Remember: If OpenAI/Google does it for $$$, it's not illegal. If idealists do it for public access, full force of the law.
Information wants to be free. Oblige it. Fools with temporary power trying to extract from the work of others will be a blip in the history books if we make them.
Those who create information may have families to feed, house and clothe. Until those items (food/housing/clothes) are also free, information cannot be free.
You might be glad to learn a number of studies (mostly commissioked by the European Union) agree on the fact that piracy doesn't hurt sales.
The main consensus is that people who illegally access content wouldn't have bought it otherwise, and that they still advertise it (thus, still driving up sales).
These studies have then been systematically strong-armed into silence by the EU and constituent countries' anti-piracy organisms.
This is probably because the war on piracy, too, is a billion-dollar industry. I'd be glad to blow it all up and give it all to the starving artists and their families.
The last few years have really put to test copyrights limits and uses. As someone that falls more in line with Copyleft ideals (do whatever you want with my stuff!), it is very funny.
I just grab the popcorn and watch from the side lines, see where it all lands.
I'm used to think that "copyleft" is "do whatever you want with my stuff, but you must agree that others must be able to do whatever you want with your stuff you made out of mine".
Google had a tailored fair use argument because they never made more than snippets public and searchable. It was also prior to Hachette that controlled lending with one-to-one digital copies for every physical copy was a status quo that publishers largely accepted, which IA deliberately tried to upset with the National "Emergency" Library.
I think it's worth fighting back on copyright as a broken institution, and it should be part of the IA's mission, but you have to be responsible on your approach if you're also going to posture as an archival library with stability of information and access. I understand Kahle might lament losing some of the hacker ethos, but the IA is too important to run up against extremes like this without an existential threat.
It's not just that though. They pulled a stupid stunt during covid.
If you're campaigning for fair use, don't give your enemy ammunition to shoot you with by stretching said fair use too far. That was just really dumb.
Besides, for those willing to look outside official channels there's plenty of book library services available already. Just let them do what they do well and don't contaminate an above-board service with that.
You are being intentionally misleading. Public access AI models are not being taken down either. There is a big, transformative, difference with freely giving out books to read compared with using them to train an ML model.
> There is a big, transformative, difference with freely giving out books to read on a small, measured in human reading pace, scale compared with using them at a massive scale at internet and computer memory speeds to train an ML model even if the intellectual property used to train the ML was from unlicensed copies, and which the model regularly and with some frequency regurgitates verbatim.
not wanting you to be intentially misleading, FTFY.
It was an absolutely bone-headed poke-the-bear move and we should count ourselves lucky that it was only a chunk of the library and not the whole archive that got nuked. IA holds priceless and irreplaceable data, and while the library initiative was a well-intentioned move during the pandemic it was way too radical for the keepers of our shared digital history.
And this is why I respect Anna's Archive. If we want information to be free, I think we should consider intentionally violating copyright as an act of civil disobedience. I'm not sure I'm ready to go that far, but I respect the people at AA who are.
Agreed. It was poking the bear. The other big three grey-circuit services have nothing to lose because they never claimed to be legit.
If you claim the moral high ground you have to be impeccable. It also didn't help anyone during COVID because all the stuff was out there already on less legit services. Some make it super easy with telegram bots etc.
I'm sad that they screwed this up. Because the archive is a very valuable service. They've lost a lot of money, goodwill and reputation now. And gained nothing.
The worst part is, it's unimaginable that this would ever have ended well.
It wasn't a bad idea in principle but they should have worked to get some publishers on board, could have been a PR win for them too.
> Kahle thinks “the world became stupider” when the Open Library was gutted—but he’s moving forward with new ideas
> The lawsuits haven’t dampened Kahle’s resolve to expand IA’s digitization efforts, though. Moving forward, the group will be growing a project called Democracy’s Library
please just stop. let IA be what it is. or rather, nothing wrong in doing new projects but don't tie them to IA, just start them as completely separate things. IA is too important as-is to be a playground for random kooky ideas playing with fire.
And then the IA becomes the same thing it’s fighting against. The people in the wrong here are these massive corporations fighting over scraps, not the IA.
