I'm so sick of modern businesses and their vampire approach on creativity and intelligent property.
I see a lot of comments in this thread with what about-isms or "I don't care, we wouldn't miss anything", but these people are short-sighted. And to be honest the hacker news community is frequently the community I loathe to engage in these topics with. Because they are always looking forward with very little respect for the past as well as very little respect for domains outside of technology.
The internet archive is a huge boon in intangible value for communities and the world. It represents a huge cultural fountain that is accessible for anyone so long as they have the ability to access a computer.
A great example of this is that the Internet Archive was the ONLY place where I could enjoy a completely random piece of lost media from a children's television show called Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. There was a lost episode where OJ Simpson was in it and it never aired because of obvious issues. BUT there was a book published from the production called "White Rabbits Can't Jump"
I can't imagine being able to go to any publisher or paid streaming service or god forbid Amazon to find this book, and I sure as shit don't believe in this community to help create ecosystems to support finding things like this.
I am so sick and tired of the copyright laws that play counter to productive creation and stymying efforts to preserve anything. The fact that I have to wait until people die until copyright is up is god awful. And the fact that I have to read people in this community who sound like boot-lickers for corporate oligarchs and their shitty value adds to the world drives me so fucking insane.
I'm only commenting here because I feel it's important to articulate that there are people out there who care, and that the vocal a-holes on this site really miss the point and the intangible value of what the internet archive provides.
Frankly, at least in the context of US Copyright Law, we need to go back to Article I of the Constitution that defines copyright. The very first sentence is "To promote the useful arts and sciences..."
If congress passes a copyright law, and that law can't demonstrate that it actually MEASURABLY does promote the useful arts and sciences, (but rather hinders them, as is often the case), then that law should be overturned, desecrated, and posted on a wall-of-shame as an example to others of what doesn't work.
I think that would solve 90% of our problems with copyright law. But that's just me. I'm not typically a "Constitutional Originalist" but I think this kind of thinking here could help.
The problem with that approach is that it would be trivial for companies to produce volumes of work and information demonstrating that it does.
Do you really think that someone like archive.org can do a better job of proving the negative than DisneyDiscoveryWarnerComcast will do producing volumes and reams of information demonstrating how they can only afford to keep making new content and supporting small creators if copyright lifetime is extended to 500 years?
The full quote is: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
The Constitution does not require that IP laws actually or measurably promote the "useful arts and sciences" because the Constitution does not require the promotion of the useful arts and sciences but rather the progress of such. Moreover, the second half of the statement, says how Congress is Constitutionally supposed to accomplish that.
The idea is protecting even the stupid stuff is what lets the actual innovation proceed, the same way protecting Larry Flynch and flag burning protects other forms of speech.
Pretty sure that 'useful' has been defined as 'make someone ridiculous amounts of money' and is part of the 'constitution' that lobbyists imprint on their marks.
I don't disagree until your ending qualification. Being picky and choosy on when it's good to be a Constitutional Originalist means you might as well not be. If the Consitution is a dynamic living document beyond just amendments on one topic, then an originality argument loses weight even on another topic
You're not alone in thinking this way. And kudos for investing the Time to write this up -- the sophists are all-too-often over-represented here, and I'm never really sure that they're always arguing in Good Faith, or if they are, they're often being so short-sighted that it's simultaneously funny and sad.
> I see a lot of comments in this thread with what about-isms or "I don't care, we wouldn't miss anything", but these people are short-sighted. And to be honest the hacker news community is frequently the community I loathe to engage in these topics with. Because they are always looking forward with very little respect for the past as well as very little respect for domains outside of technology.
There is a severe lack of appreciation for culture or even an understanding of what constitutes our culture, especially here on HN (which is why I hate discussing these topics here). It's not just a handful books that happen to turn into literature in 100 years. Our culture consists of every medium we interact with today. Allowing corporations to monopolize nearly all of it in perpetuity is quite simply immoral and severely damaging to our continued cultural development.
I find this a very diverse space with many points of view, many which I do not agree with, and also a place I find people who are rational, cultured and thoughtful.
It's not a full discussion without disagreements.
> I am so sick and tired of the copyright laws that play counter to productive creation and stymying efforts to preserve anything.
If you think about how cruel it is to make illegal the way human culture has worked for millenia, to listen to the storys you hear, retell them, remix them and make them your own in a new context.
That is against the law now.
> very little respect for domains outside of technology.
The HN community can also be out of touch with technology. If you are an AI researcher this becomes plainly obvious the moment you visit any of the AI threads (if it isn't obvious already from the 6 to 12 month delay on the posting of cutting edge developments here). Sometimes it's hard to argue with zwj.org's assessment [0].
Not just misinformed and outdated, but people here seem to have think _very_ highly of their own intelligence - often being dismissive of frankly incredible ideas because “why didn’t they just…”
I’ve never been less impressed with the supposed elite class of Ivy League “hackers” than when I’m on this site. Get over yourself. You didn’t just solve AI with your “recursive LLM”. No one with ADHD is going to benefit from your pomodoro app that is…slightly more visible than the other thousands of pomodoro apps? Also - half of you don’t have ADHD. Believe it or not - coding is an attention drain and taking stimulants to gain an advantage so that you can ship in 3 months instead of 12 is toxic as fuck.
Don’t get me started on LessWrong.
FWIW, while I agree with the sentiment - not everyone is prepared to see an unsolicited photoshop of a testicle in a wine glass. Might want to edit a warning in if you still can.
I really wish we ditched the name "copyright" altogether because of its unfortunate implications. It's not actually a right - it's a privilege. The system is entirely artificial and wouldn't exist without active social and legal enforcement. And if the privilege is abused in ways that don't benefit society, then it can and should be curtailed or even revoked.
Personally I find the term "intellectual property" to be more messed up. It isn't property, it's a government granted monopoly on reproduction and distribution.
Calling it property allows for this bizarre concept of a form of "theft" that still leaves you with the thing "stolen" from you.
How about calling it Copyrent? Isn't iut more descriptive of what it actually is, while "right" makes it more sympathetic to the liberties and freedoms they're actually reigning in.
> It's not actually a right - it's a privilege. The system is entirely artificial and wouldn't exist without active social and legal enforcement. And if the privilege is abused in ways that don't benefit society, then it can and should be curtailed or even revoked.
Personally, I think copyright itself is a completely unnecessary concept in the information age.
The original idea was to promote creative works by authors by providing a limited term right to be the sole publisher of a work. This was important in the days where it actually cost money to publish and distribute things, as it ensured you wouldn't eat the cost of that only to have someone else make all the money by doing it cheaper.
Thing is, it doesn't cost money to publish and distribute anything anymore. I think the large number of free and fan works that exist are proof enough that creativity need not be incentivized by money, and to the extent that we want to monetarily reward works we find meaningful, there are mechanisms like Patreon or Github sponsorship to do that.
Will the production quality suffer without large corporations spending ludicrous amounts of money? Yeah, probably. But I don't see how that's something worthy of preserving for all the bullshit that copyright inflicts on our culture.
I don't know what you're talking about. White Rabbits Can't Jump is available for purchase right now on Abe Books for the low, low price of $222.22 ($4.25 shipping, US only, only one copy available)[0].
The emergency library lending seemed questionable, but the current system they're doing—they have a physical copy of the book and lend out a single scanned copy to one patron at a time—sounds legal, and certainly should be legal. Doubly so when it's out of print.
> I am so sick and tired of the copyright laws that play counter to productive creation and stymying efforts to preserve anything. The fact that I have to wait until people die until copyright is up is god awful.
So what's the right way to balance the need to preserve artistic/creative works and the rights of the creator to monitize or permit usage of their works? It seems rather gross to just say that the creator has no right to sell their work or object to some source copying their work and distributing it in a way that deprives the creator of profit.
You're presenting a false dichotomy. The alternative to our current system isn't solely "no copyright at all". It's pretty simple: reduce copyright terms to something much more reasonable. I believe the original copyright term in the US was 14 years. I'm sure we can guess why that has been raised several times since then: greedy corporate interests.
Sure, it's certainly debatable what the "correct" term length should be, but I think most people could be convinced to value the commons a bit more and agree that it should be significantly shorter than the current "life of creator + 70 years" (or for works-for-hire, 95 years from publishing or 120 years from creation, whichever comes earlier).
For copyright owned by individuals, why should a creator's children and grandchildren (and great-grandchildren?) be allowed to continue to profit off their ancestor's work, depriving the commons of history and culture? For corporate ownership, why should the company be able to profit for longer than the lifetime of anyone around when it was created or published? Hell, most companies aren't even around that long, so ultimately the copyright ends up being passed to several other companies that have no relation to the original owner.
But really... 14 years sounds reasonable to me. I would even say 25 or 30 years would be ok, if the consensus is that 14 years is too short.
We could also go with a limited renewal system, like is used for patents. Say you get 14 years, and if, after those 14 years, the work is still important to you, you can renew the copyright for another 14 years, or something like that. People and companies who still actively gain economic benefits from their work 14 years later will go to the effort to renew it, but otherwise -- what is probably the majority of cases -- it'll fall into the public domain.
Of course, copyright isn't just governed by US law: the Berne Convention, at least, attempts to govern and harmonize copyright to some extent, and it requires minimums of 50 years after the creators death for most types of copyrightable works. But this is all doable, with political will behind it. As usual, that's always the problem.
