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this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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Showerthoughts
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I would argue broadening of the scope only increases legitimacy—if the goal is to build an archive of literally everything, any objection to an individual piece of content is of diminishing validity.
And FWIW, I think an archive of everything is an incredibly valuable endeavour we should protect. We've already lost far too much media.
Be realistic. If every movie ever produced were legally available on IA, no one would ever buy a movie again. If no one ever buys a movie again, the industry would crumble overnight and there would no longer be new movies. Libraries exist in the physical space under much stricter limitations. They simply can’t stock a million copies of the same thing. The logistics limit them. Going digital is a paradigm shift that causes the entire model to be questioned, especially if these pieces of media aren’t being paid for.
Straight up piracy is simpler than getting all your content from archive.org if it was there anyway (e.g. the direct download speeds are very limited, there's no real discoverability). People still pay for movies and streaming services, so if the content being available for free was going to kill the industry, it would have already happened.
In fact we've repeatedly seen over and over again, people just pay for content if the service is actually better than piracy. Convenience is king, and archive.org is not optimised for convenient content consumption à la netflix, and as far as I can tell changing that is not a goal of theirs.
Are we talking about the merits of the Internet Archive as a library or whether or not piracy matters? If you conflate the two, then IA is piracy and they will lose.
Ah sorry, I may have misunderstood you, I thought you were suggesting if the content was on IA people would pirate the content from there and destroy the film industry.
I pointed out that the focus is archival and not making it easy to pirate stuff, and that there already exists easier ways to do that. Therefore it wouldn't change anything that's not happening already except preserving human culture (which is a particularly valuable endeavour in my opinion)
Another commentator mentioned allowing uploading but not downloading might be the solution. If the work became orphaned or anything it could be opened up for download.