Record labels hit Internet Archive with new copyright lawsuit

https://torrentfreak.com/record-labels-hit-internet-archive-with-new-400m-copyright-lawsuit-230812/

by EMIRELADERO • 3 years ago

384 231 3 years ago

al2o3cr• 3 years ago

Shorter RIAA: "We stole these recordings with bullshit contracts decades ago, who are YOU to interfere with that????!!!!"

You can see their point, though: obviously Frank Sinatra wouldn't have even bothered recording in the 1950s if he knew that a quarter-century after his death his record company might not make every available cent in profit. /s

jareklupinski• 3 years ago

he might have done it anyway, if he knew what engineers were going to do with those recordings a half century later:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDOQ-y87YnE

bongobingo1• 3 years ago

What a rabbit hole to fall down.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyfQVZHmArA

Humans doing the hard jobs on minimum wage while the robots write poetry and paint is not the future I wanted

~ https://nitter.net/KarlreMarks/status/1658028017921261569 (possibly ~ An AI too...)

realusername• 3 years ago

I love how they always talk about the poor artists which cannot make new songs due to piracy and then they chose to enforce rights on ... Sinatra and a bunch of other long dead artists who will never make a single new song.

staplers• 3 years ago

The movie and music business sure spends a lot of money fighting piracy. This fruitless endeavor draws a lot of parallels with the war on drugs.

jimbob45• 3 years ago

Their wealth managers must be tearing their hair out in frustration. If they instead invested all the money, they could easily weather the coming AI-induced collapse of their industry.

naasking3• 3 years ago

The movie and music business sure spends a lot of money fighting piracy.

If they spent it on providing a no-bullshit, reasonably priced platform that provides access to their whole catalog, then they would be making a lot more money than they would from lawsuits, and piracy would be virtually non-existent.

wredue4• 3 years ago

Most people pirate to get stuff for free. If everything was cheaply, easily available, piracy would exist at similar numbers.

Now, I do agree that “one pirate number doesn’t necessarily equate to one lost sale”. But that’s not what you’re arguing.

Pirates have been saying this for decades, and yet despite content being easier than ever, with pricing falling faster than ever (non-streaming services), piracy is as healthy as ever. If what you were saying is true, you’d expect piracy to have fallen as different people’s barriers for “cheap and easy” were broken through, but that’s not what’s observed.

kmeisthax3• 3 years ago

Yes and no. Making music ubiquitous has been great for stomping out piracy but terrible for revenues. This isn't just a problem of underpricing. In the movies and TV space, all the studios found out that exclusive licensing makes more money because you can drag viewers from one subscription service to another. At the most extreme you have shit like the Disney Vault, which works because some creative work is worth more dead than alive.

If you were correct we would have stuck with everything being on Netflix and Spotify for $10/mo each because it keeps piracy rates down. In practice, while piracy rates have gone back up, they don't hurt the bottom lines of publishers as much as they've claimed[0], at least relative to how much they make from people buying multiple subscriptions. But the law allows them to continue crying crocodile tears about how much money they're losing from old sound recordings being on an archive site.

[0] In other words, one pirate copy is not one lost sale

pessimizer12• 3 years ago

This fruitless endeavor draws a lot of parallels with the war on drugs.

Neither were fruitless. The RIAA keeps the price of culture high, and the war on drugs kept the price of drugs high.

vaylian• 3 years ago

What is the best way to let these greedy bastards know that we disagree with their conduct? Not buying records will only lead to them wrongfully claiming that they "lost revenue due to piracy".

karaterobot• 3 years ago

Don't let that stop you. They'll always have complaints.

xhkkffbf• 3 years ago

How? Set up your own record label and implement your wish list of better terms. If you're reading hacker news, there's a good chance you can do most of the coding for free/stock/spec. Then you can be like totally cool about piracy and drink all of the kool aid about how piracy is just a different form of promotion.

