[ih] Internet History Lives on the Internet?

Mon Feb 25 11:12:26 PST 2019

Here’s a link to a story on the lawsuit:

https://teleread.org/2017/12/19/the-internet-archives-openlibrary-project-violates-copyright-the-authors-guild-warns/

RB

> On Feb 25, 2019, at 11:55 AM, Michael Greenwald <mbgreen at seas.upenn.edu> wrote:
> 
> On 2019-02-25 10:30, Richard Bennett wrote:
>> I seem to recall some lawsuits over the Internet Archive’s
>> “lending library” system. It violates copyright law, of course.
> 
> Probably too off-topic, so feel free to ignore:
> I thought the Internet Archive only scans books that are in the public domain?
> 
>> RB
>>> On Feb 25, 2019, at 10:33 AM, John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net> wrote:
>>> Not really related to this discussion.  The head of the Internet
>>> Archive and the head of Boston Public Library were on Boston Public
>>> Radio last week. They were announcing a cooperation where you can
>>> check-out material in the BPL collection through the Internet
>>> Archive and only one person has access to the material at a time.
>>> Just like it was checked out.  What I didn’t hear them talk about
>>> was when the ‘book’ or whatever is returned, how is it they
>>> ensure the borrower doesn’t still have a copy?
>>> Any thoughts?
>>> John
>>> On Feb 25, 2019, at 11:14, Andrew G. Malis <agmalis at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>> Jack,
>>> In addition to the Internet Archive (already mentioned), you should
>>> also check out https://decentralizedweb.net <https://decentralizedweb.net/> [1] .
>>> Cheers,
>>> Andy
>>> On Sun, Feb 24, 2019 at 9:58 PM Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org <mailto:jack at 3kitty.org>>
>>> wrote:
>>> True, but I think a first step is a persistent crowd-sourced public
>>> store, which is what I described.    Perhaps "restricted" material
>>> could be simply stored encrypted, and thus visible in search engines
>>> and accessible only to people with the appropriate key, or maybe
>>> "permission" credentials.  Volunteers might be reluctant to
>>> participate if that became too common.
>>> There's also other considerations, e.g., tracking the provenance of
>>> an item, so you can tell whether or not something is authentic,
>>> where it came from, when it was created, etc.   Probably many more
>>> such things to ponder.
>>> IMHO those kinds of capabilities could be add-ons to a persistent
>>> store as meta-data mechanisms, possibly many of them all
>>> independent, associating their metadata with items in the warehouse
>>> by some kind of unique ID - perhaps just a large-enough hash of each
>>> of the contents.   They could be added as someone gets interested in
>>> doing so.
>>> Anybody could build a metadata mechanism "on top of" the persistent
>>> store.   Some might be built by volunteers and free, others by
>>> corporations and for sale.  This is almost what the Web is, except
>>> that the Web store isn't persistent - things on the Web disappear
>>> without warning.   Someone might put a web site "in front of" the
>>> persistent store and use today's web tools pretty much as is to
>>> access materials stored there.
>>> /Jack
>>> On 2/24/19 4:07 PM, Vint Cerf wrote:
>>> not all data that we might want to preserve needs to be publicly
>>> accessible.
>>> v
>>> On Sun, Feb 24, 2019 at 6:23 PM Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org <mailto:jack at 3kitty.org>>
>>> wrote:
>>> I don't know much about SOLID, but it appears to be addressing the
>>> problem of handling individuals' personal private data, and
>>> controlling who can access it.   What I described was somewhat of
>>> the inverse - making data public, survivable, and accessible to
>>> everyone.  But maybe there's overlap in any implementation.
>>> Certainly there are lots of pieces already in place somewhere, as
>>> evidenced by the success of viruses, pirated videos, and the like.
>>> The Internet has made possible new sorts of social mechanisms.  What
>>> I'm imagining is more like applying Internet-style "crowd-funding"
>>> to the problem of a historical archive, where people contribute
>>> cycles and bytes rather than euros and dollars.
>>> That wasn't possible pre-Internet, but it is now.   Thinking
>>> "outside the box" is a lot easier.  The Internet made the box much
>>> bigger....
>>> /Jack
>>> On 2/24/19 2:45 PM, Vint Cerf wrote:
>>> isn't that what SOLID is supposed to do?
>>> v
>>> On Sun, Feb 24, 2019 at 1:47 PM Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org <mailto:jack at 3kitty.org>>
>>> wrote:
>>> [Changed the subject line]
>>> I read the recent messages on the forum just before going to sleep,
>>> and
>>> then I had a dream....literally.
>>> There's a whole different perspective on Internet History that might
>>> be
>>> very revealing.  Instead of questions like "Who built the
>>> Internet?",
>>> perhaps also ask "Who paid for the Internet?"  If historians
>>> "followed
>>> the money" like many other investigators, they might find some
>>> interesting insights.  I didn't realize until today that the IETF is
>>> funded by ... Me!   Through my payments for my .org domain, maybe by
>>> now
>>> I've paid for an urn or two of coffee at an IETF meeting.
>>> But my dream was of how to fund some kind of Internet repository of
>>> historical materials, not subject to the management whims or
>>> financial
>>> success of an "institution".   My dream reminded me that such
>>> mechanisms
>>> already exist, have been running at scale for years, are
>>> self-funded,
>>> and seem essentially impossible to excise even when governments or
>>> industry giants try to do so.
>>> My dream is of a Benevolent BotNet (apologies to my alma mater,
>>> BBN).
>>> Instead of hosting and propagating malware and viruses, or stealing
>>> computer cycle to mine cryptocurrency, the BBN would simply store,
>>> replicate, and distribute historical materials on demand.  No doubt
