Remember: If OpenAI/Google does it for $$$, it's not illegal. If idealists do it for public access, full force of the law.
Information wants to be free. Oblige it. Fools with temporary power trying to extract from the work of others will be a blip in the history books if we make them.
Those who create information may have families to feed, house and clothe. Until those items (food/housing/clothes) are also free, information cannot be free.
You might be glad to learn a number of studies (mostly commissioked by the European Union) agree on the fact that piracy doesn't hurt sales.
The main consensus is that people who illegally access content wouldn't have bought it otherwise, and that they still advertise it (thus, still driving up sales).
These studies have then been systematically strong-armed into silence by the EU and constituent countries' anti-piracy organisms.
This is probably because the war on piracy, too, is a billion-dollar industry. I'd be glad to blow it all up and give it all to the starving artists and their families.
Funny enough, an academic department I know has cut back on its purchase requests to the university library, on the assumption that everyone, students and staff alike, is just going to download the books from shadow libraries. Individuals were never going to purchase a 400€ book from a scholarly press anyway, but if now institutions are on the piracy bandwagon, that’s a new development.
The publishers are playing shit games with faculty and providing free access for them to high quality instructional materials. To the point that the faculty doesn't really have to do anything for online classes(which is a whole other ball of shit).
The secret to why they can provide this?
The content is locked behind a code the student has to buy that provides access to the book or comes with the book.
It's absolutely disgusting. For profit bullshit is fucking the youth of America. It's disgusting.
Source; the three times I've failed to push my current instruction to open access materials instead of McGraw Hill bullshit. And it failed because the lazy ass faculty can't be bothered to develop their own lessons anymore. Fuck.
Piracy does not hurt sales because it has a lot of friction. There have been zero studies on piracy in a low friction environment, because there was no need. Such as in countries where pirated Video CDs where endemic and not policed, it was completely obvious and distributors didn't even bother putting product onto the market. Or back in the days where mp3 music sharing apps became mainstream and got integrated with music players. Or when Popcorn Time looked likely to replace every streaming service in existence. If something like the Internet Archive Library became low friction (click the button and you are reading on your e-reader), and declared legal (avoiding social stigma), do you honestly believe this would not become the default and normalized way of 'buying' books?
I think there is an important difference between (1) being able to buy the same (DRM free) content supporting the authors and (2) the copies on the Internet Archive or the likes of it being the only source available.
I think many will choose the former but there are so many cases where there is no option provided.
This is already happening, and through a technique that copyright law does not really protect against. Writers of genre fiction are already reporting that e-books are being run through an LLM to completely rephrase it, and the result sold under by somebody else under a different title and author. This is easily automated.
This seems like it would be a copyright violation? The result bears substantial similarity to the input, even though it doesn’t have the particular words in common, right?
Like, if you translated the Spanish version to English, you’d have different words than the official English version, but it would still be a copyright violation to sell that, right?
Likewise if you first had someone do a translation from English to Spanish before you translated it back to English?
If it is based on an existing copyrighted work, bears substantial similarity to it, and competes with the original in the market, I thought copyright handled that?
The key lies in how easily the process is automated. Once a certain amount of freshly published ebooks are getting rephrased and sold by someone else, authors would be playing whack-a-mole with copyright claims, and they might not even become aware of all the copies of their work out there.
If hypothetically the study had said that piracy does hurt sales, would you change your position on piracy? Because what I'm seeing in this thread is just a bunch of people pointing to studies when they support their priors, or to limitations of studies when it doesn't...
Affirmation bias leads to people usually using stuff that prove their point, so probably the commenter would not have changed his position from one study - which is fine. This is how a discussion works. But your comment leads to a dangerous path of just disregarding people defending their positions with studies, and make it seem like these studies don't hold any value beyond elaborating what the people are saying, which isn't true.
Studies, if done correctly, hold massive scientific value and (at least a bit) of "the truth". Especially in the current climate we should never go down the path of disregarding studies.
Because companies are reactionary structures of power, they often act out of fear of losing control, not out of data or reason. It's easier to lobby governments for harsher copyright laws instead of modernising business model.
There are many counter-examples.
Gabe Newell (Valve co-founder) famously said:
"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem."
Jeff Bewkes (CEO of Time Warner) famous quote about piracy:
"Game of Thrones being the most pirated show in the world? That's better than an Emmy."
Radiohead released their In Rainbows album as "pay what you want", directly online. It generated more revenue than their previous label-backed album.
I don't think this is true. Many video game companies pay for DRM protection only for the first few months to a year, then remove it after most of the sales are generated. And before the current mostly uncrackable DRMs came out (denuvo) they would still use DRM that they knew would be cracked eventually as long as it wouldn't be cracked in the first few months. They are not simply blindly acting out of fear, they are estimating the actual cost of piracy. In fact someone recently did an analysis of this and came that conclusion.[0] The companies likely have much better data than this external researcher.
>"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem."
It is true that how good the service is is an important factor and can be more important than lets say a $10 difference in price. I think that is what is meant by this quote. However if piracy was easy and legal much fewer people pay for it. Assuming that "piracy is a service problem not a pricing problem" if anything would prove that there are a significant number of people who pay for something if it is easier than pirating. Usually people that claim that anti-piracy measures have no effect say something like "people that can afford to pay for a given media will always pay for it, and people that cannot will always not" or "people who are going to pirate something will never pay for it even if it becomes impossible to pirate." But if pricing is not actually the main issue at hand here then this not correct.
>"Game of Thrones being the most pirated show in the world? That's better than an Emmy."
This doesn't say anything about income generated. He's basically remarking about how successful the show was.
>Radiohead
This is a special case where consumers have a special attachment to the producers of their entertainment and buy their products specifically to support them. You can see a similar idea with YouTubers that sell everyday items (eg. coffee) with their name on it and people buy it mainly to support them, and this is even how the sales pitch is phrased. So if you are (at least partially) selling the ability to support the creator, then it is impossible to pirate that, as piracy (obviously) does not support the creator.
>act out of fear of losing control
Even after now 20 years of digital media existing?
It's hard to convince people of X, if their earnings depend on them not agreeing.
Management and lawyers are paid to be busy and "defend rights", not on sitting still and saying that nothing should be done. Even if it true, they still need look busy and "earn their check", otherwise their numbers/salaries can be reduced.
Because those studies aren't actual proof, and companies selling things are biased to believe that people won't pay for shit if they don't have to. (Which they won't.)
As someone actually living in the third world country, I agree to this message so much.
Yes I advertise the games and actually want to buy the games once I feel like the money would start mattering less than it does right now to me.
Its also about sending a message though.
As an example, I have never bought any online subscription or any online game and yet I wanted to buy silksong purely because of the sheer dedication and respect for him
The only reason I didn't were that partially it may be that silksong isn't my usual gaming although I rarely do that nowadays and secondly, that, I wanted to buy but my brother said that he would have to buy it seperately on his PS5 and I wanted to split the money for the first time
You might call me a hypocrite for having a brother with PS5 and not buying games but its his money and he has given me enough and I am not taking any money from him out of pure respect. He earned it. I have also earned some money online from coding related stuff and I was actually going to buy it from my own money but I didn't feel like it after he stopped me.
I really recommended hollow knight to everybody I could for days lol.
Also, there are some other pressing concerns as well.
So recently, I was backing up my linux whole night and literally the next day I borked it via gnome-disk accidentally format partition, I don't drink coffee so that might explain it after an all nighter-ish saving linux
Then, everybody on discord etc. said its over. I then tried testdisk utility for so goddamn long trying out literally everything in it untill it finally worked (I may have had some skill issues in the process but I learned a lot)
In that moment, I felt like I can do anything thanks to linux/open source. I immediately opened up my mail to thank the creator of the tool and making it actually free instead of people on discord saying me to pay either 15-20$ or pay thousands of $ for recovery.
