They clarify they mean they think they will regret it historically in the sense of losing that part of history, rather than monetarily, etc.<p>But to me this is like arguing a swarm of locusts are going to one day regret that they destroyed so many fields of crops.
Some incredibly shallow takes in this thread, most of which seem to be coming from people who didn't even read the article. The quote in context:<p>> "They're going to regret it," Seubert predicted. "Not financially or anything, but just from a historical perspective, the Internet Archive is valuable for all of us."<p>This was not the central point of the article. He clearly is not saying that "the legal entity Capitol Records will manifest emotions and come to experience regret," but "the people who in aggregate comprise Capitol Records will regret the role they played in restricting access to these works," in the same way that a game developer on Hacker News might regret having added game-breaking DRM to a title he worked on twenty years ago, even though this allowed him to earn a lot of money.
Labels will not regret recordings being lost, because it's just asshole executives who only care about money.<p>The hapless sound historian is just projecting his own bellyaches onto other people that are completely different from him.
Internet Archive does not delete anything. Sometimes they leave the "item" (URL) up and block downloads. Recently they have started "darking" things en masse, which removes them from search results.<p>A sane solution would be to leave the items up, block download of the full file, and make excerpts available. They do this for many items where you cannot download the mp3 yet the spectrogram (jpg image) remains available.<p>Archive.org is at a crossroads and the people who manage it have made some very curious decisions lately.
Institutions - especially those driven by profit - do not regret. If they did, an internet archival project would not trigger it when the likes of Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse could not.
<i>"The Internet Archive is not hurting the revenue of the recording industry at all," Seubert suggested, while noting that his opinions don't "mean squat" since he's not a lawyer. "It has no impact on their revenue." Instead, he suspects that labels' lawsuit is "somehow vindictive," because the labels perhaps "don't like the Internet Archive's way of pushing the envelope on copyright and fair use."</i><p>Record companies, artists and other rights holders are not pursuing lawsuits because they are "somehow vindictive" or want to send a message.<p>Lawsuits are huge, expensive headaches that force the plaintiffs to not only take a public stance on sensitive issues, but also force them to reveal details about their operations, communications, and business relationships. Like anyone else who goes through the trouble of pursuing a case on IP grounds, they feel their rights have been violated and they want redress.<p>They're also looking at this as part of a long-term fight over how IP gets used, just as the Internet Archive is.
Internet was created to allow Library sharing and now companies try to stop the only library available from sharing books at one-person-at-a-time basis. This is similar.<p>We're doomed because whimsical companies will put down the IA and then forgot the toys they were playing with<p>Btw. What is age of music going into public domain? Still Disney's 123 years?
Just brainstorming a bit, if IA is gone, how can we lawsuit-proof that the next digital Library of Alexandria? Do we have the technology for this?<p>- IPFS over some type of dark net protocol?<p>- Can something like Chia help? I don't know about its privacy characteristics.
In 2008, Universal Media lost something like a half million original master recordings when a fire destroyed one of their storage buildings. The "Library at Alexandria" of 20th century music.
Sony and EMI worked with the Library of Congress on the National Jukebox a decade ago.<p><a href="https://www.loc.gov/collections/national-jukebox/about-this-collection/partners/" rel="nofollow">https://www.loc.gov/collections/national-jukebox/about-this-...</a><p>Internet Archive is free to archive whatever they want. The problem is that they want to be a publisher too but refuse to follow the rules.<p>There are traditional rules around access to archives that keep things in balance. But when you're publishing the most popular song of all time and your strategy is "pops and scratches makes it Fair Use" when people ask to take it down -- well then you're going to lose. Again.<p>They could structure things so that these uploads would be protected under DMCA, and act more surgically, but they can't decide whether they're an archive, a library, or an activist organization. Each of those things has different expectations for longevity and different rules for survival.<p>At this point I'd be happy if they'd just pick a lane. Other organizations would step up to handle other aspects (Musk was down there looking to vacuum up the data). And if they chose to behave like a legitimate archive, they would have less of a problem partnering with rights holders and raising money from individuals and corporations who support preservation efforts.<p>Right now they're asking for $17 donations next to pirated material and that's not a strategy.
