Internet Archive's big battle with music publishers ends in settlement
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
The book lawsuit was over current titles (not really archival and preservation), and the record lawsuit wasn't really about the rare 78s, it was about the modern Jimi Hendrix and Paul McCartney records that somehow slipped in. And their refusal to follow the modern law that they themselves celebrated that made what they're trying to do (including downloads) explicitly legal. But that law prohibited fundraising, and they couldn't resist tweeting out links to Frank Sinatra records with a big banner on top asking for money.
In both lawsuits the discovery revealed tech debt and sloppy process at the Archive that made it impossible for them to argue on behalf of the future we all want.
https://archive.org/details/fleetwood_mac-1977-rumours?webam...
It's charming and reminiscent of the best old-school Wikipedia energy. People on the fringe (and probably some OCD people) finding something to do. Curation and contribution feels good, man.
But yeah, holy shit. Brewster Kahle and Jason Scott have said "upload away, we'll figure it all out later" -- then themselves uploaded hundreds of thousands of items to set an example.
"Please don't upload copyrighted material" would go a long way at the top of that PHP upload form. Better yet a checkbox: "This is copyrighted. Archive it but don't republish it." But I suppose where's the fun in that.
I don't wonder anything about that, was very convenient.
You might want to be specific about which ones were some kind of false flag conspiracy plot (is it just "Rumours"?) because there are thousands and thousands of pirated pieces of media on archive.org. I am behind there being some kind of archive project but as things stand the site was/is just Mega with a veneer of respectability.
Internet Archive is searchable and executes DMCA takedown notices. If something of yours is on there and you don't want it to be, it's not because they're making it hard to change that.
The trick is you want them to be archived now when they're readily available not years from now when they're hard or impossible to find. The difficulty is justifying holding on to them that long when they can't be accessed and deciding when they should be exposed.
https://nowiknow.com/the-mystery-of-the-third-shaker/
TL;DR: There's a unknown 3rd shaker in many 19th century table settings and no one really knows what went in it as far as I can tell. There's some indication it might have been for dried mustard powder but that's the only guess anyone has and it wasn't that popular as a condiment as far as anyone can tell outside of the tiny references in late 19th century catalogs for the 3 shaker sets including a 'mustard bottle'.
Exactly. Over the centuries humans have used various techniques to record information they've wanted to keep for posterity and almost every newer innovation they've adopted has resulted in information being stored for a shorter time than the older technology that preceded it.
That's a sweeping and overly general comment but I'll justify it with several examples from history. First, there are many reasons why people would want to replace a time-honored way of documenting information by using alternative methods. My purpose here to draw attention to how with each new technical innovation storage longevity ends up being shorter than the previous generation.
Examples:
1. Messages chiseled on stone has a longevity of many millennia. Examples: Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Rosetta Stone.
2. Information written on parchment and vellum can, with reasonable care, be in good condition after 1000 years or more. Examples include the Doomsday Book, Magna Carta and the Lindisfarne Gospels (it's ~1300 years old).
3. Paper has the advantage of higher storage density especially if it's the substrate for printed text. Longevity can be high for high quality paper, flax types etc can last over 500 years, whereas cheap paper as in paperbacks and newsprint has a much shorter lifespan, likely 50 - 75 years at most.
4. Painting (oil-on-canvas) has, with care, good longevity, at least 500-plus years. Works of the great masters, Caravaggio, da Vinci (Mona Lisa), et al, are nowadays still in reasonable to good condition.
5. Photography has several advantages over art, it's capable of rendering an image accurately and it's much easier to reproduce multiple images than drawing them all by hand. Longevity and quality of photographic images depends on the technology that's employed. Here are several examples.
-- Wet-collodion process (negative on glass plate). Introduced 1851. Advantage: high resolution, disadvantage: not orthochromatic/panchromatic, sensitive only to blue light. Longevity: if stored with care images will last 200-plus years. Examples Civil War photos of Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner and others.
