The Internet Archive needs your help, seriously

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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

47 comments

and they accept donations in crypto 👍

Guys PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, download it all. The only way to preserve information is to copy it until 1 survives
I am just a poor fucking Iranian with shitass internet and no money to buy a NAS but I'll try to hawk some part of it as much as I can
- Is there a coordinated way to mirror it, like Anna's Archive is doing with their torrents? I'd be happy to pitch in a few terrabytes

The Internet Archive should seriously consider moving outside US juristiction.
- irc, it's already backed up to multiple other countries. I assume this isn't some crazy idea, and they've considered this themselves.
  Donate to help their defense, or donate to help them move their infrastructure. I think they need money more than they need big brain ideas.
  
  They need to operate out of a different country that respects human knowledge even at the expense of corporations' profits. What exactly that country is, I have no clue.
  But yeah. In the short term, moving out of a fascist country to basically anywhere else is a good idea for them.

I have a question. Would it be better for me to donate money to the Internet Archive, or would it be more beneficial long term to purchase a NAS and torrent as much stuff from TIA that I can?
- why not both? small donations to the IA pile up. also the IA has several petabytes of data so it would be difficult to mirror that completely but sharing parts you're interested in (even on the small scale) can be immensely useful.
  
  I think that's a good idea. I'm planning on cancelling my $3/month discord subscription so money can go twords TIA instead
  I have about a spare laptop I can setup to be a seeder in the closet or sthm
  
  Yeah agree with this, do as much as you can. We could even crowd source backups if everyone pitched in like 10TB.

Please move out of USA where trolls are more prevalent

- thank you so much, you're doing god's work

willing to bet that the ia does a million more for artists than the record labels ever did

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.
- 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
  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.
  don’t institutionalise the perpetration of rights violations?
  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.
  
  That limits and gatekeeps access
  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.
  this kind of rights violation precisely needs to be normalized
  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.

Can Internet Archive just stop copyright violations?
Do not get me wrong, I am all for piracy, but usually pirate websites hide themself (like libgen, for example), so that no lawsuit possesses a threat to the resource itself or resource owners.
IA, on the other hand, are pretentious pirates. They either believe that they are untouchable or just do not care in general. And when it causes expected result once again, they start running around asking for help and telling how dangerous it is for their entire work.
- The vast majority of these rpm records are not copyrighted. The same happened before when they were losing lawsuits over the books they archive, the vast majority of them weren't copyrighted and almost none of them were published by the sueing publishers.
  This isn't about copyright as they would have you believe, this is about information being publicly accessible rather than controlled by corporations.
- IA, on the other hand, are pretentious pirates.
  Homie, the IA is an archive. Their first and foremost aim is to make culture and knowledge available to the masses. You should read the blog entry. It's not like they're distributing the latest Marvel slop.
  
  The law is a law. Their aims do not override it. They are getting what any sane person would expect. Nothing prevented them from separating their legal and shady operations to separate entities. That, at least, would prevent compromising the whole operation. If someone puts his head in a lion mouth, it is still his fault, at least partially, that lion kills him.
  It's not like they're distributing the latest Marvel slop.
  I doubt this argument will hold in court.
  
  They lost that argument when they implemented the possibility to play games they host in the browser.
  I'm all for an archive. I'm not sure IA are doing this right.

47 comments