Copyright, lending, and the Internet Archive

[tacit]

For those of you who’ve been hiding beneath a rock these past few news cycles, the Internet Archive, the operators of the Internet Wayback Machine, was just handed a stunning defeat in a copyright feud with Hatchett, Random Penguin, and other major publishers.

Essentially, they had set up an internet lending library, and the publishers…didn’t take

Comments

[skittenwitch]

Well shit.... this is awful. Ugh!
I was prepared to simply say " and this is why i prefer paper books"...
But oh man....
Yikes!

[ysabetwordsmith]

It's why I prefer paper too. Everything electronic is "ephemera." It tends to disappear fast. Paper lasts rather well unless it gets burned or soaked. But not everything can be saved on paper.

[ysabetwordsmith]

I agree this is a disaster.

However, there are other archives. Far as I know, all of them are much smaller, but they exist. Interestingly, they also seem good and bad at different things. Wayback sucks at saving pictures unless you save them individually. Archive.fo excels at saving pictures, but won't save PDF files. And so on.