I personally have donated previously to IA but now it frankly disgusts me that the project's current management has for the last few years had its focus on fighting windmills in court instead of their core mission - preserving our digital history. Hard to think I would ever donate to them again unless there's a change in leadership after this fiasco.
Present a better battle. I can't think of one - just that, enlarged in other fields. The battle against ignorance is the only one battle. Hail to the battle.
https://blog.archive.org/2020/03/30/internet-archive-respond...
This seemed already at the time completely counter-productive and unnecessary step as it basically forced the publishers to react because it made IA's digital lending indistinguishable from casual e-book piracy.
They have now created a legal precedent that, in addition to finding the "National Emergency Library" illegal, makes the controlled lending they implemented previously illegal. Ever since the district court ruling they have been able to continue digital lending only by negotiating compensation terms with the publishers.
So, instead of expanding everyone's access to the digital archives, they have managed to indefinitely limit it by creating a restricting legal precedent. This was the inevitable outcome of "National Emergency Library" and they knew or should have known it.
casual e-book piracy doesn't include DRM.
They knew. I have an MLIS and took one copyright course and could tell immediately that what they were doing was illegal/wouldn't hold up in court. For them not to know would suggest that their staff is less informed than I am, which can't be true.
It may make logical sense to think of CDL as indistinguishable from physical book lending in libraries, but because it entailed making a copy, that was never legally the case.
You can defend against the default presumption by arguing fair use. The IA did try this but it was very clearly doomed to fail, because they are providing whole copies for normal use. It was so obvious it was a summary judgement. “Fair use” is not a general term about what we think should be allowed, it has a specific statutory definition and there is no serious debate over whether CDL can be twisted into it. It may be morally right but it’s clearly legally wrong.
It may be ridiculous that yes, if you scan in a book, send it to your friend, burn your physical copy and delete your copy of the scan, that you inarguably committed copyright infringement. But that’s the law.
The ruling clearly addresses this in the section about the application of fair use to the idea of the CDL (that is, where the lending is controlled in the way we’re idealizing) and it was deemed obviously illegal. The very act of making and distributing a copy is what is infringement, and as the ruling clearly lays out none of the pillars of fair use come close to applying as a defense. Crucially, it is not transformative (it’s the same book used in the same way) and the entire work is copied.
The law is bad and it sucks and we need to change it. It’s depressing to me that so many really smart people don’t have a good understanding of this, probably because most infringement usually goes unpunished. We don’t get to deem it okay simply because it logically makes sense that controlled digital lending is obviously equivalent to physical lending. Unfortunately the act of making the copy and then distributing it changes everything.
> "This appeal presents the following question: is it “fair use” for a nonprofit organization to scan copyright-protected print books in their entirety and distribute those digital copies online, in full, for free, subject to a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio between its print copies and the digital copies it makes available at any given time, all without authorization from the copyright-holding publishers or authors? Applying the relevant provisions of the Copyright Act as well as binding Supreme Court and Second Circuit precedent, we conclude the answer is no."
Let's not flip the situation upside down though: IA didn't limit anything, the publishers did. The publishers have the possibility to make this possible if they want, and they don't want to: the responsibility is entirely on them.
Anyone going all in on either side is not on the side of maximizing access, which legitimately depends on maximizing the production of things to access.
Anyone making a crusade of only one side, without collaborating with the other, will damage both.
It just didn’t materially hurt anyone, and it made a lot of people happy.
I think it was great, and while, sure, the battle was probably lost from the beginning, I like it when people challenge existing conventions. I’ve never stopped donating.
It took a lot of money control from the publishers and third party vendors libraries force people to use for digital lending. Those vendors can force users to create accounts, collect reading history and personal data, push ads, and sell lender's data to publishers and others. It also let publishers restrict what titles were available, remotely censor content, or remove titles whenever they wanted.
The IA was creating their own scans which limited the control publishers had and cut out much of that data collection/ad pushing. It was a better deal for readers, but it was a worse deal for publishers and advertisers.
