@SwiftOnSecurity they are probably at the point where paying for a proper distribution license for the books back then would have been cheaper than dealing with the lawyers.
@SwiftOnSecurity Book piracy sites existed before and exist after. IA didn’t even do something new. But now many folks - and most authors, afaict - have the bad taste of IA being just another piracy site.
@SwiftOnSecurity I'm conflicted on this one. Obviously there was no "real" need to pull this off and it could have ended in a true disaster. But from their viewpoint it was just a very consequential way to enact their beliefs, advance the cause and challenge some notions at a point in time which they saw as adequate, which I think deserves respect.
@SwiftOnSecurity NEL may have been a tactical legal mistake. April-May 2020 was a crazy time. COVID, which no one understood, was killing hundreds of thousands. Public parks were converted to cemetaries. Bodies were frozen in semi trucks because the morgues were full. Hospitals overflowed. Blistered, exhausted RNs worked 80 hr shifts in jury-rigged PPE, unsure whether they would survive. Professors were brought in to cover the ER. (1/2)
I mostly agree, but I too think they weren't performing a stunt. Internet Archive has a history of "better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission", though to be fair Google tried hard to make it the norm too.
@SwiftOnSecurity Is there any organization with a similar "archive the Internet" remit? I know there are a lot of random archive-dot-whatever sites, but are there any who make their records accessible in the way that the Wayback Machine does?
And, separately, are there any who work on publicly archiving public-domain works, like the rest of the Internet Archive does?
@SwiftOnSecurity I think it was a very worthwhile experiment with a disappointing outcome. All libraries could have benefited if the internet archive had succeeded.
@SwiftOnSecurity controlled digital lending (CDL) had been done by libraries for some time before Covid. That is what the Internet Archive did. The publishers are the issue here because they are greedy and have decided libraries are the issue, and went after the Internet Archive to scare the rest of us into no longer doing CDL.
@SwiftOnSecurity I agree with the sentiment but at the time we(everyone in the world) weren't sure what the fuck was going on with COVID and kids needed books. Hindsight is 20/20, but at the time I know people were like well its been nice knowing you. "Stay Safe" and "Take Care of yourself" was the good bye at the time. Everyone was going to tear up books and use them for Toilet Paper.
@SwiftOnSecurity that's entirely why I don't donate money to them, because what's the point if they're going to spend it all on lawyers and probably get shut down anyway when they lose this lawsuit