[HN Gopher] Internet Archive's legal fights are over, but its fo...
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Internet Archive's legal fights are over, but its founder mourns
what was lost
Author : thinkcontext
Score : 101 points
Date : 2025-11-05 18:59 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| bobsmooth wrote:
| That's what happens when you practically beg book publishers to
| sue you.
| choo-t wrote:
| The fact that giving free access to books during a pandemic, in
| a format that doesn't need physical contact, when libraries
| were shut down or hard to access for a lot of people should
| have been praised, not pursued by legal action from rent
| seeking entities.
|
| The copyright system as a whole should by torn up.
|
| At least it give a clear signal to anyone with a ounce of moral
| which publisher to avoid at all cost.
| alex1138 wrote:
| I worry 'hacker' news is going to become more and more
| 'normie' steadily moving farther and farther away from
| Barlow's declaration of independence of cyberspace cypherpunk
| ethos
|
| It's easier to make money when you comply with The Man
| zokier wrote:
| you realize that HN has always been deeply business
| oriented, with it's root in the startup scene through the
| connection with YC? the hackers I believe is reference to
| pgs essay Hackers and Painters:
| https://paulgraham.com/hp.html
| throwanem wrote:
| Yes, but from a much older coinage, as documented in (the
| not entirely uncontroversial) "The New Hacker's
| Dictionary" compiled by (the likewise) Eric Raymond: http
| s://www.gutenberg.org/files/3008/3008-h/3008-h.htm#hacke.
| ..
|
| I'm old enough to recall the term in active use, and to
| have received the appellation from one who'd had it
| likewise handed down. I regard both as epiphenomena of
| the Internet's frontier or "Wild West" days, of which
| California has proven as terminal as it was for the
| nominate example after the US Civil War - not wholly for
| dissimilar reasons, if we take Vietnam, for the Internet,
| as the war whose loss would spur the migration.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The site used to be called "Startup News."
| rcxdude wrote:
| Copyright needs torn up or at the very least significant
| reform but if you're going to be skirting around the edges of
| it to try to do a good thing it's probably a good idea to not
| just straight up obviously and blatently break the letter and
| spirit of the law. CDL is an awkward and dubious workaround
| but if you drop the 'C' you're just doing copyright
| infringment and that would be much better left to entities
| like Anna's Archive. The criticism of IA in this regard is
| usually that it was a bad strategy, not that the goals were
| bad.
| briandear wrote:
| So how do authors make money? Going on concert tours? The
| copyright system needs reform (Mickey Mouse for example) --
| but the system protects creators.
|
| If there were no copyrights, no author would make any money.
| eikenberry wrote:
| > If there were no copyrights, no author would make any
| money.
|
| Cory Doctorow showed that this isn't true.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Cory Doctorow's works that were released under more
| permissive licensing still reserved some rights for the
| author. I believe he used some flavor of a Creative
| Commons non-commercial license, if memory serves. Point
| being that the method of licensing his works was still
| fundamentally based on copyright.
|
| (I think the US copyright system is hugely broken and the
| social contract needs to be re-negotiated, but I comment
| here in the interests of facts, not in support of the
| broken system.)
| criddell wrote:
| Are Cory Doctorow's newest books permissively licensed? I
| thought he stopped doing that.
| tptacek wrote:
| During the pandemic, they created the "National Emergency
| Library", where they allowed users copies of books without
| caps, without any connection to holdings of the Archive
| itself, something that was black-letter proscribed by
| copyright law, and as a result they managed to sabotage the
| legal case for controlled digital lending too.
| TMWNN wrote:
| When I made this criticism before of IA, I was told that that
| was ridiculous since the publishers had it out for IA before
| the COVID-19 emergency library. That may or may not have been
| true, but the publishers did not sue IA despite OpenLibrary
| existing for years before COVID-19. Publishers didn't pull the
| trigger because they were afraid of losing. It was a MAD
| situation, and IA unnecessarily triggered a nuclear war that
| they lost.
| mzs wrote:
| Is the feature gone, the one where I use my local library card to
| access an online book for 2 weeks if no one else has it
| currently?
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| Most of the IA's ebook collection still supports controlled
| digital lending, just like every other library that operates an
| ebook lending system with CDL.
| dylan604 wrote:
| From TFA: In the end, the fight led to more than 500,000 books
| being removed from the Archive's "Open Library."
|
| Good chance the book you wanted is gone at the least
| exe34 wrote:
| I hope Anna's Archive kept a copy.
| zokier wrote:
| > Kahle thinks "the world became stupider" when the Open Library
| was gutted--but he's moving forward with new ideas
|
| > The lawsuits haven't dampened Kahle's resolve to expand IA's
| digitization efforts, though. Moving forward, the group will be
| growing a project called Democracy's Library
|
| please just stop. let IA be what it is. or rather, nothing wrong
| in doing new projects but don't tie them to IA, just start them
| as completely separate things. IA is too important as-is to be a
| playground for random kooky ideas playing with fire.
