[HN Gopher] Music labels will regret coming for the Internet Arc...
___________________________________________________________________
Music labels will regret coming for the Internet Archive, sound
historian says
Author : coloneltcb
Score : 475 points
Date : 2025-03-10 16:28 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Institutions - especially those driven by profit - do not regret.
| If they did, an internet archival project would not trigger it
| when the likes of Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse could not.
| dylan604 wrote:
| What does Cobain or Winehouse have to do with this? These
| individuals had issues well before record labels were involved
| in their life.
|
| Prince turning himself into a symbol is much more emblematic of
| record labels controlling the lives of artists.
| racl101 wrote:
| Agreed. Cobain, for example, just struggled with fame, drug
| issues, stomach pain, regardless of his dealings with the
| record labels.
|
| Seems rather immaterial. Unless, of course, I'm missing
| something. Admittedly, I don't know much about him even
| though I'm a millennial. Seems like I should but I was more
| into post grunge music.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| > Agreed. Cobain, for example, just struggled with fame,
| drug issues, stomach pain, regardless of his dealings with
| the record labels.
|
| Steve Albini remarked that during the In Utero sessions, he
| ignored everyone but the band and that everyone associated
| with Nirvana were "the biggest pieces of shit I ever met."
| [0]
|
| There was absolutely massive pressure on Cobain to produce
| for his contract, and that greatly exacerbated a number of
| the issues you listed.
|
| Seems like a guy who should have been given some time off
| from his contract. Same with Winehouse; ultimately both
| were a commodity for their labels to package and sell and
| the problems that they were showing in their behavior were
| ultimately their own to deal with.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Utero#cite_ref-26
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| On the other hand, institutions from science and technology,
| wireless communications, radio and phonograph, made all of
| these recordings possible. Just sayin. So nil-nil at half-time
| for the argument against "bare" institutions? Or are you saying
| _all_ "institutions" are inherently monstrous?
| lenerdenator wrote:
| I didn't say they were monstrous.
|
| I said they don't regret.
|
| Now you can argue that's psychopathic, which is often
| synonymous with monstrous, but I wouldn't call them
| psychopathic, either, because a _person_ is psychopathic. A
| group of people, an institution, cannot be.
|
| Now, the systems that these institutions exist within are
| often heavily influenced by psychopaths looking to leverage
| situations for their own maximum benefit, often at the
| expense of other humans, but the institutions themselves,
| they're amoral.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| I agree with much of that. Corporate "identity" and
| "ethics" is a nonsense - mostly conjured up by types who
| like to hide their malfeasance in a crowd. But there is
| such a thing as group psychology [0]. And many fascinating
| ways in which groups exhibit memory and latent intent.
|
| My objection is to vague attacks on all and any
| "institutions". Yes, most of them are corrupt and broken
| now. But that doesn't preclude the belief we can build good
| institutions, and should keep trying.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_dynamics
| qoez wrote:
| Bothers me generally that journalists anthropomorphize
| companies ("company X worried by...", "will regret...").
| Companies are totally emotionless entities only living to
| maximize profit.
| psychoslave wrote:
| And so is internet archive. And laws. And juristic
| institutions. There is no emotion or individual human
| interest in our fully rational processes, move along, you
| mere mortal.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| I doubt that's what parent was getting at. Probably
| something more along the lines of the central thesis of the
| book _Essence of Decision_ by Graham T. Allison.
|
| The gist of the book is that organizational behavior never
| makes sense if you anthropomorphize it as if it were a
| single entity with its own goals and motivations. Nor does
| it make sense if you think of it as a corporate machine
| that behaves mechanistically. It really is a bunch of
| individual humans with their own goals and motives
| interacting within a bureaucratic structure.
|
| It's a pretty interesting book because its ideas actually
| got a pretty decent test. He used the Cuban missle crisis
| to evaluate these three theories of organizational
| behavior, and showed how publicly knowable facts didn't
| make sense under the first two models. He then showed that
| the third model fit them better, and went on to make some
| hypotheses about what really happened that couldn't be
| verified at the time. Decades later the relevant
| information was declassified and it turned out that, while
| many of his guesses were incorrect, an impressive number of
| them were spot on.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >that journalists anthropomorphize companies
|
| Because companies are composed of individual tapeworms
| working towards a common goal?
|
| >Companies are totally emotionless entities
|
| You speak as if they're evil spirits. They're made up of
| people. They're very emotional, you just get to see all the
| worst emotions manifesting at the most inappropriate times.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Geffen didn't shoot heroin into Kurt Cobain's arm and Island
| Records didn't pour a 1.75L of whiskey down Amy Winehouse's
| throat every day.
|
| Kurt and Amy did that to themselves.
|
| FWIW, I am a former heroin addict and alcoholic.
|
| If you want an actual honest take on what's fucked up about the
| music industry, Steve Albini covers it well in this essay:
| https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music
| lenerdenator wrote:
| They didn't, but at a certain point, one should realize that
| it's better for the artists (and thus, arguably, the long-
| term investment the label has made into their careers) to not
| have their problems made worse by commoditization.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| Her management notoriously tried to get Winehouse to stay
| alive and keep making music. She made a song about it [0].
|
| I think simply getting a paycheck was quite a contribution
| to these artists' demise. Though he managed to not die
| directly as a result of the heroin that consumed his
| existence, the late Matt Dike autobiographically remarked
| (paraphrasing here) that the worst thing in the world for a
| junkie was unlimited resources.
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehab_(Amy_Winehouse_song)
| quickthrowman wrote:
| You can't force someone to stop shooting heroin or drinking
| excessively. They were addicts before show business, the
| money just made it easier to maintain an addiction. I
| would've never quit heroin or alcohol if I had virtually
| unlimited resources to acquire more drugs.
| DannyBee wrote:
| They clarify they mean they think they will regret it
| historically in the sense of losing that part of history, rather
| than monetarily, etc.
|
| But to me this is like arguing a swarm of locusts are going to
| one day regret that they destroyed so many fields of crops.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Doesn't the use of the word regret imply that they care?
| quuxplusone wrote:
| Right, OP is saying (and I came here to agree) that the
| writer's use of the word "regret" was just clickbait --
| there's no actual regret predicted to take place except to
| music historians and the few ordinary people who know what
| they missed out on. Even the historian quoted says he's using
| the word "regret" metaphorically:
|
| > "They're going to regret it," Seubert predicted. "Not
| financially or anything, but just from a historical
| perspective."
|
| Music execs are in the business of selling music. The less
| music is available in the wild, the better for them.
| cheeseomlit wrote:
| Exactly, classic case of anthropomorphising a lawnmower. A
| thought like this would never occur to a record label exec
| racl101 wrote:
| Highly doubt it. Seems far fetched for a soulless entity to
| care.
| agentultra wrote:
| You're right. They might regret it financially if they could
| plan past their next meal. In the case of locusts it results in
| their decline.
|
| Music industry has been... not great with licensing and
| archives. There are recordings of Lightning Hopkins that only
| exist because of the Smithsonian Archives. And there are re-
| issues of that music today that only exist because of
| independent labels sourcing from those archives.
