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.
