Daily Archives: 2024-09-04

Article note: Unfortunate but not unexpected.

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The Internet Archive has lost its appeal after book publishers successfully sued to block the Open Libraries Project from lending digital scans of books for free online.

Judges for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday rejected the Internet Archive (IA) argument that its controlled digital lending—which allows only one person to borrow each scanned e-book at a time—was a transformative fair use that worked like a traditional library and did not violate copyright law.

As Judge Beth Robinson wrote in the decision, because the IA's digital copies of books did not "provide criticism, commentary, or information about the originals" or alter the original books to add "something new," the court concluded that the IA's use of publishers' books was not transformative, hobbling the organization's fair use defense.

Article note: Several thoughts. Cargo-Cult-y style is going to emerge in the face of any (dis)incentive structure - see the fucked up writing styles absolutely endemic in academic and legal writing. You can't do uncontrolled sumative assessments and imagine there isn't going to be rampant cheating. It's been more obvious in the recent LLM era because the quality of the cheating is worse.