I think more broadly, a problem that needs to be solved for journalists is archival rights or something for their work. In the past, you could just buy newspapers or keep copies of your works after they were published. You can still do that now, but it's not as important until it goes down. It would be better to negotiate into contracts something like archival rights to writing, or at least a permanent credit/record.
Journalism is unique in that it's almost always public in some form. It should be a reasonable expectation that it stays in its original medium, or is accessible in archives if that medium vanishes. Major newspapers often offer reprints or back issues. NYT offers the "Times Machine" [0] with basically everything they've ever run digitally. This should be the standard, not the exception.
"Major newspaper often offer reprints or back issues."
Perhaps younger readers have never experienced looking at microfiche of old newspapers in a library. Analog machines, not computers, but, if memory serves me correctly, the archives were far more complete than the so-called "tech" company-mediated, advertising-based nonsense what we have today on the www. And the analog fidelity was great.
Google ultimately failed to "organise the world's information" to the extent that it previously was organised by public libraries. Instead they turned finding public information into a game designed to support a massive programmatic advertising racket. The www has more volume perhaps than pre-internet libraries but 1. an enormous amount of it is garbage and 2. it is not organised for systematic browsing (leading to discovery) nor serious, methodical research. It is optimised for "clicks" and "views", selling ad services, not learning. There is no way to "browse the stacks" to see how this information is organised. It's all "secret". Imagine a public library that had to hide its operations as a "trade secret". Imagine that it tried to intermedite which stacks a patron will browse, for commercial purposes.
The point is that public libraries had extensive collections of newpapers and periodicals. The public could do serious research. But the www is dominated by advertisers and most of the information published is influenced by commercial motives. And it's all intermediated by a gatekeeper that sells ad services: Google.
If I want to use the internet (cf. www) for library research I still somtimes search library catalogs via z39.50 if the library's website is cludgy.
Those microfiche archives were amazing, and you can still today find things in them that do not exist anywhere else in the world. I'm not even talking articles that had errors when digitized or were edited/removed years later, but things like advertisements and all the other stuff that was in a newspaper that "wasn't the news".
It's simply a call to support the Internet Archive more robustly, and ensure data stored is durable globally.
Who would you trust more? Big Tech and Silicon Valley? Or a non profit with a quirky benevolent dictator whose mission is universal access to all knowledge?
The Internet Archive needs all the support we can give so that when hack writers who have Reddit personality disorder blame them for their books not selling during the pandemic sue that the Internet Archive legal team can vaporize said hack from orbit.
The UK has something like this: it's called "legal deposit". Publishers of books and periodicals are required to send copies to the enumerated deposit libraries (one of which is in Ireland despite no longer being part of the UK).
Laws were passed to update this to the digital age, allowing the deposit libraries to archive UK websites. Unfortunately they don't right now archive video. It's also a bit limited given that web publishing is not national, so much UK content is published on US run websites.
Canada does something similar - you can register to become a publisher, which then allows you to issue ISBN numbers for your works (eBooks count), with one stipulation - you have to send a copy of anything published to Archives Canada:
Also MTV News was archived, until today that is. How long until the new CEO of NYT will decide the costs of archiving are not bringing enough shareholder value? From that moment on there won't be a source for reprints either. Am I too negative?
The logical decision then is to entrust the preservation to once of the few organizations capable of surviving thousands of years, and forming a religion based on the preservation of works.
Gawker and numerous shuttered local newspapers (the former Santa Barbara News Press comes to mind: <https://doc.searls.com/2024/04/21/archives-as-commons/>) have also seen this occur. The challenge for former reporters and staffers who lose any ready access to their portfolio is profound.
If you're your own rightsholder, obviously you can do whatever you want. The NYT archive is one such example.
In the more common case where you are not, though, the law already provides exceptions to copyright for archiving and redistributing materials that are no longer available. This generally only applies to content that isn't audio/video/graphical, but a wider exception is provided specifically for "news" (journalism).
If you want to negotiate a contract making such archival exceptions explicit within the contract itself, that's probably not a bad idea. Even if not though, the law provides for archival protections already.
> You can still do that now, but it's not as important
I think you hit the nail here.
