- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
It looks like the internet archive is needed assistance, I just heard about this today and figured lemmy could help spread this message around
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Why can’t anyone spot a grift anymore? The IA is hugely profitable, and is very clearly crafting PR statements designed to increase donations. Has noone had their trust abused before? If they were trying to make change around this subject they wouldnt be so dishonest in their messaging.
IA are not Robin Hood.
How is IA profitable?
Same question here. How can they be profitable if they are a registered non-profit?
Is it somehow possible to pay employees exorbitant salaries, similar to Mozilla’s CEO?
Non profit doesn’t mean revenue can’t exceed expenses. It means that the org can’t be owned by investors, and the org can’t pay dividends.
Interesting. And there really is nothing stopping someone in control from getting themselves a huge portion of it, while laying off staff?
That seems like a huge flaw that someone with the required people skills (read, social engineering) can exploit.
Thats not a violation of being a nonprofit. If someone does work, they should get paid for their work.
The point of a nonprofit is to prevent folks who don’t work from stealing the org’s cash. Really, this is the baseline for any ethical org. All for-profit companies should just straight-up be illegal to form.
Of course, it happens all the time with many non profit orgs. They even pest you and call people for donations. You didn’t know?
My grandma is pestered daily from some organisations that ‚help poor kids’ or whatever. Pretty lucrative business.
Some even get public money and are connected to politicans that sometimes launder public money through them, seemingly with no consequences.
Legitimate ones will never whore for cash with spam emails or calls and won’t be connected to government. All the rest are just get rich schemes.
You have to do proper, thorough research before you donate money to some kids helping org or similar. Else you will just fund someone’s Porsche.
IA my guess is they are mostly legit but it’s puzzling where they ended up
Legitimate nonprofits definitely will ask you for donations.
Can they sink the IA name and just set up as another entity? I mean, declare bankruptcy etc. What happens to the archived data in this scenario? I am not a lawyer so I have no idea
Edit perhaps they can setup up an entity, sell the data to it, and bankrupt IA?
Surely not or else companies would be doing this every day to avoid litigation.
The mercenary company Blackgate(?) has done it a dozen times.
Again, I have no idea what I am talking about but you can have provisions to protect assets in bankruptcy. But besides that, I am not sure if distributing the assets to another nonprofit entity prior would help save the archived data
Is it still under attack?
They should have:
- Not sell out to AI.
- Deleted doxxing info (they already removed stuff like Mike Matei’s racist webcomics on behalf of Mike Matei).
Mike Matei’s racist webcomics
What’s this, now?
Oh. Oh, no! I’d heard he was a shitty person, but I wasn’t expecting that!
Europe is voting this weekend. If you care about copyright reform, you should consider voting for the European Pirate Party. IA is probably in the wrong here, legally. But many would argue it’s morally right to have free access to information. Sure, shadow libraries are popping up everywhere and we have access to more information than ever before, but if we really want access for everyone, we need different copyright laws, and for that we need politicians.
For Germean voters there is the WahloMat to help with the voting choice (a dozen of questions and in the end shows how much overlap there is with all the parties): https://www.wahl-o-mat.de/europawahl2024/app/main_app.html
The major issue is that if you care about CopyRight: Party A. Easier to comply with regulation: Party B. Migration: Party C. Environment: Party D.
And all of the choices (A-D) have some very removed, prominent positions that you strongly oppose and in the end, have no clue what to elect and choose the least worst option and hope for the best.
Sadly in countries without a pirate party, like Denmark, you can’t (as far as I know) vote for the EP pirate party.
Does voting for a party like that even help anything? I’m asking because my voting experience is US, and everyone knows how many parties matter here. So I’m curious.
Yes. In most European countries even small parties can get seats. In my country there are 8 parties in parliament, for example, and 2 of them didn’t use to be there 2 election cycles ago (they were too small/new 8 years ago but eventually grew in popularity and got enough votes for representation).
Of course if they only have 1 or 2 members in parliament they typcily tend to form coalitions with other like-minded parties so they can get more voting power.
I wonder how many people that aren’t from the US running around telling people to vote third party their are, because of what you just described.