|
| If the music industry had had its way they would have been done
| with Hopkins years ago and his music would have been forgotten,
| having moved on to the next crop.
|
| Books are good at republishing. Film has been decent at it but
| suffer from licensing issues. Video games are probably the
| worst at archiving and maintaining access to libraries of prior
| art.
|
| Locusts. Good analogy.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| In defense of video games, in a lot of cases technology has
| churned so much that it's prohibitive to maintain older
| games, and in general besides the 16 bit aesthetic people are
| so put off by the look of older games they tend not to get as
| engaged.
|
| AI will improve this situation on the graphics side, perhaps
| with some sort of game container that emulates older
| environments well (Proton, anyone?) we'll see more re-
| releases.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Games that old are super easy to archive on a technical
| level. Take the 4MB or less and save it somewhere.
|
| And "sell small files for $1 or $5 without spending much
| money to set up the store" is a solved problem.
| sitkack wrote:
| Sorry, but you are just talking. The problem with video
| game preservation is that the IA isn't able to get the same
| library exemption that they got from the Library of
| Congress for archiving. The LoC doesn't yet consider video
| games an artform that can be preserved in the same way as
| books and other media.
|
| There are thousands of folks that both want and want to do
| this work.
| ghaff wrote:
| >the same library exemption
|
| Reference please? Genuine question. As far as I know,
| libraries have very little in the way of special
| privileges outside of some specific rights in the analog
| realm which don't really apply in digital where first
| sale doctrine also doesn't apply.
| phonon wrote:
| https://www.copyright.gov/1201/2024/
| ghaff wrote:
| I see nothing in there giving a carte blanche to
| libraries, however they care to define themselves, to
| have any generalized exemption from copyright law.
| Majora320 wrote:
| How does AI have anything to do with this? Are you just
| talking about emulators? Those already exist, and the main
| opposition to them is the companies that own the IP. Many
| companies would rather let games languish than let their
| community do the "prohibitive" work to maintain those games
| for free.
| the_af wrote:
| > _and in general besides the 16 bit aesthetic people are
| so put off by the look of older games they tend not to get
| as engaged._
|
| It's not about what people find pleasing today, it's about
| archiving and preserving an important part of our (digital)
| history. Videogames of the past were a big thing.
|
| And videogames, much like music, must be playable to be
| truly preserved.
|
| Imagine someone going "I don't get why it's worth
| preserving ancient Egyptian artifacts, people these days
| don't enjoy that kind of thing anymore".
| badsectoracula wrote:
| > in general besides the 16 bit aesthetic people are so put
| off by the look of older games they tend not to get as
| engaged.
|
| One of the most prolific indie developers of recent years
| (David Szymanski) has basically all of his games looking
| like they came out of PS1/early 3D accelerator days. And he
| isn't alone, there are many games that have midlate 90s /
| very early 2000s looks. There are also a _ton_ of horror
| games that use exaggerated PS1-styled graphics with bit
| crunched filtering, strong dithering effects, etc (wobbly
| low poly environments where you can barely make out what
| you are looking at are giving horror vibes basically for
| free :-P).
|
| This is something i've been saying for a long time now: if
| you can point at a game and say "this looks like a
| PS1/PS2/3/4/5/NES/SNES/DOS/Win95/etc game" then this means
| there are enough visual characteristics to _define_ such
| games and thus you are really pointing at a _visual style_
| - something that people will use at some point in the
| future even when the technical limitations that birthed the
| style aren 't there anymore (which means that some games
| may give the _feel_ of that style but not really be bound
| by the actual limitations).
| ysofunny wrote:
| shout out for the house of the underdogs!
|
| anybody else remember abandonware games??
| the_af wrote:
| Home of the Underdogs, or HOTU.
|
| I was active in their forums back in 2004. I still remember
| all the fuss when the admin/owner (going by nickname
| Underdogs) was "outed" to be a woman (she helped out
| herself, it wasn't a hostile thing). 2004 was a time when
| people could still be surprised that a woman was leading a
| major online project... wow. The past is indeed "a foreign
| country"!
| agentultra wrote:
| Pepper Ridge Farms remembers.
| wmil wrote:
| My favourite example of this is that for Babylon 5 the lawyers
| from Warner Bros insisted that the showrunners not retain any
| copies of the digital models because they were WB property and
| WB would archive them.
|
| When they started working on B5 The Lost Tales, WB had lost all
| of the digital files.
| yapyap wrote:
| Truly and authentically lost tales
| walterbell wrote:
| It's sad when requests to official and unofficial archives
| are lost.
| quitit wrote:
| This is also a common side effect of corporate policies that
| favour short term profits rather than retaining staff for the
| long term.
|
| I see this scenario play out _constantly_ :
|
| 1. A team or staff member has a project's data located on
| their user account or hardware.
|
| 2. The team or staff member are made redundant when there is
| a dip in earnings.
|
| 3. IT make a backup of the user account/s and wipe the
| hardware, and because it's older usually move it on.
|
| 4. Months or years later that data is needed and at this
| point no one at the company actually knows where the data is
| - and even if they find something, they don't know if that's
| the latest or the full version.
|
| Now this wouldn't be a problem if there was a decent overlap
| in staff retention, but that simply isn't the case these
| days.
|
| Writing better storage policies doesn't help - it's the
| understaffed nature of their businesses which mean that there
| is no time for staff to keep up with basic data housekeeping.
|
| The types of data that clients should have on hand, but
| nevertheless have asked me to supply, are frankly
| embarrassing.
| NERD_ALERT wrote:
| What company is allowing employees to have so much data
| locally? Almost all work is stored in a cloud now.
| Documents, spreadsheets, design docs, code... If you really
| are constantly seeing this then that says a lot about the
| corporation using severely outdated practices.
| LoganDark wrote:
| > If you really are constantly seeing this then that says
| a lot about the corporation using severely outdated
| practices.
|
| They probably just used _now_ -outdated practices _before
| those practices were outdated_. This happened in the
| past, remember. Sure, the cloud is a thing today, but was
| the cloud such a thing 5, 10, 20 years ago? Do you really
| think it 's their fault for not knowing in advance how
| much of a thing the cloud would one day become? Oh, how
| outdated. Sheesh.
| dgfitz wrote:
| Nope. I'll not list off all the DVCS implementations that
| existed 20 years ago, you should look it up. That is not
| an excuse.
| codetrotter wrote:
| Ah yes, git and mercurial - the perfect place to save 3TB
| of binary data that changes weekly.
| LoganDark wrote:
| You know tech savvy was not really a thing back then for
| the everyday uneducated person, right? You kind of had to
| have been a geek to have known this stuff. There are a
| number of dead-simple cloud solutions today, but you
| cannot just scold, say, WB for not using a company cloud
| back in _checks Wikipedia_ 1993!
| mulmen wrote:
| Ok but preserving media seems like a thing _Warner
| Brothers_ should be really good at. Why did Warner
| Brothers have an everyday uneducated person in charge of
| archival?
| LoganDark wrote:
| Why would an archivist back then happen to know computers
| that intimately? I'd be surprised if the average
| archivist knew much more than how to do data entry... and
| I wouldn't even hold it against them if they happened
| _not_ to know how to do data entry.
