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The Internet Technology

If We Lose the Internet Archive, We're Screwed (sbstatesman.com) 112

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: If you've ever researched anything online, you've probably used the Internet Archive (IA). The IA, founded in 1996 by librarian and engineer Brewster Kahle, describes itself as "a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more." Their annals include 37 million books, many of which are old tomes that aren't commercially available. It has classic films, plenty of podcasts and -- via its Wayback Machine -- just about every deleted webpage ever. Four corporate publishers have a big problem with this, so they've sued the Internet Archive. In Hachette v. Internet Archive, the Hachette Publishing Group, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins and Wiley have alleged that the IA is committing copyright infringement. Now a federal judge has ruled in the publishers' favor. The IA is appealing the decision.

[...] Not only is this concern-trolling disingenuous, but the ruling itself, grounded in copyright, is a smack against fair use. It brings us one step closer to perpetual copyright -- the idea that individuals should own their work forever. The IA argued that their project was covered by fair use, as the Emergency Library provides texts for educational and scholarly purposes. Even writers objected to the court's ruling. More than 300 writers signed a petition against the lawsuit, including Neil Gaiman, Naomi Klein and -- get this -- Chuck Wendig. Writers lost nothing from the Emergency Library and gained everything from it. For my part, I've acquired research materials from the IA that I wouldn't have found anywhere else. The archive has scads of primary sources which otherwise might require researchers to fly across the country for access. The Internet Archive is good for literacy. It's good for the public. It's good for readers, writers and anyone who's invested in literary education. It does not harm authors, whose income is no more dented by it than any library programs. Even the Emergency Library's initial opponents have conceded this. The federal court's decision is a victory for corporations and a disaster for everyone else. If this decision isn't reversed, human beings will lose more knowledge than the Library of Alexandra ever contained. If IA's appeal fails, it will be a tragedy of historical proportions.
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If We Lose the Internet Archive, We're Screwed More

If We Lose the Internet Archive, We're Screwed

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  • What a complete shock. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Monday April 10, 2023 @01:53PM (#63438954)

    A judge ruled in favor of corporate control of information? SHOCK! OUTRAGE! SHAME!

    Except, it's just another day, another deal. This is what happens when we hand all control over to the people with the most money. It would be shameful, but the United States passed shame by with a rocket booster on her ass decades ago. In fact, I'm pretty sure we lapped shame in the last six years or so, with both middle fingers in the air screaming like Lieutenant Dan hanging onto the mast during the storm on his sailboat. Possibly multiple times.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shanen ( 462549 )

      Mod FP Funny under Sad and entire story deserves a "sad, sad, sad" moderation. With "shame" seasoning?

      I increasingly see the Fermi Paradox as a kind of death spiral. I used to believe that there must be a few civilizations that survived the low odds, but I'm losing that hope. The power of stupidity is too great. In a discussion yesterday, I felt reason to cite the old quote attributed to Einstein: "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."

      But if there a

      • In a way the human race is a real race. We're racing greed against stupidity and seeing which one can kill us off first. It's entirely possible they'll decide to be a team and take us out together in the end.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by shanen ( 462549 )

          Sure would be reassuring if we knew of a single proof-of-concept for long-term survival by "intelligence".

          • Sure would be reassuring if we knew of a single proof-of-concept for long-term survival by "intelligence".

            It would probably involve some very difficult conversations about population control, balance with your natural surroundings, and finding ways to accept your own nature without giving in to it completely. Modern man isn't ready for those conversations, because even the merest mention of population control brings all the tinfoil wearing brigades out to play and then you're right back to thinking it's all pointless.

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by shanen ( 462549 )

              Want to talk about passive eugenics? I didn't think so. Or maybe "Better not"?

              But mostly just the ACK.

        • "Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment. Humanity is in a final exam as to whether or not it might qualify for continuance in the Universe."
          Utopia Or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity, R. Buckminster Fuller

          See also my sig on the irony of the tools of abundance being used by scarcity-minded people.

    • In 2020, the IA introduced the National Emergency Library, which made copyrighted books available for free during the COVID-19 pandemic. The publishers behind the lawsuit alleged that this entailed copyright infringement. The judge, who was hostile from the beginning, decided to rule in the publishers' favor.

      If that's all there is to it, the Emergency Library is no different than the Pirate Bay. Is there some key fact that the article is omitting? Just handing out copyrighted materials to everybody and

      • Re:What a complete shock. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <slashdot@worf.ERDOSnet minus math_god> on Monday April 10, 2023 @03:52PM (#63439304)

        In 2020, the IA introduced the National Emergency Library, which made copyrighted books available for free during the COVID-19 pandemic. The publishers behind the lawsuit alleged that this entailed copyright infringement. The judge, who was hostile from the beginning, decided to rule in the publishers' favor.

