Comments by "Mark Pawelek" (@mark4asp) on "The Death of the Internet Archive" video.

  1. Re: Internet archive. Two arguments Internet Archive could use is that 1) they provide copies of books no longer in print (OOP), and or that they provide digital copies (rather than paper copies) of books unavailable in digital form. Consider an OOP book, for example: "The theory of democratic elitism; a critique" by Peter Bachrach, 1968. It is not in print. Nor is it likely to ever get into print again as the audience for it must be tiny. So no one is actually making money by distributing it. Yet at the Internet Archive the DOWNLOAD OPTIONS say "No suitable files to display here. EPUB and PDF access not available for this item". So, had the Internet archive submitted a defence that they made avaiable almost impossible to obtain OOP books - they'd had a more convincing argument. I think the publishers went after them because many of the books Internet Archive scanned were still in print. Had Internet Archive restricted themselves to making available either out of copyright and out of print books I doubt the publishers would've gone after them.
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