Most contemporary journalism is just not worth archiving.
There is a small percentage that definitely is worth archiving, but the bulk of it is produced for the moment.
> Most contemporary journalism is just not worth archiving.
I don't agree. There are many interesting tidbits which go unnoticed as bog-standard / disposable news until the dots connect in the future, and one wants to construct the history backwards from that tipping point.
When these "contemporary articles" go missing, many important details of the history is lost.
One of the people who recovered a lot of old Usenet archives once remarked that the reality was that no one cares about the details of some long ago SunOS bug whereas a lot of the cultural discussions about government policies etc. provide a window into the time.
Are you really interested in reading a 50 year old newspaper article about a collision that happened midday on Saturday afternoon in your community newspaper?
Of course not. BUT on the other hand that particular collision may become highly relevant in those 50 years. Imagine your own scenario where the facts reported on the day might conflict with something claimed to be true much later, and the person wasn’t notable at the time but they’re highly notable now.
The issue is we don’t know what may be important after many years, decades or centuries have passed. Given how easily text compresses, it would be a shame to not have at least text of real news sources archived perpetually. I know there is also an endless stream of listicles which are just generated to get clicks and ad views, but newspapers are worth archiving.
> Imagine your own scenario where the facts reported on the day might conflict with something claimed to be true much later, and the person wasn’t notable at the time but they’re highly notable now.
I do see your point. I'm reminded of the photograph who snapped basically a digital throw away picture of Monica Lewinsky weeks/months/years before anyone really knew who she was. later on, he was happy to have that picture, since it was one (or the only one) of her at some event hugging Clinton.
Text is easy enough to store, but making it useful to search and access seems like another problem to solve.
I’d challenge you to find one article where this is the case.
Almost all “journalism” today is opinion notifications without substance, source, or first hand accounts. I suppose that’s its own kind of historical artifact, but not the kind I’ve seen be meaningful in my study of history.
Who knows, maybe in the future one of those opinion pieces may be the first digital record about a specific topic found by some future civilization. In the same way that the Complaint Tablet to Ea-Nāṣir doesn't provide much historical value, but is interesting in being the oldest written customer complaint.
History isn't just about the big things. The history of the mundane is also important in understanding a culture.
The text of every article is easily worth archiving. If we take average article size to be 500-800 words, then 2KB each is plenty. You want to hang on to 10 billion articles? That will cost you 1 (ONE) hard drive. Remember to make backups.
If we allocate 200KB per article for pretty strongly compressed images, then it's still 100 million on a single hard drive. Why not archive the whole lot and let God or future historians sort it out?
You only need to start getting picky when video is involved, but on the other hand when the alternative is total obliteration you can crush video down to 1MB per minute and have a tolerable VHS-like experience. And even 8MB Shrek gets the point across.
I think you undershot that by a factor of 60. But when I said "get picky" I meant things like not archiving all of youtube. And for articles specifically, archiving every video article is a lot smaller.
And going by this, restricting to a reasonable view count will cut the space you need by a factor of 10 to 25.
If we round that to a petabyte per year, it's not in the range of a typical personal archive, but it's a reasonable thing to picture several big libraries doing.
(Though a single person could handle that much if they really wanted to, spending $10 a day on data tapes.)
Storage is also massively cheaper than in the past. It's worth archiving everything that was published on the Internet because you never know what it might reveal in a future context.
Maybe the comment thread on a trivial clickbait article contains a post by a future dictator, and it will be a crucial piece of her biography fifty years from now.
Who are we to decide? Many television tapes were wiped or lost last century because people didn't think them important, including a big chunk of early Doctor Who and a lot of the Apollo moon landing coverage.
What are you doing posting this on Hacker News? Don't you know it's majority-owned by Jon Danilovsky, the son of the moon landing movie producer? Oh god they have your IP now, you only have hours.
But to a historian it is all a series of moments. To understand how/why one happened, it is useful to know the ones that came before, and things created for the moment might better describe it than those with a wider purview.
Of course you don't need it all, but deciding what to keep is a complex (and bias ridden, accidental or otherwise) problem in its own right.
> Most contemporary journalism is just not worth archiving.
