A search for "Internet Archive rumors" returns a copy of Fleetwood Mac "Rumours" on my first page of results. Playable in browser and downloadable in high-quality lossless format.
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 Archive purchased 78s likely destined to be destroyed. These where digitized. [0]
"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]
> The Archive purchased 78s likely destined to be destroyed.
It's worse than that.
Many large collections were donated to the archive, under the agreement they would be made available to the public. Part of what influenced Brewster to double down on his original error.
> The Joe Terino Collection, a collection of 70,000 78 rpm singles stored in a warehouse for 40 years.
> The Barrie H. Thorpe Collection, which had been deposited at the Batavia Public Library in Batavia, Illinois, in 2007 by Barrie H. Thorpe (1925–2012). It contains 48,000 singles.
> The Daniel McNeil Collection, with 22,359 singles.
At the same time Internet Archive also launched the "Unlocked Recordings" collection of modern "out of print" LPs, as if that somehow made them free to distribute. The inclusion of Jimi Hendrix, Paul McCartney, and Nina Simone records is called out in the lawsuit.
This is how you ruin the reputation of an organization.
If a copyright holder refuses to make a work available to the public in any way (without a really good reason -- I don't agree with it, but I see Warner Bros. point in withholding certain WWII cartoons, for example) then to me at least they have no ethical claim against someone else who will.
Again, the Music Modernization Act (2018), which the Archive itself celebrated, was meant to put a dent in this problem. You prepare a list of works, then send a spreadsheet to the copyright office. Copyright holders then have 90 days to state that they're using the material commercially. If not, the library or archive (or individual) is free to make these works downloadable.
Orphaned works are a problem, but here was a way to move things a tiny bit forward. Unfortunately, just like Controlled Digital Lending it was left in the hands of some particularly careless people. I'd imagine the settlement also prohibits them from submitting the list (and thus causing the parties to do an enormous amount of research work).
I'm always up for a good ethics debate and likely wholeheartedly agree with your position. But this is a very different issue that resulted in clear damage to the culture we share and the future we all want.
It’s a good time to remind everyone that the budget of the Internet Archive — the largest library in the world — is smaller than the SF public library. It has a small fraction of the budget of Wikipedia.
A ton of Wikipedia citations go to URLs that can now only be found in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Since they are so dependent on it, they should support it financially.
Probably the best thing they could do would be to fund the creation of a full mirror in a non-US jurisdiction.
The Internet Archive is not the largest library in the world -- the Library of Congress is, with 170 million+ actual items on shelves.
And the SF public library has 28 buildings, 6x the employee count, and 6x the budget.
Not sure what your point is, as they provide completely different services. As the judge said, "The Internet Archive does not perform the traditional functions of a library."
Or an archive, for that matter. No grants, explicitly no research services, no oversight and no long-term plan.
Librarians have a formal code of ethics and the Internet Archive fails more than half.
As a scholar, I use libraries to find and access materials. I think that is the traditional function?
If I want to access a book (or frankly anything else), chances are I can do so in minutes on the Internet archive — I can’t say the same for my university library. Or the library of Congress.
The internet archive has more materials (and more kinds of materials) and serves more than 10x the number of people (digitally).
I recognize that a community library and the LOC have different purposes from the IA. But the scale is huge — and it is extremely useful in scholarship.
Also: did you used to work there? You know a lot about it, but maybe had a bad experience?
In my country the government has an organisation that archives everything ever released in the country in climate controlled vaults. If somebody wants to read a 17th century newspaper they can.
Link to the tech debt aspect? I knew that was the case but want to know specifics.
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 loaning them 1:N instead of 1:1 because "pandemic
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.
Or, the 1:1 lending was probably okay until Kahle showed his willingness to abandon copyright entirely with the emergency library, and publishers decided it was worth putting down CDL as a whole.
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.
No joke: the Internet Archive's physical archives are stored within the blast radius of an oil refinery. Also in a part of town where the charter warns not to expect prompt emergency services in the event of a natural disaster.
TL;DR: There's a unknown 3rd shaker in many 19th century table settings and no one really knows what went in it as far as I can tell. There's some indication it might have been for dried mustard powder but that's the only guess anyone has and it wasn't that popular as a condiment as far as anyone can tell outside of the tiny references in late 19th century catalogs for the 3 shaker sets including a 'mustard bottle'.
"…you want them to be archived now when they're readily available not years from now when they're hard or impossible to find."
Exactly. Over the centuries humans have used various techniques to record information they've wanted to keep for posterity and almost every newer innovation they've adopted has resulted in information being stored for a shorter time than the older technology that preceded it.
That's a sweeping and overly general comment but I'll justify it with several examples from history. First, there are many reasons why people would want to replace a time-honored way of documenting information by using alternative methods. My purpose here to draw attention to how with each new technical innovation storage longevity ends up being shorter than the previous generation.
Examples:
1. Messages chiseled on stone has a longevity of many millennia. Examples: Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Rosetta Stone.
2. Information written on parchment and vellum can, with reasonable care, be in good condition after 1000 years or more. Examples include the Doomsday Book, Magna Carta and the Lindisfarne Gospels (it's ~1300 years old).
3. Paper has the advantage of higher storage density especially if it's the substrate for printed text. Longevity can be high for high quality paper, flax types etc can last over 500 years, whereas cheap paper as in paperbacks and newsprint has a much shorter lifespan, likely 50 - 75 years at most.
4. Painting (oil-on-canvas) has, with care, good longevity, at least 500-plus years. Works of the great masters, Caravaggio, da Vinci (Mona Lisa), et al, are nowadays still in reasonable to good condition.
5. Photography has several advantages over art, it's capable of rendering an image accurately and it's much easier to reproduce multiple images than drawing them all by hand. Longevity and quality of photographic images depends on the technology that's employed. Here are several examples.
-- Wet-collodion process (negative on glass plate). Introduced 1851. Advantage: high resolution, disadvantage: not orthochromatic/panchromatic, sensitive only to blue light. Longevity: if stored with care images will last 200-plus years. Examples Civil War photos of Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner and others.
-- Kodachrome color transparency film. Introduced 1935. Advantage high resolution, high color accuracy. Longevity: ~200 years under ideal storage conditions.
-- Kodak Kodacolor negative (late 1940s to ~1960). Longevity: only a few years, image fades even when stored under ideal conditions. This tech was an unmitigated disaster, many families lost treasured wedding photos etc. because of fading.
-- Eastman color print film (theater release stock). Subject to considerable fading when stored, film cannot be used for archiving, it's useless if stored for several decades.
-- B&W film stock on acetate base. Longevity: 200-plus years under proper storage conditions.
6. Sound Recordings:
-- 78-RPM shellac disks. ca 1905 - ~1955 (cylinders were earlier, first produced in late 1880s). Sound quality poor to fair. Longevity: if stored under ideal conditions and handled with care then lifetime is >200 years (there are good, well kept 78 recordings that are now about 120 years old and they're still in excellent condition).
Note: that figure is the archive lifetime. Unfortunately, the original instruments—Edison phonographs and like—that 78s were designed to be played on cause considerable wear and damage to 78 RPM disks.
I cringe every time I see YouTube videos of well-meaning owners of treasured acoustic gramophones playing 78 recordings on them. They seem completely oblivious to the damage they're doing to their recordings.
(Just because 78s were designed to be played on these players it doesn't mean they're not damaged by them. In those days pickups were without electrical amplification and to get maximum sound level considerable weight was applied to the stylus. Moreover, to improve stylus (steel needle) tracking an abrasive was added to the shellac which abraded the stylus to best fit the recorded groove. It worked both ways, both the record and stylus were worn during playback).