-- Kodachrome color transparency film. Introduced 1935. Advantage high resolution, high color accuracy. Longevity: ~200 years under ideal storage conditions.
-- Kodak Kodacolor negative (late 1940s to ~1960). Longevity: only a few years, image fades even when stored under ideal conditions. This tech was an unmitigated disaster, many families lost treasured wedding photos etc. because of fading.
-- Eastman color print film (theater release stock). Subject to considerable fading when stored, film cannot be used for archiving, it's useless if stored for several decades.
-- B&W film stock on acetate base. Longevity: 200-plus years under proper storage conditions.
6. Sound Recordings:
-- 78-RPM shellac disks. ca 1905 - ~1955 (cylinders were earlier, first produced in late 1880s). Sound quality poor to fair. Longevity: if stored under ideal conditions and handled with care then lifetime is >200 years (there are good, well kept 78 recordings that are now about 120 years old and they're still in excellent condition).
Note: that figure is the archive lifetime. Unfortunately, the original instruments—Edison phonographs and like—that 78s were designed to be played on cause considerable wear and damage to 78 RPM disks.
I cringe every time I see YouTube videos of well-meaning owners of treasured acoustic gramophones playing 78 recordings on them. They seem completely oblivious to the damage they're doing to their recordings.
(Just because 78s were designed to be played on these players it doesn't mean they're not damaged by them. In those days pickups were without electrical amplification and to get maximum sound level considerable weight was applied to the stylus. Moreover, to improve stylus (steel needle) tracking an abrasive was added to the shellac which abraded the stylus to best fit the recorded groove. It worked both ways, both the record and stylus were worn during playback).
-- Vinyl LP High Fidelity recordings. 1948 to ~1980 (now in limited revival). Longevity: ~200 years or perhaps longer for a recording kept for archival purposes..
7. Magnetic Recordings—Audiotape, Videotape and Hard Disks. ca 1940s to present—athough its use has declined in recent years. Magnetic tape was often used to make master recordings for both vinyl records, videos (VHS etc.) and in television production, and it's still used for data storage, QIC cartridges, etc. Also, magnetic recording is still the underpinning technology in rotary hard disks.
Longevity: That said, magnetic tape and similar media, hard disks, etc. suffer from loss of magnetic remanence. Simply, the magnetic intensity on storage media decays over time, thus so does the recorded information.
Many factors contribute to the decay of information on magnetic media (which I cannot cover here) but in comparison with the older media (e.g, vinyl, 78s) its lifespan is almost pathetically short. One risks one's data if one uses a hard disk much past its short lifespan of about five years. Moreover, just archiving one's data on a hard disk and assuming it'll be OK because the drive is not actually being used is a risky business. The only way to guarantee the integrity of one's data is to copy it—rewrite it to media before its remanence falls below the threshold where data cannot be recovered, ideally this should be done within the drive's specified lifetime.
With analog recordings loss of remanence shows up as loss of signal-to-noise ratio. I've personally known people who've dug out VHS videos of their wedding to show to their kids on their 21st birthday only to find the tapes not viewable.
8. NAND Memory. These days just about everyone has moved to NAND flash memory because of its speed and convenience. It's hard to buy a PC without either an SSD or NVMe storage, and everyone uses USB trumb drives. NAND storage is great stuff, we all love it.
However, if one is not careful and proactive NAND is a time bomb waiting to destroy your data. First, NAND deteriorates and wears out with usage, second—like magnetic remanence—its electronic storage decays with age even when it's only being used for archival storage.
I speak from experience here, some years ago I created an archival backup of all my important photos and stored them on a new 500GB SSD which I put in a safe place for storage. Several years later when I checked the drive it was completely unresponsive and I thought it dead. As luck would have it, about a half hour later the SSD eventually came back to life.