        If that's all there is to it, the Emergency Library is no different than the Pirate Bay. Is there some key fact that the article is omitting? Just handing out copyrighted materials to everybody and saying, 'well, there's Covid19! And we're an "archive", so...??' doesn't see like an actual defense.

        Except first, the emergency library loaned out DRM'd copies of ebooks. They expire, usually within an hour. The thinking behind this was simple - the books exist in real libraries throughout the United States. But because of COVID, those books are inaccessible. This creates an unequal situation because those who can, buy the books, those who can't, are locked out of knowledge. To counter this, the IA simply stopped enforcing the lending limits - they know how many copies were loaned out at any one time, and I'm sure if ti got to brass tacks they could ask all the libraries that were closed at that time how many copies of that book were on the shelf, inaccessible.

        Of course, the publishers didn't want to argue this, so they argued that the IA archiving books and making them available online was illegal.

        It's one of those copyright things where the future is literally in our hands. This case may be a battle you lose in order to win the war - because it suddenly makes the press and people know about it, who can potentially demand changes to copyright. After all, publishers want to loan out ebooks but the rates they charge libraries is rather extortionate and the current laws mean they can do that.

        Given the cost of living right now, perhaps the demand at the library is greater than ever so people might feel more willing to defend their library against greedy publishers.

        • Given the cost of living right now, perhaps the demand at the library is greater than ever so people might feel more willing to defend their library against greedy publishers.

          I got e-mail from my local library system this morning. They're indefinitely suspending Sunday hours at four branches at the end of the month. Nobody is willing to work for them, let alone defend their reason for existing. America's library system is doomed to go out with a whimper, and the corporations take all.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by znrt ( 2424692 )

        so...??' doesn't see like an actual defense.

        yeah, well, the real issue is that copyright law doesn't seem like actual justice either, plus is regressive in a broad sense.

        no, my hopes that this case might make a dent in that are zero. so, getting back on topic: yes, we're screwed, but this is just one of multiple reasons.

  • Generlly a big fan of what IA has done but.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DarkOx ( 621550 ) on Monday April 10, 2023 @01:57PM (#63438962) Journal

    When it came to this whole emergency library thing they really seem to be over the handle bars.

    I don't have to like or agree with the law to understand and interpret it, but like everyone else I do have to follow it until it can be changed, so does IA.

    I read a good portion of the decision and frankly its difficult to see how the judge could reached any other conclusion. if you don't like - talk to your CongressCritter! - Seriously do it, our current copyright law is bonkers.

    The head line is also hyperbolic. IA having shut down their emergency library does not impact the Gutenberg project, or the wayback machine. We are talking about literature and software where its the case much of is still in print, likely in the catalog of your local library, and very possible in stock at the bookstore. It isnt as if this is material that will be lost or out of reach of anyone with more than a passing interest.

  • With the current SCOTUS... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    We're already screwed. Look at Thomas... payola-meister himself. I've never studied more than a semester of law ("Computers and Law" - how copyright, trademark, and patents impact the IT industry)... I could have written better opinions *for* what he's arguing than he did - and I disagree with almost every one of his opinions. He stretches his reasoning well beyond incredulity.

    I didn't like Scalia's opinions either - but at least they made sense.

    I do NOT believe Thomas when he says that he and his wife's

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Potor ( 658520 )

      I've never studied more than a semester of law ("Computers and Law" - how copyright, trademark, and patents impact the IT industry)... I could have written better opinions *for* what he's arguing than he did - and I disagree with almost every one of his opinions. .

      of course you could, you internet warrior you ....

  • Oh Noes! We'll lose the archives of the Twilight fanfic forums!!! haLP!!!

  • Eventually the corporations and government will take over the internet, it is just a matter of time. The only companies allowed to host pirated content will be companies like Google on YouTube.
    • They pretty much have it.
      Its just that ISPs make money off of sites like 4chan so those are still around. As soon as that stuff is profitable anymore, gone.

  • So what? (Score:1, Troll)

    by fermion ( 181285 )
    Years ago in the journal of irreproducible results there was an article foretelling the end of the world. A world in which everyone saves their National Geographic magazines. A world that collapses under the weight

    We have become a very narcissistic people. Every tweet, tik toc, post has to be preserved to perpetuity. Can you image what our world would be like if nothing every went away? Sure, I like most people wish that every doctor who episode was preserved, but take that to the logical extreme and thi

    • But I Lima tell I think we will survive this apocalypse.