It does a bit, since every party will be represented in the European council based on the number of votes they have. It’s not an election where the winner takes all.
I think the pirates had one or two representatives in the council, which is enough to start debates and make proposals. They obviously can’t push anything through by themselves.
Nice. That sounds like more than we have available. Thank you
Would you care the elaborate more?
The nonprofit Internet Archive is appealing a judgment that threatens the future of all libraries. Big publishers are suing to cut off libraries’ ownership and control of digital books, opening new paths for digital book bans and dangerous surveillance.
Join 28,000+ signers on the petition below to show your support for the Internet Archive, libraries’ digital rights, and an open internet with safe, uncensored access to knowledge.
Lol, a petition won’t stop this unless it’s a petition to bribe the judge. The US is owned by corporations.
It’s not even a question of being “owned by corporations”. Judges don’t care about petitions. They’re not politicians, their job is to adjudicate the law.
In theory. In the US, at least (I don’t know about other countries), some judge positions are voted in, In that sense, they most certainly are politicians.
On top of that, HAVE YOU SEEN OUR SUPREME COURT. THAT SHIT’S THE HALLMARK CHANNEL OF “OWNED BY OTHER ENTITIES”, be it actual politicians (Trump) or CEOs (also Trump), many of whom ARE both executives and politicans (again, not only Trump, but also a number of other reps & senators).
C’mon it’s at least worth a shot. To me at least.
With the current judges we could probably buy one fairly cheap. Crowd source lobbying I guess
Sure, but it is still better than doing nothing.
Only things that are effective are better than doing nothing. Doing ineffective things only gives a false sense of accomplishment and thus reduces the incentive to try harder to be effective, which means they’re actually worse than doing nothing.
Online petitions, “free speech zones,” and other easily-ignorable things are like honeypots for activism, designed to neuter it.
Sure, but “effectiveness” is usually not a binary and is often difficult to measure. Small, but persistent changes should still add up. Eventually.
So long as people recognize that these things are in fact quite toothless, I’m not sure they are entirely detrimental. There’s no reason this couldn’t be used as a starting point for more effective action, now that signatories are in greater contact with the campaign.
It feels better than doing nothing.
If you can convince yourself you’re not doing nothing.
I’ve never been that good a lying.I don’t know.
I still think there’s at least some value, even if the only thing it accomplishes is getting people to talk about it. Many people have never even heard of The Internet Archive.
Either way, there isn’t really a reason not to.
Large petitions also serve as a way of getting the word out.
Yep. Petition gets large enough for media attention, word is spread, MAYBE people get active.
But Then police beat on them, Trump supporters defend the corporate interests of their supreme lord, it all goes down the shitter anyway.
So don’t ever get active or protest or do anything?
Another excerpt under why from the FAQ section
**The Internet Archive has been scanning millions of print books that they own, and loaning them out to anyone around the world, for free. Other libraries like the Boston Public Library are using the same process to make digital books too.
This is happening because major publishers offer no option for libraries to permanently purchase digital books and carry out their traditional role of preservation.
Instead, libraries are forced to pay high licensing fees to “rent” books from big tech vendors that regard patron privacy as a premium feature and are vulnerable to censorship from book banners. Under this regime, publishers act as malicious gatekeepers, preventing the free flow of information and undermining libraries’ ability to serve their patrons.
But it looks bad if publishers sue the Boston Public Library. So instead, they’ve launched an attack on a groundbreaking nonprofit, including a lawsuit with clear repercussions for every library in the US. On March 24, 2023, a lower court judge issued a ruling that stated the profits of big media companies are more important than the right of libraries to preserve our history and ensure it’s available to the world. Then, in a copyright troll move for the ages, the same attorney representing Big Publishing filed a second absurd lawsuit against the Internet Archive for it’s research library of old music recordings.
Nevertheless, the Internet Archive are appealing to a higher court and will keep fighting for the digital rights of libraries.**
This buries the lede so deep it’s popping out the other side of the globe.