| mulmen wrote:
| 20 years ago is 7 years after the show ended. I looked it
| up.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Sure, the cloud is a thing today, but was the cloud
| such a thing 5, 10, 20 years ago?
|
| Yes, yes, and no.
|
| For example,
| https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/908:_The_Cloud
| is from 2011.
| LoganDark wrote:
| The Onion also made some pretty good cloud parodies back
| in 2012: https://youtu.be/9ntPxdWAWq8
|
| Old animation though I wouldn't necessarily expect to
| only have been 10 years ago, and 10 years ago I wouldn't
| expect to be scolded for not using the cloud.
| soco wrote:
| I would think policies should also be updated every X
| years in light of new regulations, new possibilities, new
| limitations... but who enjoys policies and even updating
| them? So here we are, everything done "by the book" and
| losing data because of that.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| > located on their user account or hardware
|
| Clouds have user accounts too. I have seen dead links to
| documents in a former employees space on sharepoint,
| confluence, and google docs.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Exactly. In fact, I still regularly get sharepoint
| "request for access" notifications in my email for some
| presentation I did a year ago. Even though I swear I've
| opened it up to the entire org.
|
| Who knows what happens when I've shuffled away from my
| current company.
|
| Dead links are also incredibly common, particularly
| because we are on our nth port from sharepoint to
| confluence to whatever back to sharepoint. Generally,
| because C levels don't want to pay for this year's price
| hike.
| lrem wrote:
| Why locally? In practice many companies never lose any
| data. What they lose is the knowledge what the data is
| and/or how to use it.
| windward wrote:
| Any company where you're not allowed to force-push to a
| public branch.
| mattl wrote:
| Local git repo checkouts?
| btrettel wrote:
| There's been discussion on HN of "smuggling" the lost
| information back into the organization:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42235452
| lizard wrote:
| When I get frustrated enough to consider putting a kill
| switch in my work, I cool off by reminding myself that
| would prompt them to make a huge effort recovering from
| backups and have someone go through my code to get it
| working again. If I just do what they ask me instead, it
| will slowly decay without anyone having any idea what it
| even does, until its too late to fix or recover anything.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Someone also redid all the ships from scratch I think in
| modern software and has to get rid of it due to WB.
|
| I still think B5 ships are some of the best in all of Scifi.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| I'm a big fan of the Vorlon ships, but I think The Expanse
| has the best space battles.
|
| (I also like the Lexx spaceship, though the series was
| somewhat of a mess)
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Expanse battles were far more realistic of course. The B5
| Star Fury combat scenes were pretty ground breaking for
| the time though.
|
| Expanse ships (at least where I'm at in the book series
| and show - kind of early) are a lot closer to current
| human tech of course. In B5 humanity had tech that was
| mostly believable (still used rotating mass for gravity),
| but you got to see some very unique looking ships from
| the other species like the Minbari and Shadows that truly
| looked alien and unsettling.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Back in the day, I was proud of how they'd used Amigas to
| render the B5 graphics as I also was an Amiga user.
| 09thn34v wrote:
| first hn comment i've ever laughed at. lmao. well said
| kjellsbells wrote:
| There are three types of loss: destruction, discoverability,
| and synthesis.
|
| Destruction is the one most people think of. The last tape is
| destroyed, or someone nukes everything in S3. Policies normally
| save this from happening, bit not always. (I note that lawyers
| are pretty good at saving things because of discovery, so
| perhaps corporations should sue themselves more often /s)
|
| Discoverability is when the data is there, but noone knows
| where it is. This is your classic corpo Sharepoint/teams/slack
| problem. There was a chat, once, with some shared files, from
| their onedrive, but the last person who remembered where was
| laid off a year ago and...well, that data is effectively lost.
| I dont think we have great solutions here except writing even
| more things down and hoping that everyone follows rules like
| keeping all files in one place
|
| The last case is where the data is located, but noone can vouch
| for it any more. Internal wiki pages are notorious here. People
| post about, say, some sharp edge they uncovered, and the page
| sits there for all eternity. You discover it years later. Can
| you trust it? Is there anyone who knows why the page still
| exists? It blocks the synthesis of what you know with what the
| author knew.
| 6stringmerc wrote:
| Again I'm incredulous by the perspective shared by Ars Technica
| (often trumpeted by TechDirt) that "what is going on is not how
| copyright SHOULD work" while giving no reasonable consideration
| to how legally legitimate cases like this are from a standpoint
| are in US copyright cases.
|
| I get the desire to FIX copyright in the US, I stand to benefit
| and so does society and creative progress. But these
| sensationalist writers are the lowest form of clickbait by simply
| taking a victimization position and digging in (re: TechDirt and
| Goldiblox absolutely being in the wrong for ripping off the
| Beastie Boys for a Super Bowl ad).
| wavefunction wrote:
| 700 million dollars in damages with no actual damages shown
| it's absolutely ridiculous
| freejazz wrote:
| That's not really a substantive analysis of the issue, which
| I agree with the OP that these articles never really address
| fully.
| badlibrarian wrote:
| Right, but that's how a lawsuit works. You take the number it
| says in the book, multiply it by the number of allegations,
| and you get a number. You have to write this number down in
| your filing, then Ars Technica uses it for clickbait.
|
| Murder 18 people and you can go to jail for 720 years.
| Doesn't mean squat. It's the 18 murders not the 720 years.
|
| Likewise the $700 million number isn't important. What's
| important is the 400,000 copyright violations with no
| strategy, when even Lessig says you're gonna get sued and
| lose.
| techsupporter wrote:
| I'm not sure what your criticism is?
|
| Ars is reporting on a legal case and also on people who say
| they will be harmed by that case. The reporter then goes on to
| detail the policy work that groups are doing to try to change
| copyright laws in the country.
|
| What else would you like to see? A legal analysis of the
| strengths and weaknesses of the case?
| joshuaissac wrote:
| > What else would you like to see? A legal analysis of the
| strengths and weaknesses of the case?
|
| Exactly.
|
| What are the facts of the case according to the plaintiff?
| What are the points of law being relied on?
|
| Does the IA dispute the plaintiff's version of the facts and
| the interpretation of the law? If so, what points are they
| disputing?
|
| If there have been similar cases, how did those cases go, and
| how were they different to this case?
| coliveira wrote:
| Until recently I'd say that the record labels accusations were
| unwarranted and they should stop. However I've noticed that free
| projects have the tendency to become for profit corporations and
| exploit the good will that started the project. An example is
| Open AI. Another example is how Google monetizes and monopolizes
| free and public information.
| linuxhansl wrote:
| I fail to see what bearing the actions of other projects have
| on what the IA might or might not do.
|
| So far the IA is providing an important service: Insuring the
| historical data is not lost. Until this actually changes there
| is no need to go after it, in fact it hurts us all.
| freedomben wrote:
| Are you implying we should pre-emptively abandon support for IA
| now and let them die just in case at some point in the future
| they were to go evil?