I asked grenier@cgsecurity.org regarding the whole situation expressing gratitude and I wanted to donate to him but I felt like what if he had some donation site he wanted to give to like red cross or something. I wanted to donate 10$ of my own savings lol to him or any donation list he recommended or wanted to send money to.
Mainly, it was a way to say thanks though but I will honor his wishes if he ever does read the mail and I wouldn't touch that money or I would donate that money later if he doesn't respond to something like food security either way (I personally feel like although open source is really great, I just can't live if someone is sleeping hungry, that shouldn't be there in this world)
And now you or these companies expect me to pay 70$ to play either retro games or to play unoptimized games etc.
hell no.
I will tell you the games I really love as a means to promote them, if someone's interested in hearing out my suggestions on games.
I really loved baba is you, inscryption a lot. They are both indie games which I really liked
The portal series was also a really nice game that I enjoyed a lot as well.
I have played a lot of binding of isaac even though I feel like I am a noob but I can secondly recommend that as well
I also played some other games but that company is notorious for lawsuits and I am even scared that they might sue me for just mentioning the game's name lol
I even once made a friend after first being an enemy (he said he knew karate so he did it on me and I just hold his leg mid air and he was barely balancing and I think my cousin sister had to stop me) of some person and then helping them pirate a game and walking them through it and talking about it lol.
Good times.
What isn't good is when people try to mention how its extremely unethical and how I am the bad guy and I try to explain it and they think its extremely black and white.
I feel like I would give money to companies if I feel like they deserve it and I can earn it. I will genuinely buy every single one of these games that I had mentioned just to support the devs. I wish there was a better way to support them even more directly since steam takes a 30% cut when I don't want it to.
Should any corporation be able to gate-keep me out of the ability to make me enjoy my time of what I have during my childhood simply because we can't afford it and then when I actually get the money, I would be losing out on time (which is what is happening to my brother as I had mentioned, he said that he barely uses ps5 because of his work)
Everything is connected and I think a big issue people do is try to approach things in isolated manner and to form black or white opinions but I don't really blame it either.
Same as today? Empirically demonstrated: The only ones getting richer and richer after the Napster wars are the publishers, like Apple Music, Spotify and the other mega corporations. :)
"For the reasons set forth above, plaintiffs motion for partial summary judgment is denied and Googles motion for summary judgment is granted. Judgment will be entered in favor of Google dismissing the Complaint. Google shall submit a proposed judgment, on notice, within five business days hereof."
"In sum, we conclude that: (1) Googles unauthorized digitizing of copyright-protected works, creation of a search functionality, and display of snippets from those works are non-infringing fair uses. The purpose of the copying is highly transfor-mative, the public display of text is limited, and the revelations do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals. Googles commercial nature and profit motivation do not justify denial of fair use. (2) Googles provision of digitized copies to the libraries that supplied the books, on the understanding that the libraries will use the copies in a manner consistent with the copyright law, also does not constitute infringement. Nor, on this record, is Google a contributory infringer."
you're right - really, it's in the opinion of all copyright / IP lawyers & thinkers in this country that Google lost, because it didn't get to do what it wanted to do, even if it "won", it is Pyrrhic.
the balance of comments in Hacker News about a topic like this: it tips towards the wrong understanding of that case. There's Gell Mann Amnesia in every comment section.
A summary judgement in favor of Google with an explicit sentence in the ruling that Google was not "violating intellectual property law" is an unmitigated victory.
Google removed a ridiculous amount of material during the dispute with the Author's Guild. I know because a bunch of my legal history research citation links collected between 2007-2011 are long since dead, with the material completely gone, AFAICT, and either not discoverable or only available in excerpt. And this was stuff from the 19th and early 20th centuries, which definitely was out of copyright in the US, though some of it may have potentially been a headache in Europe regarding copyright-adjacent author rights that Google didn't want to deal with.
The last few years have really put to test copyrights limits and uses. As someone that falls more in line with Copyleft ideals (do whatever you want with my stuff!), it is very funny.
I just grab the popcorn and watch from the side lines, see where it all lands.
I'm used to think that "copyleft" is "do whatever you want with my stuff, but you must agree that others must be able to do whatever you want with your stuff you made out of mine".
Google had a tailored fair use argument because they never made more than snippets public and searchable. It was also prior to Hachette that controlled lending with one-to-one digital copies for every physical copy was a status quo that publishers largely accepted, which IA deliberately tried to upset with the National "Emergency" Library.
I think it's worth fighting back on copyright as a broken institution, and it should be part of the IA's mission, but you have to be responsible on your approach if you're also going to posture as an archival library with stability of information and access. I understand Kahle might lament losing some of the hacker ethos, but the IA is too important to run up against extremes like this without an existential threat.
It's not just that though. They pulled a stupid stunt during covid.
If you're campaigning for fair use, don't give your enemy ammunition to shoot you with by stretching said fair use too far. That was just really dumb.
Besides, for those willing to look outside official channels there's plenty of book library services available already. Just let them do what they do well and don't contaminate an above-board service with that.
You are being intentionally misleading. Public access AI models are not being taken down either. There is a big, transformative, difference with freely giving out books to read compared with using them to train an ML model.
> There is a big, transformative, difference with freely giving out books to read on a small, measured in human reading pace, scale compared with using them at a massive scale at internet and computer memory speeds to train an ML model even if the intellectual property used to train the ML was from unlicensed copies, and which the model regularly and with some frequency regurgitates verbatim.
not wanting you to be intentially misleading, FTFY.
It was an absolutely bone-headed poke-the-bear move and we should count ourselves lucky that it was only a chunk of the library and not the whole archive that got nuked. IA holds priceless and irreplaceable data, and while the library initiative was a well-intentioned move during the pandemic it was way too radical for the keepers of our shared digital history.
And this is why I respect Anna's Archive. If we want information to be free, I think we should consider intentionally violating copyright as an act of civil disobedience. I'm not sure I'm ready to go that far, but I respect the people at AA who are.
Agreed. It was poking the bear. The other big three grey-circuit services have nothing to lose because they never claimed to be legit.
If you claim the moral high ground you have to be impeccable. It also didn't help anyone during COVID because all the stuff was out there already on less legit services. Some make it super easy with telegram bots etc.
I'm sad that they screwed this up. Because the archive is a very valuable service. They've lost a lot of money, goodwill and reputation now. And gained nothing.
The worst part is, it's unimaginable that this would ever have ended well.
It wasn't a bad idea in principle but they should have worked to get some publishers on board, could have been a PR win for them too.
> Kahle thinks “the world became stupider” when the Open Library was gutted—but he’s moving forward with new ideas
> The lawsuits haven’t dampened Kahle’s resolve to expand IA’s digitization efforts, though. Moving forward, the group will be growing a project called Democracy’s Library
please just stop. let IA be what it is. or rather, nothing wrong in doing new projects but don't tie them to IA, just start them as completely separate things. IA is too important as-is to be a playground for random kooky ideas playing with fire.
And then the IA becomes the same thing it’s fighting against. The people in the wrong here are these massive corporations fighting over scraps, not the IA.
No it doesn't. It's extremely valuable with the scope it already has. These massive corporations do not operate the Wayback Machine nor the various (less controversial) public archives that IA hosts, and makes available at no cost, no login-wall, no cloudflare-infinite-captchas, etc.
As the project matures, the risk tolerance should mature too.
