fpslem@lemmy.world
on 04 Sep 2024 20:28
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Not a surprise, but still somehow crushing. It’s a loss for us all.
JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee
on 04 Sep 2024 20:28
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Another sad day for pro-preservation advocates
pineapplelover@lemm.ee
on 05 Sep 2024 19:39
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A sad day for intellects
DrCake@lemmy.world
on 04 Sep 2024 20:41
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So when’s the ruling against OpenAI and the like using the same copyrighted material to train their models
Anyolduser@lemmynsfw.com
on 04 Sep 2024 20:45
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Hot on the heels of this one, I’d imagine.
shrugs@lemmy.world
on 04 Sep 2024 20:55
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So, let’s say we create an llm that will be fed will all the copyrighted data and we design it, so that it recalls the originals when asked?! Does that count as piracy or as the kind of legal shananigans openai is doing?
iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works
on 04 Sep 2024 20:55
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Fat chance. Line must go up.
wizblizz@lemmy.world
on 04 Sep 2024 21:21
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Aaaaaany minute now.
irotsoma@lemmy.world
on 04 Sep 2024 22:04
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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.
norimee@lemmy.world
on 04 Sep 2024 23:55
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Ah, I see you got that all wrong.
Open IA AI uses that content to generate billions in profit on the backs of The People. The Internet Archive just does it for the good of The People.
We can’t have that. “Good for The People” is not how the economy works, pal. We need profit and exploitation for the world to work…
v_krishna@lemmy.ml
on 05 Sep 2024 01:46
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OpenAI is burning billions of dollars not making profit.
Agret@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 04:41
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Sounds like they are operating the same as all the other big tech companies then
ShaggySnacks@lemmy.myserv.one
on 05 Sep 2024 14:57
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Burn a ton a cash to become the only major player in the market and the proceed to enshitify as no one else has anywhere to go.
buddascrayon@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 10:51
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Eh? That article says nothing about their profit margins. Today they have something like $3.5B in ARR (not really, that’s annualized from their latest peak, in Feb they had like $2B ARR). Meanwhile they have operating costs over $7B. Meaning they are losing money hand over fist and not making a profit.
I’m not suggesting anything else, just that they are not profitable and personally I don’t see a road to profitability beyond subsidizing themselves with investment.
buddascrayon@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 16:32
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It’s in the first bloody paragraph. 😮💨
OpenAI is begging the British Parliament to allow it to use copyrighted works because it’s supposedly “impossible” for the company to train its artificial intelligence models — and continue growing its multi-billion-dollar business — without them.
And if you follow the link the title of the article says it all:
#OpenAI is set to see its valuation at $80 billion—making it the third most valuable startup in the world
Just because the company has a high valuation, doesn’t mean they’re making a profit. They’re indeed losing a lot of money and will go bankrupt if they don’t get new investment and/or increase their ARR soon. Right now, they’ve only got 12 months left before they’re out of money. windowscentral.com/…/openai-could-be-on-the-brink…
buddascrayon@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 18:17
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The valuation is based on the expectation of the company to make massive profits. And if you think investor money is not profit for the people running Open AI, you’re crazy. We could only hope that they run out of money and go out of business. But that’ll never happen now with the amount of faith these corporations are putting in “AI” research.
I didn’t even realise. Thank you for pointing it out, I fixed it.
PriorityMotif@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 02:45
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It’s two different things happening. One is redistribution, which isn’t allowed and the other is fair use, which is allowed. You can’t ban someone from writing a detailed synopsis of your book. That’s all an llm is doing. It’s no different than a human reading the material and then using that to write something similar.
xthexder@l.sw0.com
on 05 Sep 2024 02:52
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the other is fair use
That’s very much up for debate still.
(I am personally still undecided)
PriorityMotif@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 03:33
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The difference is that the llm has the ability to consume and remember all available information whereas a human would have difficulty remembering everything in detail. We still see humans unintentionally remaking things they’ve heard before. Comedians have unintentionally stolen jokes they’ve heard. Every songwriter has unintentionally “discovered” a catchy tune which is actually someone else’s. We have fanfiction and parody. Most people’s personalities are just an amalgamation of everyone and everything they’ve ever seen, not unlike an llm themselves.
xthexder@l.sw0.com
on 05 Sep 2024 03:57
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I agree with you for the most part, but when the “person” in charge of the LLM is a big corporation, it just exaggerates many of the issues we have with current copyright law. All the current lawsuits going around signal to me that society as a whole is not so happy with how it’s being used, regardless of how it fits in to current law.
AI is causing humanity to have to answer a lot of questions most people have been ignoring since the dawn of philosophy. Personally I find it rather concerning how blurry some lines are getting, and I’ve already had to reevaluate how I think about certain things, like what moral responsibilities we’ll have when AIs truely start to become sentient. Is turning them off and deleting them a form of murder? Maybe…
trafficnab@lemmy.ca
on 05 Sep 2024 04:53
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OpenAI losing their case is how we ensure that the only people who can legally be in charge of an LLM are massive corporations with enough money to license sufficient source material for training, so I’m forced to begrudgingly take their side here
Agreed. I keep waffling on my feelings about it. It definitely doesn’t feel like our laws properly handle the scale that LLMs can take advantage of ‘fair use’. It also feels like yet another way to centralize and consolidate wealth, this time not money, but rather art and literary wealth in the hands of a few.
I already see artists that used to get commissions now replaced by endless AI pictures generated via a Lora specifically aping their style. If it was a human copying you, they’d still be limited by the amount they could produce. But an AI can spit out millions of images all in the style you perfected. Which feels wrong.
Is “intent” what makes all the difference? I think doing something bad unintentionally does not make it good, right?
Otherwise, all I need to do something bad is have no bad intentions. I’m sure you can find good intentions for almost any action, but generally, the end does not justify the means.
I’m not saying that those who act unintentionally should be given the same kind of punishment as those who do it with premeditation… what I’m saying is that if something is bad we should try to prevent it in the same level, as opposed to simply allowing it or sometimes even encourage it. And this can be done in the same way regardless of what tools are used. I think we just need to define more clearly what separates “bad” from “good” specifically based on the action taken (as opposed to the tools the actor used).
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.
The matter is not LLMs reproducing what they have learned, it is that they didn’t pay for the books they read, like people are supposed to do legally.
This is not about free use, this is about free access, which at the scale of an individual reading books is marketed as “piracy”…at the scale of reading all books known to man…it’s onmipiracy?
We need some kind of deal where commercial LLMs have to pay a rent to a fund that distributes that among creators or remain nonprofit, which is never gonnna happen, because it’ll be a bummer for all the grifters rushing into that industry.
it is that they didn’t pay for the books they read, like people are supposed to do legally.
If I can read a book from a library, why shouldn’t OpenAI or anybody else?
…but yes from what I’ve heard they (or whoever, don’t remember) actually trained on libgen. OpenAI can be scummy without the general process of feeding AI books you only have read access to being scummy.
Gsus4@mander.xyz
on 05 Sep 2024 11:22
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This is not like reading a book from a library…unless you want to force the LLM to only train one book per day and keep no copies after that day.
PriorityMotif@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 13:11
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I think we need to re-examine what copyright should be. There’s nothing inherently immoral about “piracy” when the original creator gets almost nothing for their work after the initial release.
index@sh.itjust.works
on 05 Sep 2024 18:21
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stop asking questions and go back to work
masterspace@lemmy.ca
on 04 Sep 2024 20:42
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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.
snooggums@midwest.social
on 04 Sep 2024 22:10
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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.
Tilgare@lemmy.world
on 04 Sep 2024 22:28
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Klear@sh.itjust.works
on 05 Sep 2024 10:19
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Huh. That made me realise I probably never heard or read “Fuck you, Obama”. Don’t live in the USA though.
Fuzzy_Red_Panda@lemm.ee
on 04 Sep 2024 23:22
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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.
NauticalNoodle@lemmy.ml
on 05 Sep 2024 03:06
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I personally like the idea that Copyright should be on par with design patent law. An initial filing 10-15yrs plus two additional opportunities to renew and extend it for 10 years if the creator can make supplementary creations that were dependent on and based off of the original works. -In the case of novels, that would equate to new sequels or prequels.
masterspace@lemmy.ca
on 05 Sep 2024 04:04
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That was fine then, but it makes zero sense today.
If a book is on sale widely to the public, and it costs nothing to copy and distribute that book to everyone, why shouldn’t we?
The fundamental problem with copyright is it is a system that rewards creators by imposing artificial scarcity where there is no need for one. Capitalism is a system designed around things having value when they’re scarce, but information in a world of computers and the internet is inherently unscarce the instant it’s digitized. Copyright just means that we build all these giant DRM systems to impose scarcity on something that doesn’t need it so that we can still get creators paid a living.
