782
The Internet Archive is an important resource and needs to be saved.
(www.techradar.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
782 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
39750 readers
270 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
They're doing themselves absolutely no favors by trying to save archived copies of copyrighted media. It's bullshit and they need to stop. It's clearly against the law whether we like the law or not..
That's not illegal, though. (All of us save copies of copyrighted media.) It's the distribution that's in question.
The law is contrary to the interests of The People and needs to change.
Let's try to keep it civil, this seems a bit more aggressive than the comment you're responding to warrants.
Should anyone else need to look up what copyright is, here's the Wikipedia article on the subject.
Sorry.
Isn't it more unethical to abide unjust laws?
Doesn't matter. We don't get that choice. Abide by the law or be illegal, it's simple. If you opt to be illegal, I would suggest that entertainment media may not be the best line in the sand to draw. It's not like stealing food to not starve to death. Just becuase you're bored and feel entitled to be entertained does not mean that someone elsewhere should have to give up possible profit to do so.
To be clear, I've got no issues sailing the black season, like many of you, but I won't be pretending I didn't know, if I get caught. I recognize what's legal and not. It's part of being in a society.
As is recognizing what's ethical and not, is it not?
Yes but that is beside the point of this comment.
Saving copies should be fine, the thing that keeps getting them in trouble is when they try to turn themselves into Library Genesis and freely distribute that media. They need to keep in the archivist mindset where preservation is the most important thing, keep the data safe for the day when it's no longer otherwise publicly available and distributing it is no longer going to get you in trouble.
How is it different from a library though? My library just buys their content from retail stores. They get their books from Amazon and their CDs and DVDs from Walmart, and they also have ebooks with a borrower limit (eg maximum of two checkouts at a time).
The thing that triggered Internet Archive's current enormous lawsuit problems is that they weren't imposing a borrower limit. They were letting as many people download copies as they wanted, with no limits.
I'm not at all a fan of current copyright laws, but that's really going straight into "what are you gonna do, stab me?" territory. This is a job for pirates, not for a library. Leave it to the experts.
They did have a limit for books originally, but removed it during COVID: https://blog.archive.org/2020/03/24/announcing-a-national-emergency-library-to-provide-digitized-books-to-students-and-the-public/. I agree that it was a poor decision.
I agree. Saving bits of published web content is one thing, and saving entire books to lend them out is a different thing.
If the content needs to be lent out, it’s not fit for this kind of thing. Either making a copy and letting a person access it is totally free, or the content is indeed something to be bought and sold.