It is impossible to know presently, how valuable something will be to someone in the future. I don't know if any historians have this as their motto, but I like to think they do.
>Most contemporary journalism is just not worth archiving
Considering how much historians love ancient rubbish bins, one mans junk is another mans treasure. Even the junk produced during and before the Trump/Brexit 2016 election/referendum would be massively valuable to a future historian in explaining how those things happened.
Most contemporary journalism isn't even worth reading, let alone archiving.
It's published at virtually no cost compared to what newspapers and magazines used to cost. And with LLMs it's going to get even cheaper as you no longer need people to write the stories. We are spiraling into an era where we will be drowned in content that is all worth next to nothing.
This may in fact be one of the most effective forms of archival available to us. (Handwaving away the preservation of compatibility with future hardware or the maintenance of an “emulation chain” to get us back from whatever GPUs are there in 2124 to something our today models would run on)
We could train a model every year and preserve it, then future historians can quiz this model that thinks it’s 2024 and ask it whatever they need to know. It’s fascinating because it will probably “know” the kinds of everyday normal people things that are very hard to glean from only reading old news stories. Things like how the average person feels about their world, or how they feel about current events and why.
there is perma.cc which gets around the archive.today and waybackmachine gray area by only allowing link archival through affiliate libraries. It's as close as you get to the government archiving journalism/culture, besides the loc.
>You can still do that now, but it's not as important until it goes down.
Yes. It's very easy to get into the mode of "I can always download it"--until you can't. Or at least it's very hard to find. I've been pretty good over time. I probably have copies of 75%+ (probably more for stuff I actually care about). But I've definitely written for sites that don't exist any longer, at least a couple of which were behind paywalls.
This sets a scary precedent regarding reporting and the capture of history in general. If all of a few decades worth of music history disappears due to a companies financial health(no company is around forever). We basically lose that data forever and history is wiped out. With most news data now being online this could happen to any news going forward and a great loss to society. Internet Archive does a good job(they are a very small outfit) but there should be a organization (non-profit that all news/media sites could pay into) that would archive everything ever created online so as to have this content available for future generations.
There's potential there. You only need to store part of the chain and there's an incentive to keep rare blocks.
But the mining is optimized for storing as big of a fraction of the chain as possible, so I worry that the future of it devolves into a few big nodes and everyone else dropping out.
It's possible to fund an immutable data archive using a normal trust. It's possible to verify immutability with traditional hashes. What is blockchain going to add?
I wonder whether that data has more value to the owner if it's not online -- make AI companies pay for it if they want it.
And maybe take legal action against those who've already used it, for training and knowledge bases, without licensing it.
That'd be different than a company simply not wanting to incur the small costs of keeping it online. (Still sounds crappy, but it's not "for nothing".)
This really only tells us that there's nothing special about digital archives. They can come and go just like physical archives. If you want something to be available for longer than it's commercial lifespan you need to put it in a library or an archive that's designed and funded with the specific goal of preserving things.
When I’m in a library, or perhaps a Goodwill store, and see some woefully out-of-date volume (that 1991 copy of “Let’s Go: Chicago”), I think about how it survives because it takes work to remove it. Multiply this by the number of physical copies that can be scattered about, and it just seems more intrinsically stable than a purely digital work. Sure, we could be making infinite digital copies, but it seems like so far we’re cool with 2 (the original, and internet archive)
Agreed, for MTV the (archival) content might have just served to generate search hits, eyeballs and ad-serving space. A library has a different set of goals with the same content.
I haven't watched it yet but, apparently, the documentary about Lollapalooza that was just released was largely based on content from their archive. I don't know the details but MTV was somehow involved in the production. So, that's all to say that their archives are undoubtedly a treasure trove of historically, culturally significant media. It's a shame only the select few get access to such a resource.
The same is true for so many archives and collections.
I think one of the worst crimes of modernity is to lock away knowledge and art for the sake of „protecting and sustaining it“ - copyright is broken and needs reform, the current system does not serve it’s intended purposes and we need to come up with something better.
I've known people working on archiving at big old media organizations, and one thing that is underestimated is the extent to which now inconvenient things are painted out of the archives.
For example, there was a large classic cartoon archive which had a whole team of retouchers painting out all the smoking.
