[HN Gopher] Someone needs to save the Internet Archives from the...
___________________________________________________________________
Someone needs to save the Internet Archives from the lawyers and I
have an idea
Author : goplayoutside
Score : 177 points
Date : 2023-08-22 13:41 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.techradar.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.techradar.com)
| withinrafael wrote:
| I see IA used more and more frequently as a free file host for
| new copyrighted content (e.g., custom hacked up Windows ISOs),
| which is incredibly frustrating. Without changes, perhaps active
| curation like a normal library, I fear the site will get forced
| off the Internet soon.
| peter_d_sherman wrote:
| >"Someone needs to save the Internet Archives from the lawyers
| and I have an idea"
|
| >"My thinking is that frequent partner The Library of Congress
| can put a stop to this by buying the Internet Archive. Make it a
| government body and protect all that digital content. I think
| these lawyers may be less inclined to sue the US Federal
| government."
|
| The US Federal government -- is primarily composed of
| _lawyers_...
|
| So let me get this straight... the author's idea, broadly
| understood, would be:
|
| To take the Internet Archive away from _lawyers_ -- and give it
| to _other lawyers_?
|
| ?
|
| (Or do I not understand the author's viewpoint correctly?)
|
| ?
| mkl95 wrote:
| > My thinking is that frequent partner The Library of Congress
| can put a stop to this by buying the Internet Archive. Make it a
| government body and protect all that digital content. I think
| these lawyers may be less inclined to sue the US Federal
| government.
|
| This is the opposite approach of what I would consider a
| potential solution. The information should be stored in a system
| expensive enough to sabotage that no government will consider it.
| Data should be replicated as many times as possible and replicas
| should be as physically distributed as possible.
| jancsika wrote:
| Unfortunately, that's the opposite of what I would consider a
| practical solution.
|
| The system you describe doesn't exist. If it did then Sci-hub
| would already be using it. Instead, Sci-hub is subject to
| essentially the same risks of takedown as IA.
| asrsgiaonionio wrote:
| [dead]
| fatfingerd wrote:
| I think they should focus more on signing structured data and
| indexes so people can just exchange IA content however they
| like and know it hasn't been tampered with. There's not much
| a state will be able to do as long as they rotate keys, etc,
| so there are just state demanded revocations which can be
| ignored.
| Pannoniae wrote:
| Or... host it in a country which doesn't care about this kind
| of stuff.
| masfuerte wrote:
| If the US cares enough (and they have a long track record of
| being irrationally overprotective of IP) then the IA becomes
| a bargaining chip for whatever shithole it's hosted in. It's
| not a long term solution.
| IX-103 wrote:
| I think it makes sense for the library of Congress to archive the
| Internet, but I think that should be independent of the Internet
| Archive.
|
| We really should go back to requiring items that want copyright
| protection to send a copy to the library of Congress. That would
| mean that those interested in copyright protection (which limits
| the ability of the public to share and retain copies for
| posterity) to actively act to ensure they are available due
| posterity.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The simple solution is a compromise, let them archive, but they
| must wait some amount of years before it is available publicly.
|
| Hundred year copyright is certainly too long, that is much longer
| than ideas are protected in a patent which costs far more in
| research and development.
| RecycledEle wrote:
| Are you suggesting we compromise with lawyers??
|
| Lawyers claim they own the copyright to Shakespeare because
| "someone has to make money off it."
|
| Never compromise with cops, lawyers, or judges.
|
| Read Shakespeare.
| jancsika wrote:
| Someone got rightly flagged for making a call for vigilantism.
| I'd like to respond to them in a non-flagged comment.
|
| To the person apparently so frustrated that they were
| brainstorming vigilantism-- I'd suggest first at least trying the
| _one_ thing that HN is allergic to-- getting engaged with
| politics. Few to none of the respondents here who are vaguely
| complaining about lobbyists (at the Library of Congress, of all
| places!) have any experience whatsoever organizing politically.
|
| There is a pair-- literally, _two_ humans-- who were able to get
| legislation passed in a state that is of general benefit to a) an
| industry where they weren 't big players, and b) to society in
| general. They weren't oligarchs or billionaires or whoever HN
| thinks controls the keys to the kingdom. They were just
| interested and diligent enough to attempt the work. (Well, one of
| them had enough free time to go and meet with nearly every
| representative-- I'm not saying it's easy or quick.)
