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0 pointsgioele13y ago0 comments

> > I treat all E-books purchased with DRM as rentals.

>Good for you. Nobody else outside of HN does.

Lawyers and librarians also do. There are big discussions in those circles about the meaning of the verbs "to buy" and "to possess" as used by Amazon, Apple and other big DRM "retailers". It is not only about DRM. Libraries are realising that paying for access to a website of a publishing house is not exactly like paying to receive a copy of a published journal or magazine. Have a look at all the dark archives and to who is financing them.

First it was an hacker problem, now it has spread to humanities, in five years the DRM will finally become a layperson problem. The first signs surfaced some years ago, when kids started complaining about the fact that their iPod could not be used to pass or share music while a cheaper Creative MP3 player could without a problem.

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dhimes13y ago

I had never heard of "dark archives." Is this what you mean?

(from: http://www.osti.gov/ostiblog/dark-archives)

So, what is a dark archive? It is, simply put, an archive of information that is not used for public access. Most often it serves as a failsafe copy of a light archive, i.e. a publicly available version of the information, for use in disaster recovery operations. Dark archives need not be a fully operational copy of an information system, rather just the content behind the information system.

gioeleOP13y ago

A dark archive is an archive that is not meant to be publicly accessible. As you said it is used to store information that must survive in case of disaster.

But what is a disaster for a library? Yesterday it was a fire, today is a publisher going bankrupt and dismissing its online (paywalled) archive. A dark archive pays the fee to access various online resources and store them indefinitely, but without letting anyone access that information (well, except the archive admins). The legality of this? Dubious. The usefulness of this? High.

As Portico.com puts it, «We chose to create a “dark” archive to focus our efforts on securing and preserving large volumes of content important to libraries and their users; however, it is not exclusively dark. Participating libraries experience the archive as a “light” or accessible archive in two ways: auditing the archive to ensure we are prepared to support eventual use and accessing of content that has been made available as the result of a “trigger event” or post-cancellation access claim. Unlike many ongoing preservation initiatives, Portico participants and their users experience direct customer support, should they ever need it.»

But the devil is in the details. Who pays the fee for these dark archives? Do we trust them? Who is auditing what is happening behind the doors of the dark archives? Luckily there are FLOSS systems like LOCKSS and CLOCKSS that allow you to create your own dark archive.

Few links:

* http://news.jstor.org/news/2004.12/repositories.html

* http://hul.harvard.edu/publications/ln1356/03.html

* http://www.clockss.org/clockss/FAQ

* http://www.clockss.org/clockss/How_CLOCKSS_Works

* http://www.portico.org/digital-preservation/the-archive-cont...

mherdeg13y ago

Could you spell out what a "dark archive" is? The top few Google hits don't give me a precise sense of the thing.

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