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.

Uhh what? I’m pretty sure libraries in Europe can’t do that. Do you mean they can photocopy any book they own…?