A search for "Internet Archive rumors" returns a copy of Fleetwood Mac "Rumours" on my first page of results. Playable in browser and downloadable in high-quality lossless format.
The book lawsuit was over current titles (not really archival and preservation), and the record lawsuit wasn't really about the rare 78s, it was about the modern Jimi Hendrix and Paul McCartney records that somehow slipped in. And their refusal to follow the modern law that they themselves celebrated that made what they're trying to do (including downloads) explicitly legal. But that law prohibited fundraising, and they couldn't resist tweeting out links to Frank Sinatra records with a big banner on top asking for money.
In both lawsuits the discovery revealed tech debt and sloppy process at the Archive that made it impossible for them to argue on behalf of the future we all want.
CYR1X 3 minutes ago [-]
Link to the tech debt aspect? I knew that was the case but want to know specifics.
Also the book lawsuit wasn't over old or new titles, it was loaning them 1:N instead of 1:1 because "pandemic". I didn't think it was a great idea at the time and everything in that lawsuit has pointed towards it just being an outright foolhardy effort. There were on a great path towards expanding digital lending boundaries (by letting any library add their books to the IA's lending circulation) and screwed it all up.
strangattractor 2 hours ago [-]
The Archive purchased 78s likely destined to be destroyed. These where digitized. [0]
"The focus of the lawsuit was the Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project, which officially started in 2017 and aimed to digitize the shellac discs that were the dominant medium for recorded music from the 1890s until the 1940s and 1950s, when vinyl arrived. With the help of audio preservationist George Blood (who was also named as a defendant in the suit), the Archive said it has digitized more than 400,000 of these old recordings." [1]
What's the URL? Curious if it's still valid and if it were uploaded by some random user or one of the archiving projects.
rtkwe 2 hours ago [-]
> not really archival and preservation
The trick is you want them to be archived now when they're readily available not years from now when they're hard or impossible to find. The difficulty is justifying holding on to them that long when they can't be accessed and deciding when they should be exposed.
NemoNobody 5 hours ago [-]
"Somehow slipped in" - are you fr rn?
I don't wonder anything about that, was very convenient.
aerostable_slug 2 hours ago [-]
Are you claiming the copyright holders put them there?
You might want to be specific about which ones were some kind of false flag conspiracy plot (is it just "Rumours"?) because there are thousands and thousands of pirated pieces of media on archive.org. I am behind there being some kind of archive project but as things stand the site was/is just Mega with a veneer of respectability.
AnthonyMouse 1 hours ago [-]
Mega isn't indexed and decrypts content in javascript on the client. If people are using it to share your stuff, you have to find where they're sharing it to even find out that it's on there. Now, Hollywood did this to themselves, because back when it was Megaupload the fact that they had a search index was used as an excuse to shut down the whole service because a couple of employees used it to access infringing stuff without taking it down, so Mega got rid of that as a means to prevent it from happening again.
Internet Archive is searchable and executes DMCA takedown notices. If something of yours is on there and you don't want it to be, it's not because they're making it hard to change that.
badlibrarian 2 hours ago [-]
Internet Archive continues to leak the verified email address of the uploader of each item, so conspiracy guy can run a spot check should he so desire.
ilamont 7 hours ago [-]
> Days before the settlement was announced, record labels had indicated that everyone but the Internet Archive and its founder, Brewster Kahle, had agreed to sign a joint settlement
Does IA have an independent board of directors? If so, why is the board and its members never mentioned in the copyright lawsuits? Most other organizations (nonprofit and corporate) with independent boards would be heavily involved in any major litigation and issuing statements as developments warrant.
I don't see that here - the IA blog post is by a director of library services. The about page (https://blog.archive.org/about/) mentions nothing about a board.
IA has a board page. My guess is the other members are independent in the sense they have don’t have material financial ties. However, you can draw your own conclusions as to whether they would ever tell management “no.”
The issue is that nonprofits don’t have shareholders that can hold boards accountable. As seen w/ OpenAI, sometimes big donors can bully (or eject) the board, and that probably needs to happen with IA.
ayaros 6 hours ago [-]
I guess things could be worse? The Internet Archive is too precious of a resource for humanity to lose. I still fear its days are numbered. I don't think non-technical people appreciate it, or are even aware of its existence, in the same way as Wikipedia.
miki123211 5 hours ago [-]
I'm a technical person, and not a fan of copyright by any means, and I don't appreaciate it either.
To be clear, I appreciate the concept of an "Internet Archive", but the current organization / execution / management is absolutely atrocious.
NemoNobody 5 hours ago [-]
Nah, it's like the wild West - I'll hold IA accountable ONLY for CP - ONLY.
If corpos want there shit off the site - they should have to send someone to take that down - every single times the whole process, always on them.
The IA is just like a big box with a copy of everything in another box.
Boxes aren't bad bc I put something bad into a box - this is a little more nuanced than that
NoNameHaveI 5 hours ago [-]
There's an easy solution to this: just move hosting to and register in the Marshall Islands where there is effectively no copyright enforcement. It is difficult to threaten someone with a lawsuit when the law they cite is not enforced.
roywiggins 5 hours ago [-]
The Internet Archive has substantial physical presence in the United States:
The Marshall Islands are litterally in the Compact Of Free Association with the United States
At that point, China is as good as any, for not batting a rats about western copyright, so bad the hosting would be a little bit complicated.
IshKebab 2 hours ago [-]
Ha I'm sure their internet connectivity is excellent. And even if it was, you think a country with a population of 42k is somehow immune to political pressure?
