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Comment by fwip | Hacker News Reader

> There is no reason laws should have power over anything in perpetuity.

Laws are simply rules chosen and enforced by a given society. Having power over things is what they do. (Also, "in perpetuity" seems untrue, as all copyright expires eventually.)

You clearly disagree with the laws (and I'm inclined to support you there), but what is special about preservation that it should automatically override the will of society? Nearly all the combined work of humanity has been "lost to time," and society seems pretty okay with that.

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> Nearly all the combined work of humanity has been "lost to time," and society seems pretty okay with that.

Pre-digital age, preserving the combined work of humanity was actually quite difficult. The cost to preserve everything outside of "obviously important" artifacts would've been preventative (or even impossible) for society as a whole.

I believe many (if not most) folks native to the digital age believe that digital artifacts should be preserved indefinitely by default - as the cost in doing so is comparatively trivial - and laws in democratic nations will catch up to that.

Hey I agree 100%. We live in a time and place where we could put about 10-Refridgerators-worth of computer and storage into the basement of every library in the world, and fill those drives with every book, painting, movie, song, etc... EVRYTHING all in one place, replicated around the world a million times over..

We could do this. The technology exists. But we, as humans, as a society and as a race of beings, have collectively decided that we will not do this: It doesn't make anyone any money.

For the first time in history, we could store all of human knowledge in a safe replicable way, world wide, for everyone. But we specifically choose not to do this.

Are you willingly ignoring the Internet Archive which is exactly doing that, and is not a for-profit operation?

We need more of those, agreed, but it makes no sense saying "no one is doing that."

No, I am not ignoring them. I know Archive very well. They do not preserve copyrighted content deliberately, it just gets uploaded, and when no one comes and complains it stays up. They remove things ALL the time. All of the Atari 2600 games from Atari itself, for example. Atari's current owners showed up and asked Jason to take those down, and he did. And he thanked them for the privilege and said they were very nice.

I ADORE Archive. But guess what, they're being sued into the ground over doing EXACTLY what we all want them to do: preserving things. If anything, this absolutely 100% proves my point: we have 1 example of a modern Library of Alexandria, and it is in danger because someone is upset they didn't get paid. This is even more than choosing as a society not to save information and our culture. This is being outright HOSTILE towards the idea.

You're focusing on the wrong part.

That argument is almost entirely about the length of copyright, and you're dismissing that with a quick "eventually". It's not about trying to "override" the intent of copyright.

Also copyright has a clear purpose, and the purpose is to promote culture and science, not to help things get lost. When works that people care about get lost, that's a flaw not a feature.

> but what is special about preservation

Because it's the only thing that will be left of us in 100, 500, 1000, 10000 years. Whatever we care to preserve today will be what will be left to our descendants. It always matters more than the profits of some company today that won't be around in 10, 20, 100 years. And before you try to argue that not everything is valuable, that's fucking not up to you to decide for our descendants.

> Nearly all the combined work of humanity has been "lost to time," and society seems pretty okay with that.

Works that were lost through things like war, conflict, migration, etc. Not through conscious choice. Copyright is a deliberate decision to prevent the collective preservation of our modern culture in favour of enriching corporations and the handful of people who own them. But that doesn't make it moral or right. And "society being okay with it" doesn't make it okay either.

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