One would think that this should be in the hands of our elected officials, however historically they have been more sympathetic to the idea that we need longer and stronger copyright than weaker.
To speak to why we need this sort of thing I would have to harken back to a fun talk that Paul Heald gave back in 2012[0] where he showed this fantastic chart[1] that shows the number of titles for sale on amazon by publish year.
The only thing I can assume from the chart is that either the publishing industry in the mid 1900s suddenly found itself publishing the same amount of books as they did in the 1830, no one cares about the books written between 1920 and 1990, or copyright has caused the loss of an enormous amount culture. According to the chart, and the talk, there are 7 times as many books published in the 1910s than are available from 1930s-1950s.
The entire concept of copyright is problematic - it limits what you can do with property that you own. It's a government granted monopoly.
Ideally copyright would be eliminated and people who choose to create will choose to create. There is development in lots of areas that aren't copyrightable.
If you want to keep copyright, then it should be reduced to the bear minimum to incentivize creative works - that could be on the order of 20 - 30 years.
You return to the original concept of (American) copyright.
Encourage more creative work by exchanging a temporary government granted monopoly now for the promise of it becoming available to society's benefit later.
Current copyright terms are too long. Not everything needs to be monetizable to the nth degree in perpetuity in order for sustainable livelihoods to exist.
We should be more discerning with where we allow copyright to be enforced. In my view, copyright's only legitimate purpose is to prevent someone else from selling your work as their own in order to make money. If the person or entity distributing your work is doing so with no direct recompense and only has the aim of making the work widely accessible mostly for education, scholarship and to the impoverished who would not otherwise purchase your work, then there should be no case to be tried. You wouldn't make any money off of these uses anyways. The people with enough disposable income to buy your book or software along with dozens of other copyright protected works they may purchase in a year aren't (generally) the same people who spend hours scouring IA or torrent sites for a freebie, their time is worth too much for that when they can just click Buy Now on Amazon and be done with it. Those are the people, whales in gaming industry parlance, that are paying your bills. Fighting legal battles against librarians and pirates won't win you any customers, it'll just reduce your publicity and sour what's left of it.
There's a fine line that could exist, but doesn't right now. Archiving content is a concept that goes back to the first cave paintings, and one tactic that has been proposed is to archive silently (meaning don't publish the archive immediately), then publish when the original source is lost. Archive.org did at one point do this, but given how often the internet changes, and the difficulty of tracking published and unpublished content, this eventually went away. We could create a robots.txt-like standard to indicated published and unpublished content, but there is actual money being made by destroying content and siloing everything. Till we accept that destroying history is bad, no attempt to solve this problem will be considered. We can have both, but the people fighting archive.org don't want both.
The "rights of the creator to monitize or permit usage of their works" are only something we as a society grant in order to incentivize more creation. There is nothing that needs to be balanced. The creators also have no "right" to make a profit either.
Capitalism causes some contradictions, this is one of those: you need a complicated/expensive scheme to lawfully defend the rights of content creators because the only possible incentive for producing content is monetary return from selling artificially scarce copies of this content.
In a world where content producers were financed anyway, because we understood as a society that this is valuable, this waste wouldn’t be necessary and we probably would have less “Avengers Nth the movie”. That was the norm and how the likes of Da Vinci and others got to do their work that are now so much appreciated, so I don’t think it’s that utopian.
Part of the problem is that there is a natural tendency for people taking extreme positions to begin dominating non-profit, academic etc types of organizations. This results in unnecessary risk taking or alienating different groups in the society that risks the organisation's core deliverable. In this case, management adventurism in an area they were widely advised as legally risky has led to existential risk.
On this specific issue, there was very much a fully compliant way to dramatic increase the number of copies in circulation - which was to reach out to all the libraries which were closed, get their catalogues all of which is electronic anyway and administer lending with a much expanded collection. It is just extra work - which likely would have gotten funded. Instead the management irresponsibily tried to score political points.
We need to have the right governance & KPIs in the charters of these critical organizations to prevent extreme people from grabbing their agenda
Internet Archive not only has lost episodes, but whole lost seasons of shows. For example, Little Britain has been “cancelled” on streaming/digital purchases. The DVDs are out of print so third party sellers jack up the price. Internet Archive provides a way of enjoying these out of print works.
> Internet Archive was the ONLY place where I could enjoy a completely random piece of lost media from a children's television show called Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Same for me with Le roi et l'oiseau and Peter and the Wolf by Disney.
If you are looking for rare things in french or with frech subs like le Roi et l'oiseau, I also recommend checking the private torrent tracker called ygg (https://mamot.fr/@YggTorrent - you may have to change your DNS, check this page regularly as they move around a lot)
The idea behind private tracker is that you are supposed to store as much content as you take from the network and you are actually incentivized to keep old rare stuff you like for people like you out there.
I would argue that the aspects of culture that shape the culture are inherently recorded by the culture. The loss of one specific work known by very few can hardly be reason to panic, because there are petabytes of this content which I'm pretty sure no one will remember ever existed in the future, except the AIs that are trained on them. Now if the work that was lost was something of value, like a mathematical paper that wasn't realized for its benefit, that would be a counter argument, but those are stored in other vaults of provenance. I'm in the camp that the internet archive is for nostalgia and curiosity enthusiasts.
> I am so sick and tired of the copyright laws that play counter to productive creation and stymying efforts to preserve anything.
Very much this. Copyright was a hack that was meant to encourage creation. I feel like it often does the reverse, and is robbing us of our public domain and making it harder for people to create.
Yes, while we have a capitalist society we need to enable creating things that can be copied somehow, but I think currently copyright law hurts that as much as it helps.
Creating silos of IP owned by giant companies that rent seek over things made ages ago, encouraged to sit on them and extract value by remaking them, rereleasing old works in new forms to get people to pay again, and stopping anyone else from exploring the ideas without pointlessly recreating the scenarios to avoid copyright violation.
We need to be able to preserve works, to share, to build off others' work, and to explore ideas further after the original creators put them out there. It feels like copyright works for giant companies that can hoarde IP, and the lucky few who make huge amounts from something that blows up, but it sucks for actually encouraging most creators, making living off creation viable for normal people, and most of all: it is terrible for building on other's work.
I think copyright length needs to be way shorter, ideally with some provision requiring source for code being submitted to a copyright office to be released after the duration runs out, as patents require explanation. (In an ideal world also stems for music and stuff, but that becomes really hard to prove and enforce).
I don't think there are easy answers, but I worry we are locked into a system that makes us worse off as a whole.
If it makes you feel better, just skimming the top reply threads on here, the most upvoted replies seem to be ones in support of your argument. And FWIW, I'm right there with you. But I also don't have all the energy I need to be pissed off all the time. Right now, a lot of that anger is directed at the gun lobby since I have a young child in school.
Pushing the idea that software is copyrightable is going to be Bill Gate's lasting legacy and history will eventually look back at it as one of humanities worse policies.
There is way more pros than cons for just scratching Copyright as it is. Patents are another insanity. Money should be a mean not the goal. We are literally living in a dystopia and most of us are so mired in it we can't see it.
I know the government has viewed certain companies as "too big to fail," because of the negative financial impact we would experience if they were to do so.
I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a repository of digital or physical artifacts is "too big to fail" because of the negative cultural impact their failure would have.
In the absence of that, anyone who sees high cultural value to the preservation of these digital artifacts should, counterintuitively, not treat the Internet Archive as having some special status, but should treat it as a liability. It has become the custodian of too much, and too much is on the line if it fails.
Rather than trying to constantly shore up the IA so it can't fail financially, we should be looking at ways to preserve those artifacts redundantly, so that even if the IA fails, it's not a calamity.
> I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a repository of digital or physical artifacts is "too big to fail" because of the negative cultural impact their failure would have.
In the US that would be the Library of Congress with its Mandatory Deposit requirement.
Which in the grand scheme of things almost nothing is deposited to since the US aligned with Berne Convention lack of explicit copyright notification requirements.
> I know the government has viewed certain companies as "too big to fail," because of the negative financial impact we would experience if they were to do so.
> I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a repository of digital or physical artifacts is "too big to fail" because of the negative cultural impact their failure would have.
If there is, the Internet Archive isn't it.
Yeah, it's super important in certain weird technology and library subcultures, but few people outside of them would even notice it if disappeared. If they shut down, the story wouldn't even be able to muscle it's way onto the front page of the New York Times: it would loose to whatever the latest Trump drama is and the Nth repetition of the standard mass shooting media package.
> In the absence of that, anyone who sees high cultural value to the preservation of these digital artifacts should, counterintuitively, not treat the Internet Archive as having some special status, but should treat it as a liability. It has become the custodian of too much, and too much is on the line if it fails.
> Rather than trying to constantly shore up the IA so it can't fail financially, we should be looking at ways to preserve those artifacts redundantly, so that even if the IA fails, it's not a calamity.
Yeah, especially since the Internet Archive (as an organization) has proven itself to be irresponsible.
Lots of people want to turn the publishers into the villains, for ideological reasons as well as a bias towards the Internet Archive, but the it's the IA that fucked up here. They imperiled their core mission for some unnecessary grandstanding. They either need to fire whatever lawyers OK'd the "Emergency Library" or the leaders that refused to listen to sane legal advice telling them not to do it.
> certain weird technology and library subcultures, but few people outside of them would even notice it if disappeared
It's pretty much indispensible to anybody who's a researcher.
