Leave the Internet Archive Alone | Hacker News Reader

Leave the Internet Archive Alone

computerworld.com

30 pointsCrankyBear19 comments

> During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kahle opened the library for free ebook borrowing via the Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) program. Publishing companies were not amused and the Internet Archive lost the resulting lawsuit, Hachette v. Internet Archive. The court rejected the Archive’s fair use defense, finding that its digital lending practices infringed on publishers’ copyrights.

> That’s a huge problem on its own. The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit with a gross revenue in its most recent 990 filing of only $30.5 million. For the size of the job it’s undertaken, it’s grossly underfinanced.

"The size of the job it's undertaken" is an interesting way to say "the size of the legal bills that it willfully racked up by intentionally violating copyright law in ways that everyone knew at the time had a snowball's chance in hell of surviving in court".

I believe that Intellectual Property is a terrible concept that shouldn't exist at all. I want copyright reform as badly as anyone. I want to want to support the Internet Archive. I want to want them to have enough resources to accomplish their mission. But man have I lost all faith in their leadership's judgement and ability to actually change anything—if they survive the judgement at all they'll be paying for it for years to come.

You don't win this kind of fight by sacrificing the ground you've won. When you've won as much ground as the Internet Archive did, you hold that ground and let someone else take the risk of winning new ground. If you absolutely can't sit still then you found a new organization to push further. But when you're the sole bastion holding the "we should be able to archive everything with no regard to copyright" space, it's irresponsible to try to move on to "we should be able to lend everything with no regard to copyright". They may very well lose both rights.

And what’s worse is at the same time shadow libraries like Z-Lib and LibGen became popular. If they had left the copyright infringement to shadow libraries, maybe making a blog post saying you totally shouldn’t go there because free books are evil and they have a full archive of our books for free, then the same thing would have happened, that is free full access to books on a wide scale, with minimal legal pushback for IA via genuinely vile publishers looking to hoard IP they should have lost decades ago.

Agreed, but what’s done is done. Many organizations were making weird calls at the chaos of the moment. It’s good to give a slap on the wrists and establish boundaries.

But at some point, there is such thing as forgiveness. And it’d be terrible if the Internet Archive would be shut down.

If this is to happen, I’m sure that anyone who used the Wayback Machine or watched Back To The Future :) would reserve very special place in their personal hell for Hatchette.

And it is easy to punish Hatchette Book Group. Just don’t keep their books. Return the books within 30, return them on Audible, or sell used for fifty cents on Amazon.

That's the painful beauty of hindsight being 20/20.

There is a world where IA became listed as a digital library and maybe had to comply with some arcane rules in order to operate but had otherwise escaped relatively unscathed from this incident.

Maybe we missed it on this pass but there's always a chance we could get another.

> I believe that Intellectual Property is a terrible concept that shouldn't exist at all.

IMHO, that's an overreaction to certain specific abuses. Intellectual property shouldn't be abolished as it solves certain pretty serious problems, we don't have much visceral experience of because intellectual property exists. It protects the little guy: for instance: if it were abolished, the first thing that would happen is the megacorps would stop paying authors anything. Around the same time, the GPL would collapse, and you can say hello to Linux-based closed-source binary blobs.

I think this mirrors my take.

Not a fan of the current IP regime, and I'm all for IP activism.

I don't think the IA is the right place to fight it. It is a valuable resource, which is why it needs to be insulated from the impact of activism.

I think it's in the National Interest of the United States to have an Internet Archive, available to all. The NSA and NARA should both have copies of the Internet Archive. NARA should be responsible for the public facing side and the NSA should make sure it doesn't get hacked and remains available.

If the NSA doesn't want to take on this task, then they shouldn't be allowed to have an archive of all of our data, including surveilled data, and should hand it off exclusively to NARA. The NSA should then have to convince a court they need access every time they "need" it.

Furthermore, Copyright needs reform, and an explicit law protecting archives.

