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Internet Archive's legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost

arstechnica.com

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Re: Internet Archive's legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost

#31

Post by charcircuit »

tototrains wrote: post #14

Remember: If OpenAI/Google does it for $$$, it's not illegal. If idealists do it for public access, full force of the law. Information wants to be free. Oblige it. Fools with temporary power trying to extract from the work of others will be a blip in the history books if we make them.

You are being intentionally misleading. Public access AI models are not being taken down either. There is a big, transformative, difference with freely giving out books to read compared with using them to train an ML model.

Re: Internet Archive's legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost

#32

Post by endgame »

It was an absolutely bone-headed poke-the-bear move and we should count ourselves lucky that it was only a chunk of the library and not the whole archive that got nuked. IA holds priceless and irreplaceable data, and while the library initiative was a well-intentioned move during the pandemic it was way too radical for the keepers of our shared digital history.

Re: Internet Archive's legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost

#33

Post by wmf »

tototrains wrote: post #14

Remember: If OpenAI/Google does it for $$$, it's not illegal. If idealists do it for public access, full force of the law. Information wants to be free. Oblige it. Fools with temporary power trying to extract from the work of others will be a blip in the history books if we make them.

There was also a lawsuit over Google Books.

Re: Internet Archive's legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost

#34

Post by fooqux »

wmf wrote: post #33
tototrains wrote: post #14

Remember: If OpenAI/Google does it for $$$, it's not illegal. If idealists do it for public access, full force of the law. Information wants to be free. Oblige it. Fools with temporary power trying to extract from the work of others will be a blip in the history books if we make them.

There was also a lawsuit over Google Books.

Sure, which Google won. Which was basically the point of the person you replied to I think.

Re: Internet Archive's legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost

#35

Post by yorwba »

ForHackernews wrote: post #25
Worksheet wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would there be anything worth putting into the libraries if intellectual property rights are not respected?

...yes? The median book sells ~3,000 copies, ever. But people keep writing them!

Most libraries probably don't stock many books like that. They'd just waste shelf space until they get discarded in the end.

Re: Internet Archive's legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost

#36

Post by fsckboy »

charcircuit wrote: post #31
tototrains wrote: post #14

Remember: If OpenAI/Google does it for $$$, it's not illegal. If idealists do it for public access, full force of the law. Information wants to be free. Oblige it. Fools with temporary power trying to extract from the work of others will be a blip in the history books if we make them.

You are being intentionally misleading. Public access AI models are not being taken down either. There is a big, transformative, difference with freely giving out books to read compared with using them to train an ML model.

> There is a big, transformative, difference with freely giving out books to read on a small, measured in human reading pace, scale compared with using them at a massive scale at internet and computer memory speeds to train an ML model even if the intellectual property used to train the ML was from unlicensed copies, and which the model regularly and with some frequency regurgitates verbatim.

not wanting you to be intentially misleading, FTFY.

Re: Internet Archive's legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost

#37

Post by tptacek »

nekusar wrote: post #16

What capitalism continues to show us: proof that public libraries, if created in the last 10 years, would be deemed illegal and sued out of existence. It's only because the late 1800's billionaires wanted to leave legacies and made pay-to-enter and free libraries, and migrated them to free, or public libraries. Thats why so many of them are (John) Carnegie Libraries. Only legal when billionaires do it.

How do you figure libraries would be deemed illegal? They operate today. The Archive, on the other hand, attempted a fair use argument for whole copies of books (the copyrighted form most legible to copyright law) currently for sale as ebooks. I agree with the comment across the thread calling this a spectacularly boneheaded move and expressing gratitude that the entire Archive wasn't compromised over the stunt.

Re: Internet Archive's legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost

#38

Post by Analemma_ »

fooqux wrote: post #34
wmf wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was also a lawsuit over Google Books.

Sure, which Google won. Which was basically the point of the person you replied to I think.

“Won” in a purely symbolic sense with no practical significance. How do I access the Google Books library?

Re: Internet Archive's legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost

#39

Post by tptacek »

choo-t wrote: post #6
bobsmooth wrote: post #2

That's what happens when you practically beg book publishers to sue you.

The fact that giving free access to books during a pandemic, in a format that doesn't need physical contact, when libraries were shut down or hard to access for a lot of people should have been praised, not pursued by legal action from rent seeking entities. The copyright system as a whole should by torn up. At least it give a clear signal to anyone with a ounce of moral which publisher to avoid at all cost.

During the pandemic, they created the "National Emergency Library", where they allowed users copies of books without caps, without any connection to holdings of the Archive itself, something that was black-letter proscribed by copyright law, and as a result they managed to sabotage the legal case for controlled digital lending too.

Re: Internet Archive's legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost

#40

Post by Levitating »

Analemma_ wrote: post #38
fooqux wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, which Google won. Which was basically the point of the person you replied to I think.

“Won” in a purely symbolic sense with no practical significance. How do I access the Google Books library?

https://books.google.com/
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