Record labels hit Internet Archive with new copyright lawsuit
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
If I'm reading correctly, the silly nature of the claim that
> [...] of the 2,749 recordings listed in the complaint, all but a “small sample” are already available to stream or download from licensed online platforms so they “face no danger of being lost, forgotten, or destroyed.”
when the 2,749 recordings have been cherry-picked from
> [...] more than 400,000 works [...]
is pretty much an attack on their own claims that
> [...] to retain, restore and redistribute content that they believe should never be lost to history [...is...] nothing but a “smokescreen” to hide what amounts to IA offering “free and unlimited access to music for everyone,” regardless of copyright.
Not to mention that the IA constantly looking for copyrighted works uploaded that are not part of the "Great 78 Project" and reducing them to 30 second previews.
Prevailing on this would be a good thing. IA needs a win, even though it doesn't need to be paying to defend itself against another lawsuit. This is obviously vexatious. They're not really concerned with 78s. They're hoping to bankrupt IA with legal expenses, and/or they think that they have the fix in at a particular venue that they think they can steer the case to.
You can't just upload music to Spotify or Apple Music or whatever as an independent artist. You need to pay rent to a distributor who is allowed to interact with the streaming service. (Some of them offer the convenient feature of administering royalties for cover songs, but it's an additional cost and not a given...) Most will probably never make enough royalties to cover the fees.
Then you have the whole growing SubmitHub thing. (Pay for consideration on playlists to get exposure.)
The blessing of the way the music side is set up is that if you want to be an indie streaming music company, you can, you just need to contract with a critical mass of the big distribution houses and royalty reporting agencies and you’ll be able to play pretty much anything your customers might want to hear. If that didn’t exist, nobody would bother uploading their music to anyone but the giant incumbents like Spotify and Apple
My view on it (take it for what you will) is those companies exist mainly as a way for the streaming platforms to outsource and scale their quality control/checks.
The expectation from platforms like Spotify was basically that anything we sent over can go up without further review and that it added value to the platform, didn’t violate copyright law, was appropriately encoded, etc. If we let anything they rejected or later found issues with through, our status as a distributor was at risk.
I expect if Spotify had to staff and scale to deal with the garbage our users were trying, they would end up charging enough extra that you’d pay the same anyway. Basing that mostly on the fact that we weren’t really making much money.
On the other end of the spectrum we could charge royalties on the sales of instruments and require musicians and listeners to buy a license. We would have so much more music that way! No one would listen to it but it would be there behind the great paywall!
You're begging the question, here. Also, you know that there exist people who distribute creative works for free, and make money by donations, sponsorships, patronage, and grants. Therefore you know that the statement as you have made it is false, and that you should be looking for a weaker one.
edit: I don't know how somebody goes from "weaken the chances" to "not be permitted" in subsequent sentences, and in addition tries to derive "not be permitted" from "weaken the chances" through the weasel word "imply," and still feels like they're engaging in good faith argument. If you're confident, you don't need to make up a position for your opponent, and your position is not as weak as you're making it look.
You are framing weakening copyright as some kind of act of violence onto the poor artists when copyright is the status where everyones rights get violated in order to help the few.
So, 0.7% which seems like a very, very small sample.
Did they spend time checking 400k tracks to find these?
If it's not a random sample then I think we probably shouldn't allow them to get away with using the word "sample" at all. It's a bowl of cherries that they picked.
How could they be held accountable for that?
The "small sample" is the number of those 2.7K that have gone out of print. They're playing language games to imply that almost all of the music that is part of the "Great 78s" project is currently in print by only suing over 0.7% of it, and saying that most of that 0.7% is available as a digital download.
So to summarize, they combed through an IA project, and probably found that it consisted 99.3% of recordings that the entire RIAA (which represents the entire mainstream US recording industry) doesn't think that it can prove ownership of. These, they insist, are just cover so they can distribute the 0.7% of Bing Crosby 78s.
It always makes me wonder why people want a tiny cartel of companies to own humanity’s music culture, and subsequently be able to bully companies like Spotify, Youtube and others into enforcing extrajudicial policies that maintain the cartel’s dominance.
Like, seriously, what is the perceived societal value here???
But I'm not sure the point of asking people to link their own free work in context, how would that change the discussion? Is the proposal to gatekeep who can access the Internet Archive and share links to other people's art on whether they're enough of an artist themselves?