What happened was the drive's controller locked drive whilst it refreshed its floating-gate charges. Luckily, charges had not decayed below the threshold where my data would have been irrecoverable. If say I'd not checked the drive for another year then chances are that I'd not have been so lucky. (That's just one incident, I'll refrain from discussing other recent NAND failures.)
Yes, it was a backup and my working copies were OK, but the point is obvious, one cannot put modern NAND storage aside and simply just forget about it indefinitely and hope one's data will still be viable. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.
We shouldn't be surprised by what happened here when we care to look at how NAND flash actually works. Frankly, it's amazing that it works at all let alone the fact that it works so well, NAND is truly a masterpiece of modern semiconductor fabrication.
NAND's functionality depends on quantum tunneling and that we use the fact to force a few hundred electrons across an 'insulated' barrier where (hopefully) they'll stay stored in the FET's floating gate for an indefinite length of time.
What I find amazing is not that quantum tunneling works and that we can store electrons in a floating gate or charge trap (and that's amazing enough of itself) but that the insulation is so good (stray resistance is so high) that it can take some years for this almost infinitesimal charge to leak away and dissipate.
Whilst we can view quantum tunneling and charge storage as a state of stable equilibrium (in that in an ideal transistor the charge would be stored indefinitely), that cannot be said for a real-world device, eventually the charge will dissipate and with it goes your data. NAND storage has many advantages but in comparison with other storage tech its both ephemeral and short lived.
We have a world now running on NAND technology and yet we've no immediate technology in the wings that'd be a better replacement—one that's intrinsically or inherently stable by design, and that's a pretty unsatisfactory and unnerving situation. Moreover, the situation is made worse by our blasé attitude and headlong rush to adopt multilayered 3D NAND which further reduces the electron count in a floating gate. By design, we're deliberately making NAND more unreliable because of our demand for even more storage.
When one thinks about it, it's pretty outrageous that the world is having to rely on dozens of data centers so as to achieve some degree or guarantee of longterm data reliability.
It's hard enough now to find and keep track of information without revengeful moneygrubbing bastards screwing the Internet Archive. We need every bit of reliable archival storage now and their actions are selfish and counterproductive. If this nonsense continues then heaven knows what the future holds for longterm data storage.
"The focus of the lawsuit was the Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project, which officially started in 2017 and aimed to digitize the shellac discs that were the dominant medium for recorded music from the 1890s until the 1940s and 1950s, when vinyl arrived. With the help of audio preservationist George Blood (who was also named as a defendant in the suit), the Archive said it has digitized more than 400,000 of these old recordings." [1]
Benn Jordan discussion of piracy in general. [2]
[0] https://great78.archive.org/
[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/internet-archi...
It's worse than that.
Many large collections were donated to the archive, under the agreement they would be made available to the public. Part of what influenced Brewster to double down on his original error.
> The Joe Terino Collection, a collection of 70,000 78 rpm singles stored in a warehouse for 40 years.
> The Barrie H. Thorpe Collection, which had been deposited at the Batavia Public Library in Batavia, Illinois, in 2007 by Barrie H. Thorpe (1925–2012). It contains 48,000 singles.
> The Daniel McNeil Collection, with 22,359 singles.
Many more listed at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_78_Project
At the same time Internet Archive also launched the "Unlocked Recordings" collection of modern "out of print" LPs, as if that somehow made them free to distribute. The inclusion of Jimi Hendrix, Paul McCartney, and Nina Simone records is called out in the lawsuit.
This is how you ruin the reputation of an organization.
Orphaned works are a problem, but here was a way to move things a tiny bit forward. Unfortunately, just like Controlled Digital Lending it was left in the hands of some particularly careless people. I'd imagine the settlement also prohibits them from submitting the list (and thus causing the parties to do an enormous amount of research work).
I'm always up for a good ethics debate and likely wholeheartedly agree with your position. But this is a very different issue that resulted in clear damage to the culture we share and the future we all want.
