Battle for Libraries
www.battleforlibraries.comDon’t let libraries die. As the future goes digital, major publishers are suing to cut off libraries’ defense of digital books from censorship. It’s time to fight back.
It looks like the internet archive is needed assistance, I just heard about this today and figured lemmy could help spread this message around
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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Is it still under attack?
not enough AI features! /s
Europe is voting this weekend. If you care about copyright reform, you should consider voting for the European Pirate Party. IA is probably in the wrong here, legally. But many would argue it’s morally right to have free access to information. Sure, shadow libraries are popping up everywhere and we have access to more information than ever before, but if we really want access for everyone, we need different copyright laws, and for that we need politicians.
For Germean voters there is the WahloMat to help with the voting choice (a dozen of questions and in the end shows how much overlap there is with all the parties): https://www.wahl-o-mat.de/europawahl2024/app/main_app.html
The major issue is that if you care about CopyRight: Party A. Easier to comply with regulation: Party B. Migration: Party C. Environment: Party D.
And all of the choices (A-D) have some very removed, prominent positions that you strongly oppose and in the end, have no clue what to elect and choose the least worst option and hope for the best.
Sadly in countries without a pirate party, like Denmark, you can’t (as far as I know) vote for the EP pirate party.
Does voting for a party like that even help anything? I’m asking because my voting experience is US, and everyone knows how many parties matter here. So I’m curious.
Yes. In most European countries even small parties can get seats. In my country there are 8 parties in parliament, for example, and 2 of them didn’t use to be there 2 election cycles ago (they were too small/new 8 years ago but eventually grew in popularity and got enough votes for representation).
Of course if they only have 1 or 2 members in parliament they typcily tend to form coalitions with other like-minded parties so they can get more voting power.
I wonder how many people that aren’t from the US running around telling people to vote third party their are, because of what you just described.
It does a bit, since every party will be represented in the European council based on the number of votes they have. It’s not an election where the winner takes all.
I think the pirates had one or two representatives in the council, which is enough to start debates and make proposals. They obviously can’t push anything through by themselves.
Nice. That sounds like more than we have available. Thank you
ill mention this in every thread about them:
run the archive team warrior if you can. it helps them archive black boxes like telegram, discord, reddit…
Didn’t know about this, but sounds like a good cause.
Is there any legal risk involved with this? Is it recommended to run behind a VPN?
No, VPNs are not allowed. See here for more info.
They should have:
What’s this, now?
Oh. Oh, no! I’d heard he was a shitty person, but I wasn’t expecting that!
Can they sink the IA name and just set up as another entity? I mean, declare bankruptcy etc. What happens to the archived data in this scenario? I am not a lawyer so I have no idea
Edit perhaps they can setup up an entity, sell the data to it, and bankrupt IA?
Surely not or else companies would be doing this every day to avoid litigation.
I mean, companies with a lot of employees, sure. But companies that are mostly just data, like movie watching sites, do it all the time
The mercenary company Blackgate(?) has done it a dozen times.
Again, I have no idea what I am talking about but you can have provisions to protect assets in bankruptcy. But besides that, I am not sure if distributing the assets to another nonprofit entity prior would help save the archived data
https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/expert-insights/dissolving-a-nonprofit-when-and-how-to-dissolve-a-nonprofit
Fuck.
I really hope someone gets hold of the data and shares it on p2p or otherwise. If all this data is deleted it would be equivalent to nuking pyramids or burning Picasso paintings.
…library… Alexandria…
That’s one of the reasons why uploads to the Archive have torrents.
Now if they’d just fix the damn tracker…
Good luck, every day more than 1PB is uploaded to IA.
Honestly, I’d say it would be much much worse than your examples. It would be erasing parts of history itself.
Exactly. Losing Internet and digital history would create another dark ages for future historians. Everything we’ve done would just be gone.
If I had more money than humanly usable I would create a project that transcribes wikipedia or whatever onto stone/metal plates so it’s not forgotten.
Fuck yes, we need to get our hands on this stuff for fucks sake. I have shit there I don’t even know I need yet
Can someone fucking near get their ass there and do a legendary copy paste operation on a massive scale
There’s no link. Down voted.
Update: OP updated the post to include a link. Up voted.
Seriously no one cares if you downvote or upvote stuff. Get lost with your inept attempt at manipulation
Yeah and I was supposed to stay calm and cute this whole week see what you have done with your shitty comment?
