

Internet Archive Starts Seeding 1,398,875 Torrents - vibrunazo
http://torrentfreak.com/internet-archive-starts-seeding-1398635-torrents-120807/

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riordan
This is among the most brilliant digital preservation strategies I've
encountered. You want to make sure your material lasts as long as possible?
Get it out on bittorrent. End of story.

We wonder what books scholars will write about 500 years from now. It won't be
what's popular, it'll be whats pirated.

~~~
knowtheory
Er... bittorrent is certainly _not_ the end of the story. Anyone who's ever
used a torrent tracker knows that access to data on a torrent network is only
as good as the network's collective will to share data.

If everyone just hops on, downloads the data and disconnects without
continuing to serve as a source for the data then the Internet Archive
wouldn't be terribly better off than just hosting direct downloads (they'd get
the benefit of leechers sharing bits between each other during the download
process).

~~~
nodata
_If._

Well, we'll see.

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vasco
Glad to see more legitimate uses of bitorrent which currently are basically
getting new linux distros and the odd free indie movie.

~~~
div
Blizzard also uses bittorrent to distribute their games and all patches for
their games. I'm not sure about other game companies, but I'd be surprised if
Blizzard was the only company doing this.

~~~
FreebytesSector
League of Legends also uses it in their download client.

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postfuturist
The Internet Archive is the most important project on the internet today,
preserving culture. I've already gained so much from it myself. They work hard
to make sure that the artifacts of our culture are not lost. They are totally
winning, and these torrents are an awesome step in that process.

~~~
tomflack
Agreed. In particular I love their public domain movie archive. It is a crime
that with extended copyrights new films won't be added to it any time soon.

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andrewcooke
are people aware that the internet archive includes netlabels with a huge
amount of free music? <http://archive.org/details/netlabels> (there is some
decent chilean electronica at <http://archive.org/details/pueblo_nuevo> for
example; clinical have experimental jazz
<http://archive.org/details/clinicalarchives> (some of it is a bit freaky for
me, but their collections are ok))

trying to work out if it's available via torrent now...

~~~
santigepigon
Yes! A lot of the audio is available via torrent now [1].

"Decent chilean electronica" nice, but the Internet Archive has an impressive
collection of live music; you can thank the Grateful Dead for letting people
tape their concerts [2].

[1] <http://archive.org/details/bittorrentaudio>

[2] [http://blog.archive.org/2012/03/27/sharing-
works-100000-conc...](http://blog.archive.org/2012/03/27/sharing-
works-100000-concert-recordings-for-free/)

~~~
andrewcooke
i'll tell my grandpa about the dead stuff, thanks. meanwhile, how can you tell
if a particular track is on a torrent? or how can you to search for files on
torrents?

ah, ok, so if it's a torrent it's listed as such in the download links.

and it's the etree collection (the concerts) that seems to be what is
available. you can search with "collection:etree" in the search. so "bluegrass
AND collection:etree", for example.

~~~
underscor
if there's something you want torrentized that's not, feel free to post here
too and I can poke it.

edit: assuming it's in one of the collections we're currently testing on. (all
the opensource_* ones) (etree and netlabels _should_ be all torrentized [we
hope])

~~~
andrewcooke
hi, ok, so here's an example (taken at random from the pueblo nuevo archive i
linked to above) - <http://archive.org/details/pn014>

i don't particularly want that album (i probably already have it thanks!) but
it doesn't mention a torrent that i can see (the etree files have torrent in
the links). and that's the same for all netlabel files (not many) that i have
checked.

in comparison, <http://archive.org/details/SPBB2006-04-29> (bluegrass etree!)
does have a bittorrent link (bottom right).

i don't understand your opensource_ comment, but pueblo nuevo is a netlabel.
so it seems to me that etree have torrents, but netlabels do not.

(this is just in case it helps / it's likely i am confused / no criticism
intended / thanks for doing all this)

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hexagonal
Right now the most popular archive.org torrent is a collection of My Little
Pony porn from /r/clopclop.

~~~
est
<http://bt1.archive.org/hotlist.php>

second popular one.

~~~
underscor
It's two of the top three in the most snatched list, though!

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tsahyt
archive.org is one of the most brilliant things I've ever seen on the
internet. I'm amazed since I first stumbled over it about 12 years ago or so.
Free knowledge to everyone, that's the way to go to make the world a better
place.

~~~
drostie
Just to be clear, the top shares right now are Asimov's _Foundation_ trilogy
(always a good read), a bunch of films, and My Little Pony pornography.

"Free knowledge to everyone" -- we're not quite there yet, and I would stick
with the various OpenCourseWare-type free-university-education initiatives.
The Internet Archive as I understand it is aiming more to be a library than a
synthetic learning resource.

~~~
tsahyt
My Little Pony pornography? What the ...?

I was referring to knowledge not as in education but as in the corpus of all
media. For learning resources universities will almost always be a better bet.
That's what they're for after all (and research, obviously).

~~~
Zirro
"My Little Pony pornography? What the ...?"

Rule 34 of the Internet. If it exists, there will be porn of it. In this case,
the new series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic has received a lot of
attention due to Bronies, who are men and women outside of the target
audience, yet fans of the show. A minority of them create and consume this
kind of content.

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treelovinhippie
Awesome! Though I wish archive.org was redesigned to make it easier to browse
files. Too much text, too little video/image previews.

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adrianwaj
There should be a formal way of coupling a torrent file with a bitcoin
address, some way of donating money to the creator but trusting that the
address is the correct one.. maybe when content is first released it's
registered somewhere alongside a bitcoin address and this shows up on the
creator's website too.

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wcchandler
Does anybody have a magnet URI? The site is overloaded right now.

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xur17
Are there any good ways to contribute bandwidth and storage to this without
manually choosing and downloading a bunch of files? I would love to dedicate a
few 100gb of storage to mirroring some of these files automatically (I have
plenty of bandwidth to go with that too).

