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Comment by jjcm | Hacker News Reader

Regardless of what happens here, one of the biggest losses in historical music archives was when what.cd got taken down. Regardless of copyright, it does feel like there is a place for archival indexing of historical recordings. I wish there was some sort of law protecting this. What.cd was clearly offending copyright, with the historical value being a secondary effect, but the internet archive's intent here clearly isn't copyright violation.

Intent should matter.

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Yes, but it shouldn't have to. The youngest recordings we're talking about are ~65 years old. Few people even have gear to play the discs. Have the authors of these songs, the players on the recordings and the publishers of these discs not had enough of a chance to make their money? I'll take whatever judgement I can get in favor of the Internet Archive, but I think we should be aiming for a principled stance of enough copyright is enough!

IMO copyright simply isn’t fine grained enough. Allowing 1:1 copies after 20 years isn’t economically meaningful to the creators in general, but when you use a work as part of a movie, commercial, political campaign, etc it’s co opting the original creator as if they where endorsing what you’re doing. Which simply isn’t appropriate while the creator is alive.

On the other hand if you’re selling action figures you expect little kids to create their own stories with those characters. Culture has long mixed existing characters in new ways just look at any mythology before writing. Jokes, memes, fanfics, etc are the natural progression of a culture and giving up on that seems detrimental in ways that aren’t obvious.

Your distinction between commercial use and things like meme culture doesn’t hold up. For example, memes can harm creators too, like Pepe the Frog being co-opted by far-right groups. If you want to protect creators, there’s no simple solution, as both can distort their intent.

Focused on “commercial” and while ignoring “political campaign, etc” misses the point. There is a difference between making up a new Chuck Norris fact and using the meme to support religion, brands, politics, or whatever.

Legal systems constantly deal with intangible abstracts like intent. “Pepe the Frog being co-opted” is cashing in on the existing work rather than operating in some hypothetical framework.

Pepe wasn’t officially adopted by that campaign, and its misuse and harm began long before and continued well after the press tied it to MAGA.

Beyond that, creative works shape society, and arbitrarily restricting them stifles creativity. Granting exceptions for reasons like ‘think of the children’ or ‘it’s just for the lulz’ fails to address the greater issue.

> Pepe wasn’t officially adopted by that campaign, and its misuse and harm began long before and continued well after the press tied it to MAGA.

Being ‘Official’ is irrelevant. Noting happens without individuals doing something, who would then be liable in the system I am describing.

> Granting exceptions for

Exceptions completely defeat the point here. It’s the implied support that’s the problem not what’s being supported. Someone could be a well known champion of the issuing being supported, but disagree with being associated with the people presenting the message.

We limit what you can do with someone’s likeness and someone’s works deserve protection for similar reasons. Under the current system this issue is irrelevant because of how long copyright lasts, but if you want dramatically shorter copyright people are going to want this kind of protection even for works they aren’t receiving royalties from.

I agree that we're probably giving up something culturally and socially important by restricting the telling and remixing of stories, myths, characters, etc. As for co-opting work to spread a message the author wouldn't necessarily endorse, that interpretation sounds like one borne of a world with strict copyright that has trained people to expect all instances of a character or uses of a work to involve the author's permission. In a world without such an expectation that sort of usage would not be misinterpreted as endorsement.

> In a world without such an expectation that sort of usage would not be misinterpreted as endorsement.

Memory is associative not some perfectly indexed logical deduction. Play a clip of something next to something else and people link them even if it doesn’t make any sense.

It’s not such a big issue of someone is using characters from a novel in a new context, but we’re also dealing with recordings and deepfakes. Make a minor edit to a song and play it in a commercial and many people would get confused as to what the original lyrics where.

> that interpretation sounds like one borne of a world with strict copyright that has trained people to expect all instances of a character or uses of a work to involve the author's permission

I think rather it's borne of a world that views ideas as something to own, rather than something that you give to the world to enrich culture, arts, or sciences. There are people who desire perpetual copyright, and the eradication of the public domain. They see ideas as something they have a right to monetize until the end of time.

Ideas and recordings of performances are separate things.

Someone may want to abolish copyright on books and still desire control over a sex tape they made 50 years ago.

> The youngest recordings we're talking about are ~65 years old.

So they could have gotten some value again as relics?

remember when they tried to codify it into an international treaty, effectively removing even congress' ability to control it?