I didn’t suddenly stop buying books on amazon when I could get them from the IA, the people who used it were the ones that could afford those books from Amazon in the first place.
Of course, me ‘thinking’ something is no guarantee, but I don’t have the numbers to say one way or another.
People were banned from exiting their homes. Libraries were forcibly closed. Emergency lending of digital books is the most noble battle they could have chosen.
Your disgust is misplaced. Your disgust should be reserved for those who exploit and hurt others. Not for idealists who fight against impossible odds. Especially when the cause (challenging how copyright law works) is one you support.
I don't think so. IA is a valuable resource for the Wayback Machine and other endeavors which are far more seated in fair use or preservation. Choosing to sacrifice the rest of IA for a grandiose or idealized vision of how the world should work is a betrayal of those who donate to IA in hopes of funding the much more tangible goal. If he wanted to take the stance he took, he should have spun the library component out of IA and served it as a separate legal entity to take on that risk.
Maybe the community trust in IA has been misplaced. The mission on their website clearly says they want to serve "All Knowledge" but I'm not alone in thinking it would be best for them to narrow their scope to just internet-related things, and specifically, things that aren't served by other archive or library sources.
IA is currently used to host and distribute large quantities of software, games, and other media in a quasi-legal mindset that is truly not something that is easily justified. Is having every Xbox 360 ISO publicly available for download on IA really serving the same mission as archiving all of the random blogs people have written on the internet? Is serving in-copyright published books?
I think the problem is that IA has multiple missions that all compete, and broadly, people assumed that they would act in a way that wouldn't jeopardize the rest of the archive.
Trials are for when parties disagree about the facts, e.g. was the light red or green.
I've never donated to them and figured it was the right choice after they started excluding websites from the WayBackMachine - the most vocal case being kiwifarms [1], where they supposedly did so after intervention of a family member of some higher-up [allegedly].
EDIT - as I remembered, the list of excluded site is a LOT larger [2], with a lot of them simply being removed on request. On one hand I understand their choice in this matter, on another - you can willingly be excluded and potentially hide archival stuff of importance...
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/7/23341051/kiwi-farms-intern... [2] https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=List_of_website...
Does anyone know of one or want to set one up?
(To be clear, it's not that I'm a big fan of Kiwifarms or anything, but Byuu's tragic story is enough for me to think that the site has significant cultural and historical value, regardless of its ethical orientation.)
>Would you support a complementary archive that took snaps of the excluded websites?
Now that I have looked at it, I likely will. I never was one to donate my money to anybody (especially with no income...), but now being employed I believe it's only fair to give them a little bit here and there for them to keep afloat.
>To be clear, it's not that I'm a big fan of Kiwifarms or anything
Neither am I. I just believe that an archive shouldn't be biased - and should keep all stuff up as long as it isn't strictly illegal, eg. CSAM or piracy. This is a blurry line though - I myself would like to be able to check out a hypothetical neo-Nazi group's website after they are all arrested for doing X to check what its contents looked like - but I am definitely in a minority here. So, essentially... >the site has significant cultural and historical value, regardless of its ethical orientation. Significant can be discussed, but I see it as a very subjective measure.
> Archive.is’s authoritative DNS servers return bad results to 1.1.1.1 when we query them. I’ve proposed we just fix it on our end but our team, quite rightly, said that too would violate the integrity of DNS and the privacy and security promises we made to our users when we launched the service.
> The archive.is owner has explained that he returns bad results to us because we don’t pass along the EDNS subnet information. This information leaks information about a requester’s IP and, in turn, sacrifices the privacy of users.
[1] https://community.cloudflare.com/t/archive-today-is-failing-...
> Note again that a query MUST NOT be refused solely because it provides 0 address bits.
The shenanigans are absolutely on archive.is's side here.
Hi, Mek here (speaking as myself). Disclosure that I run OpenLibrary.org at the Internet Archive. I'm sad to hear you're disappointed with how things are going. I share your frustration.