If you think it's wrong for people to archive old art that's not sold anymore, it seems to me that should hold regardless of whether the archivist has a Devianart and a Bandcamp account of their own
(typo)
You can do art for money or not, I just don't see how you're trying to relate this to archival of music that is no longer sold, whose authors aren't around anymore. I get the impression you're trying to ask people who archive art whether they make art themselves, but I fail to see the point. Very possibly they do, but then so what?
US Copyright laws, that tend to circle the globe, are obnoxious, favoring the already wealthy or established entities to make creativity an unfair business. I look forward to the change.
I am not advocating a blanket position on 'art', or any human endeavour, for that matter. But it would be amiss to not at least mention wider implications to society and culture as a whole.
But what's that have to do with the much more specific legal situation the Internet Archive is in, with old archived works of audio?
Not sure what you mean by 'high contextualisation'.
I put ballet dancers on a par with accountants, scientists, and (above) politicians. Not above scientists et al, you mind, on a par.
The question specific to IA being pursued and my role here is to do with questioning the somewhat regimented reaction on this forum. I have already said 'context' is critical. And blanket change never works, evolution, not revolution. There are considered views that aught to be seen by people other than the converted.
That's what I mean by high-contextualisation!
There are discussion cultures where it's okay to talk about just a thing in isolation with the understanding that we're putting context aside (low-context), and there are cultures where it's important to be very explicit about the context (high-contextualisation)
Both can be completely okay, but it's something to be aware of when someone wants to discuss a specific point, and someone else thinks the context is more important. Otherwise we're just talking past each other.
My personal software is floss BTW.
But it's kinda OT on this thread and feels too much like blatant self-promotion, so I'll refrain. :)
A picture or video of a bike doesn't substitute for an actual bike if you need to ride it to the store.
An illicit digital copy of a song, however, is pretty fungible for an officially licensed digital copy.
I am much more inclined to suggest we look for better business models to support creators than compel them to live in poverty for my amusement (or deny their children the right to manage their estate).
this is obviously nonsense; no human society is known without private property, though there are extremely well-attested societies without writing, without farming, without war, without monogamy, without women, and without clothing
by contrast, all human societies were free of copyright for hundreds of thousands of years until 313 years ago, and in practice most still are
nobody is suggesting making it legal to carry away other people's paintings, records, and books because they are 'art'
we are suggesting making it reliably legal to copy them, because the freedom to reproduce art is something that nobody should ever be denied; retelling stories you've been told, and perhaps playing music you've heard, is as fundamental to being human as private property is. laws granting monopolies on stories and songs for the sake of profit are an intolerable abomination
very few communities have not been "dependent on the outside from replenishment" within recorded history; even before recorded history, bronze-age mesopotamian kingdoms were evidently dependent on tin imported from cornwall, without which their rule would have collapsed
even deep into the stone age we have strong evidence of long-distance trading of prime knapping flint, but it's harder to know if communities were dependent on it; maybe if their trade routes were cut, they would have made do with lower-quality local flint
(just to disambiguate, this is not evidence that these ancient societies had private property; they might have been trading only their collective property. but they do seem to have made their tools of daily use from materials imported from other societies)
there are autarkic societies (the man of the hole, north sentinel island, the toromona, perhaps the himarimã, arguably north korea) but they are very much the exception, and have been for millennia, if not longer
i don't see that importing the young people that you need to perpetuate your society is particularly different from importing food or weapons. nobody doubts that argentina continued being a distinct society during the late 19th and early 20th century, despite mass immigration from europe increasing its population severalfold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Argentina#Featu...
So where do you draw the line and say "no, this is intellectual property, you are not allowed to take it with you"
(For my own part I've been coming around to thinking of it as a consent framework and not a property framework. I might refrain from distributing photos I have a copy of because someone in the photo asked me not to. Or delete a video I took at a kareoke bar because the singer is embarrased - not because they own the content and can sue me for distributing it, but because I want to be respectful of someone else's wishes.)
Am I wrong to interpret this as trying to outlaw ripping a CD and uploading to a personal NAS? There’s additional claims about distribution to the public that (may??) seem more reasonable, but that seems like some copyright maximalism trying to rewrite history?
The reason no users are violating copyright when running software normally is because of a special exception for software in the Copyright Act.
