Why are so many books listed as "Borrow Unavailable" at the Internet Archive?
help.archive.org
help.archive.org
(As a bonus, you don't even need internet for the content you have backed up.)
And you save it in in a tree-structured set of folders.
Like (say): Motor_vehicles -> ICE -> cars -> Mercedes_Benz -> C-Class -> Coupe -> 2002_W203
Videos, Music, photos, ebooks, etc,etc. They all can go on a "write-once, keep forever" archive-disk, that is backed-up daily using something like 'rsync' that only needs to track the changes in the archived materials.
a nice frontend by https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nikisweeting
[1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/history-book-browse-search/id1...
I don't think most authors are upset with IA or libraries, but rather a vocal minority of the same. Most authors know that things like this help their reach and ultimately make people more likely to buy their books in the long run.
It was a publisher who filed this lawsuit, not an author.
This is a huge, HUGE false belief amongst the technocrats who think they are on the side of the creators. I put this in the same bucket as the 'it democratizes creativity' fallacy.
It might have been true right up until every techbro decided it was totally fine to scrape every bit of creativity off the web – legally and illegally – and repackage it into an AI model.
The publishers are bad, agreed, but at least there's a framework for artists to make a penny for every buck. Today it's open season on every author, illustrator, photographer, and writer.
The creators of copyright law never imagined a world where everyone could have a free library of a lifetime of books in their pocket, and where copyright would eventually be extended to make this impossible.
This creates urgency to change the law (e.g. back to the original 12 year copyright terms), challenge the law in the courts as archive.org has been doing, or disobey it on principle, as the operators of Anna's archive, Z-library, and Scihub are doing, heroically and at great personal risk.
What was the reasoning for lengthening the terms in the first place? It's not clear to me why works from 1780 would be relatively trivial to modern and thus only merit potentially up to 20-something years of protection while they now may need ... 80ish? I'd assume production of essentially any work would be more of a PITA and riskier in 1780.
I've heard Disney and Mickey Mouse cited. But perhaps that's a different issue.
Hell, they'd prefer to eliminate the books on people's bookshelves and replace them with instantly revocable and totally non-transferable licenses to ecopies of them on devices that were well-secured against user access, but they'll take what they can get. Tomorrow is another day.
A quick search on Wikipedia suggests that a "final judgement" was made in August of last year, but also that it was appealed last year. Is this being posted now because the appeal now over?
http://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://help.arch...
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that universities aren't the bastions of knowledge sharing that we want them to be. I just think it's sad.
Elsiever's famous for acting that way. Yale, Harvard, Cambridge are known for the same.
Try exploring doing anything with academic publications. Every use falls into about the same case as the archive.org case. "We own an indefinitely copyright that lasts 70 years after our institution collapses, and if you're even allowed to read the articles without paying a fortune ($50 to find it's a 2 page scam publication, $10,000 for a subscription), you may only do so for personal consumption with no distribution." https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies-and-standards/pricin...
The prices are funny. Ever heard of "Applied Surface Science", 0169-4332? $25,462 subscription for surfaces ... that are applied. How about "Colloids and Surfaces A", 0927-7757? $20,167 subscription to find out whether you'd ever care. Frankly, all journals with the word "surface" are expensive. Magazine prices be like "daaaamn" (Friday). To be fair though, you can learn how to anesthetize your own subjects (Advances in Anesthesia) for $282.
Review completely happens in the dark if you really pay attention. Peer reviewed? Do you peer review their articles? Have you ever actually met anybody who does? They always seem to be in far away fortress schools you never meet with fancy title names like the "Dogsworth Diapers Emeritus Lifetime Chair of El Supremo Tacos." In years of academia, I think I got asked to look at a paper once for a prof. who was lazy.
The only way they're a "bastion" is in the sense of a medieval fortress paywall that takes away all opportunities, does nothing with what they've hoarded, and then stacks money for score like a game mechanic.
Obvious, I'm a huge fan of modern academia. Take all above as somewhat bias.
Every museum and archive could put up torrents just like the IA and take as a duty to guide the public through these torrents, feel certain that they would be maintained forever through minimal effort, that their reach would be the widest possible, and that the insights that could be built from people studying that work would be exponential. But that would largely cut the museum out of the process, and the purpose of the museum is mainly to preserve the museum. Instead they hand write inscrutable dogshit interfaces that prioritize preventing any sort of download or mirroring over any other concern, especially searchability or organization.
Museums started as wealthy individual collectors bragging with their personal collections to get clout, or as attractions in the manner of theme parks constructed to get people to pay admissions fees. We only mistake them for charities because it's easy to trick us into subsidizing them through tax. These are vehicles for people's lucrative careers. People with the kinds of institutionalized minds who can't figure out how not to work for elsevier for free. Upper middle-class people solely motivated by personal achievement.
Museums are far more selfless than universities.
https://www.louvre.fr/en/online-tours#virtual-tours
There is something in the current framework that allows libraries to lend out digital copies — by having purchased a physical copy. They can lend out one digital copy for each physical copy they hold.
What Internet Archive did was, during Covid, opened up lending to exceed the physical copies they held. They did not ask the copyright holders when they did this.
They broke the law, and their case has no legal merit. Their argument was to appeal to public opinion. The results of the lawsuit may jeopardize their main mission.
I really respected the IA, but how they are going about this is dishonest.
Their argument was there are enough physical copies in shuttered libraries to cover any lending and it's not impossible they could've gotten the publishers on board if they went public with the plan first urging for swift agreement instead of going for "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than to get permission".
They could have also added code to help people find the books they are looking for in their _local_ libraries if they reached the lending limit. That would bring more attention to the local library and what they do for their community.
They could have asked the public to donate books. There may be logistics problem with sending the books over, but it can be something that raised awareness and involved the public more with what their mission.
There was lots of ways to do this. Disabling the code to ignore lending limits was low effort … and frankly, not well considered.