the pandemic and the IA serves a useful purpose for society (though I suspect many publishers besides more enlightened ones would disagree with that due to self-interest!)
According to https://file.app/ storing 1PB of data to Filecoin for a year would cost $2,336, that's an amount that could be crowdfunded.
Of course, IA has much more than a petabyte of data, but it wouldn't be impractical to save the most important ( however you decide that ) parts of it.
Along with everybody with two brain cells to rub together. We all screamed "Hey, you idiots are going to ruin everything if you act like the pandemic has magically nullified the concept of copyright" and they fucking did it anyway, and now exactly what we said would happen is happening. It's like you found a landmine in your front yard and your buddy said "That landmine shouldn't be there so I'm gonna go step on it" and you told him not to and then had to watch him throw himself onto it while declaring it would be morally wrong for it to blow his stupid ass up.
Controlled digital lending had a chance of getting off the ground. The IA's Emergency Library's unlimited digital lending burned it to the ground and stomped on the ashes.
I'm tired of seeing this "well IA shouldn't have done the emergency library" line. Do you honestly believe the only reason publishers went after IA is the emergency library? I think this would have happened eventually, so pointing to the emergency library does nothing but tell everyone that you were right all along.
They operate in a country where precedent is set in a court of law, how did you expect CDL to "get off the ground" if not challenged in a court of law?
I mean, they did so right after IA did it, specifically citing IA doing it as why. Maybe they would have come after it eventually anyway but the Emergency Library specifically marked IA as an organisation that couldn't be trusted; even if they would have come after CDL, IA didn't have to hand them a slam-dunk case.
In all their comms about this IA is desperate to reframe it as nothing to do with Emergency Library, probably because they know how it undermines their case completely.
Edit: EA -> Emergency Library
I appreciate that.
However, as a long-time, regular, sustaining financial benefactor of IA, I was annoyed that they strayed into this set of activities in the first place and then dismayed when they pushed the envelope on it during C19 quarantines.
I, and others, predicted this trouble and even if there is not direct causation why do they have to tickle this dragon in the first place ?
Obviously the 1-1 lending was an issue to the publishers, but higher risk from a litigation perspective.
There absolutely is a correlation between NEL and the lawsuit. It’s a small part of the lawsuit, but it’s clear it pushed them to go to war against IA.
Yes, it's even mentioned a few times in the judgement. Publishers didn't like the CDL, but were mostly ignoring it. The NEL forced their hand, even if the lawsuit was not about that directly.
> They operate in a country where precedent is set in a court of law, how did you expect CDL to "get off the ground" if not challenged in a court of law?
If the IA really set up the CDL to have a plausible challenge they would not have shot themselves in the foot with complete lack of implementation controls, and clearly setting up a profit motive. Everyone should be furious at the IA for poisoning the CDL well.
I highly recommend reading the judgement, https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.53...
They are in court for the "emergency library". The emergency library is a key part of the case. It's just inevitable that the lawsuit would also hinge on if 1 - 1 CDL is legally permissible and the case will inevitably have to rule on that.
And yes, timing wise, and from the letters the publishes sent to the IA, they are explicitly about the "emergency library".
Whether CDL is legal under Fair Use or not was/is legally unresolved. Whether it's legally permissible to copy a printed material and distribute that copy as though it were the printed material was/is unresolved.
Lots of organizations have been skating along under one interpretation of Fair Use as a workaround for the burdensome licensing fees and absurd lending limits that publishers expect libraries to pay. Libraries being, y'know, super well-funded by that VC honey and all.
And it's not like publishers get less litigious over time. Whether the NEL prompted this or not is irrelevant; it was going to be tested, and IA are exactly the right organization to test it, and it wasn't going to become "more legal" if everyone just kept doing the same thing but more quietly.
Now that it's being tested, the right thing to do is to figure out if CDL is something we as a society want to enable for our libraries or not.