I was asking others to downvote low effort content to improve the quality of the content on the platform for others.
Yeah where? You just said down voted like your personal opinion on the post mattered. Then edited to say upvoted like anyone cared or you were deluded into thinking it was thanks to your little tiny point down
Maybe I am angry but the frikin internet archive is going down, I hate this shit
Why can’t anyone spot a grift anymore? The IA is hugely profitable, and is very clearly crafting PR statements designed to increase donations. Has noone had their trust abused before? If they were trying to make change around this subject they wouldnt be so dishonest in their messaging.
IA are not Robin Hood.
How is IA profitable?
Same question here. How can they be profitable if they are a registered non-profit?
Is it somehow possible to pay employees exorbitant salaries, similar to Mozilla’s CEO?
Non profit doesn’t mean revenue can’t exceed expenses. It means that the org can’t be owned by investors, and the org can’t pay dividends.
Interesting. And there really is nothing stopping someone in control from getting themselves a huge portion of it, while laying off staff?
That seems like a huge flaw that someone with the required people skills (read, social engineering) can exploit.
Anti Commercial-AI license
Thats not a violation of being a nonprofit. If someone does work, they should get paid for their work.
The point of a nonprofit is to prevent folks who don’t work from stealing the org’s cash. Really, this is the baseline for any ethical org. All for-profit companies should just straight-up be illegal to form.
Of course, it happens all the time with many non profit orgs. They even pest you and call people for donations. You didn’t know?
My grandma is pestered daily from some organisations that ‚help poor kids’ or whatever. Pretty lucrative business.
Some even get public money and are connected to politicans that sometimes launder public money through them, seemingly with no consequences.
Legitimate ones will never whore for cash with spam emails or calls and won’t be connected to government. All the rest are just get rich schemes.
You have to do proper, thorough research before you donate money to some kids helping org or similar. Else you will just fund someone’s Porsche.
Legitimate nonprofits definitely will ask you for donations.
Yeah well if they call/mail you specifically getting your contact from some leak database you can safely mark them as scam. As great number of them are.
Similarly you wouldn’t give money to beggars in the street because you know most of them aren’t in need of help but make money like this, scamming ppl while those that really need help are helped by various legit orgs you give money to instead.
Those scummy orgs are like these beggars manipulating you into pity. It’s very powerful manipulation mechanism and very often works. My grandma was scammed like this many times before we persuaded her to not send money to random people. Instead you should sit down, browse the list of legit orgs and choose one/few to support once a year/month with some amount.
Or you can just pay taxes if in a country with robust, developed social welfare system and enjoy.
IA my guess is they are mostly legit but it’s puzzling where they ended up
Everyone that wants context should read this: https://lunduke.substack.com/p/the-internet-archives-last-ditch
Listen, I love the IA and everything they stand for, but they’re not winning this. They fucked up and gave away copyrighted content, for free, in unlimited amounts during covid. They then proceed to melt down in court because they know it’s impossible to win. Now they’re seeking empathy from everyone and not talking about why they got sued - which is giving away potentially millions of copies of other people’s work…
Yeah, pretty much everyone who understands copyright agreed that this was the dumbest idea imaginable. But IA stupidly proceeded anyways, and now they’re finding out that the long studded dildo of justice rarely arrives lubed.
I love IA. I use it all the time. But this was just a blatantly stupid move. No amount of crying about it is going to change the fact that they seriously fucked up and angered the most well-established copyright holders in the world.
That’s not the full article, see https://lunduke.locals.com/post/5556650/the-internet-archives-last-ditch-effort-to-save-itself
Assuming they don’t win, is there any contingency in place to preserve all their data? I don’t know how exactly because I assume there’s an absolute fuckton of it, but it would be such a shame if all of that was lost forever.
I’d love to see it become like the Pirate Bay, where they squish one and ten more pop up to replace it, but I don’t know if that’s even possible.
That worked for pirate bay because they were storing a miniscule amount of actual data. Torrents are really small. The actual data is stored in the peer to peer network. The torrents are just tracking where in the p2p stuff is.
IA isn’t like that. They probably store exabytes of data.
@textfiles@mastodon.archive.org Thoughts?
@Cracks_InTheWalls @CrabAndBroom I think there are tons and tons of yummy little square boxes that will take all of the letters you type into a keyboard and then put them somewhere for everybody to see.
Lol, fair. I’m still not well versed in inter-service ActivityPub stuff. I don’t know if you’ll see this or see any of the parent comments here on Lemmy.