But a better system would for paying creators would be one of attribution and reward, where everyone can read whatever they want or stream whatever they want, and artists would be paid based on their number of views.
snooggums@midwest.social
on 05 Sep 2024 04:16
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But a better system would for paying creators would be one of attribution and reward, where everyone can read whatever they want or stream whatever they want, and artists would be paid based on their number of views.
Which would be enforced through copyright…
masterspace@lemmy.ca
on 05 Sep 2024 11:27
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If you’re referring to copyright as the actual effective title as owner of the works then yes. If you’re referring to copyright as in our system if copyright == monopoly, then no.
Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com
on 05 Sep 2024 14:50
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So if I own it… as the sole writer of some work. But don’t have a monopoly over how it’s used…
What the fuck logic is that? Can you care to explain how I, as the owner of the work cannot impose whatever limits I want to it?
masterspace@lemmy.ca
on 05 Sep 2024 15:20
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This involves trying to imagine a system other than the one we currently use.
The concept of exclusive ownership makes sense for material goods because if I have an object, you cannot have that object. If I want a copy of that object, it takes the same amount of resources as it took to make the original object. It’s a fundamental property of matter and energy, but information does not have the same properties. Information can be stored infinitely smally, and replicated for virtually nothing, as many times as you want.
In the digital age, where every single person now has an incredibly powerful information processing machine that is networked to every single other one, it means that once information is digitized, it costs us virtually nothing to distribute it to everyone on earth who wants it.
Copyright only exists, because once we started to be able to do this with early technologies like the printing press, vinyls, VHS, etc, it showed that you could rapidly drive the value of that work down to zero dollars, because in capitalism, thing only have value if they are scarce. Air is a necessity for everyone to live but it costs nothing because it’s all around us. It suddenly gets valuable in places where it’s scarce, but as long as it’s abundant, it has no value according capitalism. So continuing to allow the free copying of works meant that the original creators would never get rewarded. This made some sense at a time when it took months and a ton of resources to chop down trees, make paper, print a book, and ship it across the world and then get a response back regarding it.
But now, in the digital age, we have all the tools we need to build a middle man free service that would allow everyone to watch or read anything, and reward the creators based on how much their works are used or viewed or remixed. It’s basically how music streaming services and the behind the scenes remix/sampling licensing deals work already, they just have a ton of corporate middle men taking profits at every step.
In print media, advertising driven models are hamfisted work arounds that do the same thing of providing the information to everyone, but again, with middle men that fuck the authors and ruin the experience for readers.
Spotify, Apple Music, etc could all still exist, they’d just all have access to the same content catalog and you’d be picking and paying solely based on the quality of the interface and service they provide.
It’s also not a crazy idea that once you create an idea you don’t get to exclusively own it. For the vast majority of human history, copyright did not exist, and the only way that stories and songs and ideas were passed on was through chains of people copying and retelling them.
Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com
on 05 Sep 2024 15:31
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This involves trying to imagine a system other than the one we currently use.
No it doesn’t. Just because the work I created was done in paint or word doesn’t make it any less mine. Just because I could distribute it freely doesn’t make me obligated to. I am justified in asking for compensation and proposing limits on how it’s shared.
This is no different to printing the physical version of these works. I could print 10 copies of the book and tell my friends they cannot distribute it. Just the same I could send them an email with the works and say the same thing.
There is no difference here.
But now, in the digital age, we have all the tools we need to build a middle man free service that would allow everyone to watch or read anything, and reward the creators based on how much their works are used or viewed or remixed.
This has no logical basis in your response though. You’re saying that creators of works would have no say in how much a digital work is copied/transferred. How do you prove how much a work is even used/viewed? That would require heaps and loads of DRM management and to go after those who circumvent those measures… which takes money/infrastructure… and GASP That’s exactly what the publishers are doing now! Look at that!
masterspace@lemmy.ca
on 05 Sep 2024 15:36
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How do you prove how much a work is even used/viewed? That would require heaps and loads of DRM management and to go after those who circumvent those measures… which takes money/infrastructure… and GASP That’s exactly what the publishers are doing now! Look at that!
We’ve proven time and time again that people will pick the legal option as long as it’s more convenient and a better product than the illegal one.
Spotify and Netflix stomped piracy in every region they entered, PC games that don’t have DRM still sell like crazy through Steam.
And while it would require monitoring of metrics, that’s not the same as DRM that prevents you from using something.
But it doesn’t sound like you care to imagine a different system or why it would be better, you seem to just want to demand that the concept of information ownership stay exactly as the 1900s US Congress and Court System, in all their unquestionable wisdom, determined it should be.
Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com
on 05 Sep 2024 16:08
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PC games that don’t have DRM still sell like crazy through Steam.
But it doesn’t sound like you care to imagine a different system or why it would be better, you seem to just want to demand that the concept of ownership stay exactly as th US Congress and Court System, in all their unquestionable wisdom, determined it should be.
Nope, just asked to to clarify how this magic system can work without someone to enforce it. And you’ve yet to answer that.
masterspace@lemmy.ca
on 05 Sep 2024 16:57
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PC games that don’t have DRM still sell like crazy through Steam.
Steam is not popular because of its DRM. And again, in this scenario, everyone would have access to everything. The system’s only job would be tracking what gets downloaded / played and rewarding creators based on that.
But it doesn’t sound like you care to imagine a different system or why it would be better, you seem to just want to demand that the concept of ownership stay exactly as th US Congress and Court System, in all their unquestionable wisdom, determined it should be.
Nope, just asked to to clarify how this ***magic ***system can work without someone to enforce it. And you’ve yet to answer that.
Given that you’re dismissively talking about a “magic system” while trying to defend against being closed minded towards it, that defense rings pretty hollow.
And I’ve never said there wouldn’t be anyone to enforce it, I said there would be no incentive not to use it.
Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com
on 05 Sep 2024 17:00
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Given that you’re dismissively talking about a “magic system” while trying to defend against being closed minded towards it, that defense rings pretty hollow.
When you’ve proposed nothing that actually holds anyone accountable… You’re not winning anyone over.
GOG as an example would have been better. But you didn’t choose that. You chose a system that DOES have DRM and DOES act like a publisher and takes a cut. That isn’t a good way to sell your “new system” when Steam does EVERYTHING the “old system” does.
Edit: And now, because you simply don’t agree with me, you downvote the comments after the fact. Just because I called out how your idea doesn’t work. Congrats!
masterspace@lemmy.ca
on 05 Sep 2024 17:05
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GOG as an example would have been better. But you didn’t choose that. You chose a system that DOES have DRM and DOES act like a publisher and takes a cut. That isn’t a good way to sell your “new system” when Steam does EVERYTHING the “old system” does.
Given that you can see a different comparable example, and yet instead of just going “yeah like GOG”, or thinking to yourself “yeah GOG would be a better example, I get what he means though”, you’re going “YOU didn’t SAY gog WHAT an ASSHOLE”, I again, urge you to reflect on whether you’re having a good faith conversation or whether you just have a stick up your ass about something and are venting online.
And no, Steam prevents people who haven’t purchased a game from playing it. You are fundamentally not understanding what I’m writing if you’re not seeing how that’s different from a system where everyone has access to everything.
Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com
on 05 Sep 2024 17:12
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you’re going “YOU didn’t SAY gog WHAT an ASSHOLE”
No. My point is that when you think of YOUR perfect system. You don’t actually think of one that actually more closely meets what you described. That shows the innate problem with your idea as you haven’t even fully thought through it enough to even recognize what it looks like. And ultimately how it oftentimes does work for developers that wish to be more protective of their assets.
Regardless. Let me show you why even GOG doesn’t work out. Forget the fact that they need to take a cut still anyway (and be the middleman) for at the minimum of costs of infrastructure.
You can’t beat the cost of a torrent. Either in actual costs, or their distribution.
masterspace@lemmy.ca
on 05 Sep 2024 18:00
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Go back and reread my comments, you have evidently not understood anything I wrote.
Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com
on 05 Sep 2024 18:45
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… Nothing you wrote addresses any of the concerns/criticisms that I’ve levied in return. There’s nothing additional to read and you’ve failed to furnish more. Talk about bad faith discussions. You’re response is literally “go google it”… “go read it again”, same bullshit hand-wavy nonsense.
You cannot have a central repository and require people to enter ALL their digital works into it. This violates a number of freedoms.
You cannot maintain such a repository without funding, and a fuckton of it.
You cannot enforce that companies must use such a repository.
Even if you did… stolen materials would appear outside of repository and cannot be contained regardless. and arugably having this central repo would make it easier to steal (whether just outright theft, or theft of attribution).
Even if you did. And a book got 100,000 downloads, how do you determine what value they get? What if the writer determines that’s unreasonable?
How does a creative person in any form make money on this system?
This doesn’t stop at just “creative” works right? This must include things like code and other digital works right? Oh shit, I just recorded a vlog on my phone. Gotta upload it to your magic repository!
