Information wants to be free. Oblige it. Fools with temporary power trying to extract from the work of others will be a blip in the history books if we make them.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/harvard_pdf/8726429.pdf
"For the reasons set forth above, plaintiffs motion for partial summary judgment is denied and Googles motion for summary judgment is granted. Judgment will be entered in favor of Google dismissing the Complaint. Google shall submit a proposed judgment, on notice, within five business days hereof."
Affirmed on appeal
https://storage.courtlistener.com/harvard_pdf/3124896.pdf
"In sum, we conclude that: (1) Googles unauthorized digitizing of copyright-protected works, creation of a search functionality, and display of snippets from those works are non-infringing fair uses. The purpose of the copying is highly transfor-mative, the public display of text is limited, and the revelations do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals. Googles commercial nature and profit motivation do not justify denial of fair use. (2) Googles provision of digitized copies to the libraries that supplied the books, on the understanding that the libraries will use the copies in a manner consistent with the copyright law, also does not constitute infringement. Nor, on this record, is Google a contributory infringer."
Google Books is currently a shell of its former self.
the balance of comments in Hacker News about a topic like this: it tips towards the wrong understanding of that case. There's Gell Mann Amnesia in every comment section.
I think it's worth fighting back on copyright as a broken institution, and it should be part of the IA's mission, but you have to be responsible on your approach if you're also going to posture as an archival library with stability of information and access. I understand Kahle might lament losing some of the hacker ethos, but the IA is too important to run up against extremes like this without an existential threat.
Those who create information may have families to feed, house and clothe. Until those items (food/housing/clothes) are also free, information cannot be free.
The main consensus is that people who illegally access content wouldn't have bought it otherwise, and that they still advertise it (thus, still driving up sales).
These studies have then been systematically strong-armed into silence by the EU and constituent countries' anti-piracy organisms.
This is probably because the war on piracy, too, is a billion-dollar industry. I'd be glad to blow it all up and give it all to the starving artists and their families.
I think many will choose the former but there are so many cases where there is no option provided.
Limewire made it easy, so people used it.
The same would be true today if assume.
Funny enough, an academic department I know has cut back on its purchase requests to the university library, on the assumption that everyone, students and staff alike, is just going to download the books from shadow libraries. Individuals were never going to purchase a 400€ book from a scholarly press anyway, but if now institutions are on the piracy bandwagon, that’s a new development.
The secret to why they can provide this?
The content is locked behind a code the student has to buy that provides access to the book or comes with the book.
It's absolutely disgusting. For profit bullshit is fucking the youth of America. It's disgusting.
Source; the three times I've failed to push my current instruction to open access materials instead of McGraw Hill bullshit. And it failed because the lazy ass faculty can't be bothered to develop their own lessons anymore. Fuck.
Studies, if done correctly, hold massive scientific value and (at least a bit) of "the truth". Especially in the current climate we should never go down the path of disregarding studies.
That's why I can accept copyright even thought it's not perfect.
Like, if you translated the Spanish version to English, you’d have different words than the official English version, but it would still be a copyright violation to sell that, right? Likewise if you first had someone do a translation from English to Spanish before you translated it back to English?
If it is based on an existing copyrighted work, bears substantial similarity to it, and competes with the original in the market, I thought copyright handled that?
There are many counter-examples.
Gabe Newell (Valve co-founder) famously said:
"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem."
Jeff Bewkes (CEO of Time Warner) famous quote about piracy:
"Game of Thrones being the most pirated show in the world? That's better than an Emmy."
Radiohead released their In Rainbows album as "pay what you want", directly online. It generated more revenue than their previous label-backed album.
Management and lawyers are paid to be busy and "defend rights", not on sitting still and saying that nothing should be done. Even if it true, they still need look busy and "earn their check", otherwise their numbers/salaries can be reduced.
Yes I advertise the games and actually want to buy the games once I feel like the money would start mattering less than it does right now to me.
Its also about sending a message though.
As an example, I have never bought any online subscription or any online game and yet I wanted to buy silksong purely because of the sheer dedication and respect for him
The only reason I didn't were that partially it may be that silksong isn't my usual gaming although I rarely do that nowadays and secondly, that, I wanted to buy but my brother said that he would have to buy it seperately on his PS5 and I wanted to split the money for the first time
You might call me a hypocrite for having a brother with PS5 and not buying games but its his money and he has given me enough and I am not taking any money from him out of pure respect. He earned it. I have also earned some money online from coding related stuff and I was actually going to buy it from my own money but I didn't feel like it after he stopped me.
I really recommended hollow knight to everybody I could for days lol.
Also, there are some other pressing concerns as well.
So recently, I was backing up my linux whole night and literally the next day I borked it via gnome-disk accidentally format partition, I don't drink coffee so that might explain it after an all nighter-ish saving linux
Then, everybody on discord etc. said its over. I then tried testdisk utility for so goddamn long trying out literally everything in it untill it finally worked (I may have had some skill issues in the process but I learned a lot)
In that moment, I felt like I can do anything thanks to linux/open source. I immediately opened up my mail to thank the creator of the tool and making it actually free instead of people on discord saying me to pay either 15-20$ or pay thousands of $ for recovery.
