Generative AI products make me mad, I don’t like them, and I’m not going to defend them. That said, if this gets framed as a copyright problem, is there any way to give Studio Ghibli (or Pixar or the Seuss estate) power to cry foul here that doesn’t also shut down fan art, parodies, and the like? I’m skeptical, and that’s why I think “labor” is the more productive—if more legally ambiguous—framing here.

Thanks to this article from The Atlantic that I saw on Bluesky, I’ve been able to confirm something that I’ve long assumed to be the case: that my creative and scholarly work is being used to train generative AI tools. More specifically, I used the searchable database embedded in the article to search for myself and find that at least eight of my articles (plus two corrections) are available in the LibGen pirate library—which means that they were almost certainly used by Meta to train their Llama LLM.

Even after many years of attending, being a member of, and now serving in Community of Christ, I’m still alternately surprised by how many things are the same as my Latter-day Saint upbringing and how many things are different. In the latter category, even though I’ve intellectually understood this for a while, it still surprises me that the World Conferences of Community of Christ (renamed from General Conferences in the 1960s) are sites of debate and discussion rather than a series of sermons.

A good take by Molly White. I remember when I stopped thinking about ebooks in terms of screens (as opposed to paper) and started thinking about them in terms of DRM (as opposed to free use). DRM helps the already powerful at the expense of everything else, and I want to do more to push back against it.

Deeply appreciate Masnick’s writeup. I don’t know the ins and outs of the law, and that’s given me some pause in being upset about the ruling. To see a lawyer find fault with so much gives me greater confidence in my own frustration. The most dangerous part, though, doesn’t require a law degree to understand. The logic of the findings poses a threat to all libraries, not just this one.

In a weird kind of Streisand effect, I’ve only started using the Internet Archive library since this lawsuit began and it’s a fantastic service. I won’t pretend to know the ins and outs of copyright law, but this sucks.

What reckless hubris. As I wrote earlier today, I’m in favor of more liberal IP law, but not so that businesses can swallow up content to profit from it.

When I was slowly making my way through David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything last month, I was having trouble processing all of the ideas in the ambitious, dense book, so I was surprised when one idea sounded familiar: schismogenesis. A few years ago, Cory Doctorow wrote an essay using schismogenesis as a theme. Here’s Doctorow’s explanation of the concept from the original book, and the beginning of his thesis in the post:

This was good! Not perfect: there were some rough edges, it’s hard to take some scenes seriously if you’ve watched The Good Place, and there’s a bad case of the Force working as the plot needs it to. Despite all that, though, I love the franchise leaning into a “actually, the Jedi kind of suck” story, and there were some interesting fight scenes and compelling story elements. Happy to see Star Wars experimenting like this… though, of course, it should be moving into the public domain so that everyone (not just Disney) can do that experimentation.

Back in December, I wrote a frustrated post about an article I’d submitted to a special issue that was now being repackaged into an edited volume, in which my research would appear as a chapter. At the time, I wrote about how frustrated I was at the lack of control I had over my own research output. I might well have consented to having my work reprinted in this new format, but I was frustrated that my consent was neither sought nor necessary for the process.

Bookmarking so I have enraging examples to show my students.

I don’t think intellectual property is the way to fight back against generative AI, but it is wildly out of line for a company who profits off using other’s intellectual property to be this petty.

Membership in one of my local libraries includes access to Freegal, a kind of janky, third-tier music streaming service. The selection isn’t fantastic, but my tastes in music aren’t exactly mainstream, and over the past four years, I’ve found a lot of music I like available through the service. In fact, because you can download a limited number of tracks per week, I have Indochine songs, Gérard Lenorman albums, and even the Stranger Things soundtrack all saved to my phone so that I can bypass the jankiness of the service and the official app.

I have lots of concerns about LLM training, but I think it’s better to think of the issue in terms of digital labor, not copyright. My blog is licensed for reuse, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less exploitative for someone to scrape it all to develop software that will make them rich off my work.

My department has a copyright class on the books that’s never been taught—even when I offered to take it on after being hired. I understand why that offer wasn’t taken up, but I can’t help but think about all I could do in that class with Mickey Mouse this semester.

Ben has been one of my best students over the past 5.5 years. He was a non-traditional student who flunked out of UK decades ago, went on to be a successful small business owner elsewhere in the country, and then leapt at the chance to come back to UK through an online degree completion program. As part of that program, he took one of the classes I was teaching at the time, which counted toward general education credit.

Appreciate Doctorow’s detailed (and expert) perspectve here.

Such a cool thing to do. I haven’t read Fables in ages, but may revisit it out of respect for Willingham.

Every copyright transfer I sign destroys another part of my soul.

Good coverage of a worrying development. I’m sympathetic to authors’ worries here, but I also think they’re wrong. If digital is different than the physical, copyright considerations need to be more generous, NOT stricter. The Internet Archive is an important service, and I’m worried about the future.

Intellectual property is a social justice issue.

Weaponization of copyright filters is awful, and it’s not even the worst thing about this story.

Intellectual property is a social justice issue.

The first line is a powerful one. Libraries ought to be a constant reference point (and beneficiary) when liberalizing IP.

Intellectual property is important, but overreach is a real problem. We should be liberalizing IP, not cracking down on it.

One of my favorite students will always be the undergrad from a few years ago who expressed outrage when I explained that researchers frequently have to sign over the copyright to their own studies.

Happy public domain day!

Intellectual property can be a human rights issue.

I dream of a world where IP laws are liberalized to the point that libraries can provide their own, publicly-funded streaming services.

Weaponized copyright enforcement is awful.

Do not mess with open licensing.

I have been thinking recently about streaming as a compromise in internet-era IP disputes, but this shows one reason that it’s not good enough a compromise.

Turns out a great way to get distracted from a Disney+ show you’re enjoying is to think “this franchise should be in the public domain by now.”

One of my earliest publications has been added to a research anthology without my knowledge or consent, since publisher owns copyright. Not necessarily opposed to end result, but still miffed about lack of control.

Today I get to teach about copyright and fair use in class, which is basically an excuse to watch YouTube videos and discuss whether they meet fair use or not.