It's very frequent that you're tracking down citations to webpages that don't exist anymore, and the IA is the only way to find sources.
Not to mention that it's also often the only way to quickly get access to non-bestseller books that are more than a couple of decades old, which is also commonly needed for research purposes. Many of these books are only otherwise available in the country's largest research libraries. (Google has copies too, but nobody can view them.)
It's not weird or a subculture unless you think those labels apply to researchers. And there are a lot of researchers out there, across academics, non-fiction authors, and journalists.
More ppl in every town prob use IA than their local library. It's important (albeit overly central, but they are working on resolving that via IPFS and other technologies)
Internet Archive is likely the only memory of the digital world. They may or may not have made a mistake during the covid pandemic by extending their book lending program, but in the age of IA where many text and images are going to lack any source of truth, they may be one of the very few ways to document modern history.
I can't disagree about the irresponsibility of the IA when it comes to the Emergency Library stuff. But I for one would be pretty heartbroken to lose access to the absolutely enormous catalog of live shows from a ton of bands that IA hosts completely legally.
> Yeah, it's super important in certain weird technology and library subcultures, but few people outside of them would even notice it if disappeared.
A service can be important even if few people use it directly. The service can have downstream effects that are beneficial to a lot of people because the people who do use it are creating and disseminating other content that filters its way down.
An analogy would be the US National Weather Service (NOAA). Few people look directly at an NOAA feed, but it's used by news channels, apps, airlines, scientists, etc. and becomes content and services that most people have benefited from.
A robust archive lowers the cost/time of doing research. It enables fact checking and investigation, particularly of an historical or obscure nature. It services the long tail of less frequently accessed content that many of us will, at some time, want access to. Basically all the reasons a research library is useful.
> If they shut down, the story wouldn't even be able to muscle it's way onto the front page of the New York Times: it would loose to whatever the latest Trump drama is and the Nth repetition of the standard mass shooting media package.
That is not a good metric. If the louvre burned, that would make headlines everywhere, but it would be nowhere near as disasterous as if the internet archive was destroyed.
Just because most people may not have heard of it, it doesn't mean it's not critically important.
I'm sure most people in the US hadn't heard of many of the banks involved in the 2008 financial crisis, but many of them, after that fact, might agree that they were indeed too big to fail.
> Lots of people want to turn the publishers into the villains
I mean, they are the villains here. They’re sueing the IA over something that is less than a footnote in their balance book.
They’re purely doing this for the chilling effect it will have on other people that might be impertinent enough to try and share their books with others.
> we should be looking at ways to preserve those artifacts redundantly, so that even if the IA fails, it's not a calamity
Its 212 petabytes as of december 2021[1], that alone would be a bit less than 12 thousand 18 TB HDDs or LTO-9's. We've made virtually zero significant progress in long-term storage technology.
Its like if they are getting burned like the library of alexandria because of some copyright vampires, I wouldn't even be angry, just sad, its just what we deserve.
Destroying things over copyright will eventually be seen as absurd as ancient religious beliefs.
The future will laugh at us as some primitive ignorant culture with our heads shoved up our asses dismantling society because of some imaginary oh so sacred legal fiction called copyright.
Why do some hoarding rent seekers hold every key here and get to indiscriminately burn down our global village on a whim like a feudal lord and all we can say is "please sire, spare the library, can you burn it more slowly than the rest?"
We overthrew monarchies 200 years ago so we wouldn't have to deal with this anymore. Having these assholes sneak back in through some courtier backdoor via an institution where people still wear wigs and robes to make us all renters from (intellectual) property lords, it needs to go.
> we should be looking at ways to preserve those artifacts redundantly, so that even if the IA fails, it's not a calamity.
We don't need to look too far. IA could simply extend their middle-finger and move to Mexico, Spain, Thailand, or Sealand. Frankly, IA should be mirrored in every country that does not respect the West's initiative of blocking access and unresolvable takedown notices. Fuck US copyright anti-information bullshit. Publishers represent themselves and their own greed, not the authors and artists that created the content. There are rare success stories[1], but how many other works have been looted by publishers at the expense of the long dead content creator's family?
> IA could simply extend their middle-finger and move to ...
Unfortunately, the US government directly expands the reach of (US) copyright, patents, and trademarks with the "Free Trade" agreements they've managed to get countries around the world to sign up to.
If Sealand had an effective army ;), and could thereby say "Thanks, but no" then that might be an option. Until then though...
UNESCO Cultural Heritage Sites are basically this in spirit.
But “too big to fail” is bad policy no matter what you apply it to. That we have practiced this bad policy does not mean we should continue doubling down on it.
Too big to fail comes from the fear of popular unrest (btw, this also works in non-democratic countries, albeit is weaker). There will be no popular unrest here.
I think we need a PBS for the web, and the Internet Archive should be one of the cornerstones of such an organization.
Add to it other educational materials that would otherwise show up on youtube or elsewhere with advertisements, and you have a decent basis for the 21st century and beyond.
With regards to "too big to fail", one side that doesn't get talked about as much is that "too big to fail" banks get more regulatory scrutiny and how much risk they are allowed to take on is regulated.
If the Internet Archive is "too big to fail" then there should be more scrutiny of their actions and the avoidance of risky behavior.
Anybody with any legal sense could have told you that the "National Emergency Library" was a risky move.
The Library of Congress is open to the public. Visitors can freely read most of the books and other materials in the collection. You will generally have to travel to the actual library; only a limited subset of their collection is available online.
I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a repository of digital or physical artifacts is "too big to fail" because of the negative cultural impact their failure would have.
>> I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a repository of digital or physical artifacts is "too big to fail" because of the negative cultural impact their failure would have.
You can wonder all you like, and call me a cynic, but the US runs on money not culture. The American identity is built on money and wealth and excess, not on anything you might describe as "culture".
The IA would not "fail" if it was just left alone, but business never saw a nickel they didn't want to grab, so the law suits are not exactly surprising. And I expect the courts to lean towards the publishers.
The US runs on rule of law, and copyright law has been around for centuries. Many sites that violate copyright laws would be fine if left alone. That doesn’t mean they should be immune from lawsuits.
Everyone was telling the internet archive that this was a dumb idea because it opened them to lawsuits with ruinous fines. Now the chickens are coming home to roost and IA is crying foul.
It can be true that the internet archive is an invaluable store of history while also being true that they made an embarrassing own-goal.
fortunately, someone saying that does not make it real. Think of a "soup" and of "experiment" and you will get more detail. Resolving an entire nation to a 1 or 0 classification is not defensible, right?
A distributed, highly resilient digital museum. The internet archive meets S3 meets BitTorrent. We’re most of the way there, just need improvements around durability, rebalancing around geographies, and the identity and metadata (item inventory) planes.
(no association with IA, just an active contributor)
Back in the day, a copyright measured in decades made sense, because it took that long to promote and distribute a work and derive reasonable profit from it.
Today that process takes days, maybe months (apart from the rare work that languishes, only to be "discovered" later).
Copyright should be much shorter -- a couple years at most -- with renewal available if the creator really believes the work has yet to find its audience.
The standard for abandoned works still protected under the existing system should default against the (potential) holder of the original copyright as long as a good-faith effort was made to reach them, and damages should amount to some sort of split of the profits.
I don't think I agree with this. Novels can take years to write, and to have their copyright expire after only a few years may not be enough for the author to write another book. What would be the motivation to write a series if the series isn't worth printing after only a few books? It goes doubly if the novel might be up for a movie or a TV adaptation: the game of thrones tv adaptation didn't happen until much later after the first book... does this mean George R R Martin should be paid 0 while HBO makes a killing on the first few seasons? How would any artist retire ever if they cannot make money off their existing body of work?
For what it is worth, Cory Doctorow used to license his books with Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs. You can even find direct and free downloads to his books on his website [1]. At the same time, his publishers were selling hardcopies.
Unfortunately, at some point he stopped doing it. He explains
> There is also the fact that, in the time since Creative Commons licenses were negotiated, publishers have entered into agreements with the large ebook retailers that allow for price matching. This is in part an artifact of anti-trust litigation, but it means that if someone somewhere offers the book at $0, it technically allows all of the other ebook stores to offer the book at $0 as well.
> Thus far my publishers have been good about grandfathering in the CC-licensed books that I already had, but for the last couple of books I haven’t done CC licensing, in part because of the real fear that Amazon could set the price at $0 and there would be no recourse for my publishers—not even the recourse of not letting Amazon sell the book, because of deals ensuring that if Amazon sells one book of a publisher’s, they have to sell the whole catalog.
Fair arguments, thanks for the thoughts. I think all of it needs to be taken in the context that "helping" creators is a secondary goal in service to the prime goal of maximizing creative output overall.
That said, I'm sympathetic to creators; I've written several (unpublished) novels myself.
Most novels don't support the authors that write them. There's no argument to be made that Jane Doe's 20,000th-ranked novel makes her nothing in the third year instead of three dollars.
At the other end of the scale you have George R.R. Martin. I'm sure he would be fine with or without the revenue from HBO's GoT. That said, in that particular case I think it's likely that HBO would want his blessing in any case -- especially since he hadn't written the ending yet. Without his cooperation, would people have been as likely to watch knowing the ending was made up by someone else?