How is malicious use of that central repo mitigated? Remember… you don’t want a middleman taking anything.
You seem to think that you can do ANY of this without some form of DRM and copyright. Remember, you stated
we have all the tools we need to build a middle man free service
While at the same time outlining a literal middleman service as your standard. If a writer/artist/whatever wanted to self-publish. Nothing stops them.
Open a website with magento, woocommerce, Prestashop… whatever you want. And sell it for whatever you think is fair. That would be the best case instance to cut out the middleman. This doesn’t mean you can just strip a person of their rights to their works just because it’s “free” to make duplicates of it. It’s wild that you start the premise with that requirement from the get go, going down the premise proves that it wouldn’t work, which was most of the point of my comments. But you seem wildly disinterested in actually discussing anything. You’re nearly as bad as the people who claim communism works… but we just never saw true communism. (which is just as bad as people who claim any absolute system works… when we’ve never seen it work at all).
and the only way that stories and songs and ideas were passed on was through chains of people copying and retelling them.
From your original comment. There’s a difference in rights to the works vs rights to the performance/recording. And further there’s a difference between “personal” and “commercial” usages. The reason those stories and songs are passed down is because personal use is effectively unenforceable (and retelling in your own words would be what we call “fair use”). In your world, you’d make it also unenforceable for commercial usages as well.
masterspace@lemmy.ca
on 05 Sep 2024 19:52
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Again, you don’t understand what I wrote. Read more and write less.
Maybe try being less of an angry gnome.
Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com
on 05 Sep 2024 19:59
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Imagine actually attempting to continue a conversation.
Don’t actually do it. Just imagine it.
Nah, you need to read more!
masterspace@lemmy.ca
on 05 Sep 2024 20:01
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It’s not a conversation, it’s you venting the stick up your ass.
Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com
on 05 Sep 2024 20:05
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If the stick is in my ass, how could I possibly be venting it? Can you at least attempt to make sense?
masterspace@lemmy.ca
on 05 Sep 2024 20:09
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Apparently it’s a very long stick.
Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com
on 05 Sep 2024 20:10
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The shitty part of the stick… which would be the smelly part, would be firmly lodged no? The stick itself wouldn’t be smelly, which would be the only part that could be vented.
Doomsider@lemmy.world
on 06 Sep 2024 02:25
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Sure, you don’t actually own it. The words you strung together are not actually yours nor is the grammar you strung it together with. The knowledge you used to create it is also not yours.
The only way to ensure no one reads, borrows, or “steals” your work is to never share it with anyone and certainly never put it on the Internet.
The only way to ensure it is truly yours is to never have participated in society, invent your own language, and of course hide it from ever being discovered.
This is the only real way. You need to create in a vacuum and lock it up so no one will ever find it. Then and only then can it truly be yours.
Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
on 04 Sep 2024 20:44
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Really unfortunate. I wonder why nobody foresaw this when they started the stupid NEL thing.
Edit: NEL is the thing where the Archive removed all borrowing restrictions except 10 books per account and some sort of basic verification that you were in the US
metaStatic@kbin.earth
on 04 Sep 2024 20:47
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“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.
SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de
on 04 Sep 2024 20:55
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Agreed. While a noble cause, it was honestly predictable.
I don’t understand why they did that. Their status was already quite shaky. They really shot themselves and their users in the foot
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.
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.
conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
on 04 Sep 2024 21:35
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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.
ArchRecord@lemm.ee
on 04 Sep 2024 22:11
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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.
conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
on 04 Sep 2024 22:26
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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.
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.
conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
on 04 Sep 2024 22:59
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Literally every digital “loan” is multiple separate, unrecoverable copies. That law is not about digital lending and cannot be applied to digital lending.
All digital lending of copyrighted material without an explicit license to do so is copyright infringement, and it was always a guarantee that the ruling would happen.
The removal of the “single copy” lie isn’t relevant to the legal status. It’s relevant because it forced the hands of the publishers to take action. There was never any possibility of any ruling but the obvious blanket “you can’t do that” that the law dictates, once IA forced them to take it to court.
That law is not about digital lending and cannot be applied to digital lending.
That’s provably incorrect.
“it is not an infringement of copyright for a library or archives […] to reproduce no more than one copy or phonorecord of a work”
Title 17, USC 101 defines a copy as “…material objects, other than phonorecords, in which a work is fixed by any method now known or later developed, and from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device…”
Digital replication falls under the legal definition of copying in the US Code, and is directly cited in the prior section of the code I reference in my last reply.
The Internet Archive’s loans also utilize DRM, a standard kind of software used by every other library out there to restrict further replication of copies. This same technology is in use with libraries who have contracts with publishers to directly download and publish digital copies of non-printed ebooks, which would violate that contract by not using DRM. The Internet Archive, without any express contract from publishers, is still implementing the strongest measures of protection that the publishers themselves would require whether or not content was directly licensed from them instead of being scanned in from a physical copy.
It’s relevant because it forced the hands of the publishers to take action.
Nothing forced them to do anything. These publishers voluntarily decided to file a lawsuit because of mounting pressure from libraries as a collective to stop charging insanely high prices on ebook rentals from publishers, which they saw as being undermined by the fact that the Internet Archive was able to still pay for the books in question, but lend them out in the same manner that physical books are already lent, just through a screen.
As I mentioned before, if the Internet Archive had never done this in the first place, public outcry would be practically nonexistent, and the Internet Archive wouldn’t be lending out those books at all, just like they’re not legally able to now. There is no difference to if they had or had not done this, other than the fact that it is now more visible in the public sphere, and has active legal challenges instead of being quietly subverted by regulation and practices publishers have continued to mount against all libraries to re-establish what it means to own a copyrighted work.
conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
on 05 Sep 2024 00:04
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It is literally impossible to send a file over the internet with no more than one copy. Every additional “loan” is multiple additional copies. Even if we ignore that, you’re very conveniently ignoring the “material objects” part of that definition, which again, completely and unconditionally disqualifies a loan over the internet.
DRM is entirely irrelevant. It has no bearing on anything.
They filed a lawsuit because IA flagrantly and egregiously violated their rights. They openly fucking dared them to. And now they don’t get ignored on their limited copy illegal lending and can’t get away with any copies.
you’re very conveniently ignoring the “material objects” part of that definition
I’m not, it’s just that the wording of the definition could lead to you interpreting it as such. It does not mean what you think it means.
In essence, it’s saying that if a material object is “fixed” (under copyright law, that tends to mean captured in a medium that allows it to be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated) it is considered a copy. Copyright law generally considers things like written texts (i.e. transcribing a book onto other sheets of paper) to be copies, but it also includes things like recordings, which are very much nontangible. (although still stored on tangible hardware) Also, note the “either directly or with the aid of a machine or device” section of that description.
DRM is entirely irrelevant. It has no bearing on anything.
The fact you consider DRM to be irrelevant in a conversation about managing legal access to digitally distributed content shows a lot about your understanding of this topic, to say the least.
DRM is highly relevant. If it were not, then all libraries would already be illegally publishing copies under the agreements they sign with publishers when they distribute books through DRM-protected applications like Overdrive or Libby. Legal consequence also does not extend past the original publisher if the intent was clearly not to deliberately allow for further copying. (i.e. if the Internet Archive stated they lent books so users could copy them and later share them with friends, that would be a violation. Instead, they have loan terms, limits, and DRM)
If anything done by a user after the lending of any material, outside of reasonable safeguards (like DRM) was to be considered illegal, then any store would be liable if someone used a kitchen knife to kill someone, and any chemical distributor would be liable if someone in a lab mixed the wrong chemicals together and made an explosion. Liability has an end point, and DRM helps signify that by placing technical restrictions on redistribution of material, while also carrying heavy legal penalties for breaking it, which would not be present if it wasn’t applied in the first place.
Publishers should not be able to sue libraries for lending their books, digital, physical, or otherwise. Especially when the publishers could not demonstrate any material harm.
You are actively defending multi-billion dollar publishing companies suing a library for lending content they legally acquired, using faulty interpretations of the law, and deference to lawsuits as a means of judging the morality of actions. You haven’t made a single point that wasn’t either verifiably untrue, or misinformed.
I would advise you to reevaluate your position.
conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
on 05 Sep 2024 00:44
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DRM is relevant to the legal redistribution because that is part of the terms of their license agreement and for no other reason. Their entire lending practice of digital copies is legal because, and only because, they have contracts that specifically determine how they may do so.
It does not in any way alter the nature of blatant illegal copies. It does not make every loan not multiple distinct illegal copies.
I’m actively opposing people telling insane, completely unhinged lies that aren’t even loosely connected to reality to validate a position that every single person with a shred of common sense knew was going to get laughed out of court the day they did it and did get laughed out of court. If you tried this case a million times, Internet Archive wouldn’t have a chance in any of them.
