My favourite example of this is that for Babylon 5 the lawyers from Warner Bros insisted that the showrunners not retain any copies of the digital models because they were WB property and WB would archive them.
When they started working on B5 The Lost Tales, WB had lost all of the digital files.
This is also a common side effect of corporate policies that favour short term profits rather than retaining staff for the long term.
I see this scenario play out constantly:
1. A team or staff member has a project's data located on their user account or hardware.
2. The team or staff member are made redundant when there is a dip in earnings.
3. IT make a backup of the user account/s and wipe the hardware, and because it's older usually move it on.
4. Months or years later that data is needed and at this point no one at the company actually knows where the data is - and even if they find something, they don't know if that's the latest or the full version.
Now this wouldn't be a problem if there was a decent overlap in staff retention, but that simply isn't the case these days.
Writing better storage policies doesn't help - it's the understaffed nature of their businesses which mean that there is no time for staff to keep up with basic data housekeeping.
The types of data that clients should have on hand, but nevertheless have asked me to supply, are frankly embarrassing.
When I get frustrated enough to consider putting a kill switch in my work, I cool off by reminding myself that would prompt them to make a huge effort recovering from backups and have someone go through my code to get it working again. If I just do what they ask me instead, it will slowly decay without anyone having any idea what it even does, until its too late to fix or recover anything.
What company is allowing employees to have so much data locally? Almost all work is stored in a cloud now. Documents, spreadsheets, design docs, code… If you really are constantly seeing this then that says a lot about the corporation using severely outdated practices.
Exactly. In fact, I still regularly get sharepoint "request for access" notifications in my email for some presentation I did a year ago. Even though I swear I've opened it up to the entire org.
Who knows what happens when I've shuffled away from my current company.
Dead links are also incredibly common, particularly because we are on our nth port from sharepoint to confluence to whatever back to sharepoint. Generally, because C levels don't want to pay for this year's price hike.
> If you really are constantly seeing this then that says a lot about the corporation using severely outdated practices.
They probably just used now-outdated practices before those practices were outdated. This happened in the past, remember. Sure, the cloud is a thing today, but was the cloud such a thing 5, 10, 20 years ago? Do you really think it's their fault for not knowing in advance how much of a thing the cloud would one day become? Oh, how outdated. Sheesh.
I would think policies should also be updated every X years in light of new regulations, new possibilities, new limitations... but who enjoys policies and even updating them? So here we are, everything done "by the book" and losing data because of that.
Old animation though I wouldn't necessarily expect to only have been 10 years ago, and 10 years ago I wouldn't expect to be scolded for not using the cloud.
Expanse battles were far more realistic of course. The B5 Star Fury combat scenes were pretty ground breaking for the time though.
Expanse ships (at least where I'm at in the book series and show - kind of early) are a lot closer to current human tech of course. In B5 humanity had tech that was mostly believable (still used rotating mass for gravity), but you got to see some very unique looking ships from the other species like the Minbari and Shadows that truly looked alien and unsettling.
You're right. They might regret it financially if they could plan past their next meal. In the case of locusts it results in their decline.
Music industry has been... not great with licensing and archives. There are recordings of Lightning Hopkins that only exist because of the Smithsonian Archives. And there are re-issues of that music today that only exist because of independent labels sourcing from those archives.
If the music industry had had its way they would have been done with Hopkins years ago and his music would have been forgotten, having moved on to the next crop.
Books are good at republishing. Film has been decent at it but suffer from licensing issues. Video games are probably the worst at archiving and maintaining access to libraries of prior art.
I was active in their forums back in 2004. I still remember all the fuss when the admin/owner (going by nickname Underdogs) was "outed" to be a woman (she helped out herself, it wasn't a hostile thing). 2004 was a time when people could still be surprised that a woman was leading a major online project... wow. The past is indeed "a foreign country"!
In defense of video games, in a lot of cases technology has churned so much that it's prohibitive to maintain older games, and in general besides the 16 bit aesthetic people are so put off by the look of older games they tend not to get as engaged.
AI will improve this situation on the graphics side, perhaps with some sort of game container that emulates older environments well (Proton, anyone?) we'll see more re-releases.
> in general besides the 16 bit aesthetic people are so put off by the look of older games they tend not to get as engaged.
One of the most prolific indie developers of recent years (David Szymanski) has basically all of his games looking like they came out of PS1/early 3D accelerator days. And he isn't alone, there are many games that have midlate 90s / very early 2000s looks. There are also a ton of horror games that use exaggerated PS1-styled graphics with bit crunched filtering, strong dithering effects, etc (wobbly low poly environments where you can barely make out what you are looking at are giving horror vibes basically for free :-P).
This is something i've been saying for a long time now: if you can point at a game and say "this looks like a PS1/PS2/3/4/5/NES/SNES/DOS/Win95/etc game" then this means there are enough visual characteristics to define such games and thus you are really pointing at a visual style - something that people will use at some point in the future even when the technical limitations that birthed the style aren't there anymore (which means that some games may give the feel of that style but not really be bound by the actual limitations).
How does AI have anything to do with this? Are you just talking about emulators? Those already exist, and the main opposition to them is the companies that own the IP. Many companies would rather let games languish than let their community do the "prohibitive" work to maintain those games for free.
> and in general besides the 16 bit aesthetic people are so put off by the look of older games they tend not to get as engaged.
It's not about what people find pleasing today, it's about archiving and preserving an important part of our (digital) history. Videogames of the past were a big thing.
And videogames, much like music, must be playable to be truly preserved.
Imagine someone going "I don't get why it's worth preserving ancient Egyptian artifacts, people these days don't enjoy that kind of thing anymore".
Sorry, but you are just talking. The problem with video game preservation is that the IA isn't able to get the same library exemption that they got from the Library of Congress for archiving. The LoC doesn't yet consider video games an artform that can be preserved in the same way as books and other media.
There are thousands of folks that both want and want to do this work.
Reference please? Genuine question. As far as I know, libraries have very little in the way of special privileges outside of some specific rights in the analog realm which don't really apply in digital where first sale doctrine also doesn't apply.
I see nothing in there giving a carte blanche to libraries, however they care to define themselves, to have any generalized exemption from copyright law.
What's with the goalpost moving? Click on "Final Rule"[1] and the PDF goes into copious detail about what exemptions are currently in effect. Obviously there is no, and will never be, "carte blanche to libraries, however they care to define themselves, to have any generalized exemption from copyright law". There are specific, temporary, limited exemptions in effect.
Right, OP is saying (and I came here to agree) that the writer's use of the word "regret" was just clickbait — there's no actual regret predicted to take place except to music historians and the few ordinary people who know what they missed out on. Even the historian quoted says he's using the word "regret" metaphorically:
> "They're going to regret it," Seubert predicted. "Not financially or anything, but just from a historical perspective."
Music execs are in the business of selling music. The less music is available in the wild, the better for them.
There are three types of loss: destruction, discoverability, and synthesis.
Destruction is the one most people think of. The last tape is destroyed, or someone nukes everything in S3. Policies normally save this from happening, bit not always. (I note that lawyers are pretty good at saving things because of discovery, so perhaps corporations should sue themselves more often /s)
Discoverability is when the data is there, but noone knows where it is. This is your classic corpo Sharepoint/teams/slack problem. There was a chat, once, with some shared files, from their onedrive, but the last person who remembered where was laid off a year ago and...well, that data is effectively lost. I dont think we have great solutions here except writing even more things down and hoping that everyone follows rules like keeping all files in one place
The last case is where the data is located, but noone can vouch for it any more. Internal wiki pages are notorious here. People post about, say, some sharp edge they uncovered, and the page sits there for all eternity. You discover it years later. Can you trust it? Is there anyone who knows why the page still exists? It blocks the synthesis of what you know with what the author knew.
Some incredibly shallow takes in this thread, most of which seem to be coming from people who didn't even read the article. The quote in context:
> "They're going to regret it," Seubert predicted. "Not financially or anything, but just from a historical perspective, the Internet Archive is valuable for all of us."
This was not the central point of the article. He clearly is not saying that "the legal entity Capitol Records will manifest emotions and come to experience regret," but "the people who in aggregate comprise Capitol Records will regret the role they played in restricting access to these works," in the same way that a game developer on Hacker News might regret having added game-breaking DRM to a title he worked on twenty years ago, even though this allowed him to earn a lot of money.
> "the people who in aggregate comprise Geffen Records will regret the role they played in restricting access to these works,"
Is this deep? What people in this thread are saying is that they won't regret nor remember it, and whatever comfort you're taking from thinking "in the end, after everything is ruined, they'll realize I was right" is cheap and lazy.
Nobody needs anybody to point out that the loss of music is bad. Nobody needs anyone to conjure fantasies of future schadenfreude over the regret of record execs. People need tactics and strategies to figure out how to stop this destruction.
> What people in this thread are saying is that they won't regret nor remember it, and whatever comfort you're taking from thinking "in the end, after everything is ruined, they'll realize I was right" is cheap and lazy.
There are multiple users in this thread stating that the label is a corporate entity designed to maximize profit and that it thus cannot "feel" anything. This was obviously not what was being stated.
As to those claiming that these individuals won't regret what they have done: That may be true. But why does it happen with developers? Because it happens a lot.
Neither I nor Seubert made this claim out of some pseudo-religious self-reassurance that "One day, they'll all get theirs!" but as a simple observation that these actions are ill-advised. I don't know how you could read it any other way without being intentionally obtuse.
> Nobody needs anybody to point out that the loss of music is bad.
What you're essentially saying here is: "Your observation was so obvious to me that it shouldn't have even been written down, because everyone already knew it." This is obnoxious and not in the spirit of the forum.
> As to those claiming that these individuals won't regret what they have done: That may be true. But why does it happen with developers? Because it happens a lot.
Because Developers make games, and record execs make money. I'm sure there are a handful out there who actually give a shit about the art they make their money off of, but having worked with many of these people for many years, I assure you the vast majority are exactly as soulless as is depicted in virtually every movie or TV show that involves one, because the creatives behind those depictions have to deal with those soul-sucking vampires all the time, and they hate them. And the feeling there is very mutual, which is why every executive is creaming themselves at the prospect of being able to get rid of creatives and replace them with "AI."
> Neither I nor Seubert made this claim out of some pseudo-religious self-reassurance that "One day, they'll all get theirs!" but as a simple observation that these actions are ill-advised. I don't know how you could read it any other way without being intentionally obtuse.
Because, as is outlined by the commenter, the notion of "they'll regret this" is presupposing multiple bad assumptions, namely that record executives give the faintest shit about music beyond it's ability to make number go up.
Oh no, Capital Records has a bad reputation. It will still stream. Album sales will be unaffected because consumer revolt has always been worthless as a tactic. What are they regretting?
>There are multiple users in this thread stating that the label is a corporate entity designed to maximize profit and that it thus cannot "feel" anything.
The issue is the surrounding system and the corporate environment are what raise people to be this way and filter out those who are too sentimental. I don’t think a good majority of the people working there will ever feel bad because they’ve been raised not to feel bad and given an ideology that makes all that work in their head.
I think it's good to publicly express our disapproval. Because — as we have sadly seen recently — there will always be a small group of apologists defending villains or systematic oppressors:
(It's worth also considering that the group size does not always correlate to its power or influence).
But you are totally correct that thought-terminating expressions of Schadenfreude towards those who exert harm are not enough.
Are they? do you really think y'know what, reselling the cracked pirate copy of my game from 20 years ago that instead of my pristine version because I lost the source but I'm still making money, and that 20 years ago, fundamentally, it was really nice to be able to afford a roof over my head and provide for my wife and kids; You really think there's more than a passing feeling of regret?
DRM might have been a bad example, but it is one I've seen before. Another story I see here often is that a developer had an independent studio. The studio develops a game or an application. As the game or application ages, the developer sells it. The acquiring company goes defunct or discontinues the sale of the program some time later, and the developer wishes he would have just posted the source code for the program.
I get what you're saying in that the revealed preference is towards the "bad" behavior, but I think there is something to be said for the capacity to feel regret being a necessary precursor to discourage bad behavior from occurring in the future. The thread seems to be divided between those who believe the people working at these labels might have that capacity and those who believe that these people are essentially amoral monsters who are only concerned by the perverse vaguery of "maximizing returns."
The CEO of HBO Max, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Zaslav destroys works of art to get tax handouts from the american people. Yes, American Tax Payers, pay David Zaslav money to destroy works of art already created.
Or, more nuanced: HBO pays artists and writers and electricians $50 million to make something. It turns out to be unmarketable. So rather than throw good money after bad, he writes it off. Then uses the tax savings to hire artists and writers and electricians to make a different thing.
It's wasteful and I don't like his decisions but it's not much different from what VCs do with their expenditures.
In neither case do American Tax Payers foot the bill.
Zaslav could write it off and still dump it on YouTube. And VCs could open source all the Ruby code they bought between 2006 and 2016. But there's reasons they don't.
False. They had animated shows already being streamed on HBO Max that they pulled and fully wrote off. They can never be accessed again. Should be considered fully destroyed.
They absolutely can be accessed -- all major streaming services have new episodes/movies automatically uploaded to private bittorrent trackers & usenet within hours of them going live.
Of course, they content still has to be retained by those networks, but HBO Max hasn't been around so long that its contents are gone yet.
Tax writeoffs by definition are taxpayers paying less. It reduces tax revenue and reduces the average tax paid by everyone. When your neighbor writes off their mortgage interest it does not raise your taxes.
If you don't like certain policies around tax deductions then argue that. I might even agree with you.