      I hope I don't. I hope I am one of the first taken out.

  • The IA isn't as complete as it makes it out to be.
    Barely anyone cares. I don't. Those who do should already have had a plan in place.
    Remember folks, copyright is whatever the corporation want it to be, regardless of what the law says.

  • Move it (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 )

    Seriously, move it to a saner country, it just ain't safe anymore in the USA.

  • Elon can you launch a backup copy of it into Space? We need the corpus of knowledge from the raw internet. Otherwise the only records of the internet will be elite BS. We need to secure the archive of all that was said on the internet. That includes the slashdot archives. I will will tell your why. I have recently noticed that I said some pretty insightful things like 20+ years ago and there is no way to search the archives. I figure when the internet becomes sentient the AI/SkyNet may need some of that rea

  • Let's not get carried away. (Score:5, Funny)

    by sarren1901 ( 5415506 ) on Monday April 10, 2023 @02:37PM (#63439052)

    In fact, I'm hoping the entire Internet goes down for a week or so. The mass confusion and sheer panic from the younger people will be worth it.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Then your kids will knock on your door and bother you, just like the "good old days".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tom ( 822 )

      More elderly people than you realize will be impacted.

      Telcos are moving everyone over to VoIP, and after VoIP gained no traction at all for two decades, they're now doing it the sneaky way, i.e. without you necessarily realizing that you are now on VoIP, because the new router is also a VoIP gateway and you just keep your old phones plugged in.

      VoIP means no Internet = no telephone. That includes emergency numbers.

      The young people will know the Internet is down. They'll have a mental breakdown because they c

      • I personally hate the sneaky move to VoIP. Virgin Media did it the other month, and I've already had three spurious outages, one of which got in the way of safely contacting someone who was in hospital.

      • My entire old folk family has a cellphone and no land line. Even my 93 year old grandfather. Of course it would effect them negatively because everything is connected but unless someone had an emergency THAT week, it would be just fine.

        The young people on the other hand. hehe. Totally worth it!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Tom ( 822 )

          My old folks have mobile phones, but not smartphones, but they also are attached to their landline.

  • The torrent/hard drive combo for the win.

  • The job of the judge is to make sure all the rights of people, freedom of speech, religion, association and the second amendments are protected.

    Corporations are people, my friend

    The job of the judge is make sure the right of people to, say fly in private jet flight to a private island and cruise for a fortnight hopping islands, is protected. It is not the Court's responsibility to make sure people have the means to exercise that right

    We will protect right of people to own guns. But if police shoot some

    • Corporations are people, my friend

      And therein lies the problem. Can you throw a corporation in jail? No? Then it's not really a person. And when was the last time you saw a corporation executed for having killed flesh-and-blood people? Never? Then I rest my case.

      Job One of reforming Western civilization is to dispense with the made-from-fairy-dust legislative fiction that a corporation is equivalent to a person. Seriously, that shit needs to just die. Its death would make the survival of IA and other knowledge-and-culture-sharing initiative

      • Limited liability of corporation, (corpus = body, incorporation= the act of creating a body) has been the law since the mid 1800s.

        By itself this is not a problem.

        But the recent activist radical zealot courts are giving these corporations rights that should never be given to a soul less heart less lifeless "body".

        Corporations should not have first amendment level free speech protections. Corporations should not be able to extend it by calling "money is speech". Corporations should not be able to make

  • Data point (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ElizabethGreene ( 1185405 ) on Monday April 10, 2023 @03:00PM (#63439122)

    This lawsuit specifically focuses on the internet archive's choice to scan paper copies of copyrighted works to digital copies and then lend those digital copies out.

    If you have a long memory, there was a company that did the same thing. they'd rip your cd collection and allow others to listen to your CDs. It was deemed a copyright violation, and that precedent hasn't changed.

    I can make an ethical, not legal, argument that the above should be permitted. It is analogous to book sharing. That ethical argument falls apart for IA's "Emergency" library during the pandemic. As part of that program they removed the one-person-at-a-time limit and lent unlimited simultaneous copies of books. I can't defend that. It was a mistake, and that choice gave the publishers a case they could win in court without looking like the bad guys.

    Another ethically marginal practice is partnering with libraries to, based on the ISBNs of books in their collection, allow multiple lending. The justification for this is libraries agree to remove those books from circulation while in practice the books remained in circulation or available as reference works. Again, we're flirting with the one book to one person at a time limit.

    We aren't talking about ancient books here either. The last book in the Lemony Snicket series, a work mentioned in the suit, was published in 2006.