My guess is that you'll come to the same conclusion as me: piracy destroys marketplaces. It forces the honest people to subsidize the free riders. If it were about something like food, I can understand a Jean-Val-Jean argument, but can anyone say with a straight face that they're stealing these fresh cuts just so their baby can listen to ccool music?

I think you'll also come to a grudging recognition of just how expensive it can be to market music. I've always thought the percentages demanded by record companies were outrageous, but when I tried to duplicate their services on my own I quickly learned where the money goes.

The IA is on a crash course to destroy the livlihood of artists, writers and other content creators. Don't ask me why. It doesn't make sense. They provide a nice service for society but now they're out on some crusade.

isykt4• 3 years ago

how expensive it can be to market music.

Did you write this comment in 2001? The cost to produce and promote music has dropped to near zero. SoundCloud rappers have become millionaires. Billie Eilesh recorded her first album in her bedroom.

GhostWhisperer• 3 years ago

i grew up downloading everything from music to games, and windows xp, anything i could get my hands on

these days i do pay for everything, music(spotify), movies(netflix, apple tv), games(steam, gog, itch.io, playstation), to software(app store, gh sponsor, opencollective) – i still pirate though; if netflix has an anime but happens to be dubbed on the wrong language, i'll hit the high seas and get me a copy dubbed in english, no regrets

iforgotpassword• 3 years ago

There's more between "being cool with piracy" and "thinking copyright should hold indefinitely". This is about 78rpm records ffs. All the artists are probably dead by now.

hirako2000• 3 years ago

A couple of fallacies in there.

Distributors have

- bended creative work property laws/precedents to maximise profits.

- Been using marketing as barrier of entry.

- many times used anti competitive practices.

Paying consumers are not subsidising free riders. Given zero or an infinity of pirates the ticket price woụld not change. An effective anti piracy solution doesn't imply pirates would convert into paying consumers, some would of course, and ticket prices would most likely increase rather than decrease. Dubious parallel and nobody is forced. Taxes are forced subsidies. Aside those that's business models and market response.

BoxFour• 3 years ago

The IA is on a crash course to destroy the livlihood of artists, writers and other content creators

Every single artist mentioned by name here has long since passed away, and in some cases even their children have passed away.

satao• 3 years ago

Stop voting in capitalistic assholes who value intelectual and property rights over everything else.

cscurmudgeon2• 3 years ago

In a true free market, there won’t be govt enforcement of IP.

kmeisthax3• 3 years ago

Unfortunately you can't vote None of the Above :/

Support among the US political class for copyright and patent law runs so deep that the main argument for untangling our economy from China's is not "they undercut US labor" or "they manipulate their currency" but "they steal our IP". An interesting choice of words, because that's an exclusive 'we'[0]. US voters have little need for copyrights and patents beyond ensuring that creative works get made. But the US political class is utterly dependent on their continued existence.

BTW, this even extends to Trumpism. Trump was very vocal about China stealing "our IP." The US economy is structured such that you cannot become rich without owning copyrights, patents, oil fields, or real estate. Everything else will be thrown into the abyss of partial post-scarcity.

[0] In some languages (not English) there's an inclusive 'we' and an exclusive 'we'. The latter would be used with the same implication as, say, "We've won the lottery - except for you."

lotsofpulp4• 3 years ago

The only way to start on this path is to support ranked choice voting.

isykt4• 3 years ago

A brick through a window used to be a common way to make a message known.

lakomen4• 3 years ago

They have so many windows nowadays though ;) in too many cities

echelon• 3 years ago

Build AI music tools. Make it easy for the next generation of artists and create a Cambrian explosion of new music to wash out the old, copyright encumbered works.

jacquesm2• 3 years ago

New crappy music.

toomuchtodo3• 3 years ago

Ransomware with no key provided from a jurisdiction that won’t extradite if discussing threat modeling around generic org weaknesses. Everyone is vulnerable to a sufficiently resourced attack, one simply needs to understand their adversary’s defense budget (incident response arrangement, cyber insurance limits) and attack surface.

