AI_Hmwk6_HumanPrompt - TheEvergreenStateCollege/upper-division-cs-23-24 GitHub Wiki
The case of Hachette v. Internet Archive describes one of the many copyright conflicts that arise from this digital era. The plaintiff, Hachette, complains that their profits suffer due the availability of their texts on the website, Internet Archive. While in many cases one entity freely serving the copyrighted materials of the other might seem to clear favor the plaintiff, in this case it appears the defendant is in the favorable position. The website is only content purchased by libraries, and limits available copies according to the number of copies physically owned by Internet Archive and its partner libraries.
Reading this, it reminded me of Netflix's password-sharing crackdown a few years ago. I saw it as another incident when copyrighted material was being served and shared, and a corporation was trying to limit sharing access to media. In 2016, a court case Nosal v. U.S., resulted in the re-evaluation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and led to the conclusion that sharing passwords to streaming concerns was illegal.
In the Nosal v. U.S. case - Nosal, a former employee of a law firm, asked another employee to use their credentials to access the database. Although the credentials belonged to the employee, entrusting them to anyone else exceeded the limits of their authority. Was the Internet Archive exceeding the limits of its authority? As the article explained, its practices aligned with those of most public libraries, who frequently have their materials available digitally.
The following year, a similar case arose: Facebook v. Power. The company Power was attempting to be a social media hub. It required user's usernames and passwords to access social media websites. To operate, Power would scrape the data available to the user on each social media website to provide a hub interface for the user. Facebook argued that scraping its website data was a trademark infringement. Similar to Hachette v. Internet Archive, the defendant is aggregating data to serve to its user - however the Internet Archive gained access to this information through ownership and partnership programs, not through illicit scraping tactics.
After considering these cases, I found myself wondering what sort of technologies we might have had the opportunity to explore societally if these laws preventing web-scraping interactions hadn't been made. We've limited our abilities to provide a public service, or let one technology build from another. Moving forward, we're left to contemplate on what data should we train our own GPT, so we can avoid harming anyone who doesn't consent to their data being used in this way. But none of these stories reveal an injured party to me (until the rulings in favor of the plaintiffs, that is).
Instead, we're reminded of the necessity to ensure we're not defeated by the monstrous overreaching hands of large corporations, attempting to strip us of the bits of culture they've left, by taking advantage of every resource they might fight against publicaly but have no use harassing us for privately.