Fraudulently reducing tax revenue by 1 entity/individual effectively shifts the burden of taxation to everyone else who is not willing or able to commit the same fraud. At the macro level, this adds up to billions more dollars every year in the unmanageable and unmanageably-growing federal debt. The US federal government plans to spend 16% of its total spending simply on paying interest on its debt: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio...
So-called fiscal conservatives should be howling in Congress about this kind of thing. (Narrator: they aren't.)
Running a deficit can be profitable long term -- or not. It depends on how the funds are allocated. Ask Bezos.
Likewise a tax writeoff can increase tax revenue over the long term -- or not. It depends how the tax savings are applied. Ask the employees who still have their jobs.
Regardless, a media company struggling to breakeven with cartoon coyotes may not be the best starting point for an economics debate.
That's not what I said. For avoidance of doubt, allow me to rephrase the concept in the local language: paying a bunch of artists and engineers to build an app that generates minimal revenue, pulling it from the app store, then writing off the loss, is neither clever nor fraudulent.
Interesting. I made a remark in my above comment which I ending up editing out, that if someone gave these execs a wad of cash for deleting something, they would.
Middle-class people are taught (,and teach each other, and repeat to themselves in their journals) that the only successful labor is labor that is loved.
For them, the heads of record labels have to care, because they are the most successful people in their industry, and they wouldn't be so successful unless they loved the work. In middle-class theology, becoming successful is a matter of loving harder than the guy next to you. It takes a lot of mind games to motivate people to extreme expertise in often very narrow specializations, especially when it's usually to make someone else rich.
Internet Archive does not delete anything. Sometimes they leave the "item" (URL) up and block downloads. Recently they have started "darking" things en masse, which removes them from search results.
A sane solution would be to leave the items up, block download of the full file, and make excerpts available. They do this for many items where you cannot download the mp3 yet the spectrogram (jpg image) remains available.
Archive.org is at a crossroads and the people who manage it have made some very curious decisions lately.
>leave the items up, block download of the full file, and make excerpts available.
This is what Google does with Google Books. I imagine the Internet Archive is trying to avoid it because Books is no longer a repository of works, it's a search index. If you find a source you'd like to read, you're on your own to find a copy. Large parts of their collection are out of print, and this can be very difficult.
It's still a useful tool with those limitations, certainly, but it's not an archive anymore.
An archive is typically restricted access to avoid just the sort of copyright problem we're seeing here. In the past, this meant having to visit the materials onsite -- even if you then just fired up a computer to look at them. Universities liked this for a few reasons, and it fit in with their typical gatekeeping nonsense as a bonus.
Exhibiting or publishing the work is different. Museums show tiny thumbnails (though this is finally changing) and libraries have their own rules, complete with weird little signs around the copy machines that people used to take more seriously. The lawsuit that set the rules for Google applies here. Yes, it sucks and it's annoying to tech people, but if the goal is preservation then it's obvious how things must be run. And what you can get away with while you wait for rights to expire or laws to change.
Providing excerpts to show what you have, then providing a way for qualified researchers to access the full work has been the tradition. Even for the 500,000+ books they had to take down due to the lawsuit, those remain available for people with print disabilities.
They even had an exemption for video games, but they forgot to renew the paperwork and the Librarian of Congress removed the exemption during the last triennial review. So we lost freedom there due to sloppy administration by Internet Archive.
Yes, exactly. The Internet Archive was founded in direct response to closed archives-being open is the entire point. Their goal is not preservation if it's locked in a vault- their mission statement is "to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge."
Universal access to knowledge is illegal under the American copyright regime, and it seems the people who run it have decided to fight to the end rather than give up their mission. It'll probably lead to the destruction of the whole project, but I do find it admirable in a quixotic way.
Do you have a link to them losing an exemption because of paperwork? My understanding was that the Copyright Office makes the sole determination on exemptions during triennial reviews, and they blocked it last year due to the usual regulatory capture and industry lobbying.
If you review the history of the archive you will see that their mission changed over time. They didn't even ask for donations until they set the building on fire.
You can still find old help articles on the site where qualified researchers are instructed to ask permission to log into their Unix servers directly. Complete with privacy rationalizations like "being able to see what people are doing on the same computer is no different than peeking over a shoulder in a reading room."
Early form 990s tell a very different mission. They pivoted for a number of reasons, and I generally support the mission. But you have to obey the law to protect the assets. And if you want to press the law, you have to be very smart about it. Like, oh, testing 10 records instead of 400,000. And doing it under a different LLC so you don't lose the Wayback Machine to some dumbass AI company because you can't be bothered to keep track of how many books you're lending out.
> Do you have a link to them losing an exemption because of paperwork?
"The librarian renewed all existing exemptions except for the exemption for accessible access to video games, for which there was no petition for renewal."
I went and checked myself, and they have evolved a lot more than I remembered. For the better, I think, but you're certainly right that they could be going about this in a more legally adept way.
The exemption mentioned in that article isn't about hosting video games online- you may have confused two exemptions. That one was for accessibility in the sense of access for people with disabilities (alternate input devices, etc). It was only added in the 2021 review, and the Internet Archive wasn't one of its backers.
The exemption for remote access to video games was a separate and new proposal, and the Copyright Office blocked it after pressure from industry lobbyists.
Institutions - especially those driven by profit - do not regret. If they did, an internet archival project would not trigger it when the likes of Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse could not.
Agreed. Cobain, for example, just struggled with fame, drug issues, stomach pain, regardless of his dealings with the record labels.
Seems rather immaterial. Unless, of course, I'm missing something. Admittedly, I don't know much about him even though I'm a millennial. Seems like I should but I was more into post grunge music.
> Agreed. Cobain, for example, just struggled with fame, drug issues, stomach pain, regardless of his dealings with the record labels.
Steve Albini remarked that during the In Utero sessions, he ignored everyone but the band and that everyone associated with Nirvana were "the biggest pieces of shit I ever met." [0]
There was absolutely massive pressure on Cobain to produce for his contract, and that greatly exacerbated a number of the issues you listed.
Seems like a guy who should have been given some time off from his contract. Same with Winehouse; ultimately both were a commodity for their labels to package and sell and the problems that they were showing in their behavior were ultimately their own to deal with.
Bothers me generally that journalists anthropomorphize companies ("company X worried by...", "will regret..."). Companies are totally emotionless entities only living to maximize profit.
Because companies are composed of individual tapeworms working towards a common goal?
>Companies are totally emotionless entities
You speak as if they're evil spirits. They're made up of people. They're very emotional, you just get to see all the worst emotions manifesting at the most inappropriate times.
And so is internet archive. And laws. And juristic institutions. There is no emotion or individual human interest in our fully rational processes, move along, you mere mortal.
I doubt that's what parent was getting at. Probably something more along the lines of the central thesis of the book Essence of Decision by Graham T. Allison.
The gist of the book is that organizational behavior never makes sense if you anthropomorphize it as if it were a single entity with its own goals and motivations. Nor does it make sense if you think of it as a corporate machine that behaves mechanistically. It really is a bunch of individual humans with their own goals and motives interacting within a bureaucratic structure.
It's a pretty interesting book because its ideas actually got a pretty decent test. He used the Cuban missle crisis to evaluate these three theories of organizational behavior, and showed how publicly knowable facts didn't make sense under the first two models. He then showed that the third model fit them better, and went on to make some hypotheses about what really happened that couldn't be verified at the time. Decades later the relevant information was declassified and it turned out that, while many of his guesses were incorrect, an impressive number of them were spot on.
They didn't, but at a certain point, one should realize that it's better for the artists (and thus, arguably, the long-term investment the label has made into their careers) to not have their problems made worse by commoditization.
Her management notoriously tried to get Winehouse to stay alive and keep making music. She made a song about it [0].
I think simply getting a paycheck was quite a contribution to these artists' demise. Though he managed to not die directly as a result of the heroin that consumed his existence, the late Matt Dike autobiographically remarked (paraphrasing here) that the worst thing in the world for a junkie was unlimited resources.
You can’t force someone to stop shooting heroin or drinking excessively. They were addicts before show business, the money just made it easier to maintain an addiction. I would’ve never quit heroin or alcohol if I had virtually unlimited resources to acquire more drugs.
On the other hand, institutions from science and technology, wireless
communications, radio and phonograph, made all of these recordings
possible. Just sayin. So nil-nil at half-time for the argument against
"bare" institutions? Or are you saying all "institutions" are
inherently monstrous?
Now you can argue that's psychopathic, which is often synonymous with monstrous, but I wouldn't call them psychopathic, either, because a person is psychopathic. A group of people, an institution, cannot be.
Now, the systems that these institutions exist within are often heavily influenced by psychopaths looking to leverage situations for their own maximum benefit, often at the expense of other humans, but the institutions themselves, they're amoral.
I agree with much of that. Corporate "identity" and "ethics" is a
nonsense - mostly conjured up by types who like to hide their
malfeasance in a crowd. But there is such a thing as group psychology
[0]. And many fascinating ways in which groups exhibit memory and
latent intent.
My objection is to vague attacks on all and any "institutions". Yes,
most of them are corrupt and broken now. But that doesn't preclude the
belief we can build good institutions, and should keep trying.
"The Internet Archive is not hurting the revenue of the recording industry at all," Seubert suggested, while noting that his opinions don't "mean squat" since he's not a lawyer. "It has no impact on their revenue." Instead, he suspects that labels' lawsuit is "somehow vindictive," because the labels perhaps "don't like the Internet Archive's way of pushing the envelope on copyright and fair use."
Record companies, artists and other rights holders are not pursuing lawsuits because they are "somehow vindictive" or want to send a message.
Lawsuits are huge, expensive headaches that force the plaintiffs to not only take a public stance on sensitive issues, but also force them to reveal details about their operations, communications, and business relationships. Like anyone else who goes through the trouble of pursuing a case on IP grounds, they feel their rights have been violated and they want redress.
They're also looking at this as part of a long-term fight over how IP gets used, just as the Internet Archive is.
I think his point is that the damages they are seeking are basically punitive, not related to actual losses that they have suffered. I doubt anyone is losing too much sleep over this issue, but the approach the record labels are taking seems like it is clearly intended to dissuade others from doing anything similar to what the Internet Archive is trying to do. The RIAA has a track record of these kinds of punitive measures; think of the music piracy lawsuits they were filing in the mid-2000s.
But that's exactly what the copyright act provides for... statutory damages not tied to the actual damages lost by the copyright owner, and they are only available in limited circumstances. And statutory damages still have to be tied to something tangible, like the lost license fee, and they do explicitly allow for a jury to add a punitive element.
>The RIAA has a track record of these kinds of punitive measures; think of the music piracy lawsuits they were filing in the mid-2000s.
How were those punitive as opposed to not? Should they have not sued at all and just let the infringers continue?
> How were those punitive as opposed to not? Should they have not sued at all and just let the infringers continue?
In Arista Records LLC v. Lime Group LLC, they tried to sue for more money than existed on earth. I'm not saying they didn't have a case against individual cases of infringement, but it was quite clear what they were doing while they were doing it. The goal was always to intimidate would-be pirates with high-profile cases about grandmas and teenagers losing the family house because they downloaded an MP3 off Kazaa. The damages the RIAA sought from these people were completely disproportionate to the actual financial losses they demonstrated, to the point of being unconscionable. It's notable that they eventually abandoned this strategy by the end of the 2000s as public opinion began turning against them.
There's pretty much no way any court ever gives any copyright holder the maximum amount allowed under statutory damages, which is only trebled to the possibility of $150k when the infringement was willful. I love Weird Al, but I don't go to him for legal advice or analysis!
Maybe the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York will convince you where Weird Al could not:
> Defendants face a potential award of over a billion dollars in statutory damages alone. If Plaintiffs were able to pursue a statutory damage theory predicated on the number of direct infringers per work, Defendants’ damages could reach into the trillions. See Dkt Entry No. 461 (“Thousands (or even millions) of uploads and downloads occurred across disparate users.”) 3 As Defendants note, Plaintiffs are suggesting an award that is “more money than the entire music recording industry has made since Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877.”
I'm not sure how this is actually a response to my comment. I'm an IP litigator, asserting max statutory damages is something every attorney does at the outset otherwise they'd be waiving that recovery. It's really not the big deal you make it out to be, and nothing in your quote supports that either. Do you think a court is actually going to award more money than the entire world? No. So what are you going on about, really?
> asserting max statutory damages is something every attorney does at the outset otherwise they'd be waiving that recovery
Meaning that they could not have asked for a lower amount without waiving their rights to all statutory damages? What it sounds like you're saying is that this was just a fluke of the lawyers who drafted the brief abiding by an industry standard that ended up producing an odd result. This seems incredibly unlikely.
It seems incredibly unlikely on what basis? Your complete lack of legal expertise and any insight into legal practice?
If you draft a complaint in federal court saying you were owed $30,000, you don't get to later change that to a higher amount without amending. I'm not sure why you think it's a fluke, it's a basic practice of legal drafting. Look at any federal complaint and it's going to be written with language like "in an amount no less than..."
> It seems incredibly unlikely on what basis? Your complete lack of legal expertise and any insight into legal practice?
I worked in the industry for several years, though not in litigation. I've been nothing but courteous to you despite your posts being shallow and dismissive. Review the site guidelines; you are breaking several of them.
> If you draft a complaint in federal court saying you were owed $30,000, you don't get to later change that to a higher amount without amending.
They weren't asking for $30,000. They were asking for more money than has ever existed. Your contention is that this came about from an industry standard practice of multiplying the statutory maximum by the number of infringements. You already stated yourself that a court was never going to award these damages because it would be impossible to pay them, so the idea that they were leaving money on the table by revising down from the the statutory maximum is nonsensical.
