Two Bollywood Film Producers Get Court To Block Tons Of Sites In India, Including Archive.org

from the street-sweeper-for-justice dept

How many innocents would you accept being caught up in an action designed to nab criminals? How many good people is it acceptable to throw into jail alongside the truly bad actors? Most people would agree that any action that penalizes the innocent in order to punish the guilty is a bad course, with only truly minimal amounts of collateral damage being acceptable. Now let's port that over to internet sites and ask how many innocent websites is it acceptable to block in order to block sites that are actually engaged in undesirable behavior?

Well, for the legal system in India, that question has often been answered in a cavalier manner, with regular court orders to block innocent websites being doled out to battle both terrorism and at the request of copyright holders to stop infringement. It's in the latter cases where things get really silly, with previous orders issued to block sites like GitHub and the Internet Archive. Well, it seems the Internet Archive endured this sort of thing again recently, as a court order at the request of two Bollywood film studios caught archive.org into its ISP blocking web.

Earlier this week (and again for no apparent reason), the world renowned Internet Archive was rendered inaccessible to millions of users in India. The platform, which is considered by many to be one of the Internet’s most valued resources, hosts more than 15 petabytes of data, a figure which grows on a daily basis. Yet despite numerous requests for information, none was forthcoming from authorities. Quoted by local news outlet Medianama, Chris Butler, Office Manager at the Internet Archive, said that their attempts to contact the Indian Department of Telecom (DoT) and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity) had proven fruitless.

Now, however, the mystery has been solved. The BBC says a local government agency provided a copy of a court order obtained by two Bollywood production companies who are attempting to slow down piracy of their films in India. Issued by a local judge, the sweeping order compels local ISPs to block access to 2,650 mainly file-sharing websites, including The Pirate Bay, RARBG, the revived KickassTorrents, and hundreds of other ‘usual suspects’. However, it also includes the URL for the Internet Archive, hence the problems with accessibility this week.

Let's be clear about what this sort of thing represents: the punishment of the innocent in favor of an easy and lazy attempt to block copyright infringement. That's not an overstatement. The continued use of court orders to block entire websites and the routine collateral damage are not exceptions, they are the rule. That they are allowed to continue to do this sort of damage even while the Indian government hand-waves away frantic requests for information from innocent site operators is as good a definition of whatever the opposite of justice is as I can think of.

Importantly, neither the court that issued the order or the two film companies requesting it, and ostensibly providing the list of sites to be blocked, are due any recompense for these actions. Perhaps most frustrating, the Internet Archive has clearly stated that not only does it have a method for copyright holders to request content takedowns, but it complied with those requests from these very same film studios.

“Is the Court aware of and did it consider the fact that the Internet Archive has a well-established and standard procedure for rights holders to submit take down requests and processes them expeditiously?” the platform said. “We find several instances of take down requests submitted for one of the plaintiffs, Red Chillies Entertainments, throughout the past year, each of which were processed and responded to promptly. After a preliminary review, we find no instance of our having been contacted by anyone at all about these films. Is there a specific claim that someone posted these films to archive.org? If so, we’d be eager to address it directly with the claimant.”

Now, archive.org was not the only innocent site blocked by this order. Weebly.com, along with at least one news site and the site for a French ISP also had their sites blocked. Still, this damage appears to be mostly met with indifferent shrugs by the Indian government and the film studios that issued this request.

So, for India, we have an answer to the question of how many innocent sites it's willing to harm to combat copyright infringement. That answer, by our litmus test, is "too many."

Filed Under: copyright, india, internet archive
Companies: bbc

Ahead Of President Trump, The Web's One And Only Backup Wants To Make A Backup Of Itself (In Canada)

from the you-know,-just-in-case dept

The Internet Archive is probably the most important site that most people have never heard of, much less used. It is an amazing thing: not just a huge collection of freely-available digitized materials, but a backup copy of much of today's Web, available through something known as the Wayback Machine. It gets its name from the fact that it lets visitors view snapshots of vast numbers of Web pages as they have changed over the last two decades since the Internet Archive was founded -- some 279 billion pages currently. That feature makes it an indispensable -- and generally unique -- record of pages and information that have since disappeared, sometimes because somebody powerful found them inconvenient.