They should have let someone else take the risk, and continued archiving the internet. That is all that most of their supporters expected of them, for good reason. Their attempt to pivot toward being a generic, universal library was bad scope creep and should have been stopped when it started.
That's what IA wants to believe. But it's just not the case that legal points aren't "resolved" or "tested" unless exactly the same situation shows up in court and gets ruled on. The law works in large part by analogy. Strong enough analogies can be predicted.
Here's from the trial court's summary judgment opinion against IA:
> Even full enforcement of a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio, however, would not excuse IA's reproduction of the Works in Suit.
Then there's the citation so many saw coming to a case called ReDigi, about a system for reselling authorized digital music downloads by ensuring there was only ever one digital copy. They lost, too.
There's another case out there, Aereo, about a company offering a warehouse full of TV tuners subscribers could stream from on a one-to-one basis. For technical legal reasons, that involved different aspects of the copyright law. But the case didn't go well for Aereo, either. Or for any of its competitors pursuing essentially the same business model.
A lot of IA supporters wish they would have gone about discovering this in a way that protected the actual internet archive. Maybe I don't understand the actual risks to the IA, but it feels like a reckless move.
CDL being legalized is dependent on the concept that it respects copyright and is only a digital version of rights and practices that already exist. The NEL proved that as far as the IA is concerned, CDL is nothing of the sort and is in actuality just a method of keeping rightsholders from suing them and what they'd really rather be doing is copying every work in existence and giving it away to everybody. They proved they don't want to be a library. They have destroyed their credibility. Other than the operator of Z-Library there is no worse entity to be litigating this.
that's a nice idea, but it's hard to see how we as a society have a say.
> Controlled digital lending had a chance of getting off the ground. The IA's Emergency Library's unlimited digital lending burned it to the ground and stomped on the ashes.
One of the problems libraries face is that many publishers will not sell them "real" licenses, but only "quota licenses" that allow a total of n borrows and m concurrent borrows. Once the total number of borrows is exceeded, the license expires. n can be very low.
This was not always the case. 10 years ago, most licenses were unrestricted licenses that allowed an unlimited number of total borrows, but only limited the number of m concurrent borrows at a time - just like it would be if the library bought m real books.
The argument is that real books wear out - digital books don't. However, my local librarian vehemently disagrees with this statement, as many books survive more than 100 borrows, something the new e-book licenses will never manage.
Additionally, those "quota" licenses are still way more expensive than an equal amount of m real, physical books. It's insanity. My local library could, by their own account, not survive if the number of digital lends permanently increased significantly (like it did in 2020).
So if controlled digital lending had a chance for the mainstream, the publishers killed it many years ago, when many of them decided to just not sell libraries unrestricted licenses anymore, but only "quota" licenses. :/
(Disclaimer: Not the US, Europe)
This has been a hostage/terrorist situation from the beginning. The Internet Archive has been holding the Wayback Machine hostage, essentially saying "let us break copyright, or this critical piece of internet history goes down as well".
There are plenty of places to torrent books online. If people are desperate for a book and savvy enough to know about the Internet Archive, chances are they would have found an available copy online anyway. It's also not as though downloading an illegal copy from IA put the user at any less legal risk than downloading from elsewhere (other than giving publishers a bigger target to go after, which is exactly what happened).
It's a shame, because IA felt like a true public good on the Internet, and now it looks like it's going away. Sigh.
Fuck it. It should never get off the ground, really. We, as a society, don't need controlled lending for something that can be copied for free.
What we need is a fair mechanism to keep authors whole while keeping digital copies available for all, free of charge. And the system slowly changes by itself, discovering multiple such mechanisms. Like, for example, making physical books collectibles; or paying for early access (not for the access per se).
Unsolicited advice: IME I've found being angry because I was right serves no one, least of all myself. I would recommend you soften your language. Harshness, even if warranted, turns people off, especially those who could learn most from what you have to say.
