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Category Archives: Intellectual Property

Inside Iron Mountain: It’s Time to Talk About Hard Drives

MIX: “A few years ago, archiving specialist Iron Mountain Media and Archive Services did a survey of its vaults and discovered an alarming trend: Of the thousands and thousands of archived hard disk drives from the 1990s that clients ask the company to work on, around one-fifth are unreadable. Iron Mountain has a broad customer… Continue Reading

Academic Journal Publishers Antitrust Litigation

Press release: “On September 12, 2024, Lieff Cabraser and co-counsel at Justice Catalyst Law filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against six commercial publishers of academic journals, including Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor and Francis, Sage, Wiley, and Wolters Kluwer, on behalf of a proposed class of scientists and scholars who provided manuscripts or peer review, alleging… Continue Reading

When A.I.’s Output Is a Threat to A.I. Itself

The New York Times – As A.I.-generated data becomes harder to detect, it’s increasingly likely to be ingested by future A.I., leading to worse results. ” The internet is becoming awash in words and images generated by artificial intelligence. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, wrote in February that the company generated about 100 billion words… Continue Reading

New web crawler launched by Meta last month is quietly scraping the internet for AI training data

Fortune [no paywall]: “Meta has quietly unleashed a new web crawler to scour the internet and collect data en masse to feed its AI model. The crawler, named the Meta External Agent, was launched last month according to three firms that track web scrapers and bots across the web. The automated bot essentially copies, or… Continue Reading

EU Proposal for an ePrivacy Regulation

“The European Commission’s proposal for a Regulation on ePrivacy aims at reinforcing trust and security in the digital world. Why a reform of ePrivacy legislation? European legislation needs to keep up with the fast pace at which IT-based services are developing and evolving. The Commission has started a major modernisation process of the data protection… Continue Reading

Has your paper been used to train an AI model? Almost certainly

Nature – Artificial-intelligence developers are buying access to valuable data sets that contain research papers — raising uncomfortable questions about copyright. “Academic publishers are selling access to research papers to technology firms to train artificial-intelligence (AI) models. Some researchers have reacted with dismay at such deals happening without the consultation of authors. The trend is… Continue Reading

Groundbreaking Agreement Provides Libraries with Permanent Ownership Rights Over Tens of Thousands of Digital Titles

Digital Public Library of America and Independent Publishers Group have partnered to rewrite the future of providing ebooks to benefit libraries, authors and readers alike. Chicago, August 13, 2024 – The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and Independent Publishers Group (IPG) have announced a groundbreaking agreement that will transform how American libraries provide access… Continue Reading

The mining of the public domain

Jessamyn West, Librarian.net – “Public.work is a search engine for public domain content.” The site claims to have over 100,000 public domain images. This in and of itself is not that special, but the interface is. It’s gorgeous, a fun and engaging discovery layer where every search becomes a URL that can be shared [example]… Continue Reading

How to Find the Source of a Video on the Web

MakeUseOf: “If you’ve ever wanted to find the source of a video you’ve watched online, you’ll know it’s no easy feat. Even after a lot of searching, you may not turn up results. Here’s how to search for the full video from a clip you’ve seen online. There are many reasons you might want to… Continue Reading

DOE Public Database Featuring Intellectual Property from DOE National Labs and Sites

“Thousands of the treasures developed by scientists working for the Department of Energy—ideas, methods and software created to address some of the world’s biggest challenges—are now available in one place for entrepreneurs, researchers and others interested in learning more and developing them for commercialization.  DOE’s Office of Technology Transitions (OTT) has created the Visual Intellectual… Continue Reading

An open copyright casebook, featuring AI, Warhol and more

Pluralistic: “Few debates invite more uninformed commentary than “IP” – a loosely defined grab bag that regulates an ever-expaning sphere of our daily activities, despite the fact that almost no one, including senior executives in the entertainment industry, understands how it works. Take reading a book. If the book arrives between two covers in the… Continue Reading