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Comment by jimbob45 | Hacker News Reader

Nobody will preserve the culture you care about for you. Nobody can make it better but us.

Internet Archive is doing a pretty incredible job of just that.

I think the message is more about self-organizing and takings steps to be active in preservation. The Internet Archive does great work, but putting all our eggs in that basket creates a huge risk if it becomes a Library of Alexandria, and publishers would love for it to no longer exist. [0]

[0] https://time.com/6266147/internet-archive-copyright-infringe...

The Internet Archive was never sold to a third party. That's the point: they've always retained control of their company and therefore their vision.

Well, you've gotten to the crux of it. Stop trusting culture to for profit companies who will be flipped as soon as majority stakeholders get a whiff of "cash me out." Brewster Kahle takes the role of the Internet Archive and its mission very seriously. It has been organized in a manner to defend against this peril and will survive a custodian transition.

https://winners.webbyawards.com/2017/specialachievement/130/...

https://archive.org/details/2017-Webby-award-video

“The Internet Archive…is building a home for Universal Access to All Knowledge, open to everyone, everywhere, to use as they like. Open to all societies of the future that care to build on our triumphs and learn from our mistakes.” -- Lawrence Lessig, narrator

EDIT: TLDR Build public goods if motivated and resourced, defend them through legal, logical, physical, and technological controls.

Internet Archive won't read your mind and automatically archive everything you desire, you still have to explicitely tell it what to save

Exactly. And there's tons of stuff out there it doesn't have, waiting to be converted from analog media or out of the clutches of overreaching copyright.

Internet Archive is great, but to be clear: it's a museum of dead cultures for historical examination and appreciation. That's a valuable service, but it's not at all the same thing as supporting a living community. By its nature, the Internet Archive can never do that.

Internet Archive can never exist in the EU in regards to hosting because they're so egregiously violating basic consumer rights, including the right to privacy and the right to be forgotten. They make it intentionally difficult, and often impossible, to get content removed from their archive (especially if you don't control the domain). They're oblivious to how many violations of personal information they contain within their own archives - by design grabbing content without having any idea what it is - and stand no chance of ever meeting stringent EU laws on such matters including GDPR.

And that's something to celebrate? No, it's something HN nearly universally somehow overlooks in every single conversation about Internet Archive, because they get a pass (the end justifies the means essentially).

Internet Archive should be illegal because it violates human rights.

The 'right to be forgotten' has always been one of the more ill-conceived ideas coming from the EU. Censoring lawful and factual information is dubious in principle and flawed as a means of protecting privacy. Since its introduction, it has been widely abused as a tool to hide misdeeds and embarrassments, to pretend they never actually happened.

By the way, I think I should remind you that you must bear no memory about Herostratus, arsonist who burned down the Temple of Artemis.

> Internet Archive should be illegal because it violates human rights.

You raise some interesting points, but the kill-it-with-fire solution ignores the great (necessary!) benefits the archive provides to humanity, by protecting useful public/published information from constant churn.

Humanity is just beginning to find its moral/ethical way forward, in this new integrated world of information, by feel in the dark.

In the meantime, its unavoidable that many things will be imperfect balances, and people will disagree where the balances should be.

European laws are not universal laws. This is like arguing that European corporations violate human rights by not enforcing the 2nd amendment. Which the US considers to be an unalienable right. That would be absurd, just like trying to claim that some particular right you have in Europe is suddenly universal and a "human right".

I'm glad that organizations don't try to cater to every single law in every country. But it's weird that this urge to force their own laws on the entire world seems so prevalent amongst Europeans.

Because the right to be forgotten is idiotic. Humanity has a right to accurate history even if it's embarrassing to certain individuals. Information archiving is a matter of preservation and continuity of understanding that can live for millennia if we do it right.

> Internet Archive can never exist in the EU

British Library archives every publication, print and digital (including websites and social media posts), made in UK. They started to do this before exiting EU.

They don't just do it, but are obligated to do it.

> violating basic consumer rights, including the right to privacy

It's an openly published stuff that was openly available at some point and didn't require any credentials like login and password for access.

It's like pinning a piece of paper on a public lamppost and then complaining that someone wrote the text down and told others.

> and the right to be forgotten

By the way, did you forget about Herostratus already or should I remind you that you must bear no memory of this arsonist who burned Temple of Artemis?

> They make it intentionally difficult, and often impossible, to get content removed from their archive.

I did read about people sending GDPR requests and getting their personal data removed. I suspect that using just "I want this deleted" as a reasoning will result in rejection though.

British Library that operated in EU requires a legal reason for material removal, not just "I don't want this here".

> (especially if you don't control the domain)

It's reasonable to prove the right to manage the data first.

> Internet Archive should be illegal because it violates human rights.

Publishing stuff openly makes it available to everyone. 100% of people. Why do it and then be mad that someone remembered it?

I will rephrase one of the most widely used quotes in American movies: "You have a right to remain silent. Everything you post may be remembered".

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