Anıl Şerifoğlu (talk) 19:55, 29 March 2024 (UTC)I don't want to come across with this Senate Hall thread as fearmongering or anything like that, but with the arisal of yet another lawsuit against the Internet Archive, one which threatens the existence of the website as a whole, I believe it is time that Wookieepedia begins to legitimately plan for the case in which the Internet Archive were to shut down.
For those who do not know, four major publishing companies (including Penguin Random House) are in the process of suing the Internet Archive for the hosting of copyrighted content on the website. The Internet Archive has made it clear that the website's existence is at risk should the legal battle end unfavorably for them.
Wookieepedia relies on the Internet Archive extensively to preserve content, and IA hosts numerous webpages and archivals of content that is no longer available in their original forms. Without Internet Archive, an astounding amount of content we reference and research would become lost to us.
As I said, I believe we need to have a plan or some kind of backup archive in place should the Internet Archive be shut down. There are alternative archival sites that we have used on occasion, but examples of this are few and far in between, and as it stands Wookieepedia has no wide-reaching backup for the vast swathes of content backed up in IA.
I also understand that, given the scope of everything, it might not be entirely feasible to back-up all of the archives we rely upon (StarWars.com is not the sole domain we archive and even it alone would be an insurmountable task to back up). At least, not manually—automation of the process may be possible but I am no expert on the matter.
I am not proposing or suggesting that Wookieepedia stop using the Internet Archive extensively or even primarily. But I think that we would be foolish to make no effort to back the content we peruse on it up or be prepared for its entirely possible demise. - Thannus (DFaceG) (he/him) (talk) 01:01, 24 February 2024 (UTC)
Situation report
Here's a quick overview of the situation since 2020 and why some editors have expressed concerns. I won't go into too much details, as Wikipedia and pdf links are provided for anyone wishing to dig deeper, nor do I feel necessary to explain why Internet Archive (IA), and the Wayback Machine in particular, are of major importance to Wookieepedia, given how it is now well established in our culture and policies.
- March 24, 2020: During the Covid-19 pandemic crisis, the Internet Archive, through it's digital library service Open Library (OL; a Controlled digital lending (CDL) service, working on the basis of a digital library made of scans of books owned by IA, who then lend those digital copy protected by DRM on a request basis to a single user-per-copy at a time, much like a public library; IA also has a joint partnership with multiple libraries to pool in common their copies) launched the National Emergency Library (NEL) initiative to counter the effect of the global shutdown on the public access to culture by removing the Open Library lending limit.
- June 1, 2020: A lawsuit to the initiative of Hachette Book Group, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins and Wiley (the plaintiffs), and with support of the Authors Guild, is targeting IA, their CDL services (the OL) as a whole and the NEL initiative, on the basis that IA was committing copyright infringement. The lawsuit provided a specific list of 127 books. IA followed this by ending the NEL on June 16, 2020 instead of the originally planned June 30 or the end of the US national emergency. IA defense was that while they admitted to copyright infringement, they were allowed to do so under the protection provided by the fair use doctrine, in particular on CDL.
- March 25, 2023: The court published an Opinion and Order (here), rejecting IA's defense on all four factors of fair use regarding the scanning and lending of copyrighted material in general and in particular in the case of the NEL, and asking the defendant and plaintiffs to reach a negotiated judgement.
- August 11, 2023: The plaintiffs and IA reached a Consent Judgement (here, see also final Order), with IA agreeing to a monetary judgement payment (undisclosed) and an injonction to cease their CDL service in regard to the copyrighted catalog of the plaintiffs (including all editors represented by the Association of American Publishers), limited only to books already available under electronic licensing format, but also protecting IA's right for an appeal. Note that others services provided by the OL are not affected, and are even protected per previous ruling such as Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. and Authors Guild, Inc. v. HathiTrust.
- September 11, 2023: IA filled a notice for an appeal, with the appeal's brief filled on December 15 (here). Several organizations, including Wikimedia, declared themselves "friend of the court", which mean that they can provide their own brief to the court in support to IA (see list here).
NanoLuukeCloning Facility 20:09, 24 February 2024 (UTC)
Risk assessment
While I can't pretend to be knowledgeable enough in the matters of US copyright laws to claim to understand the full extend of possible repercussions this lawsuit may have upon Wookieepedia, it is, however, quite clear that the most obvious effects of this lawsuit, the removal of copyrighted content from the Open Library, isn't going to affect us, simply because we never use this service in the first place. And even if we did, which we may or may not want to do in the future for citing particular non-official books (a discussion for another day), like Wikipedia does with some of their citations, this also would not affect us. Per IA's statement: "We may continue to display "short portions" of books as is consistent with fair use—for example, Wikipedia references."
