[gojomo]

The internet has given everyone the tools to publish a personal newsletter/blog/profile-page, just as only the few could do so earlier. It not only allows essentially-free publishing to the whole public, but also extreme narrowcasting with any level of access-control one desires.

You've not made a case that personal writings should be treated any differently, on either copyright or privacy grounds, nor that the law does treat them any differently.

You've made unsupportable allegations of "flaunting privacy" or "direct attack on individual privacy", and accused those who simply reason from copyright-history as making "bad faith" arguments. And, you are asking for the roughly the same level of expansive copyright interpretation – not at all a feature of the jurisdictions where the Internet Archive primarly operates – that copyright maximalists and DRM advocates do.

Just as you misrepresented the Archive's process for exclusion as requiring a DMCA request – even though your own links complimented the Archive's "straightforward" process – you're now confusing an imaginary claim of "commons" (no rights) versus my narrower claim of traditional balance, fair use, and implied licenses.

And if you think the straightforward, sympathetic, norm-respecting noncommercial policies of the San Francisco' based Internet Archive are a threat to queer and other often-persecuted lifestyles – rather than the opaque data-collection efforts of hundreds of other unobserved entities, platforms, apps, & persistent threats, up to and including actual nation-states – I believe you've made a dangerous category error. The Wayback Machine is a friendly canary reminding people of the risk and responsive to their concerns; others represent the fatal dangers of privacy blowback.

Thanks for promoting my Twitter & old blog posts!

My current & former affiliations are well-disclosed across my web presences - and I often mention my once-upon-a-time Archive involvement here on HN if more directly commenting on Archive details, as opposed to broad principles involved.

But I've not been full-time there for about a decade – and the specific blogspot posts you've chosen to highlight actually predate my tenure at IA. I don't speak for IA nowadays, only myself, as myself.

Yes, my work history is congruent with my beliefs about privacy & copyright on the internet, and prominently disclosed. (My jobs don't dictate my views; my views dictate my jobs.)

Your broken links are, thankfully, available at the Wayback Machine:

2008 "Gordon Mohr Takes Us Inside the Internet Archives" https://web.archive.org/web/20080619045327/http://news.oreil...

2001 "Security Fears for Peers" https://web.archive.org/web/20010331094133/http://www.wired....

How heavenly it might be if only every paid employee (and potentially, compensated advocate) of big tech, big copyright, big nation-state, big regulation, and big ideologies – as they pile-on the votes & comments here & elsewhere – were similarly open about their affiliations!

[_ktx2]

> How heavenly it might be if only every paid employee (and potentially, compensated advocate) of big tech, big copyright, big nation-state, big regulation, and big ideologies – as they pile-on the votes & comments here & elsewhere – were similarly open about their affiliations!

Luckily I'm not paid to talk about privacy. While there's probably some people who monetize privacy they're usually looked at negatively. Apple is a good case study of that. The closest you could get to saying that I'm paid to talk about privacy is my work on cryptography orchestration, but that was not built to be monetized - it was built to protect information and put users in control.

> My current & former affiliations are well-disclosed across my web presences...

> But I've not been full-time there for about a decade

> Yes, my work history is congruent with my beliefs about privacy & copyright on the internet, and prominently disclosed. (My jobs don't dictate my views; my views dictate my jobs.)

Doesn't really matter, disclose your affiliations - especially for the kind of wild statements you make (eg: comparing thread commenters to "big tech, big copyright, big nation-state, big regulation, and big ideologies".)

> Just as you misrepresented the Archive's process for exclusion as requiring a DMCA request – even though your own links complimented the Archive's "straightforward" process –

I didn't misrepresent it. https://medium.com/wednesday-genius/how-to-remove-your-websi... Quite literally, the most expedient way to get them to remove content is to frame it as a DMCA. Just because the changed process is "easy" or "straight forward" right now, doesn't mean that won't change on a dime. I already noted they removed a web norm and replaced it with email.

> you're now confusing an imaginary claim of "commons" (no rights) versus my narrower claim of traditional balance, fair use, and implied licenses.

I agree, commons is the wrong term, "fair use" is what IA legally rides on.

