this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2024
994 points (98.8% liked)

Privacy

31993 readers
373 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Related communities

Chat rooms

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
994
Internet Archive is in danger (www.battleforlibraries.com)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

It looks like the internet archive is needed assistance, I just heard about this today and figured lemmy could help spread this message around

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago

Exactly. I hate fucking everything about this. I love the internet archive and ^nearly^ all they do.

In principal I love their "covid-19 emergency library" or whatever they called it. In practice? They absolutely know better than to pull stunts and I'm terrified that this will spell the end for one of the greatest knowledge and media resources of the modern age. For shit that was effectively already available to the public through ebook piracy sites.

They already operated on shaky ground, hosting downloads for a metric ton of shit that is unquestionably still under copyright (despite their claims to only be archival of things that are not), skating by on technicalities and by not drawing too much attention to themselves.

Plus, there were so fucking many better ways to do the "free digital library" thing without jeapordizing themselves.

  • Have some volunteers "misuse resources": load an SSD up with the book files, "borrow" some compute power to decrypt/remove drm, pass batches off to existing ebook "dumping" groups to stagger releases and obsfucate the true source. This would ensure that any material they had which was not already available on the high seas would get there.
  • Make a big red banner on the site to a blog post with the generic "While we would never condone piracy or copyright infringement, we understand that times are extremely hard right now [blah blah] here are some links to community guides on how to access learning literature (pirate ebooks) during these trying times [blah blah] Please abide by your local laws."