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >However I've noticed that free projects have the tendency to
| become for profit corporations
|
| I would say that for a non-profit project to become a for
| profit entity, legally speaking, is rare. I believe Google was
| always for profit? I welcome any statistics you have to back up
| the assertion.
| tracker1 wrote:
| So shut down a good org today, in favor of bad orgs today,
| because good org might be bad in the future?
| kazinator wrote:
| Labels will not regret recordings being lost, because it's just
| asshole executives who only care about money.
|
| The hapless sound historian is just projecting his own bellyaches
| onto other people that are completely different from him.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Middle-class people are taught (,and teach each other, and
| repeat to themselves in their journals) that the only
| successful labor is labor that is loved.
|
| For them, the heads of record labels have to care, because they
| are the most successful people in their industry, and they
| wouldn't be so successful unless they loved the work. In
| middle-class theology, becoming successful is a matter of
| loving harder than the guy next to you. It takes a lot of mind
| games to motivate people to extreme expertise in often very
| narrow specializations, especially when it's usually to make
| someone else rich.
| sitkack wrote:
| The CEO of HBO Max, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Zaslav
| destroys works of art to get tax handouts from the american
| people. Yes, American Tax Payers, pay David Zaslav money to
| destroy works of art already created.
| kazinator wrote:
| Interesting. I made a remark in my above comment which I
| ending up editing out, that if someone gave these execs a wad
| of cash for deleting something, they would.
| badlibrarian wrote:
| Or, more nuanced: HBO pays artists and writers and
| electricians $50 million to make something. It turns out to
| be unmarketable. So rather than throw good money after bad,
| he writes it off. Then uses the tax savings to hire artists
| and writers and electricians to make a different thing.
|
| It's wasteful and I don't like his decisions but it's not
| much different from what VCs do with their expenditures.
|
| In neither case do American Tax Payers foot the bill.
|
| Zaslav could write it off and still dump it on YouTube. And
| VCs could open source all the Ruby code they bought between
| 2006 and 2016. But there's reasons they don't.
| sitkack wrote:
| False. They had animated shows already being streamed on
| HBO Max that they pulled and fully wrote off. They can
| never be accessed again. Should be considered fully
| destroyed.
| badlibrarian wrote:
| That's different. Impairment is the same as Goodwill.
| Taxpayers are unaffected.
|
| And I think we both know quite well that the stuff that
| was aired still exists.
| sitkack wrote:
| I can see you are passionate about this. Tax writeoffs
| are paid for by the taxpayers.
| badlibrarian wrote:
| Tax writeoffs by definition are taxpayers paying less. It
| reduces tax revenue and reduces the average tax paid by
| everyone. When your neighbor writes off their mortgage
| interest it does not raise your taxes.
|
| If you don't like certain policies around tax deductions
| then argue that. I might even agree with you.
| sitkack wrote:
| Why are you passionate about HBO Max using the
| destruction of artwork already produced to lower their
| tax bill? Many of which they _bought_.
| badlibrarian wrote:
| Six <ul> tags upstream I all but said that HBO Max guy is
| an idiot. I'm personally pissed at the ACME thing. But it
| didn't increase your tax burden.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Fraudulently reducing tax revenue by 1 entity/individual
| effectively shifts the burden of taxation to everyone
| else who is not willing or able to commit the same fraud.
| At the macro level, this adds up to billions more dollars
| every year in the unmanageable and unmanageably-growing
| federal debt. The US federal government plans to spend
| 16% of its total spending simply on paying interest on
| its debt: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-
| finance-guide/natio...
|
| So-called fiscal conservatives should be howling in
| Congress about this kind of thing. (Narrator: they
| aren't.)
| badlibrarian wrote:
| It may be bad policy but it's not fraudulent.
|
| Running a deficit can be profitable long term -- or not.
| It depends on how the funds are allocated. Ask Bezos.
|
| Likewise a tax writeoff can increase tax revenue over the
| long term -- or not. It depends how the tax savings are
| applied. Ask the employees who still have their jobs.
|
| Regardless, a media company struggling to breakeven with
| cartoon coyotes may not be the best starting point for an
| economics debate.
| nerdponx wrote:
| It's fraudulent in the sense that it's a fake loss, as
| you say created by clever accounting.
| badlibrarian wrote:
| That's not what I said. For avoidance of doubt, allow me
| to rephrase the concept in the local language: paying a
| bunch of artists and engineers to build an app that
| generates minimal revenue, pulling it from the app store,
| then writing off the loss, is neither clever nor
| fraudulent.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Right, I get what you said.
|
| I am arguing that it is in fact a fraud perpetrated
| against the taxpayer, even if it's not legally
| categorized as "fraud" at this time.
| badlibrarian wrote:
| Why is writing off a loss fraudulent? This very website
| is funded by such actions.
| bigtimesink wrote:
| Are you talking about Coyote Vs. Acme?
| m463 wrote:
| He needs to be introduced to NFT art.
| ilamont wrote:
| _" The Internet Archive is not hurting the revenue of the
| recording industry at all," Seubert suggested, while noting that
| his opinions don't "mean squat" since he's not a lawyer. "It has
| no impact on their revenue." Instead, he suspects that labels'
| lawsuit is "somehow vindictive," because the labels perhaps
| "don't like the Internet Archive's way of pushing the envelope on
| copyright and fair use."_
|
| Record companies, artists and other rights holders are not
| pursuing lawsuits because they are "somehow vindictive" or want
| to send a message.
|
| Lawsuits are huge, expensive headaches that force the plaintiffs
| to not only take a public stance on sensitive issues, but also
| force them to reveal details about their operations,
| communications, and business relationships. Like anyone else who
| goes through the trouble of pursuing a case on IP grounds, they
| feel their rights have been violated and they want redress.
|
| They're also looking at this as part of a long-term fight over
| how IP gets used, just as the Internet Archive is.
| dchichkov wrote:
| Just in case, here's the list of these labels:
|
| - UMG Recordings, Inc.
|
| - Capitol Records, LLC
|
| - Concord Bicycle Assets, LLC
|
| - CMGI Recorded Music Assets LLC
|
| - Sony Music Entertainment
|
| - Arista Music
|
| Taken from: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-
| content/uploads/2025/03/UMG-v...
| lurk2 wrote:
| I think his point is that the damages they are seeking are
| basically punitive, not related to actual losses that they have
| suffered. I doubt anyone is losing too much sleep over this
| issue, but the approach the record labels are taking seems like
| it is clearly intended to dissuade others from doing anything
| similar to what the Internet Archive is trying to do. The RIAA
| has a track record of these kinds of punitive measures; think
| of the music piracy lawsuits they were filing in the mid-2000s.
| freejazz wrote:
| But that's exactly what the copyright act provides for...
| statutory damages not tied to the actual damages lost by the
| copyright owner, and they are only available in limited
| circumstances. And statutory damages still have to be tied to
| something tangible, like the lost license fee, and they do
| explicitly allow for a jury to add a punitive element.
|
| >The RIAA has a track record of these kinds of punitive
| measures; think of the music piracy lawsuits they were filing
| in the mid-2000s.
|
| How were those punitive as opposed to not? Should they have
| not sued at all and just let the infringers continue?
| lurk2 wrote:
| > How were those punitive as opposed to not? Should they
| have not sued at all and just let the infringers continue?