Is simply not having a download button sufficient? Do you need to prevent people from right-clicking and choose "Save Image"? Or do you need to run the book through a video stream encrypted with Widevine L3 so screenshots don't work? Or heck, why not Widevine L1 which requires hardware not found on Windows because L3 will always be exploitable?
They do many many things - most of which are not in any way affected by this lawsuit. The judge even specified that the Internet Archive can still scan and publish copies of books in the public domain.
sure, it may have worked, but fuck me if that's what we get. controlled digital lending means we throw away[1] the great advantage brought by digital technology.
controlled digital lending is a very stupid thing to do. I saw megaupload. it showed us all that we can all share it all; we just don't seem to want to, or rather, the American government pursued them into extinction.
[1] looking at this even more closely, it's not that this 'digital advantage' is wasted, it is merely captured by authoritative powers who only understand markets, trade, and exclusive properties (exclusive due to being physical/material in nature unlike digital assets). e.g. Microsoft's billionaire business is made from capturing this digital boon as I called it.
https://scienceagri.com/16-most-important-plant-species-in-t...
I would add bamboo to that list, though.
Dude. We're not talking about losing secret ancient knowledge. We're talking about losing pictures of cats.
There is nothing on the internet that's so valuable that we couldn't live without it. Real research, real knowledge, makes its way out of the internet. And besides, most of the internet that we can actually discover is cached in search engines.
You will find the most obscure things that practically cannot be found anywhere else. Stuff that would otherwise be permanently lost.
"Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more."
"As of January 1, 2023, the Internet Archive holds over 36 million books and texts, 11.6 million movies, videos and TV shows and clips, 950 thousand software programs, 15 million audio files, 4.5 million images, 251 thousand concerts, and 780 billion web pages in its Wayback Machine."
But we're literally talking about book lending, and preserving the old knowledge of the early internet. However lofty and pretensions the analogy may seem, comparing it to the burning of the library of Alexandria actually does seem like a better analogy than "we're just losing pictures of cats"
authors gotta make a living. but then they can make living via speaking engagements.
e.g speak at a public library say at 50k. paid via benefactors and tax.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/author-coalition-bl... [2] https://www.authorsalliance.org/2021/08/17/library-lending-a...
I recently used some online periodical archive access from my local library to find sources about 1940s musicians protesting recorded music...couldn't find anything. Then I tried IA, and boom, they've got it[0] — someone had to source and scan all these.
I recently wanted to revisit some 1980s-era computer games from when I was a kid. Internet Archive. How'd they get there? Someone there pulled them from 5.25" floppies.
A few weeks ago, I remembered 3-2-1 Contact magazine, which I enjoyed as a kid. No problem: IA has source and scanned them.
I could store all the DOS games in the world on my hard drive without noticing the space usage at all, but step one is acquiring copies of them. When it comes to the long tail of obscure 1940s periodicals or 1980s advertisements[0].
[0] https://twitter.com/lkbm/status/1608480435691995137
[1] https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1643781181568327681
Freudian typo...
It is a melancholy object to those who walk through this great Internet of ours when they behold the countless instances of piracy and blatant disregard for the sanctity of copyright laws. The noble and ever-vigilant lawmakers, in their infinite wisdom, have blessed us with these righteous statutes, designed to protect the creative genius of the chosen few and ensure their perpetual enrichment. I shall now humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection, for the enhancement of copyright laws and the merciless suppression of those who would dare to infringe upon them.
I have been assured by a very knowing academic of my acquaintance that copyright infringement is a scourge upon our society, depriving deserving creators of their rightful earnings and perpetuating anarchy in the realm of intellectual property. It is of the utmost importance that we reinforce the importance of copyright, extending its reign to the furthest reaches of human creativity, even unto the most mundane and trivial expressions.