I remember the battles around '2000 when the record industry tried to get paid for each instance when parts of the music files were buffered (because they were "copies"). They weren't laughed out of court. These days I think they would.
Not just case law; it's explicit in statute too:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117
> (a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy.—Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
> (1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or
> (2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.
You can't just drop an extraordinary claim like that without a citation. When I search those terms, your comment is the only one I can find that remotely resembles anything like the case you're describing.
(a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy.—Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or
(2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.
The law was written prior to the existence of digital computers.
That law, as written, made copying a program into computer memory to execute it illegal.
The law was dumb.
But judges enforce the law. That's their job. They have discretion when laws conflict with each other (including with the Constitution) or provide space for ambiguity or flexibility, but otherwise the law is the law.
So Congress did their job (a novel concept these days, I know) and updated the law to reflect the realities in modern technology.
You don't want judges legislating from the bench. If laws need to be updated, lawmakers should update them. That's how the system works.
For a long time downloading was legal (uploading wasn't), due to this. But it has changed sometime in the last decade. While the tax is still there and mandatory, so the copyright-lobbyists won on paper.
In reality people are moving back from streaming to pirate sites and nothing is being done about it.
That fee only covers general piracy. It does not give you the right to copy copyrighted works. In fact, european copyright is much stricter than US copyright. There is no fair use and european copyright (based on the napoleon code) forbids making a copy of copyrighted works except for a few exceptions specifically mentioned in the law (eg a browser displaying a webpage, etc...).
All I can say is that analogue copies were permitted. You play it back analogue and record digitally.
A youtube copyright claim one of my videos got, from where I filmed fireworks and there was music playing in the background, which was then auto-flagged by the machine, I responded with that video not being about the music and that I can't record fireworks without that music playing and that I had no influence over the person playing that music and that it was technically an analogue recording.
The claim was dropped.
That is however different from this case of the IA and Sony etc
> You are permitted to make copies of other people’s texts, music and photographs provided that they derive from a legal source. The copies must be for your own use. It is not permissible, however, to distribute or publish such copies.
https://www.government.nl/topics/intellectual-property/quest...
The fee is not about piracy at all, it's about legal home copies that are not distributed.
A summary of stance of polish law on copying a copyrighted work can be given as "feel free", with an annoying bit about "circumventing effective copy protection" that got pushed in (note that "effective" results in funny legal discussion of whether a broken DRM system is effective).
What is controlled is distribution. I can have my house overflowing with all sorts of copies of disney movies, including derivative works made by myself, so long as I do not actually distribute them beyond myself.
Given to some rights holders.
The only way to fight this is to pirate the fuck out of everything. Seriously. Fuck DRM, fuck gatekeepers, free information NOW and ALWAYS.
Goodbye Calculus 47th Edition. Students can now buy Calculus 40th edition both used and new at a reasonable price in perpetuity. The publisher can charge more for Calculus 50th edition when there's actually new calculus or better teaching methods.
Making students buy their own copies of required textbooks always seemed insane to me. Glad that that's not how things work here and any required excercises (already uncommon) were just provided by the professors/assitants as part of the course.
Eventually, Amazon will open a site called "Internet Archive" where you can stream 50s and 60s television commercial free, and the circle will be complete.
Still a shadow of its former self though.
Few people remember that. But losing it was such a shame.
On the specifics of the lawsuit.. well if the law us bad, then change the law. But not following the law is not nice.
There are cases when 2 admins "guard" an article and no user can change them. Worst is that wikimedia foundation takes tens of millions and doesnt even bother to spend anything to defend wikipedia from that.
This doesn't refute the general principle though - unjust laws should be broken. Historically enough repulsive stuff was mandated by law.
The March on Selma and Greensboro Lunch Counter Sit-ins agree with you.
> But not following the law is not nice.
The March on Selma and Greensboro Lunch Counter Sit-ins disagree with you.
I do insist about the power of the Law. And I do insist that we should either respect or change a law. An unfair law should not exist.
But we should never make law voluntary. But that's my opinion, it's not the Law :)
Working for Sony, UMG, Netflix, any media distribution group, is, as far as I'm concerned, evil. You actively work to make human existence worse. I'd have a word for their lawyers, but I'm sure they're busy being paid hundred of thousands to be sacks of shit.
As a music producer once told me "it's LA man, there must be something in the water."