    Opinion:
    TFS conflates the Internet Archive's physical to virtual library work with the wayback machine and other services they provide. IMHO, that's a bit disingenuous at best.

    For what it's worth, I love IA's library efforts. Ebook publishers contracts are so abusive they'd make Faust blush. We need to fix the laws that prevent reasonable digital use of physical materials, a task that requires Congress' assistance. That won't be easy.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by davecb ( 6526 )
      They testified that they had loaned out fewer copies than had become unavailable when the physical libraries had been ordered closed. That wasn't considered relevant in the fair-use case.
  • This is Slashdot. Despite the lapse in quality since the halcyon days of CmdrTaco, we're still a resourceful bunch of insensitive clods when we want to be. So who's helming the GeoCities-scale project to mirror the IA's various parts in case the worst should happen? I'll help if I can.
  • Musk, Thiel, Bezos, Brin, Gates !

    The world needs you to save a large part of our accumulated wisdom!

    Okay maybe not Gates.
    Ach, maybe even he's changed.
    But I'm pretty sure Ellison is right now working out how to make more money from the IA shutdown.

    Anyway:
    The Internet Archive of Ebooks is estimated ( okay, that was on Reddit, better estimates welcome ) to require one million dollars of hard drive space to store.

    Billionaires, have a look in your other jacket pocket, check down the back of the sofas at your mis

  • I hate to say this, but perhaps it's time for the IA to start preparing for the worst by moving/copying its archives to something more persistent than a singularly owned data center which can be taken out with a police raid.

    There are technologies which exist now which can help with this:

    IPFS
    Bittorrent
    Blockchains
    Filecoin

    None are a perfect fit for what IA needs a - distributed, free, un-cancelable archive of history - but perhaps some combination of the above could be used? For instance, integrating torrents

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Sigma 7 ( 266129 )

      The correct process is to have the content available on multiple independent sites. That is, Internet Archive and Archive of the Internet both have similar content. There's multiple sites for books, and each other type of media. They do risky and independent measures in a staggered fashion, thus one faltering allows the other to maintain the current level of service (until a new team comes up.)

      That's how old pirate sites survived - so many of them. They also died quickly, but another would pop up under a di

  • I get having copyright protection, but resources like the IA are needed to fill the digital gaps between copyright protections and market realities. IP owners own huge blocks of copyrights, but it's not profitable for companies to keep literally EVERYTHING they own available online so a majority of works of art are lost forever while those owners sit on them as an asset (or liability) on a balance sheet.

    Study of one case in point: I recently went online to find the Rankin/Bass, animated version of The Retur

  • Let me just say at the top, I love the goal of the Internet Archive. I've been to the physical place and had lunch with the staff. I've talked with the CTO about what possibilities there might be for me to work there. I like these people. So all that being said, I've probably only found the IA useful about 1% of the time I've looked for things. The search is horrendous in that there's such a glut of search results that are not relevant to my search beyond a shared word that finding anything is really hard.

  • The System has screwed us so badly, that this is not America. Our "country" is not remotely close to being recognizable as the greatest and freest nation on Earth.

    When do we stop supporting The System that keeps screwing us?

    When does Atlas shrug and walk away, headed for Galt's Gulch?

    • Because Atlas is fictional bullshit and Galt is a MacGuffin all part of a juvenile revenge dream by a clever but sociopath author who had some kind of daddy issue (maybe Freudian?)

      You can't escape from society and especially not the evil people who leverage society to their own ends. They'll find you on your island and then conquer you for whatever they want and you can't stop the collective power they manipulate.

      Giving up is handing power over to others who decide for you; which works as long as they just

  • If they get rid of the Internet Archive, there goes essentially half the internet. We will lose terabytes upon terabytes of history, history that can't be found in a museum. All over copyright infringement. It's a dick move, and I hope somebody they fail in every conceivable way of getting rid of the Archive

  • We need to preserve the existing archive, yes, but recall that IA employees have started censoring their archive.

    Some dumbass posted something to KiwiFarms last year and IA nuked the whole site from the archive.

    Yeah, they're offensive. But not as much as memory-holing reality.

  • It looks like they are already rewriting history. When the fuck did Julius Caesar ever burn down any libraries!? What a rubbish article.

  • The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester was serialized in it, and rousing stories like Bright Side Crossing are still thrilling adventures. OK, they're in public domain, which is different, but I still use the archive for books like Level 7.

    https://archive.org/details/ga... [archive.org]

    https://openlibrary.org/books/... [openlibrary.org]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • The internet archive is too important to be shutdown, they need to lock a lot of the information away until the copyright expires. The actual contents of the library is too important to lose.

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