The Internet Archive just lost its appeal over ebook lending

So when’s the ruling against OpenAI and the like using the same copyrighted material to train their models

But OpenAI not being allowed to use the content for free means they are being prevented from making a profit, whereas the Internet Archive is giving away the stuff for free and taking away the right of the authors to profit. /s
Disclaimer: this is the argument that OpenAI is using currently, not my opinion.
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...
- OpenAI is burning billions of dollars not making 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.
Hot on the heels of this one, I'd imagine.
- Fat chance. Line must go up.
- 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?
- Aaaaaany minute now.
- the other is fair use
  That's very much up for debate still.
  (I am personally still undecided)
- 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.
stop asking questions and go back to work

If OpenAI can get away with going through copy-righted material, then the answer to piracy is simple: round up a bunch of talented Devs from the internet who are writing and training AI models, and let's make a fantastic model trained on what the internet archive has. Tell you what, let Mistral's engineers lead that charge, and put an AGPL license on the project so that companies can't fuck us over.

I refuse to believe that nobody has thought of this yet

An AI trained on old Internet material would be like a synthetic Grandpa Simpson:
"In my day we said 'all your base' and laughed all day long, because it took all day to download the video."
- This stupid thing just keeps saying “I can Haz Cheeseburger”. What the hell does that even mean?
What do you think Mistral trains its models on? Public domain stuff?
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.
"AI write Hamlet" AI writes Idiocracy.
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"?
- have a 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.

Another sad day for pro-preservation advocates

A sad day for intellects

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.
- 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.
- 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.

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...

Not a surprise, but still somehow crushing. It's a loss for us all.

Ah, I see we're burning the Library of Alexandria again... Just as with last time, the survival of texts will rely upon copies.

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

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 ~~wrong~~ against 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.

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?)
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.
edited: page numbers on linked court document.
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.
- 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.
- Completely useless rageposting on your side.
  Also, the original commenter corrected it later to clarify.
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.
That's how it works in the rest of the world.
- What part of the rest of the world are you in?
- No it isn't.

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

Libgen.rs

Direct link to the court document: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca2.60988/gov.uscourts.ca2.60988.306.1.pdf

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. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Law_Project
- Woah, I wish I had known about this sooner. Thanks!

They need to rename themselves "Intelligent Archive" then claim they're an AI service that can just happen to regenerate whole books.

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

But I'm training my organic LLM, can't I?

what does warrior do? The git readme seems to just be setup instructitons

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.
click wiki link in readme: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warrior
Yeah I'm wondering as well. It seems to save webpages, whereas the issue is with scanned books which may be removed from IA...
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

o7

In the future, armed with burning pencil writing fingers, books will be scanned and photographed, page by page. Before they are read.

Can we make the internet archive archive?

sharing is theft^(TM)

(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.

“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.

- 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.
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

I wonder who’ll end up buying the archive.org domain and what they’ll use it for

Hope somebody buys it and starts using it as an LLM with investors since that's apparently the only way to avoid a lawsuit
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.
- Horse shit. I have had several org domains, some for over 20 years now, and never been a nonprofit