I wanted to join in and +1 one of your comments: the importance of preserving our digital history. Preservation is a core mission of the Internet Archive and central to the tagline, "Universal Access to All Knowledge".
At the end of the day, the reason to preserve cultural heritage is so that it can be made accessible: Eventually. In ways that serve people with special accessibility needs who are otherwise left behind. In formats and environments capable of playing back materials that no longer have available runtimes. With affordances that make these materials useful and relevant to modern audiences.
An important reflection is that a key role of archives and libraries is to preserve cultural heritage by building inclusive, diverse collections, which span topics and times. For decades, libraries pursued this goal by purchasing physical books and, over time, growing and preserving collections of materials that serve their patrons. Not just bestsellers. Weird, obscure, rare research materials about rollercoasters, genealogy, banned books, stories from lost voices, government records.
The shift of publishing to digital [especially how it's done] fundamentally affects how [of if] material may be archived or accessed. It's not enough to assert the importance of preserving culture. One must actively advocate for a future where media can be archived. As Danny suggests (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41454990), this is something the Internet Archive has been acting on since its inception.
What we're seeing today is a shift to digital, designed and led by publishers who are engineering a landscape with new rules where libraries can't own digitally accessible books. Libraries are being offered no choice, no path forward, but to lease (over and over) prohibitively expensive, fixed pool of books, that disappear after the lease period is up. This means libraries have ostensibly lost their ability (first sale doctrine rights) to own, grow, and preserve a collection of books over time... A fundamental ecosystem change that threatens the very function of preservation that you and I so strongly value. Preservation necessitates the ability to preserve. Preservation is a fight for the future and I believe a preservable future where libraries are allowed to own digitally accessible collections of books is a future worth fighting for.
That doesn't mean we should only be looking into the future. Looking at today, the only permanent collections libraries do / can own and preserve are physical. So what other question is there besides: how can libraries make the materials they rightfully own, preserve, and are permitted to lend accessible to a digital society? How may libraries make the digital jump to help millions of physical books enter public discourse, which takes place ostensibly online?
In my opinion, this is the discussion we're having. The Internet Archive continues to preserve millions of documents of all sorts: websites, radio, tv, books, scholarly articles, microfilm, software, etc. A very small team of staff are doing the best job possible to make sure that, not only does our cultural heritage get archived, but that in the future, archives and libraries have the right to exist, be useful, and that there are materials archives are permitted to preserve; that important research resources are made accessible to the public -- especially those who have traditionally been left behind. Someone needs to fight for the future that lets us continue preserving the past.
I'm personally very open to your suggestions on how the Open Library can improve and appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts.
I love computers, and so many aspects of the digital age. But one of my biggest concerns with this era is the impermanence of information. We have seen people trying to use this impermanence to rewrite the perception of history. This is not new (Tulsa Race Massacre), but the new systems break quicker than paper and cutting people off by expiring a license or DRM key is a lot easier than physically seizing every copy of a written work.
The transition to digital threatens to completely remove our ability to archive our culture as a public good, and puts that power solely in the hands of moneyed interests. So much human effort has been put into establishing and maintaining systems for free distribution of information. We are watching it being stripped away and selectively leased back to us, and once that process is complete, it will be much more difficult to get back to where we are now.
I am not a legal expert, and I have no special insight into how the legal process has gone or could have gone.
I personally want to thank the Internet Archive for fighting to preserve our rights. I appreciate The Internet Archive standing up and taking on this fight, and if there was a better way to do it then someone should have done it.
Fights for public rights over private interest will always be uphill battles full of road blocks, and take sustained effort. I am going to donate $100 towards The Archive's continued legal battles (both defensive and offensive).
Internet Archive Forever! I hope to catch you at one of the archive events.
Why did IA pursue this case? You all lost in summary judgement, did your attorneys not tell you that you all had a terrible case and were likely to lose?
You have damaged your credibility and reputation as well as created negative precedent.
All in all, this seems like a massive blunder and I was hoping you could share what strategy you all are pursuing?