Does media have a “right to be forgotten?”

https://www.bespacific.com/internet-archive-responds-to-recording-industry-lawsuit-targeting-obsolete-media/

Internet Archive Responds to Recording Industry Lawsuit Targeting Obsolete Media

Internet Archives Blogs: “Late Friday, some of the world’s largest record labels, including Sony and Universal Music Group, filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive and others for the Great 78 Project, a community effort for the preservation, research and discovery of 78 rpm records that are 70 to 120 years old. As a non-profit library, we take this matter seriously and are currently reviewing the lawsuit with our legal counsel. Of note, the Great 78 Project has been in operation since 2006 to bring free public access to a largely forgotten but culturally important medium. Through the efforts of dedicated librarians, archivists and sound engineers, we have preserved hundreds of thousands of recordings that are stored on shellac resin, an obsolete and brittle medium. The resulting preserved recordings retain the scratch and pop sounds that are present in the analog artifacts; noise that modern remastering techniques remove…”

• TechDirt – RIAA Piles On In The Effort To Kill The World’s Greatest Library: Sues Internet Archive For Making It Possible To Hear Old 78s. “On Friday, the Internet Archive put up a blog post noting that its digital book lending program was likely to change as it continues to fight the book publishers’ efforts to kill the Internet Archive. As you’ll recall, all the big book publishers teamed up to sue the Internet Archive over its Open Library project, which was created based on a detailed approach, backed by librarians and copyright lawyers, to recreate an online digital library that matches a physical library. Unfortunately, back in March, the judge decided (just days after oral arguments) that everything about the Open Library infringes on copyrights. There were many, many problems with this ruling, and the Archive is appealing. However, in the meantime, the judge in the district court needed to sort out the details of the injunction in terms of what activities the Archive would change during the appeal. The Internet Archive and the publishers negotiated over the terms of such an injunction and asked the court to weigh in on whether or not it also covers books for which there are no ebooks available at all. The Archive said it should only cover books where the publishers make an ebook available, while the publishers said it should cover all books, because of course they did. Given Judge Koeltl’s original ruling, I expected him to side with the publishers, and effectively shut down the Open Library. However, this morning he surprised me and sided with the Internet Archive, saying only books that are already available in electronic form need to be removed. That’s still a lot, but at least it means people can still access those other works electronically. The judge rightly noted that the injunction should be narrowly targeted towards the issues at play in the case, and thus it made sense to only block works available as ebooks…”

• See also The New York Times – The Dream Was Universal Access to Knowledge. The Result Was a Fiasco ….” In the pandemic emergency, Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive freely lent out digital scans of its library. Publishers sued. Owning a book means something different now. Information wants to be free.”

Can AI use the library? Is fair use fair for AI?

https://www.bespacific.com/copyright-fair-use-regulatory-approaches-in-ai-content-generation/

Copyright Fair Use Regulatory Approaches in AI Content Generation

Tech Policy News – Ariel Soiffer is a partner and Aric Jain is an associate at the law firm WilmerHale. “Midjourney, a platform to generate images from natural language descriptions, is an example of generative AI tools that are raising new questions around copyright and fair use, The impact of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly caught the attention of technologists and policymakers around the world. Among others, policymakers in Washington are scrambling to apply intellectual property (IP) laws and concepts in response. Indeed, just this month, the Senate Subcommittee on Intellectual Property held its second hearing on AI and its implications for copyright law. Congressional attention to copyright and AI matches a growing public interest in understanding how AI – and generative AI, in particular – uniquely affects what it means to be an author and how ownership of expression of ideas is determined. Fundamentally, this is about the relationship of works generated from generative AI models (Output Works) to works used to train generative AI models (Input Works) and how U.S. copyright law applies to that relationship. This article begins with an overview of generative AI and copyright law with a focus on fair use doctrine. It then examines four schools of thought that have emerged to address the novelty of generative AI under copyright law. It posits some of the implications for each of these approaches for innovation and the growth of the generative AI industry.”

I can hear the teachers screaming already.

https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/research/23/h/chatgpt-flaw.html

ChatGPT Highlights a Flaw in the Educational System

… The fundamental problem is that the grading system depends on homework. If education aims to teach an individual both a) a body of knowledge and b) the techniques of reasoning with that knowledge, then the metrics proving that achievement is misaligned.

One of the most quoted management scientists is Fredrick W. Taylor. He is most known for saying, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Interestingly, he never said that – which is fortunate because it is entirely wrong. People always manage things without metrics – from driving a car to raising children. He said: “If you measure it, you’ll manage it” – and he intended that as a warning. Whenever you adopt a metric, you will adjust your assessment of the underlying process in terms of your chosen metric. His warning is to be very careful about which metrics you choose.

Sometime in the past forty years, we decided that the purpose of education is to do well on tests. Unfortunately, that is also wrong. The purpose of education is to teach people to gather evidence and to think clearly about it. Students should learn how to judge various forms of evidence. They should understand rhetorical techniques (in the classical sense – how to render ideas clearly). They should be aware of common errors in thinking – the cognitive pitfalls we all fall into when rushed or distracted and logical fallacies which rob our arguments of their validity.