There is so much pirated material on Internet Archive. They have so many movies with titles directly from the warez groups. I don't think they are done getting in trouble sadly.
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it jeopardizes all of their other missions and access to otherwise inaccessible media
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.
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.