|
| In Arista Records LLC v. Lime Group LLC, they tried to sue
| for more money than existed on earth. I'm not saying they
| didn't have a case against individual cases of
| infringement, but it was quite clear what they were doing
| while they were doing it. The goal was always to intimidate
| would-be pirates with high-profile cases about grandmas and
| teenagers losing the family house because they downloaded
| an MP3 off Kazaa. The damages the RIAA sought from these
| people were completely disproportionate to the actual
| financial losses they demonstrated, to the point of being
| unconscionable. It's notable that they eventually abandoned
| this strategy by the end of the 2000s as public opinion
| began turning against them.
|
| Weird Al wrote a song about it:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGM8PT1eAvY
| freejazz wrote:
| There's pretty much no way any court ever gives any
| copyright holder the maximum amount allowed under
| statutory damages, which is only trebled to the
| possibility of $150k when the infringement was willful. I
| love Weird Al, but I don't go to him for legal advice or
| analysis!
| lurk2 wrote:
| Maybe the United States District Court for the Southern
| District of New York will convince you where Weird Al
| could not:
|
| > Defendants face a potential award of over a billion
| dollars in statutory damages alone. If Plaintiffs were
| able to pursue a statutory damage theory predicated on
| the number of direct infringers per work, Defendants'
| damages could reach into the trillions. See Dkt Entry No.
| 461 ("Thousands (or even millions) of uploads and
| downloads occurred across disparate users.") 3 As
| Defendants note, Plaintiffs are suggesting an award that
| is "more money than the entire music recording industry
| has made since Edison's invention of the phonograph in
| 1877."
| freejazz wrote:
| I'm not sure how this is actually a response to my
| comment. I'm an IP litigator, asserting max statutory
| damages is something every attorney does at the outset
| otherwise they'd be waiving that recovery. It's really
| not the big deal you make it out to be, and nothing in
| your quote supports that either. Do you think a court is
| actually going to award more money than the entire world?
| No. So what are you going on about, really?
| lurk2 wrote:
| > asserting max statutory damages is something every
| attorney does at the outset otherwise they'd be waiving
| that recovery
|
| Meaning that they could not have asked for a lower amount
| without waiving their rights to _all_ statutory damages?
| What it sounds like you 're saying is that this was just
| a fluke of the lawyers who drafted the brief abiding by
| an industry standard that ended up producing an odd
| result. This seems incredibly unlikely.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Record companies, artists and other rights holders are not
| pursuing lawsuits because they are "somehow vindictive" or want
| to send a message.
|
| > They're also looking at this as part of a long-term fight
| over how IP gets used, just as the Internet Archive is.
|
| Part of the fight is sending messages. Almost all of the fight
| is sending messages, actually. It's lobbying government,
| arguing in the courts, lobbying people in general, and creating
| fear in people who would share their works.
|
| "Somehow vindictive" is just anthropomorphizing. They want the
| most money. They think that these are the tactics that will
| bring them the most money. If letting everybody share freely
| made them more money, they'd do that.
| throwawayyK0va wrote:
| Just brainstorming a bit, if IA is gone, how can we lawsuit-proof
| that the next digital Library of Alexandria? Do we have the
| technology for this?
|
| - IPFS over some type of dark net protocol?
|
| - Can something like Chia help? I don't know about its privacy
| characteristics.
| freejazz wrote:
| Start might be not violating copyright law and staying within
| the boundaries of established fair use principles. IA is
| constantly trying to push the law on these issues, for better
| or worse, and putting the entirety of its operations at risk.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >IPFS over some type of dark net protocol?
|
| Silk Road is a good example of what will happen. Some media
| mogul will eventually cajole the government into acting. The
| government will go to the NSA, find the true identities of
| those responsible, then cook up nonsense about how they gave
| away their identities due to some weird Stack Overflow question
| no one could ever notice. The US Attorney will prosecute, and
| claim that it's a felony because of economic benefit, even if
| no money was exchanged. The culprits will end up in supermax.
| They can't afford to do this to everyone, obviously, but
| they'll pick up to 100 or so of a mix of the worst offenders
| and the most casual users, to "set an example". The media will
| publicize it to the point of absurdity so the message sinks in.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| > then cook up nonsense about how they gave away their
| identities due to some weird Stack Overflow question no one
| could ever notice
|
| In case people don't understand why the government can do
| this, it is called parallel construction and the SCOTUS
| deemed it constitutional.
|
| Btw this comment is not me approving this behavior. And that
| last sentence was not a hint of me approving that behavior in
| secret :). Those last two sentences are a hint of what I
| think about the scotus on this topic though :)
| throwawayyK0va wrote:
| There are other countries in the world, in fact, that's where
| most of these digital libraries of Alexandria have been
| hosted. That's why I framed it as a technical question,
| because while any government may decide to combat it, it is
| unlikely that all of them will. Given the ongoing collapse of
| the US-led unipolar world order, the reach of US law
| enforcement will only shrink in the coming years.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >There are other countries in the world,
|
| I believe the owner of Kickass Torrents was either in
| Ukraine or Poland, can't remember anymore. Didn't save that
| one. Kim Dotcom was in New Zealand, and the crime he was
| accused of committing in the United States (when he had
| never stepped foot in the United States, and also a crime
| that isn't extraditable under New Zealand law) he barely
| managed to avoid being shipped off in chains.
|
| That won't save anyone.
|
| >Given the ongoing collapse of the US-led unipolar world
| order,
|
| I wouldn't recommend relying on the "collapse of American
| hegemony" to save anyone. But especially not anyone you
| care about (like maybe yourself).
| TylerE wrote:
| By not hiring dumb people who flagrantly and obviously violate
| the law.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Appeasement has done nil against copyright absolutists.
| TylerE wrote:
| It getting sued out of existence is not appeasement. It's
| literally following the law. That is how non profits that
| wish to continue to operate do things.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| What alternatives to legal actions / the judiciary do you
| suggest for copyright reform?
|
| The legislative approach is thwarted by the copyright
| lobby. The executive has neither will, interest, nor
| power.
| TylerE wrote:
| The mission of the Internet Archive should not be
| "copyright reform" but maintaining the continued
| availability of data it is legally allowed to host.
| boldlybold wrote:
| Anna's Archive is on the path to this, for written works at
| least. The main idea is open source code + distributed data in
| torrents + anonymous contributors that are dedicated to the
| project.
|
| https://annas-archive.li/blog
| ed_mercer wrote:
| Also MAM
| boldlybold wrote:
| That's a new acronym to me, what is it?
| lurk2 wrote:
| Some incredibly shallow takes in this thread, most of which seem
| to be coming from people who didn't even read the article. The
| quote in context:
|
| > "They're going to regret it," Seubert predicted. "Not
| financially or anything, but just from a historical perspective,
| the Internet Archive is valuable for all of us."