Also the book lawsuit wasn't over old or new titles, it was loaning them 1:N instead of 1:1 because "pandemic". I didn't think it was a great idea at the time and everything in that lawsuit has pointed towards it just being an outright foolhardy effort. There were on a great path towards expanding digital lending boundaries (by letting any library add their books to the IA's lending circulation) and screwed it all up.
It was over loaning them 1:1, the pandemic actions were barely mentioned as part of the lawsuit and the result is that 1:1 loaning was ruled illegal. The only harm the pandemic actions did was to public opinion.
https://www.copyright.gov/music-modernization/pre1972-soundr...
"The legislation also establishes a process for lawfully engaging in noncommercial uses of Pre-1972 Sound Recordings that are not being commercially exploited. To qualify for this exemption, a user must file a notice of noncommercial use after conducting a good faith, reasonable search, and the rights owner of the sound recording must not object to the use within 90 days."
Basically Internet Archive could've sent a spreadsheet of works to the Copyright Office and anyone claiming commercial use of these old records had to respond within 90 days. In the lawsuit Brewster is quoted saying that it makes pre-1972 works "Library Fair Use."
The law does not allow people to make commercial use of these recordings (take three seconds to consider why). But they could've archived old recordings all day and then made the ones that cleared the list immediately available for unlimited download. And provided excerpts of the others for research purposes.
Instead they managed to get sued for $696 million. For a side project that nobody cared about (40,000+ downloads) that managed to put the whole org (and several participants' personal assets) at risk for two years.
As an aside, 78 RPM records are not particularly fragile. As a consumer product, yes. By preservation standards, no.
"With proper care and storage, this durable resource can last for centuries" https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J116v08n02_04
It’s a good time to remind everyone that the budget of the Internet Archive — the largest library in the world — is smaller than the SF public library. It has a small fraction of the budget of Wikipedia.
Probably the best thing they could do would be to fund the creation of a full mirror in a non-US jurisdiction.
And the SF public library has 28 buildings, 6x the employee count, and 6x the budget.
Not sure what your point is, as they provide completely different services. As the judge said, "The Internet Archive does not perform the traditional functions of a library."
Or an archive, for that matter. No grants, explicitly no research services, no oversight and no long-term plan.
Librarians have a formal code of ethics and the Internet Archive fails more than half.
In my country the government has an organisation that archives everything ever released in the country in climate controlled vaults. If somebody wants to read a 17th century newspaper they can.
If I want to access a book (or frankly anything else), chances are I can do so in minutes on the Internet archive — I can’t say the same for my university library. Or the library of Congress.
The internet archive has more materials (and more kinds of materials) and serves more than 10x the number of people (digitally).
I recognize that a community library and the LOC have different purposes from the IA. But the scale is huge — and it is extremely useful in scholarship.
Also: did you used to work there? You know a lot about it, but maybe had a bad experience?
I am guessing 4, 7 and 9, but which others?
Whether its people suing them, people begging to have personal information removed, or people letting them know credentials have been sitting in the open on Gitlab for over two years, they often do not respond at all. As for "usefully organized resources" well they've overwhelmed. But digitizing 400,000 old records and starting a bank shouldn't be a priority until they get the basics sorted. Like serving torrents that aren't corrupt and missing files.
> 3. We protect each library user's right to privacy and confidentiality...
They leaked 30 million messages from patrons, including driver's licenses and passports.
> 6. We do not advance private interests at the expense of library users, colleagues, or our employing institutions.
They've always played favorites with access. Not only read access but also write access (!) to their databases. They run an entirely separate version of the site for paying institutional clients. Conflict of interest that borders on grifting by employees is not hard to spot.
[0] https://archive.org/details/sam-cooke-the-best-0f-1963/01++S...
To be clear, I appreciate the concept of an "Internet Archive", but the current organization / execution / management is absolutely atrocious.
If corpos want there shit off the site - they should have to send someone to take that down - every single times the whole process, always on them.
The IA is just like a big box with a copy of everything in another box.
