Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "The Internet Archive Situation Just Got Worse..." video.

@de6um I think the issue is that there hasn't been sufficient consideration paid for the middle ground here. There's a lot of work that's really only of commercial value for a couple years, and some of it may not even be relevant to anybody apart from historians after 10. But, then there's things that do have more staying power, things like the early Disney movies, Agatha Christie novels, early jazz recordings. I wish the system were designed with a better balance because some books are like that and can take time to attract an audience. Moby Dick was published in 1851, but didn't become popular until sometime in the earl 20th century. Meanwhile, a bunch of media is popular for a few years and then is completely lost.
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@feckert7301 Moby Dick is probably the best example. It was written in 1851, but it took many decades before it got a reputation as a classic. During his lifetime it sold fewer than 2,000 copies. Personally, I liked it, although I recommend skipping the chapters about whales as those are rather dated and not super interesting. They're mostly just interesting as a matter of what people of that era thought about whales,very little of it is still considered to be factual in nature.
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TBH, a digital copy takes only slightly less time to make than a physical one does these days. There needs to be some way of ensuring that there's the money available for people to create these works. We can't just give everybody that thinks they want to be a writer or some other sort of artist money in case they create something of value. And there have been times when people have come out of nowhere to create great works of art. I think the real solution is to try to return copyrights to something a bit more moderate. Cut the maximum length down to something reasonable, if you can't generate enough money over the course of 75 years from creation, then you probably spent too much creating it and very few works that are so expensive wind up benefiting society if they are able to continue getting royalties. Most of the royalties typically come in the first few years.
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One of the issues is that school libraries are often the best source of material that kids have. It's a place for the school to get kids hooked on reading books, a skill that greatly improves the mind more than just about anything. If they aren't allowed to carry books for political reasons rather than developmental ones, that causes a lot of problems.
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@TheThreatenedSwan Those aren't typically banned, the libraries just don't buy them if they aren't developmentally appropriate for kids. Even without a ban, there's no point in librarians having those in school libraries as school libraries tend to be smaller and feature a curated collection that's focused on the needs of students of the appropriate age. Books that are going to get a lot of parental complaints are just not going to be in there even without a formal ban.
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@chri-k That's not a bad thing, if publishers don't enforce their rights,then it can be extremely hard to figure out if anybody owns the rights to a particular piece of media. There's a lot of things that over the years were protected and then they weren't because nobody cared enough to extend the registration. Or, the necessary supporting paperwork was lost. If you put something up and years later nobody has challenged it, that's a pretty good hint that the material was at risk of being lost forever.
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The issue here is that they've gone from preserving to distributing. The wayback machine was somewhat iffy from a legal perspective, but creating a library that shares copyright materials is clearly illegal.
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When it was just archiving the web, I think they had a fairly strong leg to stand on, but now that they're duplicating media that's available elsewhere they've crossed the line into definitely a pirate site.
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The issue is that that would be very expensive and thanks to how expansive copyright terms have become, that would be very expensive. By the time you know if something really is abandoned, there may not be any available copies to work form.
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@TheJudge_Carls_Junior_Rep Not really, most of those stories were old enough that they could have found a version that was already expired under the current age requirements. The second of the Grimm Brothers to die died in 1863, so life +70 years would have put that at 1933. Hans Christian Anderson would have been off limits until 1945. I think it's mostly folks like Mark Twain that would have been an issue as he died in 1910, which mean that work wouldn't have been made available until 1980 if the current limits were in place. Those are some more recent sources of material, there were a bunch of other Greek and Roman stuff, as an example, that have never been copyrightable in the US, or really anywhere, due to predating copyright laws by centuries at a minimum.
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@zf8496 2014? It started going wrong during the browser wars where Netscape and Microsoft were releasing competing standards to break the web for the other browser.
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