Internet Archive's Legal Fights Are Over, but Its Founder Mourns What Was Lost

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

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.

> If there were no copyrights, no author would make any money.

Cory Doctorow showed that this isn't true.

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.

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.

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.

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

"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.

> some frequency

This is a weasel word you've inserted to be intentionally misleading.

“Won” in a purely symbolic sense with no practical significance. How do I access the Google Books library?

Google didn’t “win.”

Google Books is currently a shell of its former self.

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."

Yes...? Which is the whole point. That main difference is why IA was sued, not the fact they're idealists.

Why do companies attempt to prevent piracy if it doesn't hurt sales?

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.

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.

> 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.

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?

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...

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. :)

Eh. If patronage was good enough for da Vinci...

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.

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.

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?