Yet again the Internet Archiving is suffering big this time, a coalition of major record labels filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive demanding $700 million for the extensive catalog of 78 rpm records. 78s are sometimes more than a century old at this point and i bet a lot of them are out of copyright, but i suppose for the few that still are majors are hitting it big towards the IA
This lawsuit is pretty much another existential threat to the Internet Archive and everything it preserves, including the Wayback Machine, and we’re fucked if we ever lose access to the Wayback Machine.
the original article asked to sign a petition, but i think a more logical way to support is to donate them directly so that they have more money to better defend themselves in court in this and other cases they’ll undoubtedly face in the future
There must be a lot of complicated aspects to this that I don’t understand.
The right course of action seems obvious to me…
Firstly spin out a separate organisation to manage the wayback machine. It shouldn’t be part of the pot defending against litigation like this.
Secondly, and I feel silly saying this but… don’t institutionalise the perpetration of rights violations? In the age of distributed databases and the dark web and the block chain and federation surely we can figure out a way to archive media that doesn’t put people or organisations at risk of litigation.
Finally, if the individuals involved with IA are not liable for the debts of IA then the organisation should fold because that’s practically free compared to defending against these litigious assholes.
That limits and gatekeeps access to an enormous degree. The IA wants to be useful to everyone, not just the tiny fraction of the world population savvy enough to use the internet for more than opening a browser and a chat client.
Counterpoint: The perpetration of this kind of rights violation precisely needs to be normalized to the point of meaninglessness. Intellectual property can either go away top-down (which considering the way things went over the past century is never going to happen) or it can go away bottom up - it has to be flaunted and disregarded by everybody via continued large-scale disobedience.
Or, of course, it could just never go away.
Not necessarily, I wasn’t really proposing to just torrent everything. I was kinda dreaming of a more creative solution that trivialises access while abstracts the actual hosting away from individuals.
Perhaps, but if so this just isn’t the way to achieve that. IA doesn’t seem sustainable.
Sounds like a cool idea, why don’t you set it up?
Because I’m not facing a $700m legal claim with a change.org petition as my best defence.
Archive.org has been operating for 30 years. You think your shitty little sarcasm is equivalent to an institution thats been around nearly as long as the internet, and yet has entirely resisted and avoided any of the enshittification thats infected literally everything else thats come after it? The internet archive is one of the last fundamentally good and public serving institutions and somehow you’re licking the boots of record companies trying to capitalize on expired copyright claims. Reexamine your priorities and fuck off while youre at it, since your ‘better idea’ is clearly to just do nothing at all.
Lets back up the truck a little.
This sarcastic little witticism required a sarcastic and witty response, which I provided.
Obviously I’m not going to set it up because, as I said in my earlier comments it’s a dreamy idea. I could go on to say, in the absence of such a technological solution, archive.org should still refrain from copyright infringement because they quite obviously aren’t viable with their current stance.
You’ll have to help me understand how this is so. In my comments I laid out a plan to maintain archive.org’s data for no (or very little) cost or effort, while ensuring that those record company’s receive nothing.
For users, the value of archive.org is the data. However, that data has no value to litigators nor anyone else. You can literally let the existing organisation collapse, and take the data to form a new organisation.
If you want to interpret this plan as doing “nothing at all” then you’re free to do so.
However, and forgive me this final sarcasm, doing nothing at all would be more productive than a change.org petition.
The reason this is as public as it is is because an archive like this is more useful the more is archived. If you manage it in an entirely hidden way, you basically won’t get it accessible from the clearnet and are relegated to keep it on Tor or similar. And once you do that, a lot less people will use it and thus it’ll be a lot less useful.
Also, they are not only fighting for an archive to exist, they’re fighting for it being a societally acceptable thing to exist.