Does IA have an independent board of directors? If so, why is the board and its members never mentioned in the copyright lawsuits? Most other organizations (nonprofit and corporate) with independent boards would be heavily involved in any major litigation and issuing statements as developments warrant.
I don't see that here - the IA blog post is by a director of library services. The about page (https://blog.archive.org/about/) mentions nothing about a board.
This is the board: https://archive.org/about/bios
The book lawsuit was over current titles (not really archival and preservation), and the record lawsuit wasn't really about the rare 78s, it was about the modern Jimi Hendrix and Paul McCartney records that somehow slipped in. And their refusal to follow the modern law that they themselves celebrated that made what they're trying to do (including downloads) explicitly legal. But that law prohibited fundraising, and they couldn't resist tweeting out links to Frank Sinatra records with a big banner on top asking for money.
In both lawsuits the discovery revealed tech debt and sloppy process at the Archive that made it impossible for them to argue on behalf of the future we all want.
The issue is that nonprofits don’t have shareholders that can hold boards accountable. As seen w/ OpenAI, sometimes big donors can bully (or eject) the board, and that probably needs to happen with IA.
This seems to be the whole ballgame.
They're (UMG, specifically) doing the same to YouTuber Rick Beato. His music theory/analysis/reaction videos are very careful to abide by the rules of _fair use_ and, yet, UMG is still drowning him in copyright violation claims. He's had to hire representation to deal with the backlog of claims that are (extremely likely) all bogus and _hope_ to keep his videos and channel online.
On one hand, their behavior is baffling, as I've streamed and purchased music from these companies I would not have otherwise because of Beato's channel. On the other, it's completely unsurprising, as they stand to _have their cake and eat it too_ by introducing chokepoints for _all_ access to their music (in theory, anyways) and suing anyone in the hopes of inking these bullshit settlements with anyone who dares get within a few miles of their moat.
it jeopardizes all of their other missions and access to otherwise inaccessible media
Preserve the internet, store old websites.
Everything else. The whole "Emergency Lending Library" situation was just strange. A random non government organization can just declare copyright unfair and distribute whatever they want ?
And they acted surprised when the book industry reacted ?
That was adjudicated years ago, and has nothing to do with the case at hand.
* out of copyright (totally legal)
* copyright but abandoned (not legal but nobody cares and is good for society)
* copyright and actively being sold right now (not legal and huge exposure to lawsuits)
modern pop media movies, books, audio are not uploaded to the internet archive in their entirety under any kind of fair use unless you're a copyright abolitionist taking a very expansive view on the term
A record label has never lost a sale because somebody discovered they could "get music for free" by watching YouTube critique videos.
Realistically, what's probably happening is the labels have decided it's too (i.e. would cost too much money) to apply a nuanced approach to copyright striking and so are knowingly flagging everything containing snippets of their music whether it's fair use or not. They've simply decided to not care.
Do not anthropomorphize copyright lawyers
When you're a hammer, every problem is solved by whacking something. When your business is run by lawyers, every problem is solved with legal action.
To be clear, I appreciate the concept of an "Internet Archive", but the current organization / execution / management is absolutely atrocious.
The recording companies should have gone after the individual uploaders or this one as always bullshit - the record labels themselves can just upload a bunch music and screw the IA - it's supposed to be a copy of the whole internet.
This was just to essentially own the IA, which they effectively do now - bc it was easier for them to take over the IA, than to actually protect their content creators by going after the actual distributors, the uploaders. Obviously, they broke tho
Yeah... nothing done against those companies is actually "wrong" - thats a grey area when corpos suck as bad as they do.
I'd imagine it's even the opposite, it's probably inspired people to listen to music they wouldn't otherwise. The record labels have spent a lot of time and money to shut down someone doing free advertising for their product!
https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/bay-area-warehouse-inter...
Amazon, the largest profiter of digital book media - they definitely got theirs during the pandemic, you don't actually need to have their back - they profited so much, during and off of, out hard times, to then do this, haha - I'll always back the IA.
I could watch the IA upload the entire series of the expanse to their front page and had no issue at all with that.