RiverCrochet 2 hours ago [-]
The forthcoming "Block BEARD" act in the U.S. will soon enable rights holders to apply for foreign sites to be blocked (at the IP level I believe) on piracy grounds.
But hosting it there long-term would still have value even if U.S. users couldn't easily get to it. Access would be legal when copyrights expire and everything becomes public domain.
Therefore, above, long-term means long-long-long-term: enough time for all U.S. copyrights to expire under the current law, which would be about 250 years. This of course assumes no U.S. copyright reform, no expansion of the current copyright law, and that U.S. law/authority/power continues to exist in its current form.
Do you think such an archive could be kept alive that long? Here are some potential issues:
- Literal piracy (e.g. pirates coming to shore)
- Storage of data for 250 years (metal rusts, dvds melt/warp, paper is not data dense)
- Climate change
- Undersea cable cuts
- Nuclear war
- Technological evolution (will networking and storage look the same in 50, 100, 200 years)
criddell 5 hours ago [-]
Moving the IA to the Marshall Islands is your idea of an easy solution?
ronsor 5 hours ago [-]
The Marshall Islands does not even have a copyright law.
ethagnawl 7 hours ago [-]
> He suggested that perhaps labels just "don't like the Internet Archive's way of pushing the envelope on copyright and fair use."
This seems to be the whole ballgame.
They're (UMG, specifically) doing the same to YouTuber Rick Beato. His music theory/analysis/reaction videos are very careful to abide by the rules of _fair use_ and, yet, UMG is still drowning him in copyright violation claims. He's had to hire representation to deal with the backlog of claims that are (extremely likely) all bogus and _hope_ to keep his videos and channel online.
On one hand, their behavior is baffling, as I've streamed and purchased music from these companies I would not have otherwise because of Beato's channel. On the other, it's completely unsurprising, as they stand to _have their cake and eat it too_ by introducing chokepoints for _all_ access to their music (in theory, anyways) and suing anyone in the hopes of inking these bullshit settlements with anyone who dares get within a few miles of their moat.
wackget 6 hours ago [-]
The people at these companies probably do realise that literally nobody has ever tried to watch a video like Rick Beato's to simply listen to a piece of music. Anyone who is watching a Rick Beato video is watching it because of the theory, discussion, and commentary surrounding the music.
A record label has never lost a sale because somebody discovered they could "get music for free" by watching YouTube critique videos.
Realistically, what's probably happening is the labels have decided it's too (i.e. would cost too much money) to apply a nuanced approach to copyright striking and so are knowingly flagging everything containing snippets of their music whether it's fair use or not. They've simply decided to not care.
ryandrake 5 hours ago [-]
There appears to be no cost or downside to falsely flagging, so it's unsurprising that they just spam flag everything on the off chance that they are able to do some damage to someone.
When you're a hammer, every problem is solved by whacking something. When your business is run by lawyers, every problem is solved with legal action.
gs17 5 hours ago [-]
> A record label has never lost a sale because somebody discovered they could "get music for free" by watching YouTube critique videos.
I'd imagine it's even the opposite, it's probably inspired people to listen to music they wouldn't otherwise. The record labels have spent a lot of time and money to shut down someone doing free advertising for their product!
mmis1000 3 hours ago [-]
The mindset that someone will buy a album because he have no idea about WTF it is and can not listen to it on the internet is really interesting to me.
Like, why would you even buy a album and add it to your collection if you have no idea what it is?
gs17 1 hours ago [-]
> someone will buy a album because he have no idea about WTF it is
Based on the advertising I see in Nashville's Music Row, I'm pretty sure that actually is their strategy. The signs they put out usually have only the artist name as meaningful information, which is only helpful if you're already a fan (I guess it does get their name into your brain otherwise), and a QR code. I have no idea who scans the QR codes.
Some people have told me it's really meant for other people in the music industry, but it feels odd that they'd have to find out about music by random signs on the side of the road.
ascorbic 1 hours ago [-]
They're stuck in the 90s mindset where they're worried about people taping songs off the radio.
rtkwe 2 hours ago [-]
They have no idea who Rick even is it's all automated. It's the biggest issue with the paper thin protection of Fair Use and the DMCA system where fair use is a proactive defense required to be adjudicated in court and the companies are not even required to review their claims for the possibility that it falls under fair use. It's exacerbated by the fact the Google's system isn't even properly DMCA, it's their own system with no legal consequences for false reports all based on minute audio matches.
vintermann 3 hours ago [-]
I think it's bold to think it's conscious planning that's behind this behavior from UMG. Most of us work or have worked with large companies, we've seen for ourselves how dysfunctional they can be.
dylan604 3 hours ago [-]
More than likely it is a subcontracted law firm that specializes in YT notices with automation. I seriously doubt that their in-house legal team do it at all. They might receive an email from the subcontractors with updates to their progress each day/week/month that rarely if ever gets reviewed by in-house legal.
mmmlinux 10 minutes ago [-]
i'm sure they have lost sales though from bad reviews.
2 hours ago [-]
raverbashing 5 hours ago [-]
> The people at these companies probably do realise that literally nobody has ever tried to watch a video like Rick Beato's to simply listen to a piece of music.
