So when’s the ruling against OpenAI and the like using the same copyrighted material to train their models
But OpenAI not being allowed to use the content for free means they are being prevented from making a profit, whereas the Internet Archive is giving away the stuff for free and taking away the right of the authors to profit. /s
Disclaimer: this is the argument that OpenAI is using currently, not my opinion.
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the other is fair use
That’s very much up for debate still.
(I am personally still undecided)
I think that’s the difference right there.
One is up for debate, the other one is already heavily regulated currently. Libraries are generally required to have consent if they are making straight copies of copyrighted works. Whether we like it or not.
What AI does is not really a straight up copy, which is why it’s fuzzy, and much harder to regulate without stepping in our own toes, specially as tech advances and the difference between a human reading something and a machine doing it becomes harder and harder to detect.
If OpenAI can get away with going through copy-righted material, then the answer to piracy is simple: round up a bunch of talented Devs from the internet who are writing and training AI models, and let’s make a fantastic model trained on what the internet archive has. Tell you what, let Mistral’s engineers lead that charge, and put an AGPL license on the project so that companies can’t fuck us over.
I refuse to believe that nobody has thought of this yet
An AI trained on old Internet material would be like a synthetic Grandpa Simpson:
“In my day we said ‘all your base’ and laughed all day long, because it took all day to download the video.”
Not a surprise, but still somehow crushing. It’s a loss for us all.
Ah, I see we’re burning the Library of Alexandria again… Just as with last time, the survival of texts will rely upon copies.
Fuck Copyright.
A system for distributing information and rewarding it’s creators should not be one based on scarcity, given that it costs nothing to copy and distribute information.
It was fine when the limited duration was a reasonable number of years. Anything over 30 years max before being in the public domain is too long.
Yeah. In a better world where the US court system doesn’t get weaponized and rulings aren’t delayed for years or decades, I would argue 8 to 15 years is the reasonable number, depending on the type of information being copyrighted.
Artificial scarcity at its finest. Imagine recording a song digitally, then pretending there are a limited amount of copies of that song in existence. Then you sell an agreement to another person that says they have to pretend there is only a certain made up number of copies that they bought, and if they allow more than that number of people to listen to those copies at rhe same time, they will get sued for “stealing” additional pretend copies?
I hope everybody can see how this is the insane and pathetic result of Capitalism’s unrelenting drive to commodify everything it possibly can in the pursuit of profit.
As always, the solution is sailing the high seas. Throughout history, those who created or saved illegal copies/translations of literature and art were important to preserving and furthering human knowledge.
Many incredibly powerful people, empires, and countries have tried very hard to suppress that, but they keep failing. You cannot suppress the human drive for curiosity and knowledge.
True, and the fleet is big and strong. There are many people seeding hundreds of terabytes of books/research papers/etc. The knowledge will not be lost. Yarr, can’t catch me in the high seas…
Oh sure I want to read copyright books it’s an issue, but OpenAI does it and it’s vital to their business so they can keep going.
what does warrior do? The git readme seems to just be setup instructitons
If only the readme clearly said what it was with a link you could click…
“We are reviewing the court’s opinion and will continue to defend the rights of libraries to own, lend, and preserve books.”
Unpopular opinion: They stepped out of their fucking lane. There are already laws that protect actual libraries, in fact most nations have laws to ensure libraries have access to all locally published works.
One good thing to come of this is I’ve now joined my national and local libraries.
The Internet Archive is a library.
Not only are they a member of the Boston Library Consortium, but their entire operation is based around preserving not just webpages, but books, and other forms of media.
They even offer loans of various materials to and from other libraries, and digitize & archive works from the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the New York Public Library, and more.
To say the Internet Archive isn’t an “actual library,” and has “stepped out of their fucking lane” is ridiculous.
This ruling doesn’t just affect the Internet Archive, it affects every single other library out there that wants to lend ebooks, and digitize their existing physical copies of books for digital lending.
Other libraries have licenses. And follow them.
Internet archive digitized actual books and lent out copies (which was already 100% not legal under current law), then thought it was a good idea to just say “fuck it” and remove the thin veil of legitimacy that kept publishers from caring too much by removing the “one copy at a time per book” policy and daring the publishers to do something about it.
They removed the one copy rule temporarily, during the pandemic, it’s now in place again. But the publishers have made any digitized lending illegal, not just more than one copy, any digitized lending. It is now illegal for them to scan and distribute even one single copy of any book.
It was never a problem with the single-copy restriction, and the publishers didn’t bring up that restriction at all as the purpose of the suit, instead attacking the entirety of scanning & lending, even using Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) systems, like the Internet Archive, and other libraries use.
Even regardless of that, the First-sale Doctrine enables all existing secondary markets for copyrighted material. It’s how you can lend a book to a friend, sell a used book after you’re finished it, or swap copies of a video game on disk with somebody.
The Internet Archive is included in this. Changing the method of distribution (lending a digital copy vs a physical copy) has no functional distinction, and the publishers in the lawsuit were not able to demonstrate material harm, instead just stating that it wasn’t “fair use,” and should thus be illegal, regardless of the fact that they weren’t harmed by the supposedly non-fair use.
And on top of that, fuck the law if it’s unjust. I don’t care if it’s supposedly (even if not true) “100% not legal under current law” to do, it should be, and this ruling is unjust.
Any digitized lending was always illegal.
The law was abundantly clear. You cannot distribute wholesale copies of someone else’s work. Publishers didn’t bother because the scale was small and they didn’t want to take the PR hit for a scale that didn’t matter.
The first sale doctrine, necessarily, can only possibly apply to a physical object. There is no such thing as a “single copy” of a digital object. Every time that “single copy” moves is a new copy. There is no legal framework in the US that even acknowledges the premise of a digital copy. It’s always a license.
You need new laws to apply to the digital world. There is absolutely zero room for ambiguity that what the Internet archive did never in any way was protected. This ruling was a literal guarantee the minute the Internet Archive removed their (unambiguously not in any way legal) pretense of a “single copy”. There isn’t a court in the country that would even consider ruling any other way, because the law is well beyond clear. This ruling happened because the Internet Archive forced it to happen. If they had left open mass scale piracy to pirate sites they would have been fine.
If their lawyers advised them that there was even a possibility that this argument could work, they should be disbarred. They would be better off spending their money on lobbying for better laws than pursuing a case less likely than winning the power ball jackpot 5 draws in a row.
Any digitized lending was always illegal.
the law is well beyond clear.
I think Title 17, Chapter 108 of the U.S. Code would beg to differ. Digitized lending was always allowed, especially for libraries and archives. The only ambiguous part was the number of copies allowed to be digitized of any individual work, (many of the books the Internet Archive digitized only had one copy digitized and lent at any given time) so most of what the Internet Archive engaged in was fully legal under this code, and only a fraction of the 500 million titles that are now illegal to lend would have been affected, even though all 500 million can now not be legally lent due to this ruling.
You need new laws to apply to the digital world.
True, we can agree on that. We need new laws. Until that point, no change will happen if the boundaries are not pushed.
I guarantee you there hasn’t been anywhere near the current level of momentum for the rights of libraries to lend digitized books any time prior to this court case. If the Internet Archive hadn’t done it in the first place, we would be in the same situation we’re in after this ruling.
Them doing so pushes the issue forward.
This ruling was a literal guarantee the minute the Internet Archive removed their (unambiguously not in any way legal) pretense of a “single copy”
As I’ll say again, this was not the premise under which the publishers won this case. They won the case under the premise that any digitized lending was not transformative, and thus not “fair use,” even though it’s legal under other statutes. The number of copies held no bearing on the ruling.
