FaceDeer

Kbin calls them “magazines”, which has the advantage of being only three syllables but has the disadvantage of being a dumb name for them.

I’ve lost track because I don’t care who the whipping boy is supposed to be. I form my own opinions.

The current top whipping boy is AI, apparently. “AI must be bad” is the highest level assumption, so apparently even in this piracy community that overrides the usual “copyright must be bad” assumption.

Or is it actually “Meta must be bad?” I’ve lost track of who the Five Minutes Hate is supposed to be directed at lately.

What a bunch of losers, thinking they are making the future…… by stealing from as many artists as they can?

Are you aware of which community this is posted in?

What are these “other country” things you mention? You mean the place where war happens and immigrants come from? I didn’t know they had computers there.

Indeed. At least if you hate a work of art it’s making you feel something.

Yes, that would be preservation. I don’t think they’d have ever got in trouble for doing that, even if it was technically a copyright violation. Probably not even if they had some sort of limited “lending” system so that rare texts could be read by the few who were interested in them. The problem came when Internet Archive flung their gates wide and let everyone download freely, at that point they became a piracy site and got hammered like a piracy site. That’s counter to their goal of simple preservation.

Frankly, good. As it always should have been.

Internet Archive is not Library Genesis, the two organizations have very different functions and should be structured very differently.

Internet Archive is for preserving data, not necessarily distributing it as widely as possible. If distributing the data puts the preservation of that data at risk then don’t distribute it, keep it stashed safely away. Maybe a decade or two from now things will change and they’ll have the only copies, and keeping them snugly away out of sight will have been vital to preserving them after that point. Internet Archive has a public corporate presence that makes it easy to donate to and easy to run their servers, but also makes them easy to sue. So avoid doing anything that gets you sued.

Library Genesis, on the other hand, is piracy central. Their mandate is distributing this stuff and sticking their thumbs in the eyes of the publishers. So they’re structured entirely differently. They run on the shady side of the internet, making them hard to donate to but also hard to sue. They should be the ones “fighting the fight” right now. It would be sad if they got taken down but not an irrecoverable tragedy, a new Library Genesis can rise again.

Internet Archive are being idiots by poking the bear like they have been lately, it’s like they’re carrying a precious irreplaceable baby and they’ve decided to take a run through a minefield. I hope they learn from this debacle.