Do not anthropomorphize copyright lawyers
freedomben 5 hours ago [-]
Absolutely, and especially obvious when you realize that he only plays a few seconds of the song typically before interrupting it or talking over it. It's not in any way even close to a replacement. Their behavior only makes sense in the context of absolute and utter greed
nomilk 5 hours ago [-]
I've noticed similar false economy in some sports, where the holder of the rights is so strict that even famous pundits can't use footage (even a few seconds) or risk consequences. It seems highly detrimental to the sport itself, and perhaps even the rights holder due to the reduction in free advertising.
I wonder if this quirk is caused by the concentrated interests of rights holders' internal legal departments, where, in eagerness to keep their jobs or demand higher salaries, they pursue breaches of broadcast rights hyper aggressively, well past the point of optimal benefit to the rights holder.
throw10920 3 hours ago [-]
I've worked in a large government bureaucracy before, and I've repeatedly encountered a particular breed of bureaucrat that has no idea of what the organization is trying to accomplish (or, actively doesn't care) and has taken it upon themselves to enforce policies in their role as strictly as possible, sometimes even to the point of delighting in the power that they wield to stop people from trying to do their jobs and do good things.
AnthonyMouse 16 minutes ago [-]
There are essentially two schools of thought when it comes to rules.
The first is "rule of law" where it's important what the rules are. You need good people with knowledge of what's actually happening on the ground to be the ones who make the rules, and then the rules are strictly enforced and if that leads to a bad outcome it means the rules are deficient and there is a meaningful process for addressing that, which results in a change to the rules to prevent the bad outcome from happening in the future.
The second is "CYA" where the purpose of rules is to make prohibitions as many and broad as possible so that if anything bad happens or you have a dispute with someone you can pin a violation on them, and then the rules are ignored whenever that isn't the objective.
The best organizations use only the first system, but this is rare. If you make rules according to the first system and the way you enforce them is according to the second system, you have a minor problem with under-enforcement. If you use the second system entirely, you're going to have major problems with office politics and morale. But the worst is when the people at the top are making the rules in expectation of using the second system without noticing that someone in the middle is actually enforcing them.
kps 2 hours ago [-]
Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy: “In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.”
munificent 4 hours ago [-]
I know with trademarks, the law puts a perverse incentive on businesses to ruthlessly attack uses of their trademark. If they allow even innocuous uses of it, then they risk the trademark becoming generic and losing all rights over it [1].
I wonder if a similar perverse incentive and emergent behavior is in play here where record labels worry that any encroachment on fair use could set a precedent that will come back to bite them.
It's really a quite different set of law because the whole point of a trademark is that it uniquely identifies a particular seller so that buyers can distinguish it from others in the market. If that identification weakens then your trademark becomes meaningless and can no longer be enforced. But that logic doesn't apply to copyright.
anfilt 3 hours ago [-]
In my opinion something similar should apply to orphaned and abandoned works. Especially, considering how long copyright lasts.
econ 2 hours ago [-]
I think the creator of a work should be allowed to unpublish it but only if they own it entirely.
If other parties own it they should be required to make the work available without interruption or barriers and at a reasonable price.
If a recording was left to rot in some archive to the point others have a noticably better copy you've failed the obligation.
Anything that broadly looks like buying rights for the purpose of destroying the work should be stopped.
Objections should be written down and burned in a special ceremony.
rtkwe 2 hours ago [-]
Trademark is completely unrelated to copyright. You do not have an obligation to pursue every copyright infringement the same way you do for trademarks.
ajtaylor 5 hours ago [-]
That's a shame because Rick has some fantastic videos, especially his "What Makes This Song Great" series. He's showcasing some amazingly talented musicians and their work, which probably leads to some music sales. BS indeed!
MomsAVoxell 2 hours ago [-]
>On one hand, their behavior is baffling
If you look at this situation from the context of culture war(s), plural, its not so baffling.
This is basically an attempt to influence the future by controlling what it knows about the past.
Palomides 7 hours ago [-]
it's not really the same as putting snippets of media in a youtube video... the internet archive has, loosely, three categories of stuff:
* out of copyright (totally legal)
* copyright but abandoned (not legal but nobody cares and is good for society)
* copyright and actively being sold right now (not legal and huge exposure to lawsuits)
modern pop media movies, books, audio are not uploaded to the internet archive in their entirety under any kind of fair use unless you're a copyright abolitionist taking a very expansive view on the term
rwmj 5 hours ago [-]
They're the digital equivalent of a library. My local library lends out in-copyright music and films.
The real problem here however is copyright. There should be a balance between creators, publishers, readers, libraries, fair use, and remixers. But the balance is all out of whack with the publishers making most of the money and everyone else including most creators getting stiffed.
charcircuit 4 hours ago [-]
Digital equivalents to libraries typically have a fixed number of copies of a digital book paired with DRM such that the user can only read them while checked out. That is very different from how the internet archive works.
rwmj 3 hours ago [-]
Digital is fundamentally different because everything can be copied infinitely. Any model that doesn't accept this basic fact is broken. Luckily there are plenty of other models that could be used, such as compulsory licensing or flat fees that are divided amongst creators. The publishers of course are not interested in that.
thayne 4 hours ago [-]
Except for the DRM, that is exactly how the internet archive works for content that is still under copyright. However, for libraries, they often have a limited number of borrows per book (enforced with the DRM), and they are effectively renting the book, not owning it. Which gets back to the imbalance of copyright law and enforcement.
4 hours ago [-]
gs17 5 hours ago [-]
> * copyright but abandoned (not legal but nobody cares and is good for society)
This is where they should be "pushing the envelope on copyright", but for some reason they keep exposing themselves to big lawsuits.