Contingency plans if IA loses the appeal about the library stuff, or in general has something happen that puts IA’s collections at risk of being lost. Any thoughts on the matter? Also cool if it’s not something you want to talk about, I know you don’t speak for the whole org.
How do we archive the archive?
@Cracks_InTheWalls I’m quite aware of the thread you are connecting me to. My answer stays the same.
Ah, understood. Thanks!
I don’t know what happend the last few years with Lunduke, but it seems like he went down the conservative/conspiracy rabbit hole and now I don’t trust anything he writes anymore. Please see for yourself, this article is a good starting point: https://lunduke.substack.com/p/the-tech-industry-hates-you?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
I think this explains his stance a bit https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=rRDEkMAcwrQ I agree with some bits (because code quality does matter more than being nice when it is your profession), disagree with some (because being a grumpy idiot will harm your ability to build on collaborative projects).
PS: but yea, then there is also the video about the tech industry where he cherrypicks outrage and contradicts himself and agrees that Linus is rude and divisive…which sort of discredits him, because he only seems to like angry but competent people when they agree with him.
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And everyone that wants unbiased context should read the wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hachette_v._Internet_Archive
The judgment basically completely ignored IA’s arguments towards fair use. EFF filed an amicus brief that explains how baseless the judgment was. Assuming the entire US court system isn’t in the corporate pocket yet they will win this on appeal.
It’s ridiculous to assume that an organization whose main purpose is data archival would knowingly and blatantly ignore copyright law. IA didn’t ignore it, they did they homework and saw that their use qualified as fair use. Then they met a judge who doesn’t give a shit about that. Nobody can prepare for that in advance.
Their argument towards fair use wasn’t ignored. It was inapplicable.
Except that’s exactly what they did. They knowingly and blatantly violated copyright law. They had a system in place to ensure fair use compliance. They intentionally disabled that system, in violation of fair use, to allow unlimited free downloads of the books they had archived.
IA’s entire argument was basically “but we’re a library” and totally missed the part where even public libraries need to comply with copyright law. Even with ebooks, they can’t simply distribute an unlimited number of copies; They have licensing agreements in place, for a specific number of specific ebooks to be checked out at any one time. And they have to use time-locked DRM to ensure compliance, by automatically revoking users’ reading ability when their check-out time is up. IA did precisely none of that.
Huh. TIL. I always wondered why libraries treat ebooks like physical books.
In this case, they absolutely did. They had a CDL in place specifically to comply with copyright law, and they willfully and intentionally disabled it.
The publishers also had arrangements with local libraries to expand their ebook selections. Most libraries have ebook and audiobook deals worked out with the publishers, and those were expanded during the lockdowns. Many of the partner libraries preferred those systems to the CDL because they served their citizens directly. A small town in Nebraska didn’t have to worry about having a wait list of 3000 people ahead of the local citizen whose taxes had actually bought the license the Internet Archive wanted to borrow.
The Internet Archive held a press conference right before the ruling comparing the National Emergency Library to winter-library lands, but that’s simply not accurate. The CDL they had in place before and after was inter-library loaning. The CDL was like setting up printing presses in the library and copying books for free and handing them out to anyone.
Under the existing CDL, they could have verified that partner libraries had stopped lending their phycical copies of the books and made more copies of the ebooks available for checkout instead of just making it unlimited and they’d have legally been fine, but they did not, and the publishers had every right to sue.
The publishes also waited until June to file suit: well-after most places had been re-opened for weeks.
IA does important work, but they absolutely broke the law here, and since they did it by intentionally removing the systems designed to ensure legitimate archival status and fair-use of copywritten works, they have pretty much zero defense. It wasn’t a mistake or an oversight. And after reopening they kept doing it for weeks until they were sued and were able to magically restore the legal system the same day the lawsuit was filed.
You’re using the publisher’s arguments in your comment. If anybody’s interested, here’s the IA’s counter-argument. It boils down to the fact publishers are challenging practices that used to be considered fair use… just because they can.
This decision has wide-reaching implications that will affect all libraries, not just the IA.
Ultimately we’ll just have to see what the appeal decision will be.
Their counter-argument isn’t a legal argument. They’re saying they did it because they think the publishers aren’t being fair.
And they’re talking mostly about format-conversion, which isn’t the problem here.
You can absolutely make format conversions to digital for archival purposes. What you cannot do is them make a bunch of copies and give them away for free simultaneous use. That is not fair use. That’s 100% piracy.