Copyright law isn’t written to be reasonable. It doesn’t matter if the rightsholder wrote a song 65 years ago and hasn’t made money selling it for decades, it’s protected for the lifetime of the author plus 70 years. I’m sure everyone who comments on this would agree that’s far too long, but it doesn’t matter what we think. We could spend all day coming up with better ideas for how this could work, but the RIAA have no desire to budge on this at all, and there isn’t enough political will to overturn the current laws (all republicans and some democrats would oppose any attempt to do so).

I'll never forgive the copyright monopolists for the closing of what.cd. The world lost another library of alexandria that day. Don't care what the law says, how many of their "rights" were infringed, how much money it was costing them. I'll never forgive them for it.

Me either, the alternatives that sprung up just aren't the same.

Isn't that supposed to be the role of The Library of Congress?

"That" has a little wiggle room here, but the answer is still probably no regardless of what you mean. The Internet Archive's goal is to provide universal access to all knowledge. This is not the goal of the LOC.

I think the parent refers to this [1]:

"All works under copyright protection that are published in the United States are subject to the mandatory deposit provision of the copyright law (17 USC section 407).

This law requires that two copies of the best edition of every copyrightable work published in the United States be sent to the Copyright Office within three months of publication. Works deposited under this law are for the use of the Library of Congress"

I don't know how/if it works in practice, but if the copyright is supposed "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", I think that it is perfectly fine for the LOC to guarantee that when the copyright expires at least a copy is still around.

This doesn't mean that it should provide universal access though, especially while the copyright is still valid.

[1] https://www.copyright.gov/mandatory/

Wait, does this apply to software?

I have no idea :-). Frankly I was under the impression that this requirement had been weakened/removed over the years, but this is what they write on the official website and I cannot find any reference about that so that's why I wrote "how/if it works in practice"

(maybe the devil is in the referenced details, but alas I have not time to investigate now)

But my point was more about the matter of principle: it is reasonable for the government to ask a copy of the works (for preservation reasons) in exchange for time-limited rights over it.

I mean, it certainly doesn't apply to 80 year-old 78s published long before the law said that. They don't go looking for ancient stuff that predated that practice.

What.cd was more than an archive of nearly all recorded music, both analog and digital. It had some of the best collage lists and recommendations I have ever seen. None of the child sites came even close, but some are promising.

It was truly one of the best ways to discover music because behind each recommendation was a human that were both enthralled you were interested and would tailor their recommendations to suit your tastes.

Spotify use to have humans curate their playlists and during this time is was almost as good, but since they've moved to ML models recommendations have gone to truly awful now.

Supposed according to whom?

Believe it or not, the official role of the Library of Congress is mostly to be a library serving Congress.

Their website says "The Library is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office."

They do keep copies of things registered for copyrights, for copyright purposes.

I don't believe there is any legislation or funding to give them the role of finding and preserving 80 year old 78s en masse.

The Copyright Office is and always has been an arm of the Library of Congress.

So “supposed according to whom” is according to law and all of history.

The copyright office does not try to collect and preserve, en masse, old recordings from before they started taking deposits of audio recordings for copyright registration. (1972 prob? sound recordings didn't have federal copyright protection in the USA before 1972) There is no my knowledge no legislation authorizing that or funding from the government for it.

The Lib of Congress (probably not in the copyright office part of it) does have some historical audio recordings in their collection, including digitizations, but I don't think on this scale.

Why do you keep stating things you can’t find untrue with a moments search?

Yes, the Library of Congress actively collects old audio (and even has 450,000 of those old 78s you claimed they don’t gather, and around another million unpublished ones). They have funding and mandates to do so.

This entire thread is you posting opinion as fact, but these opinions are demonstrably false. Before posting things as true please do some due diligence.

> Regardless of copyright, it does feel like there is a place for archival indexing of historical recordings.

Does anyone have a link to such an index for what.cd? Just the following:

* album/track string plus minimal metadata (release date or whatever)

* hash for the track that goes along with that given piece of unique metadata

Such a thing is obviously on the right side of the law-- you can't reconstruct the copyrighted content from the hash or the title. And the name of an artist/track title isn't copyrightable.

That would be a valuable index that shows the exact state of what.cd's database before it was taken down. And I don't think it would be that large.

This might be what you're looking for: https://archive.org/details/What.CD_Goodbye_Release

They can archive things without breaching copyright. Why not digitise your 78rpm copy of White Christmas, stick it in the vault, and publish it when the copyright expires?

There's always the possibility that the organization falls apart, suffers catastrophic data loss, or is legally compelled to destroy their copies. The name of the game is redundancy when it comes to archival, and the best way to achieve that is to distribute copies to anyone who wants one. Many parties storing copies on many mediums in many jurisdictions for many reasons.

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