Tbh - I think the big corpos should HAVE TO subsidize the IAs existence - with no strings, so they should pay the IA to give away their shit - that is my official position.
People are on copyright holders' side in the battle with LLMs. Either winning or losing this case would be poison.
I don't wonder anything about that, was very convenient.
How much did they lose again? Where did that number come from?
Say what you will - no actual consumer that operates under actual capitalism would piss us off this much - but they can do whatever they want tho.
I will never see fault with the IA for any of this.
You don't believe in copyright.
It still would of made more sense to create a separate legal entity ( maybe based out of someplace with different copyright laws), if that's what they wanted to do.
Imagine you have a lemonade stand, all is well. The local health inspector is cool with it even though you don't have a permit.
Your cousin asks you if he can start selling raw milk. If you say ok fine, and sell it at the same stand the local health inspector is well within reason to shut you down.
Why couldn't your cousin start up his own stand ?
As is, I think having all of this concentrated in one entity like IA is a really bad idea. It should be distributed across a dozens of organizations, and dozens of countries.
https://www.reddit.com/r/internetarchive/comments/1nk4pwt/ca...
The 90s ended forever ago - def jam and blah blah, why tf are they still relevant again??
Bc they are a monopoly with like a super legal total control over their distributed products - that doesn't end for like 100 years.
If copyright law changes - who win more than the IA?
THATS why this is happening ;)
If corpos want there shit off the site - they should have to send someone to take that down - every single times the whole process, always on them.
The IA is just like a big box with a copy of everything in another box.
Boxes aren't bad bc I put something bad into a box - this is a little more nuanced than that
Unless you're suggesting this isn't user uploaded but is being put there by staff?
I wonder if this quirk is caused by the concentrated interests of rights holders' internal legal departments, where, in eagerness to keep their jobs or demand higher salaries, they pursue breaches of broadcast rights hyper aggressively, well past the point of optimal benefit to the rights holder.
I don't even know what I'll do with it - files for music in 25 - on MY DEVICE, I'll prolly just give it all away - I think we should bring back "mixtape" jump drives (wow so much of that is ancient) bc with all the TBs we can fit on like a penny sized drive - pfft, yeah we all could just bring one drive around with us, and be done paying for all the musical media that exists already - forever.
Sharing is caring
So... yeah, copyright is largely bullshit - look at LLMs - Facebook downloaded ALL OF EVERYTHING THAT WE'VE EVER MADE - to build maybe the mot profitable thing ever.. yeah, totes fine for them and that industry to do all that "theft"
Haha - is that not a joke?
I'm assuming your a Zoomer and I'm sorry they got to all of you so much, but no need to feel any guilt from piracy, that isn't actual theft, theft takes away from - this does not do that, it just makes a copy.
Marketing made these morals of yours Bud - you wouldn't have them otherwise
The real problem here however is copyright. There should be a balance between creators, publishers, readers, libraries, fair use, and remixers. But the balance is all out of whack with the publishers making most of the money and everyone else including most creators getting stiffed.
When the NYT sued OpenAI - I emailed the Times that if it's between the Times or AI, we don't need the NYT anymore.
I want UBI from the AI companies - if they can provide its bc they actually did deliver something that might as well be a god - how they get there - I will forgive, soooo much, almost anything if you think about what AGI actually is.
If I were Sam, I'd never stop talking about it either - for most people, ChatGPT is already "alive" more than can understand that it isn't.
Haha, in a few years, ask a Gen Alpha if they'd give up AI - fpr copyright law, haha
I'm just begining to realize exactly what you stated, despite my own ranting AI, automation and all without actually working with any LLMs for several months - jumped into a smaller project last week and I realized that essentially none of the limits that I thought I had were even there anymore.
Weeks of work and actual human activity down to days - days of working, down to minutes.
I'm trying to retrain how I think - otherwise, the sub 4 year old future creators will be so far ahead of me.
Haha, it's gonna be like building in Fortnite - Millennials had to go no build.
Co-Creation WITH an AI - it's actually a huge shift, then it's as you said, so easy to build new stuff.
I wonder if a similar perverse incentive and emergent behavior is in play here where record labels worry that any encroachment on fair use could set a precedent that will come back to bite them.