Boxes aren't bad bc I put something bad into a box - this is a little more nuanced than that
A pretty harsh take imo. I think they achieve a huge amount with a relatively small team and tiny budget.
The internet should be a repository of all human knowledge and culture; all information and media should (at least eventually) be free as part of the common heritage of mankind. Sites like Wikipedia and IA are a partial realization of this dream. They aren't perfect, for sure, but we need them, and we need more sites like them. I fear too many take these things for granted.
Partly because people use web.archive.org to bypass other, more sinister firewall blocks. (And I'm okay with that.)
But non-stop copyright lawsuits don't help. People begging for personal information up to child pornography to be removed and not getting a prompt response from Internet Archive support might also be a source of concern.
The site is funded by its wealthy founder and he also uses it as a vehicle for his pet projects. They don't issue annual reports. They don't have a functioning board. They didn't even consider accepting donations until Brewster realized it helps build reputation.
I certainly don't begrudge anyone who donates but the TV, Movie, and Video Game industry lawsuits are obviously next in line.
Not to mention diversions like trying to start a bank and getting your ass handed to you by the feds.
https://ncua.gov/newsroom/press-release/2016/internet-archiv...
"Unwillingness to open accounts within the field of membership, make loans, and establish operations in the low-income community where the credit union was chartered to serve..."
Suppose it were significant; then how many of the artists' descendents are getting their share of the streaming revenues on those copyrighted trax? (Before the copyright expires, of course.)
Another specious claim of the majors: these trax are 'still out there'. All 400,000? How would you know, and how would anyone where to look? If you can find where they're hiding, one at a time (online or in a cardboard box under a table in the back of a record store in Poughkeepsie?) Here they all are, on one library's website.
The Great 78 collection is a wonderful and delightful addition to the historians and explorers of 42 genres of music. It's the sort of contribution only a Great Library could afford to make. Of course, beyond the comprehension of mere commerce.
eg The Batman Animated series on there is usually sub par, low quality.
Uploading something? Expect it to be processed no matter the format.
But raw DVD RIPs of commercial DVDs, FLACs of the most popular albums of all time, and seven perfect copies of every Nintendo Switch game ever made, curated by seven different warez groups are also available.
If we lose enough key resources like the Internet Archive we could definitely shifting the pendulum in that direction.
Does IA have an independent board of directors? If so, why is the board and its members never mentioned in the copyright lawsuits? Most other organizations (nonprofit and corporate) with independent boards would be heavily involved in any major litigation and issuing statements as developments warrant.
I don't see that here - the IA blog post is by a director of library services. The about page (https://blog.archive.org/about/) mentions nothing about a board.
This is the board: https://archive.org/about/bios
The issue is that nonprofits don’t have shareholders that can hold boards accountable. As seen w/ OpenAI, sometimes big donors can bully (or eject) the board, and that probably needs to happen with IA.
https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/bay-area-warehouse-inter...
But hosting it there long-term would still have value even if U.S. users couldn't easily get to it. Access would be legal when copyrights expire and everything becomes public domain.
Therefore, above, long-term means long-long-long-term: enough time for all U.S. copyrights to expire under the current law, which would be about 250 years. This of course assumes no U.S. copyright reform, no expansion of the current copyright law, and that U.S. law/authority/power continues to exist in its current form.
Do you think such an archive could be kept alive that long? Here are some potential issues:
- Literal piracy (e.g. pirates coming to shore)
- Storage of data for 250 years (metal rusts, dvds melt/warp, paper is not data dense)
- Climate change
- Undersea cable cuts
- Nuclear war
- Technological evolution (will networking and storage look the same in 50, 100, 200 years)
I would think: LTO tapes are like 20ish years if stored properly, so you'd only have to copy them 10-15 times over the course of 250 years although that cost/effort decreases over time with ever more modern standards.
At that point, China is as good as any, for not batting a rats about western copyright, so bad the hosting would be a little bit complicated.
This seems to be the whole ballgame.
