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.
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.
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 researchers alike, is just going to download them from shadow libraries.
This is already happening, and through a technique that copyright law does not really protect against. Writers of genre fiction are already reporting that their work is being run through an LLM and the result sold under a different title and author.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
> 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.
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 researchers alike, is just going to download them from shadow libraries.
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 their work is being run through an LLM and the result sold under a different title and author.
Why do companies attempt to prevent piracy if it doesn't hurt sales?
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.
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.
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?
internetarchive.ai
It's a training set not an archive.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
...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...