NemoNobody 5 hours ago [-]
That's why exactly it tho - normal ppl that are not the non-profit with very limited resources and staff, upload the infringing content - it's not even the IA fault that they are hosting it and placing such a responsibility on the IA to polofe the.archive - isn't what that is.
The recording companies should have gone after the individual uploaders or this one as always bullshit - the record labels themselves can just upload a bunch music and screw the IA - it's supposed to be a copy of the whole internet.
This was just to essentially own the IA, which they effectively do now - bc it was easier for them to take over the IA, than to actually protect their content creators by going after the actual distributors, the uploaders. Obviously, they broke tho
Yeah... nothing done against those companies is actually "wrong" - thats a grey area when corpos suck as bad as they do.
djoldman 4 hours ago [-]
I'm interested to know if last year's book publisher settlement cost will be reflected in IA's public filings. I assume they'll file a 990 in november:
Isn't the DMCA already supposed to cover this type of situation? I can't tell from this article what was actually going on, unfortunately.
badlibrarian 3 hours ago [-]
Indeed they could've structured the whole project to give them DMCA protection but they chose not to. They truly thought copyright didn't apply. Then doubled down when pressed, just like the book lawsuit.
They had a number of ways to avoid this problem entirely and the fact that they didn't yet again brings Brewster's judgement into question. He's a sweet guy but clearly not an operations or business guy. He's at retirement age and has an opportunity to do the right thing. Hopefully clearing these lawsuits will open up some options.
tokai 7 hours ago [-]
There is so much pirated material on Internet Archive. They have so many movies with titles directly from the warez groups. I don't think they are done getting in trouble sadly.
pbhjpbhj 5 hours ago [-]
Google appear to host loads of infringing works (both as files and in YouTube) ... surely for both them and IA they're protected as long as they take down in response to properly formed and evidenced DMCA requests?
Unless you're suggesting this isn't user uploaded but is being put there by staff?
fckgw 2 hours ago [-]
YouTube has built a whole content ID and revenue sharing agreements as a direct result of getting sued nearly into oblivion by numerous organizations. Most "infringing works" on YouTube are permitted under an agreement laying out revenue sharing with the rights holder, and if not, is flagged and taken down when found.
None of that is in place with IA and I fear their laissez-faire attitude in this current climate is gonna bite them in the ass.
charcircuit 4 hours ago [-]
The suggestion is that the staff know that there is infringing material being hosted. Youtube can point to the billions of dollars they've invested into building content id, continually working to resolve the problem.
Palomides 7 hours ago [-]
it's frustrating that so many people use the internet archive as pirate file hosting for things that are easy to find elsewhere (legally or otherwise)
it jeopardizes all of their other missions and access to otherwise inaccessible media
999900000999 7 hours ago [-]
It really needs to be at least 2 different organizations.
Preserve the internet, store old websites.
Everything else. The whole "Emergency Lending Library" situation was just strange. A random non government organization can just declare copyright unfair and distribute whatever they want ?
And they acted surprised when the book industry reacted ?
TimorousBestie 7 hours ago [-]
> The whole "Emergency Lending Library" situation was just strange.
That was adjudicated years ago, and has nothing to do with the case at hand.
gs17 5 hours ago [-]
It's related, it demonstrates the IA's attitude toward copyright and how it's already gotten them into trouble. The huge amount of pirate content seems to largely fly under the radar, but the Library was advertising that they're not going to respect copyright and it puts the website archives at risk.
TimorousBestie 4 hours ago [-]
> The huge amount of pirate content seems to largely fly under the radar,
That’s literally how copyright enforcement works in the United States, it’s not specific to IA. Every user-submitted content publishing site is rife with piracy.
> but the Library was advertising that they're not going to respect copyright
A gross misreading of their stated intentions.
> and it puts the website archives at risk.
The archives are probably also not fair use in the present legal environment. They just happen to not to contain anything valuable enough for a big media company to get litigious. Yet.
gs17 4 hours ago [-]
> A gross misreading of their stated intentions.
Not really, they just kind of made up an "emergency" exemption. Their FAQ, instead of saying what legal precedent they were operating under, handwaves it away with a quote from a paper on libraries in general. I'm a fan of them, but they really open themselves up to liability a lot more than necessary.
3 hours ago [-]
NemoNobody 5 hours ago [-]
I thought that made them heroes - tbh, I think they thought we would save them from this - ppl don't remember goodwill like that long enough tho - haha, your trying pass it off as shade.
Amazon, the largest profiter of digital book media - they definitely got theirs during the pandemic, you don't actually need to have their back - they profited so much, during and off of, out hard times, to then do this, haha - I'll always back the IA.
I could watch the IA upload the entire series of the expanse to their front page and had no issue at all with that.
Tbh - I think the big corpos should HAVE TO subsidize the IAs existence - with no strings, so they should pay the IA to give away their shit - that is my official position.
999900000999 5 hours ago [-]
OK.
You don't believe in copyright.
It still would of made more sense to create a separate legal entity ( maybe based out of someplace with different copyright laws), if that's what they wanted to do.
Imagine you have a lemonade stand, all is well. The local health inspector is cool with it even though you don't have a permit.
Your cousin asks you if he can start selling raw milk. If you say ok fine, and sell it at the same stand the local health inspector is well within reason to shut you down.
Why couldn't your cousin start up his own stand ?