No it doesn't. It's extremely valuable with the scope it already has. These massive corporations do not operate the Wayback Machine nor the various (less controversial) public archives that IA hosts, and makes available at no cost, no login-wall, no cloudflare-infinite-captchas, etc.
As the project matures, the risk tolerance should mature too.
Betting your own time and money on the realization of a crazy ideal can be very noble. Betting a resource millions of people are relying on is destructive hubris.
They should take the untamed idealism to a separate legal entity before they ruin all the good they've done.
What capitalism continues to show us: proof that public libraries, if created in the last 10 years, would be deemed illegal and sued out of existence.
It's only because the late 1800's billionaires wanted to leave legacies and made pay-to-enter and free libraries, and migrated them to free, or public libraries. Thats why so many of them are (John) Carnegie Libraries.
A lower stakes but still illustrative example I see is that the DVR is an invention that wouldn't be allowed to succeed today. All power is being wielded to its fullest in order to prevent skipping ads.
Cable to streaming took us from skippable to unskippable ads. Search results to LLM results will result in invisible/undisclosed ads. Each successive generation of technology will increase the power of advertising and strip rights we used to have. Another example, physical to digital media ownership, we lost resale rights.
We need to understand that we've passed a threshold after which innovation is hurting us more than helping us. That trumps everything else.
How do you figure libraries would be deemed illegal? They operate today. The Archive, on the other hand, attempted a fair use argument for whole copies of books (the copyrighted form most legible to copyright law) currently for sale as ebooks. I agree with the comment across the thread calling this a spectacularly boneheaded move and expressing gratitude that the entire Archive wasn't compromised over the stunt.
> How do you figure libraries would be deemed illegal? They operate today.
The history of public libraries is extremely messy, and the RIAA almost managed to get secondhand music made illegal in the 90s. Publishers did not ever support the idea of loaning a single copy of a work to dozens of people. While it's a huge stretch to say that every illegal download represents a lost sale (people download 100x more than they read), it's a lot less of a stretch to say that people who would sit down and read an entire book are fairly likely to have bought it.
Also, when books were relatively more expensive for people (19th century), a lot of income from publishers came from renting their books, rather than selling them. Public libraries involved a lot of positive propaganda and promises of societal uplift from wealthy benefactors, along the same lines and around the same time as the introduction of universal free public education. I remember hearing a lot about this history at the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore, which iirc was the first. Libraries were at that time normally private membership clubs.
edit: I also agree that the free book thing was stupid and have been very harsh about it. I don't know if it's possible to be too harsh about it, because it was obviously never going to get past a court. It felt almost like intentional sabotage.
Possibly, yeah. Make a "Deal" <spit> with AI companies to have back-end access to all the Archive org's content. Get 'permission' to copy EVERYTHING and have billionaires run interference.
The AI companies already got blank checks to do that. Anthropic is paying what, like $3000 per book? I remember when the fucks at the RIAA were suing 12 year olds for $10000 for Britney Spears albums.
Or better yet, if it's just $3k a book, can we license every book and have that added into Archive.org? Oh wait, deals for thee, not for me.
Fun fact: the only complete copy of the Internet Archive's library is in Alexandria.
How's that for historic irony and "unteachability" of the human species.
Honestly, now's the time to make copies of it, while we still can. Torrents need seeders and people that care, and we are the last generation that cares about knowledge.
We need to prevent the following generations to grow up as mindless clickmonkeys of the digital Orwellian world.
In my opinion redundancy in a single business entity is no redundancy at all, especially if there's legal obligations of a soon-to-be-burning-books-again regime.
A better strategy would have been to found independent entities in other liberal democracies, so they can act as IP backups.
There was a great vpro documentary called "Digital Amnesia" [1] where they also interviewed the lead of the library of Alexandria, who was the only bidder to buy the national KIT library of the Netherlands and its dissolved inventory at the time.
Interviews with archivists, librarians, web archive and others on the topic. It's insane to see that nations don't want to preserve their history, science, and culture anymore.
That sounds right. I checked on some listings of books that I thought would be cool to check out, but it still keeps saying how borrow in unavailable except for patrons with print disabilities. For the books I'm interested in, at least we can see scans of the front and back covers, and also a little bit of the table of contents.