-- Vinyl LP High Fidelity recordings. 1948 to ~1980 (now in limited revival). Longevity: ~200 years or perhaps longer for a recording kept for archival purposes..
7. Magnetic Recordings—Audiotape, Videotape and Hard Disks. ca 1940s to present—athough its use has declined in recent years. Magnetic tape was often used to make master recordings for both vinyl records, videos (VHS etc.) and in television production, and it's still used for data storage, QIC cartridges, etc. Also, magnetic recording is still the underpinning technology in rotary hard disks.
Longevity: That said, magnetic tape and similar media, hard disks, etc. suffer from loss of magnetic remanence. Simply, the magnetic intensity on storage media decays over time, thus so does the recorded information.
Many factors contribute to the decay of information on magnetic media (which I cannot cover here) but in comparison with the older media (e.g, vinyl, 78s) its lifespan is almost pathetically short. One risks one's data if one uses a hard disk much past its short lifespan of about five years. Moreover, just archiving one's data on a hard disk and assuming it'll be OK because the drive is not actually being used is a risky business. The only way to guarantee the integrity of one's data is to copy it—rewrite it to media before its remanence falls below the threshold where data cannot be recovered, ideally this should be done within the drive's specified lifetime.
With analog recordings loss of remanence shows up as loss of signal-to-noise ratio. I've personally known people who've dug out VHS videos of their wedding to show to their kids on their 21st birthday only to find the tapes not viewable.
8. NAND Memory. These days just about everyone has moved to NAND flash memory because of its speed and convenience. It's hard to buy a PC without either an SSD or NVMe storage, and everyone uses USB trumb drives. NAND storage is great stuff, we all love it.
However, if one is not careful and proactive NAND is a time bomb waiting to destroy your data. First, NAND deteriorates and wears out with usage, second—like magnetic remanence—its electronic storage decays with age even when it's only being used for archival storage.
I speak from experience here, some years ago I created an archival backup of all my important photos and stored them on a new 500GB SSD which I put in a safe place for storage. Several years later when I checked the drive it was completely unresponsive and I thought it dead. As luck would have it, about a half hour later the SSD eventually came back to life.
What happened was the drive's controller locked drive whilst it refreshed its floating-gate charges. Luckily, charges had not decayed below the threshold where my data would have been irrecoverable. If say I'd not checked the drive for another year then chances are that I'd not have been so lucky. (That's just one incident, I'll refrain from discussing other recent NAND failures.)
Yes, it was a backup and my working copies were OK, but the point is obvious, one cannot put modern NAND storage aside and simply just forget about it indefinitely and hope one's data will still be viable. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.
We shouldn't be surprised by what happened here when we care to look at how NAND flash actually works. Frankly, it's amazing that it works at all let alone the fact that it works so well, NAND is truly a masterpiece of modern semiconductor fabrication.
NAND's functionality depends on quantum tunneling and that we use the fact to force a few hundred electrons across an 'insulated' barrier where (hopefully) they'll stay stored in the FET's floating gate for an indefinite length of time.
What I find amazing is not that quantum tunneling works and that we can store electrons in a floating gate or charge trap (and that's amazing enough of itself) but that the insulation is so good (stray resistance is so high) that it can take some years for this almost infinitesimal charge to leak away and dissipate.
Whilst we can view quantum tunneling and charge storage as a state of stable equilibrium (in that in an ideal transistor the charge would be stored indefinitely), that cannot be said for a real-world device, eventually the charge will dissipate and with it goes your data. NAND storage has many advantages but in comparison with other storage tech its both ephemeral and short lived.
We have a world now running on NAND technology and yet we've no immediate technology in the wings that'd be a better replacement—one that's intrinsically or inherently stable by design, and that's a pretty unsatisfactory and unnerving situation. Moreover, the situation is made worse by our blasé attitude and headlong rush to adopt multilayered 3D NAND which further reduces the electron count in a floating gate. By design, we're deliberately making NAND more unreliable because of our demand for even more storage.
When one thinks about it, it's pretty outrageous that the world is having to rely on dozens of data centers so as to achieve some degree or guarantee of longterm data reliability.
It's hard enough now to find and keep track of information without revengeful moneygrubbing bastards screwing the Internet Archive. We need every bit of reliable archival storage now and their actions are selfish and counterproductive. If this nonsense continues then heaven knows what the future holds for longterm data storage.
The Reddit support groups are pretty enlightening. Many people think they're just adding things in to a public library and somehow this is all perfectly legal.
It's charming and reminiscent of the best old-school Wikipedia energy. People on the fringe (and probably some OCD people) finding something to do. Curation and contribution feels good, man.
But yeah, holy shit. Brewster Kahle and Jason Scott have said "upload away, we'll figure it all out later" -- then themselves uploaded hundreds of thousands of items to set an example.
"Please don't upload copyrighted material" would go a long way at the top of that PHP upload form. Better yet a checkbox: "This is copyrighted. Archive it but don't republish it." But I suppose where's the fun in that.
I think you overestimate normal people's understanding of copyright. There's tons of videos on youtube with a description like "I don't claim to own this. No copyright intended". If you put such a form most people would probably think they're "not copyrighting" it or whatever confused idea they've got about how the law works or what the words mean.
"The legislation also establishes a process for lawfully engaging in noncommercial uses of Pre-1972 Sound Recordings that are not being commercially exploited. To qualify for this exemption, a user must file a notice of noncommercial use after conducting a good faith, reasonable search, and the rights owner of the sound recording must not object to the use within 90 days."
Basically Internet Archive could've sent a spreadsheet of works to the Copyright Office and anyone claiming commercial use of these old records had to respond within 90 days. In the lawsuit Brewster is quoted saying that it makes pre-1972 works "Library Fair Use."
The law does not allow people to make commercial use of these recordings (take three seconds to consider why). But they could've archived old recordings all day and then made the ones that cleared the list immediately available for unlimited download. And provided excerpts of the others for research purposes.
Instead they managed to get sued for $696 million. For a side project that nobody cared about (40,000+ downloads) that managed to put the whole org (and several participants' personal assets) at risk for two years.
As an aside, 78 RPM records are not particularly fragile. As a consumer product, yes. By preservation standards, no.
Are you claiming the copyright holders put them there?
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.
Mega isn't indexed and decrypts content in javascript on the client. If people are using it to share your stuff, you have to find where they're sharing it to even find out that it's on there. Now, Hollywood did this to themselves, because back when it was Megaupload the fact that they had a search index was used as an excuse to shut down the whole service because a couple of employees used it to access infringing stuff without taking it down, so Mega got rid of that as a means to prevent it from happening again.
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.
Internet Archive continues to leak the verified email address of the uploader of each item, so conspiracy guy can run a spot check should he so desire.
Fair if true, though it's not like someone uploading things to IA is likely to be using an address like michael.scott @ dundermifflin.com or something. More likely it's something anonymous. Certainly so if they were planting things to sue over, you can bet they'd use an account like dsfhakeij@ mail.ru or something.
I guess things could be worse? The Internet Archive is too precious of a resource for humanity to lose. I still fear its days are numbered. I don't think non-technical people appreciate it, or are even aware of its existence, in the same way as Wikipedia.
I fear that when a certain administration finds out about it they will force it to shut down. The last thing they want is for the internet to have a memory, because then they can define past in any way they want.
When things like this happen, I think about how during WW1 people talked about the possibility of "bombing a country back to the stone age". Destroy enough libraries, have enough people abandon their areas of specialty employment into different fields, and given enough time, you can erase a society's institutional knowledge and capability.
If we lose enough key resources like the Internet Archive we could definitely shifting the pendulum in that direction.