|
| Think about the number of times a bugfix can fail to compile
| before you finally get it to work. If you apply that discipline
| and focus to find real, lasting legislative protections to
| projects like the IA or Sci-hub, you're way more likely to end up
| making positive changes than through vigilantism.
|
| And of course if you're successful, HN will _still_ criticize you
| for failing to solve the problem with a fast, homomorphically-
| encrypted, decentralized, statically-linked, non-Electron,
| portable executable. I guess you 'll just have to accept the
| tragic ending that the most intelligent people in the world won't
| understand what you achieved. :(
| underlipton wrote:
| I can't tell if it's a matter of direct calls for vigilantism
| being against the TOS*, or a matter of comfortable people
| seeing the potential to get caught up in a shift towards that
| vigilantism, but flagged or not, I don't disagree with them. We
| allow for all kinds of preventative and punitive measures to be
| taken against people who cause harm to one, physically; I would
| argue that attacks on one's spiritual and intellectual well-
| being are similarly grievous. What the flagged comment calls
| for is, essentially, accountability for those who seek to
| deprive the public of cultural goods. You can go to jail for
| years for a single instance of robbery, and this is called
| accountability; but the law and norms say that to keep
| thousands from experiencing the enrichment of a particular
| piece of art, a substantive infringement of their human rights,
| deserves a six-figure salary. Civil disobedience is an ethical
| option.
|
| Many posters are Americans, where gun ownership (to protect
| oneself from others with guns), big trucks (to protect oneself
| from other with big vehicles), and MAD are accepted facts of
| life. Personal harassment that disincentivizes antisocial
| behavior isn't radical, it's evolutionary.
|
| *BTW, this is not one such direct call. It's a musing on its
| appropriateness. Feel free to rebut.
| macawfish wrote:
| Hey but a fast, homomorphically-encrypted, decentralized,
| statically-linked, non-Electron, portable executable would be
| nice
| Pannoniae wrote:
| I don't see how this applies here. This is a zero-sum game -
| you are fighting against the money of IP interests, and they
| have way more money than you. How would anything positive
| happen out of this?
|
| Vigilantism is immoral, and is not likely to work, but that is
| still more plausible to do _something_ than trying to out-spend
| large corporations in lobbying.
|
| Or, move the whole operations to a country which doesn't give a
| damn about all of this, that's also a way of solving the
| lawsuit problems.
| zlg_codes wrote:
| Hold up, what's _immoral_ about vigilantism? That generally
| only happens when the system fails to do its job.
|
| I'd say the belief that 'the system' is correct by default is
| more dangerous, mainly due to being rooted in dogma moreso
| than defensible reason.
| Pannoniae wrote:
| I only included that to not get flagged immediately tbh
| kevinpet wrote:
| Politics is not decided by money. Money is a huge factor, and
| you can't do much without at least some money, but it's not
| the final word. Politics is determined in large part by how
| politicians read the mood of their voters, how they
| personally feel about an issue, and whether what the
| lobbyists are saying seems to make sense.
| ddingus wrote:
| There is a grimy call center where politicians go to dial
| for dollars. Call books, now databases and dialing
| programs, filled with people of means, are used to connect
| people with money to politicians.
|
| There are handlers too. People who make sure those calls
| get made.
|
| The DNC, and likely the RNC, has a party quota, and that
| runs in addition to whatever getting reelected will
| require.
|
| On those calls, everyone knows what needs to happen:
|
| Those people of means need to be heard. They also want
| stuff to happen.
|
| The politicians need dollars, favorable press, testimonials
| and help paying for staffers who take the incoming calls,
| faxes letters and whatever else comes in from the/ public.
| Those staffers often write laws and do research too.
|
| The lobbies play off all that and are able to bring money
| and whatever else may make sense into the equation.
|
| You are right in the strict sense of dollars not driving
| choices directly.
|
| The system that does drive choices is packed to the gills
| with grift, old money, corruption, and in general, people
| of means and corporations driving most decisions.
|
| Transactions called bribes, that are criminalized in much
| of the world, happen here daily!
|
| We are among the most propagandized people in the world
| too.
|
| I forget the study, but it basically showed how voters feel
| about an issue can count, except economic issues where we
| basically do not count in all but the most extreme sense.
