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Note: article may be paywalled if you’ve read all your free articles from Wired for now. Archive link in that event.
[…] Against the back wall, where one might find confessionals in a different kind of church, there’s a tower of humming black servers. These servers hold around 10 percent of the Internet Archive’s vast digital holdings, which includes 835 billion web pages, 44 million books and texts, and 15 million audio recordings, among other artifacts. Tiny lights on each server blink on and off each time someone opens an old webpage or checks out a book or otherwise uses the Archive’s services. The constant, arrhythmic flickers make for a hypnotic light show. Nobody looks more delighted about this display than Kahle.
It is no exaggeration to say that digital archiving as we know it would not exist without the Internet Archive—and that, as the world’s knowledge repositories increasingly go online, archiving as we know it would not be as functional. Its most famous project, the Wayback Machine, is a repository of web pages that functions as an unparalleled record of the internet. Zoomed out, the Internet Archive is one of the most important historical-preservation organizations in the world. The Wayback Machine has assumed a default position as a safety valve against digital oblivion. The rhapsodic regard the Internet Archive inspires is earned—without it, the world would lose its best public resource on internet history.
Note: article may be paywalled if you’ve read all your free articles from Wired for now. Archive link in that event.
It’s not about breaking the law, what I’m saying is that copyright laws (but actually, any law) just plain doesn’t make sense when you try to apply it to the Internet, because the internet is not a national entity, and the nature of its interactions are fundamentally different from anything else that came before it. Because which country’s laws should apply when interacting across continents? If I am in country A, and I’m interacting with you, a resident of country B, on a platform that is owned by a company registered in country C, hosting their servers in country D, who should have authority to regulate this interaction? Simply put, I don’t give a fuck (pardon my french) about what the US Copyright Office has to say about anything, since I’m not a US citizen nor resident.
Copyright laws are agreed on at a international level. There even is a international copyright court.
But every country then implements them in different ways, for example duration and what constitutes “fair use”.
No there isn’t. Source?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Court_of_Justice
Yeah, no. The ICJ handles disputes between nations. It has literally nothing to do with copyright. Just take a look at the kind of cases they handle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_International_Court_of_Justice_cases
Then what court does international copyright? I know that lubuntu was trying to shutdown lubuntu[.]net because the official site is lubuntu.me
Welcome to my point: there’s no such thing. You always have to go through national courts, and if you hold copyright in several countries, you can pretty much pick and choose the legislature that is most advantageous to your case. Take this recent one: an Icelandic company sued an Icelandic artist for slander… In UK court. The “legal” basis was that the website was hosted on a .co.uk domain, but I’m sure that the strict UK slander laws and astronomical costs of its courts had nothing to do with it. Not a copyright case, I know, but I think it’s a good example of how laws and jurisdictions get fundamentally twisted when applied to the Internet. I think anyone can agree that it should’ve been settled in an Icelandic court.