It may have always been inevitable that copyright laws would burn down our modern Library of Alexandria, but they didn't have to hand out torches like this.
Technology, the great equalizer, except when it's not. Mostly not.
Lending books was to individual user accounts, so I’d guess it could be possible to reach out to users.
I’ve used IA lending one time when I wanted to check a reference in an old book and it was purely research use.
I would imagine that most of the IA use cases are research or teaching, not entertainment.
To me that sounds like even more damning evidence of conspiracy to commit mass copyright infringement.
I know there's more but here's one quick thing I found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D14y1t43FIk&t=1446s
Basically he says people ask him "why don't you ask before allowing copyrighted content to be made available" and his reply is something to the effect of "because it's too much work". Earlier in the same video he also clearly shows a huge disdain for copyright in general and laughs at people asking him to take things down.
That’s the joke. This never had a chance of changing anything. All it’s done is make publishers look reasonable, because most people don’t believe one person should be able to unilaterally override millions of authors’ preferences around their works. (To say nothing of their livelihoods.)
This is a reasonable stance! If the IA had only released books of dead authors, they’d have a point. They didn’t.
Edit: On Hacker News more people upvote subscription bypass links in articles than downvote them.
No. But most people don’t agree with the IA’s anything goes position either.
I hate our system of copyright. But I can’t think of a better defence for it than pointing to the IA and saying is that what you really want? That authors can’t demand payment for their work?
Piracy is very much anything goes. People post “commentary streams” where someone else’s YouTube video or even whole movies are shown in their entirety and there’s basically zero backlash from millions of fans. From what I can see the vast majority of Americans take no issue with what IA did.
Because nobody noticed outside a narrow slice of tech and media. When people are polled on copyright, no copyright is never more than a niche.
I’ve pirated content. That doesn’t mean I believe copyright should be eliminated.
There is widespread dissatisfaction with our current system of copyright. That doesn’t imply support for abolishment.
> I don’t think most people agree with the current copyright system even slightly.
Not doubting you. But do you have a source?
Personally I don’t pirate movies, games, shows, etc or pay for such content.
The courts can be. But you have to be strategic.
decentralize their dataset, with some distributed hash table, and a minimalistic blockchain for it (yes, yawn)
provide randomized signatures by themselves AND gather them from provably randomly selected participants of each page served, in order to testify a page showed specific claims/content at a certain date / time.
and so on ...
If the internet archive comes crashing down, at least the user base that relied on such services (or whatever simulacra they appeared to manifest) can band together and make such things happen properly, whereas the network effect was all usurped by the IA we know (and love or hate).
i.e. those who secure the status quo may regret allowing some greedy "publishers" to deconstruct an excellent fata morgana, the problem with deception is that some parts of the system start believing the overt purpouse of the covert behavior of other parts of the same system.
just look at how the soviet union spontaneously imploded.
Whether IA is morally right or wrong here is completely irrelevant. They undertook an activity which had significant legal risks attached, and that might undermine their future web archiving efforts.
THe IA might believe that they are morally and legally in the right here, but they should have at least predicted that, with copyright law being what it is, the courts could be "wrong" and believe otherwise. It feels like they don't see the difference between believing that they are right and assuming that everybody else shares this belief.