Dark Ages, maybe not as much since Europe recovered during the Renaissance, but the Middle East hasn't necessarily been too stable since the Islamic Golden Age.
I think it would only be a mild tragedy, if there is such a thing, if, say, we lost 3nm lithography or carbon fiber airplanes. Most of that stuff is luxury anyway. We wouldn't lose the core science and data, it might set us back for a generation which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Also Not A Fan. Consider that nearly all of the artists who made records pressed on 78 shellacs are long gone. How specious is the claim that they are even a significant revenue stream for the majors? (The purported rationale for copyright.)
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.
Review the Music Modernization Act (2018) which allows anyone to send a list of pre-1972 recordings to the Copyright Office. If no entity responds saying they are making commercial use of those recordings, the recordings become Free for non-commercial use, including unlimited download. Now consider why Brewster gave talks celebrating this law but chose not to follow it.
I just meant I appreciate it as resource for all kinds of information, and as an invaluable backup of the web.
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.
The fact that a site chartered to provide "universal access to all knowledge" is banned at most public library terminals is a start.
Partly because people use web.archive.org to bypass other, more sinister firewall blocks. (And I'm okay with that.)
But non-stop copyright lawsuits don't help. People begging for personal information up to child pornography to be removed and not getting a prompt response from Internet Archive support might also be a source of concern.
The site is funded by its wealthy founder and he also uses it as a vehicle for his pet projects. They don't issue annual reports. They don't have a functioning board. They didn't even consider accepting donations until Brewster realized it helps build reputation.
I certainly don't begrudge anyone who donates but the TV, Movie, and Video Game industry lawsuits are obviously next in line.
The original uploaded file is always available for download, without any processing. Agree that the processing they apply for derivative files is often dated and awful (and they don't let an uploader opt out). And the broken torrent files they've been serving for a decade with corrupt and missing files is absurd.
But raw DVD RIPs of commercial DVDs, FLACs of the most popular albums of all time, and seven perfect copies of every Nintendo Switch game ever made, curated by seven different warez groups are also available.
Accepting donations to preserve internet pages then nearly getting sued out of business twice in two years over side projects that have nothing to do with your core mission would result in management change at any normal non-profit. Likewise leaking 30+ million patron communications at a library (including passports and driver's licenses) would get you bounced from a normal library.
Not to mention diversions like trying to start a bank and getting your ass handed to you by the feds.
"Unwillingness to open accounts within the field of membership, make loans, and establish operations in the low-income community where the credit union was chartered to serve..."
> Days before the settlement was announced, record labels had indicated that everyone but the Internet Archive and its founder, Brewster Kahle, had agreed to sign a joint settlement
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.
IA has a board page. My guess is the other members are independent in the sense they have don’t have material financial ties. However, you can draw your own conclusions as to whether they would ever tell management “no.”
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.
There's an easy solution to this: just move hosting to and register in the Marshall Islands where there is effectively no copyright enforcement. It is difficult to threaten someone with a lawsuit when the law they cite is not enforced.
Ha I'm sure their internet connectivity is excellent. And even if it was, you think a country with a population of 42k is somehow immune to political pressure?
The forthcoming "Block BEARD" act in the U.S. will soon enable rights holders to apply for foreign sites to be blocked (at the IP level I believe) on piracy grounds.
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)
> Storage of data for 250 years (metal rusts, dvds melt/warp, paper is not data dense)
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.
> He suggested that perhaps labels just "don't like the Internet Archive's way of pushing the envelope on copyright and fair use."
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.
The people at these companies probably do realise that literally nobody has ever tried to watch a video like Rick Beato's to simply listen to a piece of music. Anyone who is watching a Rick Beato video is watching it because of the theory, discussion, and commentary surrounding the music.
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.
There appears to be no cost or downside to falsely flagging, so it's unsurprising that they just spam flag everything on the off chance that they are able to do some damage to someone.
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.
> A record label has never lost a sale because somebody discovered they could "get music for free" by watching YouTube critique videos.
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!
The mindset that someone will buy a album because he have no idea about WTF it is and can not listen to it on the internet is really interesting to me.
Like, why would you even buy a album and add it to your collection if you have no idea what it is?
> someone will buy a album because he have no idea about WTF it is
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.
They have no idea who Rick even is it's all automated. It's the biggest issue with the paper thin protection of Fair Use and the DMCA system where fair use is a proactive defense required to be adjudicated in court and the companies are not even required to review their claims for the possibility that it falls under fair use. It's exacerbated by the fact the Google's system isn't even properly DMCA, it's their own system with no legal consequences for false reports all based on minute audio matches.
I think it's bold to think it's conscious planning that's behind this behavior from UMG. Most of us work or have worked with large companies, we've seen for ourselves how dysfunctional they can be.
More than likely it is a subcontracted law firm that specializes in YT notices with automation. I seriously doubt that their in-house legal team do it at all. They might receive an email from the subcontractors with updates to their progress each day/week/month that rarely if ever gets reviewed by in-house legal.
> The people at these companies probably do realise that literally nobody has ever tried to watch a video like Rick Beato's to simply listen to a piece of music.
Absolutely, and especially obvious when you realize that he only plays a few seconds of the song typically before interrupting it or talking over it. It's not in any way even close to a replacement. Their behavior only makes sense in the context of absolute and utter greed
I've noticed similar false economy in some sports, where the holder of the rights is so strict that even famous pundits can't use footage (even a few seconds) or risk consequences. It seems highly detrimental to the sport itself, and perhaps even the rights holder due to the reduction in free advertising.
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've worked in a large government bureaucracy before, and I've repeatedly encountered a particular breed of bureaucrat that has no idea of what the organization is trying to accomplish (or, actively doesn't care) and has taken it upon themselves to enforce policies in their role as strictly as possible, sometimes even to the point of delighting in the power that they wield to stop people from trying to do their jobs and do good things.
There are essentially two schools of thought when it comes to rules.
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.
Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy: “In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.”
I know with trademarks, the law puts a perverse incentive on businesses to ruthlessly attack uses of their trademark. If they allow even innocuous uses of it, then they risk the trademark becoming generic and losing all rights over it [1].
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.
It's really a quite different set of law because the whole point of a trademark is that it uniquely identifies a particular seller so that buyers can distinguish it from others in the market. If that identification weakens then your trademark becomes meaningless and can no longer be enforced. But that logic doesn't apply to copyright.
Trademark is completely unrelated to copyright. You do not have an obligation to pursue every copyright infringement the same way you do for trademarks.
That's a shame because Rick has some fantastic videos, especially his "What Makes This Song Great" series. He's showcasing some amazingly talented musicians and their work, which probably leads to some music sales. BS indeed!
it's not really the same as putting snippets of media in a youtube video... the internet archive has, loosely, three categories of stuff:
* 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
That's why exactly it tho - normal ppl that are not the non-profit with very limited resources and staff, upload the infringing content - it's not even the IA fault that they are hosting it and placing such a responsibility on the IA to polofe the.archive - isn't what that is.
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.
They're the digital equivalent of a library. My local library lends out in-copyright music and films.
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.
Digital equivalents to libraries typically have a fixed number of copies of a digital book paired with DRM such that the user can only read them while checked out. That is very different from how the internet archive works.
Digital is fundamentally different because everything can be copied infinitely. Any model that doesn't accept this basic fact is broken. Luckily there are plenty of other models that could be used, such as compulsory licensing or flat fees that are divided amongst creators. The publishers of course are not interested in that.
Except for the DRM, that is exactly how the internet archive works for content that is still under copyright. However, for libraries, they often have a limited number of borrows per book (enforced with the DRM), and they are effectively renting the book, not owning it. Which gets back to the imbalance of copyright law and enforcement.