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| > let IA be what it is
|
| IA _is_ the eccentric, untamed idealism. You can't have the
| Wayback Machine without the National Emergency Library and the
| Great 78 Project.
| tedunangst wrote:
| Why not? The Wayback Machine predates the National Emergency
| Library by many years, suggesting it is possible for one to
| exist without the other.
| convolvatron wrote:
| And Brewster Kahle's notions about culture and information
| sharing start well before the Internet Archive. In theory
| one could pick and choose, but this is Brewster's life-long
| passion project. The man even outfitted a van with a
| printer and a binder to distribute physical books for free.
|
| It's very strange to insist that he _not_ push the
| boundaries of copyright law for the common good. without
| that you wouldn't have had the Wayback machine in the first
| place.
| missinglugnut wrote:
| As the project matures, the risk tolerance should mature too.
|
| Betting your own time and money on the realization of a crazy
| ideal can be very noble. Betting a resource millions of
| people are relying on is destructive hubris.
|
| They should take the untamed idealism to a separate legal
| entity before they ruin all the good they've done.
| tototrains wrote:
| Remember: If OpenAI/Google does it for $$$, it's not illegal. If
| idealists do it for public access, full force of the law.
|
| Information wants to be free. Oblige it. Fools with temporary
| power trying to extract from the work of others will be a blip in
| the history books if we make them.
| noir_lord wrote:
| internetarchive.ai
|
| It's a training set not an archive.
| charcircuit wrote:
| You are being intentionally misleading. Public access AI models
| are not being taken down either. There is a big,
| transformative, difference with freely giving out books to read
| compared with using them to train an ML model.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > There is a big, transformative, difference with freely
| giving out books to read _on a small, measured in human
| reading pace, scale_ compared with using them _at a massive
| scale at internet and computer memory speeds_ to train an ML
| model _even if the intellectual property used to train the ML
| was from unlicensed copies, and which the model regularly and
| with some frequency regurgitates verbatim._
|
| not wanting you to be intentially misleading, FTFY.
| Permit wrote:
| > some frequency
|
| This is a weasel word you've inserted to be intentionally
| misleading.
| wmf wrote:
| There was also a lawsuit over Google Books.
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| Sure, which Google won. Which was basically the point of the
| person you replied to I think.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| "Won" in a purely symbolic sense with no practical
| significance. How do I access the Google Books library?
| Levitating wrote:
| https://books.google.com/
| wahern wrote:
| Google removed a ridiculous amount of material during the
| dispute with the Author's Guild. I know because a bunch
| of my legal history research citation links collected
| between 2007-2011 are long since dead, with the material
| completely gone, AFAICT, and either not discoverable or
| only available in excerpt. And this was stuff from the
| 19th and early 20th centuries, which definitely was out
| of copyright in the US, though some of it may have
| potentially been a headache in Europe regarding
| copyright-adjacent author rights that Google didn't want
| to deal with.
| harrall wrote:
| Google didn't "win."
|
| Google Books is currently a shell of its former self.
| raincole wrote:
| Since when OpenAI made a digital library?
|
| The 'goodwill' counterparts of ChatGPT, a.k.a. open weight
| models, are still well alive online.
| margalabargala wrote:
| > Since when OpenAI made a digital library?
|
| What do you think is step 1 of training an LLM?
|
| OpenAI just kept their library private and only distribute
| the digested summaries of the library, are the main
| differences.
| raincole wrote:
| Yes...? Which is the whole point. That main _difference_ is
| why IA was sued, not the fact they 're idealists.
| AlexAplin wrote:
| Google had a tailored fair use argument because they never made
| more than snippets public and searchable. It was also prior to
| _Hachette_ that controlled lending with one-to-one digital
| copies for every physical copy was a status quo that publishers
| largely accepted, which IA deliberately tried to upset with the
| National "Emergency" Library.
|
| I think it's worth fighting back on copyright as a broken
| institution, and it should be part of the IA's mission, but you
| have to be responsible on your approach if you're also going to
| posture as an archival library with stability of information
| and access. I understand Kahle might lament losing some of the
| hacker ethos, but the IA is too important to run up against
| extremes like this without an existential threat.
| lateforwork wrote:
| > _Information wants to be free._
|
| Those who create information may have families to feed, house
| and clothe. Until those items (food/housing/clothes) are also
| free, information cannot be free.
| alt187 wrote:
| You might be glad to learn a number of studies (mostly
| commissioked by the European Union) agree on the fact that
| piracy doesn't hurt sales.
|
| The main consensus is that people who illegally access
| content wouldn't have bought it otherwise, and that they
| still advertise it (thus, still driving up sales).
|
| These studies have then been systematically strong-armed into
| silence by the EU and constituent countries' anti-piracy
| organisms.
|
| This is probably because the war on piracy, too, is a
| billion-dollar industry. I'd be glad to blow it all up and
| give it all to the starving artists and their families.