As is, I think having all of this concentrated in one entity like IA is a really bad idea. It should be distributed across a dozens of organizations, and dozens of countries.
NemoNobody 5 hours ago [-]
I actually believe in copyright. Of you write a book and use Amazon to host - THEY own that book now, they will make all decisions about it's distributions and how much you will get for your cut (Only 30% is what Amazon pays put for digital book creators) - if I don't like that, they will bully me, or you, or the entire industry of authors - Amazon will always win, BC of those copyright laws actually.
So... yeah, copyright is largely bullshit - look at LLMs - Facebook downloaded ALL OF EVERYTHING THAT WE'VE EVER MADE - to build maybe the mot profitable thing ever.. yeah, totes fine for them and that industry to do all that "theft"
Haha - is that not a joke?
I'm assuming your a Zoomer and I'm sorry they got to all of you so much, but no need to feel any guilt from piracy, that isn't actual theft, theft takes away from - this does not do that, it just makes a copy.
Marketing made these morals of yours Bud - you wouldn't have them otherwise
wizzwizz4 4 hours ago [-]
You're not responding to the comment you're replying to.
NemoNobody 5 hours ago [-]
I think the majority of infringing was uploaded by the labels themselves. I believe that, without evidence contrary - like you know, what should actually be happening if this was actually bad, but like someone already addressed - I don't know that they lost a dime when the labels uploaded the labels copy written music.
How much did they lose again? Where did that number come from?
Say what you will - no actual consumer that operates under actual capitalism would piss us off this much - but they can do whatever they want tho.
I will never see fault with the IA for any of this.
badlibrarian 4 hours ago [-]
> I think the majority of infringing was uploaded by the labels themselves
In this case Brewster and his friend personally uploaded 400,000 records to the archive and then made them available for unlimited download. Not just rare stuff, but Frank Sinatra records and the best selling single of all time.
Archiving is cool (and supposedly their charter) but they ignored the Music Modernization Act which made what they claim they were trying to do legal, including unlimited downloads. They blogged about how great it was, how it made old things effectively Fair Use for libraries, then ignored it.
Why? They wanted to get paid for distributing other people's stuff without permission. That's not cool, especially at the scale they were operating. As with the book lawsuit, they were asked nicely to remove certain items and picked an impossible to win fight instead. And lost again.
The reason to find fault with IA is that these actions and decisions put the whole operation at risk. Their recent financials show negative three million dollars in total assets and they're already running on a shoestring. No datacenter, just hard drives sitting out in a building with no air conditioning.
It's ok to love a thing, the spirit behind a thing, yet also admit that it's being run into the ground by unqualified people making terrible decisions.
TimorousBestie 7 hours ago [-]
On the other hand, it doesn’t particularly matter what legal material the Internet Archive makes available; the various media companies will still attempt to sue them into nonexistence. How much “fair use” you’re entitled to in the states these days is merely a function of how big your legal budget is.
duxup 6 hours ago [-]
The whole "The National Emergency Library" thing from IA makes me wonder if the folks in charge at IA are done with getting themselves in trouble.
That whole saga was absurd and self inflicted.
NemoNobody 5 hours ago [-]
I'm fairly certain it was to create this platform right here and right now - this is exactly what they wanted, an actual challenge to the record labels authority's.
The 90s ended forever ago - def jam and blah blah, why tf are they still relevant again??
Bc they are a monopoly with like a super legal total control over their distributed products - that doesn't end for like 100 years.
If copyright law changes - who win more than the IA?
THATS why this is happening ;)
duxup 5 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure that's relevant to the emergency library situation.
They were going to lose that fight from the outset.
qingcharles 5 hours ago [-]
Seems like a lot of stuff is being purged from (at least) the search index lately?
Why isn't the Internet Archive a function of the Library of Congress, anyone know? Seems to me that IA should be very well funded by us all.
SXX 2 hours ago [-]
Because we don't want it be shutdown because some political figure dislike that it archived something they don't like?
MomsAVoxell 1 hours ago [-]
But isn’t the purpose of the Library of Congress to avoid that scenario?
textfiles 5 hours ago [-]
Hope everyone's enjoying the Internet Archive!
badlibrarian 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
josefritzishere 8 hours ago [-]
The inability to prove damages normally is the end of a suit. But there is something magic in copyright where judges seem to waive that requirement. This special dispensation seems to be extralegal, and limited to where it serves large copyright holders.
Anduia 8 hours ago [-]
See the Copyright Act of 1976. That battle was lost long ago and judges can't ignore statutary damages.
stonogo 4 hours ago [-]
The lesson of the 2020s is that judges can do whatever the hell they want.
ToucanLoucan 7 hours ago [-]
The secret ingredient is b̶r̶i̶b̶e̶s̶ generous donations to political fundraisers
pessimizer 5 hours ago [-]
If I had to guess, I'd say that the settlement was a lot closer to $41K than one would think, and that's why it's being kept quiet. Otherwise, the labels saw themselves either losing a famous copyright case in the age of LLM threats to copyright, or winning a famous copyright case in an awkward fashion that made people far less sympathetic to them.
People are on copyright holders' side in the battle with LLMs. Either winning or losing this case would be poison.
badlibrarian 3 hours ago [-]
The settlement was beating them down and getting them to remove millions of items and police things going forward. Things are still disappearing left and right. Huge damage was done to the culture by Brewster's ill-advised, hardcore stance that played right into the hands of corporate interests.
NemoNobody 4 hours ago [-]
Haha - only people that don't have experience with AI.