That’s literally how copyright enforcement works in the United States, it’s not specific to IA. Every user-submitted content publishing site is rife with piracy.
> but the Library was advertising that they're not going to respect copyright
A gross misreading of their stated intentions.
> and it puts the website archives at risk.
The archives are probably also not fair use in the present legal environment. They just happen to not to contain anything valuable enough for a big media company to get litigious. Yet.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943...
In this case Brewster and his friend personally uploaded 400,000 records to the archive and then made them available for unlimited download. Not just rare stuff, but Frank Sinatra records and the best selling single of all time.
Archiving is cool (and supposedly their charter) but they ignored the Music Modernization Act which made what they claim they were trying to do legal, including unlimited downloads. They blogged about how great it was, how it made old things effectively Fair Use for libraries, then ignored it.
Why? They wanted to get paid for distributing other people's stuff without permission. That's not cool, especially at the scale they were operating. As with the book lawsuit, they were asked nicely to remove certain items and picked an impossible to win fight instead. And lost again.
The reason to find fault with IA is that these actions and decisions put the whole operation at risk. Their recent financials show negative three million dollars in total assets and they're already running on a shoestring. No datacenter, just hard drives sitting out in a building with no air conditioning.
It's ok to love a thing, the spirit behind a thing, yet also admit that it's being run into the ground by unqualified people making terrible decisions.
Not really, they just kind of made up an "emergency" exemption. Their FAQ, instead of saying what legal precedent they were operating under, handwaves it away with a quote from a paper on libraries in general. I'm a fan of them, but they really open themselves up to liability a lot more than necessary.
They had a number of ways to avoid this problem entirely and the fact that they didn't yet again brings Brewster's judgement into question. He's a sweet guy but clearly not an operations or business guy. He's at retirement age and has an opportunity to do the right thing. Hopefully clearing these lawsuits will open up some options.
Like, why would you even buy a album and add it to your collection if you have no idea what it is?
None of that is in place with IA and I fear their laissez-faire attitude in this current climate is gonna bite them in the ass.
The trick is you want them to be archived now when they're readily available not years from now when they're hard or impossible to find. The difficulty is justifying holding on to them that long when they can't be accessed and deciding when they should be exposed.
You might want to be specific about which ones were some kind of false flag conspiracy plot (is it just "Rumours"?) because there are thousands and thousands of pirated pieces of media on archive.org. I am behind there being some kind of archive project but as things stand the site was/is just Mega with a veneer of respectability.
But hosting it there long-term would still have value even if U.S. users couldn't easily get to it. Access would be legal when copyrights expire and everything becomes public domain.
Therefore, above, long-term means long-long-long-term: enough time for all U.S. copyrights to expire under the current law, which would be about 250 years. This of course assumes no U.S. copyright reform, no expansion of the current copyright law, and that U.S. law/authority/power continues to exist in its current form.
Do you think such an archive could be kept alive that long? Here are some potential issues:
- Literal piracy (e.g. pirates coming to shore)
- Storage of data for 250 years (metal rusts, dvds melt/warp, paper is not data dense)
- Climate change
- Undersea cable cuts
- Nuclear war
- Technological evolution (will networking and storage look the same in 50, 100, 200 years)
If you look at this situation from the context of culture war(s), plural, its not so baffling.
This is basically an attempt to influence the future by controlling what it knows about the past.
If other parties own it they should be required to make the work available without interruption or barriers and at a reasonable price.
If a recording was left to rot in some archive to the point others have a noticably better copy you've failed the obligation.
Anything that broadly looks like buying rights for the purpose of destroying the work should be stopped.
Objections should be written down and burned in a special ceremony.
"The focus of the lawsuit was the Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project, which officially started in 2017 and aimed to digitize the shellac discs that were the dominant medium for recorded music from the 1890s until the 1940s and 1950s, when vinyl arrived. With the help of audio preservationist George Blood (who was also named as a defendant in the suit), the Archive said it has digitized more than 400,000 of these old recordings." [1]
Benn Jordan discussion of piracy in general. [2]
[0] https://great78.archive.org/
[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/internet-archi...
