Internet Archive is in danger

Modern corporations are a damned plague. Most of these fuckers would destroy our whole cultural heritage in a heartbeat if it meant making a profit.

Yes, corporations exist to make profit, but come on, there are limits.

there are limits
I am glad you have a moral centre.
But that is the capitalist way. A Redditor once wrote: "*Corporations have no morals, no ethics, no code of conduct, no feelings, no empathy, and zero accountability. They have one goal and one goal only: to increase profits at all costs."
Case in point: the climate crisis. Corporations are literally destroying their own home for a symbol of success that, like their products, is man-made: money. It is the ultimate pursuit of vanity.
Crazy, if you think about it for a moment.
- Yeah. The monsters gnawing away at nature, public infrastructure, your friends? They are called corporations.
  Btw, megacorps have multiple faces and are especially hungry.
- The AI techbros wanna scare you with tales of AI becoming sentient and going rogue to destroy us all, when corporations, mindless machines made out of people to maximize profits at all cost, are already doing all that
- i guess it doesnt matter to the execs, they will always have their little islands to live on while they destroy the rest of the world
- And yet by law in some places (the US being one, I believe) they are treated as people, with certain rights.
- Agreed, now what do we do about it?
  I quit a very very well paid IT job in a very big corp because I did not want to participate to their anti-human, anti-planet shit...
  What are you doing about it?
- I agree that that is the capitalist way, which is one of the reasons I hate capitalism. I'm no tankie, but I believe there are other ways, even ways that still use personal property as well as currency, beyond capitalism, which is just the use of personal property and currency to obtain more personal property and currency at all costs in an endless cycle.
Yes, corporations exist to make profit
Maybe now they do, but that itself is a cancerous perversion of their original purpose.
come and destroy the IPFS, then!
- What is the IPFS?

corporations attack anything that might challenge their ability to make a quick buck: everyone and everything else be damned. sadly the only way to overcome this kind of monster is a decentralized network of information hoarders. appealing lawsuits is just a bandaid.

the internet archive needs to reorganize. as long as it makes itself into a target as a centralized org, it will also get shot at by soulless corporate husks. im envisioning moving everything onto ipfs, that way anyone can help host as much or little as they like.

They don't need to do anything so drastic. They just need to stop doing things that blatantly provoke legal attacks like this. Their "Emergency Covid Library" was a foolish stunt that is endangering their primary objective of information preservation, they wouldn't have been sued if they'd just kept on carrying on as they were before.
- the corporations dont care. why should the archive be under the pressure of the soulless suits at all? any "stunts" are just excuses for doing what they will do anyway: pick on anyone who doesnt bow to their petty whims.
  no, saying that this is the archive's fault is so gross, and just says that you accept their bullying and blackmail as somehow moral
  archive should decentralize, that's the only real solution imo
They could just not poke the bear
- they tied meat to themselves and ran at the bear screaming

Sadly in countries without a pirate party, like Denmark, you can't (as far as I know) vote for the EP pirate party.
- Does voting for a party like that even help anything? I'm asking because my voting experience is US, and everyone knows how many parties matter here. So I'm curious.

Would you care the elaborate more?

The nonprofit Internet Archive is appealing a judgment that threatens the future of all libraries. Big publishers are suing to cut off libraries’ ownership and control of digital books, opening new paths for digital book bans and dangerous surveillance.
Join 28,000+ signers on the petition below to show your support for the Internet Archive, libraries’ digital rights, and an open internet with safe, uncensored access to knowledge.
Battleforlibraries
- Lol, a petition won't stop this unless it's a petition to bribe the judge. The US is owned by corporations.
- Except it's not a threat to the future of all libraries, it's a threat to the future of "libraries" that decide to completely ignore copyright and give out an unlimited number of copies of ebooks. Basically turning themselves into book-focused piracy sites.
  I'm incredibly frustrated with Internet Archive for bringing this on themselves. It is not their mandate to fight copyright, that's something better left in the hands of activist organizations like the EFF. The Internet Archive's mandate is to archive the Internet, to store and preserve knowledge. Distributing it is secondary to that goal. And picking unnecessary fights with big publishing houses like this is directly contrary to that goal, since now the Internet Archive is in danger.
  It's like they're carrying around a precious baby and they decided it was a good idea to start whacking a bear with a stick. Now the bear is eating their leg and they're screaming "oh my god help me, the bear is threatening this baby!" Well yeah, but you shouldn't have brought a baby with you when you went on a bear-whacking expedition. You should have known exactly what that bear was going to do.

Fuck.

I really hope someone gets hold of the data and shares it on p2p or otherwise. If all this data is deleted it would be equivalent to nuking pyramids or burning Picasso paintings.

Honestly, I'd say it would be much much worse than your examples. It would be erasing parts of history itself.
- Fuck yes, we need to get our hands on this stuff for fucks sake. I have shit there I don’t even know I need yet
  Can someone fucking near get their ass there and do a legendary copy paste operation on a massive scale
- Exactly. Losing Internet and digital history would create another dark ages for future historians. Everything we've done would just be gone.
  If I had more money than humanly usable I would create a project that transcribes wikipedia or whatever onto stone/metal plates so it's not forgotten.
...library... Alexandria...
Good luck, every day more than 1PB is uploaded to IA.
That's one of the reasons why uploads to the Archive have torrents.
Now if they'd just fix the damn tracker..

Didn't know about this, but sounds like a good cause.
Is there any legal risk involved with this? Is it recommended to run behind a VPN?
- No, VPNs are not allowed. See here for more info.