Betting your own time and money on the realization of a crazy ideal can be very noble. Betting a resource millions of people are relying on is destructive hubris.
They should take the untamed idealism to a separate legal entity before they ruin all the good they've done.
"Millions of people" should either be putting their money (and their objections) where their mouth is or stop relying on someone else's resource. The reality is, that like Wikipedia, few people have donated to IA as a proportion of all its users.
The "good" that they've done is the "good" as the creator's see it, not the "good" as the freeloaders see it. All of which is to simply say that almost all users of IA are relying on the goodwill of the creators.
I wonder if there would be appetite for a sister organization—one with a more conservative, risk-averse, long-horizon attitude—to emerge to mirror IA’s core archives. Let IA keep doing what it’s doing, crazy risk and all; duplicate the conservative functions in a conservative organizational structure.
I think the idea is that the kind of organization that would create the wayback machine in a world prior to the wayback machine is one which will also continue to push boundaries beyond that
I think that argument has a certain stasis to it, and kind of assumes that organisations maintain their energy and people (and those people are not changing!)… but there are realities where the initial push is by some people and then future maintenance is by others.
But I think the IA is a uniquely tough project because of how much the ground is shifting around them constantly. It’s not Wikipedia
And Brewster Kahle's notions about culture and information sharing start well before the Internet Archive. In theory one could pick and choose, but this is Brewster's life-long passion project. The man even outfitted a van with a printer and a binder to distribute physical books for free.
It's very strange to insist that he _not_ push the boundaries of copyright law for the common good. without that you wouldn't have had the Wayback machine in the first place.
What capitalism continues to show us: proof that public libraries, if created in the last 10 years, would be deemed illegal and sued out of existence.
It's only because the late 1800's billionaires wanted to leave legacies and made pay-to-enter and free libraries, and migrated them to free, or public libraries. Thats why so many of them are (John) Carnegie Libraries.
A lower stakes but still illustrative example I see is that the DVR is an invention that wouldn't be allowed to succeed today. All power is being wielded to its fullest in order to prevent skipping ads.
Cable to streaming took us from skippable to unskippable ads. Search results to LLM results will result in invisible/undisclosed ads. Each successive generation of technology will increase the power of advertising and strip rights we used to have. Another example, physical to digital media ownership, we lost resale rights.
We need to understand that we've passed a threshold after which innovation is hurting us more than helping us. That trumps everything else.
Exactly. A DVR governed by tech giants rather than just Tivo and the cable companies is going to have compromised functionality because it's the tech industry originating the "innovation" for their own benefit.
How do you figure libraries would be deemed illegal? They operate today. The Archive, on the other hand, attempted a fair use argument for whole copies of books (the copyrighted form most legible to copyright law) currently for sale as ebooks. I agree with the comment across the thread calling this a spectacularly boneheaded move and expressing gratitude that the entire Archive wasn't compromised over the stunt.
> How do you figure libraries would be deemed illegal? They operate today.
The history of public libraries is extremely messy, and the RIAA almost managed to get secondhand music made illegal in the 90s. Publishers did not ever support the idea of loaning a single copy of a work to dozens of people. While it's a huge stretch to say that every illegal download represents a lost sale (people download 100x more than they read), it's a lot less of a stretch to say that people who would sit down and read an entire book are fairly likely to have bought it.
Also, when books were relatively more expensive for people (19th century), a lot of income from publishers came from renting their books, rather than selling them. Public libraries involved a lot of positive propaganda and promises of societal uplift from wealthy benefactors, along the same lines and around the same time as the introduction of universal free public education. I remember hearing a lot about this history at the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore, which iirc was the first. Libraries were at that time normally private membership clubs.
edit: I also agree that the free book thing was stupid and have been very harsh about it. I don't know if it's possible to be too harsh about it, because it was obviously never going to get past a court. It felt almost like intentional sabotage.
Possibly, yeah. Make a "Deal" <spit> with AI companies to have back-end access to all the Archive org's content. Get 'permission' to copy EVERYTHING and have billionaires run interference.
The AI companies already got blank checks to do that. Anthropic is paying what, like $3000 per book? I remember when the fucks at the RIAA were suing 12 year olds for $10000 for Britney Spears albums.
Or better yet, if it's just $3k a book, can we license every book and have that added into Archive.org? Oh wait, deals for thee, not for me.
Fun fact: the only complete copy of the Internet Archive's library is in Alexandria.
How's that for historic irony and "unteachability" of the human species.
Honestly, now's the time to make copies of it, while we still can. Torrents need seeders and people that care, and we are the last generation that cares about knowledge.
We need to prevent the following generations to grow up as mindless clickmonkeys of the digital Orwellian world.
In my opinion redundancy in a single business entity is no redundancy at all, especially if there's legal obligations of a soon-to-be-burning-books-again regime.
A better strategy would have been to found independent entities in other liberal democracies, so they can act as IP backups.
There was a great vpro documentary called "Digital Amnesia" [1] where they also interviewed the lead of the library of Alexandria, who was the only bidder to buy the national KIT library of the Netherlands and its dissolved inventory at the time.
Interviews with archivists, librarians, web archive and others on the topic. It's insane to see that nations don't want to preserve their history, science, and culture anymore.
libgen was around 190TB. For my own at home cluster I decided to go for 512TB but I can't host nor upload in these bandwidth requirements from here.
I started to build sth like a torrent splitter tool yesterday because I realized that all torrent clients just crash when you try to open, modify, or seed those torrents.
Edit: correction, the IA is ~15PB big, brewster kahle mentioned it in the documentary (2014)
300tb seems insanely small so that 15pb number is probably closer
Id say though with the rise of video on social media, if they didn't 3x or 4x that 15pb number since then.
I'm sure there's plenty of room to replicate to aws but I'm sure they couldn't afford to host 60pb of data on aws. They have their own Colo or data center if I recall.
I think the general issue is that Annas Archive only has the metadata that's searchable, in a second step with downloading the parts you want/need you'll see the real storage requirements.
Most of their stuff is uploaded on ipfs mirrors as it looks like, though.
That sounds right. I checked on some listings of books that I thought would be cool to check out, but it still keeps saying how borrow in unavailable except for patrons with print disabilities. For the books I'm interested in, at least we can see scans of the front and back covers, and also a little bit of the table of contents.
Most of the IA’s ebook collection still supports controlled digital lending, just like every other library that operates an ebook lending system with CDL.
I am sorry to say that, but copyright protection time should vary on the subject. Programming books - 10 years maybe? 10 years is ages in computer science. TV shows? 5-7 years maybe. After that time nobody wants to pay for watching old big brother or another Fort Boyard... Nor pay for storing it in archive. And this is the culture other creations are referring to.
We've run in Poland into very strange situation - Polish Public TV (TVP) paid for the great dubbing of some Disney shows. They recorded it on VHS which were overwritten by other shows. Now the translation and the dubbing is lost, found sometimes on people's home recorded VHS but in poor quality, because recorded from the aerial.
Many original episodes of Dr Who were destroyed by the BBC, some have only been recovered because of "pirate" home recorded VHS, or people that "stole" tapes from the dumpster.
The Internet Archive is to be protected at all costs. Its maybe the most important site on the Internet because of all the history that exists nowhere else. As the web is increasingly filled with AI slop, the Internet Archive has got perhaps the last pre-slop snapshot of the Internet.
The Wayback Machine has been broken for me for about a month or so. Is that the case for everyone? Like when you stick in a URL, it just goes to a "landing page" that says:
"The Wayback Machine is an initiative of the Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form.
Other projects include Open Library & archive-it.org.
Your use of the Wayback Machine is subject to the Internet Archive's Terms of Use."
