the assumption that this will stop lawsuits is very generous, especially when we consider that there are other countries than the US that have lawyers and IP too
putting such an important task in the hands of a government that might be controlled by whatever extremist possible in the future is a bad idea; who controls the past, controls the future and parties could delete parts of the past at their will
a less dystopian thought: future governments might simply cut the funding or restrict the archive to US content only because “why shouod they pay for other contries’ history?”
A legislative approach that protects what the archive does would be a much more reasonable approach.
Overall I agree with you: the government is not trustable to own and manage this service and especially all of the data itself.
I think legislative protection for this function is a good thing, to create a legal protected space for it to operate, while still having it actually operated by the private sector.
The ideal solution, IMO, is for the service to be decentralized onto a blockchain or some other kind of decentralized data store, and have a variable number of nodes running it in a redundant manner so that no single node’s loss leads to loss of data or the service itself.
This is a universal good, one I’d be happy to help “pay for” in the form of dedicating computing resources to it.
IMO all the functions of democracy (including in this case the maintenance of historical memory) should ideally be decentralized enough to be immune to attack by any organization up to and including armies.
Kinda sounds like we need a decentralized, feterated internet archive for at least each nation and maybe individuals… Or maybe I just want to federate almost everything ^^’
Edit: found a discussion here on that topic in the comments
Yeah, and since our government doesn’t work, it’d be better for open source, transparent efforts by the people. That also reminds the assholes in govt that the internet “content” is not owned by those who built machines or the government’s investment in DARPAnet, but by the people. Turn it all into a blockchain or something so there are copies or at least fragments on a ton of computers around the world and is indelible.
What if the internet archives, instead of a single site, was a bunch of federated instances sharing content with each other like fediverse?
I am of course very ignorant to how internet archives actually works, and not very tech savy, but would something like I'm suggesting be theoretically possible?
It’s already working like that, at least on the indexer side. You can create an account and use their app or browser extensions and start snapshotting websites you visit and submit them to the wayback machine. Storage is still centralized in The Internet Archive datacenter though.
Yes, for storage, if we coordinated enough. Such technologies already exist. But IA also does tons of archival work that isn’t so easily distributed. And their lending system isn’t easily legally federated.
Ok, but what if we wanted to each take pieces of that tree of knowledge and help others learn from it. Could we possibly hold onto that information and plant our own little trees with seeds? And the more people who had seeds, the faster the tree would download grow.
Yeah that was my first thought too. That seems like a way better idea than just entrusting it to the Library of Congress as the article suggests. For one thing, the internet archive isn’t just American stuff. For another, there’s no way the government won’t just bend over backwards as soon as a big corporation asks it to. Thirdly, it seems like a much better idea to keep it decentralized and to keep the corporations playing whack-a-mole with it than to just keep giving them one big, static target to aim at.
"sound recordings without authorization, neither Plaintiffs nor their artists see a dime. Not only does this harm Plaintiffs and the artists or their heirs by depriving them of compensation, but it undermines the value of music.”
Heirs? What is this, a medieval royal court? No one should see a dime from selling copies of a work created by someone who isn’t even alive. Their “heirs” should have to make their own contributions to society if they want to be rewarded with wealth, just like the rest of us.
Is there a Plan B if the fight is lost? Move it to another country, probably in the EU, that has a better legal environment? Or some other answer? Because with the current political climate in the US this is far from guaranteed to be won, and the consequences of losing it are dire
I’m not sure that the EU will stand up to IP holders here either. You probably need to move it to a dodgy developing nation with no respect for IP rights like a lot of the pirate sites do.
This is actually really disturbing to me. I normally don’t get involved in anything, but this seems like a winnable fight and it really bothers me for some reason the idea of the Internet Archive being destroyed.
Copyright infringement strike against the Internet Archive. I’ve saved a lot of Internet Archive links as evidence that something happened or existed. I really don’t like the idea of it going away.
What can I do to help this situation go the right way? Where is this lawsuit being taken? Are there courtroom proceedings going on?
Well, how else would companies profit off of works they contributed nothing to? /s
Capitalism needs to die. We need a society that works to better and enrich all, not fuckwads who bleed and exploit others and their work for personal gain.