Internet Archive is searchable and executes DMCA takedown notices. If something of yours is on there and you don't want it to be, it's not because they're making it hard to change that.
Based on the advertising I see in Nashville's Music Row, I'm pretty sure that actually is their strategy. The signs they put out usually have only the artist name as meaningful information, which is only helpful if you're already a fan (I guess it does get their name into your brain otherwise), and a QR code. I have no idea who scans the QR codes.
Some people have told me it's really meant for other people in the music industry, but it feels odd that they'd have to find out about music by random signs on the side of the road.
At that point, China is as good as any, for not batting a rats about western copyright, so bad the hosting would be a little bit complicated.
The first is "rule of law" where it's important what the rules are. You need good people with knowledge of what's actually happening on the ground to be the ones who make the rules, and then the rules are strictly enforced and if that leads to a bad outcome it means the rules are deficient and there is a meaningful process for addressing that, which results in a change to the rules to prevent the bad outcome from happening in the future.
The second is "CYA" where the purpose of rules is to make prohibitions as many and broad as possible so that if anything bad happens or you have a dispute with someone you can pin a violation on them, and then the rules are ignored whenever that isn't the objective.
The best organizations use only the first system, but this is rare. If you make rules according to the first system and the way you enforce them is according to the second system, you have a minor problem with under-enforcement. If you use the second system entirely, you're going to have major problems with office politics and morale. But the worst is when the people at the top are making the rules in expectation of using the second system without noticing that someone in the middle is actually enforcing them.
Also the book lawsuit wasn't over old or new titles, it was loaning them 1:N instead of 1:1 because "pandemic". I didn't think it was a great idea at the time and everything in that lawsuit has pointed towards it just being an outright foolhardy effort. There were on a great path towards expanding digital lending boundaries (by letting any library add their books to the IA's lending circulation) and screwed it all up.
It was over loaning them 1:1, the pandemic actions were barely mentioned as part of the lawsuit and the result is that 1:1 loaning was ruled illegal. The only harm the pandemic actions did was to public opinion.
A pretty harsh take imo. I think they achieve a huge amount with a relatively small team and tiny budget.
Revenue: $23,678,074
Expenses: $32,674,667
Net Income: -$8,996,593
Net Assets: -$3,530,018
Liabilities and expenses have likely grown in the last 18 months. IA may have gained some additional donations, but a lot of people are turned off by Kahle's doubling down on courtroom fights with copyright owners, even if he takes $0 in salary.
No organization can keep this up unless there is an ace in its back pocket.
The internet should be a repository of all human knowledge and culture; all information and media should (at least eventually) be free as part of the common heritage of mankind. Sites like Wikipedia and IA are a partial realization of this dream. They aren't perfect, for sure, but we need them, and we need more sites like them. I fear too many take these things for granted.
but this ContentID nonsense has been going on since at least 2009,
and we have had easy alternatives like PeerTube for several years now,
where they would have to actually go after him directly,
(and depending on jurisdiction, DMCA (screw that totalitarian extremist nonsense BTW) is more or less enforced),
rather than having YouTube do their censorship for them.
If we lose enough key resources like the Internet Archive we could definitely shifting the pendulum in that direction.
https://archive.org/details/fleetwood_mac-1977-rumours?webam...
I would think: LTO tapes are like 20ish years if stored properly, so you'd only have to copy them 10-15 times over the course of 250 years although that cost/effort decreases over time with ever more modern standards.
Suppose it were significant; then how many of the artists' descendents are getting their share of the streaming revenues on those copyrighted trax? (Before the copyright expires, of course.)
Another specious claim of the majors: these trax are 'still out there'. All 400,000? How would you know, and how would anyone where to look? If you can find where they're hiding, one at a time (online or in a cardboard box under a table in the back of a record store in Poughkeepsie?) Here they all are, on one library's website.
The Great 78 collection is a wonderful and delightful addition to the historians and explorers of 42 genres of music. It's the sort of contribution only a Great Library could afford to make. Of course, beyond the comprehension of mere commerce.
Also, they have a policy already https://help.archive.org/help/rights/
Unless you are claiming that they don't follow it, and this case, nor the one before, rights holders included in their cases that they tried to report them via those.