The entire core of this case is that (in abscence of more lenient agreements with publishers) traditional libraries are allowed to digitize physical books in their posession, as long as they do not lend out more copies than they physically own. The Internet Archive decided that they would lend out infinite copies, because “covid lol”.
Boston Public Library isn’t being sued because they don’t lend out more than they own! It has precisely zero to do with fucking optics.
Edit: Don’t get me wrong, I hope they win this case, but them continuing to play stupid helps nobody. Unfortunately, as discussed thoroughly online when they opened the covid19 emergency digital library, they fucked around. Now it seems they may have to find out.
Except it’s not a threat to the future of all libraries, it’s a threat to the future of “libraries” that decide to completely ignore copyright and give out an unlimited number of copies of ebooks. Basically turning themselves into book-focused piracy sites.
I’m incredibly frustrated with Internet Archive for bringing this on themselves. It is not their mandate to fight copyright, that’s something better left in the hands of activist organizations like the EFF. The Internet Archive’s mandate is to archive the Internet, to store and preserve knowledge. Distributing it is secondary to that goal. And picking unnecessary fights with big publishing houses like this is directly contrary to that goal, since now the Internet Archive is in danger.
It’s like they’re carrying around a precious baby and they decided it was a good idea to start whacking a bear with a stick. Now the bear is eating their leg and they’re screaming “oh my god help me, the bear is threatening this baby!” Well yeah, but you shouldn’t have brought a baby with you when you went on a bear-whacking expedition. You should have known exactly what that bear was going to do.
it’s a threat to the future of “libraries” that decide to completely ignore copyright and give out an unlimited number of copies of ebooks
So do I, so this is very bad.
I love the internet archive but yeah, there was just no way this wasn’t going to backfire. And by handling things the way they did they damaged the reasonable defense of archivist (not only for themselves) because publishers and others often cite that archival and backups are just “pseudonyms” for piracy.
They aren’t but the way this was handled made it impossible for them to argue otherwise and it also creates a legal precedent for lawsuits and judgments by publishers against others who are doing such work.
You summed it up exactly. As one politician put it, the Internet Archive does not decide copyright. They have became to big for there own shoes.
The thing that drives me nuts is that I really do value that baby they’re carrying around. It is precious. But I don’t want to give the Internet Archive money just to funnel into the pockets of their lawyers and settlement payments to big publishers due to these unrelated quixotic battles.
I was hoping that the IA would have learned a lesson from losing this court case, they should have settled as soon as they could. I’m sure the publishers don’t want the bad publicity of “destroying” the Internet Archive, they just want them to stop blatantly violating their copyrights. But this appeal suggests that they haven’t learned that lesson yet.
In an ideal world there’d either be some kind of leadership shakeup at the IA to get rid of whoever was behind this stunt, or some kind of alternative IA-like organization appears to pick up the archive before the IA goes broke and its collection ends up being sold off to the highest bidder. Or simply destroyed.
It is not a great situation. I wish they would break into smaller organizations
I’m sure the publishers don’t want the bad publicity of “destroying” the Internet Archive
LOL. LMAO, even.
I have little doubt that publishers detest the Internet Archive and the deepest desire of their shriveled, blackened heart is to (figuratively) mount its stuffed corpse as a trophy over their fireplace mantel.
Cynicism like this is completely unfalsifiable not to mention unproductive.
True, but that doesn’t make him wrong. While generalizing is inherently wrong, the chances of ANY corporation giving a fuck about their image for destroying something that could spell them not earning a couple of bucks is low to null.
Look around. The amount of complains about privacy breaches from all the tech giants, and some midgets, is at its highest ever, and do you see any of them pedaling back?
I am part of an executive suite myself, and while I’m trying to make a difference, you should see the ridiculous amount of pushback I get on ANYTHING that could spell improving user and staff experience, sometimes even when it has absolutely no negative financial impact. It’s like they’re programmed to destroy.
You will find a few good men and women in the Corp world, but this few can’t do much against the majority, which happens to be full of bloodsucking pricks.
Exactly. I hate fucking everything about this. I love the internet archive and nearly all they do.