If you want a good idea on how these guys operate, check that Fyre Fest documentary on Netflix.
Do you know what they do understand? Lawyers. The same lawyers that told them to sue the Archive because they can make more cash this way (or not, it's not really a cause of concern of their lawyers other than making them spend more money) will tell them to stop keep pushing for a lawsuit once they realize they can lose a lot more money they were planning to make and they have to skip this month trip to Thailand or something.
Authors and artists: make sure you have a way for me to send you money online.
Bandcamp, Patreon, Twitch, Ko-Fi, CDbaby, and probably a host of others.
You can see their point, though: obviously Frank Sinatra wouldn't have even bothered recording in the 1950s if he knew that a quarter-century after his death his record company might not make every available cent in profit. /s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyfQVZHmArA
> Humans doing the hard jobs on minimum wage while the robots write poetry and paint is not the future I wanted
~ https://nitter.net/KarlreMarks/status/1658028017921261569 (possibly ~ An AI too...)
That first step, making a digital copy of a copyrighted work, is not illegal to my knowledge of at least Dutch copyright law — you're allowed to make a copy "for your own studies", although it's not allowed to then give this copy away, or in general to make the copy for somebody else.
I also thought that copyright lasts for 70 years, so that all pre-1953 work is in the public domain, or did Disney succeed in extending this period?
That rule does not apply globally. Depends on where you live.
As a result most countries (but, yes, not all countries) have the Bern convention “life plus 70”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_licensing
(See also Taylor Swift re-recording all her own music)
For the write up on Taylor Swift's reasons for re-recording her early albums. Interesting read.
... copyright is deeply broken.
> Although it is often described as a "drinking song", Lichtenwanger states that "To Anacreon in Heaven" "was not a barroom ballad, a drinking ditty to be chorused with glasses swung in rhythm", but "convivial, ... in a special and stately way".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anacreontic_Song
So the “drinking song” description is challenged. But still…
Either way, the anthem is a remix. (From times when that was a part of extending our culture…)
The U.S. Constitution authorizes copyright as a limited monopoly granted to authors and inventors, for a limited time, in order to promote progress in science and the useful arts. A system that allows lawyers to bury old works 70+ years after they were created, by authors who are long since dead, is clearly out of control.
https://ia802701.us.archive.org/2/items/gov.uscourts.nysd.60...
And here is Exhibit A: Sound Recordings at Issue
https://ia802701.us.archive.org/2/items/gov.uscourts.nysd.60...
If they spent it on providing a no-bullshit, reasonably priced platform that provides access to their whole catalog, then they would be making a lot more money than they would from lawsuits, and piracy would be virtually non-existent.
Now, I do agree that “one pirate number doesn’t necessarily equate to one lost sale”. But that’s not what you’re arguing.
Pirates have been saying this for decades, and yet despite content being easier than ever, with pricing falling faster than ever (non-streaming services), piracy is as healthy as ever. If what you were saying is true, you’d expect piracy to have fallen as different people’s barriers for “cheap and easy” were broken through, but that’s not what’s observed.
The ways that music piracy occurs has changed, for sure.
https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/15764/prevalence-of-music...
One thing I did find is that, for some reason, Covid saw a drop in music piracy. That has nothing to do with the claim that “since Spotify released (2011), music piracy is non existent”, though. I didn’t bother to read on idea of why that occurred.
https://musically.com/2021/12/13/online-music-piracy-declini...
And Spotify might have released in 2011 but it went mainstream around late 2010s.
While the situation is obviously messier with video, it's also the case that many of us don't feel a burning need to watch most specific content and are fine with having access to enough stuff we want to watch without hassle.
Some context for the younger HN audience: a CD used to cost $15-20 new and almost no artist in the US sold singles. If you wanted a song you heard on the radio you needed to go to one or more record stores to find the CD and pay your $15. Rarely did you get to sample anything on the CD at the store. So you'd get home only to realize you essentially paid $15 for one stupid song. Hopefully you liked half the songs on the album so you were maybe paying $3 per song you liked. Ripping that CD to MP3 was also more time invested.
Even over a 28.8k dial-up downloading the same song of Napster would only take about twenty minutes.
