this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Technology

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[–] [email protected] 108 points 1 year ago (3 children)

They're definitely gonna go after the wayback machine next, because what use is there in controlling social media and deleting what bothers them, if there's freely accessible records of it somewhere else?

The archive needs to be protected at all costs.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

The archive needs to be decentralized. It must become immortal by ascending into the network itself.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I wonder if and how wanting to protect the Wayback machine is compatible with the overall sentiment (on Lemmy) that people need all necessary means to protect their privacy. Wouldn't people who want that users can protect their privacy also be against the Wayback machine?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You can already ask the Internet Archive to take down a content if you can proof the content is yours (e.g. can't just buy an old domain and demand the internet archive to delete the archived contents put up by the past owners). People also regularly ask them to take down harmful contents as well.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

(e.g. can’t just buy an old domain and demand the internet archive to delete the archived contents put up by the past owners)

This is false. My father owned a particular domain that transferred ownership to me. I was able to pull down stuff from prior to my ownership just fine without providing any evidence.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Wait, you just asked the Internet Archive to take down stuff, and they complied without asking for proof of ownership? This seems to run counter with their own guidelines.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Not at all, because the Wayback machine only archives things that are published.

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[–] [email protected] 71 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's the single most awesome website that exists, and of course people want to take it down. These ghouls will stop at nothing

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

There's another, but I'm not mentioning the name so they don't go after that one too.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A Second Archive, you say? Out in the unmapped portion of the web?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Well, how else would companies profit off of works they contributed nothing to? /s

Capitalism needs to die. We need a society that works to better and enrich all, not fuckwads who bleed and exploit others and their work for personal gain.

[–] [email protected] 58 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Not a good idea for three reasons:

  • the assumption that this will stop lawsuits is very generous, especially when we consider that there are other countries than the US that have lawyers and IP too
  • putting such an important task in the hands of a government that might be controlled by whatever extremist possible in the future is a bad idea; who controls the past, controls the future and parties could delete parts of the past at their will
  • a less dystopian thought: future governments might simply cut the funding or restrict the archive to US content only because "why shouod they pay for other contries' history?"

A legislative approach that protects what the archive does would be a much more reasonable approach.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

Totally agree with you. These things need to be preserved in some way like physical media.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

who controls the past, controls the future

I think the more relevant bit here is that whoever controls the present, controls the past.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Kinda sounds like we need a decentralized, feterated internet archive for at least each nation and maybe individuals... Or maybe I just want to federate almost everything ^^'

Edit: found a discussion here on that topic in the comments

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Yes this is the answer. Split the data into many little chunks and have as many nodes as want to be involved acting as redundancies on the data.

Frequently publish the factor of safety in terms of data redundancy.

Would this be an application for blockchain or some other technology?

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago

Read all through that article, then all through the comments, to find a donation link. There wasn't one so link for the lazy - https://archive.org/donate/

Imdoingmypart.jpeg

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (6 children)

What if the internet archives, instead of a single site, was a bunch of federated instances sharing content with each other like fediverse?

I am of course very ignorant to how internet archives actually works, and not very tech savy, but would something like I'm suggesting be theoretically possible?

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yes, for storage, if we coordinated enough. Such technologies already exist. But IA also does tons of archival work that isn't so easily distributed. And their lending system isn't easily legally federated.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Ok, but what if we wanted to each take pieces of that tree of knowledge and help others learn from it. Could we possibly hold onto that information and plant our own little trees with seeds? And the more people who had seeds, the faster the tree would ~~download~~ grow.

^Arrrgh matey^

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

water noises

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Their lending system is not part of their core functionality and IMO should be a separate thing.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

Yeah that was my first thought too. That seems like a way better idea than just entrusting it to the Library of Congress as the article suggests. For one thing, the internet archive isn't just American stuff. For another, there's no way the government won't just bend over backwards as soon as a big corporation asks it to. Thirdly, it seems like a much better idea to keep it decentralized and to keep the corporations playing whack-a-mole with it than to just keep giving them one big, static target to aim at.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

you kinda described ipfs

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

It's an interesting idea. It would take a lot of infrastructure though.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Even if we just decentralised/federated the Wayback Machine, that would really be great.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's already working like that, at least on the indexer side. You can create an account and use their app or browser extensions and start snapshotting websites you visit and submit them to the wayback machine. Storage is still centralized in The Internet Archive datacenter though.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago

This is actually really disturbing to me. I normally don’t get involved in anything, but this seems like a winnable fight and it really bothers me for some reason the idea of the Internet Archive being destroyed.

Copyright infringement strike against the Internet Archive. I’ve saved a lot of Internet Archive links as evidence that something happened or existed. I really don’t like the idea of it going away.

What can I do to help this situation go the right way? Where is this lawsuit being taken? Are there courtroom proceedings going on?

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

1,000 words just to say "the Library of Congress should acquire the Internet Archive." Not a bad idea, but man. Sometimes your bosses are really pushy about the wordcount, eh, Lance?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I feel ya. I'm not the writer of the article, just a reader that found it interesting.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

The internet archive has bedn under attack from lawsuites basically since it exists and it's still going strong, I agree that it's a important resource worth lreserving tho!

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

"sound recordings without authorization, neither Plaintiffs nor their artists see a dime. Not only does this harm Plaintiffs and the artists or their heirs by depriving them of compensation, but it undermines the value of music.”

Heirs? What is this, a medieval royal court? No one should see a dime from selling copies of a work created by someone who isn't even alive. Their “heirs” should have to make their own contributions to society if they want to be rewarded with wealth, just like the rest of us.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is there a Plan B if the fight is lost? Move it to another country, probably in the EU, that has a better legal environment? Or some other answer? Because with the current political climate in the US this is far from guaranteed to be won, and the consequences of losing it are dire

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

I'm not sure that the EU will stand up to IP holders here either. You probably need to move it to a dodgy developing nation with no respect for IP rights like a lot of the pirate sites do.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The article uses a slippery slope argument to say that if the Internet Archive loses a case that's basically only after the borrower limit then the entire site will be taken down. And I'm pretty sure they've already lost that lawsuit?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I still don't understand why IA picked a fight with publishers with the emergency library.

IA provides a really valuable service and they're an incredibly juicy target. Going on anti-copyright crusades isn't their mission.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I.. I don't know that it can be

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