You would then ask why they would bother to revise this figure; it's no big deal, right? Industry standard.
Maybe the big shots do things differently but I've seen a lot of money get left on the table to avoid bad press, which is why I find it hard to believe there was no one in the loop here who would have had the capacity to suggest that this was a bad idea. My contention is that this didn't happen, because the whole point of these lawsuits was not to recoup damages but to curtail piracy via a chilling effect.
> The RIAA's settlement amounts are typically in the neighborhood of $3,000-$4,000 for those who settle once they receive a letter from the music industry. On the other side of the balance sheet is the amount of money paid to SafeNet (formerly MediaSentry) to conduct its investigations, and the cash spent on the RIAA's legal team and on local counsel to help with the various cases. As Pariser admitted under oath today, the entire campaign is a money pit.
> I worked in the industry for several years, though not in litigation. I've been nothing but courteous to you despite your posts being shallow and dismissive. Review the site guidelines; you are breaking several of them.
Frankly, I don't find your correspondence courteous at all.
> They weren't asking for $30,000.
I'm well aware. Did you see the "if". I guess that you find this rude and/or dismissive, but you fundamentally misunderstand my point, and in a way that seems as if you are jumping to. After all, I started the sentence with "if" and then described a scenario explaining how pleading works. Which I guess you understand because you worked in the industry?
> Your contention is that this came about from an industry standard practice of multiplying the statutory maximum by the number of infringements.
No my contention is that the maximum amount of statutory damages allowed under law is $150k per work infringed, when willfulness is present. In every copyright case involving statutory damages, the pleading will seek the maximum amount of statutory damages available because if you do not, it will be waived. Do you understand the concept of waiver? I ask, not to be rude, but because it does not seem like you do. I'm happy to explain, but I'm sure google or chatgpt could provide perfectly adequate answers.
>Maybe the big shots do things differently but I've seen a lot of money get left on the table to avoid bad press, which is why I find it hard to believe there was no one in the loop here who would have had the capacity to suggest that this was a bad idea. My contention is that this didn't happen, because the whole point of these lawsuits was not to recoup damages but to curtail piracy via a chilling effect.
Yeah? You see a lot of attorneys in copyright cases not seeking the amount of statutory damages? Where did you see that? As I mentioned, I'm a litigator, and I do a lot of copyright. That's not my experience at all.
> The RIAA's settlement amounts are typically in the neighborhood of $3,000-$4,000 for those who settle once they receive a letter from the music industry.
I'm not sure what your point is. You do not seem to understand what I am talking about at all, which is that it would be malpractice to not claim the maximum amount of statutory damages available when you plead. You do not have to ultimately seek them at trial, but you cannot go the other direction. I hope that clears things up for you. And this is why I often complain about the reporting of legal cases on sites like ars, sometimes they do a good job, sometimes they only serve to confuse most readers.
> Frankly, I don't find your correspondence courteous at all.
Point out the specific comments you took issue with.
This comment, for example:
> It seems incredibly unlikely on what basis? Your complete lack of legal expertise and any insight into legal practice?
is a clear violation of the guideline to assume good faith interpretations of an argument.
> which is that it would be malpractice to not claim the maximum amount of statutory damages available when you plead.
Which is why I asked: Meaning that they could not have asked for a lower amount without waiving their rights to all statutory damages?
And you still haven't really clarified the issue, since I have no idea whether you are saying that these statutory limits have to be claimed for a lawyer to remain in good standing irrespective of a client's instructions or if the client has the option to claim less than the statutory damages and simply didn't in this instance. If it's the former, okay, sure, you were right. If it's the latter, my original argument stands: Someone representing the plaintiff went over the details of the brief with the attorneys who drafted it prior to it being filed. They had the opportunity to claim a lower limit, and didn't. These are not unsophisticated clients, and they would know what the PR implications would be of a headline like "RIAA sues Limewire for more money than God." My contention is that they didn't pump the breaks on this because the whole point of these lawsuits was to scare people into not pirating music anymore.
> Yeah? You see a lot of attorneys in copyright cases not seeking the amount of statutory damages?
Where was that stated?
> I'm not sure what your point is.
They lost money on these suits.
You made the claim originally:
> Record companies, artists and other rights holders are not pursuing lawsuits because they are "somehow vindictive" or want to send a message. [...] Like anyone else who goes through the trouble of pursuing a case on IP grounds, they feel their rights have been violated and they want redress.
The message they were trying to send was that if you pirate music, you will be financially ruined. If it had ever been about the damages, they would have stopped when it became clear that they weren't recovering their costs.
I never thought your arguments were in bad faith, just not based in actual fact nor understanding of the legal issues at play. I imagine you are capable of appreciating the difference.
My point was making a big deal out of the statutory damages claim really on reflects a complete lack of insight into copyright lawsuits and you taking away your conclusion is really besides the point, because it is normal practice (I've said this how many times?) to claim the entirety of statutory damages.
Sure, clients can do what they want to. That doesn't make the attorney's advice and/or work not malpractice if the attorney didn't advise against it, so what's your point? They could have asked for less? Sure. They could have also not sued at all! The statutory damages is a red herring being obsessed over by you because you lack the faculties to otherwise make your point, which isn't served by highlighting the completely normal practice of claiming all the available statutory damages in a pleading.
>Point out the specific comments you took issue with.
The one where you completely ignored everything I wrote and then quoted the judge. It's incredibly rude and dismissive, even when offered politely. You might be polite, but I don't find it courteous to engage in conversation with someone who makes absolutely zero effort to engage with my response, and then continues the conversation any way. To me, it's like souther hospitality, facially polite but masking of, sometimes, deep loathing. I'm from NYC, we don't pull that kind of crap. We are direct because it is more respectful to someone to be honest with them than to lie to their face with a smile.
> I imagine you are capable of appreciating the difference.
I imagine you appreciate the difference between what you are saying now and what you originally wrote, which was:
> It seems incredibly unlikely on what basis? Your complete lack of legal expertise and any insight into legal practice?
This is not assuming good faith. I know that you know that because you would never get away with this kind of disingenuous behavior on the basis that "I'm a New Yawker" when dealing with an opposing counsel. You're capable of regulating your behavior; you're choosing not to.
> The one where you completely ignored everything I wrote and then quoted the judge.
You were making the claim that these suits were not punitive. I contested that idea by pointing to the RIAA's history of engaging in punitive lawsuits. You then stated:
> There's pretty much no way any court ever gives any copyright holder the maximum amount allowed under statutory damages, which is only trebled to the possibility of $150k when the infringement was willful. I love Weird Al, but I don't go to him for legal advice or analysis!
This dismissed both the point that I was making and implied that the entire basis of my understanding was based on a song by Weird Al. I did not provide a more substantive reply because yours was not substantive and just obnoxious.
> We are direct because it is more respectful to someone to be honest with them than to lie to their face with a smile.
You've been rhetorically asking "What's your point?" the whole time we've been having this discussion even when I've stated my position plainly. You did it in this post. This isn't being direct or respectful, it's obvious from how you've been speaking (and how you've interacted with others in the thread) that you aren't a respectful person, and now you're leaning into "This is part of my culture," to try to evade the issue that you are being abrasive and obnoxious, and are now insisting that I'm the one being rude to you.
> Sure, clients can do what they want to. That doesn't make the attorney's advice and/or work not malpractice if the attorney didn't advise against it, so what's your point?
I've stated this plainly three times and you haven't listened so you can read the thread again or I'll take it as a concession that you have no point to make.
> The statutory damages is a red herring being obsessed over by you because you lack the faculties to otherwise make your point, which isn't served by highlighting the completely normal practice of claiming all the available statutory damages in a pleading.
You are the one fixating on it. Even if we ignore the Limewire case, you still haven't addressed the years and millions of dollars the RIAA spent suing individual pirates at a net loss.
>This is not assuming good faith. I know that you know that because you would never get away with this kind of disingenuous behavior on the basis that "I'm a New Yawker" when dealing with an opposing counsel. You're capable of regulating your behavior; you're choosing not to.
My behavior is perfectly fine, and you're not opposing counsel and this isn't a court and I don't have any obligations to you that are on the order of magnitude that I do to other attorneys, so this is completely misplaced if not outright ridiculous.
>You were making the claim that these suits were not punitive. I contested that idea by pointing to the RIAA's history of engaging in punitive lawsuits. You then stated:
No, I said that pointing to the damages as a reason why they are punitive only reflects a misunderstanding of the basic practice of copyright law in the US.
>This dismissed both the point that I was making and implied that the entire basis of my understanding was based on a song by Weird Al. I did not provide a more substantive reply because yours was not substantive and just obnoxious.
Sorry, you are calling my response to Weird Al not substantive? Weird Al isn't a source for insight into the legal profession. So, my response was perfectly in line with the kind of substance you were bringing to the conversation.
> You've been rhetorically asking "What's your point?" the whole time we've been having this discussion even when I've stated my position plainly. You did it in this post. This isn't being direct or respectful, it's obvious from how you've been speaking (and how you've interacted with others in the thread) that you aren't a respectful person, and now you're leaning into "This is part of my culture," to try to evade the issue that you are being abrasive and obnoxious, and are now insisting that I'm the one being rude to you.
You're entitled to that opinion. I disagree. You can find me abrasive and obnoxious. I do not particularly care as I have not found you to be a respectful conversation partner warranting any greater effort on my part than that which I've received from you.
>I've stated this plainly three times and you haven't listened so you can read the thread again or I'll take it as a concession that you have no point to make.
My point is the same it has been. Pointing to the damages number as punitive only reflects a misunderstand of basic aspect of the practice of copyright law in the US.
>You are the one fixating on it. Even if we ignore the Limewire case, you still haven't addressed the years and millions of dollars the RIAA spent suing individual pirates at a net loss.
Why would I address that? It has nothing to do with my point.
This is what, the fifth post I've written, explaining my point, which you continue to dispute? You act like you're a fair conversation partner, but you aren't. You repeatedly misstate my point and twist it around. It's obnoxious and rude and that's why you are getting the short treatment from me. If I wanted to actually insult you, which is what you're acting like, I promise you it would come off differently. But I don't think there is anything unfair about pointing out that you aren't relying on any insight into the profession when you are quoting Weird Al. Feel free to report me!
> Record companies, artists and other rights holders are not pursuing lawsuits because they are "somehow vindictive" or want to send a message.
> They're also looking at this as part of a long-term fight over how IP gets used, just as the Internet Archive is.
Part of the fight is sending messages. Almost all of the fight is sending messages, actually. It's lobbying government, arguing in the courts, lobbying people in general, and creating fear in people who would share their works.
"Somehow vindictive" is just anthropomorphizing. They want the most money. They think that these are the tactics that will bring them the most money. If letting everybody share freely made them more money, they'd do that.
Internet was created to allow Library sharing and now companies try to stop the only library available from sharing books at one-person-at-a-time basis. This is similar.
We're doomed because whimsical companies will put down the IA and then forgot the toys they were playing with
Btw. What is age of music going into public domain? Still Disney's 123 years?
Silk Road is a good example of what will happen. Some media mogul will eventually cajole the government into acting. The government will go to the NSA, find the true identities of those responsible, then cook up nonsense about how they gave away their identities due to some weird Stack Overflow question no one could ever notice. The US Attorney will prosecute, and claim that it's a felony because of economic benefit, even if no money was exchanged. The culprits will end up in supermax. They can't afford to do this to everyone, obviously, but they'll pick up to 100 or so of a mix of the worst offenders and the most casual users, to "set an example". The media will publicize it to the point of absurdity so the message sinks in.
There are other countries in the world, in fact, that's where most of these digital libraries of Alexandria have been hosted. That's why I framed it as a technical question, because while any government may decide to combat it, it is unlikely that all of them will. Given the ongoing collapse of the US-led unipolar world order, the reach of US law enforcement will only shrink in the coming years.
I believe the owner of Kickass Torrents was either in Ukraine or Poland, can't remember anymore. Didn't save that one. Kim Dotcom was in New Zealand, and the crime he was accused of committing in the United States (when he had never stepped foot in the United States, and also a crime that isn't extraditable under New Zealand law) he barely managed to avoid being shipped off in chains.
That won't save anyone.
>Given the ongoing collapse of the US-led unipolar world order,
I wouldn't recommend relying on the "collapse of American hegemony" to save anyone. But especially not anyone you care about (like maybe yourself).
> then cook up nonsense about how they gave away their identities due to some weird Stack Overflow question no one could ever notice
In case people don't understand why the government can do this, it is called parallel construction and the SCOTUS deemed it constitutional.
Btw this comment is not me approving this behavior. And that last sentence was not a hint of me approving that behavior in secret :). Those last two sentences are a hint of what I think about the scotus on this topic though :)
Anna's Archive is on the path to this, for written works at least. The main idea is open source code + distributed data in torrents + anonymous contributors that are dedicated to the project.
Its a private-ish (interview required) bittorrent tracker for ebooks.
Very different goals to IA/AA, who see the universality & ease of access as core to the mission. Its more like old-fashioned gated archives at universities & libraries that essentially tried to slow and limit access to their collections to avoid the issues that IA is coming against legally.
Start might be not violating copyright law and staying within the boundaries of established fair use principles. IA is constantly trying to push the law on these issues, for better or worse, and putting the entirety of its operations at risk.
It getting sued out of existence is not appeasement. It’s literally following the law. That is how non profits that wish to continue to operate do things.
That would entirely mean what you mean by "copyright reform". If you mean the typical crypto anarchist data hoarder everything should be free and open after 5 minutes sense, or anything close to it, frankly I don't support, so my answer is to route such ideas to /dev/null.