The inability to prove damages normally is the end of a suit. But there is something magic in copyright where judges seem to waive that requirement. This special dispensation seems to be extralegal, and limited to where it serves large copyright holders.
How does IA get picked on but YT does not? I can type in any music artist or album I can think of with the word playlist and get a full playlist. With exception of the YT channels owned by the publisher or artist I am highly skeptical YT own even 1% of the music on their site. Most of the music I run across seems to be just random YT user accounts and the music has been there for years. For the record I am not complaining, it just seems very biased to me as in IA probably do not have as many lawyers, as much bureaucracy, connections and money as YT making them an easier target but I am just guessing if that is the reason.
because youtube has Content ID. they faced the wrath of copyright holders years back, when they were small and lacked real profit, but now pretty much all videos with music in them are automatically claimed - so the big labels get money
By putting banner ads at the top asking for donations. This very lawsuit was provoked by tweeting out links to Frank Sinatra records as part of a fund raising campaign. Also, the existence of pirated material fuels the growth of the site.
Few people go there for the cool weird stuff. Find something old and amazing and blogged about: 12 views, 10 from bots. Now search for Nintendo games.
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.
Google appear to host loads of infringing works (both as files and in YouTube) ... surely for both them and IA they're protected as long as they take down in response to properly formed and evidenced DMCA requests?
Unless you're suggesting this isn't user uploaded but is being put there by staff?
YouTube has built a whole content ID and revenue sharing agreements as a direct result of getting sued nearly into oblivion by numerous organizations. Most "infringing works" on YouTube are permitted under an agreement laying out revenue sharing with the rights holder, and if not, is flagged and taken down when found.
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 suggestion is that the staff know that there is infringing material being hosted. Youtube can point to the billions of dollars they've invested into building content id, continually working to resolve the problem.
This is interesting, because Youtube staff know they're infringing too -- the expense is something that IA can't afford, but they then get to claim they're doing something. A shield of money. And why does Youtube have all that money; in part because of historic copyright infringement.
It really needs to be at least 2 different organizations.
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 ?
It's related, it demonstrates the IA's attitude toward copyright and how it's already gotten them into trouble. The huge amount of pirate content seems to largely fly under the radar, but the Library was advertising that they're not going to respect copyright and it puts the website archives at risk.
> The huge amount of pirate content seems to largely fly under the radar,
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.
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.
I thought that made them heroes - tbh, I think they thought we would save them from this - ppl don't remember goodwill like that long enough tho - haha, your trying pass it off as shade.
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.
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.
I actually believe in copyright. Of you write a book and use Amazon to host - THEY own that book now, they will make all decisions about it's distributions and how much you will get for your cut (Only 30% is what Amazon pays put for digital book creators) - if I don't like that, they will bully me, or you, or the entire industry of authors - Amazon will always win, BC of those copyright laws actually.
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
On the other hand, it doesn’t particularly matter what legal material the Internet Archive makes available; the various media companies will still attempt to sue them into nonexistence. How much “fair use” you’re entitled to in the states these days is merely a function of how big your legal budget is.
I think the majority of infringing was uploaded by the labels themselves. I believe that, without evidence contrary - like you know, what should actually be happening if this was actually bad, but like someone already addressed - I don't know that they lost a dime when the labels uploaded the labels copy written music.
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.
> I think the majority of infringing was uploaded by the labels themselves
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.
I'm fairly certain it was to create this platform right here and right now - this is exactly what they wanted, an actual challenge to the record labels authority's.
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?
If I had to guess, I'd say that the settlement was a lot closer to $41K than one would think, and that's why it's being kept quiet. Otherwise, the labels saw themselves either losing a famous copyright case in the age of LLM threats to copyright, or winning a famous copyright case in an awkward fashion that made people far less sympathetic to them.
People are on copyright holders' side in the battle with LLMs. Either winning or losing this case would be poison.
The settlement was beating them down and getting them to remove millions of items and police things going forward. Things are still disappearing left and right. Huge damage was done to the culture by Brewster's ill-advised, hardcore stance that played right into the hands of corporate interests.
Haha - only people that don't have experience with AI.
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
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.
Indeed they could've structured the whole project to give them DMCA protection but they chose not to. They truly thought copyright didn't apply. Then doubled down when pressed, just like the book lawsuit.
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.
I'm interested to know if last year's book publisher settlement cost will be reflected in IA's public filings. I assume they'll file a 990 in november:
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.
This fall will be the first time since Uni that I download all music released the whole year.
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.
I just saw your comment as I was leaving here - you are right
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.
A search for "Internet Archive rumors" returns a copy of Fleetwood Mac "Rumours" on my first page of results. Playable in browser and downloadable in high-quality lossless format.
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 Archive purchased 78s likely destined to be destroyed. These where digitized. [0]
"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...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7EHRpnJICQ&t=952s
> The Archive purchased 78s likely destined to be destroyed.
It's worse than that.
Many large collections were donated to the archive, under the agreement they would be made available to the public. Part of what influenced Brewster to double down on his original error.
> The Joe Terino Collection, a collection of 70,000 78 rpm singles stored in a warehouse for 40 years.
> The Barrie H. Thorpe Collection, which had been deposited at the Batavia Public Library in Batavia, Illinois, in 2007 by Barrie H. Thorpe (1925–2012). It contains 48,000 singles.
> The Daniel McNeil Collection, with 22,359 singles.
Many more listed at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_78_Project
At the same time Internet Archive also launched the "Unlocked Recordings" collection of modern "out of print" LPs, as if that somehow made them free to distribute. The inclusion of Jimi Hendrix, Paul McCartney, and Nina Simone records is called out in the lawsuit.
This is how you ruin the reputation of an organization.
If a copyright holder refuses to make a work available to the public in any way (without a really good reason -- I don't agree with it, but I see Warner Bros. point in withholding certain WWII cartoons, for example) then to me at least they have no ethical claim against someone else who will.
Again, the Music Modernization Act (2018), which the Archive itself celebrated, was meant to put a dent in this problem. You prepare a list of works, then send a spreadsheet to the copyright office. Copyright holders then have 90 days to state that they're using the material commercially. If not, the library or archive (or individual) is free to make these works downloadable.
Orphaned works are a problem, but here was a way to move things a tiny bit forward. Unfortunately, just like Controlled Digital Lending it was left in the hands of some particularly careless people. I'd imagine the settlement also prohibits them from submitting the list (and thus causing the parties to do an enormous amount of research work).
I'm always up for a good ethics debate and likely wholeheartedly agree with your position. But this is a very different issue that resulted in clear damage to the culture we share and the future we all want.
"Legal" vs "ethical" summarizes everything that is wrong about the current state of copyright.
Yeah, I chose that word on purpose. :-(
> tech debt and sloppy process at the Archive
It’s a good time to remind everyone that the budget of the Internet Archive — the largest library in the world — is smaller than the SF public library. It has a small fraction of the budget of Wikipedia.
A ton of Wikipedia citations go to URLs that can now only be found in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Since they are so dependent on it, they should support it financially.
Probably the best thing they could do would be to fund the creation of a full mirror in a non-US jurisdiction.
The Internet Archive is not the largest library in the world -- the Library of Congress is, with 170 million+ actual items on shelves.
And the SF public library has 28 buildings, 6x the employee count, and 6x the budget.
Not sure what your point is, as they provide completely different services. As the judge said, "The Internet Archive does not perform the traditional functions of a library."
Or an archive, for that matter. No grants, explicitly no research services, no oversight and no long-term plan.
Librarians have a formal code of ethics and the Internet Archive fails more than half.
https://www.ala.org/tools/ethics
As a scholar, I use libraries to find and access materials. I think that is the traditional function?
