Internet Archive breached again through stolen access tokens

IA is in bad need of a leadership change. The content of the archive is immensely valuable (largely thanks to volunteers) but the decisions and priorities of the org have been far off base for years.

I support archival of films, books, and music, but those items need to be write-only until copyright expires. The purpose of the Internet Archive is to achieve a wide-reaching, comprehensive archival, not provide easy and free read access to commercial works.

Website caches can be handled differently, but bulk collection of commercial works can't have this same public access treatment. It's crazy to think this wouldn't be a huge liability.

Battling for copyright changes is valiant, but orthogonal. And the IA by trying to do both puts its main charter--archival--at risk.

The IA should let some other entity fight for copyright changes.

I say this as an IA proponent and donor.

I'd agree with you if you live in a country where you can walk into your local library and read these for "free." For people who live where there may not even be a library, your argument makes no sense except to make the publishers richer. They typically price some of these books at "library prices" so normal people won't be able to afford them, but libraries will.

Do you have any examples?

> I support archival of films, books, and music, but those items need to be write-only until copyright expires.

Which means no one alive today would ever be able to see them out of copyright. It also requires an unfounded belief that major copyright owning companies won't extend copyright lengths beyond current lengths which are effectively "forever".

It's the least worst option. Remember when that happened with Mozilla? Now they're an ad company. Take the bad (some bad mis-steps re:multiple lending during the pandemic, not rotating keys immediately after a hack) with the good (staying true to the human centric mission and not the money flows).

I don't believe IA itself takes down pages that kiwifarms archives/links to. Rather they get a request to take it down and comply with it (correct me if I'm wrong here). I think IA is actually in a tough spot on this issue because they might be able to be sued eg. for defamation if they don't take down pages with personal info after a request to do so is made. Lastly, I doubt any new leadership would be less harsh on kiwifarms.

Copyright is copyright. If you don't like the idea of a publisher owning the rights to content they published doesn't mean you have a right to their content. Let alone worldwide distribution of that content.

What makes you feel entitled to the content of the publisher before the copyright expires? Do you feel that you deserve access to everything because you've deemed the concept of ownership around book publishing immoral?

You can't just take a digital copy of a physical book and give it to everyone worldwide. That isn't your choice or decision to make nor is it ethical to ascribe malice to simply retaining distribution rights to content they own.

"Make publishers richer", it's actually just honoring the concept of ownership...

Putting the organisation at risk by playing chicken with large publishing corporations. Trying to stretch fair use a little too far so they had to go to court.

That's something I completely support. There's a limit and that site crosses it.

There was no illegal content on kiwi farms. Even then, I’d say taking down a single page by request is understandable. However, they surrendered to the mob and chose to stop archiving the entire site. This was to censor any criticism of the people involved, but as a result, we lost all of the other information on the rest of the site as well. It’s clear this organization cannot handle pressure, and is relying on people treating it kindly.

They chose to stop serving archives of a site that had started explicitly using tham as a distribution mechanism to get around much a much broader attempt to censor them.

I'm curious what other information on that site you think was valuable to have available to the general public? Nothing has been lost in terms of historical data, it's only the immediate disemmination that has been slowed.

I'm really trying to understand why I should disagree with the IA's choice here. The IA is an archival service, not a distribution platform and it is not their job to help you distribute content that other people find objectionable. Their job is to make and keep an archive of internet content so that we don't lose the historical record. Blocking unrestricted public access to some of that content doesn't harm that mission and can even support it.

> but bulk collection of commercial works can't have this same public access treatment

And it doesn't.

the funny thing about the internet archive is that anyone else on this planet could do exactly what they are doing, but they consistently choose not to.

kiwifarms could spin up their own infrastructure, serve their own content for the world, but it turns out technology is a social problem more than a technical problem.

anyone that wants to stand up and be the digital backbone of “kiwi farms” can, but only the internet archive gets flack for not volunteering to be the literal kiwi farm.

for example, the pirate bay goes offline all the time, but it turns out the people that use it, care enough to keep it online themselves.

The Internet Archive Lending Library did. And there are music, movie, and video game ROMs found throughout the user uploads.

IA should collect these materials, but they shouldn't be playing fast and loose by letting everyone have access to them. That's essentially providing the same services as the Pirate Bay under the guise of archivism.

This puts IA at extreme legal risk. Their mission is too important to play such games.

I don’t like the idea of infinite ownership, which is the current problem of copyright. The public may never be able to own these ideas and build off of them. Further, just because you own something in one country doesn’t mean you can own it in another country. For a physical example, you can’t own a gun in the US and take it to Australia.

If publishers didn’t engage in tactics like “library pricing” and preventing people from actually purchasing the books, I might feel differently. Right now, I see this archiving stuff as a Robin Hood story (which fwiw, every version of this story you may have seen/heard is probably still copyrighted) and I hope the publishers die or are replaced.

Hot take, but the intersection of people with sufficient LIS / archival experience to run the place and who can live under constant legal peril without capitulating to adversarial interests is probably, what, a hundred in the world?

I'd say they need support. They didn't abandon or pervert their mission, they relied on people they trusted who weren't equipped to also handle security. If your house were broken into, I wouldn't start a neighborhood petition for you to move out, because you didn't cause it.

They may be in a rut, but short of you or someone else building an IA replacement that settles all of your concerns and commiting to it for twenty five years with no serious compromises, you're probably punching a little above your weight on the topic.

Protesting copyright and enabling pirate-like access to materials is orthogonal to archiving the world's data and recording our history.

Internet Archive should focus on its mission of archival. Let other groups figure out copyright.

By taking on both tasks, IA risks everything and could stumble in its goal to be an archivist platform. We need an entity dedicated to recording history. IA is that. They're just biting off way too much to chew and making powerful enemies along the way.

And what, we are just supposed to trust that they're actually archiving these things instead of relaxing on a beach somewhere pretending they are? If they were to only focus on archiving, nobody would know if anything has actually been archived for nearly 100 years; after we are all dead.

By making the archive public, sure, we have a bit of a "piracy" issue. However, we can also verify they are actually archiving the things they say they are, point out mistakes, and ask them to remove things from the archive.