As the various online music stores showed, money wasn't the main issue with Napster et al. People were fine paying for music so long as it was convenient. By the early 00s buying CDs was far from convenient for how people actually wanted to listen to music. Music streaming is just the latest convenience since everyone has an Internet connected device in their pocket and their "library" is just every song in the service's catalog.
Yeah, mobile probably played a role as well. Even if you have a few TB of music reasonably cataloged on a USB drive at home, that doesn't do you a huge amount of good when you're somewhere where you only have access to your phone or want to have a listen to some newly-released album.
We're also in a situation where if you know someone with vaguely similar music tastes, they could clone that few TB in less than an hour but I honestly don't know how much even that goes on these days. My sense is that most people aren't interested in spending much time to catalog their media.
I have been pirating artists’ entire discographies across multiple genres, 200 CD box sets, etc. for 20 years now, but I still have barely scratched 1TB -- and that’s even with my collection consisting entirely of FLACs, some of which are large 96/24 files or 5.1 surround-sound files. Audio alone just doesn’t take up much space. I don’t think obsessive fans are going to get into a “few TB” unless they are collecting for the sake of collecting, not just building their own personal collection to listen to. And a 1TB collection actually does fit now on your phone thanks to Sandisk offering a 1TB SD card.
For films, sure, one is definitely looking at more than “a few TB”. I have a collection of about 600 films, all of which are DVD images or Blu-ray remuxes, and that already amounts to 6TB. With the availability of 4K remuxes that can be up to 100GB each, demands on storage will only grow.
As the other poster mentioned, the music piracy scene today is a shadow of its old self. There has never again been a private tracker as vast and ambitious as what.cd. Seed numbers are down on lots of remaining trackers. I logged into Soulseek recently (which used to be the obsessive music anorak’s filesharing network) and I can’t find all kinds of things that were widely shared a decade ago.
A lot of this is due to the rise of Spotify as a more convenient means of listening. It is also due to so many young people today using their phone as their sole device, which is not very suitable for torrenting and other types of filesharing.
People want shit for free.
The number of people that openly state that they pirate music has contracted a little bit, but it’s nowhere near “non-existent”.
This contradicts all the research that shows that piracy went down when cheap, easy and reliable music services were available that let you access content how you want, eg. time shifted, different devices, not region restricted, etc. And piracy went up when they tried to lock that stuff down again.
Piracy will never fall to zero, but it's not worth fighting below a certain point.
If you were correct we would have stuck with everything being on Netflix and Spotify for $10/mo each because it keeps piracy rates down. In practice, while piracy rates have gone back up, they don't hurt the bottom lines of publishers as much as they've claimed[0], at least relative to how much they make from people buying multiple subscriptions. But the law allows them to continue crying crocodile tears about how much money they're losing from old sound recordings being on an archive site.
[0] In other words, one pirate copy is not one lost sale
That's exactly the kind of shit that drives people to piracy. Then they try to recoup their falling revenue with litigation. It's stupid.
I also don't believe streaming has been that bad for revenue. The financial shenanigans they go through to avoid paying artists, writers and more are insane. It's part of the whole impetus behind the current strikes.
Neither were fruitless. The RIAA keeps the price of culture high, and the war on drugs kept the price of drugs high.
All of the artists are dead.
> Not only does this harm Plaintiffs and the artists or their heirs by depriving them of compensation,
Hereditary wealth and continued rent-seeking is a very, very poor argument in favor of eternal copyright protection.
> but it undermines the value of music,” the complaint adds.
Music has inherent value and worth that can never be quantified or monetized.
Honestly, screw the record labels. We can argue about the technicalities of copyright law until the cows come home, but this suit is morally disgusting to me.
It might be that they're already involved in that project and it's flush with space and distribution; the message here might just be "we got this".
Or it might be "don't worry, corporate feudalism is great."
It is my belief that libraries and repositories of culture must (not may or shall, must) be built in a manner where they can’t be burned. They require durable, persistent, fault and human tolerant foundational systems (technology and otherwise) that exhibit the features of a Ulysses Pact, protecting the future from the present; from greed, from savagery, from disaster, from deterioration (regardless of source). I hope this clarifies my position on the topic.
My guess is that you'll come to the same conclusion as me: piracy destroys marketplaces. It forces the honest people to subsidize the free riders. If it were about something like food, I can understand a Jean-Val-Jean argument, but can anyone say with a straight face that they're stealing these fresh cuts just so their baby can listen to ccool music?
