It was a collection of silly quotes from IRC channels everywhere, many of which dated back to the 90s. It was rarely ever updated in the 2010s, but now, the URL no longer resolves.
Last capture was July 2023. https://web.archive.org/web/20230601000000*/bash.org
EDIT Someone archived all the quotes on the Internet Archive.
And people are abusing the fuck out of it by uploading tons of copyrighted movies. No one seems to be policing it either. I’m very worried that its days are numbered.
The Internet Archive has special status that gives it protections. What might kill it is the erosion of support for public libraries and such. The advancement of media companies’ attempt to have absolute control over everything they release, by binding it into their own services.
I don’t know that it has protections from people uploading Disney movies to it.
First example on a quick search: https://archive.org/details/LionKing1.5DisneyChannel
I really love the Internet Archive and have relied on it many times, but this is going to kill it and I’m just watching it happen in real time with nothing being done.
Yeah probably. It’s the ordinary playbook of allowing one site to become extreamly popular so it’s much easier to monitor users and shut down if needed.
Imagine how many copyrighted books are in IRL libraries. Now imagine that IRL libraries can copy any book in any amount. Congrats, now you imagined what libraries in Europe can do.
I’m not sure what that has to do with people uploading copyrighted movies to the Internet Archive. You can’t just upload Disney movies to YouTube and expect Disney to not give a shit. They still have legal recourse.
I hate copyright law, but it still exists. I don’t want the Internet Archive to shut down and I have harvested a lot from the public domain video they archive. But those videos are at risk because people are uploading copyrighted stuff, and eventually a big enough lawsuit is going to take the site down unless they do something about it.
Also, the video storage end of the site is becoming more and more unusable because of it. It used to be easy to search through videos and find the legitimately public domain ones which you could then use in your own projects. Now if I’m not 100% sure, I have to do a bunch of research… and I know for a fact from talking to some people that they think that if they download video from the Internet Archive, it isn’t copyrighted. And if they then use it in one of their projects, they are at legal risk.
And if the Internet Archive isn’t going to be the global digital repository for public domain video, then it’s going to be YouTube. Do we really want public domain video to be monetized?
This is, to me, pretty damn serious.