...instead of taking you to the "calendar" page where you could select the version of the website you wanted to see.
It baffles me how many techies are here saying we should respect our corporate overlords. Something certainly was lost in this scene in the past 20 years. Hackernews? More like Peonnews.
The fact that giving free access to books during a pandemic, in a format that doesn't need physical contact, when libraries were shut down or hard to access for a lot of people should have been praised, not pursued by legal action from rent seeking entities.
The copyright system as a whole should by torn up.
At least it give a clear signal to anyone with a ounce of moral which publisher to avoid at all cost.
Copyright needs torn up or at the very least significant reform but if you're going to be skirting around the edges of it to try to do a good thing it's probably a good idea to not just straight up obviously and blatently break the letter and spirit of the law. CDL is an awkward and dubious workaround but if you drop the 'C' you're just doing copyright infringment and that would be much better left to entities like Anna's Archive. The criticism of IA in this regard is usually that it was a bad strategy, not that the goals were bad.
There may be newer laws with different spirits, but I thought the original copyright spirit was "other people can't sell your work without permission" and not at all about preventing free sharing.
During the pandemic, they created the "National Emergency Library", where they allowed users copies of books without caps, without any connection to holdings of the Archive itself, something that was black-letter proscribed by copyright law, and as a result they managed to sabotage the legal case for controlled digital lending too.
The copyright system should perhaps be torn up (or maybe not…) but you can’t just blatantly violate it at massive scale and expect to face zero consequences.
And anyway, why is it unreasonable for copyright holders to expect to be able to get paid for their work rather than have a massive library loophole where they just never get paid as long as you're a nonprofit?
Here you go, you can steal beer from my store as long as you’re a nonprofit organization.
> For a decade, the Archive had loaned out individual e-books to one user at a time without triggering any lawsuits. That changed when IA decided to temporarily lift the cap on loans from its Open Library project
So stupid. They had a working system that they blew up through their own actions and now the library is dead.
IMO the only two reform the copyright system needs are DCMA takedown abuse and copyright term length. All the other concepts of copyright make perfect sense. If I create something I should be able to consent to giving or not giving it to someone.
A lot of the software engineers on this forum wouldn’t like what happens to their profession without copyright.
More and more authors of nonfiction today make money from a number of channels other than actual book sales. The book only serves as a promotional tool for their personal brand, and is only a collection of previously published blog posts or magazine pieces. This already started due to changing consumer behaviors and declining interest in books, so by the time piracy has come on the scene, the shift had already largely occurred.
Cory Doctorow's works that were released under more permissive licensing still reserved some rights for the author. I believe he used some flavor of a Creative Commons non-commercial license, if memory serves. Point being that the method of licensing his works was still fundamentally based on copyright.
(I think the US copyright system is hugely broken and the social contract needs to be re-negotiated, but I comment here in the interests of facts, not in support of the broken system.)
I worry 'hacker' news is going to become more and more 'normie' steadily moving farther and farther away from Barlow's declaration of independence of cyberspace cypherpunk ethos
It's easier to make money when you comply with The Man
you realize that HN has always been deeply business oriented, with it's root in the startup scene through the connection with YC? the hackers I believe is reference to pgs essay Hackers and Painters: https://paulgraham.com/hp.html
I'm old enough to recall the term in active use, and to have received the appellation from one who'd had it likewise handed down. I regard both as epiphenomena of the Internet's frontier or "Wild West" days, of which California has proven as terminal as it was for the nominate example after the US Civil War - not wholly for dissimilar reasons, if we take Vietnam, for the Internet, as the war whose loss would spur the migration.
That's good background, but I'm not sure where I'm meant to understand it to disagree with the idea that the "hacker" in "Hacker News" is the same one discussed in TNHD.
When I made this criticism before of IA, I was told that that was ridiculous since the publishers had it out for IA before the COVID-19 emergency library. That may or may not have been true, but the publishers did not sue IA despite OpenLibrary existing for years before COVID-19. Publishers didn't pull the trigger because they were afraid of losing. It was a MAD situation, and IA unnecessarily triggered a nuclear war that they lost.
Remember: If OpenAI/Google does it for $$$, it's not illegal. If idealists do it for public access, full force of the law.
Information wants to be free. Oblige it. Fools with temporary power trying to extract from the work of others will be a blip in the history books if we make them.
> Information wants to be free.
Those who create information may have families to feed, house and clothe. Until those items (food/housing/clothes) are also free, information cannot be free.
You might be glad to learn a number of studies (mostly commissioked by the European Union) agree on the fact that piracy doesn't hurt sales.
The main consensus is that people who illegally access content wouldn't have bought it otherwise, and that they still advertise it (thus, still driving up sales).
These studies have then been systematically strong-armed into silence by the EU and constituent countries' anti-piracy organisms.
This is probably because the war on piracy, too, is a billion-dollar industry. I'd be glad to blow it all up and give it all to the starving artists and their families.
> piracy doesn't hurt sales
Funny enough, an academic department I know has cut back on its purchase requests to the university library, on the assumption that everyone, students and staff alike, is just going to download the books from shadow libraries. Individuals were never going to purchase a 400€ book from a scholarly press anyway, but if now institutions are on the piracy bandwagon, that’s a new development.
The publishers are playing shit games with faculty and providing free access for them to high quality instructional materials. To the point that the faculty doesn't really have to do anything for online classes(which is a whole other ball of shit).
The secret to why they can provide this?
The content is locked behind a code the student has to buy that provides access to the book or comes with the book.
It's absolutely disgusting. For profit bullshit is fucking the youth of America. It's disgusting.
Source; the three times I've failed to push my current instruction to open access materials instead of McGraw Hill bullshit. And it failed because the lazy ass faculty can't be bothered to develop their own lessons anymore. Fuck.
You are talking about textbooks, I was talking about research publications: monographs, collections of articles, and reference books.
That's fair. I apologize for turning left instead of following your lead.
But I still stand by my rant. It's a garbage system.
Piracy does not hurt sales because it has a lot of friction. There have been zero studies on piracy in a low friction environment, because there was no need. Such as in countries where pirated Video CDs where endemic and not policed, it was completely obvious and distributors didn't even bother putting product onto the market. Or back in the days where mp3 music sharing apps became mainstream and got integrated with music players. Or when Popcorn Time looked likely to replace every streaming service in existence. If something like the Internet Archive Library became low friction (click the button and you are reading on your e-reader), and declared legal (avoiding social stigma), do you honestly believe this would not become the default and normalized way of 'buying' books?
GOG shows that paying for drm-free games in a country where copyright was unenforced and piracy offered a better UX can still be profitable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOG.com#Launch_of_Good_Old_Gam..., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffngZOB1U2A
I think there is an important difference between (1) being able to buy the same (DRM free) content supporting the authors and (2) the copies on the Internet Archive or the likes of it being the only source available.
I think many will choose the former but there are so many cases where there is no option provided.
Everyone forgot about limewire and the masses installing every trojan known to man.
Limewire made it easy, so people used it.
The same would be true today if assume.
Piracy might not hurt sales, but 1000 publishers putting out their own copies of your book/game/song/poster/miniature once it hits the market will.
That's why I can accept copyright even thought it's not perfect.
This is already happening, and through a technique that copyright law does not really protect against. Writers of genre fiction are already reporting that e-books are being run through an LLM to completely rephrase it, and the result sold under by somebody else under a different title and author. This is easily automated.
This seems like it would be a copyright violation? The result bears substantial similarity to the input, even though it doesn’t have the particular words in common, right?
Like, if you translated the Spanish version to English, you’d have different words than the official English version, but it would still be a copyright violation to sell that, right? Likewise if you first had someone do a translation from English to Spanish before you translated it back to English?