So then you have the mid-tier authors -- a misnomer since really you're talking about the 99.9th percentile, where GRRM is the 99.9999th. But in any case, I still think that the vast majority of the revenue from a novel generally comes in the first 2-3 years. If losing that last, let's say 5%, makes the difference between success and starvation, that seems like a rare case to me -- even for authors who write slowly.
As for retirement, I'm not sure how to answer except to say let's pick an author who is clearly self-supporting, but not GRRM: Piers Anthony. He's still cranking out Xanth novels (last I checked). Do you suppose sales from his Battle Circle books (published in the '60s and '70s) are contributing materially to his retirement? Ha, I just checked and he's up to 45 books in the Xanth series. :-)
I’d argue that copyright and intellectual property more broadly shouldn’t exist.
That wouldn’t lead to the end of culture but a cultural explosion as people became able to remix and propagate ideas more freely without the fear of punishment for violating artificial state-enforced monopolies.
No one is obligated to create a work and no one is obligated to share their created works with others. There’s no inherent right to anything once you put an idea out there and the legal constructs are just novel artificial ways to keep the have-nots from competing with the haves.
Culture existed well before notions of intellectual property and if anything today we have far better means of both producing works ourselves and collectively funding works that might not exist without compensation.
Rewarding the top 0.0001% of lucky creators with huge compensation isn’t worth the broad societal damage that is done by preventing people from sharing or making use of ideas.
Currently the copyright term in the US is life-of-author plus 70 (edit: corrected from 90) years. Life of author has some reasonable basis. Past death it's understandable that descendants would want the estate to be worth something, if an author was unable to capitalize upon their work in their lifetime, but supporting an author's family for 3 generations is ridiculous.
There isn't a political solution to this. Because the US has a territorial electoral system, no politician is ever going to be representing a constituency who will care about the diminution of copyright terms as their primary issue, and building a legislative coalition to advance a nebulous public interest is hard, massively more so when countered by politicians who are bankrolled by large concentrations of capital.
In this country, any attempt to advance the current and future public interest over private gain is loudly denounced as tyranny by people who are awash in wealth and power. Those who try to undermine the foundations of capital from below are denounced as thieves and terrorists. That's why you get an endless ratchet effect.
Another approach that may be less at risk of the vicissitudes of legal trajectory on the copyright issue is a mass-scale decentralized archive: in other words, a democratization of archiving.
One "organized" way to do it would be to have "Internet Archive" run a SETI-at-home type of daemon on your computer to use a bit of idle time and disk to store blocks (obviously there's a rich literature of decentralized file sharing which I'm not apprentice to and so please be suspicious of my suggestions as the "best" method~~but you get the idea).
A "disorganized" way could be to have a "federation" of personal archives, comprised by tools like SingleFile^0, ArchiveBox^1, and my own DiskerNet^2 -- which all in various ways make it possible for you to save web content to your own device, and. It can be then shared with others.
I think in general, aside from any legal perturbations, one should not as a general rule rely on such a single point of failure for something (to some at least) so critical. Probably humanity (or at least netizenry) needs to embrace some form (or mish-mash of various forms) of truly dcentralized archiving.
The title implies that losing this lawsuit is threatening the existence of the Internet Archive. Is that really the case?
If it is true, then maybe IA should be run by somebody with better judgement. This was a project with a massive chance of failure (how could anyone think that this wasn't just blatantly infringing?) and a low payoff. If it's also an existential risk, then wtf are they doing running it?
> If it is true, then maybe IA should be run by somebody with better judgement.
I'm skeptical that you even get the IA without someone like these folks running it. Imagine you're the type of crazy person who starts and runs the IA, the pandemic starts and libraries and schools shut down, and there's a big button in front of you saying "give people access to knowledge that was just removed from them". I dunno man, I can understand the type of person who creates the IA also feeling compelled to push that button under those circumstances. Was it a bad decision? I dunno, probably, I guess. It was a weird and hard time. I'm not angry at them for doing what felt right.
It's an argument for the separation of library and archival work. Access to knowledge and preservation of knowledge are separate things, even if they have a lot in common.
It might be wise for someone to consider a truly archival only organization.
> I'm skeptical that you even get the IA without someone like these folks running it.
Isolating business ventures from each other is common practice. They didn't need to run both operations out of the same business entity.
> I dunno man, I can understand the type of person who creates the IA also feeling compelled to push that button under those circumstances. Was it a bad decision? I dunno, probably, I guess.
The operation may have been a risky decision, but doing it under the umbrella of the Internet Archive made it a terrible decision.
They're doing us all a favor is what they're doing. Intellectual property is just not that important when compared with ensuring that the powerful can't rewrite history.
If they lose their case, I hope the project can be kept afloat in ways that the US government can't interfere with.
I hope the project can be kept afloat in ways that the US government can't interfere with.
The U.S. government, oddly, is the least of my fears when it comes to rewriting history.
Private enterprise is already doing it, even going to far as to reach into your private library of books and music to change them after you're purchased it:
Until yesterday, I used to sync my music library with Apple Music. Not anymore. Apple responding to the Times reporter with a big fat "no comment" tells me that it thinks it's OK to change things on my computer without my knowledge.
Yeah everyone pretty much said when they announced the National Emergency Library, they were risking everything. Sure enough, that's what happened.
Giving money to the current Internet Archive is pretty much just giving money to the book publishers. Instead we should be funding someone new to buy the assets off in the auction, and keep the previous decisionmakers far from the new entity.
Depends on what they’re looking at in terms of statutory damages. Looking at their Form 990s they bring in roughly in the neighborhood of $15-20M/year in contributions. That isn’t really a lot, and makes me wonder how they ever defend themselves in court but somehow they’ve survived this long.
Librarians are a pain in the ass to litigate against would be my guess.
We're very detail oriented, we're organized, and we're very good at following procedures. We're just as good at drawing things out as lawyers and burying us under tons of paperwork does nothing. Basically a lot of the tactics used to get big lawsuits over with quickly are much harder to execute against librarians. It becomes a war of attrition.
I have in the past, but I'm also holding off until this lawsuit nonsense is done with. Don't need to fatten the lawyer industry with my money for their own mistakes. Running the wayback machine and things like flash emulation is what I want them to do: y'know, archiving stuff and making it available to current systems.
I should really look into whether this books lending branch has a chance of taking the web archive stuff down with it and, if so, buy a hard drive and start seeding this torrent that is iirc out there as a decentralized backup of the IA. This data being lost would be similar in proportion to losing GitHub or Wikipedia.
It's not a game. It's resistance by every mean available against corporations that want control over what knowledge we have access to. He did an unexpected and courageous move for the benefit of humanity. The Internet Archive is a huge responsibility because if not exhaustive, it could falsify history. It's leaders mandate is to preserve history, not to preserve what they let him preserve
The wayback machine has much MUCH better arguments (it's copies of public content at a point in time by definition), even the DMCA has carve outs for preservation and scholarly works, many use it for real things and not just piracy, etc.
The wayback machine arguments are good enough that they could receive a Supreme Court decision along the lines of "technically this is illegal, but the law is wrong" type.
It's a reasonable question. I don't get to call myself an archive or museum and assemble a website of what I consider "culturally important" cartoons or comic strips or whatever. The Wayback Machine basically operates in the zone of most people don't care that they do this.
I use IA all the time and love the website and most of what they do. But some of the stuff that they do that risks getting it all shut down is why I stopped donating.
“Despite the widespread modern belief that the Library of Alexandria was burned once and cataclysmically destroyed, the Library actually declined gradually over the course of several centuries. This decline began with the purging of intellectuals from Alexandria in 145 BC during the reign of Ptolemy VIII Physcon, which resulted in Aristarchus of Samothrace, the head librarian, resigning from his position and exiling himself to Cyprus...The Library, or part of its collection, was accidentally burned by Julius Caesar during his civil war in 48 BC, but it is unclear how much was actually destroyed and it seems to have either survived or been rebuilt shortly thereafter; the geographer Strabo mentions having visited the Mouseion in around 20 BC and the prodigious scholarly output of Didymus Chalcenterus in Alexandria from this period indicates that he had access to at least some of the Library's resources.”
the roman catholics burned it so to make their mythical "jesus" figure stick.
with the info destroyed in that fire we became 'disconnected' from the real historical jesus; thereby enabling the rise of the mythical figure tweaked to allow easier control of the masses. "what would jesus do?"
This is what I was thinking reading the part of the discussion here about IA being too big or important to fail.. Important to who, to which type of society and social order.. In a post truth antagonistic tribal world, archives are not important to society
The internet archive served two distinct but important functions: one as a backup of the web which was important for accountability and history, and the other as a repository for archiving the world's non-web digital information. I personally scanned a whole bunch of ephemera and IA was the obvious place to put it.
Why jeopardize those functions to do something brick and mortar libraries already did better, and legally? Other libraries do virtual lending.
We will continue our work as a library. This case does not challenge many of the services we provide with digitized books including interlibrary loan, citation linking, access for the print-disabled, text and data mining, purchasing ebooks, and ongoing donation and preservation of books.
This right here! The Internet archive had a really good thing going, I've been donating, digitizing, and uploading to IA for years. They were playing with fire, we all this coming, and I'm very frustrated with them over this.
Frankly, what the IA did here is absolutely the right thing. Copyright in the US is horribly fundamentally broken, and the idea that factual information about our history and world should not be referenceable and accessible for free is a pretty heinous one. Information wants to be free, and the work that IA did for "digital lending" during the pandemic was an essential move in the direction of ensuring that people can access this information regardless of their physical proximity and access to the base source material.