The Internet Archive isn't immune to that either, unfortunately. Taylor Lorenz has leveraged her uncle to delete unfavorable stuff about her out of the Internet Archive :/
That's like in Canada we had Much Music which began after MTV but there was The New Music in 1979 three years before MTV existed. JD Roberts (before he became evil) and Jeanne Becker (went on to fashion journalism fame).
I encourage everybody to check out your local magazine rack. Many music publications (Rolling Stone, Uncut, others) are putting out "book-a-zines" or "Ultimate Guide to Band X" style compilations containing original photos, interviews and reviews from the magazines ' archives. In a world where anything online is link-rotting or pay walled, or copyrighted by Getty images, these are a way to build your own collection of non-404'ing information.
I have a few of these: Nirvana, Joy Division, Pink Floyd, Uncut Guide to Shoegaze. For $15 or so each, it's not a bad deal, about the cost of a CD. Full-size colour pictures look way better than the low res images found online too.
Internet Archive solved it. Your bookmark action should kick off an archival job, and link to the Internet Archive link, with whatever bookmarking tool you're using acting as a database of Internet Archive links.
you (fortunately) haven't watched the last 20 years of MTV. It's one of the biggest jokes in the medium that MTV was ever about Music Television.
They are clearly fine associating the brand with the most bottom bog reality shows as long as the views come in and the budget is non-existant. Wouldn't be the first brand Viacom/Paramount gutted.
Is this stuff not in the Internet Archive? Why not? I'm not disparaging; I'm just asking what the reason is. What causes something to be in the Internet Archive in the first place?
Can someone explain why wayback machine and the other archive services aren’t filling in this gap/working in this case?
(I.e., the article seems to say all archives are gone , I understand why mtvnews.com is now in-accessible, but why would the wayback machines archives be gone also ,just because the parent/ source website was shut down?) tks
> why would the wayback machines archives be gone also
I don't know for sure, but, as a hypothetical example, in this case, MTV could have requested that IA take down the archives from that time period.
(That is, if MTV can prove they owned the domain during the archive period [probably pretty easy]), and if they still hold the copyright to that work [probably], then they could essentially issue a DMCA takedown request [by email], with which IA would most likely comply [there are some HN and IA forum posts about this I think].)
> just because the parent/ source website was shut down
The "just because" part is not a well-founded assumption AFAICT. For all we know, there could have been a request like above.
> why wayback machine and the other archive services aren’t filling in this gap/working in this case?
I see no evidence that IA isn't working in this case, if working is defined as including having a process for handling valid takedown requests that must be acted on according to the rules they follow.
I hope that helps. Again I don't know if this is what happened, it's all hypothetical.
Agreed. Maybe some of the file coin based crypto can donate some storage or integrate some storage space on their network as a charity/tax write off scenario.
The analogy that comes to mine in regards to MTV taking their full site off-line, would be the equivalent of a newspaper shutting down and destroying or burning all of the extra printed copies of their paper/articles they may have in their own archives instead of donating them to a local library.
> but according to Hiatt older MTV News articles do not show up via Wayback Machine.
So not all, only "older" articles are not available. Wayback Machine only works after someone submits the site for archival; the old site might have used something that made it hard to archive content; and I expect MTV pre-dates the Internet Archive. Any of those factors might result in WM missing stuff. It's not magic.
Paramount re-merged/organized with Viacom in 2019. I imagine the co-owners are a result of that huge re-org, where no one wanted to truly step down (but I'm sure the answer is out there for someone who takes more than 3 minutes to research like I did. Take with a grain of salt)
There's also content being "lost" to paywalls / sign-up walls. A couple of days ago I went to access an article I've shared to others a couple of times a year for close to 20 years. Not now! "Must sign up and sign in to view content".
We were promised 21st Century jetpacks and all we get are same old dated mindsets, dated biz models, etc.
p.s. While we're on the subject, anyone want to recommend a Firefox extension that does full page capture (read: not a screen shot)? And then a simple in-browser DB for saving / cataloguing with tags or similar?
Yeah. Thanks, I've got that one. Was curious if there's anything else.