In 2008, Universal Media lost something like a half million original master recordings when a fire destroyed one of their storage buildings. The "Library at Alexandria" of 20th century music.
I'm guessing the rise of generative AI will help ensure this never happens again.
If you wanted to build a Sinatra Simulator, you'd want as many takes as possible to train it. For that reason, I imagine any and all high resolution recordings are now considered gold rather than something you just keep around for old times' sake, possible use in reissues, research, etc.
Even session background singers or isolated instrument tracks would be valuable; with all kinds of training data / not-samples, producers could add bits of Quentin Tarantino-esque pastiche to tracks easily -- "give me some background singers that sound like the ones in Smokey Robinson's first album..." "I want this bass track to sound like Duck Dunn playing a Hofner Beatle Bass..." Training data is what you need to make that happen, and record company vaults are the mines where that gold comes from.
Internet Archive is free to archive whatever they want. The problem is that they want to be a publisher too but refuse to follow the rules.
There are traditional rules around access to archives that keep things in balance. But when you're publishing the most popular song of all time and your strategy is "pops and scratches makes it Fair Use" when people ask to take it down -- well then you're going to lose. Again.
They could structure things so that these uploads would be protected under DMCA, and act more surgically, but they can't decide whether they're an archive, a library, or an activist organization. Each of those things has different expectations for longevity and different rules for survival.
At this point I'd be happy if they'd just pick a lane. Other organizations would step up to handle other aspects (Musk was down there looking to vacuum up the data). And if they chose to behave like a legitimate archive, they would have less of a problem partnering with rights holders and raising money from individuals and corporations who support preservation efforts.
Right now they're asking for $17 donations next to pirated material and that's not a strategy.
None of those rules are traditional. Those rules are adhoc, constantly changed at the whims of whoever is in charge of the copyright office in any given administration, and heavily lobbied by the media companies. These rules are many things: bureaucratic, official, overly-complicated, contrary to public interest, etc. but have no basis in "tradition".
>At this point I'd be happy if they'd just pick a lane.
No doubt you'd be happy.
>they would have less of a problem partnering with rights holders
These are the same rights holders that have acted irresponsibly when it suited them, leading to the wanton destruction of material that rightfully belongs to the public. You get that right? Copyright is not ownership, it's just a long-term lease... all copyright materials are in the long run property of the public domain. You don't get to destroy them just because you've got a temporary lease on it. The rights holders are the problem.
>Right now they're asking for $17 donations next to pirated material
What piracy? Did someone hijack a ship at sea and hold its crew for ransom?
I work in the space and routinely access material that predates the Berne Convention. There are indeed traditions that archives and libraries follow going back centuries.
This is entirely separate from US copyright law and if we were actually conversing I'd imagine we'd discover that we share a lot of views there.
> You don't get to destroy them just because you've got a temporary lease on it.
And that's where we disagree. For starters, nothing has gotten destroyed here. Yet. The problem as I see it is that some weird-ass white guy annointed himself keeper of the material. And now he's started behaving erratically and unlawfully, and putting everything at risk. Seems to be a lot of that going around lately.
Insiders at the Archive have gone as far as to say Brewster's sabotaging things since there's no plan for funding or running the thing after he passes. Getting sued over and over (and losing) is awful. And imagine how the employees feel -- scanning moldy books for 20 years and then your boss makes one weird decision and now nobody can see your work.
It sets up the quip two sentences later and opens up opportunities for further social commentary such as "Brewster Kahle seems to be the only white guy left who manages to lose in a courtroom each and every time."
The IA's work is essential for historians and archivists who depend on it for research and preservation. However, this is not a concern for the music industry or the major labels.
The argument that the industry's lawsuit against IA might ultimately harm its own interests—by jeopardizing valuable archival resources—rests on a misconception: that the industry cares about art and artists. It doesn’t. The industry's focus is shifting toward AI-generated music and hired musicians, prioritizing commercial output over artistic legacy. Their future is not tied to the past but to what comes next. In this scenario, history is not a resource—it’s competition.
I'm very worried that IA has risked the parts of what they do that are fully legal, or unenforced (eg. abandonware), by going after targets guaranteed to make deep-pocketed pro-copyright industries like publishing and music labels come after them.
At this point, it seems like the sensible course of action would be to create a new entity that leaves still-in-copyright books and music alone, grabs a snapshot of the entire archive, hires everyone who used to work at IA, starts accepting donations so us supporters can switch over, and then picks up, letting IA declare bankruptcy and fall into the sun.
[Edited to add:] Don't get me wrong. I think the current copyright regime is complete nonsense, and I mostly support everything IA has done from an ethical point of view (except maybe giving away recent books for free), but I'm also a pragmatist, and the idea of IA's archive falling into the memory hole because of picking bad fights is distressing.
Brings to mind the line about the behavior of most organizations being best explained by it being controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
Just mass-violating the copyright of deep pocketed plaintiffs is like writing them checks that need to go through court first. The Constitution expressly gives Congress the power to make laws concerning copyright. Congress used that power. The statutes say what they say. There is no wriggling out of it; there are centuries of case law reconciling copyright with the 1A. If the IA is going to be provocative like this it should do so outside of the reach of the judgments of US courts.
It would take a massive amount of labor to determine what in the existing archive is out of copyright in a legally verifiable manner.
There’s nothing keeping the record labels or other corporate copyright aggregators from declaring legal warfare on your hypothetical child organization.
Jason Scott and others all the way to the top have been saying "Just upload! We'll figure it out later!" for a decade. That turned out to be a bad strategy.
They're also infamous for ignoring DMCA requests. Requiring a driver's license or passport before they'll even talk to you. Then they leaked those, ugh.
Archiving stuff is Fair Use, but where's the fun in that, I guess. People should be able to upload things and say "Yes, this is a bootleg mix of a Prince song. Archive it but don't publish it, please."
A combination of bizarre policies and subverting their own DMCA protections is why they're in this mess. Again.
Musk showed up for lunch looking to vacuum things up. I hope that's not how this story ends. But it's starting to look like it.
Yes, the recent history of the IA is of its shooting itself in the foot in full auto. I don’t understand how the board members pushing these obviously dangerous actions haven’t been turfed out.
It's not just labels who aren't getting the artistic side of music. Copyright collectives are just as bad. If you give away your music for free under a license like the creative commons they will still collect money for any public use. But they will then just give it to their commercial artists probably even breaking nc clauses in open content licenses.
Sooner or later we probably will suffer the event of lost knowledge similar to fire of Library of Alexandria but with internet.
At some point greedy corporations will come to conclusion that storing old data, movies, music, documents is just to costly.
And just like that all of this will be just deleted.
People who work at Music Labels may regret what the previous generation of employees did to line their own pockets, and then do equally horrible things in their current context for the same reason.
Until now, I have always given authors the benefit of the doubt, and presented what they could have said to make their argument stronger.
I do this when hackernews is calling an article stupid and missing some of the salvageable or mostly correct things from the article, so I do some effort to highlight these kernels of truth that most articles have because most authors do have something of value to say.
For the first time on this account on this site... This article is hopelessly naive. Music label executives dgaf. If anything, they want the history gone so that they can charge extra premiums when they release 100 year old songs or for visits to their museums. It is like saying NFL owners regret people not being able to watch the first super bowl game and relive history.
Nah... that is stuff they could sell later if they figure out how.
Expecting music labels to have any sense of democratic music access is almost insulting to artists that have been often dicked by these labels.
Part of me thinks this article is a psyop to make music label executives seem more humane lol.
That huge number is merely what the plaintiffs write down by obligation when they file the case. It comes out of a book. The defense counters. The judge picks something reasonable. An appellate judge revises.
I grew up listening to some ethnic 78 singles that my father had purchased. I managed to hold onto a couple of them (others were broken) but haven't owned a turntable I could play them on (good luck finding one, or the needles) for decades.
None of the singles had been released on vinyl ... it was clearly not in the interests of the industry's monopolists to do so. Because they showed up on IA (before the Great 78 project even started) I could finally listen to them again. To my knowledge none of them have ever been re-released.
Yup. They should've stuck to that stuff and not published Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby records along with the pile of priceless rarities that exist nowhere else.
They were politely asked three times to remove certain material and refused.
Again I’m incredulous by the perspective shared by Ars Technica (often trumpeted by TechDirt) that “what is going on is not how copyright SHOULD work” while giving no reasonable consideration to how legally legitimate cases like this are from a standpoint are in US copyright cases.
I get the desire to FIX copyright in the US, I stand to benefit and so does society and creative progress. But these sensationalist writers are the lowest form of clickbait by simply taking a victimization position and digging in (re: TechDirt and Goldiblox absolutely being in the wrong for ripping off the Beastie Boys for a Super Bowl ad).
Ars is reporting on a legal case and also on people who say they will be harmed by that case. The reporter then goes on to detail the policy work that groups are doing to try to change copyright laws in the country.
What else would you like to see? A legal analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the case?
Right, but that's how a lawsuit works. You take the number it says in the book, multiply it by the number of allegations, and you get a number. You have to write this number down in your filing, then Ars Technica uses it for clickbait.
Murder 18 people and you can go to jail for 720 years. Doesn't mean squat. It's the 18 murders not the 720 years.
Likewise the $700 million number isn't important. What's important is the 400,000 copyright violations with no strategy, when even Lessig says you're gonna get sued and lose.
Until recently I'd say that the record labels accusations were unwarranted and they should stop. However I've noticed that free projects have the tendency to become for profit corporations and exploit the good will that started the project. An example is Open AI. Another example is how Google monetizes and monopolizes free and public information.
I fail to see what bearing the actions of other projects have on what the IA might or might not do.
So far the IA is providing an important service: Insuring the historical data is not lost. Until this actually changes there is no need to go after it, in fact it hurts us all.
>However I've noticed that free projects have the tendency to become for profit corporations
I would say that for a non-profit project to become a for profit entity, legally speaking, is rare. I believe Google was always for profit? I welcome any statistics you have to back up the assertion.
They clarify they mean they think they will regret it historically in the sense of losing that part of history, rather than monetarily, etc.
But to me this is like arguing a swarm of locusts are going to one day regret that they destroyed so many fields of crops.
My favourite example of this is that for Babylon 5 the lawyers from Warner Bros insisted that the showrunners not retain any copies of the digital models because they were WB property and WB would archive them.
When they started working on B5 The Lost Tales, WB had lost all of the digital files.
This is also a common side effect of corporate policies that favour short term profits rather than retaining staff for the long term.
I see this scenario play out constantly:
1. A team or staff member has a project's data located on their user account or hardware.
2. The team or staff member are made redundant when there is a dip in earnings.
3. IT make a backup of the user account/s and wipe the hardware, and because it's older usually move it on.
4. Months or years later that data is needed and at this point no one at the company actually knows where the data is - and even if they find something, they don't know if that's the latest or the full version.
Now this wouldn't be a problem if there was a decent overlap in staff retention, but that simply isn't the case these days.
Writing better storage policies doesn't help - it's the understaffed nature of their businesses which mean that there is no time for staff to keep up with basic data housekeeping.
The types of data that clients should have on hand, but nevertheless have asked me to supply, are frankly embarrassing.
When I get frustrated enough to consider putting a kill switch in my work, I cool off by reminding myself that would prompt them to make a huge effort recovering from backups and have someone go through my code to get it working again. If I just do what they ask me instead, it will slowly decay without anyone having any idea what it even does, until its too late to fix or recover anything.
There's been discussion on HN of "smuggling" the lost information back into the organization: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42235452
What company is allowing employees to have so much data locally? Almost all work is stored in a cloud now. Documents, spreadsheets, design docs, code… If you really are constantly seeing this then that says a lot about the corporation using severely outdated practices.
> located on their user account or hardware
Clouds have user accounts too. I have seen dead links to documents in a former employees space on sharepoint, confluence, and google docs.
Exactly. In fact, I still regularly get sharepoint "request for access" notifications in my email for some presentation I did a year ago. Even though I swear I've opened it up to the entire org.
Who knows what happens when I've shuffled away from my current company.
Dead links are also incredibly common, particularly because we are on our nth port from sharepoint to confluence to whatever back to sharepoint. Generally, because C levels don't want to pay for this year's price hike.
Why locally? In practice many companies never lose any data. What they lose is the knowledge what the data is and/or how to use it.
> If you really are constantly seeing this then that says a lot about the corporation using severely outdated practices.
They probably just used now-outdated practices before those practices were outdated. This happened in the past, remember. Sure, the cloud is a thing today, but was the cloud such a thing 5, 10, 20 years ago? Do you really think it's their fault for not knowing in advance how much of a thing the cloud would one day become? Oh, how outdated. Sheesh.
I would think policies should also be updated every X years in light of new regulations, new possibilities, new limitations... but who enjoys policies and even updating them? So here we are, everything done "by the book" and losing data because of that.
> Sure, the cloud is a thing today, but was the cloud such a thing 5, 10, 20 years ago?
Yes, yes, and no.
For example, https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/908:_The_Cloud is from 2011.
The Onion also made some pretty good cloud parodies back in 2012: https://youtu.be/9ntPxdWAWq8
Old animation though I wouldn't necessarily expect to only have been 10 years ago, and 10 years ago I wouldn't expect to be scolded for not using the cloud.
Any company where you're not allowed to force-push to a public branch.
Local git repo checkouts?
Someone also redid all the ships from scratch I think in modern software and has to get rid of it due to WB.
I still think B5 ships are some of the best in all of Scifi.
I'm a big fan of the Vorlon ships, but I think The Expanse has the best space battles.
(I also like the Lexx spaceship, though the series was somewhat of a mess)
Expanse battles were far more realistic of course. The B5 Star Fury combat scenes were pretty ground breaking for the time though.