I don't understand the backlash in the comments here, it seems to all come from a perspective of people being so downtrodden they just accept the current status quo crafted by MAFIAA lawyers, rather than looking at it holistically from first-principles.
IA losing and getting shut down because "information wants to be free, man" is completely detrimental to trying to move that agenda forwards.
"First principles" means jack shit if your company to build that world gets wiped off the map because you did something incredibly obviously stupidly illegal and handed the "MAFIAA lawyers" your own ass on a silver platter.
Maybe my viewpoint on this is informed by long-standing desire to basically start something like IA but in a way which is protected from the acts of nation-states. The fundamental problem with human society is that the power structures are always co-opted by elites for their own purposes rather than the purposes of society as a whole, it doesn't matter what the system of those power structures is, in all cases they get co-opted.
The fact that a corporate entity is allowed to take action against the IA in this case and be supported by the government in doing so is a symptom of our broken system, it's not evidence that the IA did anything wrong in any moral or social sense. The fact our society is held hostage, and that information is imprisoned, by entities like the MAFIAA is not a justification for this outcome.
It's really not. The copyright system essentially has two serious issues: the extraordinary length, and DMCA takedown notices that are too easy to abuse.
But what IA did infringes even on a hypothetically repaired copyright system where the maximum age of copyright was something like 10-20 years, and where DMCA take-downs were hard to abuse. There's just no reason to allow any random entity to distribute books that it doesn't own.
We have already seen in the software industry that there is no way for any but the biggest companies to survive in a world without copyright [which open source is similar to] (I am referring to how Mongo, Elastic, Grafana and others have all had to give up on up-selling open source software and move closer to a closed license; while only Microsoft, Amazon, Google, IBM etc. are thriving by giving away free software).
> But what IA did infringes even on a hypothetically repaired copyright system where the maximum age of copyright was something like 10-20 years, and where DMCA take-downs were hard to abuse.
In that world, IA would be able to make available any 20+ year book via their program. In that world, I think it’s _much_ less likely that they feel any pressure to lend out copyright covered books, and if they did I would be outraged.
I think it’s a little unfair to invent a hypothetical world, and then project their actions into that world as part of your judgement of their entity.
> Copyright in the US is horribly fundamentally broken, and the idea that factual information about our history and world should not be referenceable and accessible for free is a pretty heinous one.
I (mostly) agree with you, but remember the rest of the quote, "Information wants to be free, information wants to be expensive."
> What is considered the earliest recorded occurrence of the expression was at the first Hackers Conference in 1984, although the video recording of the conversation shows that what Brand actually said is slightly different. Brand told Steve Wozniak:
>> On the one hand you have—the point you’re making Woz—is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable—the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other.[3]
>Frankly, what the IA did here is absolutely the right thing.
Sometimes doing the right thing gets you killed.
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This lawsuit could be an existential risk for the IA. In a society that allows vastly different views on what is right and wrong, most people manage to navigate situations in a way that doesn't risk their existence.
Within that line of thinking, what IA did was more or less a form of civil disobedience. If we go back to one of the founders of the philosophy of civil disobedience in the US we get to Thoreau. He was of the mind that the disobedient party should recognize the possible consequences and be prepared to accept them.
None of this means that the IA shouldn't have made this choice. Just that they should have had their eyes wide open to these consequences.
Whether you support copyright or not, the Internet Archive did a dumb thing that will probably cost us having the Internet Archive. Everyone is mad because everyone saw it coming and told them not to risk it all.
I'm not "supporting" the cops when I tell someone they should stop their car when they get pulled over. I'm recommending someone not get themselves shot.
If the conversation ends with “be afraid of cops” and not, “let’s organize to change cops”, then you are supporting cops. Like in this instance we need to rally around copyleft politicians for the next election cycle so that something like this can’t happen again. We need to have willpower and not be so weak willed to let the rent seekers win.
> I don't understand the backlash in the comments here, it seems to all come from a perspective of people being so downtrodden they just accept the current status quo crafted by MAFIAA lawyers, rather than looking at it holistically from first-principles.
People do not understand that the IA want to go to court as part of their strategy, or else they think they understand what constitutes an effective legal strategy for the IA better than the IA do.
If this was a strategy from the IA, it has all but failed, hasn't it? And given that the vast majority predicted it would fail, I wouldn't even call this hindsight being 20/20.
I agree with the sentiment, but not IA's risky approach. What did IA assume? That publishers would look the other way, that their actions would inspire copyright reform, that executive power would pardon them post-reform? Those are some crazy assumptions. I'd think a consumer revolt championed by IA would have been more effective while not jeopardizing the archive, i.e. "Information wants to be free, digital lending costs nothing. Contact your congressperson about copyright reform."
A consumer revolt would do better, but contacting your congressperson about copyright reform is doomed to failure. Copyright (and the de facto right to abuse and extend it) is an existential issue for publishers, but not for consumers.
Any time you have a collective action problem like that our legislative system is always going to come down in favor of the capital owners, because the entire (US) polity is built around land apportionment. It's a political system designed by and for landlords.
It's an artifact of the US' huge geography and short history. The abolition of spatial barriers by broadcast and electronic networks to the point of universal communication is fundamentally incompatible with a political system based on agrarian territoriality. You can't solve 21st century problems with 18th century political technology.
> what the IA did here is absolutely the right thing
> I don't understand the backlash in the comments here
I support CDL, and copyright change. IA may have poisoned the well by not actually doing CDL and trying to profit off of the claimed CDL books. So the backlash is understandable.
The first mistake IA made was engaging in CDL aka DRM in the first place. They should have just focused on making things available without restrictions.
I agree we ought to reject the premise of copyright primacy over educational need for people. People with willpower are motivated to create without copyright, but without education they are stunted. Now let’s get some copyleft laws on the books. Stallman clearly has too many skeletons to lead a political campaign or he would have already done it.
We already have laws for historical landmarks. These laws ensure the protection of things of societal significance, even to the point of restricting the rights of their private owners.
We need such laws for the digital realm. If we had them we wouldn't have to worry about Internet Archive, dpreview, etc. Imagine if we had such laws in place long ago. We could be living in a world where Geocities and MySpace still existed, even if only in a read-only form.
What's been preserved of the earlier web will always be a little more precious because so much was lost, I suppose.
Back in the day, I assumed anything I did online would be saved in some way unless explicitly stated otherwise. I also assumed the same of my software environments. I was, of course, painfully disabused of these notions multiple times before the lesson was fully drilled into me.
I'd like to live in a world where everyone was more aware of the value of making special efforts to preserve certain kinds of data (see also: having more control over it)-- like where it's part of our deeper culture. I think we're steadily moving in that direction in some ways, but it would've been nice if it had been more thoughtfully considered by both companies and governments 25+ years ago. I suspect if they'd known how much cheaper storage was going to get, they would have done a lot more.
Laws are only as good as people's willingness to defend them. They are not real. Resource mobilization is a much better long-term strategy than agreements backed by the threat of force, because legislative capture is a real thing and your precious laws can done away with by fiat. It has happened over and over. Please, do not put your faith in process.
Readit News
I see a lot of comments in this thread with what about-isms or "I don't care, we wouldn't miss anything", but these people are short-sighted. And to be honest the hacker news community is frequently the community I loathe to engage in these topics with. Because they are always looking forward with very little respect for the past as well as very little respect for domains outside of technology.
The internet archive is a huge boon in intangible value for communities and the world. It represents a huge cultural fountain that is accessible for anyone so long as they have the ability to access a computer.
A great example of this is that the Internet Archive was the ONLY place where I could enjoy a completely random piece of lost media from a children's television show called Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. There was a lost episode where OJ Simpson was in it and it never aired because of obvious issues. BUT there was a book published from the production called "White Rabbits Can't Jump"
https://archive.org/details/whiterabbitscant00varl
I can't imagine being able to go to any publisher or paid streaming service or god forbid Amazon to find this book, and I sure as shit don't believe in this community to help create ecosystems to support finding things like this.
I am so sick and tired of the copyright laws that play counter to productive creation and stymying efforts to preserve anything. The fact that I have to wait until people die until copyright is up is god awful. And the fact that I have to read people in this community who sound like boot-lickers for corporate oligarchs and their shitty value adds to the world drives me so fucking insane.
I'm only commenting here because I feel it's important to articulate that there are people out there who care, and that the vocal a-holes on this site really miss the point and the intangible value of what the internet archive provides.
If congress passes a copyright law, and that law can't demonstrate that it actually MEASURABLY does promote the useful arts and sciences, (but rather hinders them, as is often the case), then that law should be overturned, desecrated, and posted on a wall-of-shame as an example to others of what doesn't work.
I think that would solve 90% of our problems with copyright law. But that's just me. I'm not typically a "Constitutional Originalist" but I think this kind of thinking here could help.
Do you really think that someone like archive.org can do a better job of proving the negative than DisneyDiscoveryWarnerComcast will do producing volumes and reams of information demonstrating how they can only afford to keep making new content and supporting small creators if copyright lifetime is extended to 500 years?
IMO compulsory licensing is the way.
The Constitution does not require that IP laws actually or measurably promote the "useful arts and sciences" because the Constitution does not require the promotion of the useful arts and sciences but rather the progress of such. Moreover, the second half of the statement, says how Congress is Constitutionally supposed to accomplish that.