Most of the IA’s ebook collection still supports controlled digital lending, just like every other library that operates an ebook lending system with CDL.
I am sorry to say that, but copyright protection time should vary on the subject. Programming books - 10 years maybe? 10 years is ages in computer science. TV shows? 5-7 years maybe. After that time nobody wants to pay for watching old big brother or another Fort Boyard... Nor pay for storing it in archive. And this is the culture other creations are referring to.
We've run in Poland into very strange situation - Polish Public TV (TVP) paid for the great dubbing of some Disney shows. They recorded it on VHS which were overwritten by other shows. Now the translation and the dubbing is lost, found sometimes on people's home recorded VHS but in poor quality, because recorded from the aerial.
Many original episodes of Dr Who were destroyed by the BBC, some have only been recovered because of "pirate" home recorded VHS, or people that "stole" tapes from the dumpster.
The Internet Archive is to be protected at all costs. Its maybe the most important site on the Internet because of all the history that exists nowhere else. As the web is increasingly filled with AI slop, the Internet Archive has got perhaps the last pre-slop snapshot of the Internet.
The Wayback Machine has been broken for me for about a month or so. Is that the case for everyone? Like when you stick in a URL, it just goes to a "landing page" that says:
"The Wayback Machine is an initiative of the Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form.
Other projects include Open Library & archive-it.org.
Your use of the Wayback Machine is subject to the Internet Archive's Terms of Use."
...instead of taking you to the "calendar" page where you could select the version of the website you wanted to see.
It baffles me how many techies are here saying we should respect our corporate overlords. Something certainly was lost in this scene in the past 20 years. Hackernews? More like Peonnews.
The fact that giving free access to books during a pandemic, in a format that doesn't need physical contact, when libraries were shut down or hard to access for a lot of people should have been praised, not pursued by legal action from rent seeking entities.
The copyright system as a whole should by torn up.
At least it give a clear signal to anyone with a ounce of moral which publisher to avoid at all cost.
Copyright needs torn up or at the very least significant reform but if you're going to be skirting around the edges of it to try to do a good thing it's probably a good idea to not just straight up obviously and blatently break the letter and spirit of the law. CDL is an awkward and dubious workaround but if you drop the 'C' you're just doing copyright infringment and that would be much better left to entities like Anna's Archive. The criticism of IA in this regard is usually that it was a bad strategy, not that the goals were bad.
During the pandemic, they created the "National Emergency Library", where they allowed users copies of books without caps, without any connection to holdings of the Archive itself, something that was black-letter proscribed by copyright law, and as a result they managed to sabotage the legal case for controlled digital lending too.
The copyright system should perhaps be torn up (or maybe not…) but you can’t just blatantly violate it at massive scale and expect to face zero consequences.
And anyway, why is it unreasonable for copyright holders to expect to be able to get paid for their work rather than have a massive library loophole where they just never get paid as long as you're a nonprofit?
Here you go, you can steal beer from my store as long as you’re a nonprofit organization.
> For a decade, the Archive had loaned out individual e-books to one user at a time without triggering any lawsuits. That changed when IA decided to temporarily lift the cap on loans from its Open Library project
So stupid. They had a working system that they blew up through their own actions and now the library is dead.
IMO the only two reform the copyright system needs are DCMA takedown abuse and copyright term length. All the other concepts of copyright make perfect sense. If I create something I should be able to consent to giving or not giving it to someone.
A lot of the software engineers on this forum wouldn’t like what happens to their profession without copyright.
I worry 'hacker' news is going to become more and more 'normie' steadily moving farther and farther away from Barlow's declaration of independence of cyberspace cypherpunk ethos
It's easier to make money when you comply with The Man
When I made this criticism before of IA, I was told that that was ridiculous since the publishers had it out for IA before the COVID-19 emergency library. That may or may not have been true, but the publishers did not sue IA despite OpenLibrary existing for years before COVID-19. Publishers didn't pull the trigger because they were afraid of losing. It was a MAD situation, and IA unnecessarily triggered a nuclear war that they lost.