Given the way the world is going at the moment, that's a problem that is likely to get worse, not better. The founder of the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle, is worried about that prospect, as he makes clear in a blog post:

On November 9th in America, we woke up to a new administration promising radical change. It was a firm reminder that institutions like ours, built for the long-term, need to design for change.

For us, it means keeping our cultural materials safe, private and perpetually accessible. It means preparing for a Web that may face greater restrictions.

It means serving patrons in a world in which government surveillance is not going away; indeed it looks like it will increase.

Throughout history, libraries have fought against terrible violations of privacy -- where people have been rounded up simply for what they read. At the Internet Archive, we are fighting to protect our readers' privacy in the digital world.

Ever the visionary, Kahle has come up with a bold plan to minimize possible damage from the incoming US administration, and any new laws harming the Internet that it might introduce:

So this year, we have set a new goal: to create a copy of Internet Archive's digital collections in another country. We are building the Internet Archive of Canada because, to quote our friends at LOCKSS, "lots of copies keep stuff safe." This project will cost millions.

Creating a backup of the Web's backup in this way would have been a great idea under any circumstances -- it's rather foolish to depend upon a single site to preserve humanity's collective digital memory. But it becomes even more prudent given the "radical change" that may be coming. And locating outside the US jurisdiction, in Canada, is a wise move.

As Kahle says, the project will cost millions, and he's asking for donations to help him realize his plan. As anyone who has used the Internet Archive knows, he deserves our support for what he has already achieved and made freely available through this invaluable resource. But supporting the next stage of his great project with a donation takes on an additional importance: it is not just a nice thing to do, it's a wonderful way to help the Web become more resilient to whatever 2017 may start throwing at it.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: backup, brewster kahle, canada, donald trump, internet archive, privacy
Companies: internet archive

Federal Judge Says Internet Archive's Wayback Machine A Perfectly Legitimate Source Of Evidence

from the score-one-for-the-internet's-unofficial-backup-system dept

Those of us who dwell on the internet already know the Internet Archive's "Wayback Machine" is a useful source of evidence. For one, it showed that the bogus non-disparagement clause KlearGear used to go after an unhappy customer wasn't even in place when the customer ordered the product that never arrived.

It's useful to have ways of preserving web pages the way they are when we come across them, rather than the way some people would prefer we remember them, after vanishing away troublesome posts, policies, etc. Archive.is performs the same function. Screenshots are also useful, although tougher to verify by third parties.

So, it's heartening to see a federal judge arrive at the same conclusion, as Stephen Bykowski of the Trademark and Copyright Law blog reports.

The potential uses of the Wayback Machine in IP litigation are powerful and diverse. Historical versions of an opposing party’s website could contain useful admissions or, in the case of patent disputes, invalidating prior art. Date-stamped websites can also contain proof of past infringing use of copyrighted or trademarked content.

The latter example is exactly what happened in the case Marten Transport v. PlatForm Advertising, an ongoing case in the District of Kansas. The plaintiff, a trucking company, brought a trademark infringement suit against the defendant, a truck driver job posting website, alleging unauthorized use of the plaintiff’s trademark on the defendant’s website. To prove the defendant’s use of the trademark, the plaintiff intended to introduce at trial screenshots of defendant’s website taken from the Wayback Machine, along with authenticating deposition testimony from an employee of the Internet Archive.

The defendant tried to argue that the Internet Archive's pages weren't admissible because the Wayback Machine doesn't capture everything on the page or update every page from a website on the same date. The judge, after receiving testimony from an Internet Archive employee, disagreed. He found the site to a credible source of preserved evidence -- not just because it captures (for the most part) sites as they were on relevant dates but, more importantly, it does nothing to alter the purity of the preserved evidence.

[T]he fact that the Wayback Machine doesn’t capture everything that was on those sites does not bear on whether the things that were captured were in fact on those sites. There is no suggestion or evidence … that the Wayback Machine ever adds material to sites.

Further, the judge noted that the archived pages were from the defendant's own website and he'd offered no explanation as to why pages from his own site shouldn't be considered as evidence of alleged infringement.

It's nice to know that what many of us have considered an independently-verifiable source of evidence is also acceptable in federal courts. It's more than just a handy way to preserve idiotic statements and potentially-illegal customer service policies. It's also a resource for litigants who might find their opponents performing digital cleanups after a visit from a process server.