In any case, if that's the capture, what's a viable long term pro-privacy storage option? Private GitLab or GitHub? Maybe use Issue somehow as more of DB?
Someone has to pay the content creators or else very little content will be created. What new business model would you propose as an alternative to pay walls? I do pay subscription fees for high quality journalism but most of what's out there is just low-effort slop, churned out to drive tiny bits of advertising revenue.
A universal pay as you consume. That is, one "wallet" with "credits" but many / all sites would be something new.
Or even credits at a solo site level. It's not about time but articles reads (i.e., actual usage).
Also, ending my subscription shouldn't end my access, just access to new content (i.e., content I did not pay for). And maybe the older content gets ads as a supplemental.
My beef with the 20 yr old article is... it's been openly available... and it's 20 yrs old. Now I need to sign in to see it? That's not a paywall. At this point, that's just stupid.
People have been proposing "pay as you consume" systems for decades but no one has ever figured out a sustainable business model. The overhead of accepting and distributing small payments appears to be too high, especially after dealing with fraud and chargebacks.
I don't think it's "no one has ever figured it out". It's more like, doing so would cost consumers less and companies would have less revenue. It's not an unsolvable problem. It's a problem no one - other than consumers - really wants to see solved. It's effectively a wallet. We can't solve the wallet problem? Wait! We have. Plenty of times.
Again, even at the solo site level it's not being done. Certainly, it could be.
Then start a business and do it. If your hypothesis is correct then there are thousands of websites that would love to accept payments from your service.
I think you'll find though that building a wallet is an extraordinary complex problem. The legal compliance issues alone make it tough to build a service that can operate in the USA. As soon as you build a service for transferring money, criminals will immediately try to use it for money laundering and other illegal payments. What's your plan to handle that? You can't just ignore it or most likely the government will shut you down. And those AML/KYC laws are unlikely to be loosened just to suit this use case.
Why? Why would I start a business where there is no market? We've gone over this. It's not a technical and/or solution issue. It's that the gate keepers - the ones who would but the product - don't want something that's good for consumers but bad for them.
> A universal pay as you consume. That is, one "wallet" with "credits" but many / all sites would be something new.
So if i want to read one article from website XYZ, i may need to pay 00001 credits and if I want to read another article from website yyy, i may need to pay 00002 credits?
How would yyy or xyz content creators/journalists actually make a living from this, though?
A valuable resource documenting decades of cultural and musical history is lost. This can hinder future research... And nostalgic exploration. Such a pity!
The Internet Archive should receive significant government funding. It's insane we let cultural treasures disappear into the wind when we can preserve them for negligible costs.
It seems like the Library of Congress should be making an effort to archive, in the same way archive.org is. People are constantly worried about archive.org shutting down. Having another source would be a good thing.
The LoC seems to have some web archiving going on, but it’s very selective. I don’t know how any good archivist can think they will know what will be important in the future.
I did a search for MTV and only got 3 results, and only 1 is actually from MTV. For the cultural significance MTV had, I find this hard to believe.
I actually disagree. Archiving is a complex issue that touches on the interests not only of the general public but also those who produced or are covered in the materials to be archived, and the ways in which it might affect their interests might not even have been clear at the time of publication (think about LLM training as just one example), or their interests might not have been heard at the time. I think a public institution would be better placed than a private organization to deal with weighing the - evolving - legitimate interests of all parties concerned by the decisions of whether and how to archive something.
Came to initially disagree but realized I was making the same point. Archiving is in the matter of public interest which defaults to government. Resolving the conflict, the internet archive should be absorbed into the library congress. It would be a win-win, the internet archive would have the backing it needs both financially and legally and the library of congress will be able to modernize and expand it’s already daunting mandate allowing them to gain further public awareness and legitimacy.
The Internet Archive works with the federal government currently, and while they receive benefits and incentives as a bonafide library, it is better (imho) they are distinct from the government to remain segregated from potential political influence and interference. This doesn’t prevent a federal agency tasked with preservation from kicking off archiving operations and operating a replicated copy of the Internet Archive (or a subset of the corpus).
In the current operating environment, it is important to optimize for optionality.
