Yet again the Internet Archiving is suffering big this time, a coalition of major record labels filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive demanding $700 million for the extensive catalog of 78 rpm records. 78s are sometimes more than a century old at this point and i bet a lot of them are out of copyright, but i suppose for the few that still are majors are hitting it big towards the IA
This lawsuit is pretty much another existential threat to the Internet Archive and everything it preserves, including the Wayback Machine, and we’re fucked if we ever lose access to the Wayback Machine.
the original article asked to sign a petition, but i think a more logical way to support is to donate them directly so that they have more money to better defend themselves in court in this and other cases they’ll undoubtedly face in the future
There must be a lot of complicated aspects to this that I don’t understand.
The right course of action seems obvious to me…
Firstly spin out a separate organisation to manage the wayback machine. It shouldn’t be part of the pot defending against litigation like this.
Secondly, and I feel silly saying this but… don’t institutionalise the perpetration of rights violations? In the age of distributed databases and the dark web and the block chain and federation surely we can figure out a way to archive media that doesn’t put people or organisations at risk of litigation.
Finally, if the individuals involved with IA are not liable for the debts of IA then the organisation should fold because that’s practically free compared to defending against these litigious assholes.
That limits and gatekeeps access to an enormous degree. The IA wants to be useful to everyone, not just the tiny fraction of the world population savvy enough to use the internet for more than opening a browser and a chat client.
Counterpoint: The perpetration of this kind of rights violation precisely needs to be normalized to the point of meaninglessness. Intellectual property can either go away top-down (which considering the way things went over the past century is never going to happen) or it can go away bottom up - it has to be flaunted and disregarded by everybody via continued large-scale disobedience.
Or, of course, it could just never go away.
Not necessarily, I wasn’t really proposing to just torrent everything. I was kinda dreaming of a more creative solution that trivialises access while abstracts the actual hosting away from individuals.
Perhaps, but if so this just isn’t the way to achieve that. IA doesn’t seem sustainable.
The reason this is as public as it is is because an archive like this is more useful the more is archived. If you manage it in an entirely hidden way, you basically won’t get it accessible from the clearnet and are relegated to keep it on Tor or similar. And once you do that, a lot less people will use it and thus it’ll be a lot less useful.
Also, they are not only fighting for an archive to exist, they’re fighting for it being a societally acceptable thing to exist.