Petition for changes to the law. Don’t lie and pretend the law says what you want it to.
ArchRecord@lemm.ee
on 05 Sep 2024 01:33
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DRM is relevant to the legal redistribution because that is part of the terms of their license agreement and for no other reason.
This is simply not true. If someone takes means to prevent illegal action, in a situation where they can choose to either do so, or not do so, taking those means shows they are attempting to prevent any negative legal outcomes.
The Internet Archive was explicitly, voluntarily enacting similar policy to libraries that directly license books from publishers, because they knew that it would show they were making an effort to lend responsibly. To me, it seems they carried on this set of ethics to when they opened up more copies than they originally had on hand, because that was during a time when library branches were becoming physically inaccessible, and physical resources were becoming increasingly hard to access, thus, responsible lending would include effectively making the inaccessible physical copies in other libraries accessible. That part might not be considered legal, but again, who cares? These publishers saw a substantial increase in profits during the time they were supposedly hurt by the Internet Archive, and continue to squeeze traditional libraries for every penny they can get under exploitative lending agreements. What the Internet Archive did was for the objective moral good of society.
If anything’s illegal, it’s compelling libraries to only license your content directly from you for a higher rate, while trying to discourage them from using the physical copies they can buy once like any other sane person.
Petition for changes to the law. Don’t lie and pretend the law says what you want it to.
I have not misrepresented the law by pretending it says something else. I have given you citations and quotes straight from the letter of the law, directly backing up my claims, while proving your blanket statements that all digitized lending was illegal as patently false.
Petitioning to change the law is not the only way to change it. For instance, I believe piracy from, say, streaming services, is ethical, if those same streaming services are jacking up rates, adding ads, and enshittifying their core product for the sake of making a quick buck. how else are you supposed to change things?
I’m sure you’ve seen the immense public backlash and legislative attempts to fix the rapidly enshittifying entertainment industry. They haven’t worked.
Look, even regardless of all my arguments for how I believe the vast majority of what the Internet Archive did was legal, I don’t care if it was. Because, in the end, If you own a book, you should be allowed to let other people read it. If people are losing access to literature, you should be able to make it available to as many people as possible. If companies are rapidly exploiting the public library system and looting it for everything it has, you should be able to offer an alternative.
These publishers do not deserve my, nor your sympathy.
Your arguments read like you believe a DRM-protected ebook file is a verbatim copy that can be freely distributed and used. I just want to clarify that it is not, not even on a technical level. The form of DRM that libraries use is not just a license you agree to. It is an ecryption that turns that ebook into a garbled mess for anyone but the person who borrowed the ebook, during a set timeframe. After that period expires it cannot be decrypted anymore and stays a garbled mess forever, irrevocably ceasing to be a copy.
conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
on 04 Sep 2024 22:35
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How about, instead of throwing a tantrum about the courts doing the only thing they had any authority to do, you spend your efforts lobbying to fix IP law?
Hydra_Fk@reddthat.com
on 04 Sep 2024 23:13
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Yeah because that has ever changed anything. I’ll just keep voting harder while I’m at it.
PeachMan@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 02:31
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Accusing somebody else of licking the boot, while you’re having the same boot ground in your face and just acting like it’s no big deal, not a problem.
roguetrick@lemmy.world
on 04 Sep 2024 22:54
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Side note: court listener’s RECAP is often quite disliked by the legal system. They do not like it when people put stuff from PACER fee waved sources on there like Aaron Schwartz did. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Law_Project
NotAnotherLemmyUser@lemmy.world
on 04 Sep 2024 23:39
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Woah, I wish I had known about this sooner. Thanks!
MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world
on 04 Sep 2024 22:39
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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
General_Effort@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 01:03
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What do you think Mistral trains its models on? Public domain stuff?
bandwidthcrisis@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 04:09
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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.”
Ragnarok314159@sopuli.xyz
on 05 Sep 2024 04:30
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This stupid thing just keeps saying “I can Haz Cheeseburger”. What the hell does that even mean?
werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 04:27
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Better yet! Train an AI to re-write the books into brand new books and let us read, review the content, add notes etc so that the AI can refresh the books if we find errors.
Kick the private collections to the curb! Teeth in like in American History X.
capital@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 12:00
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We get it, y’all hate LLMs and the companies who make them.
This comparison is disingenuous and I have to think you’re smart enough to know that, making this disinformation.
If/when an LLM like ChatGPT spits out a full copy of training text, that’s considered a bug and is remediated fairly quickly. It’s not a feature.
What IA was doing was sharing the full text as a feature.
As far as I know, there are some court cases pending regarding determining if companies like Open AI are guilty of copyright infringement but I haven’t seen any convictions yet (happy to be corrected here).
All that said, I love IA and have a Warrior container scheduled to run nightly to help contribute.
MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 12:03
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Hmm, true. IA wouldn’t be as supported if we couldn’t get the full text of the source.
Can you tell me more about the “warrior container”?
This is an ArchiveTeam project, which is a totally separate effort to the Internet Archive. As far as I know, they’re not related other than the fact that ArchiveTeam use The Internet Archive for storage.
Parabola@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 00:26
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If only the readme clearly said what it was with a link you could click…
Grass@sh.itjust.works
on 05 Sep 2024 01:44
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somehow I didn’t see anything above getting started. Looking again I don’t know how I missed it with the big logos unless they didn’t load and the rest was behind a notification or something.
The Archive Team Warrior is a virtual archiving appliance. You can run it to help with the Archive Team archiving efforts. It will download sites and upload them to our archive—and it’s really easy to do!
The warrior is a container running inside a virtual machine, so there is almost no security risk to your computer. (“Almost”, because in practice nothing is 100% secure.) The warrior will only use your bandwidth and some of your disk space, as well as some of your CPU and memory. It will get tasks from and report progress to the Tracker.
bamfic@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 02:10
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Libgen.rs
Etterra@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 03:08
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o7
drislands@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 04:46
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My understanding is that the IA had implemented a digital library, where they had (whether paid or not) some number of licenses for a selection of books. This implementation had DRM of some variety that meant you could only read the book while it was checked out. In theory, this means if the IA has 10 licenses of a book, only 10 people have a usable copy they borrowed from the IA at a time.
And then the IA disabled the DRM system, somehow, and started limitlessly lending the books they had copies of to anyone that asked.
I definitely don’t like the obnoxious copyright system in the USA, but what the IA did seems obviously wrongagainst the agreement they entered into. Like if your local library got a copy of Book X and then when someone wanted to borrow it they just copied it right there and let you keep the copy.
ETA: updated my wording. I don’t believe what the IA did was morally wrong, per se, but rather against the agreement I presume they entered into with the owners of the books they lent.
eskimofry@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 05:20
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Like if your local library got a copy of Book X and then when someone wanted to borrow it they just copied it right there and let you keep the copy.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
on 05 Sep 2024 10:04
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Some university library probably.
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 09:57
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No it isn’t.
MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works
on 05 Sep 2024 07:32
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They disabled drm during lockdown so people had something to do
accideath@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 08:39
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Which was nice of them, but that doesn’t mean they should’ve done that, especially in the eyes of the law.
(Also, if you’re after free ebooks, why are you pirating them on archive.org instead of libgen?)
accideath@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 16:01
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Where did I say that find it good that they got sued or lost their appeal? I just said that the reason why they lost the appeal is because according to the law they’re bound to, what they did was wrong. And maybe they should’ve left that to a platform that enjoys a little more immunity from said law, because there are plenty of those.
It was stupid of them. They painted an unnecessary target on their back that doesn’t help their cause and I‘d prefer them not to have to shut down at some point because I’m all for the Internet archive archiving anything and everything.
They should’ve stayed a legitimate library and everything would have been fine and would have served their cause sufficiently well.
accideath@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 16:34
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Ah, so you‘re one of those people that would be well at home at lemmygrad.
And what fate are you talking about? Not getting sued?
huiccewudu@lemmy.ca
on 05 Sep 2024 13:52
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I definitely don’t like the obnoxious copyright system in the USA, but what the IA did seems obviously wrong.
The publisher-plaintiffs did not prove the “obvious wrong” in this case, however US-based courts have a curious standard when it comes to the application of Fair Use doctrine. This case ultimately rested on the fourth, most significantly-weighted Fair Use standard in US-based courts: whether IA’s digital lending harmed publisher sales during the 3-month period of unlimited digital lending.
Unfortunately, when it comes to this standard, the publisher-plaintiffs are not required to prove harm, rather only assert that harm has occurred. If they were required to prove harm they’d have to reveal sales figures for the 27 works under consideration–publishers will do anything to conceal this information and US-based courts defer to them. Therefore, IA was required to prove a negative claim–that digital lending did not hurt sales–without access to the empirical data (which in other legal contexts is shared during the discovery phase) required to prove this claim. IA offered the next best argument (see pp. 44-62 of the case document to check for yourself), but the data was deemed insufficient by the court.
