In reply to Taticat.
Earier I mentioned the CCE, Archive.org’s scans of it are even directly linked from copyright.gov ( I thought they might be locally hosted there, but are not.) It would be somewhat embarassing, if a semi-officialyl backed partnerships collection were to become unavailable because of the actions of various corporate rights. At some point IA WAS considered on par with traditional libraries.
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In reply to James Rogers.
Maybe storing a copy of all archived data in a safe place until the day psychopaths are removed from power.
]]>If you control the Information… You control the Population
]]>In reply to Vincent Giannell.
How else are they going to pay for their private jets?
]]>Someone creates something that immeasurably helps people, but because it hurts the profits of the super powerful, they try to shut it down.
]]>Are these record labels publishing recordings of these discs at this time, or are they out of print? If they are out of print and don’t intend to print, they are in effect abandoned just like old books and discontinued software. Is TIA interested in the physical vinyl records as historical artifacts or just recordings from them? Preservation of one or the other presumably takes on different intentions, methods, and legalities.
]]>This doesn’t make sense. If you want to survive this, you need to stop wasting time with letter-writing campaigns and get serious. You need a good attorney — someone aggressive, strategic, and not afraid to put the fear of god into the other side. You should be countersuing them for at least twice what they’re asking for. There are dozens of grounds to do it if you have an attorney with an ounce of imagination: unlawful interference with operations, damage to organisational reputation, attempts to chill fair use and educational access, malicious misuse of copyright claims, and reckless disregard for the public interest, just for a start.
This isn’t just about preserving old music, it’s about the right to preserve history full stop, and the Internet Archive is standing exactly where traditional libraries, museums, and cultural institutions have always stood. Lending systems for physical media have existed for decades and no one sued them into oblivion.
Strategically, you’re better off pushing to get a countersuit filed immediately and forcing this in front of a judge as fast as possible. You need to put them on tilt. Make them spend money, time, and energy reacting to you instead of dictating the terms. Right now they’re operating like they assume you’ll fold. If you go straight at them, hard and fast, there’s every chance they’ll panic or crumble before this ever reaches trial. But you have to hit first and hit hard.
The only thing bullies like this respect is a real, immediate threat of loss. Make it expensive for them. Make it public. Make them regret ever thinking they could erase you.
]]>In reply to Jonathan Hasford.
As I understand it, the MMA applied a federal copyright to 78RPM records when it had previously been up to US States. There were still 78RPMs in copyright under the law of California though. It seems as if the law made it easier to enforce copyright on music online by making it a USA-wide standard.
I would favour deleting those still in copyright. Why risk losing the entire Internet Archive over this? We cannot expect the courts to agree with the “universal access to all knowledge” slogan.
]]>In reply to Erhannis.
[quote]
(It IS named the “Internet Archive”.)
[/quote]
It is. However, taken as a whole, it is the “Internet” part that is subservient to the “Archive” part rather than the other way around.
All those “side projects” you mentioned are the Archive’s entire reason for being: IA does stuff that other libraries and archives can’t or won’t do due to constraints of time, money, etc. Yes, the Wayback Machine is used by a lot of people, but it still represents only a part of what the Archive is trying to do: make the sum total of human knowledge available to all. The Internet just happens to be the means they use to make it accessible to everyone.
(Viewed this way, all those “side projects” suddenly make a lot more sense.)
Everyone has their own favourite bit of IA, but it is *all* important because even seemingly obscure things like 78 records are still part of our past. And if it is part of our collective past, the Archive is interested in trying to preserve it and make it available for future generations to view, understand, and enjoy (and reuse).
The point being: we can’t pick and choose the parts of the Archive we’d like to see survive – this is very much an “all or nothing” proposition. The IA isn’t fighting over some 78 records relatively few people care about. Rather, they are contesting the current US law which says, in essence, that it is okay for US politicians to re-write copyright law so that things that were previously in the public domain (like 78s) are suddenly taken out of it whenever a rights owner happens to decide they haven’t yet wrung enough nickels out of something someone long-dead created decades ago.
The original idea behind copyright law was to give creators a decade or two of protection to allow them to make money off their creations. Unfortunately, the law has now metastasised into something far beyond what it was originally supposed to do.
(I mean, which of us thinks that an audio recording from half a century ago hasn’t yet turned a fair profit for the author? Only groups like the RIAA seem to hold this view and deem it reasonable.)
If there is a problem here, I’d say it has to do with deficiencies in US copyright law and its grossly disproportionate favouring of rights holders, rather than with what IA is or isn’t doing.
]]>In reply to Lucy Wright.
[quote]
I hope that you don’t mind if I express some dissenting comments. Did you check this before starting the Great 78 Project?
[/quote]
I cannot speak for the Archive, but here is what happened: The Internet Archive preserving 78s was legal at the time IA was doing it. What suddenly made the Great 78 Project illegal was the passage of the Music Modernization Act *after* the recordings had been preserved and posted online.
The Archive cannot hope to check on laws when new copyright laws are created out of thin air, are written solely for the benefit of rightholders rather than the public, and have the ability to make things that were once legal now illegal after the fact.
Believe me, I am a strong believer in double-checking stuff, too, but the Archive is not doing anything wrong here. Rather, US politicians have made it wrong by passing laws out of thin air that put the Archive in the wrong after the fact.
(And yes, it is just as ridiculous as it sounds.)
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