> And if you think the straightforward, sympathetic, norm-respecting noncommercial policies of the San Francisco' based Internet Archive are a threat to queer and other often-persecuted lifestyles

IA is part of the larger problem, I'm not playing whackamole with giant businesses acting badly, or as you put it pushing boundaries for some imaginary libertarian-esque greater good. Regulation will solve anyone who wants to host or do business on US soil.

> The Wayback Machine is a friendly canary reminding people of the risk and responsive to their concerns; others represent the fatal dangers of privacy blowback.

I am literally speechless at this logic. The idea that doing harm is somehow a canary for larger potential harm and is worth continuing to do is awful reasoning. IA can make their services less harmful without harming their larger mission, I've also proposed ways to do that that you have not responded to.

> You've made unsupportable allegations of "flaunting privacy" or "direct attack on individual privacy"...

I supported both of those statements. They took a self-service, automated system that is a web norm (which you apparently like) and replaced it with emails for DMCA takedowns. You can disagree with me, but they're not unsupported.

> ...accused those who simply reason from copyright-history as making "bad faith" arguments

I reasoned that people like you know that your comparison to organized, for-profit publishers are not cogent. Every time you respond I become more confident of that assertion, especially when you accuse me of being a shill for some "big copyright" conspiracy.

Lastly, probably the most salient point I've ever heard:

> "Copyright holders aren't going to be happy with Freenet and Gnutella," Mohr said. "They are going to want to start monitoring people at the ISP level, and that means there is going to be a coming war between individual privacy versus network security."

Ironically, years later you went to work on what would end up becoming a privacy eroding tool. I wish I was talking to the gojomo of back then, I think there'd been a much more productive conversation than this has been.

[gojomo]

Your other link (https://jonathanwthomas.net/how-to-get-your-website-out-of-t...) explicitly and accurately reported, "You don’t need to file a DMCA notice or anything (but you can if you want to go nuclear)." Your insistence on sloppily referring to the process as such, and further your unwarranted fear it might "change on a dime", are odd slurs to insistently deploy.

> Doesn't really matter, disclose your affiliations - especially for the kind of wild statements you make (eg: comparing thread commenters to "big tech, big copyright, big nation-state, big regulation, and big ideologies".)

My current & prior affiliations are well-disclosed – better than yours, it seems.

And I wasn't "comparing" commenters to those things, I was pointing out: many pseudonymous voters, & commenters, here are often in the employ of, & de facto advocates for, the very topics of contentious discussion – such as Google, the US federal government, the entertainment industry, activist organizations, etc – with no disclosure.

So to harp on my open book of work history is again odd.

> I agree, commons is the wrong term, "fair use" is what IA legally rides on.

Indeed, it was unfair of you to characterize my arguments, or separately any rationales used by the Internet Archive, as involving a simplistic 'commons' assertion.

> I've also proposed ways to [make their services less harmful] that you have not responded to.

I've not noticed these proposals, just vague platitudes about "trying to establish consensus in good faith first" – what does that mean? – or an example of one person (Manley) who consciously chose to publish a life-archive along with their suicide note (!). How exactly does that outlier case convert to actionable policies for a web library, that legitimately seeks to be as comprehensive about publicly-published web materials as traditional printed-material libraries?

> Regulation will solve anyone who wants to host or do business on US soil.

No, it can't 'solve', and barely even helps, because the most serious threats are from government who themselves use regulations to force the violation of privacy – as with KYC rules, or demands for intercept capabilities – and from aggressive sub-state actors whose activites are largely invisible to regulators.

You're still alleging non-specific "harm" from the Archive without examples or magnitudes.

If the Archive helps makes people aware that what they've published persists in the public record unless they take conscious other steps, and lets them both correct the storage that surprised them, and leads them towards the truly-reliable practices for avoiding unwanted disclosure/persistence, it's done a better job than those promising safety from superficial 'regulation' that doesn't actually limit most threats.

Archiving publically-offered web pages isn't a "privacy-eroding tool" no matter how many times you repeat that allegation - it's a tool for cultural memory, honest history, and teaching people the ground realities of privacy (or lack thereof) in these new media. Directing ire at the Archive's well-behaved collection activities is getting angry at the smoke alarm, not the fire.