Mastodawn

@arstechnica go underground

mike805 Nov 3

@Sassinake @arstechnica Nobody really knows where the shadow libraries came from, do they?

The good thing is they exist. That both makes sure nothing gets lost permanently, and sets an upper bound on how evil the publishers can be. Much like file sharing did for the music industry.

and torrenting keeps some media series alive, like Willow, to name one I know of.

mike805 Nov 3

@Sassinake @arstechnica I think even Westworld is only available on bittorrent right now? Or did they restore that to streaming? For a while it was unavailable.

Cancelled tv series, and other abandoned media, like music albums, and books.

Especially banned books, which run the danger of being 'altered' to fit the current Regimes.

mike805 Nov 3

@Sassinake @arstechnica That's actually the good thing about BitTorrent. You cannot alter a torrent once it's been created. Although they do need to upgrade it to sha256 for new torrents.

I mean, it's like backup for project Gutenberg... but also remember the WikiLeaks back up way back when?

and wikipedia can also be backed up

mirrors.

Mirrors everywhere: we are Legion.

and for every country that falls to the Dark side, another votes to defeat it, another storms its capital and the people reclaim their country... from the real 'bad' minority: the Rich!

@arstechnica
Books etc are not webpages.
IA tried to invent their own rules for copyright material.
Even their free downloads have much copyright material illegally uploaded.

In Ireland & UK real libraries loan, books, CD, DVD, Audiobooks etc, and online ebooks, magazines & newspapers.

They pay the publisher price and the authors get per loan royalty.

IA deserved to lose and got off lightly.

@raymaccarthy @arstechnica

Sebastian Diaz

Nov 3

The proper recourse should have been to have these materials flagged (by the authors/publishers) and then subsequently removed by IA, not to tear down the whole thing. IA itself has a loan/borrow feature for a vast majority of its collection, it’s not just a free-for-all.

@sebastiandiaz @arstechnica
Authors have better stuff to do than check sites being pirates. The onus was on IA to only have PD content, like Project Gutenberg. They deliberately scanned and upload content they knew was copyright.

They still have copyright books for actual download.

IA deliberately set out to behave like a free version of Zlib pirate site.

@arstechnica @raymaccarthy

Sebastian Diaz

Nov 3

That’s a fair point, for sure, but I still don’t see attempts at killing IA as a net positive for society in the long run. I agree, though, that they shouldn’t have been as indiscriminate as they have been and instead works with authors/publishers directly (or indirectly) to have some sort of setup similar to how libraries do it.

@sebastiandiaz @arstechnica
They set up to archive Web Pages.
Then they started sharing supposed PD scans as PDFs, with little oversight, calling themselves Library of Alexandria.

Anyone can start a library loaning copyright ebooks online. The Irish libraries are free (paid by taxes) and legally loan copyright material online., There are US Libraries with online.

They deliberately ignored how libraries worked and tried to justify it by Covid. The regular legal ebook libraries were running.

@sebastiandiaz @arstechnica
All they needed to do was close their illegal "Open Library", well actually, never have started it without due diligence to see how existing legal libraries loaned ebooks.

They shot their own feet off. No-one was aiming to "kill" the Internet Archive.

Google should never have won the case to scan copyright material, but they claimed they were NOT making it available on the Internet.

dasparadoxon Nov 3

@arstechnica they still have very good how-to-draw books that can be borrowed.