In order to accomplish this most necessary task, I propose that all human utterances, expressions, and gestures, be they written, spoken, or signed, be henceforth copyrighted, requiring the payment of a modest fee for their use. This fee shall be directed to the original creator, or their heirs, who shall retain control of their intellectual property for a period not less than one thousand years. This, I am confident, will provide ample incentive for the continuation of human creativity and innovation.
Furthermore, to prevent the heinous crime of piracy, it is imperative that all infants be implanted with a small monitoring device, connected to the great and mighty copyright database. This device shall track each individual's every expression, ensuring prompt and accurate payment to the appropriate copyright holder. Should any attempt be made to remove this device, or should an individual be found in violation of copyright laws, they shall be immediately and publicly flogged, that others may learn from their example.
For those who might object that this proposal would stifle creativity and hinder the sharing of knowledge and ideas, I say that such fears are baseless and utterly without merit. After all, it is only through the tireless efforts of our most esteemed creators that we, the unworthy masses, are granted access to the wisdom and brilliance of human thought. Surely, it is a small price to pay for the privilege of partaking in such exalted company.
I profess, in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the least personal interest in endeavoring to promote this necessary work, having no other motive than the public good of my country, the advancement of the arts, and the salvation of mankind from the hideous specter of copyright infringement. Let us embrace these changes, for only through the eternal protection of copyright can we ensure the continued flourishing of human creativity and the preservation of our most treasured works for generations to come.
I totally agree.
The overreach at IA is much bigger than it looks on the surface. Go look at the things people are uploading there.
And a faster, more reliable (in terms of percentage of 5XX responses) one would be nice. Right now Wayback Machine performance leaves a lot to be desired. I end up using archive.is whenever possible.
Yes, I donate to Internet Archive, don’t chastise me.
Wow, pretentious much. The Wayback machine is an interesting passing curiosity that with great luck sometimes saves a webpage that isn't completely broken. The average person has never heard of its existence. Sure it's fun looking at how web pages used to look like and laugh at terrible designs but it's not exactly part of anyone's real workflow and surely violates right to delete and a bunch of other copyright laws.
You've stolen and rehosted the world's content and now you're surprised people are suing you? Do these people hear themselves? Did they not see pirating sites being fought tooth and nail in the past decades? I'm frankly surprised that the FBI hasn't sized their domains years ago.
I've used IA to research things I would not have been able to any other way, the information is _no where_ else!
* Finding missing YouTube videos from playlists. It's usually enough to get the title as YouTube doesnt care to show you the title of what's been deleted, privated, etc.
* A large university deleted all their "website builder" pages including a lot of research and news about certain projects. I used IA to find information on a building I bought from them.
* Looking at the origins/roots of companies like Unity3D. Have you seen their website in 1999? It's pretty cool!
* Old tutorials on websites that don't exist anymore.
There is so much use to IA when those that store our information would gladly pull it out from under us to save a few dollars.
Does anyone want to go back to the closed source software development model of the 1990's? Then why do we not push for the open source model not only in software, but across news, academia, music, film, databases, et cetera? How many of your hard earned tax dollars go to pay for Microsoft's and Oracle's technical debt? How much of your tax dollars go pay for Elsevier's and Random House's and Wiley's closed source databases of publications? Why do we allow this inferior model of treating ideas to exist, when we now have solid data that the open way is far superior "for the progress of arts and sciences?".
Write your representatives. Organize your communities. It's time to pass a new Amendment to the Constitution:
Section 1. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of this Constitution is hereby repealed.
Section 2. Congress shall make no law abridging the right of the people to publish ideas.Then consider us "screwed," because what you propose has a snowball's chance in hell of actually happening.
Also, too many software engineers overreact to some reformable problems with the IP system with burn-it-all down radicalism. I think your proposals would cause more harm than good. They'd likely stop most media creation that you're used to*, and what's left with either be cheap (think fanfiction) or under tighter lockdown than any DRM you've ever seen.
* Tell me, who's going to invest 10-200 million dollars to make a movies or TV shows on a regular basis, without copyright?