skygiants

I find the Wayback Machine incredibly useful. But I find the Free Library sketchy as hell and won't use it. My worry is the ultimately inevitable court case will take down the Wayback Machine, not just the Free Library.

The argument that the Free Library exists to preserve orphan books doesn't hold water when authors like J K Rowling are having to send them DMCA takedown notices. There are a lot of authors who barely scrape by, but whose books are anything but orphan works, and the fact their books are turning up in the Free Library without permission being asked says that the Free Library doesn't care less about authors. And that's a fairly unique attitude for a library.

You note that there's a problem with the ethics of the Internet Archive in the web crawls it does without asking permission of the original creators, but that's exactly what it is doing to authors. It's forcing them to do the labour of finding the copyright breach and protecting their rights, while cutting itself a break on actually respecting the law. Their entire business model is based on systematically ignoring authors rights and hoping no one sues them. And that says they don't actually give a damn about ethics, or the livelihood of content creators. And ultimately, if people can't earn a living creating content, there won't be new content to archive.