|
| My take after a good decade of activism and some access to
| this stuff is a fair bit less charitable.
|
| And yes, we both miss the mark, and that is not good news.
|
| The reality is likely more insidious and toxic to ordinary
| people.
| [deleted]
| LightHugger wrote:
| you're right that it's usually not practical, but i just
| wanted to point out that a $30k lobbying budget can and has
| beat a $3M lobbying budget in some cases when there's enough
| public support. Money in politics is a huge deal and
| politicians in the US are corrupt as hell and yet somehow the
| previous sentence sometimes holds true, so all is not lost.
| [deleted]
| soupfordummies wrote:
| >> There is a pair-- literally, two humans-- who were able to
| get legislation passed in a state that is of general benefit to
| a) an industry where they weren't big players, and b) to
| society in general.
|
| What is this in reference to? Maybe I missed that part.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| I like the internet archive, but the web sucks.
| henvic wrote:
| Wanting to have a government organization buy something like the
| Internet Archives sounds like a terrible idea for me. It's not
| like you'd keep lobbyists away from it.
|
| A great alternative is to build the Internet Archive so that
| after something is there "for a while", it is archived in a way
| that anyone can efficiently distribute it (thinking about long-
| term resiliency) and even survive a conspiracy to destroy it.
| jancsika wrote:
| An open research problem isn't what I'd call a great
| alternative.
|
| Both the history of takedowns of large private music trackers
| and the current state of Sci-hub show that nobody knows how to
| build such a thing.
| omnibrain wrote:
| I understand the function of the Internet Archives as an Archive
| of the internet. But I don't understand why they think their
| function is to influence legislation by activism in other fields.
| First they poked a bear with their "free library" of books. Now
| they are poking another bear with their music library. And in the
| process they endanger their "core function" of being the Internet
| archives.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| The archive's mission isn't "keep a backup of the internet",
| it's "Universal Access to All Knowledge"
| CydeWeys wrote:
| The Internet Archive absolutely should be engaged in activism
| to expand fair use, protect archivist work, reduce copyright
| term, etc. What they shouldn't be doing is risking their
| existence by doing things with shaky legal standing.
| InSteady wrote:
| Sure, and MLK should have stuck to marches instead of
| organizing strikes and other highly effective but risky forms
| of direct action.
|
| Kahle has stated from the outset that he wants to build a
| digital Library of Alexandria. He wants all media, including
| books, movies, music, etc to be freely available to anyone
| curious enough to come and look for it.
|
| Sounds like they are continuing to do exactly what they set
| out to do. Maybe what they shouldn't be doing is staying in
| some arbitrary lane that 3rd parties have decided they belong
| in, and instead continue fighting for freedom and universal
| access in whatever way they see fit.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| The IA should stick to it's goal of actually being an
| archive first
|
| https://archive.org/post/1126216/kiwi-farms-removed-from-
| way...
| flangola7 wrote:
| The KF pages are not deleted, only hidden from public
| view. Something they do for anyone or any domain on
| request. They are still accessible through request by
| researchers and will be there for future historians,
| they're just not open where they can be used to further
| doxxing and other harmful campaigns.
|
| I donate to IA on a monthly recurring basis and I'm glad
| to see them be ethically conscious about their service
| and prevent it from being weaponized.
| someguy7250 wrote:
| Frankly I say we let them delete all public backups of internet
| culture. Eventually there would be a backlash when this goes too
| far.
|
| Lots of games, websites and TV shows would be gone. Let them.
|
| Don't make local backups either. Or at least encrypt the backups
| and make sure they will be lost when we die.
|
| *Let DRM and Copyright become the modern equivalent of book
| burning.*
|
| Let people forget. Let it be the government's problem to preserve
| knowledge and history. And let it decide when the cost is higher
| than whatever benefits we get from strict authoritarian levels of
| Copyright protections
| Borg3 wrote:
| Nah, people just need to wake up and start building own infra.
| Everyone just waits for some white knight to pour money at
| infra to backup stuff for them. No, DO sth usefull. In good old
| days people used to have small web servers to host personal and
| friends webpages.
|
| Yeah, it could not scale and your site could be DoSed, but
| thats another problem with todays internet, noone gives a fuck
| up about abuse..
|
| Anyway, layer your virtual Internet.. All the toys are here.