If it is based on an existing copyrighted work, bears substantial similarity to it, and competes with the original in the market, I thought copyright handled that?
The key lies in how easily the process is automated. Once a certain amount of freshly published ebooks are getting rephrased and sold by someone else, authors would be playing whack-a-mole with copyright claims, and they might not even become aware of all the copies of their work out there.
If hypothetically the study had said that piracy does hurt sales, would you change your position on piracy? Because what I'm seeing in this thread is just a bunch of people pointing to studies when they support their priors, or to limitations of studies when it doesn't...
Affirmation bias leads to people usually using stuff that prove their point, so probably the commenter would not have changed his position from one study - which is fine. This is how a discussion works. But your comment leads to a dangerous path of just disregarding people defending their positions with studies, and make it seem like these studies don't hold any value beyond elaborating what the people are saying, which isn't true.
Studies, if done correctly, hold massive scientific value and (at least a bit) of "the truth". Especially in the current climate we should never go down the path of disregarding studies.
No.
Why do companies attempt to prevent piracy if it doesn't hurt sales?
Because companies are reactionary structures of power, they often act out of fear of losing control, not out of data or reason. It's easier to lobby governments for harsher copyright laws instead of modernising business model.
There are many counter-examples.
Gabe Newell (Valve co-founder) famously said:
"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem."
Jeff Bewkes (CEO of Time Warner) famous quote about piracy:
"Game of Thrones being the most pirated show in the world? That's better than an Emmy."
Radiohead released their In Rainbows album as "pay what you want", directly online. It generated more revenue than their previous label-backed album.
Hell I have a premium Netflix and premium Spotify account that I don't even use very often.
Gabe Newell was right. I subscribed to those on my phone without having to go out of the house. It was just a few touches.
I don't think this is true. Many video game companies pay for DRM protection only for the first few months to a year, then remove it after most of the sales are generated. And before the current mostly uncrackable DRMs came out (denuvo) they would still use DRM that they knew would be cracked eventually as long as it wouldn't be cracked in the first few months. They are not simply blindly acting out of fear, they are estimating the actual cost of piracy. In fact someone recently did an analysis of this and came that conclusion.[0] The companies likely have much better data than this external researcher.
>"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem."
It is true that how good the service is is an important factor and can be more important than lets say a $10 difference in price. I think that is what is meant by this quote. However if piracy was easy and legal much fewer people pay for it. Assuming that "piracy is a service problem not a pricing problem" if anything would prove that there are a significant number of people who pay for something if it is easier than pirating. Usually people that claim that anti-piracy measures have no effect say something like "people that can afford to pay for a given media will always pay for it, and people that cannot will always not" or "people who are going to pirate something will never pay for it even if it becomes impossible to pirate." But if pricing is not actually the main issue at hand here then this not correct.
>"Game of Thrones being the most pirated show in the world? That's better than an Emmy."
This doesn't say anything about income generated. He's basically remarking about how successful the show was.
>Radiohead
This is a special case where consumers have a special attachment to the producers of their entertainment and buy their products specifically to support them. You can see a similar idea with YouTubers that sell everyday items (eg. coffee) with their name on it and people buy it mainly to support them, and this is even how the sales pitch is phrased. So if you are (at least partially) selling the ability to support the creator, then it is impossible to pirate that, as piracy (obviously) does not support the creator.
>act out of fear of losing control
Even after now 20 years of digital media existing?
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18759...
It's hard to convince people of X, if their earnings depend on them not agreeing.
Management and lawyers are paid to be busy and "defend rights", not on sitting still and saying that nothing should be done. Even if it true, they still need look busy and "earn their check", otherwise their numbers/salaries can be reduced.
The opinions of their principals may not align with published findings, for many reasons.
Because those studies aren't actual proof, and companies selling things are biased to believe that people won't pay for shit if they don't have to. (Which they won't.)
As someone actually living in the third world country, I agree to this message so much.
Yes I advertise the games and actually want to buy the games once I feel like the money would start mattering less than it does right now to me.
Its also about sending a message though.
As an example, I have never bought any online subscription or any online game and yet I wanted to buy silksong purely because of the sheer dedication and respect for him
The only reason I didn't were that partially it may be that silksong isn't my usual gaming although I rarely do that nowadays and secondly, that, I wanted to buy but my brother said that he would have to buy it seperately on his PS5 and I wanted to split the money for the first time
You might call me a hypocrite for having a brother with PS5 and not buying games but its his money and he has given me enough and I am not taking any money from him out of pure respect. He earned it. I have also earned some money online from coding related stuff and I was actually going to buy it from my own money but I didn't feel like it after he stopped me.
I really recommended hollow knight to everybody I could for days lol.
Also, there are some other pressing concerns as well.
So recently, I was backing up my linux whole night and literally the next day I borked it via gnome-disk accidentally format partition, I don't drink coffee so that might explain it after an all nighter-ish saving linux
Then, everybody on discord etc. said its over. I then tried testdisk utility for so goddamn long trying out literally everything in it untill it finally worked (I may have had some skill issues in the process but I learned a lot)
In that moment, I felt like I can do anything thanks to linux/open source. I immediately opened up my mail to thank the creator of the tool and making it actually free instead of people on discord saying me to pay either 15-20$ or pay thousands of $ for recovery.
I asked grenier@cgsecurity.org regarding the whole situation expressing gratitude and I wanted to donate to him but I felt like what if he had some donation site he wanted to give to like red cross or something. I wanted to donate 10$ of my own savings lol to him or any donation list he recommended or wanted to send money to.
Mainly, it was a way to say thanks though but I will honor his wishes if he ever does read the mail and I wouldn't touch that money or I would donate that money later if he doesn't respond to something like food security either way (I personally feel like although open source is really great, I just can't live if someone is sleeping hungry, that shouldn't be there in this world)
And now you or these companies expect me to pay 70$ to play either retro games or to play unoptimized games etc.
hell no.
I will tell you the games I really love as a means to promote them, if someone's interested in hearing out my suggestions on games.
I really loved baba is you, inscryption a lot. They are both indie games which I really liked
The portal series was also a really nice game that I enjoyed a lot as well.
I have played a lot of binding of isaac even though I feel like I am a noob but I can secondly recommend that as well
I also played some other games but that company is notorious for lawsuits and I am even scared that they might sue me for just mentioning the game's name lol
I even once made a friend after first being an enemy (he said he knew karate so he did it on me and I just hold his leg mid air and he was barely balancing and I think my cousin sister had to stop me) of some person and then helping them pirate a game and walking them through it and talking about it lol.
Good times.
What isn't good is when people try to mention how its extremely unethical and how I am the bad guy and I try to explain it and they think its extremely black and white.
I feel like I would give money to companies if I feel like they deserve it and I can earn it. I will genuinely buy every single one of these games that I had mentioned just to support the devs. I wish there was a better way to support them even more directly since steam takes a 30% cut when I don't want it to.
Should any corporation be able to gate-keep me out of the ability to make me enjoy my time of what I have during my childhood simply because we can't afford it and then when I actually get the money, I would be losing out on time (which is what is happening to my brother as I had mentioned, he said that he barely uses ps5 because of his work)
Everything is connected and I think a big issue people do is try to approach things in isolated manner and to form black or white opinions but I don't really blame it either.
This is pretty much how I feel about the whole ordeal too. Vote with your wallet, and all of that.
Thanks for sharing.
How many artists will be fed, clothed, and housed by the 500,000 digital files IA is no longer hosting?
Unrelated: I wonder how much the publishing industry spent on lawyers.