Educational purposes only, not legal advice, don’t do this.

sschueller• 3 years ago

So DRM...

jazzyjackson5• 3 years ago

Perhaps some kind of rootkit would be just...

dano• 3 years ago

The answer is not palatable because it will take forever: contact your representatives in the federal government and lobby for copyright reform. IA might be luck they were not sued for more. I believe the MP3.com lawsuit is relevant reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMG_Recordings,_Inc._v._MP3.co....

Andrex• 3 years ago

Man, that's just a bad precedent. Space shifting should still apply to the internet and digital files.

account429• 3 years ago

Representative democracy is basically worhtless except for one or two issues that are important to a significant number of people. Not to mention that US copyright and especially enforcement against the internet archive also affects people who are not US citizens and can thus not even pretent that their vote matters here.

fsflover• 3 years ago

Support EFF: https://eff.org

chrisdhoover• 3 years ago

This thread brings back memories. It is refreshing to revisit. If you want to break away, unsubscribe from streaming, share with your friends, by used records, tapes, and cds.

ghastmaster• 3 years ago

This really scares me. The wayback machine is a treasure. I don't know what will happen to it if these cases succeed.

Cypher• 3 years ago

we'll lose it like the great library of alexander

IAmGraydon• 3 years ago

I think you mean Alexandria.

xtracto• 3 years ago

Or like gigapedia : https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2012/3/1/the-disappearing...

Few people remember that. But losing it was such a shame.

ta988• 3 years ago

The great library was lost by abandon not fire. That's a really strongly held belief that's hard to debunk unfortunately.

HenryBemis2• 3 years ago

Imagine a mixture of 1984: Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

On the specifics of the lawsuit.. well if the law us bad, then change the law. But not following the law is not nice.

rvba• 3 years ago

Tbh that's how cliques on wikipedia work.

There are cases when 2 admins "guard" an article and no user can change them. Worst is that wikimedia foundation takes tens of millions and doesnt even bother to spend anything to defend wikipedia from that.

praptak• 3 years ago

In principle, not following an unjust law is a moral obligation. Yes, you can argue the edge cases. I also agree that there's some good in obeying a particular law even if it is a little bad (to uphold respect for law in general).

This doesn't refute the general principle though - unjust laws should be broken. Historically enough repulsive stuff was mandated by law.

jancsika• 3 years ago

On the specifics of the lawsuit.. well if the law us bad, then change the law.

The March on Selma and Greensboro Lunch Counter Sit-ins agree with you.

But not following the law is not nice.

The March on Selma and Greensboro Lunch Counter Sit-ins disagree with you.

account429• 3 years ago

Sometimes civil disobedience ins the only way to change unjust laws.

ohgodplsno• 3 years ago

It'll move to a different country, or its authors will be hounded down by the United States and gigantic corporations.

Working for Sony, UMG, Netflix, any media distribution group, is, as far as I'm concerned, evil. You actively work to make human existence worse. I'd have a word for their lawyers, but I'm sure they're busy being paid hundred of thousands to be sacks of shit.

easyThrowaway• 3 years ago

Lol. Look, after having worked for most of these guys, I can assure you of something: all of them come from old money, have basically a fuck-all understanding of what IA is or does, and It wouldn't surprise me if they were playing some emulated nintendo games on AI's online emulators while being fed this bullshit lawsuit.

As a music producer once told me "it's LA man, there must be something in the water."

If you want a good idea on how these guys operate, check that Fyre Fest documentary on Netflix.