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| Why do companies attempt to prevent piracy if it doesn't
| hurt sales?
| nekusar wrote:
| What capitalism continues to show us: proof that public
| libraries, if created in the last 10 years, would be deemed
| illegal and sued out of existence.
|
| It's only because the late 1800's billionaires wanted to leave
| legacies and made pay-to-enter and free libraries, and migrated
| them to free, or public libraries. Thats why so many of them are
| (John) Carnegie Libraries.
|
| Only legal when billionaires do it.
| throwanem wrote:
| What I hear you say is that Brewster's time would be more
| wisely spent making friends of billionaires.
| nekusar wrote:
| Possibly, yeah. Make a "Deal" <spit> with AI companies to
| have back-end access to all the Archive org's content. Get
| 'permission' to copy EVERYTHING and have billionaires run
| interference.
|
| The AI companies already got blank checks to do that.
| Anthropic is paying what, like $3000 per book? I remember
| when the fucks at the RIAA were suing 12 year olds for $10000
| for Britney Spears albums.
|
| Or better yet, if it's just $3k a book, can we license every
| book and have that added into Archive.org? Oh wait, deals for
| thee, not for me.
| throwanem wrote:
| Eh. If patronage was good enough for da Vinci...
| gdulli wrote:
| A lower stakes but still illustrative example I see is that the
| DVR is an invention that wouldn't be allowed to succeed today.
| All power is being wielded to its fullest in order to prevent
| skipping ads.
|
| Cable to streaming took us from skippable to unskippable ads.
| Search results to LLM results will result in
| invisible/undisclosed ads. Each successive generation of
| technology will increase the power of advertising and strip
| rights we used to have. Another example, physical to digital
| media ownership, we lost resale rights.
|
| We need to understand that we've passed a threshold after which
| innovation is hurting us more than helping us. That trumps
| everything else.
| birdman3131 wrote:
| Modern DVR's are not the same as classic ones. As per this
| article from today shows that people have prerecorded are
| being pulled from their DVR's.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/youtube-tvs-
| disney-b...
| gdulli wrote:
| Exactly. A DVR governed by tech giants rather than just
| Tivo and the cable companies is going to have compromised
| functionality because it's the tech industry originating
| the "innovation" for their own benefit.
| noir_lord wrote:
| > All power is being wielded to its fullest in order to
| prevent skipping ads.
|
| And yet I can go to a site right now off the top of my head
| and watch any TV show or basically any movie made in the last
| 50 years for free in HD.
|
| It might be shut down tomorrow and it'll be up against 30s
| later with a different TLD.
|
| They aren't winning but they really are trying hard to.
| Worksheet wrote:
| Would there be anything worth putting into the libraries if
| intellectual property rights are not respected?
| ForHackernews wrote:
| ...yes? The median book sells ~3,000 copies, ever. But people
| keep writing them!
| yorwba wrote:
| Most libraries probably don't stock many books like that.
| They'd just waste shelf space until they get discarded in
| the end.
| delusional wrote:
| I think most authors believe their book to be better than
| the median. At least when they start writing it.
| tptacek wrote:
| How do you figure libraries would be deemed illegal? They
| operate today. The Archive, on the other hand, attempted a fair
| use argument for whole copies of books (the copyrighted form
| _most_ legible to copyright law) currently for sale as ebooks.
| I agree with the comment across the thread calling this a
| spectacularly boneheaded move and expressing gratitude that the
| entire Archive wasn 't compromised over the stunt.
| HelloUsername wrote:
| Previously posted:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45798283
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45809870
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45806643
| endgame wrote:
| It was an absolutely bone-headed poke-the-bear move and we should
| count ourselves lucky that it was only a chunk of the library and
| not the whole archive that got nuked. IA holds priceless and
| irreplaceable data, and while the library initiative was a well-
| intentioned move during the pandemic it was way too radical for
| the keepers of our shared digital history.
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| And this is why I respect Anna's Archive. If we want
| information to be free, I think we should consider
| intentionally violating copyright as an act of civil
| disobedience. I'm not sure I'm ready to go that far, but I
| respect the people at AA who are.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| I am sorry to say that, but copyright protection time should vary
| on the subject. Programming books - 10 years maybe? 10 years is
| ages in computer science. TV shows? 5-7 years maybe. After that
| time nobody wants to pay for watching old big brother or another
| Fort Boyard... Nor pay for storing it in archive. And this is the
| culture other creations are referring to.
|
| We've run in Poland into very strange situation - Polish Public
| TV (TVP) paid for the great dubbing of some Disney shows. They
| recorded it on VHS which were overwritten by other shows. Now the
| translation and the dubbing is lost, found sometimes on people's
| home recorded VHS but in poor quality, because recorded from the
| aerial.
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