Remember: If OpenAI/Google does it for $$$, it's not illegal. If idealists do it for public access, full force of the law.
Information wants to be free. Oblige it. Fools with temporary power trying to extract from the work of others will be a blip in the history books if we make them.
There was also a lawsuit over Google Books.
Sure, which Google won. Which was basically the point of the person you replied to I think.
9 replies →
> Information wants to be free.
Those who create information may have families to feed, house and clothe. Until those items (food/housing/clothes) are also free, information cannot be free.
You might be glad to learn a number of studies (mostly commissioked by the European Union) agree on the fact that piracy doesn't hurt sales.
The main consensus is that people who illegally access content wouldn't have bought it otherwise, and that they still advertise it (thus, still driving up sales).
These studies have then been systematically strong-armed into silence by the EU and constituent countries' anti-piracy organisms.
This is probably because the war on piracy, too, is a billion-dollar industry. I'd be glad to blow it all up and give it all to the starving artists and their families.
23 replies →
How many artists will be fed, clothed, and housed by the 500,000 digital files IA is no longer hosting?
Unrelated: I wonder how much the publishing industry spent on lawyers.
1 reply →
It's been proven that people who pirate also buy more media than those who don't.
Besides, if I was never going to buy it in the first place because you're charging too much, you've lost nothing if I pirate your product.
A victimless crime.
Don't most authors make literal pennies out of royalties?
The last few years have really put to test copyrights limits and uses. As someone that falls more in line with Copyleft ideals (do whatever you want with my stuff!), it is very funny.
I just grab the popcorn and watch from the side lines, see where it all lands.
I'm used to think that "copyleft" is "do whatever you want with my stuff, but you must agree that others must be able to do whatever you want with your stuff you made out of mine".
Google had a tailored fair use argument because they never made more than snippets public and searchable. It was also prior to Hachette that controlled lending with one-to-one digital copies for every physical copy was a status quo that publishers largely accepted, which IA deliberately tried to upset with the National "Emergency" Library.
I think it's worth fighting back on copyright as a broken institution, and it should be part of the IA's mission, but you have to be responsible on your approach if you're also going to posture as an archival library with stability of information and access. I understand Kahle might lament losing some of the hacker ethos, but the IA is too important to run up against extremes like this without an existential threat.
internetarchive.ai
It's a training set not an archive.
For my friends... everything.
For my enemies... the law.
It's not just that though. They pulled a stupid stunt during covid.
If you're campaigning for fair use, don't give your enemy ammunition to shoot you with by stretching said fair use too far. That was just really dumb.
Besides, for those willing to look outside official channels there's plenty of book library services available already. Just let them do what they do well and don't contaminate an above-board service with that.
Neither OpenAI or Google did what Internet Archive did.
To say otherwise is disingenuous.
Google Books scanned paper books in, and then made those scans available online, with some limitations.
You are being intentionally misleading. Public access AI models are not being taken down either. There is a big, transformative, difference with freely giving out books to read compared with using them to train an ML model.
> There is a big, transformative, difference with freely giving out books to read on a small, measured in human reading pace, scale compared with using them at a massive scale at internet and computer memory speeds to train an ML model even if the intellectual property used to train the ML was from unlicensed copies, and which the model regularly and with some frequency regurgitates verbatim.
not wanting you to be intentially misleading, FTFY.
2 replies →
Since when OpenAI made a digital library?
The 'goodwill' counterparts of ChatGPT, a.k.a. open weight models, are still well alive online.
> Since when OpenAI made a digital library?
What do you think is step 1 of training an LLM?
OpenAI just kept their library private and only distribute the digested summaries of the library, are the main differences.
5 replies →
It was an absolutely bone-headed poke-the-bear move and we should count ourselves lucky that it was only a chunk of the library and not the whole archive that got nuked. IA holds priceless and irreplaceable data, and while the library initiative was a well-intentioned move during the pandemic it was way too radical for the keepers of our shared digital history.
And this is why I respect Anna's Archive. If we want information to be free, I think we should consider intentionally violating copyright as an act of civil disobedience. I'm not sure I'm ready to go that far, but I respect the people at AA who are.