| VPNs (wireguard, OpenVPN, tinc-vpn, ...), Routing (Quagga, FRR,
| bird). Build infra, have fun.
|
| Neat project is DN42, but they are more for testing and
| research. We need more such networks for content, gaming and
| other interesting stuff.
| stuartjohnson12 wrote:
| This seems oxymoronic. There shouldn't be backlash against
| deletionism because deletionism will cease once there's enough
| backlash against it.
| someguy7250 wrote:
| Yes but book burning had backlash, too. And frankly if we are
| really that stupid then we didn't deserve tech and culture in
| the first place. Might as well delete wikipedia. Let people
| forget everything, then evolution will take over. /s
| stuartjohnson12 wrote:
| I don't understand your point.
| someguy7250 wrote:
| My point is book burning can cause backlash. Therefore so
| can deletionism.
|
| When the backlash happens, it's often already too late.
| But people are aware something was gone, that's why there
| is a backlash.
|
| I know this because it happened in the past with the
| Cultural Revolution. Not saying it will happen in the
| same way here.
|
| Maybe the only backlash we'll ever get is against my
| stupid comments. Lol.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| "We should delete data so that people get upset" is just
| shy of "we should shoot some kids so people will finally
| get upset". If we're going for over the top statements
| anyway.
|
| When we look at the actual current US sociopolitical
| climate, we see that people _don 't_ actually care about
| either of those things. Quite the opposite, they are more
| than happy to burn books.
|
| So what we can expect instead is that they'll care even
| less about a bunch of folks hitting the delete keys that
| wipe out several generations worth of historical record
| because it happens to be digital. If anything, they'll
| cheer about it.
| [deleted]
| gabeio wrote:
| > "We should delete data so that people get upset" is
| just shy of "we should shoot some kids so people will
| finally get upset".
|
| Excuse me? Since when is shooting kids _just shy of_
| deleting data. And no the rest of your comment doesn't
| pull that argument together.
| causi wrote:
| _My thinking is that frequent partner The Library of Congress can
| put a stop to this by buying the Internet Archive. Make it a
| government body and protect all that digital content._
|
| So instead of losing all the copyrighted content piece by piece
| we lose access to it all at once?
|
| _Someone needs to save the Internet Archives from the lawyers
| and I have an idea_
|
| More like someone needs to save the Internet Archive from
| Brewster Kahle. He and all of us knew the rules of the game: the
| IA was allowed to illegally host copyrighted content that wasn't
| making them money as long as it wasn't being exploited by the
| copyright holders and they paid lip service to IP law with things
| like controlled borrowing. Then they kicked the anthill with the
| emergency library. We pulled our hair out warning them not to and
| they did it anyway. Maybe their actions were morally justified
| but they were just so blisteringly stupid that it's hard not to
| feel betrayed.
| renewiltord wrote:
| None of you guys built this. Brewster Kahle did. Everyone
| fantasizes about how they would have sold at the top. But you
| won't. Ultimately, the Internet Archive took balls. That was
| the defining attribute. And the guy with balls was always going
| to take it farther than just that. That's what it means to have
| balls.
|
| All the guys who fantasize that they would have stopped at the
| perfect stopping point would have never started. You can run a
| mirror now. You can run a crawler now.
|
| Heritrix is free software. The IA dump is retrievable. What's
| stopping you from making The Compliant Internet Archive?
| Nothing really except for the fact that none of the armchair
| quarterbacks have even seen what a ball looks like.
| InSteady wrote:
| This needs to be said in every single thread where the IA
| comes up. With all the pearl clutching about how
| "irresponsible" and "reckless" Kahle is, you would think he
| owes something personally to each and every one of us. He's
| fighting tooth and nail for what he believes in. Anyone who
| doesn't like that should go build something of their own and
| fight in the way that they see fit.
| snapetom wrote:
| > More like someone needs to save the Internet Archive from
| Brewster Kahle.
|
| Can't vote this enough. As flawed as the rules are, you know
| them. The rules should be changed, but you don't change them by
| blatantly breaking them in the most flagrant way possible.
| causi wrote:
| Right. If IA wants to spin off a legally-separate "Red Team"
| of radical activists to demonstrate how ignoring copyright
| laws enriches us all, I'll be happy to donate. Using the IA
| for this is reckless and doomed to failure. Do you think Sci-
| Hub would've survived if they'd started flouting the law as a
| California-based nonprofit with hundreds of employees? Hell
| no.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| tl;dr: the idea is to have the US Library of Congress to buy the
| internet archive.
