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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

I support archival of films, books, and music, but those items need to be write-only until copyright expires. The purpose of the Internet Archive is to achieve a wide-reaching, comprehensive archival, not provide easy and free read access to commercial works.

Website caches can be handled differently, but bulk collection of commercial works can't have this same public access treatment. It's crazy to think this wouldn't be a huge liability.

Battling for copyright changes is valiant, but orthogonal. And the IA by trying to do both puts its main charter--archival--at risk.

The IA should let some other entity fight for copyright changes.

I say this as an IA proponent and donor.

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I'd agree with you if you live in a country where you can walk into your local library and read these for "free." For people who live where there may not even be a library, your argument makes no sense except to make the publishers richer. They typically price some of these books at "library prices" so normal people won't be able to afford them, but libraries will.

Copyright is copyright. If you don't like the idea of a publisher owning the rights to content they published doesn't mean you have a right to their content. Let alone worldwide distribution of that content.

What makes you feel entitled to the content of the publisher before the copyright expires? Do you feel that you deserve access to everything because you've deemed the concept of ownership around book publishing immoral?

You can't just take a digital copy of a physical book and give it to everyone worldwide. That isn't your choice or decision to make nor is it ethical to ascribe malice to simply retaining distribution rights to content they own.

"Make publishers richer", it's actually just honoring the concept of ownership...

I don’t like the idea of infinite ownership, which is the current problem of copyright. The public may never be able to own these ideas and build off of them. Further, just because you own something in one country doesn’t mean you can own it in another country. For a physical example, you can’t own a gun in the US and take it to Australia.

If publishers didn’t engage in tactics like “library pricing” and preventing people from actually purchasing the books, I might feel differently. Right now, I see this archiving stuff as a Robin Hood story (which fwiw, every version of this story you may have seen/heard is probably still copyrighted) and I hope the publishers die or are replaced.

Protesting copyright and enabling pirate-like access to materials is orthogonal to archiving the world's data and recording our history.

Internet Archive should focus on its mission of archival. Let other groups figure out copyright.

By taking on both tasks, IA risks everything and could stumble in its goal to be an archivist platform. We need an entity dedicated to recording history. IA is that. They're just biting off way too much to chew and making powerful enemies along the way.

And what, we are just supposed to trust that they're actually archiving these things instead of relaxing on a beach somewhere pretending they are? If they were to only focus on archiving, nobody would know if anything has actually been archived for nearly 100 years; after we are all dead.

By making the archive public, sure, we have a bit of a "piracy" issue. However, we can also verify they are actually archiving the things they say they are, point out mistakes, and ask them to remove things from the archive.

> I support archival of films, books, and music, but those items need to be write-only until copyright expires.

Which means no one alive today would ever be able to see them out of copyright. It also requires an unfounded belief that major copyright owning companies won't extend copyright lengths beyond current lengths which are effectively "forever".

> but bulk collection of commercial works can't have this same public access treatment

And it doesn't.

The Internet Archive Lending Library did. And there are music, movie, and video game ROMs found throughout the user uploads.

IA should collect these materials, but they shouldn't be playing fast and loose by letting everyone have access to them. That's essentially providing the same services as the Pirate Bay under the guise of archivism.

This puts IA at extreme legal risk. Their mission is too important to play such games.

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