Do you know what they do understand? Lawyers. The same lawyers that told them to sue the Archive because they can make more cash this way (or not, it's not really a cause of concern of their lawyers other than making them spend more money) will tell them to stop keep pushing for a lawsuit once they realize they can lose a lot more money they were planning to make and they have to skip this month trip to Thailand or something.

hunters_laptop3• 3 years ago

internet archive should move their server/business to china or russia so these greedy companies more hard to touch them

consumer4514• 3 years ago

Would they allow permanently archiving content which is censored by their own regimes?

pessimizer12• 3 years ago

Their own governments.

hunters_laptop3• 3 years ago

tbh Im not sure what do you mean, since 40% of my comments at hacker news are get censored, is HN a chinese or russian org?

izzydata• 3 years ago

We need servers in space. I wonder if the latency would be good or bad.

williamtrask• 3 years ago

...huh... there's an idea

Would just routing the data via starlink be good enough? (if you could hide the original location)

hilbert42• 3 years ago

This isn't a new concept. Those of us who are old enough will remember the UK pirate radio station Radio Caroline. It was a ship in international waters broadcasting into areas that required a broadcasting license. It was so effective that it eventually changed the whole broadcasting environment: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Caroline

I reckon there's considerable truth in what kmeisthax said in his post about the US political system, in that copyright and patent laws are so ingrained in US political class thinking that antiquated IP laws will never be reformed.

Perhaps the only practical solution is ignore the US and bypass it altogether. A ship like Radio Caroline equipped with internet servers in international waters may be the only viable way we'll ever get to achieving a fair and equitable solution to the IP mess—that is to just bypass it.

ApolloFortyNine• 3 years ago

So the internet archive is knowing distributing media still under copyright?

Is this not a slam dunk win for the record labels? Sounds like the internet archive officially made recordings available for download.

ghaff6• 3 years ago

The Internet Archive (including the Wayback Machine) basically exists in a legal Gray area (to be generous) that has mostly depended on not doing things (or undoing things) that caught someone's attention who was willing to actually take some action about it. For the most part, the IA doesn't have any more special status than you or I if we were to mirror someone's website or create a comic strip museum.

A lot of what they make available arguably shouldn't be protected by copyright under a rational copyright regime but that's an argument to make to Congress rather than saying the IA can do whatever feels justified to them. (Which can cut both ways once you say the law is whatever you personally think is fair.)

kirksan• 3 years ago

The IA has been skating on thin ice for a long time. They’ve archived a ton of content I generated over the years, most of it copyrighted. In my case I don’t care, I actually appreciate it since I didn’t keep archives as well as I should and occasionally use IA to find my own stuff. Also, my content is worth approximately 25¢. Others are not so forgiving.

What we really need are updated copyright laws that allow for research and preservation. However, people have been calling for updated laws for decades, but powerful copyright holders have stood in the way, so don’t hold your breath.

kevinmchugh2• 3 years ago

They were flaunting copyright laws with books even more egregiously and lost that suit. I think the IA is a deeply important project and wish they'd stop picking these fights.

jazzyjackson5• 3 years ago

Picking these fights is part of the mission, universal access to all knowledge requires pushing boubdaries and changing the law.

arghdos• 3 years ago

The complaint states that when the 78rpm records were converted into digital files, IA reproduced copyrighted recordings without permission. When IA copied those files to a server, that amounted to another unauthorized reproduction

Am I wrong to interpret this as trying to outlaw ripping a CD and uploading to a personal NAS? There’s additional claims about distribution to the public that (may??) seem more reasonable, but that seems like some copyright maximalism trying to rewrite history?

EMIRELADERO2• 3 years ago

Courts have ruled that merely executing an exe file is itself an act of copyright infringment, because the OS copies the contents into RAM. That's how deep it goes.

The reason no users are violating copyright when running software normally is because of a special exception for software in the Copyright Act.

gumby• 3 years ago

I think a lot of that has since gone away.

