@ernie @mitch
.
I mean it’s so much easier than physically burning libraries - but the work has never deterred them anyway. I’ve always known my blog and most of my speech was going to disappear the minute the power went out. Think of the trees we’ve saved. ❤️🙄

@ernie while I totally agree from a moral pint of view, IA knew they were flaunting rules and got sloppy / arrogant about it. While the copyright system BADLY needs reform IA brought this world of pain onto themselves knowing that system very well and should have known better.

For me it raises a pressing matter of who archives the archive..? We need redundancy of such important services to protect them against catastrophe be that technological or bureaucratic.

@ernie

Our courts are worthless

Our system is worthless

Defending it in any way is now approaching evil

@ernie do you think OpenAI could have got its corpus if text without Internet Archive (and project Gutenberg).

The tragedy of the commons is that some mobster always wants to profit from it at everyone else's expense.

@ernie some organizations make enough money by violating the law that they can sue everyone else to extinction.

@ernie @jonny

I honestly think that if IA's intent were profit they'd have an easier time arguing.

But we'll see what the judges do this fall...

@ernie If something is done with the intention of making things better for everyone, it's a crime. If something is done to make a profit, despite damaging everyone, it's considered virtuous.

@ernie https://mastodon.scot/@Penguinflight/112696599511017503

@ernie That's what they started out doing. And if they had kept doing that, they probably never would have been sued, or if they were, there's a good chance they would have won.
But then they started entering into agreements with libraries all over the country: let us integrate with your online card catalog, and then we can let people check out one digital copy of any book your currently have on your shelves. Qualitatively different, much more questionable in terms of copyright law.
(continued)

@ernie omg I hate to be the lazy non-reseacher, but... I knew of the issue with loaning books, but does "a near-extinction-level event" mean the entire site is under threat?!

@ernie yes. Insane. Aaron is crying.

@ernie both of these are acceptable. Intellectual "property" doesn't exist. You can't steal an idea.

@ernie
You have to understand that. The Internet Archive is evil. Worse, it's non-profit.
@jbz

@ernie why is it extinction-level?

@ernie i don't really consider myself a radical activist, but every once in a while i read about stuff like this and reconsider my stance

@ernie we will just pirate them. It will be fine.

@ernie

That's because the truth has always been and always will be.

Money = Power

@ernie archive.org has really tightened its access policy. To read many works now you have to be certified vision disabled.

@ernie
When it's for profit, it's OK 🤷‍♂️

@ernie I foresaw this in part @ withdrew loads of my Images, purging the data (hopefully) some of my work curated by gits at bbc! got bought as part of Hulton by Getty (oil magnate fame!) images.
one out all out!

@ernie copyright has been a broken system since the very inception.

@ernie The lesson is: Instead of investing donations into purchasing copies, they should have invested it into legal, like most companies seem to do

@ernie@writing.exchange Not problem, use Anna archive instead, stop use internet archive for reading books because site admin and team will remove stuff if received message from stingy companies who want to destroy old stuff for profit.

https://annas-archive.org/

@ernie back in the early 2000's MP3.com paid for physical CD's, made digital copies available to stream, but only if you could prove via a sophisticated hashing algorithm that you had your own physical copy at your end. The security of the "lending" didn't matter, it was the copying and subsequent distribution.

One has to lobby Congress to change Copyright law. Is Lawrence Lessig writing anything about IA's position?

@ernie but they are making profits silly! Delivering value for shareholders! Totally different to providing a useful service for not money.

@ernie We need to stop talking about everything we have to do. We need to act now.

We already live in an information economy dystopia.

Those with enough power and money to hide behind wealth and corporate structures can freely exploit our private data, while those aiming to serve the public interest are immediately punished

@ernie

We also know now what the real motivation behind the Google Books project was. To provide a training base for their AI

@ernie "Rules for thee and not for me"

@ernie ok, but internet archive did not buy the rights to electronically distribute those books, no matter how careful or limited that electronic distribution is. ALL they bought was the paper someone else’s work was printed on. That someone else has a right to determine how their work is distributed.

@ernie Working as intended

@ernie except the former one did loan more copies than they had and the latter one isn't stealing because if that was copyright infringement, we'd all be perpetual #DebtPeons starting in Kindergrdtten or Elementary school...

@ernie
Sue them. Why it's about sitting as always?

@ernie Not only this but the big publishers and online retailers make a lot of money selling people books that they can pull at any time because what’s being sold isn’t the books themselves but digital access to them. It shouldn’t be lost on anybody that they are doing this with the form of books that are most accessible to blind and otherwise print impaired people, which locks us into having to use that shitty model more than others.

@ernie this proves true on so many levels and should be hammered into ppl‘s heads