They're (UMG, specifically) doing the same to YouTuber Rick Beato. His music theory/analysis/reaction videos are very careful to abide by the rules of _fair use_ and, yet, UMG is still drowning him in copyright violation claims. He's had to hire representation to deal with the backlog of claims that are (extremely likely) all bogus and _hope_ to keep his videos and channel online.
On one hand, their behavior is baffling, as I've streamed and purchased music from these companies I would not have otherwise because of Beato's channel. On the other, it's completely unsurprising, as they stand to _have their cake and eat it too_ by introducing chokepoints for _all_ access to their music (in theory, anyways) and suing anyone in the hopes of inking these bullshit settlements with anyone who dares get within a few miles of their moat.
* out of copyright (totally legal)
* copyright but abandoned (not legal but nobody cares and is good for society)
* copyright and actively being sold right now (not legal and huge exposure to lawsuits)
modern pop media movies, books, audio are not uploaded to the internet archive in their entirety under any kind of fair use unless you're a copyright abolitionist taking a very expansive view on the term
The recording companies should have gone after the individual uploaders or this one as always bullshit - the record labels themselves can just upload a bunch music and screw the IA - it's supposed to be a copy of the whole internet.
This was just to essentially own the IA, which they effectively do now - bc it was easier for them to take over the IA, than to actually protect their content creators by going after the actual distributors, the uploaders. Obviously, they broke tho
Yeah... nothing done against those companies is actually "wrong" - thats a grey area when corpos suck as bad as they do.
This is where they should be "pushing the envelope on copyright", but for some reason they keep exposing themselves to big lawsuits.
The real problem here however is copyright. There should be a balance between creators, publishers, readers, libraries, fair use, and remixers. But the balance is all out of whack with the publishers making most of the money and everyone else including most creators getting stiffed.
A record label has never lost a sale because somebody discovered they could "get music for free" by watching YouTube critique videos.
Realistically, what's probably happening is the labels have decided it's too (i.e. would cost too much money) to apply a nuanced approach to copyright striking and so are knowingly flagging everything containing snippets of their music whether it's fair use or not. They've simply decided to not care.
Do not anthropomorphize copyright lawyers
When you're a hammer, every problem is solved by whacking something. When your business is run by lawyers, every problem is solved with legal action.
I'd imagine it's even the opposite, it's probably inspired people to listen to music they wouldn't otherwise. The record labels have spent a lot of time and money to shut down someone doing free advertising for their product!
Like, why would you even buy a album and add it to your collection if you have no idea what it is?
Based on the advertising I see in Nashville's Music Row, I'm pretty sure that actually is their strategy. The signs they put out usually have only the artist name as meaningful information, which is only helpful if you're already a fan (I guess it does get their name into your brain otherwise), and a QR code. I have no idea who scans the QR codes.
Some people have told me it's really meant for other people in the music industry, but it feels odd that they'd have to find out about music by random signs on the side of the road.
I wonder if this quirk is caused by the concentrated interests of rights holders' internal legal departments, where, in eagerness to keep their jobs or demand higher salaries, they pursue breaches of broadcast rights hyper aggressively, well past the point of optimal benefit to the rights holder.
The first is "rule of law" where it's important what the rules are. You need good people with knowledge of what's actually happening on the ground to be the ones who make the rules, and then the rules are strictly enforced and if that leads to a bad outcome it means the rules are deficient and there is a meaningful process for addressing that, which results in a change to the rules to prevent the bad outcome from happening in the future.
The second is "CYA" where the purpose of rules is to make prohibitions as many and broad as possible so that if anything bad happens or you have a dispute with someone you can pin a violation on them, and then the rules are ignored whenever that isn't the objective.
The best organizations use only the first system, but this is rare. If you make rules according to the first system and the way you enforce them is according to the second system, you have a minor problem with under-enforcement. If you use the second system entirely, you're going to have major problems with office politics and morale. But the worst is when the people at the top are making the rules in expectation of using the second system without noticing that someone in the middle is actually enforcing them.
