French officials call Project Gutenberg archive, 15 million ebooks, Grateful Dead recordings and Prelinger Archive "terrorism," demands removal from Internet Archive

“24 hours to comply with its demand or face a nationwide block”

Oh noooo…the French are going block our website! I say, let them block every website they send these to, and let the EU voters sort this out.

So really, what’s the strategy/motivation here? I don’t think I can accept “They’re just evil/They just want control/They just want to destroy the Internet!” as anything but hyperbole. So whyyyy on earth do something so abjectly stupid?

Because, to them, anything that is public/free/open is a missed opportunity to charge rent.

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I guess it looks like time to add this to their firewall:

http://www.ipdeny.com/ipblocks/data/aggregated/fr-aggregated.zone

I knew it they would try to go after the archive. I fucking knew it!
those fucking lying fucks!

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What is the penalty for filing false takedowns? Because I suspect that the French government agencies, politicians, etc. are about to be inundated.

Me, I’d start with CERN. Not that Deutsche Welle isn’t a good target too.

Hmm. Block the IA, and then put the content up behind a paywall.

None, certainly.

Is there a place where I can report France’s Internet Referral Unit as a terrorist organisation?

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I mean fine if France wants to be like North Korea and block them selves off from the outside world I guess all these websites could just make their content not accessible to France. I mean, it sucks to be French then

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France did actually try to run its own parallel web service for a while.

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I wonder if OCLTIC has anything to do with HADOPI, the French copyright enforcement agency known for its copyright infringing logo

I wouldn’t rule out simple error.

That isn’t intended to be exculpatory: you only make errors like this when the penalty for doing so is effectively zero and you are slapping out takedowns fast enough that even trivial sanity checks are skipped, which is an obviously invidious state of affairs; but once you’ve gone down the dark path of ‘takedown in haste, repent at leisure or never’ one of the expected effects is significant collateral damage that doesn’t have any particular strategic or tactical explanation(the decision makers might not even be aware that the takedown has been ordered, since a bulk operation inevitably relies on bots and low level operatives to keep throughout up).

This certainly doesn’t exclude the possibility of some sort of intentional harassment(anyone get caught out by a cached version of a page they tried to silently change lately; or some collecting society see a bunch of mp3s and assume that they must be evil?); but simple error, inflicted because there is no penalty for getting it wrong, is part of the system.

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No, IA should not pre-emptively block France or let France block them. This is contrary tot the mission of IA and is not a solution.

Do we really want to balkanize the web? Do you really want to let significant countries or all of Europe’s view of the web really just be Google and Facebook?

I think they would be justified in blocking OCLCTIC in response to the harassing and abusive use of the site.

What about creating a front end to the archive or browser extension with some VPN options as well?

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If those countries’ voters don’t give a shit, then yes. Sometimes in democracies, the electorate needs to get what it has consented to. Good and hard.

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This is the correct answer.

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tenor

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This is making me understand a little bit about Brexit.

Maybe if the EU had stuck to enabling free movement of people and goods across its members’ boundaries instead of trying to micromanage all kinds of additional shit that has nothing to do with that primary goal, there would have been no Brexit at all.

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Yes, they know perfectly well that it’s impossible to comply with their ridiculous demands in any timely manner. They probably are looking for an excuse to ban the Internet Archive because it allows access to information they consider subversive. So be it. Let French citizens be cut off from access and maybe they will rise up to overthrow these censors. The real danger though is that it will be used as an excuse to try and extend the ban/blocking to other countries in an attempt to shut them down altogether.