I think you'll also come to a grudging recognition of just how expensive it can be to market music. I've always thought the percentages demanded by record companies were outrageous, but when I tried to duplicate their services on my own I quickly learned where the money goes.
The IA is on a crash course to destroy the livlihood of artists, writers and other content creators. Don't ask me why. It doesn't make sense. They provide a nice service for society but now they're out on some crusade.
Did you write this comment in 2001? The cost to produce and promote music has dropped to near zero. SoundCloud rappers have become millionaires. Billie Eilesh recorded her first album in her bedroom.
If you think there is no marketing and PR people behinds those "grassroots superstars", you're utterly naive.
these days i do pay for everything, music(spotify), movies(netflix, apple tv), games(steam, gog, itch.io, playstation), to software(app store, gh sponsor, opencollective) – i still pirate though; if netflix has an anime but happens to be dubbed on the wrong language, i'll hit the high seas and get me a copy dubbed in english, no regrets
Distributors have
- bended creative work property laws/precedents to maximise profits.
- Been using marketing as barrier of entry.
- many times used anti competitive practices.
Paying consumers are not subsidising free riders. Given zero or an infinity of pirates the ticket price woụld not change. An effective anti piracy solution doesn't imply pirates would convert into paying consumers, some would of course, and ticket prices would most likely increase rather than decrease. Dubious parallel and nobody is forced. Taxes are forced subsidies. Aside those that's business models and market response.
Every single artist mentioned by name here has long since passed away, and in some cases even their children have passed away.
Support among the US political class for copyright and patent law runs so deep that the main argument for untangling our economy from China's is not "they undercut US labor" or "they manipulate their currency" but "they steal our IP". An interesting choice of words, because that's an exclusive 'we'[0]. US voters have little need for copyrights and patents beyond ensuring that creative works get made. But the US political class is utterly dependent on their continued existence.
BTW, this even extends to Trumpism. Trump was very vocal about China stealing "our IP." The US economy is structured such that you cannot become rich without owning copyrights, patents, oil fields, or real estate. Everything else will be thrown into the abyss of partial post-scarcity.
[0] In some languages (not English) there's an inclusive 'we' and an exclusive 'we'. The latter would be used with the same implication as, say, "We've won the lottery - except for you."
Felix Dennis would contend that such people aren't "wealthy". They're comfortable.
It may take a decade or two, but individuals in these professions who work at top tier roles will be wealthy by any reasonable measure (7-figure investment portfolios and no bad debt is “wealthy” to anyone without a very uninformed understanding of what the word means).
A case study here would be Louis Rossman: rich enough to run a MacBook repair business but not rich enough to bribe/tip Congress into passing a right-to-repair law.
It can be better to pick the one you like most rather than to sort a bunch of candidates, some of which will be inauthentic and strategic, evenly along a continuum. In a field of nine, that transforms the number one candidate from being preferred over the number nine candidate to being nine times better than the number one candidate.
I think there's a reason that Australia requires that you rank all choices. If you don't, it spoils your vote. If you intentionally spoil your vote, that's actually a crime in Australia (don't listen to people who tell you that the least Australia requires is that you turn in a blank ballot; Australia disagrees.) You're not even allowed to ask people not to rank certain candidates. It is a jailable offense:
> In 1986 Albert Langer wrote a conference paper entitled Don't Vote, examining possible electoral strategy for the left, aiming to bring down the Labor government and to target ALP candidates in marginal seats. In 1987 and 1990 there were instances where Victorian voters were urged to take advantage of section 270 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act and give less preferred parties equal last preferences (now known as a Langer vote), so as not to express a choice for either major party.
> As a result of his imprisonment, Amnesty International declared him the first Australian prisoner of conscience for over 20 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Langer
Ranked choice (and obligatory) voting inflates the support for status quo parties. It's also a way to make that pesky 40% who don't vote because they hate both parties disappear.
I never get to vote for the person representing the policies I want, but rather voting against the handful of policies I do not want.
I'm deep into P2P collaboration in terms of implementing aids for deliberative assemblies, or even complete implementations of different kinds of deliberative assemblies. When you study this stuff, you find first that it's still a very loose and new field of study that hasn't quite come together yet. Next, you find that there's a split: some people are trying to figure out the practicalities of implementing traditional deliberative rules in new mediums, aided by all of our cool devices, and even to experiment with those rules when things assumed by them have changed due to technology, e.g. asynchronous deliberation, or instant recall of delegates, etc..