The idea is protecting even the stupid stuff is what lets the actual innovation proceed, the same way protecting Larry Flynch and flag burning protects other forms of speech.
Don't worry, 50 years was only close to the median amount of time that it takes for old laws and old court rulings to be overturned
So it wont undermine your brand to support, ironically, what might be seen as a rogue court outcome nowadays
You're not alone in thinking this way. And kudos for investing the Time to write this up -- the sophists are all-too-often over-represented here, and I'm never really sure that they're always arguing in Good Faith, or if they are, they're often being so short-sighted that it's simultaneously funny and sad.
There is a severe lack of appreciation for culture or even an understanding of what constitutes our culture, especially here on HN (which is why I hate discussing these topics here). It's not just a handful books that happen to turn into literature in 100 years. Our culture consists of every medium we interact with today. Allowing corporations to monopolize nearly all of it in perpetuity is quite simply immoral and severely damaging to our continued cultural development.
If you think about how cruel it is to make illegal the way human culture has worked for millenia, to listen to the storys you hear, retell them, remix them and make them your own in a new context. That is against the law now.
Perfectly legal.
Oh, you want to "retell" it and make money off of it? Yeah, that's something else.
The HN community can also be out of touch with technology. If you are an AI researcher this becomes plainly obvious the moment you visit any of the AI threads (if it isn't obvious already from the 6 to 12 month delay on the posting of cutting edge developments here). Sometimes it's hard to argue with zwj.org's assessment [0].
[0] https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2016/hn.png
I’ve never been less impressed with the supposed elite class of Ivy League “hackers” than when I’m on this site. Get over yourself. You didn’t just solve AI with your “recursive LLM”. No one with ADHD is going to benefit from your pomodoro app that is…slightly more visible than the other thousands of pomodoro apps? Also - half of you don’t have ADHD. Believe it or not - coding is an attention drain and taking stimulants to gain an advantage so that you can ship in 3 months instead of 12 is toxic as fuck.
Don’t get me started on LessWrong.
FWIW, while I agree with the sentiment - not everyone is prepared to see an unsolicited photoshop of a testicle in a wine glass. Might want to edit a warning in if you still can.
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Calling it property allows for this bizarre concept of a form of "theft" that still leaves you with the thing "stolen" from you.
In other words, it's a right.
The original idea was to promote creative works by authors by providing a limited term right to be the sole publisher of a work. This was important in the days where it actually cost money to publish and distribute things, as it ensured you wouldn't eat the cost of that only to have someone else make all the money by doing it cheaper.
Thing is, it doesn't cost money to publish and distribute anything anymore. I think the large number of free and fan works that exist are proof enough that creativity need not be incentivized by money, and to the extent that we want to monetarily reward works we find meaningful, there are mechanisms like Patreon or Github sponsorship to do that.
Will the production quality suffer without large corporations spending ludicrous amounts of money? Yeah, probably. But I don't see how that's something worthy of preserving for all the bullshit that copyright inflicts on our culture.
The emergency library lending seemed questionable, but the current system they're doing—they have a physical copy of the book and lend out a single scanned copy to one patron at a time—sounds legal, and certainly should be legal. Doubly so when it's out of print.
[0] https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=3145733862...
Long lost episodes of local shows (super local) are being uploaded by their actors and creators.
So what's the right way to balance the need to preserve artistic/creative works and the rights of the creator to monitize or permit usage of their works? It seems rather gross to just say that the creator has no right to sell their work or object to some source copying their work and distributing it in a way that deprives the creator of profit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...
Sure, it's certainly debatable what the "correct" term length should be, but I think most people could be convinced to value the commons a bit more and agree that it should be significantly shorter than the current "life of creator + 70 years" (or for works-for-hire, 95 years from publishing or 120 years from creation, whichever comes earlier).
For copyright owned by individuals, why should a creator's children and grandchildren (and great-grandchildren?) be allowed to continue to profit off their ancestor's work, depriving the commons of history and culture? For corporate ownership, why should the company be able to profit for longer than the lifetime of anyone around when it was created or published? Hell, most companies aren't even around that long, so ultimately the copyright ends up being passed to several other companies that have no relation to the original owner.
But really... 14 years sounds reasonable to me. I would even say 25 or 30 years would be ok, if the consensus is that 14 years is too short.
We could also go with a limited renewal system, like is used for patents. Say you get 14 years, and if, after those 14 years, the work is still important to you, you can renew the copyright for another 14 years, or something like that. People and companies who still actively gain economic benefits from their work 14 years later will go to the effort to renew it, but otherwise -- what is probably the majority of cases -- it'll fall into the public domain.
Of course, copyright isn't just governed by US law: the Berne Convention, at least, attempts to govern and harmonize copyright to some extent, and it requires minimums of 50 years after the creators death for most types of copyrightable works. But this is all doable, with political will behind it. As usual, that's always the problem.
To speak to why we need this sort of thing I would have to harken back to a fun talk that Paul Heald gave back in 2012[0] where he showed this fantastic chart[1] that shows the number of titles for sale on amazon by publish year.
The only thing I can assume from the chart is that either the publishing industry in the mid 1900s suddenly found itself publishing the same amount of books as they did in the 1830, no one cares about the books written between 1920 and 1990, or copyright has caused the loss of an enormous amount culture. According to the chart, and the talk, there are 7 times as many books published in the 1910s than are available from 1930s-1950s.
[0]: https://youtu.be/-DpfZcftI00 [1]: https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/mt/science/Amazon%20pub%20...
Ideally copyright would be eliminated and people who choose to create will choose to create. There is development in lots of areas that aren't copyrightable.
If you want to keep copyright, then it should be reduced to the bear minimum to incentivize creative works - that could be on the order of 20 - 30 years.
Encourage more creative work by exchanging a temporary government granted monopoly now for the promise of it becoming available to society's benefit later.
Current copyright terms are too long. Not everything needs to be monetizable to the nth degree in perpetuity in order for sustainable livelihoods to exist.
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In a world where content producers were financed anyway, because we understood as a society that this is valuable, this waste wouldn’t be necessary and we probably would have less “Avengers Nth the movie”. That was the norm and how the likes of Da Vinci and others got to do their work that are now so much appreciated, so I don’t think it’s that utopian.
On this specific issue, there was very much a fully compliant way to dramatic increase the number of copies in circulation - which was to reach out to all the libraries which were closed, get their catalogues all of which is electronic anyway and administer lending with a much expanded collection. It is just extra work - which likely would have gotten funded. Instead the management irresponsibily tried to score political points.
We need to have the right governance & KPIs in the charters of these critical organizations to prevent extreme people from grabbing their agenda
A truly cursed book cover!
Same for me with Le roi et l'oiseau and Peter and the Wolf by Disney.
Very much this. Copyright was a hack that was meant to encourage creation. I feel like it often does the reverse, and is robbing us of our public domain and making it harder for people to create.
Yes, while we have a capitalist society we need to enable creating things that can be copied somehow, but I think currently copyright law hurts that as much as it helps.
Creating silos of IP owned by giant companies that rent seek over things made ages ago, encouraged to sit on them and extract value by remaking them, rereleasing old works in new forms to get people to pay again, and stopping anyone else from exploring the ideas without pointlessly recreating the scenarios to avoid copyright violation.
We need to be able to preserve works, to share, to build off others' work, and to explore ideas further after the original creators put them out there. It feels like copyright works for giant companies that can hoarde IP, and the lucky few who make huge amounts from something that blows up, but it sucks for actually encouraging most creators, making living off creation viable for normal people, and most of all: it is terrible for building on other's work.
I think copyright length needs to be way shorter, ideally with some provision requiring source for code being submitted to a copyright office to be released after the duration runs out, as patents require explanation. (In an ideal world also stems for music and stuff, but that becomes really hard to prove and enforce).
I don't think there are easy answers, but I worry we are locked into a system that makes us worse off as a whole.
"bUt tHaTs SoCiAlIsM" whined the masses
For some reason it's ok with extra steps that fuck over everyone else and mainly lead profit towards few middle men though.
I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a repository of digital or physical artifacts is "too big to fail" because of the negative cultural impact their failure would have.
In the absence of that, anyone who sees high cultural value to the preservation of these digital artifacts should, counterintuitively, not treat the Internet Archive as having some special status, but should treat it as a liability. It has become the custodian of too much, and too much is on the line if it fails.
Rather than trying to constantly shore up the IA so it can't fail financially, we should be looking at ways to preserve those artifacts redundantly, so that even if the IA fails, it's not a calamity.
In the US that would be the Library of Congress with its Mandatory Deposit requirement.
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> I wonder if there needs to be a cultural equivalent, where a repository of digital or physical artifacts is "too big to fail" because of the negative cultural impact their failure would have.
If there is, the Internet Archive isn't it.
Yeah, it's super important in certain weird technology and library subcultures, but few people outside of them would even notice it if disappeared. If they shut down, the story wouldn't even be able to muscle it's way onto the front page of the New York Times: it would loose to whatever the latest Trump drama is and the Nth repetition of the standard mass shooting media package.
> In the absence of that, anyone who sees high cultural value to the preservation of these digital artifacts should, counterintuitively, not treat the Internet Archive as having some special status, but should treat it as a liability. It has become the custodian of too much, and too much is on the line if it fails.