Filed Under: evidence, internet archive, wayback machine
Companies: internet archive

Awesomeness: Millions Of Public Domain Images Being Put Online

from the go-use-them dept

Here's some nice news. Kalev Leetaru has been liberating a ton of public domain images from books and putting them all on Flickr. He's been going through Internet Archive scans of old, public domain books, isolating the images, and turning them into individual images. Because, while the books and images are all public domain, very few of the images have been separated from the books and released in a digital format.

To achieve his goal, Mr Leetaru wrote his own software to work around the way the books had originally been digitised.

The Internet Archive had used an optical character recognition (OCR) program to analyse each of its 600 million scanned pages in order to convert the image of each word into searchable text.

As part of the process, the software recognised which parts of a page were pictures in order to discard them.

Mr Leetaru's code used this information to go back to the original scans, extract the regions the OCR program had ignored, and then save each one as a separate file in the Jpeg picture format.

Already over 2.6 million images have been posted to Flickr in this manner -- all completely in the public domain. From a historical perspective, the images are fascinating -- and the fact that anyone can do anything with them, free of charge, is important culturally as well. Just scrolling through the images is amazing. Here are a few interesting ones that I spotted:



There seem to be lots of images of musical scores, sewing machines, individual portraits, building and machinery. Each Flickr page associated with the image gives information about the book, including the text before and after the image, which is pretty cool. The one (only slightly) annoying thing is that on the Flickr pages, rather than saying these are public domain images, it says that there are "no known copyright restrictions." While that's accurate, and a potentially reasonable hedge against some miraculous finding that says these images are covered by copyright, it's really too bad that it's so problematic to come out and say "this is in the public domain, do whatever the hell you want with it."

Filed Under: book scans, copyright, flickr, internet archive, kalev, leetaru, old books, public domain

Copyright Strikes Again: No Online Access To UK Internet Archive

from the you're-doing-it-wrong dept

Last week we wrote about how Norway had come up with a way to provide online access to all books in Norwegian, including the most recent ones, available to anyone in the country. Here, by contrast, is how not to do it, courtesy of publishers in the UK:

The UK is preparing to launch its official internet archive without internet access, after the publishing industry put restrictions on its release.

The archive was held up by a decade of negotiations between publishers and the British Library, meaning that regulations permitting the library to perform its first archive copy of every UK website were not passed until April this year, more than 20 years since the World Wide Web took off and 10 years since Parliament passed a law making it possible.

In my post about the Norwegian system, I joked about what form a typical copyright maximalist approach to providing online access to a nation's heritage might take:

available in a specially constructed room deep in the basement of the National Library on a (small) screen, and with guards stationed either side of it to ensure that no unauthorized copies were made.

Little did I suspect that reality was way ahead of me, as the story in Computer Weekly quoted above explains:

The British Library gave the first demonstration of the UK internet archive to publishers last week, to demonstrate how it would meet their restrictions that the only people who could see it were those privileged few people eligible for readers' passes at one of the UK's six major academic libraries -- and only then one at a time, in person, at a terminal in the library.

What's particularly tragic here is that the ten years of foot-dragging and obstructionism by the British publishers has resulted in a loss of countless millions of older Web pages that are now probably gone for ever -- and with them, a key part of the UK's early digital heritage. Once again, we see that contrary to the dogma, copyright does not always promote culture, but can destroy it, too.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: access, copyright, internet archive, uk

Internet Archive Fire Shows Vulnerability Of The World's Online Memory

from the taking-things-for-granted dept

The Internet Archive is a jewel of the digital world:

The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format.

Founded in 1996 and located in San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes: texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections, and provides specialized services for adaptive reading and information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities.

Here's the amazing scale of the project today:

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine contains almost 2 petabytes of data and is currently growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month. This eclipses the amount of text contained in the world's largest libraries, including the Library of Congress.

The Internet Archive is the world's online memory, holding the only copies of many historic (and not-so-historic) Web pages that have long disappeared from the Web itself.

Bad news:

This morning at about 3:30 a.m. a fire started at the Internet Archive's San Francisco scanning center.

Good news:

no one was hurt and no data was lost. Our main building was not affected except for damage to one electrical run. This power issue caused us to lose power to some servers for a while.

