I would agree that copyright has many problems. But "rule of law" also matters.
Perhaps more importantly, the Internet Archive has chosen to take actions that are likely illegal, and do that in ways that threaten its very existence. Any court in the world might rule against the IA with a financial punishment that would permanently shut it down AND hand all its resources to its enemies. And those rules will be enforced by trained policemen with guns, tear gas, and bulletproof vests.
The IA is very important, and in general I really like the IA. The Wayback machine is a critical resource today. The IA's decision to risk the existence of itself and all its archives, by taking this step, was extremely unwise. I'm disappointed in the IA, I expected smarter decisions.
I hope they get some excellent lawyers that might salvage them so they can at least exist in some form. Right now, the IA and all it archived is at risk of being destroyed, with nothing good to come from it. If they stay in existence, I hope that they get some good lawyers to keep them away from such horrendously bad legal decisions in the future.
Whether or not you think the existing copyright laws have exceeded their purpose is a completely different discussion, and one that is not at all related to this particular topic at all. Because the Internet Archive did not only violate copyright for content benefiting from whatever your opinion of excessive copyright is, they violated it for all the content they had.
> Whether or not you think the existing copyright laws have exceeded their purpose is a completely different discussion
Bringing up another completely seperate category of abuse is again another completely different discussion, and completely not relevant to this one.
So no, you don't get the idea of owning ideas is directly itself an attack on freedom itself, aka if you can claim you own ideas you can use violence against others because you believe in that idea. The problem you're not seeing is that it's impossible to enforce property rights for ideas while not infringing on basic human freedoms. Copyright is backdoor to get rid of property rights for the public by associating it with software/technology.
The idea that we just need "good regulation" to stop the abuses, is bs, since the last 200 years of copyright has always seen its power and abuse expanded and not reduced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#/...
So you're the one making disingenuous arguments. Since our culture is literally being irrevocably destroyed and there's no way much culture during this period will be saved because of the lawlessness of the USA and general idiocy of its citizenry.
Please don't create HN accounts to do that with. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
I actually said that copyright itself is neither moral nor immoral, which is a completely different statement.
Any particularly copyright law can be as immoral as you want it to be, but the idea that somebody can retain rights over content they create is not immoral. You could easily create a society that didn’t have such rights, but the outcome would certainly be much less content, and much more restrictions put on it. You complain about copyright destroying video games history, but copyright is the only reason that history exists to begin with.
Your examples harmful copyright abuse are irrelevant first of all because they are not copyright able. The alphabet can not be copyrighted, and neither can an idea (that would be a patent, which is again a completely different thing).
They are made even more irrelevant by the fact that such “harmful” applications of copyright are not relevant to this situation. The copyright in question is not of a word, or the alphabet, or an idea, or the work of some long dead author. The copyright in question here is entire recently released books.
The idea that somebody who writes a book, or creates a movie, or a video game, can retain exclusive rights over its distribution for a certain period of time is not generally classified as copyright abuse. To characterize it that way is a very extreme, niche position.
Copyright does not have the moral high ground either. The fact is most books should already have entered the public domain. However, the public was cheated out of its rights due to ever increasing copyright durations. Why should authors and publishers retain monopoly rights to works for over a hundred years? It should be a few years at most and that's being exceptionally generous.
There's absolutely nothing moral about copyright. When properly constrained to a reasonable duration, it could be considered a necessary evil at best. In its current form, it is equivalent to rent seeking and should be straight up abolished.