| permo-w wrote:
| 2023 - 1993 != 40
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| I think you forgot to account for Covid, which adds 10 year.
| masfuerte wrote:
| And the author claims to have had 35 years in the industry so
| he should have some kind of intuition of when 30 years ago was.
| Or maybe he miscalculated 25 years experience.
| [deleted]
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Cyberpunk and technothriller literature has anticipated this,
| going all the way back to the 1980s -- but most prominently in
| Neal Stephenson's 1999 novel Cryptonomicon, where the main
| characters work to set up an underground data haven in the
| fictional SE-Asian Sultanate of Kinakuta.
|
| Back then, it was naturally assumed that large databases and
| archives would need to be hosted in secure offshore locations,
| for obvious legal reasons. (IIRC, Cryptonomicon has an amusing
| segment where the characters describe the US legal system's
| discovery processes. "Never, ever send anything in email" was the
| gist of it.)
|
| Fast forward to today, and there are two great data havens --
| SciHub and Libgen -- which, by design, are correctly and
| appropriately difficult for the US Government and its loathsome
| civil legal apparatus to grasp.
|
| The third great data haven is the Internet Archive, which was
| unwisely based in the US and managed as though it were a
| legitimate tech company. The lawyers smell the blood in the water
| and I fear it's not long for this world. What the world needs is
| a pared-down distributed version that's more slippery and totally
| unresponsive to legal complaints.
| cbozeman wrote:
| Sounds more like what we need are less lawyers, and less rent-
| seeking.
| laurex wrote:
| While I think it's an interesting idea to have the LOC 'acquire'
| the Internet Archive, it's not addressing the more fundamental
| questions around copyright, fair use, public access, and
| ownership. If we actually tried to create a system, in the
| context of today's technology, globalism, and ways of creating
| work, that 'incentivised innovation' or, as it originally was
| framed, 'Encouragement of Learning' we would not come up with the
| copyright system we have. That's the conversation I would like to
| see.
| pipo234 wrote:
| Very good point, but not at odds. Let's have _both_ :
|
| 1. An organization like LoC (or UN sponsored "government"
| organization) take over the Internet Archive. Let curators
| curate and conserve.
|
| 2. A discussion about reform of copyright, public domain,
| "intellectual property", incentivizing innovation, etc.
|
| [EDIT] And while we're at it:
|
| 3. Let's also have a discussion about the legitimacy and
| desirability of tools and tricks used to enforce corporate
| lawyer whims (ie.: DRM, 20 page EULAs, cookie banners, terms of
| service, etc.)
| singleshot_ wrote:
| As to 3:
|
| We have been having that discussion in the courts for
| decades. The consensus is that the tools we have are at least
| part of why eight of the top ten global websites are run by
| American companies. To the extent you want to have a thriving
| marketplace to ply (what I assume is) your trade, these tools
| are at least desirable.
|
| I do agree that the existence of law that supports these
| techniques is a choice, and that it's entirely possible that
| avoidance of these techniques might win in the marketplace.
| sp332 wrote:
| We already have a Library of Congress. If they want a copy of the
| Internet Archive, they can just download one. (The raw WARC files
| from the web crawls are not publicly available, but I'm sure they
| could work something out.)
| bhartzer wrote:
| I know websites (and some of my clients) who are actually
| actively REMOVING copies of their website from the Internet
| Archive.
|
| There's a specific process for getting all of the content
| removed, and asking them to not archive the website.
|
| For some ecommerce websites, they're removing copies from
| Internet Archive because there's pricing data that's getting
| archived.
|
| I've also had clients remove copies because they've had a big
| problem with scrapers who are scraping the copies of the site in
| Internet Archive. They've been able to (mostly) stop scrapers on
| the site, but having archived copies of the site allows scrapers
| to scrape the Internet Archive.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| Heh. What's nuts is that, stripped of other copyright-bearing
| context, it's my understanding that they'd not have a (legal,
| but policy, maybe) leg to stand on asking for pricing data to
| be removed. That's supposed to be free (as in freedom) to
| anyone who finds a way to get ahold of it. Sucks that they're
| killing the entire archive over something they have no actual
| claim to.