When the NYT sued OpenAI - I emailed the Times that if it's between the Times or AI, we don't need the NYT anymore.
I want UBI from the AI companies - if they can provide its bc they actually did deliver something that might as well be a god - how they get there - I will forgive, soooo much, almost anything if you think about what AGI actually is.
If I were Sam, I'd never stop talking about it either - for most people, ChatGPT is already "alive" more than can understand that it isn't.
Haha, in a few years, ask a Gen Alpha if they'd give up AI - fpr copyright law, haha
hsuduebc2 7 hours ago [-]
Oh the good ol' greed. They surely deserve the piracy.
NemoNobody 5 hours ago [-]
This fall will be the first time since Uni that I download all music released the whole year.
I don't even know what I'll do with it - files for music in 25 - on MY DEVICE, I'll prolly just give it all away - I think we should bring back "mixtape" jump drives (wow so much of that is ancient) bc with all the TBs we can fit on like a penny sized drive - pfft, yeah we all could just bring one drive around with us, and be done paying for all the musical media that exists already - forever.
Sharing is caring
gojomo 4 hours ago [-]
Imminent Death of the Archive Averted, Film at 11.
cramcgrab 7 hours ago [-]
Seeing with ai there’s not gonna be a need for copyright and patents in the future. So easy to invent new stuff now.
NemoNobody 4 hours ago [-]
I just saw your comment as I was leaving here - you are right
I'm just begining to realize exactly what you stated, despite my own ranting AI, automation and all without actually working with any LLMs for several months - jumped into a smaller project last week and I realized that essentially none of the limits that I thought I had were even there anymore.
Weeks of work and actual human activity down to days - days of working, down to minutes.
I'm trying to retrain how I think - otherwise, the sub 4 year old future creators will be so far ahead of me.
Haha, it's gonna be like building in Fortnite - Millennials had to go no build.
Co-Creation WITH an AI - it's actually a huge shift, then it's as you said, so easy to build new stuff.
The book lawsuit was over current titles (not really archival and preservation), and the record lawsuit wasn't really about the rare 78s, it was about the modern Jimi Hendrix and Paul McCartney records that somehow slipped in. And their refusal to follow the modern law that they themselves celebrated that made what they're trying to do (including downloads) explicitly legal. But that law prohibited fundraising, and they couldn't resist tweeting out links to Frank Sinatra records with a big banner on top asking for money.
In both lawsuits the discovery revealed tech debt and sloppy process at the Archive that made it impossible for them to argue on behalf of the future we all want.
Also the book lawsuit wasn't over old or new titles, it was loaning them 1:N instead of 1:1 because "pandemic". I didn't think it was a great idea at the time and everything in that lawsuit has pointed towards it just being an outright foolhardy effort. There were on a great path towards expanding digital lending boundaries (by letting any library add their books to the IA's lending circulation) and screwed it all up.
"The focus of the lawsuit was the Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project, which officially started in 2017 and aimed to digitize the shellac discs that were the dominant medium for recorded music from the 1890s until the 1940s and 1950s, when vinyl arrived. With the help of audio preservationist George Blood (who was also named as a defendant in the suit), the Archive said it has digitized more than 400,000 of these old recordings." [1]
Benn Jordan discussion of piracy in general. [2]
[0] https://great78.archive.org/
[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/internet-archi...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7EHRpnJICQ&t=952s
The trick is you want them to be archived now when they're readily available not years from now when they're hard or impossible to find. The difficulty is justifying holding on to them that long when they can't be accessed and deciding when they should be exposed.
I don't wonder anything about that, was very convenient.
You might want to be specific about which ones were some kind of false flag conspiracy plot (is it just "Rumours"?) because there are thousands and thousands of pirated pieces of media on archive.org. I am behind there being some kind of archive project but as things stand the site was/is just Mega with a veneer of respectability.
Internet Archive is searchable and executes DMCA takedown notices. If something of yours is on there and you don't want it to be, it's not because they're making it hard to change that.
Does IA have an independent board of directors? If so, why is the board and its members never mentioned in the copyright lawsuits? Most other organizations (nonprofit and corporate) with independent boards would be heavily involved in any major litigation and issuing statements as developments warrant.
I don't see that here - the IA blog post is by a director of library services. The about page (https://blog.archive.org/about/) mentions nothing about a board.
This is the board: https://archive.org/about/bios
The issue is that nonprofits don’t have shareholders that can hold boards accountable. As seen w/ OpenAI, sometimes big donors can bully (or eject) the board, and that probably needs to happen with IA.
To be clear, I appreciate the concept of an "Internet Archive", but the current organization / execution / management is absolutely atrocious.
If corpos want there shit off the site - they should have to send someone to take that down - every single times the whole process, always on them.
The IA is just like a big box with a copy of everything in another box.
Boxes aren't bad bc I put something bad into a box - this is a little more nuanced than that
https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/bay-area-warehouse-inter...
At that point, China is as good as any, for not batting a rats about western copyright, so bad the hosting would be a little bit complicated.
But hosting it there long-term would still have value even if U.S. users couldn't easily get to it. Access would be legal when copyrights expire and everything becomes public domain.
Therefore, above, long-term means long-long-long-term: enough time for all U.S. copyrights to expire under the current law, which would be about 250 years. This of course assumes no U.S. copyright reform, no expansion of the current copyright law, and that U.S. law/authority/power continues to exist in its current form.