I trust Brewster and the rest of the IA gang more than the US government to safeguard the Internet Archive. The US cares more about copyright and IP rent seeking than preserving culture and universal access to all knowledge.

If the US government via NARA wants to pay for their own IA replica and donate to the Internet Archive to offset the ops costs to stream updates, I would support that. Separation between Archive and State. More replicas globally, regardless of sponsoring institution or colocation facility. This mitigates against disasters, both natural and human, inherently.

> Furthermore, Copyright needs reform, and an explicit law protecting archives.

US becomes more hostile to the Internet Archive? Pull up stakes, update DNS and/or BGP, and move on to someplace that respects them. Disk and compute can live anywhere globally. Don't get mad, get durable. Let economic termites chase distributed object storage around the world until they're tired.

Why the Library of Congress or some other over budgeted agency can't archive the web is beyond me.

> Except for book publishers, the Internet Archive has done no one any harm.

I strongly disagree with this statement and would argue book publishers have done more to damage their own reputations and finances than anyone else.

Neither has damaged the publisher's bottomline, which is all that matters.

The publishers fight piracy so law abidding people consider committing a crime less attractive and pay the levy to publisher's instead.

How can you say this? All it takes is one person to not buy a book because they can get it for free from the IA. And there's plenty of evidence that more than one person did this.

Your argument only works if they were going to buy the book if it were not available by other means.

The position you're taking is the one the publishing industry, RIAA, MPAA, the worst publishers in the games industry, etc have taken via piracy. It has done nothing but hurt themselves, irritate people who would otherwise pay for their output, and prove ineffective.

But your argument only works if EVERY person who downloaded a book from IA would never have paid for a legit copy. But I contend that the general level of corner cutting in the world means that the odds of this being true about EVERY person is essentially zero.

> All it takes is one person to not buy a book because they can get it for free from the IA.

And how many people bought books because they liked what they got for free, ot because their friend who pirated it told them it was great?

Because if it's anything like record sales, basically every non industry funded study said that piracy is actually net good for sales. What publishers dislike is losing control over what sells.

When you say "non industry study", you mean "non recording industry study." It was almost certainly paid for by someone who would profit from the piracy, either by owning an ISP, selling bandwidth or running a search engine.

But go on dreaming that giving away complete copies of something will somehow encourage people to go and pay for another complete copy. Because if that strategy worked, other businesses would do it too. But it doesn't and that's why the other businesses only give away very limited samples.

> It was almost certainly paid for by someone who would profit from the piracy

You can't imagine anyone funding a study that doesn't profit from it? Sounds like a you problem.

Hint: government and academia exists. | Here I'll even write the prompt for you: "What are some good studies that showed how piracy can increase book / album sales - and who funded them?"

> But go on dreaming that giving away complete copies of something will somehow encourage people to go and pay for another complete copy.

I don't need to dream, because there are studies. Seems unlikely they're all secretly funded by Big ISP, lol.

And you do realize we're talking about digital books, with like one or less sales / year, right?

> if that strategy worked, other businesses would do it too.

Businesses do that all the time bud. Because yes, it works.

There's shareware, freemium, open source, content marketing, loss leaders, working for exposure, etc. How strange you never heard of any of this.

> As we put more of our records and news on the Web and nowhere else, that’s *vitally important for historians and other people who appreciate knowing* who said what to whom and when.

Fortunately the Internet Archive crawler has already continued (confirmed by Jason Scott), the new information is just not yet represented in the Wayback Machine.

Considering the importance of events currently happening around the world (wars, elections, ...), that's very good. (although I'm not sure how extensive its coverage is)

However, all the archiving efforts by individuals using Save Page Now or the API are still halted.

The Internet Archive is such a unique and vital service, we really need to do more to support it's longevity. I'm still bitter that it was the victim of several cyberattacks. Couldn't have picked a more undeserving target.

Which reminds me, I made a donation during their downtime but now that they're back up I can increase my monthly giving amount.

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