Comment by faeranne | Hacker News Reader

Comment by faeranne | Hacker News Reader

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The sought damages is $621 Million. Internet Archive reported having about $7 Million in assets and $30 Million in revenue (for those who accidentally read over that, revenue is before factoring in costs, which for IA budgets around $37 Million annually as well.) (EDIT: in 2022. I've been rewriting this a few times and forgot to re-add that part in the final comment)

If the suit is found in favor of UGM and enforced at full effect (not impossible, but Hachette v. Internet Archive was not either), then IA will be on the hook for the full $621 Million. You can guess how that ends.

But even if they don't enforce at full effect (and given Web Archive has been successfully used to provide evidence against UMG and Sony multiple times now, they have a pretty strong incentive to get it burned down), a sizable portion of the 400,000 recordings are from disks that quite literally broke down after capture. Those disks are the last copies of those recordings. Ever. Should UMG and Sony succeed, it is a very safe assumption, given they already confirmed they don't have those recordings (and based on that, don't want them), that those recordings immediately become lost media.

What on _earth_ is the IA thinking, sitting on something that valuable and poking the bear like this!?

We need a backup of the backup, because so much of what they've got is irreplaceable.

Probably they're thinking "This person brought us something that is about to be extinct, our job is to keep things from going extinct."

The entirety of IA is the idea that culture and history are to be preserved for future generations. The job of these big companies like UMG is to make as much money as possible, and destroying history eliminates a core competitor, themselves. IA's existence is poking the bear (just look at how often the Web Archive's existence is used by others to show off back actors in companies). Compromise left a long time ago.

>a sizable portion of the 400,000 recordings are from disks that quite literally broke down after capture. Those disks are the last copies of those recordings. Ever.

Somewhere, there was a critical failure of risk assessment and management.

As I mentioned in a sibling comment, the entirety of IA's existence is a "critical failure of risk assessment" now. Their existence forces companies to deal with the one competitor they can't beat, their past selves. The question we begin to ask here is "This is the only place that was able and ready to accept and preserve these otherwise permanently lost works. Do we let copyright ensure the destruction of itself, or is culture and history more important?"

Ah, you're misunderstanding me.

In the course of preservation, the Rule That Shall Not Be Violated(tm) is that anything which would lead to significant and irreversible damage or destruction of the artifact is off limits. Especially if the artifact is irreplacable.

Recording the audio off of those disks should not have happened if it was already understood or reasonably expected that doing so would lead to their destruction. Whoever gave the OK on that exhibited a critical failure of risk assessment and management.

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