In principal I love their “covid-19 emergency library” or whatever they called it. In practice? They absolutely know better than to pull stunts and I’m terrified that this will spell the end for one of the greatest knowledge and media resources of the modern age. For shit that was effectively already available to the public through ebook piracy sites.
They already operated on shaky ground, hosting downloads for a metric ton of shit that is unquestionably still under copyright (despite their claims to only be archival of things that are not), skating by on technicalities and by not drawing too much attention to themselves.
Plus, there were so fucking many better ways to do the “free digital library” thing without jeapordizing themselves.
- Have some volunteers “misuse resources”: load an SSD up with the book files, “borrow” some compute power to decrypt/remove drm, pass batches off to existing ebook “dumping” groups to stagger releases and obsfucate the true source. This would ensure that any material they had which was not already available on the high seas would get there.
- Make a big red banner on the site to a blog post with the generic “While we would never condone piracy or copyright infringement, we understand that times are extremely hard right now [blah blah] here are some links to community guides on how to access learning literature (pirate ebooks) during these trying times [blah blah] Please abide by your local laws.”
They did not ignore copyright. The judge brazenly and incorrectly dismissed all their arguments for fair use. They had no way to foresee they would meet a judge that would go that far.
Modern corporations are a damned plague. Most of these fuckers would destroy our whole cultural heritage in a heartbeat if it meant making a profit.
Yes, corporations exist to make profit, but come on, there are limits.
Yes, corporations exist to make profit
Maybe now they do, but that itself is a cancerous perversion of their original purpose.
there are limits
I am glad you have a moral centre.
But that is the capitalist way. A Redditor once wrote: “*Corporations have no morals, no ethics, no code of conduct, no feelings, no empathy, and zero accountability. They have one goal and one goal only: to increase profits at all costs.”
Case in point: the climate crisis. Corporations are literally destroying their own home for a symbol of success that, like their products, is man-made: money. It is the ultimate pursuit of vanity.
Crazy, if you think about it for a moment.
And yet by law in some places (the US being one, I believe) they are treated as people, with certain rights.
Like people, but with a feduciary responsibility to gain wealth at every opportunity. Corporations are almost like vampires: they don’t need food or water, they don’t age, they have inhuman power, yet they wear the guise of people; they pass as human to make it easier to drain us of our blood, an endless thirst they feel compelled to heed.
Well said
I agree that that is the capitalist way, which is one of the reasons I hate capitalism. I’m no tankie, but I believe there are other ways, even ways that still use personal property as well as currency, beyond capitalism, which is just the use of personal property and currency to obtain more personal property and currency at all costs in an endless cycle.
Agreed, now what do we do about it?
I quit a very very well paid IT job in a very big corp because I did not want to participate to their anti-human, anti-planet shit…
What are you doing about it?
What am I doing about it? For the most part, nothing at the moment besides actively refusing to purchase from a small number of companies—Nestlé, Walmart, Amazon, etc—mostly out of principal as I’m not illusioned enough to think one person will make a difference in this sense). Primarily because at the moment I live in a dead-end job making barely enough money to buy food and trying to keep my car from disintegrating long enough for me to get to work and back.
Frankly, I’d love to do more, but there’s really not much I can do. Doesn’t mean I have to like it though. Just because you don’t have an alternative ready doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to dislike the current situation.
Thank you for your reply! You are doing what you can and that is important!
I appreciate you understanding. It really sucks our world has come to just having to deal with it most of the time.
I decided not to pursue my interest in geology because I didn’t want to be stuck with the only employment options being oil companies.
It sucks that we need to give up so much even though they keep destroying and pillaging.
Respect! Hope you will find your way following your passion and working for the Good!
i guess it doesnt matter to the execs, they will always have their little islands to live on while they destroy the rest of the world
Who’s gonna tell them that the small islands are the first thing to go in the climate crisis
Billionaires remember! Yacht first, island second.
True, but they’ll be the only ones able to afford to buy a boat. Lol.
Yeah. The monsters gnawing away at nature, public infrastructure, your friends? They are called corporations.
Btw, megacorps have multiple faces and are especially hungry.your friends?
I do not understand. Could you explain what you mean please?
