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Comment by zokier | Hacker News Reader

I must say I'm becoming increasingly disappointed about archive.orgs lax copyright policies. Becoming a treasure trove of pirated material really eats its legitimacy in my eyes.

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I'm having trouble if the ARD (or parts of it) starts dicking around with copyright restrictions. They receive a huge amount of funding from mandatory payments of all German households (you can try to avoid that if you're a poor student or poor, period, but usually you're (supposed to be) paying - by law).

It's really close to a tax to pay for their content, their infrastructure. Which makes sense in a way for me, I do want broadcasters that don't need to rely on 'what the masses want' alone to pick their content, ending with Big Brother and brainless idiotic stuff everywhere.

But there's power and there's responsibility. If you take money from ~every~ citizen/household, then you better release that stuff with a decent license.

But the content is freely viewable in Germany, isn't it? Imho that would easily cover their mandate to the people (who are financing them)

For a number of days. I wonder when they will go un-publish this one.

Most things disappear from their websites after 7 days, which is a "compromise" they worked out with the private media corporations.

You can't really fault them for following the restrictions set by past deals

Well, even in Germany they failed by

- not showing this prominently enough

- not providing the original version without a lot of prodding

As for the rest of the comment: I don't know. The content's created. Why not set it free? I expect that for me/for locals, but I fail to see why you'd want to use geolocation to exclude others. Ever. The only cost at this point is bandwidth and by offering the content with a liberal license you could expect decent mirrors.

This is historically important material produced by a wholly owned subsidiary of a license-funded public broadcaster for a license-funded public broadcasting group. Of anything to complain about "lax copyright policies" and "becoming a treasure trove of pirated material" over, this would seem a particularly bad choice.

I sadly realize that this is a bad place to complain. But honestly I've encountered a significant amount of works of dubious copyright status (or clearly blatant copyright infringement) in the past months (and years), and this case kinda broke the proverbial camels back.

I probably should pick up blogging so that I could discuss these kinds of issues in a more neutral context, but so far HN feels more natural outlet for me.

Why this case in particular?

I guess they follow the usual DMCA dance, the data is uploaded by users after all.

The only thing I wonder is if they actually delete such files or hide them with a "first published on 2014-01-26, author John Doe" marker to unlock once copyright expired.

It might be easier to get hold of certain artefacts now than in 135 years (or whenever recently obtained copyrights actually will expire).

It's better for the NSA to collect all your data now than when you've set us up the bomb.

I love the irony in this flawed line of thinking here.

I see a huge difference between historians and spooks.

For one, few historians run torture camps and assassination units.

Nutrality and obstaining from censorship gives it legitimacy, in my eyes.

To each their own, I suppose.

If Snowden didn't want limitations on distribution of his interview then he should have mandated the release to public domain as a condition for the interview. Instead he chose to give the interview to a entity willing to retain and reserve all rights, resulting limited exposure. You are free to disagree with that choice, but that does not give you right to overrule it.

edit: I might add that we already have The Piratebay as a place to rebel against the copyright system. I just feel that The Internet Archive is too valuable (as an archive of public-domain material) to be dragged down to that fight. I don't feel like it is too much to ask to keep the two segregated.

I think Snowden is probably being advised by lawyers to limit his communications to "official" journalist outlets, for his own protection. It's unfortunate, but in many countries journalists have more protections than regular citizens.

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