[My personal opinion, unrelated to any employment:]

FWIW I've studied copyright informally in UK, USA, and to a lesser extent other countries.

In UK our "Fair Dealing" is highly restrictive compared to USA's Fair Use.

Our (UK) archiving rights extend only to a couple of institutions and then only to people attending the library in person. We don't have rights to make backups; we don't have rights to format shift (except to help the disabled).

Yes, copyright specifics apply but wrt archiving USA is far from the most restrictive regime.

In Sweden we have the super restricted "right to quote"[1]. Fair use seems like a dream compared to this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_quote

And the US through it's massive influence and bullying would undoubtedly force it upon other countries, as they have done countless times including in the context of copyright.

In the case of copyright, at least nominally, it's the more-restrictive (and European) Berne Convention (1886) terms which have been adopted elsewhere.

To what extent this reflects European rather than US interests I'm uncertain, though the latter certainly exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention

It reflects the interests of special interest copyright groups who work both to get these treaties written with terms favorable to themselves, and to get laws passed to enforce them.

When those laws are passed they try to get the laws to be stronger than the treaty. Thereby leading to differences in laws and a push for a new treaty to "harmonize" different copyright regimes. Strangely, the new treaty harmonizes on the strong end of the laws passed, thereby creating a ratchet effect.

After decades of success on things like copyright terms, Disney finally reached the end of the road when the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement died. As a result Steamboat Willie, written in 1924, will become public domain in 2024, some 68 years after it was originally supposed to do so.

Undoubtedly.

Point being that the initial push in the present direction came from Europe in the 19th century, no matter how influential the 20th century US publishing sector eventually became.

And to be clear, I don't think the "US, no, Europe" blame game accomplishes or illuminates much. Far more useful is to note that monopoly power seeks to extend itself, regardless of origin.

I was in Morocco when we signed copyright restrictions, and I can assure you 95% of the pressure is from United States, and it is in the interests mainly of the US and it's allies.

As far as it reflecting European interests, the Berne convention is against European interests as it pertains to US copyrighted work as it offers them less protection than US works and forces a higher standard for US copyright than domestic copyright in many cases.

Understood and accurate so far as I'm aware. As my other response notes, the tradition of copyright maximalisation began in Europe in the 19th century before being adopted by US interests in the 20th. Nationalistic attribution of traits answers far less than monopolistic power expansion.

I agree wholeheartedly, the tradition of copyright maximization has its origins in capitalism and value extraction, as such it follows the siege of global capitalism as that is where the interests in the commodification and extraction of value from intellectual property originates from. So it naturally began in Europe, then in the US, and maybe shortly in China? We will see.

Many countries pay copyright owners for library lending (the UK for example through the public lending right).

In the US, libraries buy the books, etc., they lend, or pay for license agreements for digital media.

UK libraries buy the books and pay additionally for every lend, as it should be.

"...as it should be."

Hey, don't try to convince me. I spend most of the hundreds of dollars I pay for books every year at used book stores and things like estate sales.

I am literally Satan.

Same here. What publishers give to authors is practically zero, so if you want the author to get any money you're better off sending them a donation directly.

>Archive.org might as well rebase itself somewhere else.

That would probably be extremely expensive given the fastest way to mirror the IA is with a truck full of hard drives.

It's actually relatively inexpensive to move gear via cargo container. I'd hazard you could move all 10PB of the Internet Archive for less than $25k-50k in shipping costs (~$2k per 40FT container), with labor extra for loading and unloading. (Disclaimer: I have coordinated data center migrations in a previous life)

Although, it's probably more financially efficient for other nations to offer cultural grants for local IA non-profit entities to spin up infra in country and begin mirroring the South SF location.

How many backups do they have? I'd hate for the shipping container to fall off the side of the ship, bye bye all that precious data.

(Just last week some shipping containers washed ashore on a beach in my local area – they had fallen off a ship [1].)

[1] https://coastcommunitynews.com.au/central-coast/news/2020/05...

What they are being accused of would be highly questionable under the copyright laws of over 190 countries, including almost all that are likely to be reasonable places to host a major internet site.