Comment on Internet Archive forced to remove 500,000 books after publishers’ court win
AutistoMephisto@lemmy.world 3 months agoThere’s a Minecraft server that has books and articles stored. it’s called The Uncensored Library, (visit.uncensoredlibrary.com), and they have various articles and books that are free to view. The Uncensored Library was created by Reporters Without Borders. If I were the people of the Internet Archive, I’d be talking to the folks in the RSF about porting some of their content to this virtual library.
Jordan117@lemmy.world 3 months ago
It only contains a relatively small collection of banned reporting from various countries, not the whole Internet Archive, and only in the form of in-game books, not anything really usable IRL. It’s neat but basically a promotional project for RWB.
AutistoMephisto@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Maybe I’m just seeing potential where there isn’t any, but I really think if the people of the Archive could find a way to get their stuff stored in TUL, or perhaps build a Library of their own, the publishers couldn’t go after them then, because to the outside observer, all they see is a buncha dudes playing Minecraft.
Jordan117@lemmy.world 3 months ago
It’s just not practical – no Minecraft server or map can realistically hold all the books in the Archive, or even just the 500k that were removed. Even if it could, you’d only be able to read them by literally taking your avatar to the book object and reading it in the tiny in-game interface.
The Minecraft thing is just a gimmick to promote awareness of press freedom and censorship, not a plausible way to deliver books to people. If the IA wanted to “set books free” they’d be better off using torrents or something like Libgen (and even then they’d still be criminally liable for making the files available, even if there publishers couldn’t stop the files from being shared further).
fuzzzerd@programming.dev 3 months ago
Maybe the fact you have to be there and read it while connected is the secret sauce to prove that it’s a “real” library, meaning they have a fixed number of copies (max players connected to the server at any given time) and that helps them get protected the same way a real library is?
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
you could easily stuff a script to rip the books out and stuff them into usable formats pretty easily, minecraft worlds are just a list of files.
Though i haven’t verified this, and i’m not going to so.
ALifeToRemember@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I had a look at this map and ifirc the problem is that the Minecraft books have a very small word limit. Only a few hundred words. You cannot even put a full article on a Minecraft book, let alone an actual book.
It was rather underwhelming to be honest.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
yeah that sounds about right. Limiting engines be limited after all