To be clear, our primary use of Internet Archive is the Wayback Machine, a web archival service, that we use on 60,000 pages (articles and files), and it does not appear to be threatened in any way at the moment.
The secondary use we have of Internet Archive is when we sometimes link to an unusual document (often, video games paratext materials, like manuals) that as found its way onto Internet Archive thank to user contribution. Those are in a somewhat legal grey area (that is yet another discussion), and can be removed without notice (we previously linked to Starlog magazines in the past, but those were removed from IA, for example).
The last issue is that the monetary payement, consisting of "AAP’s significant attorney’s fees and costs incurred in the Action since 2020 have been substantially compensated by the Monetary Judgement Payment." per IA's statement, can be quite substantial and hurt IA in the long run... or not at all, but I don't expect it to affect the Wayback Machine in a way we will notice, and unless IA communicate about this (and they have always been quite open), I don't think we need to concern ourselves over the finance of IA.
Finally, accounting for the statement bellow, I do not think we need to worry about the future of the Wayback Machine, as I really don't think it's in any real danger at the moment. NanoLuukeCloning Facility 20:09, 24 February 2024 (UTC)
Mark Graham statement
Following is a statement by Mark Graham, director at the Internet Archive. I took the initiative to contact him through a private channel after the creation of this Senate Hall, since I had already the chance to exchange with him in the past following Wookieepedia's 2020 archival effort. NanoLuukeCloning Facility 20:09, 24 February 2024 (UTC)
While I can appreciate your (and other editor's) concerns I am able to share that the Internet Archive is strong and the wayback Machine is safe.
I am not able to get into specifics but I assure you we have the financial, organizational, technical and other support needed to ensure the ongoing operation of the Wayback Machine for many decades into the future.
We benefited from support from more than 150,000 patrons last year and that does not include support from rich people, foundations, and earned income from our Archive-It program.
Please know we take our responsibility as stewards of much of the history of the Web very very seriously and have taken many specific steps to help ensure we will be around long after some of us in the organization die.
BTW... our theme this year is "preservation". I encourage you, or anyone, to come to (or watch) our public event on that subject on October 23rd. We will have a LOT to share.
Discuss
- While this does happen with the IA every now and again (I've seen this battle too many times to count), it definitely would benefit Wookieepedia as a whole to make sure everything is archived elsewhere, just on the off chance things do go south. —SnowedLightning (they/them) 07:11, 24 February 2024 (UTC)
- I perfectly understand that the lawsuit had you and others worried, DFaceG, but you did jumped into the proverbial water puddle without much restrain after seeing the Jacobin article get shared over social media ^^. However, contrary to some previous statement by myself in the past (that I consider now an overconfidence bias on my part), I understand that worrying over the possible loss of the Wayback Machine is a legitimate concern, and I've tried my best to address it. I took upon myself to clarify the situation (sorry, kind of hijacked the Senate Hall ^^), as it's not a all a new lawsuit, but an appeal of the 2020 lawsuit. I also would request preemptively that users stay on topic by only discussing the possible effects of the lawsuit on Wookieepedia, any other aspect on the matter can be discussed elsewhere, including our Discord. NanoLuukeCloning Facility 20:09, 24 February 2024 (UTC)
- Thanks for sharing everything you did, and I will say most of my concerns are certainly alleviated. However, I also maintain that having a contingency in place for the however unlikely event the Web Archive were to shut down would be wise on our (Wookieepedia’s) part. If the web side of the IA was ever at risk, it would behoove us to have something already prepared for such a scenario. - Thannus (DFaceG) (he/him) (talk) 20:19, 24 February 2024 (UTC)
- Thank you for the report, Nano! Responding to Thannus' point, I suppose taking screenshots (similar to our Wookieepedia:Social media screenshots process and archivefile field in our citation templates) would be one assurance in case IA's website is down for e.g. temporary maintenance or cyberattacks. I also suppose a more labour-intensive option of downloading all the archive webpages that Wookieepedia links to via the archivedate field in our citation templates isn't impossible either. OOM 224 (he/him) 10:46, 25 February 2024 (UTC)
- I'm going to repeat what I said over on Discord here: I really don't think we should prospect any kind of solution that could not be achieved through automation. With more than 60 000 pages concerned, anything else would be an additional burden to editors, especially now we have some assurance that there is no real threat toward our sourcing system at the moment. NanoLuukeCloning Facility 11:52, 25 February 2024 (UTC)