|
| This was not the central point of the article. He clearly is not
| saying that "the legal entity Capitol Records will manifest
| emotions and come to experience regret," but "the people who in
| aggregate comprise Capitol Records will regret the role they
| played in restricting access to these works," in the same way
| that a game developer on Hacker News might regret having added
| game-breaking DRM to a title he worked on twenty years ago, even
| though this allowed him to earn a lot of money.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > "the people who in aggregate comprise Geffen Records will
| regret the role they played in restricting access to these
| works,"
|
| Is this deep? What people in this thread are saying is that
| they won't regret nor remember it, and whatever comfort you're
| taking from thinking "in the end, after everything is ruined,
| they'll realize I was right" is cheap and lazy.
|
| Nobody needs anybody to point out that the loss of music is
| bad. Nobody needs anyone to conjure fantasies of future
| schadenfreude over the regret of record execs. People need
| tactics and strategies to figure out how to stop this
| destruction.
| rolandog wrote:
| I think it's good to publicly express our disapproval.
| Because -- as we have sadly seen recently -- there will
| always be a small group of apologists defending villains or
| systematic oppressors:
|
| (It's worth also considering that the group size does not
| always correlate to its power or influence).
|
| But you are totally correct that thought-terminating
| expressions of Schadenfreude towards those who exert harm are
| not enough.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > What people in this thread are saying is that they won't
| regret nor remember it, and whatever comfort you're taking
| from thinking "in the end, after everything is ruined,
| they'll realize I was right" is cheap and lazy.
|
| There are multiple users in this thread stating that the
| label is a corporate entity designed to maximize profit and
| that it thus cannot "feel" anything. This was obviously not
| what was being stated.
|
| As to those claiming that these individuals won't regret what
| they have done: That may be true. But why does it happen with
| developers? Because it happens a lot.
|
| Neither I nor Seubert made this claim out of some pseudo-
| religious self-reassurance that "One day, they'll all get
| theirs!" but as a simple observation that these actions are
| ill-advised. I don't know how you could read it any other way
| without being intentionally obtuse.
|
| > Nobody needs anybody to point out that the loss of music is
| bad.
|
| What you're essentially saying here is: "Your observation was
| so obvious to me that it shouldn't have even been written
| down, because everyone already knew it." This is obnoxious
| and not in the spirit of the forum.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| >There are multiple users in this thread stating that the
| label is a corporate entity designed to maximize profit and
| that it thus cannot "feel" anything.
|
| The issue is the surrounding system and the corporate
| environment are what raise people to be this way and filter
| out those who are too sentimental. I don't think a good
| majority of the people working there will ever feel bad
| because they've been raised not to feel bad and given an
| ideology that makes all that work in their head.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > As to those claiming that these individuals won't regret
| what they have done: That may be true. But why does it
| happen with developers? Because it happens a lot.
|
| Because Developers make games, and record execs make money.
| I'm sure there are a handful out there who actually give a
| shit about the art they make their money off of, but having
| worked with many of these people for many years, I assure
| you the vast majority are exactly as soulless as is
| depicted in virtually every movie or TV show that involves
| one, because the creatives behind those depictions have to
| deal with those soul-sucking vampires all the time, and
| they hate them. And the feeling there is very mutual, which
| is why every executive is creaming themselves at the
| prospect of being able to get rid of creatives and replace
| them with "AI."
|
| > Neither I nor Seubert made this claim out of some pseudo-
| religious self-reassurance that "One day, they'll all get
| theirs!" but as a simple observation that these actions are
| ill-advised. I don't know how you could read it any other
| way without being intentionally obtuse.
|
| Because, as is outlined by the commenter, the notion of
| "they'll regret this" is presupposing multiple bad
| assumptions, namely that record executives give the
| faintest shit about music beyond it's ability to make
| number go up.
|
| Oh no, Capital Records has a bad reputation. It will still
| stream. Album sales will be unaffected because consumer
| revolt has always been worthless as a tactic. What are they
| regretting?
| thayne wrote:
| > Nobody needs anybody to point out that the loss of music is
| bad
|
| The people filing this suit obviously do.
| fragmede wrote:
| Are they? do you really think y'know what, reselling the
| cracked pirate copy of my game from 20 years ago that instead
| of my pristine version because I lost the source but I'm still
| making money, and that 20 years ago, fundamentally, it _was_
| really nice to be able to afford a roof over my head and
| provide for my wife and kids; You really think there 's more
| than a passing feeling of regret?
| freejazz wrote:
| I agree with you, it's an absurd suggestion offered with zero
| reasoning.
| lurk2 wrote:
| DRM might have been a bad example, but it is one I've seen
| before. Another story I see here often is that a developer
| had an independent studio. The studio develops a game or an
| application. As the game or application ages, the developer
| sells it. The acquiring company goes defunct or discontinues
| the sale of the program some time later, and the developer
| wishes he would have just posted the source code for the
| program.
|
| I get what you're saying in that the revealed preference is
| towards the "bad" behavior, but I think there is something to
| be said for the capacity to feel regret being a necessary
| precursor to discourage bad behavior from occurring in the
| future. The thread seems to be divided between those who
| believe the people working at these labels might have that
| capacity and those who believe that these people are
| essentially amoral monsters who are only concerned by the
| perverse vaguery of "maximizing returns."
| xnzakg wrote:
| Something like this?
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37394665
| nerdponx wrote:
| It's wishful thinking. These people know what they're doing and
| won't regret it as they live out their days in comfort and
| luxury.
| badlibrarian wrote:
| Internet Archive does not delete anything. Sometimes they leave
| the "item" (URL) up and block downloads. Recently they have
| started "darking" things en masse, which removes them from search
| results.
|
| A sane solution would be to leave the items up, block download of
| the full file, and make excerpts available. They do this for many
| items where you cannot download the mp3 yet the spectrogram (jpg
| image) remains available.
|
| Archive.org is at a crossroads and the people who manage it have
| made some very curious decisions lately.
| Miraste wrote:
| >leave the items up, block download of the full file, and make
| excerpts available.
|
| This is what Google does with Google Books. I imagine the
| Internet Archive is trying to avoid it because Books is no
| longer a repository of works, it's a search index. If you find
| a source you'd like to read, you're on your own to find a copy.
| Large parts of their collection are out of print, and this can
| be very difficult.
|
| It's still a useful tool with those limitations, certainly, but
| it's not an archive anymore.
| badlibrarian wrote:
| An archive is typically restricted access to avoid just the
| sort of copyright problem we're seeing here. In the past,
| this meant having to visit the materials onsite -- even if
| you then just fired up a computer to look at them.
| Universities liked this for a few reasons, and it fit in with
| their typical gatekeeping nonsense as a bonus.
|
| Exhibiting or publishing the work is different. Museums show
| tiny thumbnails (though this is finally changing) and
| libraries have their own rules, complete with weird little
| signs around the copy machines that people used to take more
| seriously. The lawsuit that set the rules for Google applies
| here. Yes, it sucks and it's annoying to tech people, but if
| the goal is preservation then it's obvious how things must be
| run. And what you can get away with while you wait for rights
| to expire or laws to change.
|
| Providing excerpts to show what you have, then providing a
| way for qualified researchers to access the full work has
| been the tradition. Even for the 500,000+ books they had to
| take down due to the lawsuit, those remain available for
| people with print disabilities.