Same as today? Empirically demonstrated: The only ones getting richer and richer after the Napster wars are the publishers, like Apple Music, Spotify and the other mega corporations. :)
It's been proven that people who pirate also buy more media than those who don't.
Besides, if I was never going to buy it in the first place because you're charging too much, you've lost nothing if I pirate your product.
A victimless crime.
Don't most authors make literal pennies out of royalties?
There was also a lawsuit over Google Books.
Sure, which Google won. Which was basically the point of the person you replied to I think.
Google wins on summary judgment
https://storage.courtlistener.com/harvard_pdf/8726429.pdf
"For the reasons set forth above, plaintiffs motion for partial summary judgment is denied and Googles motion for summary judgment is granted. Judgment will be entered in favor of Google dismissing the Complaint. Google shall submit a proposed judgment, on notice, within five business days hereof."
Affirmed on appeal
https://storage.courtlistener.com/harvard_pdf/3124896.pdf
"In sum, we conclude that: (1) Googles unauthorized digitizing of copyright-protected works, creation of a search functionality, and display of snippets from those works are non-infringing fair uses. The purpose of the copying is highly transfor-mative, the public display of text is limited, and the revelations do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals. Googles commercial nature and profit motivation do not justify denial of fair use. (2) Googles provision of digitized copies to the libraries that supplied the books, on the understanding that the libraries will use the copies in a manner consistent with the copyright law, also does not constitute infringement. Nor, on this record, is Google a contributory infringer."
Google didn’t “win.”
Google Books is currently a shell of its former self.
you're right - really, it's in the opinion of all copyright / IP lawyers & thinkers in this country that Google lost, because it didn't get to do what it wanted to do, even if it "won", it is Pyrrhic.
the balance of comments in Hacker News about a topic like this: it tips towards the wrong understanding of that case. There's Gell Mann Amnesia in every comment section.
A summary judgement in favor of Google with an explicit sentence in the ruling that Google was not "violating intellectual property law" is an unmitigated victory.
“Won” in a purely symbolic sense with no practical significance. How do I access the Google Books library?
Ask Gemini to write you a story
https://books.google.com/
Google removed a ridiculous amount of material during the dispute with the Author's Guild. I know because a bunch of my legal history research citation links collected between 2007-2011 are long since dead, with the material completely gone, AFAICT, and either not discoverable or only available in excerpt. And this was stuff from the 19th and early 20th centuries, which definitely was out of copyright in the US, though some of it may have potentially been a headache in Europe regarding copyright-adjacent author rights that Google didn't want to deal with.
The last few years have really put to test copyrights limits and uses. As someone that falls more in line with Copyleft ideals (do whatever you want with my stuff!), it is very funny.
I just grab the popcorn and watch from the side lines, see where it all lands.
I'm used to think that "copyleft" is "do whatever you want with my stuff, but you must agree that others must be able to do whatever you want with your stuff you made out of mine".
Google had a tailored fair use argument because they never made more than snippets public and searchable. It was also prior to Hachette that controlled lending with one-to-one digital copies for every physical copy was a status quo that publishers largely accepted, which IA deliberately tried to upset with the National "Emergency" Library.
I think it's worth fighting back on copyright as a broken institution, and it should be part of the IA's mission, but you have to be responsible on your approach if you're also going to posture as an archival library with stability of information and access. I understand Kahle might lament losing some of the hacker ethos, but the IA is too important to run up against extremes like this without an existential threat.
internetarchive.ai
It's a training set not an archive.
For my friends... everything.
For my enemies... the law.
It's not just that though. They pulled a stupid stunt during covid.
If you're campaigning for fair use, don't give your enemy ammunition to shoot you with by stretching said fair use too far. That was just really dumb.
Besides, for those willing to look outside official channels there's plenty of book library services available already. Just let them do what they do well and don't contaminate an above-board service with that.
You are being intentionally misleading. Public access AI models are not being taken down either. There is a big, transformative, difference with freely giving out books to read compared with using them to train an ML model.
> There is a big, transformative, difference with freely giving out books to read on a small, measured in human reading pace, scale compared with using them at a massive scale at internet and computer memory speeds to train an ML model even if the intellectual property used to train the ML was from unlicensed copies, and which the model regularly and with some frequency regurgitates verbatim.
not wanting you to be intentially misleading, FTFY.
> some frequency
This is a weasel word you've inserted to be intentionally misleading.
Saying "some frequency" instead of "often" doesn't mean their overall point is wrong. You know that, you're just being intentionally deceitful.
Neither OpenAI or Google did what Internet Archive did.
To say otherwise is disingenuous.
Google Books scanned paper books in, and then made those scans available online, with some limitations.
Since when OpenAI made a digital library?
The 'goodwill' counterparts of ChatGPT, a.k.a. open weight models, are still well alive online.
> Since when OpenAI made a digital library?
What do you think is step 1 of training an LLM?
OpenAI just kept their library private and only distribute the digested summaries of the library, are the main differences.
Yes...? Which is the whole point. That main difference is why IA was sued, not the fact they're idealists.
So it’s OK to make an illegal copy of all copyrighted works as long as you don’t put it on the Internet?
In some places you can copy anything you like and as long as you don't distribute it you're not breaking copyright.
Not in the US, though.
You making the copy is the violation.
What OpenAI did is equally not legal under the same statutes that were used to sue IA.
It was an absolutely bone-headed poke-the-bear move and we should count ourselves lucky that it was only a chunk of the library and not the whole archive that got nuked. IA holds priceless and irreplaceable data, and while the library initiative was a well-intentioned move during the pandemic it was way too radical for the keepers of our shared digital history.
And this is why I respect Anna's Archive. If we want information to be free, I think we should consider intentionally violating copyright as an act of civil disobedience. I'm not sure I'm ready to go that far, but I respect the people at AA who are.
I mean I suspect most people on HN have used torrent sites at least a little bit so we are already there.
Agreed. It was poking the bear. The other big three grey-circuit services have nothing to lose because they never claimed to be legit.
If you claim the moral high ground you have to be impeccable. It also didn't help anyone during COVID because all the stuff was out there already on less legit services. Some make it super easy with telegram bots etc.
I'm sad that they screwed this up. Because the archive is a very valuable service. They've lost a lot of money, goodwill and reputation now. And gained nothing.
The worst part is, it's unimaginable that this would ever have ended well.
It wasn't a bad idea in principle but they should have worked to get some publishers on board, could have been a PR win for them too.
I am just hoping they get on top of the massive trove of game ROM's before Nintendo's lawyers have a field day.
Personally, I say they should be free for everyone, the lawyers however think the complete opposite and they have the means of enforcing this.
Don't they still have safe harbour protections if they remove those in response to a DMCA? Those were all uploaded by users unrelated to IA.
It wasn't poking a bear, it was poking a monster.
Just like in Frankenstein, that monster was created by someone, and those who created the monster are the true villains.
> Kahle thinks “the world became stupider” when the Open Library was gutted—but he’s moving forward with new ideas
> The lawsuits haven’t dampened Kahle’s resolve to expand IA’s digitization efforts, though. Moving forward, the group will be growing a project called Democracy’s Library
please just stop. let IA be what it is. or rather, nothing wrong in doing new projects but don't tie them to IA, just start them as completely separate things. IA is too important as-is to be a playground for random kooky ideas playing with fire.
And then the IA becomes the same thing it’s fighting against. The people in the wrong here are these massive corporations fighting over scraps, not the IA.
No it doesn't. It's extremely valuable with the scope it already has. These massive corporations do not operate the Wayback Machine nor the various (less controversial) public archives that IA hosts, and makes available at no cost, no login-wall, no cloudflare-infinite-captchas, etc.