In other words, on the most important test of Fair Use doctrine, which this entire case ultimately pivoted upon, IA was expected to defend itself with one arm tied behind its back. That’s not ‘fair’ and the publishers did not prove ‘obvious’ harm, but the US-based courts are increasingly uninterested in these things.
What the IA may be illegal but is certainly not wrong.
finitebanjo@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 19:10
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Wrong? No.
Against the terms of agreements they made? Yes.
Actions also protected by laws exempting nonprofits and archives from copyright restrictions? Also supposed to be yes.
drislands@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 19:44
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Against the terms of agreements they made? Yes.
To be fair, this is what I meant when I said wrong. Enough people have taken umbrage with my wording that I think I should update it, though. Thank you for your reply.
HexesofVexes@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 10:21
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Ah, I see we’re burning the Library of Alexandria again… Just as with last time, the survival of texts will rely upon copies.
Stern@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 14:28
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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.
yetAnotherUser@lemmy.ca
on 05 Sep 2024 17:19
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We live in a capitalist society. You can do whatever you want as long as you have money or promise lots of money to powerful people.
MellowYellow13@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 18:29
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Still doesnt make any sense whatsoever
Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml
on 05 Sep 2024 14:32
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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.
Ming@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 05 Sep 2024 14:49
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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…
sircac@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 15:19
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But I’m training my organic LLM, can’t I?
Redruth@feddit.nl
on 05 Sep 2024 16:52
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sharing is theft^™^
(Old meme directly quotes the courts and govt ministers. Gen-z too young to remember napster and kazaa)
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 17:25
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Hoo, boy. You’re not gonna have a good time on Lemmy if you really believe that.
xenoclast@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 17:37
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It’s ok. They don’t.
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 17:39
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I wasn’t gonna go digging on a less than a day old account.
No really. I mean it. sharing is actually theft. dispersing resources evenly is wasteful. it’s inefficient. and sharing only with your ingroup creates cliques and class divides. ultimately it is sharing in all its forms which robs society of progress and long term prosperity. on the other hand, self interest drives innovation while trade leads to prosperity. self interest is the true driver of human progress.
buy only paper books from the publisher. and only new books. not used. as the good book says; “Neither a borrower, nor a lender be.”
Frost752@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 18:14
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Oh, that stuff about “sharing is theft”? thats an exercise in doublespeak. my attempt to parody the institutions. …“it is sharing which robs society”… Mwuahaha!
bitwolf@lemmy.one
on 05 Sep 2024 17:21
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Easy solution. Update the web-scraper they use to include an LLM. Then its for “training”
xenoclast@lemmy.world
on 05 Sep 2024 17:37
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As long as they have a tech billionaire in charge they should be fine.
They could also rename the project to: “The AI Archive” and add lots of buttons with multicolor gradients.
threaded - newest
Not a surprise, but still somehow crushing. It’s a loss for us all.
Another sad day for pro-preservation advocates
A sad day for intellects
So when’s the ruling against OpenAI and the like using the same copyrighted material to train their models
Hot on the heels of this one, I’d imagine.
So, let’s say we create an llm that will be fed will all the copyrighted data and we design it, so that it recalls the originals when asked?! Does that count as piracy or as the kind of legal shananigans openai is doing?
Fat chance. Line must go up.
Aaaaaany minute now.
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.
Ah, I see you got that all wrong.
Open
IAAI uses that content to generate billions in profit on the backs of The People. The Internet Archive just does it for the good of The People.We can’t have that. “Good for The People” is not how the economy works, pal. We need profit and exploitation for the world to work…
OpenAI is burning billions of dollars not making profit.
Sounds like they are operating the same as all the other big tech companies then
Burn a ton a cash to become the only major player in the market and the proceed to enshitify as no one else has anywhere to go.
Wrong
futurism.com/…/openai-copyrighted-material-parlia…
Eh? That article says nothing about their profit margins. Today they have something like $3.5B in ARR (not really, that’s annualized from their latest peak, in Feb they had like $2B ARR). Meanwhile they have operating costs over $7B. Meaning they are losing money hand over fist and not making a profit.
I’m not suggesting anything else, just that they are not profitable and personally I don’t see a road to profitability beyond subsidizing themselves with investment.
It’s in the first bloody paragraph. 😮💨
And if you follow the link the title of the article says it all:
#OpenAI is set to see its valuation at $80 billion—making it the third most valuable startup in the world
Just because the company has a high valuation, doesn’t mean they’re making a profit. They’re indeed losing a lot of money and will go bankrupt if they don’t get new investment and/or increase their ARR soon. Right now, they’ve only got 12 months left before they’re out of money. windowscentral.com/…/openai-could-be-on-the-brink…
The valuation is based on the expectation of the company to make massive profits. And if you think investor money is not profit for the people running Open AI, you’re crazy. We could only hope that they run out of money and go out of business. But that’ll never happen now with the amount of faith these corporations are putting in “AI” research.
I take it you don’t understand how startups work?
OpenAI is not making any profit and is losing money hand over fist today. Valuation and raising investment rounds isn’t profit.
“Good for the people”? You mean COMMUNISM?
I think you accidentally swapped OpenAI and Open IA which happens to initialize Internet Archive, a little confusing.
I didn’t even realise. Thank you for pointing it out, I fixed it.
It’s two different things happening. One is redistribution, which isn’t allowed and the other is fair use, which is allowed. You can’t ban someone from writing a detailed synopsis of your book. That’s all an llm is doing. It’s no different than a human reading the material and then using that to write something similar.
That’s very much up for debate still.
(I am personally still undecided)
The difference is that the llm has the ability to consume and remember all available information whereas a human would have difficulty remembering everything in detail. We still see humans unintentionally remaking things they’ve heard before. Comedians have unintentionally stolen jokes they’ve heard. Every songwriter has unintentionally “discovered” a catchy tune which is actually someone else’s. We have fanfiction and parody. Most people’s personalities are just an amalgamation of everyone and everything they’ve ever seen, not unlike an llm themselves.
I agree with you for the most part, but when the “person” in charge of the LLM is a big corporation, it just exaggerates many of the issues we have with current copyright law. All the current lawsuits going around signal to me that society as a whole is not so happy with how it’s being used, regardless of how it fits in to current law.
AI is causing humanity to have to answer a lot of questions most people have been ignoring since the dawn of philosophy. Personally I find it rather concerning how blurry some lines are getting, and I’ve already had to reevaluate how I think about certain things, like what moral responsibilities we’ll have when AIs truely start to become sentient. Is turning them off and deleting them a form of murder? Maybe…
OpenAI losing their case is how we ensure that the only people who can legally be in charge of an LLM are massive corporations with enough money to license sufficient source material for training, so I’m forced to begrudgingly take their side here
Agreed. I keep waffling on my feelings about it. It definitely doesn’t feel like our laws properly handle the scale that LLMs can take advantage of ‘fair use’. It also feels like yet another way to centralize and consolidate wealth, this time not money, but rather art and literary wealth in the hands of a few.
I already see artists that used to get commissions now replaced by endless AI pictures generated via a Lora specifically aping their style. If it was a human copying you, they’d still be limited by the amount they could produce. But an AI can spit out millions of images all in the style you perfected. Which feels wrong.
Is “intent” what makes all the difference? I think doing something bad unintentionally does not make it good, right?
Otherwise, all I need to do something bad is have no bad intentions. I’m sure you can find good intentions for almost any action, but generally, the end does not justify the means.
I’m not saying that those who act unintentionally should be given the same kind of punishment as those who do it with premeditation… what I’m saying is that if something is bad we should try to prevent it in the same level, as opposed to simply allowing it or sometimes even encourage it. And this can be done in the same way regardless of what tools are used. I think we just need to define more clearly what separates “bad” from “good” specifically based on the action taken (as opposed to the tools the actor used).
You’re anthropomorphizing LLMs.
There’s a philosophical and neuroscuence concept called “Qualia,” which helps define the human experience. LLMs have no Qualia.
No, they’re taking the argument to it’s logical end.
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.
The matter is not LLMs reproducing what they have learned, it is that they didn’t pay for the books they read, like people are supposed to do legally.
This is not about free use, this is about free access, which at the scale of an individual reading books is marketed as “piracy”…at the scale of reading all books known to man…it’s onmipiracy?
We need some kind of deal where commercial LLMs have to pay a rent to a fund that distributes that among creators or remain nonprofit, which is never gonnna happen, because it’ll be a bummer for all the grifters rushing into that industry.
If I can read a book from a library, why shouldn’t OpenAI or anybody else?
…but yes from what I’ve heard they (or whoever, don’t remember) actually trained on libgen. OpenAI can be scummy without the general process of feeding AI books you only have read access to being scummy.