The CDL was built specifically to ensure that only one digital copy was on loan for each owned copy of the material because the IA absolutely knew that was the law.
In that counter argument they are essentially admitting that 99% of their content was distributed without the copyright holder’s consent.
Was it fair use in the past to redistribute reprints/format-conversions of works without the copyright holders consent?
I agree that copyright law sucks… but that’s why it needs to change so it actually serves “the greater public good”. The judiciary system is not the right place to advocate for that (they don’t make the law, just interpret it), so I don’t really think there’s much hope in them winning this. Sadly.
I love your optimism
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Just sent them a couple of bucks. Wish I could give more but the conversion rate on my currency is atrocious lol 🫠
They made a really dumb move and now have to pay for it. I understand their importance but it doesn’t seem like they do - or they are naive enough to believe corpos have good will.
They broke law in such a dumb way, and it’s a pity they put their entire project in jeopardy. My only thought while deciding to donate is “what will prevent them from doing something this dumb again?”
Anti Commercial-AI license
Made me look for internet archive merch and found they actually do have a store for it
https://store.archive.org/
Is there any way to use my own computer to take up summer off the dose traffic?
Modern corporations are a damned plague. Most of these fuckers would destroy our whole cultural heritage in a heartbeat if it meant making a profit.
Yes, corporations exist to make profit, but come on, there are limits.
come and destroy the IPFS, then!
What is the IPFS?
a decentralized file hosting/sharing protocol that powers library genesis, for example
The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a protocol, hypermedia, and file sharing peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system. It allows users to host and receive content in a manner similar to BitTorrent.
That’s pretty cool. :)
I am glad you have a moral centre.
But that is the capitalist way. A Redditor once wrote: “*Corporations have no morals, no ethics, no code of conduct, no feelings, no empathy, and zero accountability. They have one goal and one goal only: to increase profits at all costs.”
Case in point: the climate crisis. Corporations are literally destroying their own home for a symbol of success that, like their products, is man-made: money. It is the ultimate pursuit of vanity.
Crazy, if you think about it for a moment.
I agree that that is the capitalist way, which is one of the reasons I hate capitalism. I’m no tankie, but I believe there are other ways, even ways that still use personal property as well as currency, beyond capitalism, which is just the use of personal property and currency to obtain more personal property and currency at all costs in an endless cycle.
Yeah. The monsters gnawing away at nature, public infrastructure, your friends? They are called corporations.
Btw, megacorps have multiple faces and are especially hungry.
I do not understand. Could you explain what you mean please?
Agreed, now what do we do about it?
I quit a very very well paid IT job in a very big corp because I did not want to participate to their anti-human, anti-planet shit…
What are you doing about it?
What am I doing about it? For the most part, nothing at the moment besides actively refusing to purchase from a small number of companies—Nestlé, Walmart, Amazon, etc—mostly out of principal as I’m not illusioned enough to think one person will make a difference in this sense). Primarily because at the moment I live in a dead-end job making barely enough money to buy food and trying to keep my car from disintegrating long enough for me to get to work and back.
Frankly, I’d love to do more, but there’s really not much I can do. Doesn’t mean I have to like it though. Just because you don’t have an alternative ready doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to dislike the current situation.
Thank you for your reply! You are doing what you can and that is important!
I appreciate you understanding. It really sucks our world has come to just having to deal with it most of the time.
I decided not to pursue my interest in geology because I didn’t want to be stuck with the only employment options being oil companies.
It sucks that we need to give up so much even though they keep destroying and pillaging.
Respect! Hope you will find your way following your passion and working for the Good!
And yet by law in some places (the US being one, I believe) they are treated as people, with certain rights.
Like people, but with a feduciary responsibility to gain wealth at every opportunity. Corporations are almost like vampires: they don’t need food or water, they don’t age, they have inhuman power, yet they wear the guise of people; they pass as human to make it easier to drain us of our blood, an endless thirst they feel compelled to heed.
Well said
The AI techbros wanna scare you with tales of AI becoming sentient and going rogue to destroy us all, when corporations, mindless machines made out of people to maximize profits at all cost, are already doing all that
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Who’s gonna tell them that the small islands are the first thing to go in the climate crisis
True, but they’ll be the only ones able to afford to buy a boat. Lol.
Billionaires remember! Yacht first, island second.
Maybe now they do, but that itself is a cancerous perversion of their original purpose.