JemmyThe Internet Archive just lost its appeal over ebook lending
submitted a week ago by
fossilesque
edited a week ago
submitted a week ago by
fossilesque
edited a week ago
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
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
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.
“Good for the people”? You mean COMMUNISM?
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.
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)
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 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…
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Meta is defending because they trained on books3 which contained all of Bibliotik. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pile_(dataset)
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?
stop asking questions and go back to work
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
Another sad day for pro-preservation advocates
A sad day for intellects
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
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.
Libgen.rs
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
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”?
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.
They need to rename themselves “Intelligent Archive” then claim they’re an AI service that can just happen to regenerate whole books.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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: wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_…
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
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
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.
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.
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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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.
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.
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?
Unpopular opinion: They stepped out of their fucking lane. There are already laws that protect actual libraries, in fact most nations have laws to ensure libraries have access to all locally published works.
One good thing to come of this is I've now joined my national and local libraries.
The Internet Archive is a library.
Not only are they a member of the Boston Library Consortium, but their entire operation is based around preserving not just webpages, but books, and other forms of media.
They even offer loans of various materials to and from other libraries, and digitize & archive works from the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the New York Public Library, and more.
To say the Internet Archive isn’t an “actual library,” and has “stepped out of their fucking lane” is ridiculous.
This ruling doesn’t just affect the Internet Archive, it affects every single other library out there that wants to lend ebooks, and digitize their existing physical copies of books for digital lending.
Other libraries have licenses. And follow them.
Internet archive digitized actual books and lent out copies (which was already 100% not legal under current law), then thought it was a good idea to just say “fuck it” and remove the thin veil of legitimacy that kept publishers from caring too much by removing the “one copy at a time per book” policy and daring the publishers to do something about it.
They removed the one copy rule temporarily, during the pandemic, it’s now in place again. But the publishers have made any digitized lending illegal, not just more than one copy, any digitized lending. It is now illegal for them to scan and distribute even one single copy of any book.
It was never a problem with the single-copy restriction, and the publishers didn’t bring up that restriction at all as the purpose of the suit, instead attacking the entirety of scanning & lending, even using Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) systems, like the Internet Archive, and other libraries use.
Even regardless of that, the First-sale Doctrine enables all existing secondary markets for copyrighted material. It’s how you can lend a book to a friend, sell a used book after you’re finished it, or swap copies of a video game on disk with somebody.
The Internet Archive is included in this. Changing the method of distribution (lending a digital copy vs a physical copy) has no functional distinction, and the publishers in the lawsuit were not able to demonstrate material harm, instead just stating that it wasn’t “fair use,” and should thus be illegal, regardless of the fact that they weren’t harmed by the supposedly non-fair use.
And on top of that, fuck the law if it’s unjust. I don’t care if it’s supposedly (even if not true) “100% not legal under current law” to do, it should be, and this ruling is unjust.
Any digitized lending was always illegal.
The law was abundantly clear. You cannot distribute wholesale copies of someone else’s work. Publishers didn’t bother because the scale was small and they didn’t want to take the PR hit for a scale that didn’t matter.
The first sale doctrine, necessarily, can only possibly apply to a physical object. There is no such thing as a “single copy” of a digital object. Every time that “single copy” moves is a new copy. There is no legal framework in the US that even acknowledges the premise of a digital copy. It’s always a license.
You need new laws to apply to the digital world. There is absolutely zero room for ambiguity that what the Internet archive did never in any way was protected. This ruling was a literal guarantee the minute the Internet Archive removed their (unambiguously not in any way legal) pretense of a “single copy”. There isn’t a court in the country that would even consider ruling any other way, because the law is well beyond clear. This ruling happened because the Internet Archive forced it to happen. If they had left open mass scale piracy to pirate sites they would have been fine.
If their lawyers advised them that there was even a possibility that this argument could work, they should be disbarred. They would be better off spending their money on lobbying for better laws than pursuing a case less likely than winning the power ball jackpot 5 draws in a row.
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.
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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.
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
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.”
This must be irony. I cannot be certain because you doubled down on it
Quite the take
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
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…