I mean I suspect most people on HN have used torrent sites at least a little bit so we are already there.
Agreed. It was poking the bear. The other big three grey-circuit services have nothing to lose because they never claimed to be legit.
If you claim the moral high ground you have to be impeccable. It also didn't help anyone during COVID because all the stuff was out there already on less legit services. Some make it super easy with telegram bots etc.
I'm sad that they screwed this up. Because the archive is a very valuable service. They've lost a lot of money, goodwill and reputation now. And gained nothing.
The worst part is, it's unimaginable that this would ever have ended well.
It wasn't a bad idea in principle but they should have worked to get some publishers on board, could have been a PR win for them too.
It wasn't poking a bear, it was poking a monster.
Just like in Frankenstein, that monster was created by someone, and those who created the monster are the true villains.
I am just hoping they get on top of the massive trove of game ROM's before Nintendo's lawyers have a field day.
Personally, I say they should be free for everyone, the lawyers however think the complete opposite and they have the means of enforcing this.
Don't they still have safe harbour protections if they remove those in response to a DMCA? Those were all uploaded by users unrelated to IA.
> Kahle thinks “the world became stupider” when the Open Library was gutted—but he’s moving forward with new ideas
> The lawsuits haven’t dampened Kahle’s resolve to expand IA’s digitization efforts, though. Moving forward, the group will be growing a project called Democracy’s Library
please just stop. let IA be what it is. or rather, nothing wrong in doing new projects but don't tie them to IA, just start them as completely separate things. IA is too important as-is to be a playground for random kooky ideas playing with fire.
And then the IA becomes the same thing it’s fighting against. The people in the wrong here are these massive corporations fighting over scraps, not the IA.
No it doesn't. It's extremely valuable with the scope it already has. These massive corporations do not operate the Wayback Machine nor the various (less controversial) public archives that IA hosts, and makes available at no cost, no login-wall, no cloudflare-infinite-captchas, etc.
> let IA be what it is
IA is the eccentric, untamed idealism. You can’t have the Wayback Machine without the National Emergency Library and the Great 78 Project.
As the project matures, the risk tolerance should mature too.
Betting your own time and money on the realization of a crazy ideal can be very noble. Betting a resource millions of people are relying on is destructive hubris.
They should take the untamed idealism to a separate legal entity before they ruin all the good they've done.
2 replies →
Why not? The Wayback Machine predates the National Emergency Library by many years, suggesting it is possible for one to exist without the other.
3 replies →
We had the Wayback Machine for years before those two projects. What am I missing?
What capitalism continues to show us: proof that public libraries, if created in the last 10 years, would be deemed illegal and sued out of existence.
It's only because the late 1800's billionaires wanted to leave legacies and made pay-to-enter and free libraries, and migrated them to free, or public libraries. Thats why so many of them are (John) Carnegie Libraries.
Only legal when billionaires do it.
A lower stakes but still illustrative example I see is that the DVR is an invention that wouldn't be allowed to succeed today. All power is being wielded to its fullest in order to prevent skipping ads.
Cable to streaming took us from skippable to unskippable ads. Search results to LLM results will result in invisible/undisclosed ads. Each successive generation of technology will increase the power of advertising and strip rights we used to have. Another example, physical to digital media ownership, we lost resale rights.
We need to understand that we've passed a threshold after which innovation is hurting us more than helping us. That trumps everything else.
Modern DVR's are not the same as classic ones. As per this article from today shows that people have prerecorded are being pulled from their DVR's.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/youtube-tvs-disney-b...
1 reply →
> All power is being wielded to its fullest in order to prevent skipping ads.
And yet I can go to a site right now off the top of my head and watch any TV show or basically any movie made in the last 50 years for free in HD.
It might be shut down tomorrow and it'll be up against 30s later with a different TLD.
They aren't winning but they really are trying hard to.
How do you figure libraries would be deemed illegal? They operate today. The Archive, on the other hand, attempted a fair use argument for whole copies of books (the copyrighted form most legible to copyright law) currently for sale as ebooks. I agree with the comment across the thread calling this a spectacularly boneheaded move and expressing gratitude that the entire Archive wasn't compromised over the stunt.