If I want to access a book (or frankly anything else), chances are I can do so in minutes on the Internet archive — I can’t say the same for my university library. Or the library of Congress.
The internet archive has more materials (and more kinds of materials) and serves more than 10x the number of people (digitally).
I recognize that a community library and the LOC have different purposes from the IA. But the scale is huge — and it is extremely useful in scholarship.
Also: did you used to work there? You know a lot about it, but maybe had a bad experience?
Exactly I find it a weird name.
In my country the government has an organisation that archives everything ever released in the country in climate controlled vaults. If somebody wants to read a 17th century newspaper they can.
Link to the tech debt aspect? I knew that was the case but want to know specifics.
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 loaning them 1:N instead of 1:1 because "pandemic
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.
That's what I said? The pandemic excuse was IA's reason for doing it at first.
Or, the 1:1 lending was probably okay until Kahle showed his willingness to abandon copyright entirely with the emergency library, and publishers decided it was worth putting down CDL as a whole.
The book publishers had been building a case against the CDL for a decade. They saw an opportunity to control the narrative and took it.
> not really archival and preservation
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.
Also environmental conditions (ie. fires) can ruin physical archives in the long run.
No joke: the Internet Archive's physical archives are stored within the blast radius of an oil refinery. Also in a part of town where the charter warns not to expect prompt emergency services in the event of a natural disaster.
Yep. Historically, some of the hardest stuff to find are the things that were common and people assumed would always be available and known.
What's the third shaker for?!
https://nowiknow.com/the-mystery-of-the-third-shaker/
TL;DR: There's a unknown 3rd shaker in many 19th century table settings and no one really knows what went in it as far as I can tell. There's some indication it might have been for dried mustard powder but that's the only guess anyone has and it wasn't that popular as a condiment as far as anyone can tell outside of the tiny references in late 19th century catalogs for the 3 shaker sets including a 'mustard bottle'.
"…you want them to be archived now when they're readily available not years from now when they're hard or impossible to find."
Exactly. Over the centuries humans have used various techniques to record information they've wanted to keep for posterity and almost every newer innovation they've adopted has resulted in information being stored for a shorter time than the older technology that preceded it.
That's a sweeping and overly general comment but I'll justify it with several examples from history. First, there are many reasons why people would want to replace a time-honored way of documenting information by using alternative methods. My purpose here to draw attention to how with each new technical innovation storage longevity ends up being shorter than the previous generation.
Examples:
1. Messages chiseled on stone has a longevity of many millennia. Examples: Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Rosetta Stone.
2. Information written on parchment and vellum can, with reasonable care, be in good condition after 1000 years or more. Examples include the Doomsday Book, Magna Carta and the Lindisfarne Gospels (it's ~1300 years old).
3. Paper has the advantage of higher storage density especially if it's the substrate for printed text. Longevity can be high for high quality paper, flax types etc can last over 500 years, whereas cheap paper as in paperbacks and newsprint has a much shorter lifespan, likely 50 - 75 years at most.
4. Painting (oil-on-canvas) has, with care, good longevity, at least 500-plus years. Works of the great masters, Caravaggio, da Vinci (Mona Lisa), et al, are nowadays still in reasonable to good condition.
5. Photography has several advantages over art, it's capable of rendering an image accurately and it's much easier to reproduce multiple images than drawing them all by hand. Longevity and quality of photographic images depends on the technology that's employed. Here are several examples.
-- Wet-collodion process (negative on glass plate). Introduced 1851. Advantage: high resolution, disadvantage: not orthochromatic/panchromatic, sensitive only to blue light. Longevity: if stored with care images will last 200-plus years. Examples Civil War photos of Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner and others.
-- Kodachrome color transparency film. Introduced 1935. Advantage high resolution, high color accuracy. Longevity: ~200 years under ideal storage conditions.
-- Kodak Kodacolor negative (late 1940s to ~1960). Longevity: only a few years, image fades even when stored under ideal conditions. This tech was an unmitigated disaster, many families lost treasured wedding photos etc. because of fading.
-- Eastman color print film (theater release stock). Subject to considerable fading when stored, film cannot be used for archiving, it's useless if stored for several decades.
-- B&W film stock on acetate base. Longevity: 200-plus years under proper storage conditions.
6. Sound Recordings:
-- 78-RPM shellac disks. ca 1905 - ~1955 (cylinders were earlier, first produced in late 1880s). Sound quality poor to fair. Longevity: if stored under ideal conditions and handled with care then lifetime is >200 years (there are good, well kept 78 recordings that are now about 120 years old and they're still in excellent condition).
Note: that figure is the archive lifetime. Unfortunately, the original instruments—Edison phonographs and like—that 78s were designed to be played on cause considerable wear and damage to 78 RPM disks.
I cringe every time I see YouTube videos of well-meaning owners of treasured acoustic gramophones playing 78 recordings on them. They seem completely oblivious to the damage they're doing to their recordings.
(Just because 78s were designed to be played on these players it doesn't mean they're not damaged by them. In those days pickups were without electrical amplification and to get maximum sound level considerable weight was applied to the stylus. Moreover, to improve stylus (steel needle) tracking an abrasive was added to the shellac which abraded the stylus to best fit the recorded groove. It worked both ways, both the record and stylus were worn during playback).
-- Vinyl LP High Fidelity recordings. 1948 to ~1980 (now in limited revival). Longevity: ~200 years or perhaps longer for a recording kept for archival purposes..
7. Magnetic Recordings—Audiotape, Videotape and Hard Disks. ca 1940s to present—athough its use has declined in recent years. Magnetic tape was often used to make master recordings for both vinyl records, videos (VHS etc.) and in television production, and it's still used for data storage, QIC cartridges, etc. Also, magnetic recording is still the underpinning technology in rotary hard disks.
Longevity: That said, magnetic tape and similar media, hard disks, etc. suffer from loss of magnetic remanence. Simply, the magnetic intensity on storage media decays over time, thus so does the recorded information.
Many factors contribute to the decay of information on magnetic media (which I cannot cover here) but in comparison with the older media (e.g, vinyl, 78s) its lifespan is almost pathetically short. One risks one's data if one uses a hard disk much past its short lifespan of about five years. Moreover, just archiving one's data on a hard disk and assuming it'll be OK because the drive is not actually being used is a risky business. The only way to guarantee the integrity of one's data is to copy it—rewrite it to media before its remanence falls below the threshold where data cannot be recovered, ideally this should be done within the drive's specified lifetime.
With analog recordings loss of remanence shows up as loss of signal-to-noise ratio. I've personally known people who've dug out VHS videos of their wedding to show to their kids on their 21st birthday only to find the tapes not viewable.
8. NAND Memory. These days just about everyone has moved to NAND flash memory because of its speed and convenience. It's hard to buy a PC without either an SSD or NVMe storage, and everyone uses USB trumb drives. NAND storage is great stuff, we all love it.
However, if one is not careful and proactive NAND is a time bomb waiting to destroy your data. First, NAND deteriorates and wears out with usage, second—like magnetic remanence—its electronic storage decays with age even when it's only being used for archival storage.
I speak from experience here, some years ago I created an archival backup of all my important photos and stored them on a new 500GB SSD which I put in a safe place for storage. Several years later when I checked the drive it was completely unresponsive and I thought it dead. As luck would have it, about a half hour later the SSD eventually came back to life.
What happened was the drive's controller locked drive whilst it refreshed its floating-gate charges. Luckily, charges had not decayed below the threshold where my data would have been irrecoverable. If say I'd not checked the drive for another year then chances are that I'd not have been so lucky. (That's just one incident, I'll refrain from discussing other recent NAND failures.)