(No affiliation with the Internet Archive, just a concerned citizen)
In today's political climate I can imagine one side or the other demanding that all material that espouses position X must be expunged from the archive as "wrong think"
I mentioned above in the thread, perma.cc is a service, that collects government, institution, and library money and archives on their behalf.
I think its a fair way to have some check and balance between a centralized library doing all the archiving, and a million libraries each with their own archival system.
Far from it. Archive.org is a passion project funded and run by a moderately wealthy guy (Brewster Kahle). Or at least, he had a few millions when he started it, and I'm certain the org has been a money pit for him. Hopefully some kind of foundation exists to keep it going after he passes, but it's not a certainty.
It's inevitable that they go dark. They piss off too many people regarding IP rights, and people hate to have proof out in the wild of what they said or did in the past. Plus a ton of other reasons; more people have an interest in it disappearing than have an interest in it surviving.
I mean, when it dies it will be a greater tragedy than the burning of the library of Alexandria (at least many of the books there were copied elsewhere), it will be a tremendous blow to our collective knowlege and memory.
Or small groups of people interested in the community could archive it themselves and host it. I don't know if MTV news had a serious following or not, maybe that part of the reason the archive was taken down - nobody really cared to keep ~20 year old articles.
Not sure what they did to upset you, but they are absolutely archivists. Off the top of my head, they've preserved flash games and animations and written an interpreter to get them working in modern browsers; they've scanned books and made them borrowable from the browser, which I've personally used for archival research.
I'm guessing what you're referring to is their lawsuit with the publishing industry, where they attempted to lend digital copies of books without backing them with hard copies on a shelf. That was probably ill advised, and I suppose you could view it as political activism, but it's pretty obviously in furtherance of their mission as archivists - preserving content means little if it can't be accessed. (This was also in the context of the early pandemic, where access to physical libraries was extremely limited.)
I'm far less interested in how they measure up to some legal definition of an archive than I am in all the good work they do to archive things. If you think the former is more important, I would suggest the confusion is on your part.
An archive very clearly means something very specific, and it's certainly not the "We want free-as-in-beer content!" thing a lot of people here and elsewhere scream about.
If you cannot or will not consider what an archive is legally defined as, you cannot discuss in good faith about archives, archivists, or the act of archiving.
I'm not going to quote a definition to you, the only winning move in that game is not to play, but there are certainly more interpretations of "archive" than just the one. I certainly didn't assume you meant the narrow legal meaning in your original comment, and if you were only willing to entertain a single definition it would have been nice to know that upfront.
> it is *not an infringement of copyright* for a library or archives
Emphasis is mine here. The OPs link does not define what an archive is or isn't, it defines constraints on an archive or library such that it doesn't infringe on copyright according to US law.
To conclude that the IA is not operating an archive because they might be infringing on some copyrights according to US law is fallacious thinking.
You have it backwards. It is not an infringement of copyright if an archive or library reproduces and redistributes according to the exceptions set forth.
The Internet Archive quite clearly does not abide by those exceptions, and as such they are infringing copyright and not an archive protected by these laws.
If the Internet Archive (or anyone and anything for that matter) wants to spend my tax dollars, they can start by first abiding by the laws and regulations of the legal jurisdiction they reside in, in this case the USA's.
> An archive very clearly means something very specific
What you perhaps meant to say was:
"An archive that infringes US copyright laws should not be afforded protections under US law"
Most people, myself included, took issue with the way you dismissed IA as not being an archive altogether; it clearly is an archive and whether or not it infringes US copyright law does not change that fact.
Whether it should be protected by law is a different matter.
An archive doesn't engage in reproduction beyond what is necessary to archive a work or to utilize the academical value of a work, as exempted by the copyright laws concerned.
Internet Archive goes far beyond that and I stand by my claim that it is not an archive.
Staying within the bounds of copyright to do vital preservation work is the best way to set oneself up for failure before you even begin. Piracy is preservation, always has been, always will be, and is always moral for that reason. Large rights holders have zero interest in being stewards of their content for the eventual public domain transfer. They'd rather the work cease to exist than the public own it. That is direct theft from the public in a way that mere copyright infringement, and even monetized copyright infringement, doesn't actually approach the concept of theft. If a rightsholder releases a work, and refuses to preserve it, it is the public's moral imperative to ensure the work endures until copyright lapses.