> How do you figure libraries would be deemed illegal? They operate today.
The history of public libraries is extremely messy, and the RIAA almost managed to get secondhand music made illegal in the 90s. Publishers did not ever support the idea of loaning a single copy of a work to dozens of people. While it's a huge stretch to say that every illegal download represents a lost sale (people download 100x more than they read), it's a lot less of a stretch to say that people who would sit down and read an entire book are fairly likely to have bought it.
Also, when books were relatively more expensive for people (19th century), a lot of income from publishers came from renting their books, rather than selling them. Public libraries involved a lot of positive propaganda and promises of societal uplift from wealthy benefactors, along the same lines and around the same time as the introduction of universal free public education. I remember hearing a lot about this history at the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore, which iirc was the first. Libraries were at that time normally private membership clubs.
edit: I also agree that the free book thing was stupid and have been very harsh about it. I don't know if it's possible to be too harsh about it, because it was obviously never going to get past a court. It felt almost like intentional sabotage.
The claim is that they operate today only via precedent.
> proof that public libraries, if created in the last 10 years
Would there be anything worth putting into the libraries if intellectual property rights are not respected?
There is a lot of writing on the internet that's done for free with no profit motive. Both fiction and nonfiction.
Paying the editors is the bigger issue than paying the authors
...yes? The median book sells ~3,000 copies, ever. But people keep writing them!
2 replies →
What I hear you say is that Brewster's time would be more wisely spent making friends of billionaires.
Possibly, yeah. Make a "Deal" <spit> with AI companies to have back-end access to all the Archive org's content. Get 'permission' to copy EVERYTHING and have billionaires run interference.
The AI companies already got blank checks to do that. Anthropic is paying what, like $3000 per book? I remember when the fucks at the RIAA were suing 12 year olds for $10000 for Britney Spears albums.
Or better yet, if it's just $3k a book, can we license every book and have that added into Archive.org? Oh wait, deals for thee, not for me.
1 reply →
Fun fact: the only complete copy of the Internet Archive's library is in Alexandria.
How's that for historic irony and "unteachability" of the human species.
Honestly, now's the time to make copies of it, while we still can. Torrents need seeders and people that care, and we are the last generation that cares about knowledge.
We need to prevent the following generations to grow up as mindless clickmonkeys of the digital Orwellian world.
You're telling me they have no redundant copies at all in another location?
I could see that due to the sheer size but im sure they have a robust disk pool that would take a lot for it to lose data
In my opinion redundancy in a single business entity is no redundancy at all, especially if there's legal obligations of a soon-to-be-burning-books-again regime.
A better strategy would have been to found independent entities in other liberal democracies, so they can act as IP backups.
There was a great vpro documentary called "Digital Amnesia" [1] where they also interviewed the lead of the library of Alexandria, who was the only bidder to buy the national KIT library of the Netherlands and its dissolved inventory at the time.
Interviews with archivists, librarians, web archive and others on the topic. It's insane to see that nations don't want to preserve their history, science, and culture anymore.
But here we are.
[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=NdZxI3nFVJs
2 replies →
Previously posted:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45806643
Is the feature gone, the one where I use my local library card to access an online book for 2 weeks if no one else has it currently?
From TFA: In the end, the fight led to more than 500,000 books being removed from the Archive’s “Open Library.”
Good chance the book you wanted is gone at the least
That sounds right. I checked on some listings of books that I thought would be cool to check out, but it still keeps saying how borrow in unavailable except for patrons with print disabilities. For the books I'm interested in, at least we can see scans of the front and back covers, and also a little bit of the table of contents.
I hope Anna's Archive kept a copy.
Most of the IA’s ebook collection still supports controlled digital lending, just like every other library that operates an ebook lending system with CDL.
[dead]
I am sorry to say that, but copyright protection time should vary on the subject. Programming books - 10 years maybe? 10 years is ages in computer science. TV shows? 5-7 years maybe. After that time nobody wants to pay for watching old big brother or another Fort Boyard... Nor pay for storing it in archive. And this is the culture other creations are referring to.
