I may have used "You Can't Make It Up" for an earlier post, so have added a disclaimer. My apologies if the disclaimer [Double Entedre] weakens the title, does not make sense, or comes across as pretentious.
What can't one make up?
For one thing, one cannot make up ones own copyright law to suit oneself.
CDL or Controlled Digital Lending is not something that a so-called internet library may simply impose on copyright owners. One may not purchase a print copy of a copyrighted work, scan it, and create an e-book for the purpose of loaning out that ebook to online borrowers. One "can" do it, as has been demonstrated, but by doing so, one falls afoul of copyright law and one may lose a copyright infringement lawsuit.
The case is Hachette Book Group, Inc versus Internet Archive. Legal bloggers Matthew Samet and Margaret A. Esquenet for the law firm Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett and Dunner LLP write a very thorough, reasoned, and superb explanation of how the Internet Archive fails on every point of law to justify copyright infringement under the "fair use" doctrine.
There may be an appeal. This case could go further, although this writer wonders how a self-described "non-profit" enterprise has the funding necessary to litigate the matter for years.
For The Copyright Alliance, Isabella Hyun discusses the Internet Archive, but also a variety of other seminal literary copyright cases of which writers and publishers should be aware.
https://copyrightalliance.org/literary-copyright-cases/
For anyone who really likes to get into the weeds (see the logo of the House Judiciary Committee), there is an informative video on the hearings on AI and IP.
Speaking of Artificial Intelligence (as I did just a week or so ago), a guest on one of the financial news programs that I have on in my kitchen all day, weekdays (except for when I try to do my part to prevent blackouts by cutting back on my power consumption) explained how his company was scammed using a deep fake of his distinctive voice.
As I recall, the scammers made a brief telephone call purporting to be from the executive in question to a direct report. The scammers claimed that the line or connection was bad, and "he" (the boss) would complete the call by text. The scammers then, still pretending to be the distinctive-voiced boss, instructed the employee to send gift cards to certain folks. The scam was discovered because they made a further request, and the employee called the real boss and asked in person if the boss truly wanted to send a second batch of gift cards.
This bad stuff is not made up. Just do a search of "deep fake voice".
My view? Never agree to voice-recognition as authentication for any accounts that you want to be secure!
All the best,
Rowena Cherry
Posts
I just hope cleaning up the contaminated bath water won't include throwing out the proverbial baby. I've visited Internet Archive a couple of times; it also stores untold thousands of older, public domain items that can't easily be found anywhere else.
ReplyDelete