The article uses a slippery slope argument to say that if the Internet Archive loses a case that's basically only after the borrower limit then the entire site will be taken down. And I'm pretty sure they've already lost that lawsuit?
They're definitely gonna go after the wayback machine next, because what use is there in controlling social media and deleting what bothers them, if there's freely accessible records of it somewhere else?
I wonder if and how wanting to protect the Wayback machine is compatible with the overall sentiment (on Lemmy) that people need all necessary means to protect their privacy. Wouldn’t people who want that users can protect their privacy also be against the Wayback machine?
You can already ask the Internet Archive to take down a content if you can proof the content is yours (e.g. can’t just buy an old domain and demand the internet archive to delete the archived contents put up by the past owners). People also regularly ask them to take down harmful contents as well.
They’re doing themselves absolutely no favors by trying to save archived copies of copyrighted media. It’s bullshit and they need to stop. It’s clearly against the law whether we like the law or not…
Doesn’t matter. We don’t get that choice. Abide by the law or be illegal, it’s simple. If you opt to be illegal, I would suggest that entertainment media may not be the best line in the sand to draw. It’s not like stealing food to not starve to death. Just becuase you’re bored and feel entitled to be entertained does not mean that someone elsewhere should have to give up possible profit to do so.
To be clear, I’ve got no issues sailing the black season, like many of you, but I won’t be pretending I didn’t know, if I get caught. I recognize what’s legal and not. It’s part of being in a society.
Ok smart-ass, yeah the distribution that can only happen becuase they archived copies without permission, with absolute and clear intent for archiving to be used as basis of distribution.
And you speak for everyone, except im part of everyone and disagree… you certainly don’t speak for me, but managed to bundle me into “The People”, as I am a citizen of this country who is represented by the choices you speak of.
There’s absolutely no reason that on one hand you should expect to get rich and famous being a popular musician, while on the same hand expecting to get music and video for free. Where do you propose the $$ come from? Are artists and IP creators alike not entitled to the benefits of their labor, and to protect those benefits from others? So, do you want volunteer musicians and actors, with zero budget, but you get the media for free, or do you want to admit that entertainment has financial value and should retain it as such?
Entitled fucking morons everywhere I look, with zero God damn ability to stop and think critically for a picosecond about the realities of modern society and how they contrast against the morals and ethics we claim to hold so dear elsewhere.
You need to look up what a copywrite is even I think
Saving copies should be fine, the thing that keeps getting them in trouble is when they try to turn themselves into Library Genesis and freely distribute that media. They need to keep in the archivist mindset where preservation is the most important thing, keep the data safe for the day when it's no longer otherwise publicly available and distributing it is no longer going to get you in trouble.
How is it different from a library though? My library just buys their content from retail stores. They get their books from Amazon and their CDs and DVDs from Walmart, and they also have ebooks with a borrower limit (eg maximum of two checkouts at a time).
The thing that triggered Internet Archive's current enormous lawsuit problems is that they weren't imposing a borrower limit. They were letting as many people download copies as they wanted, with no limits.
I'm not at all a fan of current copyright laws, but that's really going straight into "what are you gonna do, stab me?" territory. This is a job for pirates, not for a library. Leave it to the experts.
It only does not have a significant adverse effect because enough people actually do pay for the media that they are able to make a profit off of it. If no one paid for it then they would lose all of their revenue from selling copies, which would definitely be a significant adverse effect on their profits.
I mean, maybe you don’t consider that to be a problem. Maybe you think that copying media should be free and that instead of making money selling copies people should live off of the money they make from performances and/or patronage, even if this means that there is less money available to create media so in practice there is less of it around. I don’t agree with this position, but I also don’t think it is an inherently unreasonable one as long as you are being honest about it.
The point is, though, that whatever moral position you take on piracy, you cannot justify it with a claim that only holds as long as other people act differently from you.
I agree. Saving bits of published web content is one thing, and saving entire books to lend them out is a different thing.
If the content needs to be lent out, it’s not fit for this kind of thing. Either making a copy and letting a person access it is totally free, or the content is indeed something to be bought and sold.
1,000 words just to say “the Library of Congress should acquire the Internet Archive.” Not a bad idea, but man. Sometimes your bosses are really pushy about the wordcount, eh, Lance?
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