This is not like reading a book from a library…unless you want to force the LLM to only train one book per day and keep no copies after that day.
They don’t keep copies and learning speed? Why one day? Does it count if I skim through a book?
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Meta is defending because they trained on books3 which contained all of Bibliotik. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pile_(dataset)
I think we need to re-examine what copyright should be. There’s nothing inherently immoral about “piracy” when the original creator gets almost nothing for their work after the initial release.
stop asking questions and go back to work
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.
Thanks, Disney.
Things I’ve never heard said before
Huh. That made me realise I probably never heard or read “Fuck you, Obama”. Don’t live in the USA though.
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.
I personally like the idea that Copyright should be on par with design patent law. An initial filing 10-15yrs plus two additional opportunities to renew and extend it for 10 years if the creator can make supplementary creations that were dependent on and based off of the original works. -In the case of novels, that would equate to new sequels or prequels.
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That was fine then, but it makes zero sense today.
If a book is on sale widely to the public, and it costs nothing to copy and distribute that book to everyone, why shouldn’t we?
The fundamental problem with copyright is it is a system that rewards creators by imposing artificial scarcity where there is no need for one. Capitalism is a system designed around things having value when they’re scarce, but information in a world of computers and the internet is inherently unscarce the instant it’s digitized. Copyright just means that we build all these giant DRM systems to impose scarcity on something that doesn’t need it so that we can still get creators paid a living.
But a better system would for paying creators would be one of attribution and reward, where everyone can read whatever they want or stream whatever they want, and artists would be paid based on their number of views.
Which would be enforced through copyright…
If you’re referring to copyright as the actual effective title as owner of the works then yes. If you’re referring to copyright as in our system if copyright == monopoly, then no.
So if I own it… as the sole writer of some work. But don’t have a monopoly over how it’s used…
What the fuck logic is that? Can you care to explain how I, as the owner of the work cannot impose whatever limits I want to it?
This involves trying to imagine a system other than the one we currently use.
The concept of exclusive ownership makes sense for material goods because if I have an object, you cannot have that object. If I want a copy of that object, it takes the same amount of resources as it took to make the original object. It’s a fundamental property of matter and energy, but information does not have the same properties. Information can be stored infinitely smally, and replicated for virtually nothing, as many times as you want.
In the digital age, where every single person now has an incredibly powerful information processing machine that is networked to every single other one, it means that once information is digitized, it costs us virtually nothing to distribute it to everyone on earth who wants it.
Copyright only exists, because once we started to be able to do this with early technologies like the printing press, vinyls, VHS, etc, it showed that you could rapidly drive the value of that work down to zero dollars, because in capitalism, thing only have value if they are scarce. Air is a necessity for everyone to live but it costs nothing because it’s all around us. It suddenly gets valuable in places where it’s scarce, but as long as it’s abundant, it has no value according capitalism. So continuing to allow the free copying of works meant that the original creators would never get rewarded. This made some sense at a time when it took months and a ton of resources to chop down trees, make paper, print a book, and ship it across the world and then get a response back regarding it.
But now, in the digital age, we have all the tools we need to build a middle man free service that would allow everyone to watch or read anything, and reward the creators based on how much their works are used or viewed or remixed. It’s basically how music streaming services and the behind the scenes remix/sampling licensing deals work already, they just have a ton of corporate middle men taking profits at every step.
In print media, advertising driven models are hamfisted work arounds that do the same thing of providing the information to everyone, but again, with middle men that fuck the authors and ruin the experience for readers.
Spotify, Apple Music, etc could all still exist, they’d just all have access to the same content catalog and you’d be picking and paying solely based on the quality of the interface and service they provide.
It’s also not a crazy idea that once you create an idea you don’t get to exclusively own it. For the vast majority of human history, copyright did not exist, and the only way that stories and songs and ideas were passed on was through chains of people copying and retelling them.
No it doesn’t. Just because the work I created was done in paint or word doesn’t make it any less mine. Just because I could distribute it freely doesn’t make me obligated to. I am justified in asking for compensation and proposing limits on how it’s shared.
This is no different to printing the physical version of these works. I could print 10 copies of the book and tell my friends they cannot distribute it. Just the same I could send them an email with the works and say the same thing.
There is no difference here.
This has no logical basis in your response though. You’re saying that creators of works would have no say in how much a digital work is copied/transferred. How do you prove how much a work is even used/viewed? That would require heaps and loads of DRM management and to go after those who circumvent those measures… which takes money/infrastructure… and GASP That’s exactly what the publishers are doing now! Look at that!
We’ve proven time and time again that people will pick the legal option as long as it’s more convenient and a better product than the illegal one.
Spotify and Netflix stomped piracy in every region they entered, PC games that don’t have DRM still sell like crazy through Steam.
And while it would require monitoring of metrics, that’s not the same as DRM that prevents you from using something.
But it doesn’t sound like you care to imagine a different system or why it would be better, you seem to just want to demand that the concept of information ownership stay exactly as the 1900s US Congress and Court System, in all their unquestionable wisdom, determined it should be.
Steam… IS a DRM. partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/drm
Nope, just asked to to clarify how this magic system can work without someone to enforce it. And you’ve yet to answer that.
Steam is not popular because of its DRM. And again, in this scenario, everyone would have access to everything. The system’s only job would be tracking what gets downloaded / played and rewarding creators based on that.
Given that you’re dismissively talking about a “magic system” while trying to defend against being closed minded towards it, that defense rings pretty hollow.
And I’ve never said there wouldn’t be anyone to enforce it, I said there would be no incentive not to use it.
When you’ve proposed nothing that actually holds anyone accountable… You’re not winning anyone over.
GOG as an example would have been better. But you didn’t choose that. You chose a system that DOES have DRM and DOES act like a publisher and takes a cut. That isn’t a good way to sell your “new system” when Steam does EVERYTHING the “old system” does.
Edit: And now, because you simply don’t agree with me, you downvote the comments after the fact. Just because I called out how your idea doesn’t work. Congrats!
Given that you can see a different comparable example, and yet instead of just going “yeah like GOG”, or thinking to yourself “yeah GOG would be a better example, I get what he means though”, you’re going “YOU didn’t SAY gog WHAT an ASSHOLE”, I again, urge you to reflect on whether you’re having a good faith conversation or whether you just have a stick up your ass about something and are venting online.
And no, Steam prevents people who haven’t purchased a game from playing it. You are fundamentally not understanding what I’m writing if you’re not seeing how that’s different from a system where everyone has access to everything.
No. My point is that when you think of YOUR perfect system. You don’t actually think of one that actually more closely meets what you described. That shows the innate problem with your idea as you haven’t even fully thought through it enough to even recognize what it looks like. And ultimately how it oftentimes does work for developers that wish to be more protective of their assets.
Regardless. Let me show you why even GOG doesn’t work out. Forget the fact that they need to take a cut still anyway (and be the middleman) for at the minimum of costs of infrastructure.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.saik0.com/pictrs/image/2749c169-959c-45d3-b4a3-9137f7ed37d3.png">
You can’t beat the cost of a torrent. Either in actual costs, or their distribution.
Go back and reread my comments, you have evidently not understood anything I wrote.
… Nothing you wrote addresses any of the concerns/criticisms that I’ve levied in return. There’s nothing additional to read and you’ve failed to furnish more. Talk about bad faith discussions. You’re response is literally “go google it”… “go read it again”, same bullshit hand-wavy nonsense.
You seem to think that you can do ANY of this without some form of DRM and copyright. Remember, you stated
While at the same time outlining a literal middleman service as your standard. If a writer/artist/whatever wanted to self-publish. Nothing stops them. Open a website with magento, woocommerce, Prestashop… whatever you want. And sell it for whatever you think is fair. That would be the best case instance to cut out the middleman. This doesn’t mean you can just strip a person of their rights to their works just because it’s “free” to make duplicates of it. It’s wild that you start the premise with that requirement from the get go, going down the premise proves that it wouldn’t work, which was most of the point of my comments. But you seem wildly disinterested in actually discussing anything. You’re nearly as bad as the people who claim communism works… but we just never saw true communism. (which is just as bad as people who claim any absolute system works… when we’ve never seen it work at all).
From your original comment. There’s a difference in rights to the works vs rights to the performance/recording. And further there’s a difference between “personal” and “commercial” usages. The reason those stories and songs are passed down is because personal use is effectively unenforceable (and retelling in your own words would be what we call “fair use”). In your world, you’d make it also unenforceable for commercial usages as well.
Again, you don’t understand what I wrote. Read more and write less.
Maybe try being less of an angry gnome.
Imagine actually attempting to continue a conversation.
Don’t actually do it. Just imagine it.
Nah, you need to read more!
It’s not a conversation, it’s you venting the stick up your ass.
