Hachette v. Internet Archive
I've come a bit late as the post I saw talking about it is from the 18th, (just two days at time of writing) but whatever, turns out a bunch of book publishing houses 'hachette book group, HarperCollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House' are trying to sue the Internet archive because in their eyes it makes them lose millions of dollars. And the feelign inside me at the moment, is... Infuriating, angrer, something akin to that. The internet archive is such an important part of the net that... that... arg. It houses not only the history of the internet but so much more, tv series, programing, news, books,music. Even videogames, and it's not like they only have archivals of already existing things, if seen videogames, psp homebrews that're hosted in the archive, games that live there. Then you also have the Wayback machine a way to record old webpages and their change through time. Do you want to see how the old internet was in a more direct medium than screenshots? This is the way to do it. And you don't even need to be interested in the early internet to make use of it, recently there was a tumblr post making fun of an AI made article that repeated the word "pebble" like 30 times. I was late to the party and the article was edited, however someone archived that page, someone was able to save that instance in time and allowed everyone to revisit it whenever they liked.
For now some are listed as “Borrow Unavailable”. But among those there're things like:
Because who cares? Let's burn the books Guy.
Look, I cannot explain in my own words how bad this is, how relevant it is, but I know others that can.
Electronic Frontier Foundation, Hachette v. Internet Archive
Battle for libraries
At the moment my blood is boiling, they're seriously considering torching down the most relevant digital archive. It's bad enough that there's only 1 big initiative to save all this data, all this information. It's also relevant to note that this is basically one step away from suing libraries because the corps cannot proffit. However they know how bad it looks to target libraries in the meatspace. But in the net? In the net they can get away with so much. To most this will be just a "webpage closing" however they're torching alexandria's library.
when you enter in hachette's webpage you see a big banner with Womens History Month and how they celebrate it and blah blah blah pr talk. I wonder how much women's history content they would be deleting by attacking the internet archive, not only books, also movies, and tv programming, from new to documentaries... But it's not surprising, it's a corpo after all...
We're living in a cyberpunk distopia, but without the crazy augmentations.