> let IA be what it is
IA is the eccentric, untamed idealism. You can’t have the Wayback Machine without the National Emergency Library and the Great 78 Project.
As the project matures, the risk tolerance should mature too.
Betting your own time and money on the realization of a crazy ideal can be very noble. Betting a resource millions of people are relying on is destructive hubris.
They should take the untamed idealism to a separate legal entity before they ruin all the good they've done.
"Millions of people" should either be putting their money (and their objections) where their mouth is or stop relying on someone else's resource. The reality is, that like Wikipedia, few people have donated to IA as a proportion of all its users.
The "good" that they've done is the "good" as the creator's see it, not the "good" as the freeloaders see it. All of which is to simply say that almost all users of IA are relying on the goodwill of the creators.
I wonder if there would be appetite for a sister organization—one with a more conservative, risk-averse, long-horizon attitude—to emerge to mirror IA’s core archives. Let IA keep doing what it’s doing, crazy risk and all; duplicate the conservative functions in a conservative organizational structure.
Why not? The Wayback Machine predates the National Emergency Library by many years, suggesting it is possible for one to exist without the other.
I think the idea is that the kind of organization that would create the wayback machine in a world prior to the wayback machine is one which will also continue to push boundaries beyond that
I think that argument has a certain stasis to it, and kind of assumes that organisations maintain their energy and people (and those people are not changing!)… but there are realities where the initial push is by some people and then future maintenance is by others.
But I think the IA is a uniquely tough project because of how much the ground is shifting around them constantly. It’s not Wikipedia
And Brewster Kahle's notions about culture and information sharing start well before the Internet Archive. In theory one could pick and choose, but this is Brewster's life-long passion project. The man even outfitted a van with a printer and a binder to distribute physical books for free.
It's very strange to insist that he _not_ push the boundaries of copyright law for the common good. without that you wouldn't have had the Wayback machine in the first place.
> It's very strange to insist that he _not_ push the boundaries of copyright law for the common good
He as an individual can keep pushing whatever he wants. Just keep IA out of it.
We had the Wayback Machine for years before those two projects. What am I missing?
What capitalism continues to show us: proof that public libraries, if created in the last 10 years, would be deemed illegal and sued out of existence.
It's only because the late 1800's billionaires wanted to leave legacies and made pay-to-enter and free libraries, and migrated them to free, or public libraries. Thats why so many of them are (John) Carnegie Libraries.
Only legal when billionaires do it.
A lower stakes but still illustrative example I see is that the DVR is an invention that wouldn't be allowed to succeed today. All power is being wielded to its fullest in order to prevent skipping ads.
Cable to streaming took us from skippable to unskippable ads. Search results to LLM results will result in invisible/undisclosed ads. Each successive generation of technology will increase the power of advertising and strip rights we used to have. Another example, physical to digital media ownership, we lost resale rights.
We need to understand that we've passed a threshold after which innovation is hurting us more than helping us. That trumps everything else.
Modern DVR's are not the same as classic ones. As per this article from today shows that people have prerecorded are being pulled from their DVR's.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/youtube-tvs-disney-b...
Exactly. A DVR governed by tech giants rather than just Tivo and the cable companies is going to have compromised functionality because it's the tech industry originating the "innovation" for their own benefit.
> All power is being wielded to its fullest in order to prevent skipping ads.
And yet I can go to a site right now off the top of my head and watch any TV show or basically any movie made in the last 50 years for free in HD.
It might be shut down tomorrow and it'll be up against 30s later with a different TLD.
They aren't winning but they really are trying hard to.
How do you figure libraries would be deemed illegal? They operate today. The Archive, on the other hand, attempted a fair use argument for whole copies of books (the copyrighted form most legible to copyright law) currently for sale as ebooks. I agree with the comment across the thread calling this a spectacularly boneheaded move and expressing gratitude that the entire Archive wasn't compromised over the stunt.
> How do you figure libraries would be deemed illegal? They operate today.
The history of public libraries is extremely messy, and the RIAA almost managed to get secondhand music made illegal in the 90s. Publishers did not ever support the idea of loaning a single copy of a work to dozens of people. While it's a huge stretch to say that every illegal download represents a lost sale (people download 100x more than they read), it's a lot less of a stretch to say that people who would sit down and read an entire book are fairly likely to have bought it.
Also, when books were relatively more expensive for people (19th century), a lot of income from publishers came from renting their books, rather than selling them. Public libraries involved a lot of positive propaganda and promises of societal uplift from wealthy benefactors, along the same lines and around the same time as the introduction of universal free public education. I remember hearing a lot about this history at the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore, which iirc was the first. Libraries were at that time normally private membership clubs.
edit: I also agree that the free book thing was stupid and have been very harsh about it. I don't know if it's possible to be too harsh about it, because it was obviously never going to get past a court. It felt almost like intentional sabotage.
The claim is that they operate today only via precedent.
> proof that public libraries, if created in the last 10 years
Would there be anything worth putting into the libraries if intellectual property rights are not respected?
There is a lot of writing on the internet that's done for free with no profit motive. Both fiction and nonfiction.
Paying the editors is the bigger issue than paying the authors
...yes? The median book sells ~3,000 copies, ever. But people keep writing them!
Most libraries probably don't stock many books like that. They'd just waste shelf space until they get discarded in the end.
I think most authors believe their book to be better than the median. At least when they start writing it.
What I hear you say is that Brewster's time would be more wisely spent making friends of billionaires.
Possibly, yeah. Make a "Deal" <spit> with AI companies to have back-end access to all the Archive org's content. Get 'permission' to copy EVERYTHING and have billionaires run interference.
The AI companies already got blank checks to do that. Anthropic is paying what, like $3000 per book? I remember when the fucks at the RIAA were suing 12 year olds for $10000 for Britney Spears albums.
Or better yet, if it's just $3k a book, can we license every book and have that added into Archive.org? Oh wait, deals for thee, not for me.
Eh. If patronage was good enough for da Vinci...
Fun fact: the only complete copy of the Internet Archive's library is in Alexandria.
How's that for historic irony and "unteachability" of the human species.
Honestly, now's the time to make copies of it, while we still can. Torrents need seeders and people that care, and we are the last generation that cares about knowledge.
We need to prevent the following generations to grow up as mindless clickmonkeys of the digital Orwellian world.
You're telling me they have no redundant copies at all in another location?
I could see that due to the sheer size but im sure they have a robust disk pool that would take a lot for it to lose data
In my opinion redundancy in a single business entity is no redundancy at all, especially if there's legal obligations of a soon-to-be-burning-books-again regime.
A better strategy would have been to found independent entities in other liberal democracies, so they can act as IP backups.
There was a great vpro documentary called "Digital Amnesia" [1] where they also interviewed the lead of the library of Alexandria, who was the only bidder to buy the national KIT library of the Netherlands and its dissolved inventory at the time.
Interviews with archivists, librarians, web archive and others on the topic. It's insane to see that nations don't want to preserve their history, science, and culture anymore.
But here we are.
[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=NdZxI3nFVJs
Do we know how much data the internet archive has?
Is it even viable to replicate to multiple regions if it's 1000s of PB?
Anna's archive has the metadata on it.
IA was around 300TB last time I checked.
libgen was around 190TB. For my own at home cluster I decided to go for 512TB but I can't host nor upload in these bandwidth requirements from here.
I started to build sth like a torrent splitter tool yesterday because I realized that all torrent clients just crash when you try to open, modify, or seed those torrents.
Edit: correction, the IA is ~15PB big, brewster kahle mentioned it in the documentary (2014)
300tb seems insanely small so that 15pb number is probably closer
Id say though with the rise of video on social media, if they didn't 3x or 4x that 15pb number since then.
