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...

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."

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.

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...

They disabled drm during lockdown so people had something to do

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.