Do you think such an archive could be kept alive that long? Here are some potential issues:
- Literal piracy (e.g. pirates coming to shore)
- Storage of data for 250 years (metal rusts, dvds melt/warp, paper is not data dense)
- Climate change
- Undersea cable cuts
- Nuclear war
- Technological evolution (will networking and storage look the same in 50, 100, 200 years)
This seems to be the whole ballgame.
They're (UMG, specifically) doing the same to YouTuber Rick Beato. His music theory/analysis/reaction videos are very careful to abide by the rules of _fair use_ and, yet, UMG is still drowning him in copyright violation claims. He's had to hire representation to deal with the backlog of claims that are (extremely likely) all bogus and _hope_ to keep his videos and channel online.
On one hand, their behavior is baffling, as I've streamed and purchased music from these companies I would not have otherwise because of Beato's channel. On the other, it's completely unsurprising, as they stand to _have their cake and eat it too_ by introducing chokepoints for _all_ access to their music (in theory, anyways) and suing anyone in the hopes of inking these bullshit settlements with anyone who dares get within a few miles of their moat.
A record label has never lost a sale because somebody discovered they could "get music for free" by watching YouTube critique videos.
Realistically, what's probably happening is the labels have decided it's too (i.e. would cost too much money) to apply a nuanced approach to copyright striking and so are knowingly flagging everything containing snippets of their music whether it's fair use or not. They've simply decided to not care.
When you're a hammer, every problem is solved by whacking something. When your business is run by lawyers, every problem is solved with legal action.
I'd imagine it's even the opposite, it's probably inspired people to listen to music they wouldn't otherwise. The record labels have spent a lot of time and money to shut down someone doing free advertising for their product!
Like, why would you even buy a album and add it to your collection if you have no idea what it is?
Based on the advertising I see in Nashville's Music Row, I'm pretty sure that actually is their strategy. The signs they put out usually have only the artist name as meaningful information, which is only helpful if you're already a fan (I guess it does get their name into your brain otherwise), and a QR code. I have no idea who scans the QR codes.
Some people have told me it's really meant for other people in the music industry, but it feels odd that they'd have to find out about music by random signs on the side of the road.
Do not anthropomorphize copyright lawyers
I wonder if this quirk is caused by the concentrated interests of rights holders' internal legal departments, where, in eagerness to keep their jobs or demand higher salaries, they pursue breaches of broadcast rights hyper aggressively, well past the point of optimal benefit to the rights holder.
The first is "rule of law" where it's important what the rules are. You need good people with knowledge of what's actually happening on the ground to be the ones who make the rules, and then the rules are strictly enforced and if that leads to a bad outcome it means the rules are deficient and there is a meaningful process for addressing that, which results in a change to the rules to prevent the bad outcome from happening in the future.
The second is "CYA" where the purpose of rules is to make prohibitions as many and broad as possible so that if anything bad happens or you have a dispute with someone you can pin a violation on them, and then the rules are ignored whenever that isn't the objective.
The best organizations use only the first system, but this is rare. If you make rules according to the first system and the way you enforce them is according to the second system, you have a minor problem with under-enforcement. If you use the second system entirely, you're going to have major problems with office politics and morale. But the worst is when the people at the top are making the rules in expectation of using the second system without noticing that someone in the middle is actually enforcing them.
I wonder if a similar perverse incentive and emergent behavior is in play here where record labels worry that any encroachment on fair use could set a precedent that will come back to bite them.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark
If other parties own it they should be required to make the work available without interruption or barriers and at a reasonable price.
If a recording was left to rot in some archive to the point others have a noticably better copy you've failed the obligation.
Anything that broadly looks like buying rights for the purpose of destroying the work should be stopped.
Objections should be written down and burned in a special ceremony.
If you look at this situation from the context of culture war(s), plural, its not so baffling.
This is basically an attempt to influence the future by controlling what it knows about the past.
* out of copyright (totally legal)
* copyright but abandoned (not legal but nobody cares and is good for society)
* copyright and actively being sold right now (not legal and huge exposure to lawsuits)
modern pop media movies, books, audio are not uploaded to the internet archive in their entirety under any kind of fair use unless you're a copyright abolitionist taking a very expansive view on the term
The real problem here however is copyright. There should be a balance between creators, publishers, readers, libraries, fair use, and remixers. But the balance is all out of whack with the publishers making most of the money and everyone else including most creators getting stiffed.
This is where they should be "pushing the envelope on copyright", but for some reason they keep exposing themselves to big lawsuits.
The recording companies should have gone after the individual uploaders or this one as always bullshit - the record labels themselves can just upload a bunch music and screw the IA - it's supposed to be a copy of the whole internet.
This was just to essentially own the IA, which they effectively do now - bc it was easier for them to take over the IA, than to actually protect their content creators by going after the actual distributors, the uploaders. Obviously, they broke tho
Yeah... nothing done against those companies is actually "wrong" - thats a grey area when corpos suck as bad as they do.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943...
They had a number of ways to avoid this problem entirely and the fact that they didn't yet again brings Brewster's judgement into question. He's a sweet guy but clearly not an operations or business guy. He's at retirement age and has an opportunity to do the right thing. Hopefully clearing these lawsuits will open up some options.
Unless you're suggesting this isn't user uploaded but is being put there by staff?
None of that is in place with IA and I fear their laissez-faire attitude in this current climate is gonna bite them in the ass.
it jeopardizes all of their other missions and access to otherwise inaccessible media
Preserve the internet, store old websites.