I wonder if a similar perverse incentive and emergent behavior is in play here where record labels worry that any encroachment on fair use could set a precedent that will come back to bite them.
If other parties own it they should be required to make the work available without interruption or barriers and at a reasonable price.
If a recording was left to rot in some archive to the point others have a noticably better copy you've failed the obligation.
Anything that broadly looks like buying rights for the purpose of destroying the work should be stopped.
Objections should be written down and burned in a special ceremony.
If you look at this situation from the context of culture war(s), plural, its not so baffling.
This is basically an attempt to influence the future by controlling what it knows about the past.
but this ContentID nonsense has been going on since at least 2009,
and we have had easy alternatives like PeerTube for several years now,
where they would have to actually go after him directly,
(and depending on jurisdiction, DMCA (screw that totalitarian extremist nonsense BTW) is more or less enforced),
rather than having YouTube do their censorship for them.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943...
Revenue: $23,678,074
Expenses: $32,674,667
Net Income: -$8,996,593
Net Assets: -$3,530,018
Liabilities and expenses have likely grown in the last 18 months. IA may have gained some additional donations, but a lot of people are turned off by Kahle's doubling down on courtroom fights with copyright owners, even if he takes $0 in salary.
No organization can keep this up unless there is an ace in its back pocket.
it jeopardizes all of their other missions and access to otherwise inaccessible media
Preserve the internet, store old websites.
Everything else. The whole "Emergency Lending Library" situation was just strange. A random non government organization can just declare copyright unfair and distribute whatever they want ?
And they acted surprised when the book industry reacted ?
That was adjudicated years ago, and has nothing to do with the case at hand.
That’s literally how copyright enforcement works in the United States, it’s not specific to IA. Every user-submitted content publishing site is rife with piracy.
> but the Library was advertising that they're not going to respect copyright
A gross misreading of their stated intentions.
> and it puts the website archives at risk.
The archives are probably also not fair use in the present legal environment. They just happen to not to contain anything valuable enough for a big media company to get litigious. Yet.
Not really, they just kind of made up an "emergency" exemption. Their FAQ, instead of saying what legal precedent they were operating under, handwaves it away with a quote from a paper on libraries in general. I'm a fan of them, but they really open themselves up to liability a lot more than necessary.
Then why the case makes no reference to that?
Amazon, the largest profiter of digital book media - they definitely got theirs during the pandemic, you don't actually need to have their back - they profited so much, during and off of, out hard times, to then do this, haha - I'll always back the IA.
I could watch the IA upload the entire series of the expanse to their front page and had no issue at all with that.
Tbh - I think the big corpos should HAVE TO subsidize the IAs existence - with no strings, so they should pay the IA to give away their shit - that is my official position.
You don't believe in copyright.
It still would of made more sense to create a separate legal entity ( maybe based out of someplace with different copyright laws), if that's what they wanted to do.
Imagine you have a lemonade stand, all is well. The local health inspector is cool with it even though you don't have a permit.
Your cousin asks you if he can start selling raw milk. If you say ok fine, and sell it at the same stand the local health inspector is well within reason to shut you down.
Why couldn't your cousin start up his own stand ?
As is, I think having all of this concentrated in one entity like IA is a really bad idea. It should be distributed across a dozens of organizations, and dozens of countries.
So... yeah, copyright is largely bullshit - look at LLMs - Facebook downloaded ALL OF EVERYTHING THAT WE'VE EVER MADE - to build maybe the mot profitable thing ever.. yeah, totes fine for them and that industry to do all that "theft"
Haha - is that not a joke?
I'm assuming your a Zoomer and I'm sorry they got to all of you so much, but no need to feel any guilt from piracy, that isn't actual theft, theft takes away from - this does not do that, it just makes a copy.
Marketing made these morals of yours Bud - you wouldn't have them otherwise
How much did they lose again? Where did that number come from?