Yes, it was a backup and my working copies were OK, but the point is obvious, one cannot put modern NAND storage aside and simply just forget about it indefinitely and hope one's data will still be viable. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.
We shouldn't be surprised by what happened here when we care to look at how NAND flash actually works. Frankly, it's amazing that it works at all let alone the fact that it works so well, NAND is truly a masterpiece of modern semiconductor fabrication.
NAND's functionality depends on quantum tunneling and that we use the fact to force a few hundred electrons across an 'insulated' barrier where (hopefully) they'll stay stored in the FET's floating gate for an indefinite length of time.
What I find amazing is not that quantum tunneling works and that we can store electrons in a floating gate or charge trap (and that's amazing enough of itself) but that the insulation is so good (stray resistance is so high) that it can take some years for this almost infinitesimal charge to leak away and dissipate.
Whilst we can view quantum tunneling and charge storage as a state of stable equilibrium (in that in an ideal transistor the charge would be stored indefinitely), that cannot be said for a real-world device, eventually the charge will dissipate and with it goes your data. NAND storage has many advantages but in comparison with other storage tech its both ephemeral and short lived.
We have a world now running on NAND technology and yet we've no immediate technology in the wings that'd be a better replacement—one that's intrinsically or inherently stable by design, and that's a pretty unsatisfactory and unnerving situation. Moreover, the situation is made worse by our blasé attitude and headlong rush to adopt multilayered 3D NAND which further reduces the electron count in a floating gate. By design, we're deliberately making NAND more unreliable because of our demand for even more storage.
When one thinks about it, it's pretty outrageous that the world is having to rely on dozens of data centers so as to achieve some degree or guarantee of longterm data reliability.
It's hard enough now to find and keep track of information without revengeful moneygrubbing bastards screwing the Internet Archive. We need every bit of reliable archival storage now and their actions are selfish and counterproductive. If this nonsense continues then heaven knows what the future holds for longterm data storage.
What's the URL? Curious if it's still valid and if it were uploaded by some random user or one of the archiving projects.
For extra awesome use their Winamp clone. It really whips the llama's ass.
https://archive.org/details/fleetwood_mac-1977-rumours?webam...
Uploaded by user "Ultra Lo Fi Experimental" who appears to be putting lots of big name releases on there, I can't understand why they would do this.
The Reddit support groups are pretty enlightening. Many people think they're just adding things in to a public library and somehow this is all perfectly legal.
It's charming and reminiscent of the best old-school Wikipedia energy. People on the fringe (and probably some OCD people) finding something to do. Curation and contribution feels good, man.
But yeah, holy shit. Brewster Kahle and Jason Scott have said "upload away, we'll figure it all out later" -- then themselves uploaded hundreds of thousands of items to set an example.
"Please don't upload copyrighted material" would go a long way at the top of that PHP upload form. Better yet a checkbox: "This is copyrighted. Archive it but don't republish it." But I suppose where's the fun in that.
I think you overestimate normal people's understanding of copyright. There's tons of videos on youtube with a description like "I don't claim to own this. No copyright intended". If you put such a form most people would probably think they're "not copyrighting" it or whatever confused idea they've got about how the law works or what the words mean.
Here's one: https://archive.org/details/FleetwoodMacRumours
What modern law(s) are you referring to? (Serious question, interested in learning more)
Music Modernization Act (2018). A long overdue tiny step into common sense copyright reform.
https://www.copyright.gov/music-modernization/pre1972-soundr...
"The legislation also establishes a process for lawfully engaging in noncommercial uses of Pre-1972 Sound Recordings that are not being commercially exploited. To qualify for this exemption, a user must file a notice of noncommercial use after conducting a good faith, reasonable search, and the rights owner of the sound recording must not object to the use within 90 days."
Basically Internet Archive could've sent a spreadsheet of works to the Copyright Office and anyone claiming commercial use of these old records had to respond within 90 days. In the lawsuit Brewster is quoted saying that it makes pre-1972 works "Library Fair Use."
The law does not allow people to make commercial use of these recordings (take three seconds to consider why). But they could've archived old recordings all day and then made the ones that cleared the list immediately available for unlimited download. And provided excerpts of the others for research purposes.
Instead they managed to get sued for $696 million. For a side project that nobody cared about (40,000+ downloads) that managed to put the whole org (and several participants' personal assets) at risk for two years.
As an aside, 78 RPM records are not particularly fragile. As a consumer product, yes. By preservation standards, no.
"With proper care and storage, this durable resource can last for centuries" https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J116v08n02_04
"Somehow slipped in" - are you fr rn?
I don't wonder anything about that, was very convenient.
Are you claiming the copyright holders put them there?
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.
Mega isn't indexed and decrypts content in javascript on the client. If people are using it to share your stuff, you have to find where they're sharing it to even find out that it's on there. Now, Hollywood did this to themselves, because back when it was Megaupload the fact that they had a search index was used as an excuse to shut down the whole service because a couple of employees used it to access infringing stuff without taking it down, so Mega got rid of that as a means to prevent it from happening again.
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.
Internet Archive continues to leak the verified email address of the uploader of each item, so conspiracy guy can run a spot check should he so desire.
Fair if true, though it's not like someone uploading things to IA is likely to be using an address like michael.scott @ dundermifflin.com or something. More likely it's something anonymous. Certainly so if they were planting things to sue over, you can bet they'd use an account like dsfhakeij@ mail.ru or something.
I guess things could be worse? The Internet Archive is too precious of a resource for humanity to lose. I still fear its days are numbered. I don't think non-technical people appreciate it, or are even aware of its existence, in the same way as Wikipedia.
I fear that when a certain administration finds out about it they will force it to shut down. The last thing they want is for the internet to have a memory, because then they can define past in any way they want.
When things like this happen, I think about how during WW1 people talked about the possibility of "bombing a country back to the stone age". Destroy enough libraries, have enough people abandon their areas of specialty employment into different fields, and given enough time, you can erase a society's institutional knowledge and capability.
If we lose enough key resources like the Internet Archive we could definitely shifting the pendulum in that direction.
The siege of Baghdad and the House of Wisdom by the Mongols arguably still affects us today.
And the entire "Dark Ages"?
Dark Ages, maybe not as much since Europe recovered during the Renaissance, but the Middle East hasn't necessarily been too stable since the Islamic Golden Age.
I think it would only be a mild tragedy, if there is such a thing, if, say, we lost 3nm lithography or carbon fiber airplanes. Most of that stuff is luxury anyway. We wouldn't lose the core science and data, it might set us back for a generation which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
I'm a technical person, and not a fan of copyright by any means, and I don't appreaciate it either.
To be clear, I appreciate the concept of an "Internet Archive", but the current organization / execution / management is absolutely atrocious.
Also Not A Fan. Consider that nearly all of the artists who made records pressed on 78 shellacs are long gone. How specious is the claim that they are even a significant revenue stream for the majors? (The purported rationale for copyright.)
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.
Review the Music Modernization Act (2018) which allows anyone to send a list of pre-1972 recordings to the Copyright Office. If no entity responds saying they are making commercial use of those recordings, the recordings become Free for non-commercial use, including unlimited download. Now consider why Brewster gave talks celebrating this law but chose not to follow it.
I just meant I appreciate it as resource for all kinds of information, and as an invaluable backup of the web.
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.
Nah, it's like the wild West - I'll hold IA accountable ONLY for CP - ONLY.
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
Why do you say that? I'm in agreement with the other responses, and this thread has prompted me to start a recurring donation to the Internet Archive.
The fact that a site chartered to provide "universal access to all knowledge" is banned at most public library terminals is a start.
Partly because people use web.archive.org to bypass other, more sinister firewall blocks. (And I'm okay with that.)
