Record Labels File $412M Copyright Infringement Lawsuit Against Internet Archive | Hacker News Reader

Record Labels File $412M Copyright Infringement Lawsuit Against Internet Archive

rollingstone.com

85 pointswebmaven15 comments

Dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37100140

If it's so stupid, how do they manage to get so many billions out of it?

Thuggery and exploitation

The concept that corporations can have control over the works of a long dead person and can claim damages for people archiving and distributing those works is stupid.

Being rich is not the same as being intelligent

Something being stupid and something being technically not illegal are wildly orthogonal.

Getting billions out of something doesn't make it smart.

People get billions out of lots of dumb stuff.

I’m reading the Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg and just heard a story how the toothpaste craze in the early 20th century was started by Pepsodent linking toothpaste to people feeling the film on their teeth. But this film isn’t bad and toothpaste doesn’t do anything to help with it. You can get rid of the film with anything, like eating an apple.

It’s dumb that people would feel this film and want to use pepsodent to brush away the film. But they made billions.

Lots of dumb things make money. Doesn’t mean they should. And certainly doesn’t mean they should to the limitation or destruction of other value (in this case maximalist copyright laws are endangering the preservation of culture).

Now this is the kind of high quality, well thought out, insightful commentary I look for on HN. Thank you for your contribution.

I read it in Butthead's voice. But to be fair, Beavis and Butthead were some of the greatest social commentators of the 90s.

> I read it in Butthead's voice

That right there is a violation of copyright. You are an immoral monster.

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. If copyright laws were still reasonable, like the original term of 14 years - renewable once for 14 more if the author is still alive - none of these 70+-year-old recordings would still be under copyright.

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://archive.ph/2023.08.13-044622/https://www.rollingston...

When the metric-to-measure becomes the target, this is the type of silly real-world application we see.

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