Bad news:

Some physical materials were in the scanning center because they were being digitized, but most were in a separate locked room or in our physical archive and were not lost. Of those materials we did unfortunately lose, about half had already been digitized. We are working with our library partners now to assess.

That loss is unfortunate, but imagine if the fire had been in the main server room holding the Internet Archive's 2 petabytes of data. Wisely, the project has placed copies at other locations:

We have copies of the data in the Internet Archive in multiple locations, so even if our main building had been involved in the fire we still would not have lost the amazing content we have all worked so hard to collect.

That's good to know, but it seems rather foolish for the world to depend on the Internet Archive always being able to keep all its copies up to date, especially as the quantity of data that it stores continues to rise. This digital library is so important in historical and cultural terms: surely it's time to start mirroring the Internet Archive around the world in many locations, with direct and sustained support from multiple governments. They can also help provide the Internet Archive with a wider, more international range of content, to make an even more representative store of the world's digital activity.

Unfortunately, that's not likely to happen anytime soon, as people seem happy to take for granted the amazing work of Brewster Kahle and his team. The next best thing would be to donate so that they can continue with their indispensable project -- and perhaps create a few more backup copies.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: culture, fire, history, internet archive, preservation
Companies: internet archive

DailyDirt: The Ever-Growing Growth Of Data...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There are a lot of reasons to be optimistic about the future. Some folks will always predict doom and gloom, but we say, "The Sky Is Rising!" (loud and proud -- and again with sequel The Sky Is Rising 2). The advent of digital information has created an enormous wealth of data, and the amount of this digital awesomeness seems to be growing all the time. Here are just a few more examples of the amazing abundance of media that surrounds us.

• The Internet Archive has updated its Wayback Machine, indexing 5 petabytes of internet goodness, covering the web from 1996 to December 2012. That data is from over 240,000,000,000 URLs, and this virtual backup of the web doesn't even touch sites that have a login or a robot.txt file that blocks the Wayback Machine. [url]
• Sandvine's global internet phenomena report contains a prediction that US internet traffic may rise to over 700,000 exabytes per year by 2019. And if Netflix continues to do well (accounting for about double the amount of traffic as YouTube and crushing Amazon Video, Hulu and HBO Go), a lot of that traffic will be people watching streaming movies and TV shows (legitimately, too, not just using BitTorrent). [url]
• Every minute of the day, more and more data is generated. For example, 571 new websites per minute, 100K+ tweets per minute... gazillions of infographics and bazillions of random factoids. [url]
• Since the beginning of time until 2003, humans generated about 5 billion gigabytes of data... and now we generate that much every 2 days. And that rate is accelerating (but humans are not exclusively generating all that data). [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: data, factoids, internet archive, media, sky is rising, wayback machine
Companies: sandvine

'Rogue Site' The Internet Archive To Go Dark In Protest Of SOPA/PIPA

from the making-a-statement dept

You may recall that, a few months ago, the popular "library of the internet," The Internet Archive, was among the popular sites listed as a "rogue site" dedicated to "piracy," by ad giant GroupM, with inputs from Universal Music, Paramount Pictures and others. It seems that Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Archive, has recognized that SOPA and PIPA are important issues -- especially for a site that some apparently think is a rogue site. He's announced that the Internet Archive will go dark tomorrow, joining Reddit, Wikipedia and others. Tomorrow might be quite a strange day online.

Filed Under: brewster kahle, internet archive, pipa, protect ip, rogue sites, sopa
Companies: internet archive

FBI Forced To Back Down On Secret Info Request To Internet Archive

from the civil-liberties-matter dept

Congress curtailed the FBI's ability to use National Security Letters (NSLs) a few years ago after it became clear that the FBI was widely abusing the process to request information from organizations with no judicial oversight and with built in gag orders forbidding recipients from talking about receiving the letters. However, the FBI is still using the letters in some cases. Last fall, it sent one to Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive, demanding info on an Archive user while forbidding Kahle from talking about the letter to anyone but his lawyers. Kahle, the EFF and the ACLU fought back in court and have won, getting the FBI to rescind the demand and also removing part of the gag order, allowing Kahle to say he received the letter (though not discussing what info it demanded). As the EFF points out, this should serve as a blueprint for how others can challenge questionable NSLs as well.

Filed Under: aclu, brewster kahle, civil liverties, eff, fbi, gag order, internet archive, national security letters, nsl