| bhartzer wrote:
| I agree, now that you pointed it out, there probably isn't a
| legal leg to stand on. IANAL, though--would be interested in
| hearing from an attorney about that.
|
| Regardless, if you can prove you're the website owner, then
| Internet Archive will remove all of your content and stop
| archiving your site if you ask them.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| Right, by IA policy they can ask to have the site taken
| down. What's unfortunate about it is that they're doing it
| over data that they aren't supposed to be able to restrict,
| and the rest of the site (which I doubt they much mind
| being on IA) is caught in the crossfire, as the _means_ by
| which they're getting the part they care about taken down.
| Like, they probably wouldn't bother except that the archive
| happens to contain data that _isn't supposed to be
| restricable anyway_ but de facto is, if they take the whole
| archive of the site down.
| mattnewton wrote:
| Rights holders have managed to wring perpetual copyright and
| things like the DMCA from congress, there is no way they won't
| just hire different lawyers good at influencing the government
| and shut it down there. In fact this might even get
| administrative regulations made that make any private attempts
| illegal too.
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| Most rights holders were happy to look past it until Chuck
| Wendig started crying about people being able to read his pulp
| sci-fi too easily.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Sounds at first listen like a way to make it _easier_ to destroy
| the IA. If the LoC copies it and continues to archive the web, it
| would be a lot easier to make the argument in court that the IA
| wasn 't even necessary.
|
| The LoC would have no obligation to open up the archive to the
| public - maybe instead access would be provided through a single
| computer in a DC building after filling out a form, having that
| form approved, and they search you for thumb drives and take away
| your phone before you go in. Eventually the entire thing could be
| accidentally deleted, or the budget for it could be cut.
|
| Somebody needs to save all of us from the control of the
| government and its justice system by corporate special interests.
| bityard wrote:
| I agree that the Internet Archive needs help, but I don't agree
| that it should get absorbed into the Library of Congress. Let's
| say it happens and now the LoC is running the IA. Others have
| already made the point that lobbyists and politicians can more
| easily erode its functionality much more easily and silently, and
| that's a good point. But what I fear the most is that it would
| mean the actual existence of the IA would be at the whim of
| congressional budget planning (which is frankly a shitshow)
| rather than being funded by those who actually CARE about it.
|
| If you really want to help the Internet Archive survive, the very
| best thing any of us can do is donate directly to the IA so that
| they can afford good legal council to fight back against the
| music and book publishers who want to shut them down:
| https://archive.org/donate?origin=iawww-TopNavDonateButton
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Is the Library of Congress still preserving tweets? Seems like
| that's probably gone to the wayside with all the API restrictions
| and what not?
| pipo234 wrote:
| TLDR; the idea he has:
|
| > My thinking is that frequent partner The Library of Congress
| can put a stop to this by buying the Internet Archive. Make it a
| government body and protect all that digital content.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| The guberment is not exempt from acts of congress.
| ncallaway wrote:
| It can be, with an act of Congress...
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Which can be undone by yet another act of Congress.
| vel0city wrote:
| I'm not allowed to eat this candy bar. I wrote a sticky
| note that says I'm not allowed to eat it. Its not like I
| can just ignore or rewrite the sticky note whenever I want.
|
| Congress passing a law saying it can't do X doesn't mean
| they can't just come back a few years later and decide to
| remove that rule, assuming its not unconstitutional.
| tb_technical wrote:
| [flagged]
| patja wrote:
| Lawyers, tax advisors, sales & marketing...all are "necessary"
| evils that would never exist in a perfect world. We should be
| looking for methods of limiting and discouraging the "need" for
| these professions wherever possible.
| ThrowAway1922A wrote:
| What are you gonna do, order them a pizza? Or are you
| suggesting people try to ruin their lives?
|
| The lawyers and their families have done nothing illegal,
| unlike the IA who very well might have after being blinded by
| ideology. If the IA broke the law, or violated IP, copyright,
| etc than why should they not be taken to court?
| tb_technical wrote:
| "They were just doing their job" is not a response we accept
| when police and soldiers brutalize people. Why should it be
| the same for lawyers when they attack publicly accessible
| archives?
|
| IMHO, publicly accessible archives can uplift large groups of
| the disadvantaged. Attacking them is equivalent to cutting
| public services for the poor.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > "They were just doing their job" is not a response we
| accept when police and soldiers brutalize people.