On the other side are the "deliberative polling" people. They present themselves as looking for some sort of innovation in randomly selected focus groups, and ultimately, as looking for ways to essentially split a citizenry into focus groups, and to use those combined focus groups to either wield power as a government, or, more often, to advise a government. It sounds laudable, like a Delphi Method (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_method) for non-experts.
But this is until you read their papers, and notice that the way they evaluate the conclusions of their deliberative group experiments is by how well the conclusions the groups reach agree with their hand-picked experts. Then you notice that what they're actually doing is figuring out frameworks that can guide randomly selected groups of people into predetermined conclusions. It's literally manufacturing consent by maximizing the feeling of participation that people have in ratifying decisions already made. Then you finally realize why Cass Sunstein is interested in it. They want to build a nation of grand juries.
I see ranked-choice voting as a similar tactic. It allows people to express their feelings without any danger that those feelings will have any effect.
edit: I'd also like to point out that in the UK, which has a long recent history of complaining about their FPTP systems, has more viable parties than the US even with FPTP, such as the Liberals who have been around forever (although they've only been "Liberal Democrats" since the SDP split from Labour), the SNP, and even single issue Brexit parties. Even their major parties, such as Labour, are to a degree composites, including things like The Labour and Co-operative Party.
The reason the Democrats and Republicans are the only real choices is because they fixed the rules, like e.g. against "fusion," which makes it so parties like Labour and Co-operative can't even exist outside of New York. The insane requirements for qualifying to run, the absence of campaign finance regulations, the fact that the government hosts their internal primary elections and marks parties on the ballot sheet... there are obvious ways to keep these awful parties from a lock on power, and they will not be done because these awful parties make the rules.
Incorrect.
Spoilt votes are legal and non criminal - spoil your own vote as much as you like.
> Albert Langer
wasn't convicted of spoiling his vote.
He advocated everybody spoil their votes, and handed out "how to not vote" flyers
He was asked not to, there was a court case, an appeal, an injunction against Langer, a deliberate violation of that injunction, an arrest for violating that injunction, a sentence, that sentence halved, a review of the law created to mess with Langer, and then that law was tossed out.
So ..
Never a crime to spoil a vote in Australia.
Briefly "illegal" to advocate others do so (during one election).
That's no longer the case.
> I think there's a reason that Australia requires that you rank all choices.
Only in the House of Representatives - where you order a small number of choices to choose a candidate to represent your local district.
https://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/How_to_Vote/Voting_HOR.htm
Senate votes (the other House) only require to rank six parties (out of a field of potentially many) OR rank 12 individuals (out of potentially many more)
https://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/How_to_Vote/Voting_Senate.htm
You really don't appear to know much about the Australian Electoral system.
> Incorrect.
I warned you not to listen to Australians about this. It's some kind of folk rebel legend that they're not required to vote completely. They are. Beware of "corrections" without references.
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> The Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918, under section 245(1), states: "It shall be the duty of every elector to vote at each election".
> Under the Electoral Act, the actual duty of the elector is to attend a polling place, have their name marked off the certified list, receive a ballot paper and take it to an individual voting booth, mark it, fold the ballot paper and place it in the ballot box.
> It is not the case, as some people have claimed, that it is only compulsory to attend the polling place and have your name marked off, and this has been upheld by a number of legal decisions:
High Court 1926 – Judd v McKeon (1926) 38 CLR 380
Supreme Court of Victoria 1970 – Lubcke v Little [1970] VR 807
High Court 1971 – Faderson v Bridger (1971) 126 CLR 271
Supreme Court of Queensland 1974 – Krosch v Springbell; ex parte
Krosch [1974] QdR 107
ACT Supreme Court 1981 – O'Brien v Warden (1981) 37 ACTR 13
https://aec.gov.au/About_AEC/Publications/voting/index.htm
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>> Albert Langer
> wasn't convicted of spoiling his vote.
> He advocated everybody spoil their votes, and handed out "how to not vote" flyers
Which is somewhat true, although the conference paper was called "Don't Vote." It was a witty title, because it wasn't about not voting, but marking voting papers in such a way that you could avoid ranking the two biggest parties. I don't know why you think that it would be a crime to advocate for a legal act, but you do you.