I'm very worried that IA has risked the parts of what they do that are fully legal, or unenforced (eg. abandonware), by going after targets guaranteed to make deep-pocketed pro-copyright industries like publishing and music labels come after them.<p>At this point, it seems like the sensible course of action would be to create a new entity that leaves still-in-copyright books and music alone, grabs a snapshot of the entire archive, hires everyone who used to work at IA, starts accepting donations so us supporters can switch over, and then picks up, letting IA declare bankruptcy and fall into the sun.<p>[Edited to add:] Don't get me wrong. I think the current copyright regime is complete nonsense, and I mostly support everything IA has done from an ethical point of view (except maybe giving away recent books for free), but I'm also a pragmatist, and the idea of IA's archive falling into the memory hole because of picking bad fights is distressing.
The IA's work is essential for historians and archivists who depend on it for research and preservation. However, this is not a concern for the music industry or the major labels.<p>The argument that the industry's lawsuit against IA might ultimately harm its own interests—by jeopardizing valuable archival resources—rests on a misconception: that the industry cares about art and artists. It doesn’t. The industry's focus is shifting toward AI-generated music and hired musicians, prioritizing commercial output over artistic legacy. Their future is not tied to the past but to what comes next. In this scenario, history is not a resource—it’s competition.
It's not just labels who aren't getting the artistic side of music. Copyright collectives are just as bad. If you give away your music for free under a license like the creative commons they will still collect money for any public use. But they will then just give it to their commercial artists probably even breaking nc clauses in open content licenses.
Sooner or later we probably will suffer the event of lost knowledge similar to fire of Library of Alexandria but with internet.<p>At some point greedy corporations will come to conclusion that storing old data, movies, music, documents is just to costly.
And just like that all of this will be just deleted.
People who work at Music Labels may regret what the previous generation of employees did to line their own pockets, and then do equally horrible things in their current context for the same reason.
Until now, I have always given authors the benefit of the doubt, and presented what they could have said to make their argument stronger.<p>I do this when hackernews is calling an article stupid and missing some of the salvageable or mostly correct things from the article, so I do some effort to highlight these kernels of truth that most articles have because most authors do have something of value to say.<p>For the first time on this account on this site... This article is hopelessly naive. Music label executives dgaf. If anything, they want the history gone so that they can charge extra premiums when they release 100 year old songs or for visits to their museums. It is like saying NFL owners regret people not being able to watch the first super bowl game and relive history.<p>Nah... that is stuff they could sell later if they figure out how.<p>Expecting music labels to have any sense of democratic music access is almost insulting to artists that have been often dicked by these labels.<p>Part of me thinks this article is a psyop to make music label executives seem more humane lol.
I grew up listening to some ethnic 78 singles that my father had purchased. I managed to hold onto a couple of them (others were broken) but haven't owned a turntable I could play them on (good luck finding one, or the needles) for decades.<p>None of the singles had been released on vinyl ... it was clearly not in the interests of the industry's monopolists to do so. Because they showed up on IA (before the Great 78 project even started) I could finally listen to them again. To my knowledge none of them have ever been re-released.
Again I’m incredulous by the perspective shared by Ars Technica (often trumpeted by TechDirt) that “what is going on is not how copyright SHOULD work” while giving no reasonable consideration to how legally legitimate cases like this are from a standpoint are in US copyright cases.<p>I get the desire to FIX copyright in the US, I stand to benefit and so does society and creative progress. But these sensationalist writers are the lowest form of clickbait by simply taking a victimization position and digging in (re: TechDirt and Goldiblox absolutely being in the wrong for ripping off the Beastie Boys for a Super Bowl ad).
Until recently I'd say that the record labels accusations were unwarranted and they should stop. However I've noticed that free projects have the tendency to become for profit corporations and exploit the good will that started the project. An example is Open AI. Another example is how Google monetizes and monopolizes free and public information.