[DaoVeles]

I do worry about the future of IA. Simply because of some of their reckless moves with their book lending policy, they have opened themselves up to being bleed dry financially. That plus the amount of copyright infringement openly available on the site is just waiting to be attacked.

I am waiting for Nintendo to get wind of the huge ROM dumps on there, it is not going to pretty. No manner of 'moral high ground' will defend against lawyers.

[Gud]

I disagree. I am happy the Internet Archive are fighting the draconian copy right laws that exist.

[anonymousab]

They aren't really fighting it, because they never picked a winnable battle.

Rather, they overextended themselves massively in a blunder akin to just throwing themselves on their enemy's sword. They decided to go all-or-nothing on uncontrolled digital lending when there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell that the current laws would give them any wiggle room. And unsurprisingly, it will give them a mortal wound.

[mrguyorama]

"Pick a winnable fight" means the internet archive does not exist. Copyright in the US is very clear cut. There is no fight to "win" without changing the law.

That means advocacy. That sometimes means civil disobedience and getting society to fight for them. You want an internet archive? We need to reform copyright law.

[lolinder]

The Internet Archive already pushed the boundaries and existed for long enough to make meaningful headway. They were winning the fight by picking the right battles and flying under the radar all the way up until they decided to completely overstep their mission and take on a fight that no one had any hope they would win.

[renewiltord]

Yeah, but no person who would worry about this would have made the IA in the first place. IA itself is a massive copyright suit waiting to happen.

I know, I know, if you were them and had bought bitcoin at $10 you would have sold at precisely the top at $70k per and neither before nor after.

[anonymousab]

I would agree, but IA did eventually add a mechanism for removing a site/copyrighted content entirely.

If they were straight up ignoring or rejecting DMCA takedown requests, then that would be a self-immolation that is similarly pyrrhic to the uncontrolled digital lending operation.

[Apocryphon]

[flagged]

[renewiltord]

Sure, but the guy who would conceive and execute on this idea was never going to be a guy who would stop there.

Folks like this don’t aim at some point and then achieve it and stay there. They aim higher, land where they do, and continue to target the higher point. It’s how it is.

You can tell because how many of the rest of the people who would have stopped and flown under the radar have duplicated the Archive and served it without the taint of the ebook lending? Precisely zero.

[Apocryphon]

Hm, what's that Carl Sagan quote, "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." Brewster Kahle's vision for the Internet Archive as an electronic repository for human knowledge is the former. His belief that he can just blithely tussle with the entire copyright regime in such a half-cocked manner is the latter. You should not confuse folly for audacity. Especially when it might completely jeopardize the former.

[HeatrayEnjoyer]

But the arena for that fight is legislation. Weed didn't become legal through lawsuits, it became legal because laws were repealed. I hope IA prevails but it's long shot, even more with the Heritage infestation of the courts.

[Gud]

Again, disagree. The copyright trolls need to be fought in the courts as well.

Obviously the law needs to be changed.

[vineyardmike]

The “problem” is that society doesn’t see Nintendo/Disney/et al as copyright trolls - instead they’re successful businesses who made content and profit. Connecting those dots to archival work and historic preservation is a long slow process and won’t be successful in courts without legal changes.

[throwaway14356]

We have to stop prioritizing it over everything else. You can't compete in the global playground if you have impossible to implement entitlement programs. Priority has to be new work not existing work and definitely not the work of dead people. We have countless similar schemes were people are to be rewarded for things done long ago. One can't pretend it isn't slowing everything down.

[account42]

I wonder if reframing it as getting rid of hereditary wealth would make more people open to copyright reform.

[raxxorraxor]

Everyone just ignoring bad laws and contradicting them can remove laws too. But of course this is a niche topic that would never get such broad support.

A lot of people smoking weed is certainly a component for the prohibition to fail at some point.

Writing mails to legislative members isn't enough if you don't have any form of leverage.

[autoexec]

Jury nullification is the real mechanism for We The People when we don't consent to be held to laws passed by They The Wealthy/Bribed Lawmakers

It requires that people refuse plea deals and demand jury trials, and that the jury is educated on what jury nullification is but when prosecutors can't get a conviction regardless of much evidence they have of guilt the laws will get changed or at least they stop being enforced.

[account42]

AFAIU the jury doesn't have final say in civil trials so this would only work partially (copyright infringement can be both a civil dispute as well as a criminal matter).

[lolinder]

They risked one of the greatest public goods in the history of humanity on a battle that everyone knew they would lose.

That's not an admirable underdog fight and it's not a glorious martyrdom, it's at best a naive slip up and at worst an ignoble organizational suicide attempt.

Change isn't going to happen because people recklessly throw themselves against the draconian laws and get annihilated by them—it will happen when people strategically set up a battle that they can win or persuade Congress to fix it.

[rwmj]

Back over here in the real world, there is no possible way the IA will win this fight through the courts. It has to be dealt with by legislation.

[account42]

So far no one has won the fight by legislation. Or even a single battle. In fact, copyright terms have only gotten worse over the years - FAR worse.

[rwmj]

That doesn't contradict what I said.