Gregory's ServerThe irony is not lost on me that the Internet Archive went out of its way to acquire the physical versions of millions of books and loan them out carefully and in a limited way, and is facing a near-extinction-level event over it, while for-profit and VC-backed companies are just stealing people’s content and making up excuses to validate the bad behavior.
 118 comments
@mybarkingdogs @ernie Abolish it moreso than what it is maybe? I could buy that ideology  @Agrawals_1_Twitter_Dream @mybarkingdogs @ernie I'd be happy to start with disallowing any form of bargaining away or transferring an artist's right to their own work for any reason, for all art, including newer media like video games. Start with.  @ernie you know, I have to wonder if the inaction on prosecuting LLM training companies actually introduced a legal loophole for libraries. Consider that right now, the American legal standard is that GenAI output is considered a derivative work, even if it derived it from 30 billion works. I wonder if the Internet Archive "chunked" editions of books together into a specialized model, could they then "loan" the book out by inferencing a near exact but legally 'distinct' copy of that work? @ernie after all, coaxing an LLM to reproduce a reference work basically in full is pretty established research at this point. We know it's possible — it's how the tech started, by being able to reproduce a ground truth image despite never having actually been exposed to the original file. I dunno, I'm just some idiot online. @mitch Just thinking of how Aaron Swartz—how his good intentions got exploited by people looking to make maximum $$$ and an org actually working in his spirit is being threatened @ernie I miss Aaron a lot, we used to chat through Reddit comments way back when. I'm very glad that he didn't have to see all this, let alone what Reddit and Steve Huffman both turned into.   @mitch @ernie “Inaction” is inaccurate, publishers are exploring lawsuits, but you have to prove the use of copyrighted material in the training of LLM systems which isn’t straightforward unless the company straight-up admits it. It’s comparatively easier for Hachette to sue the Internet Archive since they explicitly reference individual books.   @ernie while I totally agree from a moral pint of view, IA knew they were flaunting rules and got sloppy / arrogant about it. While the copyright system BADLY needs reform IA brought this world of pain onto themselves knowing that system very well and should have known better. For me it raises a pressing matter of who archives the archive..? We need redundancy of such important services to protect them against catastrophe be that technological or bureaucratic. @wiredfire I think IA pushed the edges of the program a little too hard during the pandemic but the idea of checking out digital forms of physical books is how things should work. It’s infuriating that it does not @ernie absolutely, it’s maddening. In a similar way I have a stack of physical books but I just don’t read them, I always pick up the Kobo instead. There is no legal route for me to simply format-shift them to digital. Of course there are plenty of routes I could go to furnish myself with digital copies, but still.  @wiredfire @ernie I have never heard of that "write a message in the book to prove ownership" thing and as a librarian who has also worked at Open Library, I am very curious, Do you remember what it was called? @wiredfire @ernie morally right or morally evil? If the former, please help me understand how AI has been morally trained?  @wiredfire *hiss*! *boo*! You're pretending that the "rules" are some sort of objective, knowable, and respectable thing? *hiss*! :blobcatglare: Our courts are worthless Our system is worthless Defending it in any way is now approaching evil  That's not irony. It's capitalism and corruption. It's a system that at its core does not work for the people. @ernie do you think OpenAI could have got its corpus if text without Internet Archive (and project Gutenberg). The tragedy of the commons is that some mobster always wants to profit from it at everyone else's expense. @craignicol @ernie “tragedy of the commons” was more about resources running out. The problem with the idea is that common spaces generally functioned well until property ownership and capital changed the equation. In other words, human fictions like copyright ruin commons, not some natural law.  I honestly think that if IA's intent were profit they'd have an easier time arguing. But we'll see what the judges do this fall... @ernie If something is done with the intention of making things better for everyone, it's a crime. If something is done to make a profit, despite damaging everyone, it's considered virtuous.  The decision they made during COVID to not limit loans to what they had on hand was a well-intentioned but bad decision. @ernie That's what they started out doing. And if they had kept doing that, they probably never would have been sued, or if they were, there's a good chance they would have won. @ernie And then COVID happened and they removed all borrowing limits and let anyone check out any book, infinite copies. And that's when the publishers noped out, decided they had gone too far, and sued. @jik It wasn’t a shitty, stupid overstep. It was a well-intentioned overstep at a time when people couldn’t go to the library. Was the result damaging and ultimately out of bounds? Yes. But I absolutely draw the line at calling it dumb. The publishers moved out of bounds too here—they didn’t have to go after the whole thing. That was their choice. Let us not lose context here. @ernie Ah, so now we're moving the goalposts. @jik @ernie Fully scanning, storing electronically, and distributing a work protected by someone else's copyright is out of bounds of legality and fairness. The Internet Archive pirated someone else's property in the name of a purported social cause or closeted authoritarian socialism. They held no entitlement to do so. This is where I stand on this. And