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Comment by dehrmann | Hacker News Reader

I refuse to donate to them because I see their disregard for copyright as a liability.

Non-profits essentially have to be the ones to push the limits of laws like this, because it's not profitable, so for-profit entities aren't going to do it. But someone has to do it or you can never get a precedent saying that something good is actually allowed.

The problem is the RIAA knows this, because they have expensive lawyers, and they try to avoid proceeding with a suit unless they think their victim has made a mistake. So you have to get close enough to the line to at least make them think that, but then there is the risk that the judge thinks that too. Yet what alternative is there?

Although he actually had a profit motive, god bless Larry Flynt.

And this is why public companies are worse than private ones. A public company exists to make the shareholders money. A private company exists to do whatever the owners want. And then, once in a while, one of them wants to do something good.

But sadly most major companies are public anymore.

> be the ones to push the limits of laws like this

I can think of a much more prudent way to do that, namely, by legally segregating their non-contentious archiving (the wayback machine et al) from their legally contentious archiving such that legal threats to one entity cannot disrupt the other entity.

Which would make them less sympathetic and imply that they think they're doing something illegitimate.

Also, the wayback machine is not a non-contentious thing. They're making copies of everything on the internet and then distributing them to the public. It's all content that was freely available to begin with, but as far as I know that has never been tested in court.

> Which would make them less sympathetic

You think them saying 'we understand that the web archive is a valuable resource of data which isn't under legal attack, and to best serve the needs of the public we'll ring-fence that resource by spinning it off as a separate legal entity that won't be affected by any legal action that may be taken against us while we fight a (more) contentious battle' would result in less sympathy for them?

How so?

You're proposing that they separate their more sympathetic more traditional activities into a separate entity than their more contentious activities, so that the latter entity is engaged in only the more contentious activities. Is it not clear why that makes the latter entity less sympathetic and more likely to lose? Even the act of doing it would imply that they expect to lose.

> Is it not clear why that makes the latter entity less sympathetic and more likely to lose?

Yes, but that entity is clearly violating the law and is archiving material that is already (by definition) archived by somebody, just not publicly accessible. This strategy is about preserving the more valuable non-alternatively-archived data.

> Even the act of doing it would imply that they expect to lose.

They're clearly violating the law, they've lost already on a similar case, if they don't expect to lose they should fire their counsel.

> archiving material that is already (by definition) archived by somebody, just not publicly accessible.

How useful to the public is it to have it archived but not publicly accessible?

> They're clearly violating the law, they've lost already on a similar case

They're not clearly violating the law, they're doing something where the law isn't established (which is the point), and the other case is subject to appeal.

You have to host copyrighted work to make an archive, there's no other choice since the current copyright system swallowed the whole culture. The problem isn't them, it's the law.

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