This does not apply to unreleased work. If you create something and keep it private, I don't consider you to have a moral obligation to ensure your work eventually becomes public domain. If you do distribute that work to the public, at that point I do consider you to have that obligation, and if you won't do it, then someone else has every right to ensure that the public will gain ownership of the work at the appropriate time of copyright expiration.
No one else in this discussion accepts your definition of an archive. No one else is moved by the argument that they violated your chosen definition. The problem isn't that you haven't explained yourself clearly; you have, we understood, and we weren't convinced. Repeating yourself won't change that.
To be frank with you, it seems to me like this organization did something that is counter to your politics, and so you refuse to acknowledge the obvious reality that engaging in archival activity makes them an archive (to all the world if not you personally). I don't think you're speaking from a place of interest in preserving cultural and historic artefacts, it would appear your interest is in lashing out at them because you have chosen to view them as your ideological enemies.
And I think that's a shame, and not compatible with the goal of curious discussion. I think you ought to be able to express your disapproval without taking these ontological liberties. The other commenter's suggestion ("they shouldn't be protected by the law") is a good example.
"An archive may not be available directly to the public"
Well, then, most files that call themselves archives can't be legal under that definition. Wipe your computer of every archive you've downloaded, that would also include Linux ISO files.
Many of those formats are made by archival institutions, and also follow rules like ISO certifications.
Even librarians (my husband being head librarian for a city library) shake their head at this, and they're trained in databases and archives and related materials as a matter of profession, some to a higher degree than some CS students.
Are you (or your husband) really trying to tell me something like this[1] is an archive or a library?
That is one of the more, if not most, flagrant demonstrations of the Internet Archive not understanding what an archive is. There's more where that came from, including stuff like their one:many digital book lending program.
The law stipulates what an archive/library is and how they are protected from certain copyright prosecutions. The Internet Archive does not abide them, and thus I would absolutely not want my tax dollars sent their way. If they want to engage in flagrant piracy and political activism, they can do so on their own dime.
A proper archive deals solely in storing and preserving works thereof.
Note that redistribution isn't among them, and as such copyright doesn't apply because there is no copying for copyright to be concerned with. Aside from copying that must occur as a practical matter of archiving, of course, which are protected by the exceptions I cited.
This is why I said archives may not be directly available to the public, because once you start redistributing you are beholden to copyright regulations and otherwise the demands of rightsholders thereof. The very fact we can access that page freely is proof that the Internet Archive is not an archive.
Libraries, specifically those that aren't private libraries which are a form of archive, such as public libraries and institutions like the Library of Congress operate abiding copyright. Either by signing contracts with rightsholders permitting such redistribution or by adhering to the exceptions provided by copyright laws.
In other words: No, the Internet Archive is not an archive; they either don't know what an archive is, or more likely they are disingenuously calling themselves an archive to try and skirt the law which is unacceptable particularly if someone is proposing funding them with public monies.
For the record, I have no personal qualms with the Internet Archive dealing in pirated goods if they are honest about it. They will still reap the books thrown at them anyway, but honesty is a virtue. I do have a problem with them claiming to be an archive or even a library and serving a public good: Hell no they are not, fucking liars they are.
It's true that if no one archives it, it's gone. But there are people willing to archive things like this, and copyright makes it illegal to do so.
Edit: it's not the archiving that's illegal (probably)--it's the sharing of the archive that is. And sure they can share it after the copyright term runs out, but that's so far in the future the odds of an unmirrored archive surviving are slim.
Copyright does not make it illegal to archive. There should be a better exception about how to make accessible archives in case the source goes down I agree. But it should be nothing to do with copyright term.
Really? It takes a ridiculously long time for anything to enter the public domain. The original intention of copyright was to incentivize authors. It was not intended as a means of passive income for corporations, profiting off works that were made long after the death of the original creators and their immediate descendants.
The issue with MTV taking down its archive has nothing to do with copyright duration. If Netflix takes down its archive tomorrow you will say copyright is too long again. You can say it every time something is inconvenient to you as consumer (not producer and copyright holder). So in the end you will argue for elimination of copyright.