Expanse ships (at least where I'm at in the book series and show - kind of early) are a lot closer to current human tech of course. In B5 humanity had tech that was mostly believable (still used rotating mass for gravity), but you got to see some very unique looking ships from the other species like the Minbari and Shadows that truly looked alien and unsettling.
Back in the day, I was proud of how they'd used Amigas to render the B5 graphics as I also was an Amiga user.
It's sad when requests to official and unofficial archives are lost.
Truly and authentically lost tales
You're right. They might regret it financially if they could plan past their next meal. In the case of locusts it results in their decline.
Music industry has been... not great with licensing and archives. There are recordings of Lightning Hopkins that only exist because of the Smithsonian Archives. And there are re-issues of that music today that only exist because of independent labels sourcing from those archives.
If the music industry had had its way they would have been done with Hopkins years ago and his music would have been forgotten, having moved on to the next crop.
Books are good at republishing. Film has been decent at it but suffer from licensing issues. Video games are probably the worst at archiving and maintaining access to libraries of prior art.
Locusts. Good analogy.
shout out for the house of the underdogs!
anybody else remember abandonware games??
Home of the Underdogs, or HOTU.
I was active in their forums back in 2004. I still remember all the fuss when the admin/owner (going by nickname Underdogs) was "outed" to be a woman (she helped out herself, it wasn't a hostile thing). 2004 was a time when people could still be surprised that a woman was leading a major online project... wow. The past is indeed "a foreign country"!
Pepper Ridge Farms remembers.
In defense of video games, in a lot of cases technology has churned so much that it's prohibitive to maintain older games, and in general besides the 16 bit aesthetic people are so put off by the look of older games they tend not to get as engaged.
AI will improve this situation on the graphics side, perhaps with some sort of game container that emulates older environments well (Proton, anyone?) we'll see more re-releases.
> in general besides the 16 bit aesthetic people are so put off by the look of older games they tend not to get as engaged.
One of the most prolific indie developers of recent years (David Szymanski) has basically all of his games looking like they came out of PS1/early 3D accelerator days. And he isn't alone, there are many games that have midlate 90s / very early 2000s looks. There are also a ton of horror games that use exaggerated PS1-styled graphics with bit crunched filtering, strong dithering effects, etc (wobbly low poly environments where you can barely make out what you are looking at are giving horror vibes basically for free :-P).
This is something i've been saying for a long time now: if you can point at a game and say "this looks like a PS1/PS2/3/4/5/NES/SNES/DOS/Win95/etc game" then this means there are enough visual characteristics to define such games and thus you are really pointing at a visual style - something that people will use at some point in the future even when the technical limitations that birthed the style aren't there anymore (which means that some games may give the feel of that style but not really be bound by the actual limitations).
How does AI have anything to do with this? Are you just talking about emulators? Those already exist, and the main opposition to them is the companies that own the IP. Many companies would rather let games languish than let their community do the "prohibitive" work to maintain those games for free.
Games that old are super easy to archive on a technical level. Take the 4MB or less and save it somewhere.
And "sell small files for $1 or $5 without spending much money to set up the store" is a solved problem.
> and in general besides the 16 bit aesthetic people are so put off by the look of older games they tend not to get as engaged.
It's not about what people find pleasing today, it's about archiving and preserving an important part of our (digital) history. Videogames of the past were a big thing.
And videogames, much like music, must be playable to be truly preserved.
Imagine someone going "I don't get why it's worth preserving ancient Egyptian artifacts, people these days don't enjoy that kind of thing anymore".
Sorry, but you are just talking. The problem with video game preservation is that the IA isn't able to get the same library exemption that they got from the Library of Congress for archiving. The LoC doesn't yet consider video games an artform that can be preserved in the same way as books and other media.
There are thousands of folks that both want and want to do this work.
>the same library exemption
Reference please? Genuine question. As far as I know, libraries have very little in the way of special privileges outside of some specific rights in the analog realm which don't really apply in digital where first sale doctrine also doesn't apply.
https://www.copyright.gov/1201/2024/
I see nothing in there giving a carte blanche to libraries, however they care to define themselves, to have any generalized exemption from copyright law.
Look up 17 usc 108.
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim...
What's with the goalpost moving? Click on "Final Rule"[1] and the PDF goes into copious detail about what exemptions are currently in effect. Obviously there is no, and will never be, "carte blanche to libraries, however they care to define themselves, to have any generalized exemption from copyright law". There are specific, temporary, limited exemptions in effect.
[1] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2024-10-28/pdf/2024-2...
Exactly, classic case of anthropomorphising a lawnmower. A thought like this would never occur to a record label exec
Highly doubt it. Seems far fetched for a soulless entity to care.
Doesn't the use of the word regret imply that they care?
Right, OP is saying (and I came here to agree) that the writer's use of the word "regret" was just clickbait — there's no actual regret predicted to take place except to music historians and the few ordinary people who know what they missed out on. Even the historian quoted says he's using the word "regret" metaphorically:
> "They're going to regret it," Seubert predicted. "Not financially or anything, but just from a historical perspective."
Music execs are in the business of selling music. The less music is available in the wild, the better for them.
first hn comment i've ever laughed at. lmao. well said
There are three types of loss: destruction, discoverability, and synthesis.
Destruction is the one most people think of. The last tape is destroyed, or someone nukes everything in S3. Policies normally save this from happening, bit not always. (I note that lawyers are pretty good at saving things because of discovery, so perhaps corporations should sue themselves more often /s)
Discoverability is when the data is there, but noone knows where it is. This is your classic corpo Sharepoint/teams/slack problem. There was a chat, once, with some shared files, from their onedrive, but the last person who remembered where was laid off a year ago and...well, that data is effectively lost. I dont think we have great solutions here except writing even more things down and hoping that everyone follows rules like keeping all files in one place
The last case is where the data is located, but noone can vouch for it any more. Internal wiki pages are notorious here. People post about, say, some sharp edge they uncovered, and the page sits there for all eternity. You discover it years later. Can you trust it? Is there anyone who knows why the page still exists? It blocks the synthesis of what you know with what the author knew.
Some incredibly shallow takes in this thread, most of which seem to be coming from people who didn't even read the article. The quote in context:
> "They're going to regret it," Seubert predicted. "Not financially or anything, but just from a historical perspective, the Internet Archive is valuable for all of us."
This was not the central point of the article. He clearly is not saying that "the legal entity Capitol Records will manifest emotions and come to experience regret," but "the people who in aggregate comprise Capitol Records will regret the role they played in restricting access to these works," in the same way that a game developer on Hacker News might regret having added game-breaking DRM to a title he worked on twenty years ago, even though this allowed him to earn a lot of money.
> "the people who in aggregate comprise Geffen Records will regret the role they played in restricting access to these works,"
Is this deep? What people in this thread are saying is that they won't regret nor remember it, and whatever comfort you're taking from thinking "in the end, after everything is ruined, they'll realize I was right" is cheap and lazy.
Nobody needs anybody to point out that the loss of music is bad. Nobody needs anyone to conjure fantasies of future schadenfreude over the regret of record execs. People need tactics and strategies to figure out how to stop this destruction.
> What people in this thread are saying is that they won't regret nor remember it, and whatever comfort you're taking from thinking "in the end, after everything is ruined, they'll realize I was right" is cheap and lazy.
There are multiple users in this thread stating that the label is a corporate entity designed to maximize profit and that it thus cannot "feel" anything. This was obviously not what was being stated.
As to those claiming that these individuals won't regret what they have done: That may be true. But why does it happen with developers? Because it happens a lot.
Neither I nor Seubert made this claim out of some pseudo-religious self-reassurance that "One day, they'll all get theirs!" but as a simple observation that these actions are ill-advised. I don't know how you could read it any other way without being intentionally obtuse.
> Nobody needs anybody to point out that the loss of music is bad.
What you're essentially saying here is: "Your observation was so obvious to me that it shouldn't have even been written down, because everyone already knew it." This is obnoxious and not in the spirit of the forum.
> As to those claiming that these individuals won't regret what they have done: That may be true. But why does it happen with developers? Because it happens a lot.
Because Developers make games, and record execs make money. I'm sure there are a handful out there who actually give a shit about the art they make their money off of, but having worked with many of these people for many years, I assure you the vast majority are exactly as soulless as is depicted in virtually every movie or TV show that involves one, because the creatives behind those depictions have to deal with those soul-sucking vampires all the time, and they hate them. And the feeling there is very mutual, which is why every executive is creaming themselves at the prospect of being able to get rid of creatives and replace them with "AI."
> Neither I nor Seubert made this claim out of some pseudo-religious self-reassurance that "One day, they'll all get theirs!" but as a simple observation that these actions are ill-advised. I don't know how you could read it any other way without being intentionally obtuse.
Because, as is outlined by the commenter, the notion of "they'll regret this" is presupposing multiple bad assumptions, namely that record executives give the faintest shit about music beyond it's ability to make number go up.
Oh no, Capital Records has a bad reputation. It will still stream. Album sales will be unaffected because consumer revolt has always been worthless as a tactic. What are they regretting?
>There are multiple users in this thread stating that the label is a corporate entity designed to maximize profit and that it thus cannot "feel" anything.
The issue is the surrounding system and the corporate environment are what raise people to be this way and filter out those who are too sentimental. I don’t think a good majority of the people working there will ever feel bad because they’ve been raised not to feel bad and given an ideology that makes all that work in their head.
> Nobody needs anybody to point out that the loss of music is bad
The people filing this suit obviously do.
I think it's good to publicly express our disapproval. Because — as we have sadly seen recently — there will always be a small group of apologists defending villains or systematic oppressors:
(It's worth also considering that the group size does not always correlate to its power or influence).
But you are totally correct that thought-terminating expressions of Schadenfreude towards those who exert harm are not enough.
It's wishful thinking. These people know what they're doing and won't regret it as they live out their days in comfort and luxury.
Are they? do you really think y'know what, reselling the cracked pirate copy of my game from 20 years ago that instead of my pristine version because I lost the source but I'm still making money, and that 20 years ago, fundamentally, it was really nice to be able to afford a roof over my head and provide for my wife and kids; You really think there's more than a passing feeling of regret?
DRM might have been a bad example, but it is one I've seen before. Another story I see here often is that a developer had an independent studio. The studio develops a game or an application. As the game or application ages, the developer sells it. The acquiring company goes defunct or discontinues the sale of the program some time later, and the developer wishes he would have just posted the source code for the program.
I get what you're saying in that the revealed preference is towards the "bad" behavior, but I think there is something to be said for the capacity to feel regret being a necessary precursor to discourage bad behavior from occurring in the future. The thread seems to be divided between those who believe the people working at these labels might have that capacity and those who believe that these people are essentially amoral monsters who are only concerned by the perverse vaguery of "maximizing returns."
Something like this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37394665
I agree with you, it's an absurd suggestion offered with zero reasoning.
Labels will not regret recordings being lost, because it's just asshole executives who only care about money.
The hapless sound historian is just projecting his own bellyaches onto other people that are completely different from him.
The CEO of HBO Max, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Zaslav destroys works of art to get tax handouts from the american people. Yes, American Tax Payers, pay David Zaslav money to destroy works of art already created.
Or, more nuanced: HBO pays artists and writers and electricians $50 million to make something. It turns out to be unmarketable. So rather than throw good money after bad, he writes it off. Then uses the tax savings to hire artists and writers and electricians to make a different thing.
It's wasteful and I don't like his decisions but it's not much different from what VCs do with their expenditures.
In neither case do American Tax Payers foot the bill.
Zaslav could write it off and still dump it on YouTube. And VCs could open source all the Ruby code they bought between 2006 and 2016. But there's reasons they don't.
False. They had animated shows already being streamed on HBO Max that they pulled and fully wrote off. They can never be accessed again. Should be considered fully destroyed.
They absolutely can be accessed -- all major streaming services have new episodes/movies automatically uploaded to private bittorrent trackers & usenet within hours of them going live. Of course, they content still has to be retained by those networks, but HBO Max hasn't been around so long that its contents are gone yet.
That's different. Impairment is the same as Goodwill. Taxpayers are unaffected.
And I think we both know quite well that the stuff that was aired still exists.
I can see you are passionate about this. Tax writeoffs are paid for by the taxpayers.
Tax writeoffs by definition are taxpayers paying less. It reduces tax revenue and reduces the average tax paid by everyone. When your neighbor writes off their mortgage interest it does not raise your taxes.
If you don't like certain policies around tax deductions then argue that. I might even agree with you.
Why are you passionate about HBO Max using the destruction of artwork already produced to lower their tax bill? Many of which they bought.
Six <ul> tags upstream I all but said that HBO Max guy is an idiot. I'm personally pissed at the ACME thing. But it didn't increase your tax burden.
Fraudulently reducing tax revenue by 1 entity/individual effectively shifts the burden of taxation to everyone else who is not willing or able to commit the same fraud. At the macro level, this adds up to billions more dollars every year in the unmanageable and unmanageably-growing federal debt. The US federal government plans to spend 16% of its total spending simply on paying interest on its debt: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio...
So-called fiscal conservatives should be howling in Congress about this kind of thing. (Narrator: they aren't.)
It may be bad policy but it's not fraudulent.
Running a deficit can be profitable long term -- or not. It depends on how the funds are allocated. Ask Bezos.
Likewise a tax writeoff can increase tax revenue over the long term -- or not. It depends how the tax savings are applied. Ask the employees who still have their jobs.
Regardless, a media company struggling to breakeven with cartoon coyotes may not be the best starting point for an economics debate.