We've run in Poland into very strange situation - Polish Public TV (TVP) paid for the great dubbing of some Disney shows. They recorded it on VHS which were overwritten by other shows. Now the translation and the dubbing is lost, found sometimes on people's home recorded VHS but in poor quality, because recorded from the aerial.
Many original episodes of Dr Who were destroyed by the BBC, some have only been recovered because of "pirate" home recorded VHS, or people that "stole" tapes from the dumpster.
The Internet Archive is to be protected at all costs. Its maybe the most important site on the Internet because of all the history that exists nowhere else. As the web is increasingly filled with AI slop, the Internet Archive has got perhaps the last pre-slop snapshot of the Internet.
a lot of it was scraped by LLMs, I asked ChatGPT about a tutorial written on a page that no longer existed from 2013 and it knew all the functions
The Wayback Machine has been broken for me for about a month or so. Is that the case for everyone? Like when you stick in a URL, it just goes to a "landing page" that says:
"The Wayback Machine is an initiative of the Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form.
Other projects include Open Library & archive-it.org.
Your use of the Wayback Machine is subject to the Internet Archive's Terms of Use."
...instead of taking you to the "calendar" page where you could select the version of the website you wanted to see.
https://web.archive.org/web/*/news.ycombinator.com
works for me
Huh. Works for me at home as well. Must be something with the firewall at work or similar. Thanks!
It baffles me how many techies are here saying we should respect our corporate overlords. Something certainly was lost in this scene in the past 20 years. Hackernews? More like Peonnews.
That's what happens when you practically beg book publishers to sue you.
The fact that giving free access to books during a pandemic, in a format that doesn't need physical contact, when libraries were shut down or hard to access for a lot of people should have been praised, not pursued by legal action from rent seeking entities.
The copyright system as a whole should by torn up.
At least it give a clear signal to anyone with a ounce of moral which publisher to avoid at all cost.
Copyright needs torn up or at the very least significant reform but if you're going to be skirting around the edges of it to try to do a good thing it's probably a good idea to not just straight up obviously and blatently break the letter and spirit of the law. CDL is an awkward and dubious workaround but if you drop the 'C' you're just doing copyright infringment and that would be much better left to entities like Anna's Archive. The criticism of IA in this regard is usually that it was a bad strategy, not that the goals were bad.
2 replies →
During the pandemic, they created the "National Emergency Library", where they allowed users copies of books without caps, without any connection to holdings of the Archive itself, something that was black-letter proscribed by copyright law, and as a result they managed to sabotage the legal case for controlled digital lending too.
The copyright system should perhaps be torn up (or maybe not…) but you can’t just blatantly violate it at massive scale and expect to face zero consequences.
And anyway, why is it unreasonable for copyright holders to expect to be able to get paid for their work rather than have a massive library loophole where they just never get paid as long as you're a nonprofit?
Here you go, you can steal beer from my store as long as you’re a nonprofit organization.
> For a decade, the Archive had loaned out individual e-books to one user at a time without triggering any lawsuits. That changed when IA decided to temporarily lift the cap on loans from its Open Library project
So stupid. They had a working system that they blew up through their own actions and now the library is dead.
IMO the only two reform the copyright system needs are DCMA takedown abuse and copyright term length. All the other concepts of copyright make perfect sense. If I create something I should be able to consent to giving or not giving it to someone.
A lot of the software engineers on this forum wouldn’t like what happens to their profession without copyright.
So how do authors make money? Going on concert tours? The copyright system needs reform (Mickey Mouse for example) — but the system protects creators.
If there were no copyrights, no author would make any money.
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I worry 'hacker' news is going to become more and more 'normie' steadily moving farther and farther away from Barlow's declaration of independence of cyberspace cypherpunk ethos
It's easier to make money when you comply with The Man
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When I made this criticism before of IA, I was told that that was ridiculous since the publishers had it out for IA before the COVID-19 emergency library. That may or may not have been true, but the publishers did not sue IA despite OpenLibrary existing for years before COVID-19. Publishers didn't pull the trigger because they were afraid of losing. It was a MAD situation, and IA unnecessarily triggered a nuclear war that they lost.