Tech Dirt: “…About a year and a half later, the Internet Archive was sued for providing books in this manner to the public. The suit was triggered by a short-lived, well meaning program that made books available to students during a dark part of the pandemic by lifting certain restrictions on how many people at… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Digital Rights
Zoom May Use Your Calls and Data to Train AI
Cyber Kendra: “…Recently, the popular video conferencing platform, Zoom, brought in a significant change to its terms of service which has sent ripples of worry across its vast user base. With this revision, Zoom has brought under its wing the permission to use users’ data to train Artificial Intelligence (AI). While this has undoubtedly sparked… Continue Reading
It’s Time to Rethink Digital Ownership
Wired: “In his quest to watch every Nicolas Cage movie in chronological order, law professor and author Aaron Perzanowski confirmed that he owns nothing—and that you probably don’t, either.” This is a podcast that includes a transcript…. Lauren Goode: “And do you own that music in the cloud? Gideon Lichfield: Well, that’s an interesting question… Continue Reading
Cory Doctorow is a Bestselling Author, but Audible Won’t Carry his Audiobooks
Editorial by Cory Doctorow: “Audible is a monopolist. The audiobook giant – a division of Amazon – controls more than 90 percent of the audiobook market in most commercially significant categories. Audible built that monopoly the old-fashioned way: by cheating. Audible is part of the Amazon conglomerate. Like all tech giants, Amazon’s growth strategy was… Continue Reading
How to Tell If an Image Is AI Generated
How to Geek: AI photos are getting better, but there are still ways to tell if you’re looking at the real thing — most of the time. An AI-generated photograph is any image that has been produced or manipulated with synthetic content using so-called artificial intelligence (AI) software based on machine learning. As the images cranked… Continue Reading
‘Not for Machines to Harvest’: Data Revolts Break Out Against A.I.
The New York Times [free to read]: “Fed up with A.I. companies consuming online content without consent, fan fiction writers, actors, social media companies and news organizations are among those rebelling…Fan fiction writers are just one group now staging revolts against A.I. systems as a fever over the technology has gripped Silicon Valley and the… Continue Reading
Digital Privacy Legislation is Civil Rights Legislation
EFF: “Our personal data and the ways private companies harvest and monetize it plays an increasingly powerful role in modern life. Corporate databases are vast, interconnected, and opaque. The movement and use of our data is difficult to understand, let alone trace. Yet companies use it to reach inferences about us, leading to lost employment,… Continue Reading
Oversight of A.I.: Rules for Artificial Intelligence
Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing. May 15, 20223 – Oversight of A.I.: Rules for Artificial Intelligence – Hearing video Witnesses – Samuel Altman, CEO OpenAI San Francisco, CA – Download Testimony: “…OpenAI is a leading developer of large language models (LLMs) and other AI tools. Fundamentally, the current generation of AI models are large-scale statistical prediction… Continue Reading
Big Tech Lobbyists Explain How They Took Over Washington
reThink Trade: “An amazing research paper unearths how the tech industry invented the concept of digital trade and sold it to government officials. Progressive trade advocates continue to express confusion over the Biden administration’s trade policies. Despite a U.S. trade representative (USTR) in Katherine Tai who has prioritized a worker-centered trade vision that breaks with… Continue Reading
ICANN and Verisign Proposal Would Allow Any Government In The World To Seize Domain Names
FreeSpeech.com: “ICANN, the organization that regulates global domain name policy, and Verisign, the abusive monopolist that operates the .COM and .NET top-level domains, have quietly proposed enormous changes to global domain name policy in their recently published “Proposed Renewal of the Registry Agreement for .NET”, which is now open for public comment. Either by design,… Continue Reading
Digital Privacy Legislation is Civil Rights Legislation
EFF: “As Congress ponders legislation to reform “big tech,” it must view comprehensive digital privacy legislation as desperately needed civil rights legislation, because data abuses often disproportionately harm communities already bearing the brunt of other inequalities. Harvesting and monetizing personal data whenever anyone uses social media or even vital online services has become ubiquitous, yet… Continue Reading
The Ruling That Threatens the Future of Libraries
The Atlantic – Knowledge is too precious to be abandoned to the whims of the profit motive. “By collecting and digitizing such a huge collection of works and lending them out online, the Internet Archive is making an incredible social contribution. The way the nonprofit manages that archive, however, has earned the wrath of book… Continue Reading
