You approach this from a perspective of realism. The law is what it is and IA is wrong according to the plain interpretation of the law. Except that's not how everybody lives. Some people do what they believe is right regardless of the consequences. They will fight fights they are guaranteed to lose. Not because it makes sense but because that's who they are. The people who get mad that idealists fight losing battles tend not to be pragmatic fighters for change but people who will never fight at all because "it's just not worth it" or "the risk/reward doesn't make sense". Idealism doesn't make rational sense. Idealists mostly just lose. But the world still needs people who are not motivated by pragmatic self-interest.
Your disgust is misplaced. Your disgust should be reserved for those who exploit and hurt others. Not for idealists who fight against impossible odds. Especially when the cause (challenging how copyright law works) is one you support.
You make him into a martyr because you agree. The other characterization is he's someone standing for theft. I don't see how one can reasonably apply your perspective to problems or disputes in the world. He's good because he's an idealist without regard? Yawn.
It certainly is when you knowingly use someone's work without compensating them for it when you are required to by law. Acting like it isn't because it's an intangible thing is a semantic point and not the political statement you are making it out to be.
> Your disgust is misplaced. Your disgust should be reserved for those who exploit and hurt others. Not for idealists who fight against impossible odds. Especially when the cause (challenging how copyright law works) is one you support.
I don't think so. IA is a valuable resource for the Wayback Machine and other endeavors which are far more seated in fair use or preservation. Choosing to sacrifice the rest of IA for a grandiose or idealized vision of how the world should work is a betrayal of those who donate to IA in hopes of funding the much more tangible goal. If he wanted to take the stance he took, he should have spun the library component out of IA and served it as a separate legal entity to take on that risk.
Maybe the community trust in IA has been misplaced. The mission on their website clearly says they want to serve "All Knowledge" but I'm not alone in thinking it would be best for them to narrow their scope to just internet-related things, and specifically, things that aren't served by other archive or library sources.
IA is currently used to host and distribute large quantities of software, games, and other media in a quasi-legal mindset that is truly not something that is easily justified. Is having every Xbox 360 ISO publicly available for download on IA really serving the same mission as archiving all of the random blogs people have written on the internet? Is serving in-copyright published books?
I think the problem is that IA has multiple missions that all compete, and broadly, people assumed that they would act in a way that wouldn't jeopardize the rest of the archive.
> Choosing to sacrifice the rest of IA for a grandiose or idealized vision of how the world should work is a betrayal of those who donate to IA in hopes of funding the much more tangible goal. If he wanted to take the stance he took, he should have spun the library component out of IA and served it as a separate legal entity to take on that risk.
Hard agree, and this is how I've felt since they started this whole boondoggle.
> Maybe the community trust in IA has been misplaced. The mission on their website clearly says they want to serve "All Knowledge" but I'm not alone in thinking it would be best for them to narrow their scope to just internet-related things, and specifically, things that aren't served by other archive or library sources.
I'm a librarian/archivist and my very first career goal back in the 90s was to work for the IA - digital preservation is why I went into the field. They've essentially torched my opinion of them by doing this, and I was one of their biggest supporters/proponents. Even my most charitable readings of their actions lead me to think that either their egos got in the way (because oh goodness did they ever get accolades within the profession and librarianship/archivism has a severe problem with not thought out armchair activism) or they're just idiots when it comes to tactics and strategy. Either of which suggest to me that they are thoroughly unsuited to run an archive of any importance.
You're angry that IA is not run by rational pragmatists, but you don't seem to appreciate that projects like these never are. Some people live by idealism and die by idealism. I get that from the outside it looks pointless to set a valuable project on fire like this. Like you I don't want AI to self-immolate. But it's not a betrayal of any kind. The assumptions you made about IA were wrong and you were wrong to project assumptions of pragmatism on an organization that fundamentally isn't.
Your disgust is misplaced. Your disgust should be reserved for those who exploit and hurt others. Not for idealists who fight against impossible odds. Especially when the cause (challenging how copyright law works) is one you support.