>>> Richard's comment on Pirate Bay triggered this part of the dream.
>>> Such technology obviously exists, and survives despite serious
>>> efforts
>>> to eradicate it.  Where the Internet was coopted for evil, perhaps
>>> the
>>> evil could be coopted for good?
>>> Maybe even better would be a mechanism that didn't rely on theft and
>>> subterfuge at all.  Perhaps something akin to the SETI mechanisms,
>>> where
>>> people voluntarily donate their computer resources to analyze radio
>>> signals, by simply downloading a piece of code and allowing it to
>>> run on
>>> their computers.
>>> So, my dream was that some new software appears, which is freely
>>> downloaded by thousands or millions of people around the world,
>>> which
>>> uses a few GB of the disk on their machines, and stores historical
>>> material in a redundant, highly survivable, persistent, distrubuted
>>> historical warehouse.   One, or many, search engines (go Google!,
>>> Bing!,
>>> DuckDuckGo!) would allow people to find material in the warehouse.
>>> Anyone could contribute material to the historical archive by simply
>>> placing a copy into the disk area of their machine that they've
>>> shared,
>>> from where it would be automatically distributed and replicated.
>>> Perhaps this is one or more apps that can be downloaded.  Or perhaps
>>> a
>>> plug in or extension to popular browsers.  Or maybe an addition to
>>> existing mechanisms like BitTorrent.  Much of the code already
>>> exists,
>>> as evidenced by the millions of computers unwittingly participating
>>> in a
>>> Botnet, or willingly running code like SETI.
>>> Dave's offer of disk space is just the start.  I suspect many people
>>> would contribute some unused chunk of their computers and network
>>> capacity.  I have a few Terabytes on my NAS that are empty...you
>>> probably do too.   With enough participants, the BBN becomes
>>> self-suficient even as people come and go.
>>> All it would seem to take is for someone to sit down and write the
>>> code....in the classic Internet spirit of Rough Consensus and
>>> Running Code.
>>> Dave....?
>>> /Jack Haverty
>>> On 2/24/19 7:42 AM, Dave Taht wrote:
>>>> Joe Touch <touch at strayalpha.com <mailto:touch at strayalpha.com>> writes:
>>>>> On Feb 23, 2019, at 12:42 PM, Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org <mailto:jack at 3kitty.org>>
>>> wrote:
>>>>> But "internet-history at postel.org <mailto:internet-history at postel.org>", and others like it, even
>>> RFC
>>>>> repositories, likely exist at the whim of their sponsor.
>>>>> Indeed - even assuming volunteers run them - they’re’s still
>>> the issue
>>>>> of hosting and net access.
>>>>> I have old repositories (end2end-interest, for one) that even the
>>> ISOC
>>>>> has declined to host (even though the E2E-RG originated there).
>>>>> Then again, if you want to see the worst of “free riders”, go
>>> attend
>>>>> an IETF. Companies send armies there for free training and free
>>>>> consulting.
>>>>> PS - speaking as list admin, if anyone wants to offer a place to
>>> host
>>>>> this list more reliably and archivally, please do let me know
>>> (contact
>>>>> me directly off-list).
>>>> My email list server currently lives on linode in the cloud. The
>>> cost is
>>>> $5/month for 25GB of SSD storage. ( https://www.linode.com/pricing <https://www.linode.com/pricing>
>>>> ). Has IPv6 and IPv4. It's paid for via a patreon donation.
>>>> It's not like I'm using much of that box - or the bandwidth
>>> available -
>>>> how big are these archives?
>>>> I wouldn't mind sharing that existing list server, but I long ago
>>>> switched to violating whatever RFC it was that said starttls was a
>>>> "should" - to *mandate* starttls only - which cuts down on spam
>>> (and
>>>> sigh, about 13% of my measured potential correspondents, still).
>>> The
>>>> biggest administrative cost I'd had was dealing with spam.
>>>> If that's not an acceptable policy for these lists/archives, well,
>>> go
>>>> burn the 5 bucks/mo on yer own.
>>>>> Joe
>>>>> _______
>>>>> internet-history mailing list
>>>>> internet-history at postel.org <mailto:internet-history at postel.org>
>>>>> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history <http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history>
>>>>> Contact list-owner at postel.org <mailto:list-owner at postel.org> for assistance.
>>> _______
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>>> Contact list-owner at postel.org <mailto:list-owner at postel.org> for assistance.
>>> --
>>> New postal address:
>>> Google
>>> 1875 Explorer Street, 10th Floor
>>> Reston, VA 20190
>> --
>> New postal address:
>> Google
>> 1875 Explorer Street, 10th Floor
>> Reston, VA 20190 _______
>> internet-history mailing list
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>> Contact list-owner at postel.org <mailto:list-owner at postel.org> for assistance.
>> _______
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>> Contact list-owner at postel.org <mailto:list-owner at postel.org> for assistance.
>> _______
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>> Contact list-owner at postel.org <mailto:list-owner at postel.org> for assistance.
>> —
>> Richard Bennett
>> High Tech Forum [2] Founder
>> Ethernet & Wi-Fi standards co-creator
>> Internet Policy Consultant
>> Links:
>> ------
>> [1] https://decentralizedweb.net/ <https://decentralizedweb.net/>
>> [2] http://hightechforum.org <http://hightechforum.org/>
>> _______
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>> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history <http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history>
>> Contact list-owner at postel.org <mailto:list-owner at postel.org> for assistance.

—
Richard Bennett
High Tech Forum <http://hightechforum.org/> Founder
Ethernet & Wi-Fi standards co-creator

Internet Policy Consultant

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