If anything, the players slapping each other on the ass cheering each other on as they lose game after game seems like the problem here. Not criticism from fans.
Maybe they could pick one sport -- archiving things -- and focus on that for a while?
They rely very heavily on public support, politically and financially. You're participating in a public pile-on, which absolutely can damage them.
> Maybe they could pick one sport -- archiving things -- and focus on that for a while?
Archiving them without sharing them? What's the point? Certainly that's not their mission.
They've been very successful with multiple projects; it's also part of pushing the envelope - part of their mission - politically, socially, and technologically. Innovative organizations have a lot failures. I think they are doing great, except for the emergency lending library, and one mistake isn't
IMHO you and others are just finding fault, joining in on the sport of piling on. This is your team, and the IA is a critical resource and not, at all, a sport. Instead of treating it like one (I know the metaphor was my idea, but that's how people seem to treat it), we'd better fight for it if we want it.
Who will stand up for it if not you? While you are playing social sports, who else is out there to save IA?
Most archives require you to visit in person. It's annoying to tech people, but there are many reasons for it that extend beyond the obvious copyright issues that Internet Archive keeps tripping over.
One is that given limited resources and the endless amount of material to conserve, archive, digitize, and develop metadata for so that people in the future can even find it, things like "let's start our own financial institution" and "let's pick a fight over 78 RPM records where even Lessig says we'll probably be sued for 25x our annual budget" tend not to come up in preservation organizations.
Likewise cool ideas like "how about we let the general public post comments on albums and videos and even let them post links" tend to get shot down as archivists have better things to do than police porn spam all day.
Archiving sucks and is expensive and thankless so of course they want to be a library, too.
Unfortunately to do so means you have to understand and follow the rules. Making copyrighted books, video game ROMS, and the most popular song of all time downloadable while asking for donations isn't how it's done.
Again, things like "Let's make Donkey Kong playable in a web browser hosted at our domain" does not normally come up in discussions at libraries. It's a bunch of well-intentioned kids and I love them for it, but enough already. It's a failed experiment.
Fix the strategy, put a grownup in charge of the thing, and they'll find financial support from individuals and institutions far easier to come by.
Failed? Because one project went wrong? They are incredibly successful - one large success after another, and they archive more and make more available to the public than any other 'archive'.
Maybe those other questions don't come up for traditional archivists, but IA delivered. The idea that archives should sit inaccessible to the public is bizarre, I think, to everyone but (some?) archivists.
It's easy to sit back and criticize others. They delivered. I use IA all the time.
The primary duty of an archive is to protect and preserve materials. A library has a different set of responsibilities and requirements.
Over the years Archive.org turned into a catch-all for Brewster's increasingly wacky projects and I must be looking at different data because I don't see a lot of wins. And since the various efforts aren't particularly related in risk or goals, perhaps they should be structured and run in a fashion so that one effort couldn't destroy the others. And foremost that the archival materials are safe.
IA is a great resource but frankly the breadth is tiny compared to what's out there in the real world. Their jewels (and what seems like should be their expertise) is the web crawl but even that is a mess. Meanwhile you may want to familiarize yourself with what's out there in the real world:
> The primary duty of an archive is to protect and preserve materials. A library has a different set of responsibilities and requirements.
I think their name is confusing to a professional, perhaps. Here's IA's mission: https://archive.org/about/
"The Internet Archive ... is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, people with print disabilities, and the general public. Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge."
So they think of themselves as a library. Regardless, they are what they are. It doesn't matter what other institutions do.
The Open Library initiative resulted in a lawsuit from four publishers that they lost on Summary Judgment -- in other words, their behavior was so clearly illegal that hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and EFF briefs were unable to raise a single issue that the judge thought deserved a trial.
Internet Archive Federal Credit Union was shut down by the feds for "Unwillingness to open accounts within the field of membership, make loans, and establish operations in the low-income community where the credit union was chartered to serve; Violations of the Bank Secrecy Act and USA PATRIOT Act; and Weakening financial conditions and mounting losses."
The Great 78 project resulted in a pending $621 million lawsuit and their defense is that pops and crackles allows them to publish 400,000 records because it's Fair Use. I think we both know how that one turns out.
In the Hachette lawsuit, where IA decided Covid gave them the right to let people download unlimited copies of modern copyrighted books, it came out in discovery that they weren't keeping accurate records of the books they were loaning out before the panic. The judge ruled that even the previous effort where they only loaned out one copy at a time was improper. So other libraries had to do work and make things inaccessible, too.
There's more, but it's ongoing stupid behavior. In any other organization, a pattern of decisions like this would result in leadership change. To preserve the archived materials that do not exist anywhere, I'm going to speak up about it.
They have a mission (you didn't quote it correctly) and none of this helps that mission. And as a 501c3 they deserve more scrutiny from the public, not less.
> They have a mission (you didn't quote it correctly)
Perhaps you can show us where it was wrong? lol
All leadership has failures; it would be a failure of management otherwise; a fundamental misunderstanding of risk. It's also irrational to look at only failures and not successes - like talking only about the player's 3 missed penalty kicks without ever mentioning their 101 successful ones. It's like describing Steve Jobs to someone who doesn't know them as the failure who founded Next, without mentioning the rest. Look at the endless failures in the FAANG companies, and all the VC investments, etc. Have you visited Meta's VR world recently? How is your Apple Car driving? Your self-driving Tesla? Those people must not know what they're doing.
Attacking the failures in hindsight is just serving another agenda, and of course when something goes wrong, there's blood in the water for a toxic response. The question is, do you want to sacrifice all the great good of IA? And who will take on leadership next or start another project, knowing you and your angry mob will do the same when there are inevitably setbacks? Look at the response to IA, Mozilla, etc.
From their Form 990: "Internet Archive was founded in 1996 to build an Internet library with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format including texts, audio, movies, images, software and web pages."
Note that it does not talk about making things publicly downloadable and available to the general public. Archives work this way for a reason.
They've increased their scope and changed a bunch of pages as they position toward fundraising and facing lawsuits. From the page you (misquoted): "Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge."
The first step in doing this is to collect and organize the knowledge. You then provide access gradually and within the law so as not to get sued out of existence. If the law is unclear, you lobby to change it (thus the original post) and/or work with others to expand the law.
If you want to bait a hook and risk a lawsuit in hopes of setting case law, you manage the risk. Maybe make 4 albums downloadable instead of 400,000. And if you're arguing for extensions to Controlled Digital Lending, well you better make sure you have your record keeping straight before you make your entire library openly downloadable without restriction.
If you insist on responding, please provide a list of these "wins" you're so certain of. I see a tiny staff that does amazing things, assets in the single digit millions, and nearly a billion dollars in liabilities across multiple lawsuits.
You have expertise and I think you have a lot to contribute. But when someone speaks to me with contempt, dismissal, condescenion, I pretty much ignore the content of what they say, and I think that's true of anyone listening. The tone overwhelms the message. I don't find that I'm curious or try to understand, I just see you as, in a sense, an attacker.
Maybe they could pick one sport -- archiving things -- and focus on that for a while?
https://ncua.gov/newsroom/press-release/2016/internet-archiv...
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/internet-a...