Another Massive Blow to the Web
YESTERDAY Locus Magazine (where Cory Doctorow occasionally writes) wrote that "Internet Archive (IA) has elected not to further appeal its loss in the copyright infringement case upheld by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in September.
"Now that the case is settled, IA will remove infringing books from their “lending library” and pay an undisclosed monetary sum to the plaintiff publishers, which the Association of American Publishers says should “substantially” cover the attorney fees and court costs."
Considering what happened to SCOTUS (seating Justices take bribes from billionaires and face no consequences for it), it's not hard to understand why IA's lawyers decided to spend no more money on appeals.
This is awful news and it neatly relates to topics that we covered this morning (before even learning about the above breaking news).
So it's a huge financial blow to the Internet Archive, which already relies on donations and had to deal with a recent crisis (DDoS and data breach). Some people believe that the Internet Archive won't last for much longer. The same would apply to the Wayback Machine, which we rely on heavily for our research (e.g. showing how institutions became progressively more rogue over time, abandoning/betraying past missions and statements).
If social control media wasn't already a cancer, now there's the above. Somehow "open" AI can operate at vast losses and get bailed out by the Pentagon (more "contracts" as noted in the news), whereas the Internet Archive faces the full wrath of copyright law. It's not about their value to society; it's about whose monetary interests get served.
So now the IA's donors basically need to pay a bunch of aggressive lawyers of oligarchs' publishing monopolies. █