|
| They even had an exemption for video games, but they forgot
| to renew the paperwork and the Librarian of Congress removed
| the exemption during the last triennial review. So we lost
| freedom there due to sloppy administration by Internet
| Archive.
| Miraste wrote:
| Yes, exactly. The Internet Archive was founded in direct
| response to closed archives-being open is the entire point.
| Their goal is _not_ preservation if it 's locked in a
| vault- their mission statement is "to provide Universal
| Access to All Knowledge."
|
| Universal access to knowledge is illegal under the American
| copyright regime, and it seems the people who run it have
| decided to fight to the end rather than give up their
| mission. It'll probably lead to the destruction of the
| whole project, but I do find it admirable in a quixotic
| way.
|
| Do you have a link to them losing an exemption because of
| paperwork? My understanding was that the Copyright Office
| makes the sole determination on exemptions during triennial
| reviews, and they blocked it last year due to the usual
| regulatory capture and industry lobbying.
| badlibrarian wrote:
| If you review the history of the archive you will see
| that their mission changed over time. They didn't even
| ask for donations until they set the building on fire.
|
| You can still find old help articles on the site where
| qualified researchers are instructed to ask permission to
| log into their Unix servers directly. Complete with
| privacy rationalizations like "being able to see what
| people are doing on the same computer is no different
| than peeking over a shoulder in a reading room."
|
| Early form 990s tell a very different mission. They
| pivoted for a number of reasons, and I generally support
| the mission. But you have to obey the law to protect the
| assets. And if you want to press the law, you have to be
| very smart about it. Like, oh, testing 10 records instead
| of 400,000. And doing it under a different LLC so you
| don't lose the Wayback Machine to some dumbass AI company
| because you can't be bothered to keep track of how many
| books you're lending out.
|
| > Do you have a link to them losing an exemption because
| of paperwork?
|
| https://www.arl.org/news/librarian-of-congress-expands-
| dmca-...
|
| "The librarian renewed all existing exemptions except for
| the exemption for accessible access to video games, for
| which there was no petition for renewal."
| Miraste wrote:
| Ah, 90s network security. Happier times.
|
| I went and checked myself, and they have evolved a lot
| more than I remembered. For the better, I think, but
| you're certainly right that they could be going about
| this in a more legally adept way.
|
| The exemption mentioned in that article isn't about
| hosting video games online- you may have confused two
| exemptions. That one was for accessibility in the sense
| of access for people with disabilities (alternate input
| devices, etc). It was only added in the 2021 review, and
| the Internet Archive wasn't one of its backers.
|
| The exemption for remote access to video games was a
| separate and new proposal, and the Copyright Office
| blocked it after pressure from industry lobbyists.
|
| https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/legally-weird/u-s-
| copyrig...
| m463 wrote:
| I think this is the real answer. They will probably still
| collect everything.
|
| (they're gonna be sitting pretty in life + 75 years)
| zellyn wrote:
| I'm very worried that IA has risked the parts of what they do
| that are fully legal, or unenforced (eg. abandonware), by going
| after targets guaranteed to make deep-pocketed pro-copyright
| industries like publishing and music labels come after them.
|
| At this point, it seems like the sensible course of action would
| be to create a new entity that leaves still-in-copyright books
| and music alone, grabs a snapshot of the entire archive, hires
| everyone who used to work at IA, starts accepting donations so us
| supporters can switch over, and then picks up, letting IA declare
| bankruptcy and fall into the sun.
|
| [Edited to add:] Don't get me wrong. I think the current
| copyright regime is complete nonsense, and I mostly support
| everything IA has done from an ethical point of view (except
| maybe giving away recent books for free), but I'm also a
| pragmatist, and the idea of IA's archive falling into the memory
| hole because of picking bad fights is distressing.
| mountainb wrote:
| Brings to mind the line about the behavior of most
| organizations being best explained by it being controlled by a
| cabal of its enemies.
|
| Just mass-violating the copyright of deep pocketed plaintiffs
| is like writing them checks that need to go through court
| first. The Constitution expressly gives Congress the power to
| make laws concerning copyright. Congress used that power. The
| statutes say what they say. There is no wriggling out of it;
| there are centuries of case law reconciling copyright with the
| 1A. If the IA is going to be provocative like this it should do
| so outside of the reach of the judgments of US courts.
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| It would take a massive amount of labor to determine what in
| the existing archive is out of copyright in a legally
| verifiable manner.
|
| There's nothing keeping the record labels or other corporate
| copyright aggregators from declaring legal warfare on your
| hypothetical child organization.
| badlibrarian wrote:
| Jason Scott and others all the way to the top have been
| saying "Just upload! We'll figure it out later!" for a
| decade. That turned out to be a bad strategy.
|
| They're also infamous for ignoring DMCA requests. Requiring a
| driver's license or passport before they'll even talk to you.
| Then they leaked those, ugh.
|
| Archiving stuff is Fair Use, but where's the fun in that, I
| guess. People should be able to upload things and say "Yes,
| this is a bootleg mix of a Prince song. Archive it but don't
| publish it, please."
|
| A combination of bizarre policies and subverting their own
| DMCA protections is why they're in this mess. Again.
|
| Musk showed up for lunch looking to vacuum things up. I hope
| that's not how this story ends. But it's starting to look
| like it.
| TylerE wrote:
| Yes, the recent history of the IA is of its shooting itself in
| the foot in full auto. I don't understand how the board members
| pushing these obviously dangerous actions haven't been turfed
| out.
| badlibrarian wrote:
| They don't really have a board. It's just Brewster doing what
| he wants.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/internetarchive/comments/1he3ml5/in.
| ..
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| Internet was created to allow Library sharing and now companies
| try to stop the only library available from sharing books at one-
| person-at-a-time basis. This is similar.
|
| We're doomed because whimsical companies will put down the IA and
| then forgot the toys they were playing with
|
| Btw. What is age of music going into public domain? Still
| Disney's 123 years?
| badlibrarian wrote:
| Sony and EMI worked with the Library of Congress on the National
| Jukebox a decade ago.
|
| https://www.loc.gov/collections/national-jukebox/about-this-...
|
| Internet Archive is free to archive whatever they want. The
| problem is that they want to be a publisher too but refuse to
| follow the rules.
|
| There are traditional rules around access to archives that keep
| things in balance. But when you're publishing the most popular
| song of all time and your strategy is "pops and scratches makes
| it Fair Use" when people ask to take it down -- well then you're
| going to lose. Again.
|
| They could structure things so that these uploads would be
| protected under DMCA, and act more surgically, but they can't
| decide whether they're an archive, a library, or an activist
| organization. Each of those things has different expectations for
| longevity and different rules for survival.
|
| At this point I'd be happy if they'd just pick a lane. Other
| organizations would step up to handle other aspects (Musk was
| down there looking to vacuum up the data). And if they chose to
| behave like a legitimate archive, they would have less of a
| problem partnering with rights holders and raising money from
| individuals and corporations who support preservation efforts.
|
| Right now they're asking for $17 donations next to pirated
| material and that's not a strategy.