The AI techbros wanna scare you with tales of AI becoming sentient and going rogue to destroy us all, when corporations, mindless machines made out of people to maximize profits at all cost, are already doing all that
come and destroy the IPFS, then!
What is the IPFS?
The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a protocol, hypermedia, and file sharing peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system. It allows users to host and receive content in a manner similar to BitTorrent.
a decentralized file hosting/sharing protocol that powers library genesis, for example
Is there any way to use my own computer to take up summer off the dose traffic?
Fuck.
That’s one of the reasons why uploads to the Archive have torrents.
Now if they’d just fix the damn tracker…
…library… Alexandria…
Good luck, every day more than 1PB is uploaded to IA.
Hibestly, I’d say it would be much much worse than your examples. It would be erasing parts of history itself.
Fuck yes, we need to get our hands on this stuff for fucks sake. I have shit there I don’t even know I need yet
Can someone fucking near get their ass there and do a legendary copy paste operation on a massive scale
Exactly. Losing Internet and digital history would create another dark ages for future historians. Everything we’ve done would just be gone.
If I had more money than humanly usable I would create a project that transcribes wikipedia or whatever onto stone/metal plates so it’s not forgotten.
not enough AI features! /s
The DDOS attack or the lawsuits?
This one pertains to the lawsuits.
Lots of people hate blockchain technology, but you can neither take down nor ddos websites hosted on web3.0. You also cannot threaten with legal actions againts the many nodes that run the blockchain because you don’t know who those are.
This is the worst kind of misrepresentation of tech. Nothing you said is explicitly false, it sounds true in passing, but it sure is effectively false.
The amount of data you can actually store in any single node/transaction on a given blockchain is traditionally very small. Even most NFTs are not truly “on the chain” as in the image data fully stored in a node/element, it’s instead a “smart contract” which just says X identity owns Y (with Y itself being stored elsewhere). There have been many many attempts at actually storing data on various chains and there hasn’t been any successes significant enough to come even close to being able to store the classic 90’s Space Jam website, let alone the fucking Internet Archive.
Beyond that, you absolutely can take down nodes in a chain, so to speak. Numerous major “heists” have been “rolled back” or had their nodes/transactions flagged to be ignored by marketplace admins.
You’re right about NFTs. There’s no reason to store the data on chain. Chain stores the metadata and pointers to the files (IPFS, torrent/magnet link whatever). Chain administers how many copies etc should exist and enforces those rules. Filecoin etc have already successfully done this.
You use IPFS for the website itself, and the blockchain to guarantee donations cannot get frozen or stolen like on patreon, and also to keep track of the files on IPFS. The latter is why you need the blockchain and no alternative work.
Think magnet links, but you can’t take down hosts who share the links like piratebay.
You don’t need blockchain to accomplish what the internet archive is, just a network of computers that share a part of their disk space to the other computers. This is just a torrent network at the end of the day
Except you can take down piratebay and send the founders to jail. You can’t take down Ethereum, or anything hosted on it.
Blockchain is great for when you need global consensus on the ordering of events (e.g. Alice gave all her 5 ETH to Bob first, so a later transaction to give 5 ETH to Charlie is invalid). It is an unnecessarily expensive solution just for archival, since it necessitates storing the data on every node forever.
Ethereum charges ‘gas’ fees per transaction which helps ensure it doesn’t collapse under the weight of excess usage. Blocks have transaction limits, and transactions have size limits. It is currently working out at about US$7,500 per MB of block data (which is stored forever, and replicated to every node in the network). The Internet Archive have apparently ~50 PB of data, which would cost US$371 trillion to put onto Ethereum (in practice, attempting this would push up the price of ETH further, and if they succeeded, most nodes would not be able to keep up with the network). Really, this is just telling us that blockchain is not appropriate for that use case, and the designers of real world blockchains have created mechanisms to make it financially unviable to attempt at that scale, because it would effectively destroy the ability to operate nodes.
The only real reason to use an existing blockchain anyway would be on the theory that you could argue it is too big to fail due to legitimate business use cases, and too hard to remove censorship resistant data. However, if it became used in the majority for censorship resistant data sharing, and transactions were the minority, I doubt that this would stop authorities going after node operators and so on.