The DDOS attack or the lawsuits?

This one pertains to the lawsuits.

Made me look for internet archive merch and found they actually do have a store for it

https://store.archive.org/

They made a really dumb move and now have to pay for it. I understand their importance but it doesn't seem like they do - or they are naive enough to believe corpos have good will.

They broke law in such a dumb way, and it's a pity they put their entire project in jeopardy. My only thought while deciding to donate is "what will prevent them from doing something this dumb again?"

Anti Commercial-AI license

There's no link. Down voted.

Update: OP updated the post to include a link. Up voted.

Seriously no one cares if you downvote or upvote stuff. Get lost with your inept attempt at manipulation
Yeah and I was supposed to stay calm and cute this whole week see what you have done with your shitty comment?
- I was asking others to downvote low effort content to improve the quality of the content on the platform for others.

Is this suppost to be a link

I was trying to link to Battleforlibraries but I failed, it's my first lemmy post
- Please update the post to include the link. Use the edit button.

Just sent them a couple of bucks. Wish I could give more but the conversion rate on my currency is atrocious lol 🫠

Can they sink the IA name and just set up as another entity? I mean, declare bankruptcy etc. What happens to the archived data in this scenario? I am not a lawyer so I have no idea

Edit perhaps they can setup up an entity, sell the data to it, and bankrupt IA?

Surely not or else companies would be doing this every day to avoid litigation.
- The mercenary company Blackgate(?) has done it a dozen times.
- Again, I have no idea what I am talking about but you can have provisions to protect assets in bankruptcy. But besides that, I am not sure if distributing the assets to another nonprofit entity prior would help save the archived data
  https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/expert-insights/dissolving-a-nonprofit-when-and-how-to-dissolve-a-nonprofit
- I mean, companies with a lot of employees, sure. But companies that are mostly just data, like movie watching sites, do it all the time

This is the worst kind of misrepresentation of tech. Nothing you said is explicitly false, it sounds true in passing, but it sure is effectively false.
The amount of data you can actually store in any single node/transaction on a given blockchain is traditionally very small. Even most NFTs are not truly "on the chain" as in the image data fully stored in a node/element, it's instead a "smart contract" which just says X identity owns Y (with Y itself being stored elsewhere). There have been many many attempts at actually storing data on various chains and there hasn't been any successes significant enough to come even close to being able to store the classic 90's Space Jam website, let alone the fucking Internet Archive.
Beyond that, you absolutely can take down nodes in a chain, so to speak. Numerous major "heists" have been "rolled back" or had their nodes/transactions flagged to be ignored by marketplace admins.
- You're right about NFTs. There's no reason to store the data on chain. Chain stores the metadata and pointers to the files (IPFS, torrent/magnet link whatever). Chain administers how many copies etc should exist and enforces those rules. Filecoin etc have already successfully done this.
Downvote this guy all you want, but this is an incredibly true point. For 15 years, Bitcoin has maintained a distributed, uncensorable ledger, the question is, can we use similar ledger tech to store archive.org? Wikipedia is a single point of failure, so is Archive.org. So is the library of congress. We could easily store all the text content of wikipedia on chain that's under 100GB, along with IPFS pointers to media content. Long-term, humanity needs a resilient censorship-resistant system to store our collective knowledge and history. These systems, when sufficiently large, are uncensorable and incredibly difficult to exercise undue influence against or shut down. Ask anybody whose tried to get a judge to enforce a judgement against the bitcoin blockchain lol. And they can survive quite well major disruptive events like wars, natural disasters, and even widespread network disruptions. Blockchain can also solve the spam problem that plagued early P2P systems like Gnutella/Ed2k/etc. Everybody moved to BitTorrent because we could trust custodians (trackers and indexers) to curate lists of valid torrents. But that can be decentralized now.
There's over a dozen different blockchain projects working on the "file storage problem", some of them have very interesting proposals, at least one of those is going to emerge from the smoke with something that will replicate archive.org's current role, but it might be a few years before that happens. Already, we have blockchains which offer "decentralized file storage marketplace" that competes pretty well with current file storage providers (AWS etc), and some of them have been running for years.
And guess what? You don't need blockchain for that.
Torrents exists, IPFS dropped dependency on block chain. What blockchain do is that if your literal neighbor has the file you want, you must first connect to the global super inefficient network to sync your chain. And if you have censored Internet? Well...
Layer torrent on top of Yggdrasil on top of I2P and you'll get faster, more decentralized and more resilient network than any blockchain ever done. Such network would continue to work from friend to friend even if your whole town get cut from global net.
You don't need blockchain to accomplish what the internet archive is, just a network of computers that share a part of their disk space to the other computers. This is just a torrent network at the end of the day

They should have:

Not sell out to AI.
Deleted doxxing info (they already removed stuff like Mike Matei's racist webcomics on behalf of Mike Matei).

Mike Matei’s racist webcomics
What's this, now?
Oh. Oh, no! I'd heard he was a shitty person, but I wasn't expecting that!

not enough AI features! /s

Is it still under attack?

Why can't anyone spot a grift anymore? The IA is hugely profitable, and is very clearly crafting PR statements designed to increase donations. Has noone had their trust abused before? If they were trying to make change around this subject they wouldnt be so dishonest in their messaging.

IA are not Robin Hood.

How is IA profitable?
- Same question here. How can they be profitable if they are a registered non-profit?
  Is it somehow possible to pay employees exorbitant salaries, similar to Mozilla's CEO?

Is there any way to use my own computer to take up summer off the dose traffic?