> Rather than trying to constantly shore up the IA so it can't fail financially, we should be looking at ways to preserve those artifacts redundantly, so that even if the IA fails, it's not a calamity.
Yeah, especially since the Internet Archive (as an organization) has proven itself to be irresponsible.
Lots of people want to turn the publishers into the villains, for ideological reasons as well as a bias towards the Internet Archive, but the it's the IA that fucked up here. They imperiled their core mission for some unnecessary grandstanding. They either need to fire whatever lawyers OK'd the "Emergency Library" or the leaders that refused to listen to sane legal advice telling them not to do it.
It's pretty much indispensible to anybody who's a researcher.
It's very frequent that you're tracking down citations to webpages that don't exist anymore, and the IA is the only way to find sources.
Not to mention that it's also often the only way to quickly get access to non-bestseller books that are more than a couple of decades old, which is also commonly needed for research purposes. Many of these books are only otherwise available in the country's largest research libraries. (Google has copies too, but nobody can view them.)
It's not weird or a subculture unless you think those labels apply to researchers. And there are a lot of researchers out there, across academics, non-fiction authors, and journalists.
Um... I don't get the impression that you are speaking from any sort of authority
Look up any of their stats and tell me that's librarians and "weird technologists".
Small example: 600,000 new users per month are niche technologists?
https://archive.org/about/stats.php
More ppl in every town prob use IA than their local library. It's important (albeit overly central, but they are working on resolving that via IPFS and other technologies)
What do New York Times reporters use to check web history when researching for their stories? Do they just make stuff up?
I think the archive made a bad decision. I do not think it is generally irresponsible.
A service can be important even if few people use it directly. The service can have downstream effects that are beneficial to a lot of people because the people who do use it are creating and disseminating other content that filters its way down.
An analogy would be the US National Weather Service (NOAA). Few people look directly at an NOAA feed, but it's used by news channels, apps, airlines, scientists, etc. and becomes content and services that most people have benefited from.
A robust archive lowers the cost/time of doing research. It enables fact checking and investigation, particularly of an historical or obscure nature. It services the long tail of less frequently accessed content that many of us will, at some time, want access to. Basically all the reasons a research library is useful.
That is not a good metric. If the louvre burned, that would make headlines everywhere, but it would be nowhere near as disasterous as if the internet archive was destroyed.
I'm sure most people in the US hadn't heard of many of the banks involved in the 2008 financial crisis, but many of them, after that fact, might agree that they were indeed too big to fail.
I mean, they are the villains here. They’re sueing the IA over something that is less than a footnote in their balance book.
They’re purely doing this for the chilling effect it will have on other people that might be impertinent enough to try and share their books with others.
Its 212 petabytes as of december 2021[1], that alone would be a bit less than 12 thousand 18 TB HDDs or LTO-9's. We've made virtually zero significant progress in long-term storage technology.
Its like if they are getting burned like the library of alexandria because of some copyright vampires, I wouldn't even be angry, just sad, its just what we deserve.
[1] https://archive.org/web/petabox.php
The future will laugh at us as some primitive ignorant culture with our heads shoved up our asses dismantling society because of some imaginary oh so sacred legal fiction called copyright.
Why do some hoarding rent seekers hold every key here and get to indiscriminately burn down our global village on a whim like a feudal lord and all we can say is "please sire, spare the library, can you burn it more slowly than the rest?"
We overthrew monarchies 200 years ago so we wouldn't have to deal with this anymore. Having these assholes sneak back in through some courtier backdoor via an institution where people still wear wigs and robes to make us all renters from (intellectual) property lords, it needs to go.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliotheca_Alexandrina#Intern...
We don't need to look too far. IA could simply extend their middle-finger and move to Mexico, Spain, Thailand, or Sealand. Frankly, IA should be mirrored in every country that does not respect the West's initiative of blocking access and unresolvable takedown notices. Fuck US copyright anti-information bullshit. Publishers represent themselves and their own greed, not the authors and artists that created the content. There are rare success stories[1], but how many other works have been looted by publishers at the expense of the long dead content creator's family?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/jun/14/books.booksnew...
Unfortunately, the US government directly expands the reach of (US) copyright, patents, and trademarks with the "Free Trade" agreements they've managed to get countries around the world to sign up to.
If Sealand had an effective army ;), and could thereby say "Thanks, but no" then that might be an option. Until then though...
But “too big to fail” is bad policy no matter what you apply it to. That we have practiced this bad policy does not mean we should continue doubling down on it.
Add to it other educational materials that would otherwise show up on youtube or elsewhere with advertisements, and you have a decent basis for the 21st century and beyond.
Or this one? - https://netpreserve.org/
If the Internet Archive is "too big to fail" then there should be more scrutiny of their actions and the avoidance of risky behavior.
Anybody with any legal sense could have told you that the "National Emergency Library" was a risky move.
https://www.loc.gov/visit/
Here it is: https://loc.gov
You can wonder all you like, and call me a cynic, but the US runs on money not culture. The American identity is built on money and wealth and excess, not on anything you might describe as "culture".
The IA would not "fail" if it was just left alone, but business never saw a nickel they didn't want to grab, so the law suits are not exactly surprising. And I expect the courts to lean towards the publishers.
Everyone was telling the internet archive that this was a dumb idea because it opened them to lawsuits with ruinous fines. Now the chickens are coming home to roost and IA is crying foul.
It can be true that the internet archive is an invaluable store of history while also being true that they made an embarrassing own-goal.
This isn’t an American problem, it’s a drawback to the economic system the globe has adopted.
Now it's arguably a culture of attention and tribal identity.
fortunately, someone saying that does not make it real. Think of a "soup" and of "experiment" and you will get more detail. Resolving an entire nation to a 1 or 0 classification is not defensible, right?
(no association with IA, just an active contributor)
Back in the day, a copyright measured in decades made sense, because it took that long to promote and distribute a work and derive reasonable profit from it.
Today that process takes days, maybe months (apart from the rare work that languishes, only to be "discovered" later).
Copyright should be much shorter -- a couple years at most -- with renewal available if the creator really believes the work has yet to find its audience.
The standard for abandoned works still protected under the existing system should default against the (potential) holder of the original copyright as long as a good-faith effort was made to reach them, and damages should amount to some sort of split of the profits.
Unfortunately, at some point he stopped doing it. He explains
> There is also the fact that, in the time since Creative Commons licenses were negotiated, publishers have entered into agreements with the large ebook retailers that allow for price matching. This is in part an artifact of anti-trust litigation, but it means that if someone somewhere offers the book at $0, it technically allows all of the other ebook stores to offer the book at $0 as well.
> Thus far my publishers have been good about grandfathering in the CC-licensed books that I already had, but for the last couple of books I haven’t done CC licensing, in part because of the real fear that Amazon could set the price at $0 and there would be no recourse for my publishers—not even the recourse of not letting Amazon sell the book, because of deals ensuring that if Amazon sells one book of a publisher’s, they have to sell the whole catalog.
[1] https://craphound.com/pc/download/
[2] https://www.authorsalliance.org/2017/05/09/a-good-guy-offeri...
That said, I'm sympathetic to creators; I've written several (unpublished) novels myself.
Most novels don't support the authors that write them. There's no argument to be made that Jane Doe's 20,000th-ranked novel makes her nothing in the third year instead of three dollars.
At the other end of the scale you have George R.R. Martin. I'm sure he would be fine with or without the revenue from HBO's GoT. That said, in that particular case I think it's likely that HBO would want his blessing in any case -- especially since he hadn't written the ending yet. Without his cooperation, would people have been as likely to watch knowing the ending was made up by someone else?
So then you have the mid-tier authors -- a misnomer since really you're talking about the 99.9th percentile, where GRRM is the 99.9999th. But in any case, I still think that the vast majority of the revenue from a novel generally comes in the first 2-3 years. If losing that last, let's say 5%, makes the difference between success and starvation, that seems like a rare case to me -- even for authors who write slowly.
As for retirement, I'm not sure how to answer except to say let's pick an author who is clearly self-supporting, but not GRRM: Piers Anthony. He's still cranking out Xanth novels (last I checked). Do you suppose sales from his Battle Circle books (published in the '60s and '70s) are contributing materially to his retirement? Ha, I just checked and he's up to 45 books in the Xanth series. :-)
That wouldn’t lead to the end of culture but a cultural explosion as people became able to remix and propagate ideas more freely without the fear of punishment for violating artificial state-enforced monopolies.
No one is obligated to create a work and no one is obligated to share their created works with others. There’s no inherent right to anything once you put an idea out there and the legal constructs are just novel artificial ways to keep the have-nots from competing with the haves.
Culture existed well before notions of intellectual property and if anything today we have far better means of both producing works ourselves and collectively funding works that might not exist without compensation.
Rewarding the top 0.0001% of lucky creators with huge compensation isn’t worth the broad societal damage that is done by preventing people from sharing or making use of ideas.
when cultural creations are prompted by a profit motive, we get "masterpieces" like the rings of power.
There isn't a political solution to this. Because the US has a territorial electoral system, no politician is ever going to be representing a constituency who will care about the diminution of copyright terms as their primary issue, and building a legislative coalition to advance a nebulous public interest is hard, massively more so when countered by politicians who are bankrolled by large concentrations of capital.