I'm sure there's plenty of room to replicate to aws but I'm sure they couldn't afford to host 60pb of data on aws. They have their own Colo or data center if I recall.
I think the general issue is that Annas Archive only has the metadata that's searchable, in a second step with downloading the parts you want/need you'll see the real storage requirements.
Most of their stuff is uploaded on ipfs mirrors as it looks like, though.
Previously posted:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45798283
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45809870
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45806643
Is the feature gone, the one where I use my local library card to access an online book for 2 weeks if no one else has it currently?
From TFA: In the end, the fight led to more than 500,000 books being removed from the Archive’s “Open Library.”
Good chance the book you wanted is gone at the least
That sounds right. I checked on some listings of books that I thought would be cool to check out, but it still keeps saying how borrow in unavailable except for patrons with print disabilities. For the books I'm interested in, at least we can see scans of the front and back covers, and also a little bit of the table of contents.
I hope Anna's Archive kept a copy.
Most of the IA’s ebook collection still supports controlled digital lending, just like every other library that operates an ebook lending system with CDL.
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I am sorry to say that, but copyright protection time should vary on the subject. Programming books - 10 years maybe? 10 years is ages in computer science. TV shows? 5-7 years maybe. After that time nobody wants to pay for watching old big brother or another Fort Boyard... Nor pay for storing it in archive. And this is the culture other creations are referring to.
We've run in Poland into very strange situation - Polish Public TV (TVP) paid for the great dubbing of some Disney shows. They recorded it on VHS which were overwritten by other shows. Now the translation and the dubbing is lost, found sometimes on people's home recorded VHS but in poor quality, because recorded from the aerial.
Many original episodes of Dr Who were destroyed by the BBC, some have only been recovered because of "pirate" home recorded VHS, or people that "stole" tapes from the dumpster.
The Internet Archive is to be protected at all costs. Its maybe the most important site on the Internet because of all the history that exists nowhere else. As the web is increasingly filled with AI slop, the Internet Archive has got perhaps the last pre-slop snapshot of the Internet.
a lot of it was scraped by LLMs, I asked ChatGPT about a tutorial written on a page that no longer existed from 2013 and it knew all the functions
The Wayback Machine has been broken for me for about a month or so. Is that the case for everyone? Like when you stick in a URL, it just goes to a "landing page" that says:
"The Wayback Machine is an initiative of the Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form.
Other projects include Open Library & archive-it.org.
Your use of the Wayback Machine is subject to the Internet Archive's Terms of Use."
...instead of taking you to the "calendar" page where you could select the version of the website you wanted to see.
https://web.archive.org/web/*/news.ycombinator.com
works for me
Huh. Works for me at home as well. Must be something with the firewall at work or similar. Thanks!
It baffles me how many techies are here saying we should respect our corporate overlords. Something certainly was lost in this scene in the past 20 years. Hackernews? More like Peonnews.
That's what happens when you practically beg book publishers to sue you.
The fact that giving free access to books during a pandemic, in a format that doesn't need physical contact, when libraries were shut down or hard to access for a lot of people should have been praised, not pursued by legal action from rent seeking entities.
The copyright system as a whole should by torn up.
At least it give a clear signal to anyone with a ounce of moral which publisher to avoid at all cost.
Copyright needs torn up or at the very least significant reform but if you're going to be skirting around the edges of it to try to do a good thing it's probably a good idea to not just straight up obviously and blatently break the letter and spirit of the law. CDL is an awkward and dubious workaround but if you drop the 'C' you're just doing copyright infringment and that would be much better left to entities like Anna's Archive. The criticism of IA in this regard is usually that it was a bad strategy, not that the goals were bad.
There may be newer laws with different spirits, but I thought the original copyright spirit was "other people can't sell your work without permission" and not at all about preventing free sharing.
Common misconception. The original spirit is "Others can't copy your work without permission", hence why piracy is a violation.
During the pandemic, they created the "National Emergency Library", where they allowed users copies of books without caps, without any connection to holdings of the Archive itself, something that was black-letter proscribed by copyright law, and as a result they managed to sabotage the legal case for controlled digital lending too.
The copyright system should perhaps be torn up (or maybe not…) but you can’t just blatantly violate it at massive scale and expect to face zero consequences.
And anyway, why is it unreasonable for copyright holders to expect to be able to get paid for their work rather than have a massive library loophole where they just never get paid as long as you're a nonprofit?
Here you go, you can steal beer from my store as long as you’re a nonprofit organization.
> For a decade, the Archive had loaned out individual e-books to one user at a time without triggering any lawsuits. That changed when IA decided to temporarily lift the cap on loans from its Open Library project
So stupid. They had a working system that they blew up through their own actions and now the library is dead.
IMO the only two reform the copyright system needs are DCMA takedown abuse and copyright term length. All the other concepts of copyright make perfect sense. If I create something I should be able to consent to giving or not giving it to someone.
A lot of the software engineers on this forum wouldn’t like what happens to their profession without copyright.
So how do authors make money? Going on concert tours? The copyright system needs reform (Mickey Mouse for example) — but the system protects creators.
If there were no copyrights, no author would make any money.
Put it another way - how many authors are making money off of books they wrote >10 years ago?
And how many actually make a living off of writing books? The authors I know all have jobs.
More and more authors of nonfiction today make money from a number of channels other than actual book sales. The book only serves as a promotional tool for their personal brand, and is only a collection of previously published blog posts or magazine pieces. This already started due to changing consumer behaviors and declining interest in books, so by the time piracy has come on the scene, the shift had already largely occurred.
> If there were no copyrights, no author would make any money.
Cory Doctorow showed that this isn't true.
Cory Doctorow's works that were released under more permissive licensing still reserved some rights for the author. I believe he used some flavor of a Creative Commons non-commercial license, if memory serves. Point being that the method of licensing his works was still fundamentally based on copyright.
(I think the US copyright system is hugely broken and the social contract needs to be re-negotiated, but I comment here in the interests of facts, not in support of the broken system.)
Are Cory Doctorow's newest books permissively licensed? I thought he stopped doing that.
I worry 'hacker' news is going to become more and more 'normie' steadily moving farther and farther away from Barlow's declaration of independence of cyberspace cypherpunk ethos
It's easier to make money when you comply with The Man
you realize that HN has always been deeply business oriented, with it's root in the startup scene through the connection with YC? the hackers I believe is reference to pgs essay Hackers and Painters: https://paulgraham.com/hp.html
Yes, but from a much older coinage, as documented in (the not entirely uncontroversial) "The New Hacker's Dictionary" compiled by (the likewise) Eric Raymond: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3008/3008-h/3008-h.htm#hacke...
I'm old enough to recall the term in active use, and to have received the appellation from one who'd had it likewise handed down. I regard both as epiphenomena of the Internet's frontier or "Wild West" days, of which California has proven as terminal as it was for the nominate example after the US Civil War - not wholly for dissimilar reasons, if we take Vietnam, for the Internet, as the war whose loss would spur the migration.
The site used to be called "Startup News."
https://news.ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html
That's good background, but I'm not sure where I'm meant to understand it to disagree with the idea that the "hacker" in "Hacker News" is the same one discussed in TNHD.
When I made this criticism before of IA, I was told that that was ridiculous since the publishers had it out for IA before the COVID-19 emergency library. That may or may not have been true, but the publishers did not sue IA despite OpenLibrary existing for years before COVID-19. Publishers didn't pull the trigger because they were afraid of losing. It was a MAD situation, and IA unnecessarily triggered a nuclear war that they lost.