The Internet Archive just lost its appeal over ebook lending

Easy solution. Update the web-scraper they use to include an LLM. Then its for "training"

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.

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.

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

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

sharing is theft^(TM)

oh come on guys! Lighten up ffs!

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.

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

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

Libgen.rs

Another sad day for pro-preservation advocates

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.

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

o7

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

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

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

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

“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.