The real problems that an archival project faces are:
- The cost of storing and retrieving large amounts of data. That could be decentralised using a solution where not all data is stored on a chain - for example, IPFS.
- The problem of curating data and deciding what is worth archiving, and what is a true-to-source archive vs fake copy. This probably requires either a centralised trusted party, or maybe a voting system.
- The problem of censorship. Anonymity and opaqueness about what is on a particular node can help - but they might in some cases undermine the other goals of archival.
???
Taking down PirateBay didn’t kill the torrents it hostedPiratebay itself was taken down. You need piratebay to distribute the magnet links.
Well then, just use an anonymus service to distribute magnet links (i2p, tor, blockchain)
Fully agree. In fact, that’s what I’m suggesting in my original comment.
Web3 is essentially just indexing links. But since indexing links to pirated data is illegal, that’s why the blockchain is needed. Sure, tor is also viable, but riskier for the people hosting the websites.
I agree but I find blockchain technology too costly hardwarewise, a simple anonimizing network may be enough
No, but it landed the founders in jail. Are you suggesting we just accept jail as an outcome if we want to save the internet archive?
And guess what? You don’t need blockchain for that.
Torrents exists, IPFS dropped dependency on block chain. What blockchain do is that if your literal neighbor has the file you want, you must first connect to the global super inefficient network to sync your chain. And if you have censored Internet? Well…
Layer torrent on top of Yggdrasil on top of I2P and you’ll get faster, more decentralized and more resilient network than any blockchain ever done. Such network would continue to work from friend to friend even if your whole town get cut from global net.
Yes, torrents exist, and people get fined or go to jail for seeding them, especially ebooks, movies and music, which is what the internet archive hosts.
Same would apply to yggdrasil.
But no one is going to jail for running an Ethereum node even if illegal file sharing occurs as a result of it because it is impossible to prevent it by design.
Downvote this guy all you want, but this is an incredibly true point. For 15 years, Bitcoin has maintained a distributed, uncensorable ledger, the question is, can we use similar ledger tech to store archive.org? Wikipedia is a single point of failure, so is Archive.org. So is the library of congress. We could easily store all the text content of wikipedia on chain that’s under 100GB, along with IPFS pointers to media content. Long-term, humanity needs a resilient censorship-resistant system to store our collective knowledge and history. These systems, when sufficiently large, are uncensorable and incredibly difficult to exercise undue influence against or shut down. Ask anybody whose tried to get a judge to enforce a judgement against the bitcoin blockchain lol. And they can survive quite well major disruptive events like wars, natural disasters, and even widespread network disruptions. Blockchain can also solve the spam problem that plagued early P2P systems like Gnutella/Ed2k/etc. Everybody moved to BitTorrent because we could trust custodians (trackers and indexers) to curate lists of valid torrents. But that can be decentralized now.
There’s over a dozen different blockchain projects working on the “file storage problem”, some of them have very interesting proposals, at least one of those is going to emerge from the smoke with something that will replicate archive.org’s current role, but it might be a few years before that happens. Already, we have blockchains which offer “decentralized file storage marketplace” that competes pretty well with current file storage providers (AWS etc), and some of them have been running for years.
Is this suppost to be a link
I was trying to link to Battleforlibraries but I failed, it’s my first lemmy post
Please update the post to include the link. Use the edit button.
Okay I edited the post and changed the link, tell me If I was successful!
It was successful. Thank you.
There’s no link. Down voted.
Seriously no one cares if you downvote or upvote stuff. Get lost with your inept attempt at manipulation
Yeah and I was supposed to stay calm and cute this whole week see what you have done with your shitty comment?
I was asking others to downvote low effort content to improve the quality of the content on the platform for others.
Yeah where? You just said down voted like your personal opinion on the post mattered. Then edited to say upvoted like anyone cared or you were deluded into thinking it was thanks to your little tiny point down
Just sent them a couple of bucks. Wish I could give more but the conversion rate on my currency is atrocious lol 🫠