But non-stop copyright lawsuits don't help. People begging for personal information up to child pornography to be removed and not getting a prompt response from Internet Archive support might also be a source of concern.
The site is funded by its wealthy founder and he also uses it as a vehicle for his pet projects. They don't issue annual reports. They don't have a functioning board. They didn't even consider accepting donations until Brewster realized it helps build reputation.
I certainly don't begrudge anyone who donates but the TV, Movie, and Video Game industry lawsuits are obviously next in line.
> To be clear, I appreciate the concept of an "Internet Archive", but the current organization / execution / management is absolutely atrocious.
A pretty harsh take imo. I think they achieve a huge amount with a relatively small team and tiny budget.
Originals are far superior to the processed Internet Archive versions.
eg The Batman Animated series on there is usually sub par, low quality.
Uploading something? Expect it to be processed no matter the format.
The original uploaded file is always available for download, without any processing. Agree that the processing they apply for derivative files is often dated and awful (and they don't let an uploader opt out). And the broken torrent files they've been serving for a decade with corrupt and missing files is absurd.
But raw DVD RIPs of commercial DVDs, FLACs of the most popular albums of all time, and seven perfect copies of every Nintendo Switch game ever made, curated by seven different warez groups are also available.
what's the better alternative? what's so bad that forced you to voice that comment?
Accepting donations to preserve internet pages then nearly getting sued out of business twice in two years over side projects that have nothing to do with your core mission would result in management change at any normal non-profit. Likewise leaking 30+ million patron communications at a library (including passports and driver's licenses) would get you bounced from a normal library.
Not to mention diversions like trying to start a bank and getting your ass handed to you by the feds.
https://ncua.gov/newsroom/press-release/2016/internet-archiv...
"Unwillingness to open accounts within the field of membership, make loans, and establish operations in the low-income community where the credit union was chartered to serve..."
> Days before the settlement was announced, record labels had indicated that everyone but the Internet Archive and its founder, Brewster Kahle, had agreed to sign a joint settlement
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.
Is it really that important or significant?
This is the board: https://archive.org/about/bios
IA has a board page. My guess is the other members are independent in the sense they have don’t have material financial ties. However, you can draw your own conclusions as to whether they would ever tell management “no.”
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.
There's an easy solution to this: just move hosting to and register in the Marshall Islands where there is effectively no copyright enforcement. It is difficult to threaten someone with a lawsuit when the law they cite is not enforced.
The Internet Archive has substantial physical presence in the United States:
https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/bay-area-warehouse-inter...
The Marshall Islands are litterally in the Compact Of Free Association with the United States
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.
Moving the IA to the Marshall Islands is your idea of an easy solution?
Ha I'm sure their internet connectivity is excellent. And even if it was, you think a country with a population of 42k is somehow immune to political pressure?
The forthcoming "Block BEARD" act in the U.S. will soon enable rights holders to apply for foreign sites to be blocked (at the IP level I believe) on piracy grounds.
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)
> Storage of data for 250 years (metal rusts, dvds melt/warp, paper is not data dense)
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.
Magnetic media is not optimal for long-term storage: its strength is mutability not durability. Something like Project Silica is much more promising.
Could you keep the drives working that long?
For 20ish years stored properly with a few spares, absolutely, why wouldn't they?
The Marshall Islands does not even have a copyright law.
> He suggested that perhaps labels just "don't like the Internet Archive's way of pushing the envelope on copyright and fair use."
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.
The people at these companies probably do realise that literally nobody has ever tried to watch a video like Rick Beato's to simply listen to a piece of music. Anyone who is watching a Rick Beato video is watching it because of the theory, discussion, and commentary surrounding the music.
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.
There appears to be no cost or downside to falsely flagging, so it's unsurprising that they just spam flag everything on the off chance that they are able to do some damage to someone.
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.
> A record label has never lost a sale because somebody discovered they could "get music for free" by watching YouTube critique videos.
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!
The mindset that someone will buy a album because he have no idea about WTF it is and can not listen to it on the internet is really interesting to me.
Like, why would you even buy a album and add it to your collection if you have no idea what it is?
> someone will buy a album because he have no idea about WTF it is
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.
They're stuck in the 90s mindset where they're worried about people taping songs off the radio.
They have no idea who Rick even is it's all automated. It's the biggest issue with the paper thin protection of Fair Use and the DMCA system where fair use is a proactive defense required to be adjudicated in court and the companies are not even required to review their claims for the possibility that it falls under fair use. It's exacerbated by the fact the Google's system isn't even properly DMCA, it's their own system with no legal consequences for false reports all based on minute audio matches.
I think it's bold to think it's conscious planning that's behind this behavior from UMG. Most of us work or have worked with large companies, we've seen for ourselves how dysfunctional they can be.
More than likely it is a subcontracted law firm that specializes in YT notices with automation. I seriously doubt that their in-house legal team do it at all. They might receive an email from the subcontractors with updates to their progress each day/week/month that rarely if ever gets reviewed by in-house legal.
> The people at these companies probably do realise that literally nobody has ever tried to watch a video like Rick Beato's to simply listen to a piece of music.
Do not anthropomorphize copyright lawyers
Absolutely, and especially obvious when you realize that he only plays a few seconds of the song typically before interrupting it or talking over it. It's not in any way even close to a replacement. Their behavior only makes sense in the context of absolute and utter greed
i'm sure they have lost sales though from bad reviews.
I've noticed similar false economy in some sports, where the holder of the rights is so strict that even famous pundits can't use footage (even a few seconds) or risk consequences. It seems highly detrimental to the sport itself, and perhaps even the rights holder due to the reduction in free advertising.
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've worked in a large government bureaucracy before, and I've repeatedly encountered a particular breed of bureaucrat that has no idea of what the organization is trying to accomplish (or, actively doesn't care) and has taken it upon themselves to enforce policies in their role as strictly as possible, sometimes even to the point of delighting in the power that they wield to stop people from trying to do their jobs and do good things.
There are essentially two schools of thought when it comes to rules.
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.
Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy: “In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.”
I know with trademarks, the law puts a perverse incentive on businesses to ruthlessly attack uses of their trademark. If they allow even innocuous uses of it, then they risk the trademark becoming generic and losing all rights over it [1].
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark
It's really a quite different set of law because the whole point of a trademark is that it uniquely identifies a particular seller so that buyers can distinguish it from others in the market. If that identification weakens then your trademark becomes meaningless and can no longer be enforced. But that logic doesn't apply to copyright.
In my opinion something similar should apply to orphaned and abandoned works. Especially, considering how long copyright lasts.
I think the creator of a work should be allowed to unpublish it but only if they own it entirely.
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.
Trademark is completely unrelated to copyright. You do not have an obligation to pursue every copyright infringement the same way you do for trademarks.
That's a shame because Rick has some fantastic videos, especially his "What Makes This Song Great" series. He's showcasing some amazingly talented musicians and their work, which probably leads to some music sales. BS indeed!
it's not really the same as putting snippets of media in a youtube video... the internet archive has, loosely, three categories of stuff:
* 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
> * copyright but abandoned (not legal but nobody cares and is good for society)
This is where they should be "pushing the envelope on copyright", but for some reason they keep exposing themselves to big lawsuits.
That's why exactly it tho - normal ppl that are not the non-profit with very limited resources and staff, upload the infringing content - it's not even the IA fault that they are hosting it and placing such a responsibility on the IA to polofe the.archive - isn't what that is.
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.
They're the digital equivalent of a library. My local library lends out in-copyright music and films.
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.
Digital equivalents to libraries typically have a fixed number of copies of a digital book paired with DRM such that the user can only read them while checked out. That is very different from how the internet archive works.