|
| Unfortunately, it is a response that we, collectively,
| mostly do accept.
|
| We _shouldn 't_, and occasionally we don't, but...
| nameandshame wrote:
| [dead]
| dahwolf wrote:
| I'm on IA's side here but I do take issue with the lack of
| introspection.
|
| We frame this story by defining some villains, like lawyers and
| Google, whilst no fault is upon us. We're victims even.
|
| And yet the typical internet user doesn't pay a dime for most
| things. Blocks ads. Works around Paywalls. Piggybacks on the
| neighbors' Netflix and then Tweets how they fully support the
| writer's strike.
|
| What I'm saying is that we're not that great either, us internet
| citizens. We very much have the internet we deserve.
| pseingatl wrote:
| Great idea. Or a state library in another country that has the
| same status. The British Library, or hell, even the Lenin Library
| or whatever it's called these days.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| I applied for a job at the Library of Congress once. By the time
| they got around to contacting me, I was already a couple of
| months into another job. Then my info got stolen in the USAJobs
| data breach. None of that is their fault per se, but it's a
| limitation of the position. You end up with people who want
| stability above all else. It actually could be a good thing for
| the Internet Archive which basically just needs to continue
| existing forever.
| zokier wrote:
| Personally I consider IA having all the eggs in basket
| unreasonably risky move. If IA did the basic sane segregation,
| the legitimate and truly valuable parts would not be facing such
| high existential risks. For example one way of dividing would be
| 1) wayback machine 2) public domain collections 3) non-pd
| collections 4) user-provided content. Having those firewalled
| into separate services and separate legal entities would protect
| 1) and 2) when its 3) and 4) that are drawing these attacks.
|
| This lack of separation is also hurting IA in other ways; I think
| Wayback Machine and PD archives are really important and
| valuable, but right now I can not support or even endorse IA
| because their poor leadership playing with fire and putting those
| services under unnecessary risk.
| alex_young wrote:
| Why not both?
|
| Can't the LOC start maintaining a copy of the Internet Archive?
| The IA should exist independently, but there's no reason we
| should keep the archive in one place.
| oofbey wrote:
| "The World Wide Web ... is arguably roughly 40 years old."
|
| 1993 was 30 years ago not 40. I see no valid argument that there
| was any WWW in the early 1980s.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| That's correct. The World Wide Web became available to the
| broader public 30 years ago On April 30, 1993.
| reacweb wrote:
| before http (ncsa mosaic is march 1993), I was using gopher,
| newsgroups and xarchie. When you saw a reference to a program
| in a newsgroup, it was often easy with xarchie to find a public
| ftp mirror where you could download it. I remember reading CERT
| advisories on gopher and having noticed that at my school, the
| vulnerable command xloadmodule was present (sunOS 4.3). I
| warned the admin and after 15 days of no reaction and no
| answer, I became root of all the servers. Good old days ;-)
| oofbey wrote:
| The internet is of course much older than the WWW. And the
| internet had and still has many non-WWW ways to communicate
| and publish content. But applying the term "WWW" to any non-
| HTML non-HTTP technologies is revisionist, and I'd argue just
| wrong.
| lincon127 wrote:
| Where's the idea?
| permo-w wrote:
| the page is poorly coded and later paragraphs load and unload
| making it seem as if the article prematurely finishes, which
| explains why you might have missed it. the idea is for the
| Library of Congress to buy the Internet Archive to protect it
| from legal action
|
| my thoughts on this are that it's a good idea, but it can't be
| the only solution. moving from a single point of failure to a
| more secure single point of failure is okay, but a better
| solution would be for the Library of Congress and similar
| public bodies around the world to be able to buy/obtain a
| _copy_ of the archive and the protocols it uses to do the
| archiving. this would practically guarantee the permanency of
| the data and, if it was deemed legally viable, provide a decent
| revenue source
| iraqmtpizza wrote:
| Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the
| present controls the past. There is no enumerated power which
| gives the federal government the authority to manage an
| internet archive. So this isn't just crazy and dangerous,
| it's illegal as well.
|
| It's alway funny to see people suggest things the federal
| government should do without considering its deliberately
| limited nature and why that should go out the window with a
| constitutional amendment. This isn't the UK where we can just
| make up the law however we want. 10th amendment anyone?
| Enumerated powers?
| [deleted]
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