kolderman wrote on 2020-06-08, 06:39:

Because suing people who have no money is a waste of time...and money (unless you are after something else like a takedown).

The RIAA once sued a dead grandma.

Suing for copyright is often about making examples out of people, not getting money.

kolderman wrote on 2020-06-08, 06:39:

And any ruling cannot take into account future donations

Citation needed.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-06-08, 07:39:

That's related to books only though. At worst, they'll remove book archive completely, but most of us probably are more concerned about obscure software and site copies. Then again, they could use experience from manga sites and move servers where west oriented publisher can't do anything.

Removing the book archive won't pay for the damages done.

So no that's not the worst case scenario. The worst case scenario is that they end up having to pay a lot of damages and/or prison time.

The main problem is that people are hypocrites. They turn a blind eye when authors lose money over piracy but go nuts when others copy, modify or sell their content. Of course explaining a thief why stealing is wrong is like convincing a junkie that drugs are bad. It can't be done.

You are all criminally underestimating the power of the dark side...
OTOH Archive.org has been asking to get slapped with a lawsuit for quite some time 🙁

kolderman wrote on 2020-06-08, 06:39:

Because suing people who have no money is a waste of time...and money (unless you are after something else like a takedown).

Tell that to RIAA/MPAA that has been suing random citizens for tens of thousands. Obviously money has never been their goal. The goal is and always has been bullying and intimidation of end-users en route to complete control of the media distribution rights. We don't know what the book publishers want, but time will tell.

kolderman wrote on 2020-06-08, 06:39:

And any ruling cannot take into account future donations, so they could spin up another org tomorrow to run the wayback machine, and new donations would be unaffected. I think I lot of people would contribute to save the WBM, I would.

Are you really sure about that? If you are deemed liable and ordered to pay certain money that you don't have, the court can totally rule that large portions of any future income will be taken away from you to pay whoever you owe that money to. Are donations treated different that income?

There is a point to it. If an organization owes money but goes bancrupt the debt is gone (or depending on the organization structure the debt goes to the leaders). But a new organization is not liable even though they might have bought the assets of the former org.

kolderman wrote on 2020-06-08, 06:39:

And any ruling cannot take into account future donations, so they could spin up another org tomorrow to run the wayback machine, and new donations would be unaffected.

Tell that to anyone who has had their wages garnished.

dr_st wrote on 2020-06-08, 12:25:

We don't know what the book publishers want, but time will tell.

Are you really sure about that?

Are donations treated different that income?

Easy, just gotta look at which publisher(s) and what specific works they are going after.

My guess is they are delusional and hoping to go back in time to get millions of dollars from a Turnip pretending they are in a bygone age where books are more than decorative
You know...
because the 2 people that read the 1950 Novel “Across The River and Into the Trees” on the way back machine totally would have bought the book instead.

My feeling is that works that are “beyond economic recovery “ should be immediately dismissed, copywrite folks unfortunately never have to prove that the thing copywrited can actually be sold for profit which is quite unfortunate,
you can’t steal that which has no value and giving away for charity is very different than stealing for profit.

Hopefully common sense enters the equation or neither party will be happy.

The way back machine isn’t a person and has no income, the lawsuit can’t really reclaim anything and if it did the site would simply stop operating and change ownership outside our jurisdiction.

Neither party would get what they want in the case of monetary extraction

Errius wrote on 2020-06-07, 23:18:

I'm surprised Wayback Machine has lasted as long as it has. There's a lot of stuff behind paywalls which can be read on the WM because it was free some time in the past. I won't say this hasn't been useful to me, but the legal problems are obvious.

I was under the impression that they take down archived contents whenever requested. If you "cease and desist" when told to, there should be no issue.
In the past they even used to apply robots.txt exclusion rules retroactively, so as long as you owned the domain, you could make historical content unavailable on the WM without even asking. (Apparently this was changed after cases of abuse by domain hijackers.)

Web hosting companies are also unhappy that taking offensive/controversial materials offline doesn't actually remove them from the internet, as they still remain available on the WM.

Source (for said unhappiness)?

Hosts have legitimate reasons for concern about offensive/controversial material when it's hosted on their *own* servers, and might violate their terms of service and/or expose them to risks and liabilities. Their job is not to police the internet and to make such content unavailable *anywhere*. If they believe it is, they can go get bent, and they'd be told as much by any legal authority (that isn't hijacked or corrupt).

http://blogsite.com/hatesite just becomes http://archive.org/blogsite.com/hatesite. It doesn't remove the original host's URL, or any corporate names/logos that may appear on the hosted page. The original host still has to endure the odium of association with the content.

Maybe, but typically you wouldn't be able to find it unless you were already aware of the original URL before the host nuked it. And in any case, I believe the domain owner can still make a request to archive.org to remove the snapshots. Although I don't know what the IA's policies are in cases that don't involve piracy or IP violations.

In the latter type of case, I do know that archive.org complies with takedown notices from publishers. They're still on fairly thin ice since they don't pre-emptively police what their users upload, so they have piles of warez strewn all over the place, and I don't think they have the infrastructure or the tools to properly deal with it. But as long as they're removing stuff on demand from the rights holders, I believe they should be good on that front.

Based on some comments in “another forum” I frequent, despite the “unlimited e-reading offer” only a couple hundred additional folks than normal took advantage of the service.

Hopefully the way back machine keeps excellent records and can tell the publishers to plow sand and get the judge to
dismiss without prejudice
And bar any future similar legal actions

Ah well time will tell.