It's fraudulent in the sense that it's a fake loss, as you say created by clever accounting.
That's not what I said. For avoidance of doubt, allow me to rephrase the concept in the local language: paying a bunch of artists and engineers to build an app that generates minimal revenue, pulling it from the app store, then writing off the loss, is neither clever nor fraudulent.
Right, I get what you said.
I am arguing that it is in fact a fraud perpetrated against the taxpayer, even if it's not legally categorized as "fraud" at this time.
Why is writing off a loss fraudulent? This very website is funded by such actions.
Interesting. I made a remark in my above comment which I ending up editing out, that if someone gave these execs a wad of cash for deleting something, they would.
He needs to be introduced to NFT art.
Are you talking about Coyote Vs. Acme?
Middle-class people are taught (,and teach each other, and repeat to themselves in their journals) that the only successful labor is labor that is loved.
For them, the heads of record labels have to care, because they are the most successful people in their industry, and they wouldn't be so successful unless they loved the work. In middle-class theology, becoming successful is a matter of loving harder than the guy next to you. It takes a lot of mind games to motivate people to extreme expertise in often very narrow specializations, especially when it's usually to make someone else rich.
Internet Archive does not delete anything. Sometimes they leave the "item" (URL) up and block downloads. Recently they have started "darking" things en masse, which removes them from search results.
A sane solution would be to leave the items up, block download of the full file, and make excerpts available. They do this for many items where you cannot download the mp3 yet the spectrogram (jpg image) remains available.
Archive.org is at a crossroads and the people who manage it have made some very curious decisions lately.
>leave the items up, block download of the full file, and make excerpts available.
This is what Google does with Google Books. I imagine the Internet Archive is trying to avoid it because Books is no longer a repository of works, it's a search index. If you find a source you'd like to read, you're on your own to find a copy. Large parts of their collection are out of print, and this can be very difficult.
It's still a useful tool with those limitations, certainly, but it's not an archive anymore.
An archive is typically restricted access to avoid just the sort of copyright problem we're seeing here. In the past, this meant having to visit the materials onsite -- even if you then just fired up a computer to look at them. Universities liked this for a few reasons, and it fit in with their typical gatekeeping nonsense as a bonus.
Exhibiting or publishing the work is different. Museums show tiny thumbnails (though this is finally changing) and libraries have their own rules, complete with weird little signs around the copy machines that people used to take more seriously. The lawsuit that set the rules for Google applies here. Yes, it sucks and it's annoying to tech people, but if the goal is preservation then it's obvious how things must be run. And what you can get away with while you wait for rights to expire or laws to change.
Providing excerpts to show what you have, then providing a way for qualified researchers to access the full work has been the tradition. Even for the 500,000+ books they had to take down due to the lawsuit, those remain available for people with print disabilities.
They even had an exemption for video games, but they forgot to renew the paperwork and the Librarian of Congress removed the exemption during the last triennial review. So we lost freedom there due to sloppy administration by Internet Archive.
Yes, exactly. The Internet Archive was founded in direct response to closed archives-being open is the entire point. Their goal is not preservation if it's locked in a vault- their mission statement is "to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge."
Universal access to knowledge is illegal under the American copyright regime, and it seems the people who run it have decided to fight to the end rather than give up their mission. It'll probably lead to the destruction of the whole project, but I do find it admirable in a quixotic way.
Do you have a link to them losing an exemption because of paperwork? My understanding was that the Copyright Office makes the sole determination on exemptions during triennial reviews, and they blocked it last year due to the usual regulatory capture and industry lobbying.
If you review the history of the archive you will see that their mission changed over time. They didn't even ask for donations until they set the building on fire.
You can still find old help articles on the site where qualified researchers are instructed to ask permission to log into their Unix servers directly. Complete with privacy rationalizations like "being able to see what people are doing on the same computer is no different than peeking over a shoulder in a reading room."
Early form 990s tell a very different mission. They pivoted for a number of reasons, and I generally support the mission. But you have to obey the law to protect the assets. And if you want to press the law, you have to be very smart about it. Like, oh, testing 10 records instead of 400,000. And doing it under a different LLC so you don't lose the Wayback Machine to some dumbass AI company because you can't be bothered to keep track of how many books you're lending out.
> Do you have a link to them losing an exemption because of paperwork?
https://www.arl.org/news/librarian-of-congress-expands-dmca-...
"The librarian renewed all existing exemptions except for the exemption for accessible access to video games, for which there was no petition for renewal."
Ah, 90s network security. Happier times.
I went and checked myself, and they have evolved a lot more than I remembered. For the better, I think, but you're certainly right that they could be going about this in a more legally adept way.
The exemption mentioned in that article isn't about hosting video games online- you may have confused two exemptions. That one was for accessibility in the sense of access for people with disabilities (alternate input devices, etc). It was only added in the 2021 review, and the Internet Archive wasn't one of its backers.
The exemption for remote access to video games was a separate and new proposal, and the Copyright Office blocked it after pressure from industry lobbyists.
https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/legally-weird/u-s-copyrig...
I think this is the real answer. They will probably still collect everything.
(they're gonna be sitting pretty in life + 75 years)
Institutions - especially those driven by profit - do not regret. If they did, an internet archival project would not trigger it when the likes of Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse could not.
What does Cobain or Winehouse have to do with this? These individuals had issues well before record labels were involved in their life.
Prince turning himself into a symbol is much more emblematic of record labels controlling the lives of artists.
Agreed. Cobain, for example, just struggled with fame, drug issues, stomach pain, regardless of his dealings with the record labels.
Seems rather immaterial. Unless, of course, I'm missing something. Admittedly, I don't know much about him even though I'm a millennial. Seems like I should but I was more into post grunge music.
> Agreed. Cobain, for example, just struggled with fame, drug issues, stomach pain, regardless of his dealings with the record labels.
Steve Albini remarked that during the In Utero sessions, he ignored everyone but the band and that everyone associated with Nirvana were "the biggest pieces of shit I ever met." [0]
There was absolutely massive pressure on Cobain to produce for his contract, and that greatly exacerbated a number of the issues you listed.
Seems like a guy who should have been given some time off from his contract. Same with Winehouse; ultimately both were a commodity for their labels to package and sell and the problems that they were showing in their behavior were ultimately their own to deal with.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Utero#cite_ref-26
Bothers me generally that journalists anthropomorphize companies ("company X worried by...", "will regret..."). Companies are totally emotionless entities only living to maximize profit.
>that journalists anthropomorphize companies
Because companies are composed of individual tapeworms working towards a common goal?
>Companies are totally emotionless entities
You speak as if they're evil spirits. They're made up of people. They're very emotional, you just get to see all the worst emotions manifesting at the most inappropriate times.
And so is internet archive. And laws. And juristic institutions. There is no emotion or individual human interest in our fully rational processes, move along, you mere mortal.
I doubt that's what parent was getting at. Probably something more along the lines of the central thesis of the book Essence of Decision by Graham T. Allison.
The gist of the book is that organizational behavior never makes sense if you anthropomorphize it as if it were a single entity with its own goals and motivations. Nor does it make sense if you think of it as a corporate machine that behaves mechanistically. It really is a bunch of individual humans with their own goals and motives interacting within a bureaucratic structure.
It's a pretty interesting book because its ideas actually got a pretty decent test. He used the Cuban missle crisis to evaluate these three theories of organizational behavior, and showed how publicly knowable facts didn't make sense under the first two models. He then showed that the third model fit them better, and went on to make some hypotheses about what really happened that couldn't be verified at the time. Decades later the relevant information was declassified and it turned out that, while many of his guesses were incorrect, an impressive number of them were spot on.
Geffen didn’t shoot heroin into Kurt Cobain’s arm and Island Records didn’t pour a 1.75L of whiskey down Amy Winehouse’s throat every day.
Kurt and Amy did that to themselves.
FWIW, I am a former heroin addict and alcoholic.
If you want an actual honest take on what’s fucked up about the music industry, Steve Albini covers it well in this essay: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music
They didn't, but at a certain point, one should realize that it's better for the artists (and thus, arguably, the long-term investment the label has made into their careers) to not have their problems made worse by commoditization.
Her management notoriously tried to get Winehouse to stay alive and keep making music. She made a song about it [0].
I think simply getting a paycheck was quite a contribution to these artists' demise. Though he managed to not die directly as a result of the heroin that consumed his existence, the late Matt Dike autobiographically remarked (paraphrasing here) that the worst thing in the world for a junkie was unlimited resources.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehab_(Amy_Winehouse_song)
You can’t force someone to stop shooting heroin or drinking excessively. They were addicts before show business, the money just made it easier to maintain an addiction. I would’ve never quit heroin or alcohol if I had virtually unlimited resources to acquire more drugs.
On the other hand, institutions from science and technology, wireless communications, radio and phonograph, made all of these recordings possible. Just sayin. So nil-nil at half-time for the argument against "bare" institutions? Or are you saying all "institutions" are inherently monstrous?
I didn't say they were monstrous.
I said they don't regret.
Now you can argue that's psychopathic, which is often synonymous with monstrous, but I wouldn't call them psychopathic, either, because a person is psychopathic. A group of people, an institution, cannot be.
Now, the systems that these institutions exist within are often heavily influenced by psychopaths looking to leverage situations for their own maximum benefit, often at the expense of other humans, but the institutions themselves, they're amoral.
I agree with much of that. Corporate "identity" and "ethics" is a nonsense - mostly conjured up by types who like to hide their malfeasance in a crowd. But there is such a thing as group psychology [0]. And many fascinating ways in which groups exhibit memory and latent intent.
My objection is to vague attacks on all and any "institutions". Yes, most of them are corrupt and broken now. But that doesn't preclude the belief we can build good institutions, and should keep trying.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_dynamics
"The Internet Archive is not hurting the revenue of the recording industry at all," Seubert suggested, while noting that his opinions don't "mean squat" since he's not a lawyer. "It has no impact on their revenue." Instead, he suspects that labels' lawsuit is "somehow vindictive," because the labels perhaps "don't like the Internet Archive's way of pushing the envelope on copyright and fair use."
Record companies, artists and other rights holders are not pursuing lawsuits because they are "somehow vindictive" or want to send a message.
Lawsuits are huge, expensive headaches that force the plaintiffs to not only take a public stance on sensitive issues, but also force them to reveal details about their operations, communications, and business relationships. Like anyone else who goes through the trouble of pursuing a case on IP grounds, they feel their rights have been violated and they want redress.
They're also looking at this as part of a long-term fight over how IP gets used, just as the Internet Archive is.
I think his point is that the damages they are seeking are basically punitive, not related to actual losses that they have suffered. I doubt anyone is losing too much sleep over this issue, but the approach the record labels are taking seems like it is clearly intended to dissuade others from doing anything similar to what the Internet Archive is trying to do. The RIAA has a track record of these kinds of punitive measures; think of the music piracy lawsuits they were filing in the mid-2000s.
But that's exactly what the copyright act provides for... statutory damages not tied to the actual damages lost by the copyright owner, and they are only available in limited circumstances. And statutory damages still have to be tied to something tangible, like the lost license fee, and they do explicitly allow for a jury to add a punitive element.
>The RIAA has a track record of these kinds of punitive measures; think of the music piracy lawsuits they were filing in the mid-2000s.
How were those punitive as opposed to not? Should they have not sued at all and just let the infringers continue?
> How were those punitive as opposed to not? Should they have not sued at all and just let the infringers continue?
In Arista Records LLC v. Lime Group LLC, they tried to sue for more money than existed on earth. I'm not saying they didn't have a case against individual cases of infringement, but it was quite clear what they were doing while they were doing it. The goal was always to intimidate would-be pirates with high-profile cases about grandmas and teenagers losing the family house because they downloaded an MP3 off Kazaa. The damages the RIAA sought from these people were completely disproportionate to the actual financial losses they demonstrated, to the point of being unconscionable. It's notable that they eventually abandoned this strategy by the end of the 2000s as public opinion began turning against them.
Weird Al wrote a song about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGM8PT1eAvY
There's pretty much no way any court ever gives any copyright holder the maximum amount allowed under statutory damages, which is only trebled to the possibility of $150k when the infringement was willful. I love Weird Al, but I don't go to him for legal advice or analysis!
Maybe the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York will convince you where Weird Al could not:
> Defendants face a potential award of over a billion dollars in statutory damages alone. If Plaintiffs were able to pursue a statutory damage theory predicated on the number of direct infringers per work, Defendants’ damages could reach into the trillions. See Dkt Entry No. 461 (“Thousands (or even millions) of uploads and downloads occurred across disparate users.”) 3 As Defendants note, Plaintiffs are suggesting an award that is “more money than the entire music recording industry has made since Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877.”
I'm not sure how this is actually a response to my comment. I'm an IP litigator, asserting max statutory damages is something every attorney does at the outset otherwise they'd be waiving that recovery. It's really not the big deal you make it out to be, and nothing in your quote supports that either. Do you think a court is actually going to award more money than the entire world? No. So what are you going on about, really?
> asserting max statutory damages is something every attorney does at the outset otherwise they'd be waiving that recovery
Meaning that they could not have asked for a lower amount without waiving their rights to all statutory damages? What it sounds like you're saying is that this was just a fluke of the lawyers who drafted the brief abiding by an industry standard that ended up producing an odd result. This seems incredibly unlikely.
It seems incredibly unlikely on what basis? Your complete lack of legal expertise and any insight into legal practice?
If you draft a complaint in federal court saying you were owed $30,000, you don't get to later change that to a higher amount without amending. I'm not sure why you think it's a fluke, it's a basic practice of legal drafting. Look at any federal complaint and it's going to be written with language like "in an amount no less than..."