all I was honestly trying to say to @jik before he kind of went left. I wasn’t trying to piss him off, just to say the program was to some degree defensible. @AndersBaerbock @jik You clearly disagree, but this is my view. The Internet Archive should be able to scan books and lend them. Fair use should extend in this way. @ernie @jik If most people, after a healthy discussion, agree with you, your idea will become incorporated as law. If democracy is nowadays broken, IMHO is better to fix it rather than embracing the law of the jungle like the IA attempted. @AndersBaerbock @jik I disagree. That frames the content owner as having fewer rights in a digital realm. Fair use should bend more than that. Libraries should work exactly the same in the digital era as they do the physical one. It's the belief that they're somehow different feels like a warping of the library’s intent, as well as the intent of fair use It's possible the case in front of the court may go either way on this point. @AndersBaerbock @jik You totally misread what I said. The content owner is the person who bought the object. I specifically did not say copyright owner.  @ernie omg I hate to be the lazy non-reseacher, but... I knew of the issue with loaning books, but does "a near-extinction-level event" mean the entire site is under threat?! @sstrader When you have to pay massive legal bills for a long-running case, it doesn’t do amazing things for your financial situation. @sstrader I think this NYT story really does a great job of highlighting just how dangerous this has all been for the archive. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/13/business/media/internet-archive-emergency-lending-library.html @ernie ahhhhh, duh. <he says as he goes to up his monthly donation>. Internet Archive is one of the few sites from the Halcyon days of early tech optimism that truly has lived up to what we all dreamt of. Goddamn these corporations  @Fu I think copyright law is super-broken, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not quite as far as intellectual property not existing. I think both of these things cause people to be disillusioned by copyright law FYI: @ernie this just in: predetory systems are abusive and ruin everything; the internet is a bad place and people are irredeemable. I feel like i've been hearing literally the same thing over and over and over said with different words since the internet began and since i met people for the first time.  I think that sarcasm eroded part of my screen. The way the publishers are going, once they own it all, they’ll delete it. @ernie  “Near extinction-level” 1) The proposed fines in the case ($150,000 per title) would have bankrupted the organization, though it was eventually narrowed down to 127 titles     @ernie archive.org has really tightened its access policy. To read many works now you have to be certified vision disabled.  @ernie I foresaw this in part @ withdrew loads of my Images, purging the data (hopefully) some of my work curated by gits at bbc! got bought as part of Hulton by Getty (oil magnate fame!) images. @ernie@writing.exchange Not problem, use Anna archive instead, stop use internet archive for reading books because site admin and team will remove stuff if received message from stingy companies who want to destroy old stuff for profit. @ernie back in the early 2000's MP3.com paid for physical CD's, made digital copies available to stream, but only if you could prove via a sophisticated hashing algorithm that you had your own physical copy at your end. The security of the "lending" didn't matter, it was the copying and subsequent distribution. One has to lobby Congress to change Copyright law. Is Lawrence Lessig writing anything about IA's position? @dkoneill One gets the feeling that trying to convince legislators of the importance of this would be immensely fraught in part because the advocacy groups are much more established on the copyright-holders’ sides. I was just thinking about the MP3.com case. The fact that isn’t how copyright law works is wrong; it was clearly an idea ahead of its time. @ernie but they are making profits silly! Delivering value for shareholders! Totally different to providing a useful service for not money.  @ernie We need to stop talking about everything we have to do. We need to act now. We already live in an information economy dystopia. Those with enough power and money to hide behind wealth and corporate structures can freely exploit our private data, while those aiming to serve the public interest are immediately punished  We also know now what the real motivation behind the Google Books project was. To provide a training base for their AI  @ernie ok, but internet archive did not buy the rights to electronically distribute those books, no matter how careful or limited that electronic distribution is. ALL they bought was the paper someone else’s work was printed on. That someone else has a right to determine how their work is distributed.  @ernie except the former one did loan more copies than they had and the latter one isn't stealing because if that was copyright infringement, we'd all be perpetual #DebtPeons starting in Kindergrdtten or Elementary school... @ernie Not only this but the big publishers and online retailers make a lot of money selling people books that they can pull at any time because what’s being sold isn’t the books themselves but digital access to them. It shouldn’t be lost on anybody that they are doing this with the form of books that are most accessible to blind and otherwise print impaired people, which locks us into having to use that shitty model more than others.   @ernie the stranglehold that publishers have on our entire culture is obscene. We have to find ways to support authors that don't further empower these ghouls. Meanwhile, z library doesn't bother paying publishers anything, and has books and scientific articles freely available to all, and has yet to be taken down. TOR URL: |
@ernie Copyright is a tool of those rich enough to enforce it #AbolishCopyright