I remember the battles around '2000 when the record industry tried to get paid for each instance when parts of the music files were buffered (because they were "copies"). They weren't laughed out of court. These days I think they would.

cma• 3 years ago

How about skip protection in portable CD players? It loads bit ahead of time into a little buffer of RAM.

terminous• 3 years ago

Courts have ruled that merely executing an exe file is itself an act of copyright infringment, because the OS copies the contents into RAM

You can't just drop an extraordinary claim like that without a citation. When I search those terms, your comment is the only one I can find that remotely resembles anything like the case you're describing.

teddyh• 3 years ago

So executing software actually isn’t an infringement of copyright, as an exception exists in the law? An explicit exception is an actual exception (unlike “fair use” which remains technically illegal until brought to a trial). AFAIK, IANAL.

gcanyon• 3 years ago

If we're going to be pedantic about it, just playing a piece of music, from whatever medium it is stored in, is making a (n analog and transient) copy of it.

t0mas882• 3 years ago

They can relocate that part to the Netherlands. Copying without public distribution is explicitly legal, and all storage media and smartphones carry a "tax" that's given to the rights holders to compensate them for this.

For a long time downloading was legal (uploading wasn't), due to this. But it has changed sometime in the last decade. While the tax is still there and mandatory, so the copyright-lobbyists won on paper.

In reality people are moving back from streaming to pirate sites and nothing is being done about it.

bluelu• 3 years ago

You are completely mistaken

That fee only covers general piracy. It does not give you the right to copy copyrighted works. In fact, european copyright is much stricter than US copyright. There is no fair use and european copyright (based on the napoleon code) forbids making a copy of copyrighted works except for a few exceptions specifically mentioned in the law (eg a browser displaying a webpage, etc...).

account429• 3 years ago

They can relocate that part to the Netherlands. Copying without public distribution is explicitly legal, and all storage media and smartphones carry a "tax" that's given to the rights holders to compensate them for this.

Given to some rights holders.

drewbug01• 3 years ago

“When Defendants exploit Plaintiffs’ sound recordings without authorization, neither Plaintiffs nor their artists see a dime.

All of the artists are dead.

Not only does this harm Plaintiffs and the artists or their heirs by depriving them of compensation,

Hereditary wealth and continued rent-seeking is a very, very poor argument in favor of eternal copyright protection.

but it undermines the value of music,” the complaint adds.

Music has inherent value and worth that can never be quantified or monetized.

Honestly, screw the record labels. We can argue about the technicalities of copyright law until the cows come home, but this suit is morally disgusting to me.

tptacek• 3 years ago

I'm sure that whatever the labels are doing here is odious, and that there's no validity to the suit, but "all the artists are dead" isn't a valid argument. Artists receive, during their lifetimes, funds valued based on the duration of the label's rights to their work. Copyrights that terminated with the life of the author would drastically reduce the compensation authors got in their own lifetimes.

jtode3• 3 years ago

Is there a distributed archive project to save the content? I could donate a few TB of redundancy.

toomuchtodo3• 3 years ago

You should not be concerned.

rovr138• 3 years ago

explain?

dns_snek• 3 years ago

This isn't exactly what you asked about, but If you're interested in archiving efforts in general, there's an adjacent project: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ (they use Internet Archive for storage)

beej712• 3 years ago

And I'll double down on making sure I never pay the record labels another dime.

Authors and artists: make sure you have a way for me to send you money online.

prox• 3 years ago

A few options for those looking:

Bandcamp, Patreon, Twitch, Ko-Fi, CDbaby, and probably a host of others.

gabereiser• 3 years ago

Soundcloud, Music Gateway, Discogs, Reverb Nation, Sellfy, TuneCore...

pessimizer12• 3 years ago

I like this case. It's about recordings that are 70 years old or more, the vast majority are out of print, and the rest are often precariously in print.

If I'm reading correctly, the silly nature of the claim that

[...] of the 2,749 recordings listed in the complaint, all but a “small sample” are already available to stream or download from licensed online platforms so they “face no danger of being lost, forgotten, or destroyed.”

when the 2,749 recordings have been cherry-picked from

[...] more than 400,000 works [...]

is pretty much an attack on their own claims that

[...] to retain, restore and redistribute content that they believe should never be lost to history [...is...] nothing but a “smokescreen” to hide what amounts to IA offering “free and unlimited access to music for everyone,” regardless of copyright.