Say what you will - no actual consumer that operates under actual capitalism would piss us off this much - but they can do whatever they want tho.
I will never see fault with the IA for any of this.
In this case Brewster and his friend personally uploaded 400,000 records to the archive and then made them available for unlimited download. Not just rare stuff, but Frank Sinatra records and the best selling single of all time.
Archiving is cool (and supposedly their charter) but they ignored the Music Modernization Act which made what they claim they were trying to do legal, including unlimited downloads. They blogged about how great it was, how it made old things effectively Fair Use for libraries, then ignored it.
Why? They wanted to get paid for distributing other people's stuff without permission. That's not cool, especially at the scale they were operating. As with the book lawsuit, they were asked nicely to remove certain items and picked an impossible to win fight instead. And lost again.
The reason to find fault with IA is that these actions and decisions put the whole operation at risk. Their recent financials show negative three million dollars in total assets and they're already running on a shoestring. No datacenter, just hard drives sitting out in a building with no air conditioning.
It's ok to love a thing, the spirit behind a thing, yet also admit that it's being run into the ground by unqualified people making terrible decisions.
That whole saga was absurd and self inflicted.
The 90s ended forever ago - def jam and blah blah, why tf are they still relevant again??
Bc they are a monopoly with like a super legal total control over their distributed products - that doesn't end for like 100 years.
If copyright law changes - who win more than the IA?
THATS why this is happening ;)
They were going to lose that fight from the outset.
Unless you're suggesting this isn't user uploaded but is being put there by staff?
None of that is in place with IA and I fear their laissez-faire attitude in this current climate is gonna bite them in the ass.
You can argue the law is wrong but you can't argue that IA isn't trampling it.
Few people go there for the cool weird stuff. Find something old and amazing and blogged about: 12 views, 10 from bots. Now search for Nintendo games.
People are on copyright holders' side in the battle with LLMs. Either winning or losing this case would be poison.
When the NYT sued OpenAI - I emailed the Times that if it's between the Times or AI, we don't need the NYT anymore.
I want UBI from the AI companies - if they can provide its bc they actually did deliver something that might as well be a god - how they get there - I will forgive, soooo much, almost anything if you think about what AGI actually is.
If I were Sam, I'd never stop talking about it either - for most people, ChatGPT is already "alive" more than can understand that it isn't.
Haha, in a few years, ask a Gen Alpha if they'd give up AI - fpr copyright law, haha
They had a number of ways to avoid this problem entirely and the fact that they didn't yet again brings Brewster's judgement into question. He's a sweet guy but clearly not an operations or business guy. He's at retirement age and has an opportunity to do the right thing. Hopefully clearing these lawsuits will open up some options.
Also, they have a policy already https://help.archive.org/help/rights/
Unless you are claiming that they don't follow it, and this case, nor the one before, rights holders included in their cases that they tried to report them via those.
https://www.reddit.com/r/internetarchive/comments/1nk4pwt/ca...
I don't even know what I'll do with it - files for music in 25 - on MY DEVICE, I'll prolly just give it all away - I think we should bring back "mixtape" jump drives (wow so much of that is ancient) bc with all the TBs we can fit on like a penny sized drive - pfft, yeah we all could just bring one drive around with us, and be done paying for all the musical media that exists already - forever.
Sharing is caring
Seriously, if you are going to challenge this kind of shit actually challenge it.
I'm just begining to realize exactly what you stated, despite my own ranting AI, automation and all without actually working with any LLMs for several months - jumped into a smaller project last week and I realized that essentially none of the limits that I thought I had were even there anymore.
Weeks of work and actual human activity down to days - days of working, down to minutes.
I'm trying to retrain how I think - otherwise, the sub 4 year old future creators will be so far ahead of me.
Haha, it's gonna be like building in Fortnite - Millennials had to go no build.
Co-Creation WITH an AI - it's actually a huge shift, then it's as you said, so easy to build new stuff.