Everything else. The whole "Emergency Lending Library" situation was just strange. A random non government organization can just declare copyright unfair and distribute whatever they want ?
And they acted surprised when the book industry reacted ?
That was adjudicated years ago, and has nothing to do with the case at hand.
That’s literally how copyright enforcement works in the United States, it’s not specific to IA. Every user-submitted content publishing site is rife with piracy.
> but the Library was advertising that they're not going to respect copyright
A gross misreading of their stated intentions.
> and it puts the website archives at risk.
The archives are probably also not fair use in the present legal environment. They just happen to not to contain anything valuable enough for a big media company to get litigious. Yet.
Not really, they just kind of made up an "emergency" exemption. Their FAQ, instead of saying what legal precedent they were operating under, handwaves it away with a quote from a paper on libraries in general. I'm a fan of them, but they really open themselves up to liability a lot more than necessary.
Amazon, the largest profiter of digital book media - they definitely got theirs during the pandemic, you don't actually need to have their back - they profited so much, during and off of, out hard times, to then do this, haha - I'll always back the IA.
I could watch the IA upload the entire series of the expanse to their front page and had no issue at all with that.
Tbh - I think the big corpos should HAVE TO subsidize the IAs existence - with no strings, so they should pay the IA to give away their shit - that is my official position.
You don't believe in copyright.
It still would of made more sense to create a separate legal entity ( maybe based out of someplace with different copyright laws), if that's what they wanted to do.
Imagine you have a lemonade stand, all is well. The local health inspector is cool with it even though you don't have a permit.
Your cousin asks you if he can start selling raw milk. If you say ok fine, and sell it at the same stand the local health inspector is well within reason to shut you down.
Why couldn't your cousin start up his own stand ?
As is, I think having all of this concentrated in one entity like IA is a really bad idea. It should be distributed across a dozens of organizations, and dozens of countries.
So... yeah, copyright is largely bullshit - look at LLMs - Facebook downloaded ALL OF EVERYTHING THAT WE'VE EVER MADE - to build maybe the mot profitable thing ever.. yeah, totes fine for them and that industry to do all that "theft"
Haha - is that not a joke?
I'm assuming your a Zoomer and I'm sorry they got to all of you so much, but no need to feel any guilt from piracy, that isn't actual theft, theft takes away from - this does not do that, it just makes a copy.
Marketing made these morals of yours Bud - you wouldn't have them otherwise
How much did they lose again? Where did that number come from?
Say what you will - no actual consumer that operates under actual capitalism would piss us off this much - but they can do whatever they want tho.
I will never see fault with the IA for any of this.
In this case Brewster and his friend personally uploaded 400,000 records to the archive and then made them available for unlimited download. Not just rare stuff, but Frank Sinatra records and the best selling single of all time.
Archiving is cool (and supposedly their charter) but they ignored the Music Modernization Act which made what they claim they were trying to do legal, including unlimited downloads. They blogged about how great it was, how it made old things effectively Fair Use for libraries, then ignored it.
Why? They wanted to get paid for distributing other people's stuff without permission. That's not cool, especially at the scale they were operating. As with the book lawsuit, they were asked nicely to remove certain items and picked an impossible to win fight instead. And lost again.
The reason to find fault with IA is that these actions and decisions put the whole operation at risk. Their recent financials show negative three million dollars in total assets and they're already running on a shoestring. No datacenter, just hard drives sitting out in a building with no air conditioning.
It's ok to love a thing, the spirit behind a thing, yet also admit that it's being run into the ground by unqualified people making terrible decisions.
That whole saga was absurd and self inflicted.
The 90s ended forever ago - def jam and blah blah, why tf are they still relevant again??
Bc they are a monopoly with like a super legal total control over their distributed products - that doesn't end for like 100 years.
If copyright law changes - who win more than the IA?
THATS why this is happening ;)
They were going to lose that fight from the outset.
https://www.reddit.com/r/internetarchive/comments/1nk4pwt/ca...
People are on copyright holders' side in the battle with LLMs. Either winning or losing this case would be poison.
When the NYT sued OpenAI - I emailed the Times that if it's between the Times or AI, we don't need the NYT anymore.
I want UBI from the AI companies - if they can provide its bc they actually did deliver something that might as well be a god - how they get there - I will forgive, soooo much, almost anything if you think about what AGI actually is.
If I were Sam, I'd never stop talking about it either - for most people, ChatGPT is already "alive" more than can understand that it isn't.
Haha, in a few years, ask a Gen Alpha if they'd give up AI - fpr copyright law, haha
I don't even know what I'll do with it - files for music in 25 - on MY DEVICE, I'll prolly just give it all away - I think we should bring back "mixtape" jump drives (wow so much of that is ancient) bc with all the TBs we can fit on like a penny sized drive - pfft, yeah we all could just bring one drive around with us, and be done paying for all the musical media that exists already - forever.
Sharing is caring
I'm just begining to realize exactly what you stated, despite my own ranting AI, automation and all without actually working with any LLMs for several months - jumped into a smaller project last week and I realized that essentially none of the limits that I thought I had were even there anymore.
Weeks of work and actual human activity down to days - days of working, down to minutes.
I'm trying to retrain how I think - otherwise, the sub 4 year old future creators will be so far ahead of me.
Haha, it's gonna be like building in Fortnite - Millennials had to go no build.
Co-Creation WITH an AI - it's actually a huge shift, then it's as you said, so easy to build new stuff.