Not to mention that the IA constantly looking for copyrighted works uploaded that are not part of the "Great 78 Project" and reducing them to 30 second previews.

Prevailing on this would be a good thing. IA needs a win, even though it doesn't need to be paying to defend itself against another lawsuit. This is obviously vexatious. They're not really concerned with 78s. They're hoping to bankrupt IA with legal expenses, and/or they think that they have the fix in at a particular venue that they think they can steer the case to.

nikanj• 3 years ago

Oh no, not free and unlimited access to art! Anything but that!

tux35• 3 years ago

Think of the middlemen and distributors, they need to get paid, otherwise who will be making the music?

IndySun12• 3 years ago

Is this 'Art access' you refer to something you make also? Or are you only referring to 'Art' other people make? The distinction is critical.

djbusby• 3 years ago

2749÷400000 = 0.0068725

So, 0.7% which seems like a very, very small sample.

Did they spend time checking 400k tracks to find these?

mumblemumble• 3 years ago

If it were a proper random sample then it would be a decent-sized sample that should permit the calculation of a useful confidence interval on a non-negligible proportion. The cool thing about random samples is that the size you need is generally not dependent on the size of the population you're sampling from.

If it's not a random sample then I think we probably shouldn't allow them to get away with using the word "sample" at all. It's a bowl of cherries that they picked.

mycall• 3 years ago

Oh, I was wondering why so many of my search hits were 30 seconds long, but there is so much other stuff that is great.

feedsmgmt• 3 years ago

Time to boycott the labels participating in this lawsuit.

dariosalvi78• 3 years ago

This a fight between barbarians and civilization. Each one pick their own side. History will tell us which one was right.

mschuster91• 3 years ago

Is there any way we can get rid of these rent-seeking parasites destroying everything in their path out of their greed?

NetOpWibby• 3 years ago

That's the million dollar question

boomboomsubban3• 3 years ago

I don't understand, did the record labels DMCA strike the recordings? The article says something about a cease and desist that was ignored, but my understanding is that the IA follows DMCA claims so there must be something more missing about this story.

Sticking the IA with more legal fees as another poster suggested seems plausible.

slenk• 3 years ago

Yo ho yo ho a pirate's life for me.

This does not make me want to support record labels

aquariusDue• 3 years ago

As an interesting side note almost 24 hours ago (roughly) I believe someone posted a thread on 4chan's /g/ urging people to back up the things they cared about on Internet Archieve warning about an upcoming takedown/court case, looks like they weren't fooling around.

whycome2• 3 years ago

Whenever we hit upon copyright battles in the USA, I’m reminded that the national anthem steals its tune from a well established English drinking song. A drinking song — basically understood that it “belongs to everyone and is shared for when we collectively drink and be merry together”.

pixelatedindex• 3 years ago

I had no idea! Would you be able to shed light on the name of the song?

p1mrx• 3 years ago

To Anacreon in Heaven: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eg7z0-6Nhc

whycome2• 3 years ago

Wiki

Although it is often described as a "drinking song", Lichtenwanger states that "To Anacreon in Heaven" "was not a barroom ballad, a drinking ditty to be chorused with glasses swung in rhythm", but "convivial, ... in a special and stately way".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anacreontic_Song

So the “drinking song” description is challenged. But still…

Either way, the anthem is a remix. (From times when that was a part of extending our culture…)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrafactum

westcort• 3 years ago

Enjoy them while they last by streaming them here: https://www.locserendipity.com/PushPlay.html

And LPs here: https://locserendipity.com/LP.html

(And donate to IA)

j0057• 3 years ago

The complaint states that when the 78rpm records were converted into digital files, IA reproduced copyrighted recordings without permission. When IA copied those files to a server, that amounted to another unauthorized reproduction, and when it transferred those copies to the public, yet another.