> It seems incredibly unlikely on what basis? Your complete lack of legal expertise and any insight into legal practice?
I worked in the industry for several years, though not in litigation. I've been nothing but courteous to you despite your posts being shallow and dismissive. Review the site guidelines; you are breaking several of them.
> If you draft a complaint in federal court saying you were owed $30,000, you don't get to later change that to a higher amount without amending.
They weren't asking for $30,000. They were asking for more money than has ever existed. Your contention is that this came about from an industry standard practice of multiplying the statutory maximum by the number of infringements. You already stated yourself that a court was never going to award these damages because it would be impossible to pay them, so the idea that they were leaving money on the table by revising down from the the statutory maximum is nonsensical.
You would then ask why they would bother to revise this figure; it's no big deal, right? Industry standard.
Maybe the big shots do things differently but I've seen a lot of money get left on the table to avoid bad press, which is why I find it hard to believe there was no one in the loop here who would have had the capacity to suggest that this was a bad idea. My contention is that this didn't happen, because the whole point of these lawsuits was not to recoup damages but to curtail piracy via a chilling effect.
> The RIAA's settlement amounts are typically in the neighborhood of $3,000-$4,000 for those who settle once they receive a letter from the music industry. On the other side of the balance sheet is the amount of money paid to SafeNet (formerly MediaSentry) to conduct its investigations, and the cash spent on the RIAA's legal team and on local counsel to help with the various cases. As Pariser admitted under oath today, the entire campaign is a money pit.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2007/10/music-industry-e...
> I worked in the industry for several years, though not in litigation. I've been nothing but courteous to you despite your posts being shallow and dismissive. Review the site guidelines; you are breaking several of them.
Frankly, I don't find your correspondence courteous at all.
> They weren't asking for $30,000.
I'm well aware. Did you see the "if". I guess that you find this rude and/or dismissive, but you fundamentally misunderstand my point, and in a way that seems as if you are jumping to. After all, I started the sentence with "if" and then described a scenario explaining how pleading works. Which I guess you understand because you worked in the industry?
> Your contention is that this came about from an industry standard practice of multiplying the statutory maximum by the number of infringements.
No my contention is that the maximum amount of statutory damages allowed under law is $150k per work infringed, when willfulness is present. In every copyright case involving statutory damages, the pleading will seek the maximum amount of statutory damages available because if you do not, it will be waived. Do you understand the concept of waiver? I ask, not to be rude, but because it does not seem like you do. I'm happy to explain, but I'm sure google or chatgpt could provide perfectly adequate answers.
>Maybe the big shots do things differently but I've seen a lot of money get left on the table to avoid bad press, which is why I find it hard to believe there was no one in the loop here who would have had the capacity to suggest that this was a bad idea. My contention is that this didn't happen, because the whole point of these lawsuits was not to recoup damages but to curtail piracy via a chilling effect.
Yeah? You see a lot of attorneys in copyright cases not seeking the amount of statutory damages? Where did you see that? As I mentioned, I'm a litigator, and I do a lot of copyright. That's not my experience at all.
> The RIAA's settlement amounts are typically in the neighborhood of $3,000-$4,000 for those who settle once they receive a letter from the music industry.
I'm not sure what your point is. You do not seem to understand what I am talking about at all, which is that it would be malpractice to not claim the maximum amount of statutory damages available when you plead. You do not have to ultimately seek them at trial, but you cannot go the other direction. I hope that clears things up for you. And this is why I often complain about the reporting of legal cases on sites like ars, sometimes they do a good job, sometimes they only serve to confuse most readers.
> Frankly, I don't find your correspondence courteous at all.
Point out the specific comments you took issue with.
This comment, for example:
> It seems incredibly unlikely on what basis? Your complete lack of legal expertise and any insight into legal practice?
is a clear violation of the guideline to assume good faith interpretations of an argument.
> which is that it would be malpractice to not claim the maximum amount of statutory damages available when you plead.
Which is why I asked: Meaning that they could not have asked for a lower amount without waiving their rights to all statutory damages?
And you still haven't really clarified the issue, since I have no idea whether you are saying that these statutory limits have to be claimed for a lawyer to remain in good standing irrespective of a client's instructions or if the client has the option to claim less than the statutory damages and simply didn't in this instance. If it's the former, okay, sure, you were right. If it's the latter, my original argument stands: Someone representing the plaintiff went over the details of the brief with the attorneys who drafted it prior to it being filed. They had the opportunity to claim a lower limit, and didn't. These are not unsophisticated clients, and they would know what the PR implications would be of a headline like "RIAA sues Limewire for more money than God." My contention is that they didn't pump the breaks on this because the whole point of these lawsuits was to scare people into not pirating music anymore.
> Yeah? You see a lot of attorneys in copyright cases not seeking the amount of statutory damages?
Where was that stated?
> I'm not sure what your point is.
They lost money on these suits.
You made the claim originally:
> Record companies, artists and other rights holders are not pursuing lawsuits because they are "somehow vindictive" or want to send a message. [...] Like anyone else who goes through the trouble of pursuing a case on IP grounds, they feel their rights have been violated and they want redress.
The message they were trying to send was that if you pirate music, you will be financially ruined. If it had ever been about the damages, they would have stopped when it became clear that they weren't recovering their costs.
I never thought your arguments were in bad faith, just not based in actual fact nor understanding of the legal issues at play. I imagine you are capable of appreciating the difference.
My point was making a big deal out of the statutory damages claim really on reflects a complete lack of insight into copyright lawsuits and you taking away your conclusion is really besides the point, because it is normal practice (I've said this how many times?) to claim the entirety of statutory damages.
Sure, clients can do what they want to. That doesn't make the attorney's advice and/or work not malpractice if the attorney didn't advise against it, so what's your point? They could have asked for less? Sure. They could have also not sued at all! The statutory damages is a red herring being obsessed over by you because you lack the faculties to otherwise make your point, which isn't served by highlighting the completely normal practice of claiming all the available statutory damages in a pleading.
>Point out the specific comments you took issue with.
The one where you completely ignored everything I wrote and then quoted the judge. It's incredibly rude and dismissive, even when offered politely. You might be polite, but I don't find it courteous to engage in conversation with someone who makes absolutely zero effort to engage with my response, and then continues the conversation any way. To me, it's like souther hospitality, facially polite but masking of, sometimes, deep loathing. I'm from NYC, we don't pull that kind of crap. We are direct because it is more respectful to someone to be honest with them than to lie to their face with a smile.
> I imagine you are capable of appreciating the difference.
I imagine you appreciate the difference between what you are saying now and what you originally wrote, which was:
> It seems incredibly unlikely on what basis? Your complete lack of legal expertise and any insight into legal practice?
This is not assuming good faith. I know that you know that because you would never get away with this kind of disingenuous behavior on the basis that "I'm a New Yawker" when dealing with an opposing counsel. You're capable of regulating your behavior; you're choosing not to.
> The one where you completely ignored everything I wrote and then quoted the judge.
You were making the claim that these suits were not punitive. I contested that idea by pointing to the RIAA's history of engaging in punitive lawsuits. You then stated:
> There's pretty much no way any court ever gives any copyright holder the maximum amount allowed under statutory damages, which is only trebled to the possibility of $150k when the infringement was willful. I love Weird Al, but I don't go to him for legal advice or analysis!
This dismissed both the point that I was making and implied that the entire basis of my understanding was based on a song by Weird Al. I did not provide a more substantive reply because yours was not substantive and just obnoxious.
> We are direct because it is more respectful to someone to be honest with them than to lie to their face with a smile.
You've been rhetorically asking "What's your point?" the whole time we've been having this discussion even when I've stated my position plainly. You did it in this post. This isn't being direct or respectful, it's obvious from how you've been speaking (and how you've interacted with others in the thread) that you aren't a respectful person, and now you're leaning into "This is part of my culture," to try to evade the issue that you are being abrasive and obnoxious, and are now insisting that I'm the one being rude to you.
> Sure, clients can do what they want to. That doesn't make the attorney's advice and/or work not malpractice if the attorney didn't advise against it, so what's your point?
I've stated this plainly three times and you haven't listened so you can read the thread again or I'll take it as a concession that you have no point to make.
> The statutory damages is a red herring being obsessed over by you because you lack the faculties to otherwise make your point, which isn't served by highlighting the completely normal practice of claiming all the available statutory damages in a pleading.
You are the one fixating on it. Even if we ignore the Limewire case, you still haven't addressed the years and millions of dollars the RIAA spent suing individual pirates at a net loss.
>This is not assuming good faith. I know that you know that because you would never get away with this kind of disingenuous behavior on the basis that "I'm a New Yawker" when dealing with an opposing counsel. You're capable of regulating your behavior; you're choosing not to.
My behavior is perfectly fine, and you're not opposing counsel and this isn't a court and I don't have any obligations to you that are on the order of magnitude that I do to other attorneys, so this is completely misplaced if not outright ridiculous.
>You were making the claim that these suits were not punitive. I contested that idea by pointing to the RIAA's history of engaging in punitive lawsuits. You then stated:
No, I said that pointing to the damages as a reason why they are punitive only reflects a misunderstanding of the basic practice of copyright law in the US.
>This dismissed both the point that I was making and implied that the entire basis of my understanding was based on a song by Weird Al. I did not provide a more substantive reply because yours was not substantive and just obnoxious.
Sorry, you are calling my response to Weird Al not substantive? Weird Al isn't a source for insight into the legal profession. So, my response was perfectly in line with the kind of substance you were bringing to the conversation.
> You've been rhetorically asking "What's your point?" the whole time we've been having this discussion even when I've stated my position plainly. You did it in this post. This isn't being direct or respectful, it's obvious from how you've been speaking (and how you've interacted with others in the thread) that you aren't a respectful person, and now you're leaning into "This is part of my culture," to try to evade the issue that you are being abrasive and obnoxious, and are now insisting that I'm the one being rude to you.
You're entitled to that opinion. I disagree. You can find me abrasive and obnoxious. I do not particularly care as I have not found you to be a respectful conversation partner warranting any greater effort on my part than that which I've received from you.
>I've stated this plainly three times and you haven't listened so you can read the thread again or I'll take it as a concession that you have no point to make.
My point is the same it has been. Pointing to the damages number as punitive only reflects a misunderstand of basic aspect of the practice of copyright law in the US.
>You are the one fixating on it. Even if we ignore the Limewire case, you still haven't addressed the years and millions of dollars the RIAA spent suing individual pirates at a net loss.
Why would I address that? It has nothing to do with my point.
This is what, the fifth post I've written, explaining my point, which you continue to dispute? You act like you're a fair conversation partner, but you aren't. You repeatedly misstate my point and twist it around. It's obnoxious and rude and that's why you are getting the short treatment from me. If I wanted to actually insult you, which is what you're acting like, I promise you it would come off differently. But I don't think there is anything unfair about pointing out that you aren't relying on any insight into the profession when you are quoting Weird Al. Feel free to report me!
Just in case, here's the list of these labels:
- UMG Recordings, Inc.
- Capitol Records, LLC
- Concord Bicycle Assets, LLC
- CMGI Recorded Music Assets LLC
- Sony Music Entertainment
- Arista Music
Taken from: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/UMG-v...
> Record companies, artists and other rights holders are not pursuing lawsuits because they are "somehow vindictive" or want to send a message.
> They're also looking at this as part of a long-term fight over how IP gets used, just as the Internet Archive is.
Part of the fight is sending messages. Almost all of the fight is sending messages, actually. It's lobbying government, arguing in the courts, lobbying people in general, and creating fear in people who would share their works.
"Somehow vindictive" is just anthropomorphizing. They want the most money. They think that these are the tactics that will bring them the most money. If letting everybody share freely made them more money, they'd do that.
Internet was created to allow Library sharing and now companies try to stop the only library available from sharing books at one-person-at-a-time basis. This is similar.
We're doomed because whimsical companies will put down the IA and then forgot the toys they were playing with
Btw. What is age of music going into public domain? Still Disney's 123 years?
Just brainstorming a bit, if IA is gone, how can we lawsuit-proof that the next digital Library of Alexandria? Do we have the technology for this?
- IPFS over some type of dark net protocol?
- Can something like Chia help? I don't know about its privacy characteristics.
>IPFS over some type of dark net protocol?
Silk Road is a good example of what will happen. Some media mogul will eventually cajole the government into acting. The government will go to the NSA, find the true identities of those responsible, then cook up nonsense about how they gave away their identities due to some weird Stack Overflow question no one could ever notice. The US Attorney will prosecute, and claim that it's a felony because of economic benefit, even if no money was exchanged. The culprits will end up in supermax. They can't afford to do this to everyone, obviously, but they'll pick up to 100 or so of a mix of the worst offenders and the most casual users, to "set an example". The media will publicize it to the point of absurdity so the message sinks in.
There are other countries in the world, in fact, that's where most of these digital libraries of Alexandria have been hosted. That's why I framed it as a technical question, because while any government may decide to combat it, it is unlikely that all of them will. Given the ongoing collapse of the US-led unipolar world order, the reach of US law enforcement will only shrink in the coming years.
>There are other countries in the world,
I believe the owner of Kickass Torrents was either in Ukraine or Poland, can't remember anymore. Didn't save that one. Kim Dotcom was in New Zealand, and the crime he was accused of committing in the United States (when he had never stepped foot in the United States, and also a crime that isn't extraditable under New Zealand law) he barely managed to avoid being shipped off in chains.
That won't save anyone.
>Given the ongoing collapse of the US-led unipolar world order,
I wouldn't recommend relying on the "collapse of American hegemony" to save anyone. But especially not anyone you care about (like maybe yourself).