I asked grenier@cgsecurity.org regarding the whole situation expressing gratitude and I wanted to donate to him but I felt like what if he had some donation site he wanted to give to like red cross or something. I wanted to donate 10$ of my own savings lol to him or any donation list he recommended or wanted to send money to.
Mainly, it was a way to say thanks though but I will honor his wishes if he ever does read the mail and I wouldn't touch that money or I would donate that money later if he doesn't respond to something like food security either way (I personally feel like although open source is really great, I just can't live if someone is sleeping hungry, that shouldn't be there in this world)
And now you or these companies expect me to pay 70$ to play either retro games or to play unoptimized games etc.
hell no.
I will tell you the games I really love as a means to promote them, if someone's interested in hearing out my suggestions on games.
I really loved baba is you, inscryption a lot. They are both indie games which I really liked
The portal series was also a really nice game that I enjoyed a lot as well.
I have played a lot of binding of isaac even though I feel like I am a noob but I can secondly recommend that as well
I also played some other games but that company is notorious for lawsuits and I am even scared that they might sue me for just mentioning the game's name lol
I even once made a friend after first being an enemy (he said he knew karate so he did it on me and I just hold his leg mid air and he was barely balancing and I think my cousin sister had to stop me) of some person and then helping them pirate a game and walking them through it and talking about it lol.
Good times.
What isn't good is when people try to mention how its extremely unethical and how I am the bad guy and I try to explain it and they think its extremely black and white.
I feel like I would give money to companies if I feel like they deserve it and I can earn it. I will genuinely buy every single one of these games that I had mentioned just to support the devs. I wish there was a better way to support them even more directly since steam takes a 30% cut when I don't want it to.
Should any corporation be able to gate-keep me out of the ability to make me enjoy my time of what I have during my childhood simply because we can't afford it and then when I actually get the money, I would be losing out on time (which is what is happening to my brother as I had mentioned, he said that he barely uses ps5 because of his work)
Everything is connected and I think a big issue people do is try to approach things in isolated manner and to form black or white opinions but I don't really blame it either.
Thanks for sharing.
Unrelated: I wonder how much the publishing industry spent on lawyers.
Besides, if I was never going to buy it in the first place because you're charging too much, you've lost nothing if I pirate your product.
A victimless crime.
I just grab the popcorn and watch from the side lines, see where it all lands.
If you're campaigning for fair use, don't give your enemy ammunition to shoot you with by stretching said fair use too far. That was just really dumb.
Besides, for those willing to look outside official channels there's plenty of book library services available already. Just let them do what they do well and don't contaminate an above-board service with that.
To say otherwise is disingenuous.
not wanting you to be intentially misleading, FTFY.
This is a weasel word you've inserted to be intentionally misleading.
The 'goodwill' counterparts of ChatGPT, a.k.a. open weight models, are still well alive online.
What do you think is step 1 of training an LLM?
OpenAI just kept their library private and only distribute the digested summaries of the library, are the main differences.
If you claim the moral high ground you have to be impeccable. It also didn't help anyone during COVID because all the stuff was out there already on less legit services. Some make it super easy with telegram bots etc.
I'm sad that they screwed this up. Because the archive is a very valuable service. They've lost a lot of money, goodwill and reputation now. And gained nothing.
The worst part is, it's unimaginable that this would ever have ended well.
It wasn't a bad idea in principle but they should have worked to get some publishers on board, could have been a PR win for them too.
Personally, I say they should be free for everyone, the lawyers however think the complete opposite and they have the means of enforcing this.
> The lawsuits haven’t dampened Kahle’s resolve to expand IA’s digitization efforts, though. Moving forward, the group will be growing a project called Democracy’s Library
please just stop. let IA be what it is. or rather, nothing wrong in doing new projects but don't tie them to IA, just start them as completely separate things. IA is too important as-is to be a playground for random kooky ideas playing with fire.
IA is the eccentric, untamed idealism. You can’t have the Wayback Machine without the National Emergency Library and the Great 78 Project.
Betting your own time and money on the realization of a crazy ideal can be very noble. Betting a resource millions of people are relying on is destructive hubris.
They should take the untamed idealism to a separate legal entity before they ruin all the good they've done.
The "good" that they've done is the "good" as the creator's see it, not the "good" as the freeloaders see it. All of which is to simply say that almost all users of IA are relying on the goodwill of the creators.
I think that argument has a certain stasis to it, and kind of assumes that organisations maintain their energy and people (and those people are not changing!)… but there are realities where the initial push is by some people and then future maintenance is by others.
But I think the IA is a uniquely tough project because of how much the ground is shifting around them constantly. It’s not Wikipedia
It's very strange to insist that he _not_ push the boundaries of copyright law for the common good. without that you wouldn't have had the Wayback machine in the first place.