That first step, making a digital copy of a copyrighted work, is not illegal to my knowledge of at least Dutch copyright law — you're allowed to make a copy "for your own studies", although it's not allowed to then give this copy away, or in general to make the copy for somebody else.

I also thought that copyright lasts for 70 years, so that all pre-1953 work is in the public domain, or did Disney succeed in extending this period?

lakomen4• 3 years ago

I seem to very vaguely remember some shenanigans in the past 3 years that lifted the 70 years restriction, but not sure if it was the US or EU.

nukeman• 3 years ago

It’s 70 years after the death of the author. So if Andy Weir died tomorrow, The Martian wouldn’t enter the public domain until 2093.

IndySun12• 3 years ago

"...70 years.."

That rule does not apply globally. Depends on where you live.

qingcharles3• 3 years ago

Copyright in music is a nightmare. I used to work in this area, setting up one of the very first legal streaming services. There are about five different rights attached to each piece of music:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_licensing

(See also Taylor Swift re-recording all her own music)

MrVandemar• 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Swift_masters_controver...

For the write up on Taylor Swift's reasons for re-recording her early albums. Interesting read.

... copyright is deeply broken.

cannabis_sam• 3 years ago

The ONLY reason these disgusting predators can colonize human cultural output like this is the antisocial, and tremendously stupid copyright laws enacted.

It always makes me wonder why people want a tiny cartel of companies to own humanity’s music culture, and subsequently be able to bully companies like Spotify, Youtube and others into enforcing extrajudicial policies that maintain the cartel’s dominance.

Like, seriously, what is the perceived societal value here???

lotsoweiners• 3 years ago

Because normal people don’t care about “human cultural output” or “societal value” and think people who use those kinds of terms sound like blowhards. The rest of us just want reasonably cheap, convenient entertainment. Artists and others in the music biz want to get paid. Nothing here that is very hard to understand.

mixmastamyk2• 3 years ago

Normal people do like free stuff it turns out. And typically not going to pay when it's ancient anyway. Instead of going without, they could give it a try. They'd like that too—if they knew it was possible and even encouraged.

uni_rule2• 3 years ago

This point would work better if the vast majority of artists actually were paid well.

IndySun12• 3 years ago

So the answer to 'disgusting predators' is to declare all 'art' (ludicrous distinction, why not everything, and why art?) free? Why not go after the 'disgusting predators' instead?

zdragnar• 3 years ago

The value of art is in the experience of observing it (excepting the case of proxy transactions for money laundering).

A picture or video of a bike doesn't substitute for an actual bike if you need to ride it to the store.

An illicit digital copy of a song, however, is pretty fungible for an officially licensed digital copy.

I am much more inclined to suggest we look for better business models to support creators than compel them to live in poverty for my amusement (or deny their children the right to manage their estate).

kragen4• 3 years ago

you seem to be suggesting that abolishing copyright is tantamount to abolishing private property

this is obviously nonsense; no human society is known without private property, though there are extremely well-attested societies without writing, without farming, without war, without monogamy, without women, and without clothing

by contrast, all human societies were free of copyright for hundreds of thousands of years until 313 years ago, and in practice most still are

nobody is suggesting making it legal to carry away other people's paintings, records, and books because they are 'art'

we are suggesting making it reliably legal to copy them, because the freedom to reproduce art is something that nobody should ever be denied; retelling stories you've been told, and perhaps playing music you've heard, is as fundamental to being human as private property is. laws granting monopolies on stories and songs for the sake of profit are an intolerable abomination

jazzyjackson5• 3 years ago

You are free to repeat what you've heard, are you not?