If the stick is in my ass, how could I possibly be venting it? Can you at least attempt to make sense?
Apparently it’s a very long stick.
The shitty part of the stick… which would be the smelly part, would be firmly lodged no? The stick itself wouldn’t be smelly, which would be the only part that could be vented.
Sure, you don’t actually own it. The words you strung together are not actually yours nor is the grammar you strung it together with. The knowledge you used to create it is also not yours.
The only way to ensure no one reads, borrows, or “steals” your work is to never share it with anyone and certainly never put it on the Internet.
The only way to ensure it is truly yours is to never have participated in society, invent your own language, and of course hide it from ever being discovered.
This is the only real way. You need to create in a vacuum and lock it up so no one will ever find it. Then and only then can it truly be yours.
Really unfortunate. I wonder why nobody foresaw this when they started the stupid NEL thing.
Edit: NEL is the thing where the Archive removed all borrowing restrictions except 10 books per account and some sort of basic verification that you were in the US
Yeah they flew too close to the sun
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.
Agreed. While a noble cause, it was honestly predictable.
I don’t understand why they did that. Their status was already quite shaky. They really shot themselves and their users in the foot
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.
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.
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.
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.
Literally every digital “loan” is multiple separate, unrecoverable copies. That law is not about digital lending and cannot be applied to digital lending.
All digital lending of copyrighted material without an explicit license to do so is copyright infringement, and it was always a guarantee that the ruling would happen.
The removal of the “single copy” lie isn’t relevant to the legal status. It’s relevant because it forced the hands of the publishers to take action. There was never any possibility of any ruling but the obvious blanket “you can’t do that” that the law dictates, once IA forced them to take it to court.
That’s provably incorrect.
“it is not an infringement of copyright for a library or archives […] to reproduce no more than one copy or phonorecord of a work”
Title 17, USC 101 defines a copy as “…material objects, other than phonorecords, in which a work is fixed by any method now known or later developed, and from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device…”
Digital replication falls under the legal definition of copying in the US Code, and is directly cited in the prior section of the code I reference in my last reply.
The Internet Archive’s loans also utilize DRM, a standard kind of software used by every other library out there to restrict further replication of copies. This same technology is in use with libraries who have contracts with publishers to directly download and publish digital copies of non-printed ebooks, which would violate that contract by not using DRM. The Internet Archive, without any express contract from publishers, is still implementing the strongest measures of protection that the publishers themselves would require whether or not content was directly licensed from them instead of being scanned in from a physical copy.
Nothing forced them to do anything. These publishers voluntarily decided to file a lawsuit because of mounting pressure from libraries as a collective to stop charging insanely high prices on ebook rentals from publishers, which they saw as being undermined by the fact that the Internet Archive was able to still pay for the books in question, but lend them out in the same manner that physical books are already lent, just through a screen.
As I mentioned before, if the Internet Archive had never done this in the first place, public outcry would be practically nonexistent, and the Internet Archive wouldn’t be lending out those books at all, just like they’re not legally able to now. There is no difference to if they had or had not done this, other than the fact that it is now more visible in the public sphere, and has active legal challenges instead of being quietly subverted by regulation and practices publishers have continued to mount against all libraries to re-establish what it means to own a copyrighted work.
It is literally impossible to send a file over the internet with no more than one copy. Every additional “loan” is multiple additional copies. Even if we ignore that, you’re very conveniently ignoring the “material objects” part of that definition, which again, completely and unconditionally disqualifies a loan over the internet.
DRM is entirely irrelevant. It has no bearing on anything.
They filed a lawsuit because IA flagrantly and egregiously violated their rights. They openly fucking dared them to. And now they don’t get ignored on their limited copy illegal lending and can’t get away with any copies.
I’m not, it’s just that the wording of the definition could lead to you interpreting it as such. It does not mean what you think it means.
In essence, it’s saying that if a material object is “fixed” (under copyright law, that tends to mean captured in a medium that allows it to be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated) it is considered a copy. Copyright law generally considers things like written texts (i.e. transcribing a book onto other sheets of paper) to be copies, but it also includes things like recordings, which are very much nontangible. (although still stored on tangible hardware) Also, note the “either directly or with the aid of a machine or device” section of that description.
The fact you consider DRM to be irrelevant in a conversation about managing legal access to digitally distributed content shows a lot about your understanding of this topic, to say the least.
DRM is highly relevant. If it were not, then all libraries would already be illegally publishing copies under the agreements they sign with publishers when they distribute books through DRM-protected applications like Overdrive or Libby. Legal consequence also does not extend past the original publisher if the intent was clearly not to deliberately allow for further copying. (i.e. if the Internet Archive stated they lent books so users could copy them and later share them with friends, that would be a violation. Instead, they have loan terms, limits, and DRM)
If anything done by a user after the lending of any material, outside of reasonable safeguards (like DRM) was to be considered illegal, then any store would be liable if someone used a kitchen knife to kill someone, and any chemical distributor would be liable if someone in a lab mixed the wrong chemicals together and made an explosion. Liability has an end point, and DRM helps signify that by placing technical restrictions on redistribution of material, while also carrying heavy legal penalties for breaking it, which would not be present if it wasn’t applied in the first place.
Publishers should not be able to sue libraries for lending their books, digital, physical, or otherwise. Especially when the publishers could not demonstrate any material harm.
You are actively defending multi-billion dollar publishing companies suing a library for lending content they legally acquired, using faulty interpretations of the law, and deference to lawsuits as a means of judging the morality of actions. You haven’t made a single point that wasn’t either verifiably untrue, or misinformed.
I would advise you to reevaluate your position.
DRM is relevant to the legal redistribution because that is part of the terms of their license agreement and for no other reason. Their entire lending practice of digital copies is legal because, and only because, they have contracts that specifically determine how they may do so.
It does not in any way alter the nature of blatant illegal copies. It does not make every loan not multiple distinct illegal copies.
I’m actively opposing people telling insane, completely unhinged lies that aren’t even loosely connected to reality to validate a position that every single person with a shred of common sense knew was going to get laughed out of court the day they did it and did get laughed out of court. If you tried this case a million times, Internet Archive wouldn’t have a chance in any of them.
Petition for changes to the law. Don’t lie and pretend the law says what you want it to.
This is simply not true. If someone takes means to prevent illegal action, in a situation where they can choose to either do so, or not do so, taking those means shows they are attempting to prevent any negative legal outcomes.
The Internet Archive was explicitly, voluntarily enacting similar policy to libraries that directly license books from publishers, because they knew that it would show they were making an effort to lend responsibly. To me, it seems they carried on this set of ethics to when they opened up more copies than they originally had on hand, because that was during a time when library branches were becoming physically inaccessible, and physical resources were becoming increasingly hard to access, thus, responsible lending would include effectively making the inaccessible physical copies in other libraries accessible. That part might not be considered legal, but again, who cares? These publishers saw a substantial increase in profits during the time they were supposedly hurt by the Internet Archive, and continue to squeeze traditional libraries for every penny they can get under exploitative lending agreements. What the Internet Archive did was for the objective moral good of society.
If anything’s illegal, it’s compelling libraries to only license your content directly from you for a higher rate, while trying to discourage them from using the physical copies they can buy once like any other sane person.
I have not misrepresented the law by pretending it says something else. I have given you citations and quotes straight from the letter of the law, directly backing up my claims, while proving your blanket statements that all digitized lending was illegal as patently false.
Petitioning to change the law is not the only way to change it. For instance, I believe piracy from, say, streaming services, is ethical, if those same streaming services are jacking up rates, adding ads, and enshittifying their core product for the sake of making a quick buck. how else are you supposed to change things?
I’m sure you’ve seen the immense public backlash and legislative attempts to fix the rapidly enshittifying entertainment industry. They haven’t worked.
Look, even regardless of all my arguments for how I believe the vast majority of what the Internet Archive did was legal, I don’t care if it was. Because, in the end, If you own a book, you should be allowed to let other people read it. If people are losing access to literature, you should be able to make it available to as many people as possible. If companies are rapidly exploiting the public library system and looting it for everything it has, you should be able to offer an alternative.
These publishers do not deserve my, nor your sympathy.
Your arguments read like you believe a DRM-protected ebook file is a verbatim copy that can be freely distributed and used. I just want to clarify that it is not, not even on a technical level. The form of DRM that libraries use is not just a license you agree to. It is an ecryption that turns that ebook into a garbled mess for anyone but the person who borrowed the ebook, during a set timeframe. After that period expires it cannot be decrypted anymore and stays a garbled mess forever, irrevocably ceasing to be a copy.
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How about, instead of throwing a tantrum about the courts doing the only thing they had any authority to do, you spend your efforts lobbying to fix IP law?
Yeah because that has ever changed anything. I’ll just keep voting harder while I’m at it.
Accusing somebody else of licking the boot, while you’re having the same boot ground in your face and just acting like it’s no big deal, not a problem.