| freejazz wrote:
| Not sure why this is being downvoted, it is pretty spot-on.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >There are traditional rules
|
| None of those rules are traditional. Those rules are adhoc,
| constantly changed at the whims of whoever is in charge of the
| copyright office in any given administration, and heavily
| lobbied by the media companies. These rules are many things:
| bureaucratic, official, overly-complicated, contrary to public
| interest, etc. but have no basis in "tradition".
|
| >At this point I'd be happy if they'd just pick a lane.
|
| No doubt you'd be happy.
|
| >they would have less of a problem partnering with rights
| holders
|
| These are the same rights holders that have acted irresponsibly
| when it suited them, leading to the wanton destruction of
| material that rightfully belongs to the public. You get that
| right? Copyright is not ownership, it's just a long-term
| lease... all copyright materials are in the long run property
| of the public domain. You don't get to destroy them just
| because you've got a temporary lease on it. The rights holders
| are the problem.
|
| >Right now they're asking for $17 donations next to pirated
| material
|
| What piracy? Did someone hijack a ship at sea and hold its crew
| for ransom?
| badlibrarian wrote:
| I work in the space and routinely access material that
| predates the Berne Convention. There are indeed traditions
| that archives and libraries follow going back centuries.
|
| This is entirely separate from US copyright law and if we
| were actually conversing I'd imagine we'd discover that we
| share a lot of views there.
|
| > You don't get to destroy them just because you've got a
| temporary lease on it.
|
| And that's where we disagree. For starters, nothing has
| gotten destroyed here. Yet. The problem as I see it is that
| some weird-ass white guy annointed himself keeper of the
| material. And now he's started behaving erratically and
| unlawfully, and putting everything at risk. Seems to be a lot
| of that going around lately.
|
| Insiders at the Archive have gone as far as to say Brewster's
| sabotaging things since there's no plan for funding or
| running the thing after he passes. Getting sued over and over
| (and losing) is awful. And imagine how the employees feel --
| scanning moldy books for 20 years and then your boss makes
| one weird decision and now nobody can see your work.
| bboozzoo wrote:
| > some weird-ass white guy annointed himself keeper of the
| material
|
| how's their skin colour so relevant to the discussion that
| it needs to be brought up? what if they were
| yellow/black/green?
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| I grew up listening to some ethnic 78 singles that my father had
| purchased. I managed to hold onto a couple of them (others were
| broken) but haven't owned a turntable I could play them on (good
| luck finding one, or the needles) for decades.
|
| None of the singles had been released on vinyl ... it was clearly
| not in the interests of the industry's monopolists to do so.
| Because they showed up on IA (before the Great 78 project even
| started) I could finally listen to them again. To my knowledge
| none of them have ever been re-released.
| badlibrarian wrote:
| Yup. They should've stuck to that stuff and not published Frank
| Sinatra and Bing Crosby records along with the pile of
| priceless rarities that exist nowhere else.
|
| They were politely asked three times to remove certain material
| and refused.
|
| This is not the way an archive should act.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| In 2008, Universal Media lost something like a half million
| original master recordings when a fire destroyed one of their
| storage buildings. The "Library at Alexandria" of 20th century
| music.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| I'm guessing the rise of generative AI will help ensure this
| never happens again.
|
| If you wanted to build a Sinatra Simulator, you'd want as many
| takes as possible to train it. For that reason, I imagine any
| and all high resolution recordings are now considered gold
| rather than something you just keep around for old times' sake,
| possible use in reissues, research, etc.
|
| Even session background singers or isolated instrument tracks
| would be valuable; with all kinds of training data / not-
| samples, producers could add bits of Quentin Tarantino-esque
| pastiche to tracks easily -- "give me some background singers
| that sound like the ones in Smokey Robinson's first album..."
| "I want this bass track to sound like Duck Dunn playing a
| Hofner Beatle Bass..." Training data is what you need to make
| that happen, and record company vaults are the mines where that
| gold comes from.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Enemies of mankind. There are friendlier comic book
| supervillains.
| eccentricwind wrote:
| The notion of those hyenas having morals in the first place is
| hilarious on its own
| pmkary wrote:
| What a sad thing to read. Loosing. What will remain of the
| internet if even IA is destroyed the rich?
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| Until now, I have always given authors the benefit of the doubt,
| and presented what they could have said to make their argument
| stronger.
|
| I do this when hackernews is calling an article stupid and
| missing some of the salvageable or mostly correct things from the
| article, so I do some effort to highlight these kernels of truth
| that most articles have because most authors do have something of
| value to say.
|
| For the first time on this account on this site... This article
| is hopelessly naive. Music label executives dgaf. If anything,
| they want the history gone so that they can charge extra premiums
| when they release 100 year old songs or for visits to their
| museums. It is like saying NFL owners regret people not being
| able to watch the first super bowl game and relive history.
|
| Nah... that is stuff they could sell later if they figure out
| how.
|
| Expecting music labels to have any sense of democratic music
| access is almost insulting to artists that have been often dicked
| by these labels.
|
| Part of me thinks this article is a psyop to make music label
| executives seem more humane lol.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| The music industry is essentially a bunch of psychopaths robbing
| artists blind.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| For there to be damages, wouldn't you have to prove that you had
| lost out in some way? How could an unavailable record be affected
| by this?
| badlibrarian wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_damages
|
| That huge number is merely what the plaintiffs write down by
| obligation when they file the case. It comes out of a book. The
| defense counters. The judge picks something reasonable. An
| appellate judge revises.
| henearkr wrote:
| Ok, I just donated to IA. They seem to need support.
| dartos wrote:
| Implying for-profit labels care about anything other than profit.
| ikekkdcjkfke wrote:
| Labels remaster and loose old versions, youtube re-compresses old
| videos
| Manheim wrote:
| The IA's work is essential for historians and archivists who
| depend on it for research and preservation. However, this is not
| a concern for the music industry or the major labels.
|
| The argument that the industry's lawsuit against IA might
| ultimately harm its own interests--by jeopardizing valuable
| archival resources--rests on a misconception: that the industry
| cares about art and artists. It doesn't. The industry's focus is
| shifting toward AI-generated music and hired musicians,
| prioritizing commercial output over artistic legacy. Their future
| is not tied to the past but to what comes next. In this scenario,
| history is not a resource--it's competition.
| alex1138 wrote:
| https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
| npodbielski wrote:
| Sooner or later we probably will suffer the event of lost
| knowledge similar to fire of Library of Alexandria but with
| internet.
|
| At some point greedy corporations will come to conclusion that
| storing old data, movies, music, documents is just to costly. And
| just like that all of this will be just deleted.
| nedt wrote:
| It's not just labels who aren't getting the artistic side of
| music. Copyright collectives are just as bad. If you give away
| your music for free under a license like the creative commons
| they will still collect money for any public use. But they will
| then just give it to their commercial artists probably even
| breaking nc clauses in open content licenses.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| People who work at Music Labels may regret what the previous
| generation of employees did to line their own pockets, and then
| do equally horrible things in their current context for the same
| reason.
| exabrial wrote:
| psssh, thats a problem for the future. profits now
| SuperSandro2000 wrote:
| The greet of the music labels. They would likely not have made a
| penny of this because you can't even buy this stuff anymore!
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