So where do you draw the line and say "no, this is intellectual property, you are not allowed to take it with you"

(For my own part I've been coming around to thinking of it as a consent framework and not a property framework. I might refrain from distributing photos I have a copy of because someone in the photo asked me not to. Or delete a video I took at a kareoke bar because the singer is embarrased - not because they own the content and can sue me for distributing it, but because I want to be respectful of someone else's wishes.)

amelius2• 3 years ago

Yes, it was a mistake. But now these companies have power and the law won't change.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 3 years ago

Here is the complaint

https://ia802701.us.archive.org/2/items/gov.uscourts.nysd.60...

And here is Exhibit A: Sound Recordings at Issue

https://ia802701.us.archive.org/2/items/gov.uscourts.nysd.60...

qingcharles3• 3 years ago

Can anyone find anywhere on the IA where they explain the process they are using to archive these 78s?

They have a brief link to Audacity if you want to do it yourself, but no-one do they explain their process for doing it themselves. Very opaque :(

ShadowBanThis01• 3 years ago

I would get a 78-optimized needle for my turntable, set it for 45 RPM (since it doesn’t have 78), and capture it through a high-quality ADC. Then I’d speed it up in post. I’ve done this.

I imagine that contributors use different methods. Old record players used thorn needles (as in plant thorns). A purist might do that and record from the player’s horn with a mic.

One annoyance I encountered in capturing old mono content is the lack of a filter in the audio software I’ve used that would keep only the mono content of a stereo recording. A lot of the crackles on a mono record are in stereo, being on only one side of a groove.

jazzyjackson5• 3 years ago

https://great78.archive.org/preservation/

qingcharles3• 3 years ago

Thank you!

isykt4• 3 years ago

If IA is dismantled, and doesn’t manage to survive on its Canadian or other outposts, historians will look back on its destruction with disdain. Cultural heritage destroyed so corporate stooges can afford another yacht or whatever.

The only way to fight this is to pirate the fuck out of everything. Seriously. Fuck DRM, fuck gatekeepers, free information NOW and ALWAYS.

amelius2• 3 years ago

Or run IA like SciHub.

pyuser583• 3 years ago

Historians are very, very used to siloed and proprietary knowledge.

LocalH• 3 years ago

Piracy is preservation. Always has been. Always will be.

ikekkdcjkfke• 3 years ago

Enforcers of copywrite on materials that currently isn't being sold are Book Burners

isykt4• 3 years ago

Agreed. There should be an active sale clause for all copyrighted material, including video games. If you want to make money from the work you “own,” then fucking do it. Emulators exists for most systems. For books, the marginal cost of epub distribution is essentially zero and any high school kid can make one for you on a Sunday afternoon.

pessimizer12• 3 years ago

That's not how things work anymore. They'll just destroy all references to it, the search engines will eventually blackhole the years that people were discussing IAs shutdown in favor of more current results about comic book movies and Trump, and the fact that it ever existed or was ever useful will become another Russian conspiracy theory.

Eventually, Amazon will open a site called "Internet Archive" where you can stream 50s and 60s television commercial free, and the circle will be complete.

livinginfear• 3 years ago

I've donated multiple times to IA. I can't live without the Wayback Machine. I have a question about the Wayback Machine that someone here might know the answer to: Sometimes a website may be imaged 10 times across the years, but hasn't changed since the first time it was crawled. Is there some system in place to avoid storing the redundant, duplicate data?

kragen4• 3 years ago

governments burn libraries

zugi• 3 years ago

If copyright laws were still reasonable, like the original term of 14 years - renewable once for 14 more if the author is still alive - none of these 70+-year-old recordings would still be under copyright.

The U.S. Constitution authorizes copyright as a limited monopoly granted to authors and inventors, for a limited time, in order to promote progress in science and the useful arts. A system that allows lawyers to bury old works 70+ years after they were created, by authors who are long since dead, is clearly out of control.

helpfulmandrill• 3 years ago

Does IA have some sort of legal fund one can donate to?

Edit: answered my own question: https://archive.org/donate

Record labels hit Internet Archive with new copyright lawsuit

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