In this country, any attempt to advance the current and future public interest over private gain is loudly denounced as tyranny by people who are awash in wealth and power. Those who try to undermine the foundations of capital from below are denounced as thieves and terrorists. That's why you get an endless ratchet effect.
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One "organized" way to do it would be to have "Internet Archive" run a SETI-at-home type of daemon on your computer to use a bit of idle time and disk to store blocks (obviously there's a rich literature of decentralized file sharing which I'm not apprentice to and so please be suspicious of my suggestions as the "best" method~~but you get the idea).
A "disorganized" way could be to have a "federation" of personal archives, comprised by tools like SingleFile^0, ArchiveBox^1, and my own DiskerNet^2 -- which all in various ways make it possible for you to save web content to your own device, and. It can be then shared with others.
I think in general, aside from any legal perturbations, one should not as a general rule rely on such a single point of failure for something (to some at least) so critical. Probably humanity (or at least netizenry) needs to embrace some form (or mish-mash of various forms) of truly dcentralized archiving.
^0: https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile
^1: https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox
^2: https://github.com/dosyago/DiskerNet
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If it is true, then maybe IA should be run by somebody with better judgement. This was a project with a massive chance of failure (how could anyone think that this wasn't just blatantly infringing?) and a low payoff. If it's also an existential risk, then wtf are they doing running it?
I'm skeptical that you even get the IA without someone like these folks running it. Imagine you're the type of crazy person who starts and runs the IA, the pandemic starts and libraries and schools shut down, and there's a big button in front of you saying "give people access to knowledge that was just removed from them". I dunno man, I can understand the type of person who creates the IA also feeling compelled to push that button under those circumstances. Was it a bad decision? I dunno, probably, I guess. It was a weird and hard time. I'm not angry at them for doing what felt right.
It might be wise for someone to consider a truly archival only organization.
Isolating business ventures from each other is common practice. They didn't need to run both operations out of the same business entity.
> I dunno man, I can understand the type of person who creates the IA also feeling compelled to push that button under those circumstances. Was it a bad decision? I dunno, probably, I guess.
The operation may have been a risky decision, but doing it under the umbrella of the Internet Archive made it a terrible decision.
I'm not really buying the Robinhood theory. This feels like some techies thinking their above the law and getting a reality check.
It's not like actual libraries don't offer digital lending. You might need to wait a week for Gane of Thrones, but it'll be OK.
IA decided the world was unfair and with a bit of arrogance decided to 'correct' it. Let's hope IA is able to just stop lending books and still exist.
If they lose their case, I hope the project can be kept afloat in ways that the US government can't interfere with.
The U.S. government, oddly, is the least of my fears when it comes to rewriting history.
Private enterprise is already doing it, even going to far as to reach into your private library of books and music to change them after you're purchased it:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/arts/dahl-christie-stine-...
Until yesterday, I used to sync my music library with Apple Music. Not anymore. Apple responding to the Times reporter with a big fat "no comment" tells me that it thinks it's OK to change things on my computer without my knowledge.
That overstates IA's influence. People still think Elon started Tesla.
Giving money to the current Internet Archive is pretty much just giving money to the book publishers. Instead we should be funding someone new to buy the assets off in the auction, and keep the previous decisionmakers far from the new entity.
We're very detail oriented, we're organized, and we're very good at following procedures. We're just as good at drawing things out as lawyers and burying us under tons of paperwork does nothing. Basically a lot of the tactics used to get big lawsuits over with quickly are much harder to execute against librarians. It becomes a war of attrition.
I should really look into whether this books lending branch has a chance of taking the web archive stuff down with it and, if so, buy a hard drive and start seeding this torrent that is iirc out there as a decentralized backup of the IA. This data being lost would be similar in proportion to losing GitHub or Wikipedia.
The IA resisted nothing, achieved nothing, made nobody's life better, and created an opportunity for bad precedent.
It was an utterly boneheaded move. (It has also nothing to do with "exhaustive preservation")
The wayback machine arguments are good enough that they could receive a Supreme Court decision along the lines of "technically this is illegal, but the law is wrong" type.
“Despite the widespread modern belief that the Library of Alexandria was burned once and cataclysmically destroyed, the Library actually declined gradually over the course of several centuries. This decline began with the purging of intellectuals from Alexandria in 145 BC during the reign of Ptolemy VIII Physcon, which resulted in Aristarchus of Samothrace, the head librarian, resigning from his position and exiling himself to Cyprus...The Library, or part of its collection, was accidentally burned by Julius Caesar during his civil war in 48 BC, but it is unclear how much was actually destroyed and it seems to have either survived or been rebuilt shortly thereafter; the geographer Strabo mentions having visited the Mouseion in around 20 BC and the prodigious scholarly output of Didymus Chalcenterus in Alexandria from this period indicates that he had access to at least some of the Library's resources.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliotheca_Alexandrina#Intern...
with the info destroyed in that fire we became 'disconnected' from the real historical jesus; thereby enabling the rise of the mythical figure tweaked to allow easier control of the masses. "what would jesus do?"
Why jeopardize those functions to do something brick and mortar libraries already did better, and legally? Other libraries do virtual lending.
We will continue our work as a library. This case does not challenge many of the services we provide with digitized books including interlibrary loan, citation linking, access for the print-disabled, text and data mining, purchasing ebooks, and ongoing donation and preservation of books.
http://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/
I don't understand the backlash in the comments here, it seems to all come from a perspective of people being so downtrodden they just accept the current status quo crafted by MAFIAA lawyers, rather than looking at it holistically from first-principles.
"First principles" means jack shit if your company to build that world gets wiped off the map because you did something incredibly obviously stupidly illegal and handed the "MAFIAA lawyers" your own ass on a silver platter.
The fact that a corporate entity is allowed to take action against the IA in this case and be supported by the government in doing so is a symptom of our broken system, it's not evidence that the IA did anything wrong in any moral or social sense. The fact our society is held hostage, and that information is imprisoned, by entities like the MAFIAA is not a justification for this outcome.
Shutting down? Let's not jump to conclusions here, they would not shut down even if they lost.
But what IA did infringes even on a hypothetically repaired copyright system where the maximum age of copyright was something like 10-20 years, and where DMCA take-downs were hard to abuse. There's just no reason to allow any random entity to distribute books that it doesn't own.
We have already seen in the software industry that there is no way for any but the biggest companies to survive in a world without copyright [which open source is similar to] (I am referring to how Mongo, Elastic, Grafana and others have all had to give up on up-selling open source software and move closer to a closed license; while only Microsoft, Amazon, Google, IBM etc. are thriving by giving away free software).
In that world, IA would be able to make available any 20+ year book via their program. In that world, I think it’s _much_ less likely that they feel any pressure to lend out copyright covered books, and if they did I would be outraged.
I think it’s a little unfair to invent a hypothetical world, and then project their actions into that world as part of your judgement of their entity.
I (mostly) agree with you, but remember the rest of the quote, "Information wants to be free, information wants to be expensive."
> What is considered the earliest recorded occurrence of the expression was at the first Hackers Conference in 1984, although the video recording of the conversation shows that what Brand actually said is slightly different. Brand told Steve Wozniak:
>> On the one hand you have—the point you’re making Woz—is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable—the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other.[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free
Sometimes doing the right thing gets you killed.
-
This lawsuit could be an existential risk for the IA. In a society that allows vastly different views on what is right and wrong, most people manage to navigate situations in a way that doesn't risk their existence.
Within that line of thinking, what IA did was more or less a form of civil disobedience. If we go back to one of the founders of the philosophy of civil disobedience in the US we get to Thoreau. He was of the mind that the disobedient party should recognize the possible consequences and be prepared to accept them.
None of this means that the IA shouldn't have made this choice. Just that they should have had their eyes wide open to these consequences.
I'm not "supporting" the cops when I tell someone they should stop their car when they get pulled over. I'm recommending someone not get themselves shot.
People do not understand that the IA want to go to court as part of their strategy, or else they think they understand what constitutes an effective legal strategy for the IA better than the IA do.
Any time you have a collective action problem like that our legislative system is always going to come down in favor of the capital owners, because the entire (US) polity is built around land apportionment. It's a political system designed by and for landlords.
It's an artifact of the US' huge geography and short history. The abolition of spatial barriers by broadcast and electronic networks to the point of universal communication is fundamentally incompatible with a political system based on agrarian territoriality. You can't solve 21st century problems with 18th century political technology.
I support CDL, and copyright change. IA may have poisoned the well by not actually doing CDL and trying to profit off of the claimed CDL books. So the backlash is understandable.
We need such laws for the digital realm. If we had them we wouldn't have to worry about Internet Archive, dpreview, etc. Imagine if we had such laws in place long ago. We could be living in a world where Geocities and MySpace still existed, even if only in a read-only form.
Back in the day, I assumed anything I did online would be saved in some way unless explicitly stated otherwise. I also assumed the same of my software environments. I was, of course, painfully disabused of these notions multiple times before the lesson was fully drilled into me.
I'd like to live in a world where everyone was more aware of the value of making special efforts to preserve certain kinds of data (see also: having more control over it)-- like where it's part of our deeper culture. I think we're steadily moving in that direction in some ways, but it would've been nice if it had been more thoughtfully considered by both companies and governments 25+ years ago. I suspect if they'd known how much cheaper storage was going to get, they would have done a lot more.
Because:
> We already have laws for historical landmarks. These laws ensure the protection of things of societal significance