He as an individual can keep pushing whatever he wants. Just keep IA out of it.
How's that for historic irony and "unteachability" of the human species.
Honestly, now's the time to make copies of it, while we still can. Torrents need seeders and people that care, and we are the last generation that cares about knowledge.
We need to prevent the following generations to grow up as mindless clickmonkeys of the digital Orwellian world.
I could see that due to the sheer size but im sure they have a robust disk pool that would take a lot for it to lose data
A better strategy would have been to found independent entities in other liberal democracies, so they can act as IP backups.
There was a great vpro documentary called "Digital Amnesia" [1] where they also interviewed the lead of the library of Alexandria, who was the only bidder to buy the national KIT library of the Netherlands and its dissolved inventory at the time.
Interviews with archivists, librarians, web archive and others on the topic. It's insane to see that nations don't want to preserve their history, science, and culture anymore.
But here we are.
Is it even viable to replicate to multiple regions if it's 1000s of PB?
IA was around 300TB last time I checked.
libgen was around 190TB. For my own at home cluster I decided to go for 512TB but I can't host nor upload in these bandwidth requirements from here.
I started to build sth like a torrent splitter tool yesterday because I realized that all torrent clients just crash when you try to open, modify, or seed those torrents.
Edit: correction, the IA is ~15PB big, brewster kahle mentioned it in the documentary (2014)
Good chance the book you wanted is gone at the least
We've run in Poland into very strange situation - Polish Public TV (TVP) paid for the great dubbing of some Disney shows. They recorded it on VHS which were overwritten by other shows. Now the translation and the dubbing is lost, found sometimes on people's home recorded VHS but in poor quality, because recorded from the aerial.
"The Wayback Machine is an initiative of the Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form.
Other projects include Open Library & archive-it.org.
Your use of the Wayback Machine is subject to the Internet Archive's Terms of Use."
...instead of taking you to the "calendar" page where you could select the version of the website you wanted to see.
The copyright system as a whole should by torn up.
At least it give a clear signal to anyone with a ounce of moral which publisher to avoid at all cost.
If there were no copyrights, no author would make any money.
And how many actually make a living off of writing books? The authors I know all have jobs.
Cory Doctorow showed that this isn't true.
(I think the US copyright system is hugely broken and the social contract needs to be re-negotiated, but I comment here in the interests of facts, not in support of the broken system.)
It's easier to make money when you comply with The Man
I'm old enough to recall the term in active use, and to have received the appellation from one who'd had it likewise handed down. I regard both as epiphenomena of the Internet's frontier or "Wild West" days, of which California has proven as terminal as it was for the nominate example after the US Civil War - not wholly for dissimilar reasons, if we take Vietnam, for the Internet, as the war whose loss would spur the migration.
It's only because the late 1800's billionaires wanted to leave legacies and made pay-to-enter and free libraries, and migrated them to free, or public libraries. Thats why so many of them are (John) Carnegie Libraries.
Only legal when billionaires do it.
Cable to streaming took us from skippable to unskippable ads. Search results to LLM results will result in invisible/undisclosed ads. Each successive generation of technology will increase the power of advertising and strip rights we used to have. Another example, physical to digital media ownership, we lost resale rights.
We need to understand that we've passed a threshold after which innovation is hurting us more than helping us. That trumps everything else.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/youtube-tvs-disney-b...
And yet I can go to a site right now off the top of my head and watch any TV show or basically any movie made in the last 50 years for free in HD.
It might be shut down tomorrow and it'll be up against 30s later with a different TLD.
They aren't winning but they really are trying hard to.
The history of public libraries is extremely messy, and the RIAA almost managed to get secondhand music made illegal in the 90s. Publishers did not ever support the idea of loaning a single copy of a work to dozens of people. While it's a huge stretch to say that every illegal download represents a lost sale (people download 100x more than they read), it's a lot less of a stretch to say that people who would sit down and read an entire book are fairly likely to have bought it.
Also, when books were relatively more expensive for people (19th century), a lot of income from publishers came from renting their books, rather than selling them. Public libraries involved a lot of positive propaganda and promises of societal uplift from wealthy benefactors, along the same lines and around the same time as the introduction of universal free public education. I remember hearing a lot about this history at the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore, which iirc was the first. Libraries were at that time normally private membership clubs.
edit: I also agree that the free book thing was stupid and have been very harsh about it. I don't know if it's possible to be too harsh about it, because it was obviously never going to get past a court. It felt almost like intentional sabotage.
> proof that public libraries, if created in the last 10 years
Paying the editors is the bigger issue than paying the authors
The AI companies already got blank checks to do that. Anthropic is paying what, like $3000 per book? I remember when the fucks at the RIAA were suing 12 year olds for $10000 for Britney Spears albums.
Or better yet, if it's just $3k a book, can we license every book and have that added into Archive.org? Oh wait, deals for thee, not for me.