> then cook up nonsense about how they gave away their identities due to some weird Stack Overflow question no one could ever notice
In case people don't understand why the government can do this, it is called parallel construction and the SCOTUS deemed it constitutional.
Btw this comment is not me approving this behavior. And that last sentence was not a hint of me approving that behavior in secret :). Those last two sentences are a hint of what I think about the scotus on this topic though :)
Anna's Archive is on the path to this, for written works at least. The main idea is open source code + distributed data in torrents + anonymous contributors that are dedicated to the project.
https://annas-archive.li/blog
Also MAM
That's a new acronym to me, what is it?
Its a private-ish (interview required) bittorrent tracker for ebooks. Very different goals to IA/AA, who see the universality & ease of access as core to the mission. Its more like old-fashioned gated archives at universities & libraries that essentially tried to slow and limit access to their collections to avoid the issues that IA is coming against legally.
Start might be not violating copyright law and staying within the boundaries of established fair use principles. IA is constantly trying to push the law on these issues, for better or worse, and putting the entirety of its operations at risk.
By not hiring dumb people who flagrantly and obviously violate the law.
Appeasement has done nil against copyright absolutists.
It getting sued out of existence is not appeasement. It’s literally following the law. That is how non profits that wish to continue to operate do things.
What alternatives to legal actions / the judiciary do you suggest for copyright reform?
The legislative approach is thwarted by the copyright lobby. The executive has neither will, interest, nor power.
The mission of the Internet Archive should not be "copyright reform" but maintaining the continued availability of data it is legally allowed to host.
Then which organization is better positioned and able to push for copyright reform in your opinion?
That would entirely mean what you mean by "copyright reform". If you mean the typical crypto anarchist data hoarder everything should be free and open after 5 minutes sense, or anything close to it, frankly I don't support, so my answer is to route such ideas to /dev/null.
In 2008, Universal Media lost something like a half million original master recordings when a fire destroyed one of their storage buildings. The "Library at Alexandria" of 20th century music.
I'm guessing the rise of generative AI will help ensure this never happens again.
If you wanted to build a Sinatra Simulator, you'd want as many takes as possible to train it. For that reason, I imagine any and all high resolution recordings are now considered gold rather than something you just keep around for old times' sake, possible use in reissues, research, etc.
Even session background singers or isolated instrument tracks would be valuable; with all kinds of training data / not-samples, producers could add bits of Quentin Tarantino-esque pastiche to tracks easily -- "give me some background singers that sound like the ones in Smokey Robinson's first album..." "I want this bass track to sound like Duck Dunn playing a Hofner Beatle Bass..." Training data is what you need to make that happen, and record company vaults are the mines where that gold comes from.
Sony and EMI worked with the Library of Congress on the National Jukebox a decade ago.
https://www.loc.gov/collections/national-jukebox/about-this-...
Internet Archive is free to archive whatever they want. The problem is that they want to be a publisher too but refuse to follow the rules.
There are traditional rules around access to archives that keep things in balance. But when you're publishing the most popular song of all time and your strategy is "pops and scratches makes it Fair Use" when people ask to take it down -- well then you're going to lose. Again.
They could structure things so that these uploads would be protected under DMCA, and act more surgically, but they can't decide whether they're an archive, a library, or an activist organization. Each of those things has different expectations for longevity and different rules for survival.
At this point I'd be happy if they'd just pick a lane. Other organizations would step up to handle other aspects (Musk was down there looking to vacuum up the data). And if they chose to behave like a legitimate archive, they would have less of a problem partnering with rights holders and raising money from individuals and corporations who support preservation efforts.
Right now they're asking for $17 donations next to pirated material and that's not a strategy.
>There are traditional rules
None of those rules are traditional. Those rules are adhoc, constantly changed at the whims of whoever is in charge of the copyright office in any given administration, and heavily lobbied by the media companies. These rules are many things: bureaucratic, official, overly-complicated, contrary to public interest, etc. but have no basis in "tradition".
>At this point I'd be happy if they'd just pick a lane.
No doubt you'd be happy.
>they would have less of a problem partnering with rights holders
These are the same rights holders that have acted irresponsibly when it suited them, leading to the wanton destruction of material that rightfully belongs to the public. You get that right? Copyright is not ownership, it's just a long-term lease... all copyright materials are in the long run property of the public domain. You don't get to destroy them just because you've got a temporary lease on it. The rights holders are the problem.
>Right now they're asking for $17 donations next to pirated material
What piracy? Did someone hijack a ship at sea and hold its crew for ransom?
I work in the space and routinely access material that predates the Berne Convention. There are indeed traditions that archives and libraries follow going back centuries.
This is entirely separate from US copyright law and if we were actually conversing I'd imagine we'd discover that we share a lot of views there.
> You don't get to destroy them just because you've got a temporary lease on it.
And that's where we disagree. For starters, nothing has gotten destroyed here. Yet. The problem as I see it is that some weird-ass white guy annointed himself keeper of the material. And now he's started behaving erratically and unlawfully, and putting everything at risk. Seems to be a lot of that going around lately.
Insiders at the Archive have gone as far as to say Brewster's sabotaging things since there's no plan for funding or running the thing after he passes. Getting sued over and over (and losing) is awful. And imagine how the employees feel -- scanning moldy books for 20 years and then your boss makes one weird decision and now nobody can see your work.
> some weird-ass white guy annointed himself keeper of the material
how's their skin colour so relevant to the discussion that it needs to be brought up? what if they were yellow/black/green?
It sets up the quip two sentences later and opens up opportunities for further social commentary such as "Brewster Kahle seems to be the only white guy left who manages to lose in a courtroom each and every time."
Not sure why this is being downvoted, it is pretty spot-on.
The IA's work is essential for historians and archivists who depend on it for research and preservation. However, this is not a concern for the music industry or the major labels.
The argument that the industry's lawsuit against IA might ultimately harm its own interests—by jeopardizing valuable archival resources—rests on a misconception: that the industry cares about art and artists. It doesn’t. The industry's focus is shifting toward AI-generated music and hired musicians, prioritizing commercial output over artistic legacy. Their future is not tied to the past but to what comes next. In this scenario, history is not a resource—it’s competition.
I'm very worried that IA has risked the parts of what they do that are fully legal, or unenforced (eg. abandonware), by going after targets guaranteed to make deep-pocketed pro-copyright industries like publishing and music labels come after them.
At this point, it seems like the sensible course of action would be to create a new entity that leaves still-in-copyright books and music alone, grabs a snapshot of the entire archive, hires everyone who used to work at IA, starts accepting donations so us supporters can switch over, and then picks up, letting IA declare bankruptcy and fall into the sun.
[Edited to add:] Don't get me wrong. I think the current copyright regime is complete nonsense, and I mostly support everything IA has done from an ethical point of view (except maybe giving away recent books for free), but I'm also a pragmatist, and the idea of IA's archive falling into the memory hole because of picking bad fights is distressing.
Brings to mind the line about the behavior of most organizations being best explained by it being controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
Just mass-violating the copyright of deep pocketed plaintiffs is like writing them checks that need to go through court first. The Constitution expressly gives Congress the power to make laws concerning copyright. Congress used that power. The statutes say what they say. There is no wriggling out of it; there are centuries of case law reconciling copyright with the 1A. If the IA is going to be provocative like this it should do so outside of the reach of the judgments of US courts.
It would take a massive amount of labor to determine what in the existing archive is out of copyright in a legally verifiable manner.
There’s nothing keeping the record labels or other corporate copyright aggregators from declaring legal warfare on your hypothetical child organization.
Jason Scott and others all the way to the top have been saying "Just upload! We'll figure it out later!" for a decade. That turned out to be a bad strategy.
They're also infamous for ignoring DMCA requests. Requiring a driver's license or passport before they'll even talk to you. Then they leaked those, ugh.
Archiving stuff is Fair Use, but where's the fun in that, I guess. People should be able to upload things and say "Yes, this is a bootleg mix of a Prince song. Archive it but don't publish it, please."
A combination of bizarre policies and subverting their own DMCA protections is why they're in this mess. Again.
Musk showed up for lunch looking to vacuum things up. I hope that's not how this story ends. But it's starting to look like it.
Yes, the recent history of the IA is of its shooting itself in the foot in full auto. I don’t understand how the board members pushing these obviously dangerous actions haven’t been turfed out.
They don't really have a board. It's just Brewster doing what he wants.
https://www.reddit.com/r/internetarchive/comments/1he3ml5/in...
Enemies of mankind. There are friendlier comic book supervillains.
It's not just labels who aren't getting the artistic side of music. Copyright collectives are just as bad. If you give away your music for free under a license like the creative commons they will still collect money for any public use. But they will then just give it to their commercial artists probably even breaking nc clauses in open content licenses.
Sooner or later we probably will suffer the event of lost knowledge similar to fire of Library of Alexandria but with internet.
At some point greedy corporations will come to conclusion that storing old data, movies, music, documents is just to costly. And just like that all of this will be just deleted.
What a sad thing to read. Loosing. What will remain of the internet if even IA is destroyed the rich?
People who work at Music Labels may regret what the previous generation of employees did to line their own pockets, and then do equally horrible things in their current context for the same reason.
The notion of those hyenas having morals in the first place is hilarious on its own
The greet of the music labels. They would likely not have made a penny of this because you can't even buy this stuff anymore!
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
Until now, I have always given authors the benefit of the doubt, and presented what they could have said to make their argument stronger.
I do this when hackernews is calling an article stupid and missing some of the salvageable or mostly correct things from the article, so I do some effort to highlight these kernels of truth that most articles have because most authors do have something of value to say.
For the first time on this account on this site... This article is hopelessly naive. Music label executives dgaf. If anything, they want the history gone so that they can charge extra premiums when they release 100 year old songs or for visits to their museums. It is like saying NFL owners regret people not being able to watch the first super bowl game and relive history.
Nah... that is stuff they could sell later if they figure out how.
Expecting music labels to have any sense of democratic music access is almost insulting to artists that have been often dicked by these labels.
Part of me thinks this article is a psyop to make music label executives seem more humane lol.
For there to be damages, wouldn't you have to prove that you had lost out in some way? How could an unavailable record be affected by this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_damages
That huge number is merely what the plaintiffs write down by obligation when they file the case. It comes out of a book. The defense counters. The judge picks something reasonable. An appellate judge revises.
Ok, I just donated to IA. They seem to need support.
I grew up listening to some ethnic 78 singles that my father had purchased. I managed to hold onto a couple of them (others were broken) but haven't owned a turntable I could play them on (good luck finding one, or the needles) for decades.
None of the singles had been released on vinyl ... it was clearly not in the interests of the industry's monopolists to do so. Because they showed up on IA (before the Great 78 project even started) I could finally listen to them again. To my knowledge none of them have ever been re-released.
Yup. They should've stuck to that stuff and not published Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby records along with the pile of priceless rarities that exist nowhere else.
They were politely asked three times to remove certain material and refused.
This is not the way an archive should act.
Labels remaster and loose old versions, youtube re-compresses old videos
Implying for-profit labels care about anything other than profit.
psssh, thats a problem for the future. profits now
The music industry is essentially a bunch of psychopaths robbing artists blind.
Again I’m incredulous by the perspective shared by Ars Technica (often trumpeted by TechDirt) that “what is going on is not how copyright SHOULD work” while giving no reasonable consideration to how legally legitimate cases like this are from a standpoint are in US copyright cases.
I get the desire to FIX copyright in the US, I stand to benefit and so does society and creative progress. But these sensationalist writers are the lowest form of clickbait by simply taking a victimization position and digging in (re: TechDirt and Goldiblox absolutely being in the wrong for ripping off the Beastie Boys for a Super Bowl ad).
I’m not sure what your criticism is?
Ars is reporting on a legal case and also on people who say they will be harmed by that case. The reporter then goes on to detail the policy work that groups are doing to try to change copyright laws in the country.
What else would you like to see? A legal analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the case?
> What else would you like to see? A legal analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the case?
Exactly.
What are the facts of the case according to the plaintiff? What are the points of law being relied on?
Does the IA dispute the plaintiff's version of the facts and the interpretation of the law? If so, what points are they disputing?
If there have been similar cases, how did those cases go, and how were they different to this case?
700 million dollars in damages with no actual damages shown it's absolutely ridiculous
Right, but that's how a lawsuit works. You take the number it says in the book, multiply it by the number of allegations, and you get a number. You have to write this number down in your filing, then Ars Technica uses it for clickbait.
Murder 18 people and you can go to jail for 720 years. Doesn't mean squat. It's the 18 murders not the 720 years.
Likewise the $700 million number isn't important. What's important is the 400,000 copyright violations with no strategy, when even Lessig says you're gonna get sued and lose.
That's not really a substantive analysis of the issue, which I agree with the OP that these articles never really address fully.
Until recently I'd say that the record labels accusations were unwarranted and they should stop. However I've noticed that free projects have the tendency to become for profit corporations and exploit the good will that started the project. An example is Open AI. Another example is how Google monetizes and monopolizes free and public information.
I fail to see what bearing the actions of other projects have on what the IA might or might not do.
So far the IA is providing an important service: Insuring the historical data is not lost. Until this actually changes there is no need to go after it, in fact it hurts us all.
Are you implying we should pre-emptively abandon support for IA now and let them die just in case at some point in the future they were to go evil?
>However I've noticed that free projects have the tendency to become for profit corporations
I would say that for a non-profit project to become a for profit entity, legally speaking, is rare. I believe Google was always for profit? I welcome any statistics you have to back up the assertion.
So shut down a good org today, in favor of bad orgs today, because good org might be bad in the future?