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Oh, and now you make a great deal of change by putting slurs all over.
Wanna change someone’s mind? Go civil. Wanna vent your anger? Don’t vent it on other people.
I 100% want all copyright to be eliminated, but what you do is counterproductive and rude at best.
Direct link to the court document: …courtlistener.com/…/gov.uscourts.ca2.60988.306.1…
Side note: court listener’s RECAP is often quite disliked by the legal system. They do not like it when people put stuff from PACER fee waved sources on there like Aaron Schwartz did. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Law_Project
Woah, I wish I had known about this sooner. Thanks!
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
What do you think Mistral trains its models on? Public domain stuff?
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.”
This stupid thing just keeps saying “I can Haz Cheeseburger”. What the hell does that even mean?
Better yet! Train an AI to re-write the books into brand new books and let us read, review the content, add notes etc so that the AI can refresh the books if we find errors.
Kick the private collections to the curb! Teeth in like in American History X.
We get it, y’all hate LLMs and the companies who make them.
This comparison is disingenuous and I have to think you’re smart enough to know that, making this disinformation.
If/when an LLM like ChatGPT spits out a full copy of training text, that’s considered a bug and is remediated fairly quickly. It’s not a feature.
What IA was doing was sharing the full text as a feature.
As far as I know, there are some court cases pending regarding determining if companies like Open AI are guilty of copyright infringement but I haven’t seen any convictions yet (happy to be corrected here).
All that said, I love IA and have a Warrior container scheduled to run nightly to help contribute.
Hmm, true. IA wouldn’t be as supported if we couldn’t get the full text of the source.
Can you tell me more about the “warrior container”?
It’s mentioned in the OP but it’s this:
wiki.archiveteam.org/…/ArchiveTeam_Warrior
Basically, distributed collection.
This is an ArchiveTeam project, which is a totally separate effort to the Internet Archive. As far as I know, they’re not related other than the fact that ArchiveTeam use The Internet Archive for storage.
Ahh my mistake.
Might be time to financially contribute to IA.
“AI write Hamlet” AI writes Idiocracy.
I wonder who’ll end up buying the archive.org domain and what they’ll use it for
The archive isn’t completely dead with that yet. There is still a lot of free domain stuff and private uploads on there. A lot of public records too.
And I think you can’t just randomly buy a .org domain, can you? You have to be officially a nonprofit.
I remember for example couchsurfing had to change from a .org to .com when their tax exempt status was rejected by the irs and they went for profit.
You definitely can just buy a .org, I own multiple.
They’ve just been sued into almost certain bankruptcy.
lol, no.
.org just means “organization”. There are literally no rules on who can own one.
4chan is a .org domain…
Horse shit. I have had several org domains, some for over 20 years now, and never been a nonprofit
Hope somebody buys it and starts using it as an LLM with investors since that’s apparently the only way to avoid a lawsuit
what does warrior do? The git readme seems to just be setup instructitons
Yeah I’m wondering as well. It seems to save webpages, whereas the issue is with scanned books which may be removed from IA…
click wiki link in readme: wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_…
If only the readme clearly said what it was with a link you could click…
somehow I didn’t see anything above getting started. Looking again I don’t know how I missed it with the big logos unless they didn’t load and the rest was behind a notification or something.
Just give the link if you have one
I had the same question. Here’s the answer:
The Archive Team Warrior is a virtual archiving appliance. You can run it to help with the Archive Team archiving efforts. It will download sites and upload them to our archive—and it’s really easy to do!
The warrior is a container running inside a virtual machine, so there is almost no security risk to your computer. (“Almost”, because in practice nothing is 100% secure.) The warrior will only use your bandwidth and some of your disk space, as well as some of your CPU and memory. It will get tasks from and report progress to the Tracker.
Libgen.rs
o7
My understanding is that the IA had implemented a digital library, where they had (whether paid or not) some number of licenses for a selection of books. This implementation had DRM of some variety that meant you could only read the book while it was checked out. In theory, this means if the IA has 10 licenses of a book, only 10 people have a usable copy they borrowed from the IA at a time.
And then the IA disabled the DRM system, somehow, and started limitlessly lending the books they had copies of to anyone that asked.
I definitely don’t like the obnoxious copyright system in the USA, but what the IA did seems obviously
wrongagainst the agreement they entered into. Like if your local library got a copy of Book X and then when someone wanted to borrow it they just copied it right there and let you keep the copy.ETA: updated my wording. I don’t believe what the IA did was morally wrong, per se, but rather against the agreement I presume they entered into with the owners of the books they lent.
That’s how it works in the rest of the world.
What part of the rest of the world are you in?
Some university library probably.
No it isn’t.
They disabled drm during lockdown so people had something to do
Which was nice of them, but that doesn’t mean they should’ve done that, especially in the eyes of the law. (Also, if you’re after free ebooks, why are you pirating them on archive.org instead of libgen?)
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Where did I say that find it good that they got sued or lost their appeal? I just said that the reason why they lost the appeal is because according to the law they’re bound to, what they did was wrong. And maybe they should’ve left that to a platform that enjoys a little more immunity from said law, because there are plenty of those. It was stupid of them. They painted an unnecessary target on their back that doesn’t help their cause and I‘d prefer them not to have to shut down at some point because I’m all for the Internet archive archiving anything and everything. They should’ve stayed a legitimate library and everything would have been fine and would have served their cause sufficiently well.
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Ah, so you‘re one of those people that would be well at home at lemmygrad. And what fate are you talking about? Not getting sued?
The publisher-plaintiffs did not prove the “obvious wrong” in this case, however US-based courts have a curious standard when it comes to the application of Fair Use doctrine. This case ultimately rested on the fourth, most significantly-weighted Fair Use standard in US-based courts: whether IA’s digital lending harmed publisher sales during the 3-month period of unlimited digital lending.
Unfortunately, when it comes to this standard, the publisher-plaintiffs are not required to prove harm, rather only assert that harm has occurred. If they were required to prove harm they’d have to reveal sales figures for the 27 works under consideration–publishers will do anything to conceal this information and US-based courts defer to them. Therefore, IA was required to prove a negative claim–that digital lending did not hurt sales–without access to the empirical data (which in other legal contexts is shared during the discovery phase) required to prove this claim. IA offered the next best argument (see pp. 44-62 of the case document to check for yourself), but the data was deemed insufficient by the court.
In other words, on the most important test of Fair Use doctrine, which this entire case ultimately pivoted upon, IA was expected to defend itself with one arm tied behind its back. That’s not ‘fair’ and the publishers did not prove ‘obvious’ harm, but the US-based courts are increasingly uninterested in these things.
edited: page numbers on linked court document.
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The decision is that even lending out ebooks against owned copies is illegal
What the IA may be illegal but is certainly not wrong.
Wrong? No.
Against the terms of agreements they made? Yes.
Actions also protected by laws exempting nonprofits and archives from copyright restrictions? Also supposed to be yes.
To be fair, this is what I meant when I said wrong. Enough people have taken umbrage with my wording that I think I should update it, though. Thank you for your reply.
Ah, I see we’re burning the Library of Alexandria again… Just as with last time, the survival of texts will rely upon copies.
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.
We live in a capitalist society. You can do whatever you want as long as you have money or promise lots of money to powerful people.
Still doesnt make any sense whatsoever
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…
But I’m training my organic LLM, can’t I?
sharing is theft^™^
(Old meme directly quotes the courts and govt ministers. Gen-z too young to remember napster and kazaa)
Hoo, boy. You’re not gonna have a good time on Lemmy if you really believe that.
It’s ok. They don’t.
I wasn’t gonna go digging on a less than a day old account.
No really. I mean it. sharing is actually theft. dispersing resources evenly is wasteful. it’s inefficient. and sharing only with your ingroup creates cliques and class divides. ultimately it is sharing in all its forms which robs society of progress and long term prosperity. on the other hand, self interest drives innovation while trade leads to prosperity. self interest is the true driver of human progress.
buy only paper books from the publisher. and only new books. not used. as the good book says; “Neither a borrower, nor a lender be.”
Quite the take
This must be irony. I cannot be certain because you doubled down on it
Oh, that stuff about “sharing is theft”? thats an exercise in doublespeak. my attempt to parody the institutions. …“it is sharing which robs society”… Mwuahaha!
Easy solution. Update the web-scraper they use to include an LLM. Then its for “training”
As long as they have a tech billionaire in charge they should be fine.
They could also rename the project to: “The AI Archive” and add lots of buttons with multicolor gradients.
Need to give it a quirky name.
The AIkive
In the future, armed with burning pencil writing fingers, books will be scanned and photographed, page by page. Before they are read.
They need to rename themselves “Intelligent Archive” then claim they’re an AI service that can just happen to regenerate whole books.
Can we make the internet archive archive?