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[…] Against the back wall, where one might find confessionals in a different kind of church, there’s a tower of humming black servers. These servers hold around 10 percent of the Internet Archive’s vast digital holdings, which includes 835 billion web pages, 44 million books and texts, and 15 million audio recordings, among other artifacts. Tiny lights on each server blink on and off each time someone opens an old webpage or checks out a book or otherwise uses the Archive’s services. The constant, arrhythmic flickers make for a hypnotic light show. Nobody looks more delighted about this display than Kahle.
It is no exaggeration to say that digital archiving as we know it would not exist without the Internet Archive—and that, as the world’s knowledge repositories increasingly go online, archiving as we know it would not be as functional. Its most famous project, the Wayback Machine, is a repository of web pages that functions as an unparalleled record of the internet. Zoomed out, the Internet Archive is one of the most important historical-preservation organizations in the world. The Wayback Machine has assumed a default position as a safety valve against digital oblivion. The rhapsodic regard the Internet Archive inspires is earned—without it, the world would lose its best public resource on internet history.
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Copyright laws are agreed on at a international level. There even is a international copyright court.
But every country then implements them in different ways, for example duration and what constitutes “fair use”.
No there isn’t. Source?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Court_of_Justice
Yeah, no. The ICJ handles disputes between nations. It has literally nothing to do with copyright. Just take a look at the kind of cases they handle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_International_Court_of_Justice_cases
Then what court does international copyright? I know that lubuntu was trying to shutdown lubuntu[.]net because the official site is lubuntu.me
Welcome to my point: there’s no such thing. You always have to go through national courts, and if you hold copyright in several countries, you can pretty much pick and choose the legislature that is most advantageous to your case. Take this recent one: an Icelandic company sued an Icelandic artist for slander… In UK court. The “legal” basis was that the website was hosted on a .co.uk domain, but I’m sure that the strict UK slander laws and astronomical costs of its courts had nothing to do with it. Not a copyright case, I know, but I think it’s a good example of how laws and jurisdictions get fundamentally twisted when applied to the Internet. I think anyone can agree that it should’ve been settled in an Icelandic court.