But consider that what I said was "You're not even allowed to ask people not to rank certain candidates. It is a jailable offense."
> Never a crime to spoil a vote in Australia.
This is a falsehood. Currently a crime to intentionally spoil your vote in Australia, currently not ranking all choices with spoil your vote.
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>> I think there's a reason that Australia requires that you rank all choices.
> Only in the House of Representatives - where you order a small number of choices to choose a candidate to represent your local district.
You got me. I think there's a reason that the House of Representatives requires you to rank all choices, and that the Senate only requires you to rank what is likely to be all vaguely viable choices (as power rules go.)
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> You really don't appear to know much about the Australian Electoral system.
You seem to have gotten everything wrong about Australian voting except to point out that the Senate only requires you to rank the top six parties or twelve individuals out of a selection that could be larger. Seems like very little to be gloating about, but, again, you do you.
Educational purposes only, not legal advice, don’t do this.
Sticking the IA with more legal fees as another poster suggested seems plausible.
They have a brief link to Audacity if you want to do it yourself, but no-one do they explain their process for doing it themselves. Very opaque :(
I imagine that contributors use different methods. Old record players used thorn needles (as in plant thorns). A purist might do that and record from the player’s horn with a mic.
One annoyance I encountered in capturing old mono content is the lack of a filter in the audio software I’ve used that would keep only the mono content of a stereo recording. A lot of the crackles on a mono record are in stereo, being on only one side of a groove.
NK needs no explanation, I hope. Here is the most recent example of why I have no respect for the system in Russia:
https://www.businessinsider.in/politics/world/news/kremlin-s...
Let me break it down:
- Archives attempt to backup Wikipedia.org for one thing.
- Wikipedia.org is blocked in Russia and China.
- Therefore it is logical to assume that they would not allow the hosting of an archive of a blocked site, in their own country.
The remainder of your comment is illogical.
Would just routing the data via starlink be good enough? (if you could hide the original location)
I reckon there's considerable truth in what kmeisthax said in his post about the US political system, in that copyright and patent laws are so ingrained in US political class thinking that antiquated IP laws will never be reformed.
Perhaps the only practical solution is ignore the US and bypass it altogether. A ship like Radio Caroline equipped with internet servers in international waters may be the only viable way we'll ever get to achieving a fair and equitable solution to the IP mess—that is to just bypass it.
Is this not a slam dunk win for the record labels? Sounds like the internet archive officially made recordings available for download.
A lot of what they make available arguably shouldn't be protected by copyright under a rational copyright regime but that's an argument to make to Congress rather than saying the IA can do whatever feels justified to them. (Which can cut both ways once you say the law is whatever you personally think is fair.)
What we really need are updated copyright laws that allow for research and preservation. However, people have been calling for updated laws for decades, but powerful copyright holders have stood in the way, so don’t hold your breath.
If you did, you could DMCA claim it. They'd still archive the stuff, but it wouldn't be publicly available until whenever it'd fall into the public domain. That part of the system seems to work fairly well, except the century it would take for it to fall into public domain.
I picked three random pieces of recent copyright content (Adobe Lightroom, the video game Hollow Knight, the Taylor Swift album "Folklore"), and I found all of them easily and trivially on the Internet Archive. In fact I found hacked versions of the entire Adobe CC suite. The IA is at least as complete a source for pirated content as most public bittorrent trackers.
Officially, of course, the Internet Archive is subject to DMCA safe harbor protections. This is user uploaded content, and so long as IA responds quickly to takedown notices, they're in the clear. But this story represents the situation de jure, not de facto. Ever since Viacom v. YouTube, it's been abundantly clear that even the biggest online platforms can't use this excuse in practice when sharing of copyright IP becomes rampant. YouTube put in the first version of their much maligned "Content ID" system the year after the Viacom lawsuit, and the parties settled out of court after YouTube lost at the circuit court level. [1]
I don't believe that the Internet Archive, as a much smaller entity, is likely to see a significantly different outcome - that is, unless the lawsuits manage to bankrupt them entirely. This would suggest they need to be much more proactive about removing or disabling access to copyright content on the platform.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y....
And LPs here: https://locserendipity.com/LP.html
(And donate to IA)
Edit: answered my own question: https://archive.org/donate
This does not make me want to support record labels