Walled Culture has already written about the two–pronged attack by the copyright industry against the Internet Archive, which was founded by Brewster Kahle, whose Kahle/Austin Foundation supports this blog. The Intercept has an interesting article that reveals another reason why some newspaper publishers are not great fans of the site: The New York Times tried …
Honestly? Yeah.
I love The Internet Archive and throw a few bucks at them every couple months. So much lost media and software is ACTUALLY preserved by them* and this is increasingly important as more and more chuds attack libraries.
But… it is pretty fucked that I can grab every 3ds and ps2 game in existence without seeing a single shitty pop-up and even a decent number of newer games.
Out of print and “disney vaulted” content is a mess. And I understand why, legally, IA might not want to make the distinction. But we already have the solution for in print media that better maps to the actual library model. Buy copies/licenses and use DRM to control the number in circulation. Might have some massive wait queues but that can be solved by “outreach”.
*: As an aside, fuck abandonware sites with a rusty metal pole. Loved how the vast majority went from “It is important to preserve these games you can’t otherwise buy” to “fuck it, upload ALL the gog installers” overnight
DRM at best makes it take more effect to access - a hurdle to entry. In this day and age it has never been easier for regular people to copy, and trying to fight that is an uphill battle in a war they aught to stop anyway.
DRM is a black box of software, doing god-knows-what. That gives them unjust power over users’ computing. DRM manages “rights” by denying people’s software freedoms. DRM is digital restrictions management.