Internet and e-mail policy and practice including Notes on Internet E-mail

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Home 14 Aug 2023 The Internet Archive hops out of the copyright frying pan into a new and different fire Copyright Law In 2020 a group of book publishers sued the Internet Archive over their Controlled Digital Lending program, which made PDF scans of books and lent them out from the Archive's web site. For books still in copyright, the Archive usually limited the number of copies of a book lent to the number of physical copies of the book they had in storage. Several publishers sued with an argument that can be summarized as "that's not how it works". In late March the judge made a ruling that can be summarized as "of course that's not how it works." (More background here.) After several months of quiet negotiations, on Friday the two parties filed a proposed consent agreement in which the Archive promised to stop it, and pay the plaintiffs an undisclosed but presumably not huge amount of money. The only disagreement was exactly what they promise to stop, with letters from each to the judge explaining their positions. See more ...   posted at: 00:02 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Stable link is https://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/fryingfire.html 07 May 2023 Can large language models use the contents of your web site? Copyright Law Large Language Models (LLM) like GPT-4 and its front end ChatGPT work by ingesting gigantic amounts of text from the Internet to train the model, and then responding to prompts with text generated from those models. Depending on who you ask, this is either one step (or maybe no steps) from Artificial General Intelligence, or as Ted Chiang wrote in the New Yorker, ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web. While I have my opinions about that, at this point I'm considering what the relationship is under copyright law between the input text and the output text. Keeping in mind that I am not a lawyer, and no court has yet decided a LLM case, let's take a look. See more ...   posted at: 13:17 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Stable link is https://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/llmcopy.html 14 Apr 2023 Is there any hope for Controlled Digital Lending, and should there be? Copyright Law The Internet Archive has for several years run a program they call Controlled Digital Lending (CDL.) The Archive takes physical paper books, scans them, puts the books in storage, and then lends out the scans, with each scan lent to only one person at a time. Their theory is that the scans are equivalent to the books, so what they're doing is the same as when a library lends physical books. Not surprisingly, book publishers don't like this since they have their own idea about how e-books work. In 2020 several publishers sued, and on March 24 the court ruled quite firmly in favor of the publishers and said there is no such thing as CDL. While there was a lot not to like about the plaintiffs, and there are certainly reasons to want CDL to exist in some form, this decision reminds us that wishful thinking is not a substitute for legal research. What we think the law should say, or wishes it said, is not what it actually says. It also reminds us yet again why copyright law is such a poor fit for digital materals. See more ...   posted at: 11:37 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Stable link is https://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/nocdl.html 22 Mar 2023 Spam filtering and social media moderation are the same thing Email CDA Section 230 has been called ``The 26 Words that Created the Internet''. While it is obvious how Sec 230 protects the World Wide Web, it is equally important for e-mail. A recent Pennsylvania court case emphasizes this point. Dr. Thomas, a professor at the Univeristy of Pennysylvania forwarded an article about another professor Dr. Monge to an online e-mail discussion list. Dr. Monge claimed the article was defamatory and sued Dr Thomas, the university, and many others. But since neither Dr Thomas, nor the university were the author of the article, under Sec 230 they were quickly dismissed from the case. This is good news for anyone who (like me) runs mailing lists for other people. If we were legally responsible for everything anyone said on a list, the number of lists would be a whole lot smaller. But Sec 230 doesn't just protect mailing lists. It also protects spam filtering, and on the modern Internet, mail without filtering would be unusable. See more ...   posted at: 21:30 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/sec230spam.html 11 Jan 2023 Who owns the copyright on stuff that an AI writes? Copyright Law We hear that the widely touted ChatGPT can do a respectable job writing high school essays, malware ransom notes, and the like. When it writes a document, who owns the copyright? An acquaintance asked ChatGPT for its advice and unsurprisingly it suggested updating copyright law to give special recognition to material written by AI software. (Tomorrow I plan to ask an herbalist if I should use more herbs.) See more ...   posted at: 23:16 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Stable link is https://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/notai.html

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