As someone who makes use of copyright to protect my works, I completely disagree that it needs strengthening. I'm sure the MPAA and RIAA disagree with me. 28 years is more than enough. I'd argue for even less.
Edit: and this case drives it home. Copyright makes it illegal to preserve this music history, and the owners don't give a shit.
This has nothing to do with copyright duration, if Netflix takes down its archive tomorrow you will say the same thing. Let's shorten it to 2 years right?
It's not illegal to archive of course. Video recorders were a thing even back in the day of MTV, completely legal consumer devices.
By the same argument, let's lengthen it to 1000 years, right? Someone can still archive it until it falls into the public domain!
I think saying that duration isn't a factor is oversimplifying the issue. We'd be relying on multiple independent archivists to all hold individually-obtained copies of the data for nearly 100 years, and none of them would be allowed to transfer the data to anyone else. That's a very different scenario to one where the data were freely mirrorable after 24 years.
The data should be archivable immediately, no need to wait for 24 years. It likely already is legal. It was never illegal to record a broadcast, so it should be legal to have a copy of a Netflix film for personal use.
Some regulations or clarifications for copyright and fair use could be useful but trying to reduce the term or abolish it is not the proper solution...
It should not depend on types of content but more like intangible cultural value, maybe case by case basis, that would allow to distribute archive if the original is unavailable even before copyright expiration
Erosion of copyright = erosion of creativity. If IP theft is OK then people can safely assume you didn't actually make your work of art (since it's easier to steal/generate). It doesn't inspire creativity.
The '90s MTV animated show Daria suffered from a re-release without the original music. All the MTV-era specific music was replaced with stock instrumentals, which frankly takes a lot away from the atmosphere of the show.
Is it not the case that you can buy the theatrical release, but only used, and on VHS? Or was the theatrical release never actually put on tape and sold to the public?
Han shot first. If you want to see it, you'll have to track down a very early VHS release (from 1984?) or from pirates. Every other official release has been revised for Lucas's change of heart.
Probably a copy out in my garage someplace. No idea of the version though.
But, to another point, copyright is a convenient bogeyman in these discussions--and it plays a role. But someone would also need to pay for archiving all this material and indexing it in a manner that would actually be useful.
Marion Stokes recorded tens of thousands of hours of broadcast TV from the 80s to the 90s. Without her efforts, a huge chunk of US TV history would have disappeared.
Was the reporting any good? Were people reading it?
I'd be concerned if the archives of, say, Kerrang! looked at risk of being lost. Or even back episodes of Pimp My Ride or Celebrity Deathmatch. But I didn't even know MTV had a news.
At some point such source comes as good enough source for collection of very likely true facts. Like when something was released, some dates of tours and so on. Things which they have no point to lie. Or time points when something was reported. This information is also elsewhere, but collection from one source on topic would still be valuable.
Good is subjective. The value for me is that during the heyday of MTV they interviewed practically every mainstream musician and often had access to them that no other news organization had. They also had series like True Life which were at least initially under the MTV News division. They may have tackled sensationalist topics but at lest they covered them.
Well, yeah, that goes to show how subjective this is: I couldn't care less about Pimp My Ride, but, even if I never had access to MTV News, I can understand how people could get emotionally attached to music and related programs. Anyone remember MTV's Most Wanted with Ray Cokes back on MTV Europe in the 90s? I think I watched every episode of that...
I loved that show. I've struggled to explain to my teenage kids what the show was about and the appeal of it .. they don't get it. I used to tape it to VHS and still have said tapes in my loft, they haven't been played back since the late 90s. I dawned on me how much culturally significant material is probably on those tapes, down to the adverts and little MTV idents and the odd music video. I really must get round to getting them digitised.
I never cared about Pimp My Ride as such - I don't think I ever watched it - but it was culturally relevant, to the point that I heard about it anyway. So I can see that it's something that should be preserved for future cultural historians.
Journalism is unique in that it's almost always public in some form. It should be a reasonable expectation that it stays in its original medium, or is accessible in archives if that medium vanishes. Major newspapers often offer reprints or back issues. NYT offers the "Times Machine" [0] with basically everything they've ever run digitally. This should be the standard, not the exception.
[0]: https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/browser