Digital is fundamentally different because everything can be copied infinitely. Any model that doesn't accept this basic fact is broken. Luckily there are plenty of other models that could be used, such as compulsory licensing or flat fees that are divided amongst creators. The publishers of course are not interested in that.
Except for the DRM, that is exactly how the internet archive works for content that is still under copyright. However, for libraries, they often have a limited number of borrows per book (enforced with the DRM), and they are effectively renting the book, not owning it. Which gets back to the imbalance of copyright law and enforcement.
>On one hand, their behavior is baffling
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.
Not only it's 2025, so anyone still using YouTube(/Google/Alphabet) to make money is complicit with totalitarian extremists,
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.
The inability to prove damages normally is the end of a suit. But there is something magic in copyright where judges seem to waive that requirement. This special dispensation seems to be extralegal, and limited to where it serves large copyright holders.
See the Copyright Act of 1976. That battle was lost long ago and judges can't ignore statutary damages.
The lesson of the 2020s is that judges can do whatever the hell they want.
[flagged]
How does IA get picked on but YT does not? I can type in any music artist or album I can think of with the word playlist and get a full playlist. With exception of the YT channels owned by the publisher or artist I am highly skeptical YT own even 1% of the music on their site. Most of the music I run across seems to be just random YT user accounts and the music has been there for years. For the record I am not complaining, it just seems very biased to me as in IA probably do not have as many lawyers, as much bureaucracy, connections and money as YT making them an easier target but I am just guessing if that is the reason.
because youtube has Content ID. they faced the wrath of copyright holders years back, when they were small and lacked real profit, but now pretty much all videos with music in them are automatically claimed - so the big labels get money
Hrmm so maybe IA could implement this type of identification.
The Internet Archive has unfortunately turned into a cross between a poorly organised archive and a pirate site.
How do they financially benefit from pirate material?
By putting banner ads at the top asking for donations. This very lawsuit was provoked by tweeting out links to Frank Sinatra records as part of a fund raising campaign. Also, the existence of pirated material fuels the growth of the site.
Few people go there for the cool weird stuff. Find something old and amazing and blogged about: 12 views, 10 from bots. Now search for Nintendo games.
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.
Google appear to host loads of infringing works (both as files and in YouTube) ... surely for both them and IA they're protected as long as they take down in response to properly formed and evidenced DMCA requests?
Unless you're suggesting this isn't user uploaded but is being put there by staff?
YouTube has built a whole content ID and revenue sharing agreements as a direct result of getting sued nearly into oblivion by numerous organizations. Most "infringing works" on YouTube are permitted under an agreement laying out revenue sharing with the rights holder, and if not, is flagged and taken down when found.
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 suggestion is that the staff know that there is infringing material being hosted. Youtube can point to the billions of dollars they've invested into building content id, continually working to resolve the problem.
This is interesting, because Youtube staff know they're infringing too -- the expense is something that IA can't afford, but they then get to claim they're doing something. A shield of money. And why does Youtube have all that money; in part because of historic copyright infringement.
it's frustrating that so many people use the internet archive as pirate file hosting for things that are easy to find elsewhere (legally or otherwise)
it jeopardizes all of their other missions and access to otherwise inaccessible media
It really needs to be at least 2 different organizations.
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 ?
> The whole "Emergency Lending Library" situation was just strange.
That was adjudicated years ago, and has nothing to do with the case at hand.
It's related, it demonstrates the IA's attitude toward copyright and how it's already gotten them into trouble. The huge amount of pirate content seems to largely fly under the radar, but the Library was advertising that they're not going to respect copyright and it puts the website archives at risk.
> The huge amount of pirate content seems to largely fly under the radar,
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.
> A gross misreading of their stated intentions.
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.
> It's related, it demonstrates the IA's attitude toward copyright and how it's already gotten them into trouble
Then why the case makes no reference to that?
I thought that made them heroes - tbh, I think they thought we would save them from this - ppl don't remember goodwill like that long enough tho - haha, your trying pass it off as shade.
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.
OK.
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.
I actually believe in copyright. Of you write a book and use Amazon to host - THEY own that book now, they will make all decisions about it's distributions and how much you will get for your cut (Only 30% is what Amazon pays put for digital book creators) - if I don't like that, they will bully me, or you, or the entire industry of authors - Amazon will always win, BC of those copyright laws actually.
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
You're not responding to the comment you're replying to.
On the other hand, it doesn’t particularly matter what legal material the Internet Archive makes available; the various media companies will still attempt to sue them into nonexistence. How much “fair use” you’re entitled to in the states these days is merely a function of how big your legal budget is.
I think the majority of infringing was uploaded by the labels themselves. I believe that, without evidence contrary - like you know, what should actually be happening if this was actually bad, but like someone already addressed - I don't know that they lost a dime when the labels uploaded the labels copy written music.
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.
> I think the majority of infringing was uploaded by the labels themselves
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.
The whole "The National Emergency Library" thing from IA makes me wonder if the folks in charge at IA are done with getting themselves in trouble.
That whole saga was absurd and self inflicted.
I'm fairly certain it was to create this platform right here and right now - this is exactly what they wanted, an actual challenge to the record labels authority's.
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 ;)
I'm not sure that's relevant to the emergency library situation.
They were going to lose that fight from the outset.
Yeah this is exactly it. They try to claim some moral high ground but the reality is that they ARE distributing copyright content.
You can argue the law is wrong but you can't argue that IA isn't trampling it.
If I had to guess, I'd say that the settlement was a lot closer to $41K than one would think, and that's why it's being kept quiet. Otherwise, the labels saw themselves either losing a famous copyright case in the age of LLM threats to copyright, or winning a famous copyright case in an awkward fashion that made people far less sympathetic to them.
People are on copyright holders' side in the battle with LLMs. Either winning or losing this case would be poison.
The settlement was beating them down and getting them to remove millions of items and police things going forward. Things are still disappearing left and right. Huge damage was done to the culture by Brewster's ill-advised, hardcore stance that played right into the hands of corporate interests.
Haha - only people that don't have experience with AI.
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
Isn't the DMCA already supposed to cover this type of situation? I can't tell from this article what was actually going on, unfortunately.
They have exceptions to several categories of IP https://archive.org/about/dmca.php
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.
Indeed they could've structured the whole project to give them DMCA protection but they chose not to. They truly thought copyright didn't apply. Then doubled down when pressed, just like the book lawsuit.
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.
I'm interested to know if last year's book publisher settlement cost will be reflected in IA's public filings. I assume they'll file a 990 in november:
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943...
Thanks for sharing that. 2023 data:
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.
Seems like a lot of stuff is being purged from (at least) the search index lately?
https://www.reddit.com/r/internetarchive/comments/1nk4pwt/ca...
Oh the good ol' greed. They surely deserve the piracy.
This fall will be the first time since Uni that I download all music released the whole year.
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
Hope everyone's enjoying the Internet Archive!
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Why isn't the Internet Archive a function of the Library of Congress, anyone know? Seems to me that IA should be very well funded by us all.
Because we don't want it be shutdown because some political figure dislike that it archived something they don't like?
But isn’t the purpose of the Library of Congress to avoid that scenario?
If that’s the purpose of the Library of Congress, they failed.
I’m not funding them just so they can decide to give my money to Sony. There’s much more direct and beneficial ways of doing so.
Seriously, if you are going to challenge this kind of shit actually challenge it.
Imminent Death of the Archive Averted, Film at 11.
Ajjdem
Seeing with ai there’s not gonna be a need for copyright and patents in the future. So easy to invent new stuff now.
I just saw your comment as I was leaving here - you are right
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.