Aniwave, The Internet Archive, and Piracy
September 6th, 2024
Currently Feeling: Chill B)
Currently Listening to: FFXIV Stormblood OST
Hello friends!
The move is finally over. Thank goodness XD. I haven't moved in four years and I forgot how much it SUCKS!!! But, I am 90% moved in, and I've got my desk set up. I realized during the last few weeks of not having it, how much I needed it for me. My bed is holy, but my desk is my safe space. Where I can express a side of me that I can't otherwise: my connection to the net.
I was going to dedicate this blog to blathering about Sleater Kinney, as I mentioned in my last blog post. However, I wanted to touch on some serious topics going around, topics relevant for a community involved in bringing back web 1.0, and designing our own websites, and preserving. And because this is MY BLOG :D where I can write about ~ whatever I want ~, I will address them. SK, we'll come back to you soon.
At the end of August, aniwave, solar movies, and a number of other pirate sites went dark. Aniwave, previously 9anime, has been running since 2016, a remarkably long time for a pirate website, and had...pretty much everything. Before we continue, I'd like to bring up an important part of the US copyright law: streaming online is a grey zone in terms of copyright violation. Technically, you can do it. *Distributing* (like reuploading the media) is where the line is crossed. But, of course, depending on the suit, it depends. And of course, if you are getting something that you should pay for and you didn't pay for it, tread lightly.
Now, we can all hope for a rebrand, that aniwave is pulling a similar situation as when they rebranded from 9anime. However, there is something else that makes me think twice, at least if not for connection, then to step forward wearily: The Internet Archive Case. Preface: I love the internet archive. However, this case is rather concerning. To rewind: back in 2020, when the CDC declared covid-19 a global pandemic and the modern world had a dramatic change, the Internet Archive decided to make its entire digital book collection free to access. For anyone. At any time. Now, this is a great idea: there should be no barriers to the ideas people have, and books are a primary way of doing that. However, in USA, copyright law is a very real thing. Property is the law, and ideas are property. So, the American Publishing Association put their foot down.
The other major issue with this case is that The Internet Archive went about doing this in a very stupid way. They decided to call accessing their collection 'Controlled Digital Lending', a term very much already used *by libraries* for a different practice. CDL, as libraries do it, is again, a grey zone. Authors (and Publishers) want people to buy the work. Libraries house a collection of purchased copies, and loan out the electronic copy to one person at a time, maintaining their corresponding physical copy. This was their argument to publishers to trigger Fair Use clause in copyright law (the same law OTW operates on, with different aspect). This worked--libraries were able to do this thing that was kind of a grey zone, satisfied publishers, and were able to increase the accessibility of their collections.
Good luck doing that now.
Internet Archive endangered this practice by calling their actions by the same name. Now, libraries will be called into question about this practice. Honestly, likely any site hosting media will be under higher scrutiny. The Internet Archive wanted to help, and to be clear, copyright law is its own messed up can of worms. I believe information should be freely and widely accessible by everyone. But the way they went about it was...not great. The one good thing that came out of this is their appeals declared them a nonprofit, instead of a corporation. That's pretty great.
Internet Archive, take your L. This is bad enough as is. But if they make the decision to appeal, the decision goes to the supreme court. And...I am not happy with the current proclivities of our court. There is no way they will lose, and if it goes to the Supreme Court, the digital media landscape we currently live on will lilely be altered irrevocably. Even now, scrutiny increases, and physical media becomes harder and harder to get ahold of. Couple this with AI globbering up the internet and itself triggering massive copyright violations, things are definitely changing on the net.
This is why archiving is more important than ever.
I know, even despite all of this news, maintaining a personal archive is essential. Get physical media. Save copies of physical media. Build your own libraries. Support your local libraries! I love renting movies from my library. I have a copy of Mark Oshiro's *Into the Light* from the library on my nightstand. Burn your own cds. I had to set aside my own archiving project as my HDD broke ( :( ), but this news is making me want to start up again. Sometime in the future I'll walk through my experiences with jellyfin. Until then though, just keep saving, and expressing yourself online. This (neocities, our own personal creations not mediated by LLMs or corps) is friggin awesome. I found some new sites just by surfing: shouting out Leviathren and ribo.zone.
Stay safe out there. And remember: LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS.
xoxo -- Storm