Internet Archive does not delete anything. Sometimes they leave the "item" (URL) up and block downloads. Recently they have started "darking" things en masse, which removes them from search results.
A sane solution would be to leave the items up, block download of the full file, and make excerpts available. They do this for many items where you cannot download the mp3 yet the spectrogram (jpg image) remains available.
Archive.org is at a crossroads and the people who manage it have made some very curious decisions lately.
>leave the items up, block download of the full file, and make excerpts available.
This is what Google does with Google Books. I imagine the Internet Archive is trying to avoid it because Books is no longer a repository of works, it's a search index. If you find a source you'd like to read, you're on your own to find a copy. Large parts of their collection are out of print, and this can be very difficult.
It's still a useful tool with those limitations, certainly, but it's not an archive anymore.
An archive is typically restricted access to avoid just the sort of copyright problem we're seeing here. In the past, this meant having to visit the materials onsite -- even if you then just fired up a computer to look at them. Universities liked this for a few reasons, and it fit in with their typical gatekeeping nonsense as a bonus.
Exhibiting or publishing the work is different. Museums show tiny thumbnails (though this is finally changing) and libraries have their own rules, complete with weird little signs around the copy machines that people used to take more seriously. The lawsuit that set the rules for Google applies here. Yes, it sucks and it's annoying to tech people, but if the goal is preservation then it's obvious how things must be run. And what you can get away with while you wait for rights to expire or laws to change.
Providing excerpts to show what you have, then providing a way for qualified researchers to access the full work has been the tradition. Even for the 500,000+ books they had to take down due to the lawsuit, those remain available for people with print disabilities.
They even had an exemption for video games, but they forgot to renew the paperwork and the Librarian of Congress removed the exemption during the last triennial review. So we lost freedom there due to sloppy administration by Internet Archive.
Yes, exactly. The Internet Archive was founded in direct response to closed archives-being open is the entire point. Their goal is not preservation if it's locked in a vault- their mission statement is "to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge."
Universal access to knowledge is illegal under the American copyright regime, and it seems the people who run it have decided to fight to the end rather than give up their mission. It'll probably lead to the destruction of the whole project, but I do find it admirable in a quixotic way.
Do you have a link to them losing an exemption because of paperwork? My understanding was that the Copyright Office makes the sole determination on exemptions during triennial reviews, and they blocked it last year due to the usual regulatory capture and industry lobbying.
If you review the history of the archive you will see that their mission changed over time. They didn't even ask for donations until they set the building on fire.
You can still find old help articles on the site where qualified researchers are instructed to ask permission to log into their Unix servers directly. Complete with privacy rationalizations like "being able to see what people are doing on the same computer is no different than peeking over a shoulder in a reading room."
Early form 990s tell a very different mission. They pivoted for a number of reasons, and I generally support the mission. But you have to obey the law to protect the assets. And if you want to press the law, you have to be very smart about it. Like, oh, testing 10 records instead of 400,000. And doing it under a different LLC so you don't lose the Wayback Machine to some dumbass AI company because you can't be bothered to keep track of how many books you're lending out.
> Do you have a link to them losing an exemption because of paperwork?
"The librarian renewed all existing exemptions except for the exemption for accessible access to video games, for which there was no petition for renewal."
I went and checked myself, and they have evolved a lot more than I remembered. For the better, I think, but you're certainly right that they could be going about this in a more legally adept way.
The exemption mentioned in that article isn't about hosting video games online- you may have confused two exemptions. That one was for accessibility in the sense of access for people with disabilities (alternate input devices, etc). It was only added in the 2021 review, and the Internet Archive wasn't one of its backers.
The exemption for remote access to video games was a separate and new proposal, and the Copyright Office blocked it after pressure from industry lobbyists.
A sane solution would be to leave the items up, block download of the full file, and make excerpts available. They do this for many items where you cannot download the mp3 yet the spectrogram (jpg image) remains available.
Archive.org is at a crossroads and the people who manage it have made some very curious decisions lately.