this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2025
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But it would also mean that the Internet Archive is illegal, even tho they don't profit, but if scraping the internet is a copyright violation, then they are as guilty as Anthropic.
IA doesn't make any money off the content. Not that LLM companies do, but that's what they'd want.
Profit (or even revenue) is not required for it to be considered an infringement, in the current legal framework.
Do you think that would rescue the IA from the type of people who made the IA already pull 300k books?
No. But going after LLMs wont make the situation for IA any worse, not directly anyway.
if the courts decide that scraping is illegal, IA can close up shop.
They could move to a voluntary model in the worst case, they don't profit from it. Institute a "robots.txt" style protocol for signalling opt-in intent to volunteer for scraping by the archive.
yeah that might work, but what will happen to all the data they store currently?
I would imagine someone would still need to actually sue the Internet Archive for this to be a problem for them. The vast majority probably won't care, and they'll likely just have to deal with whatever the equivalent of a DMCA takedown notice is for them.
And this is exactly the reason why I think the IA will be forced to close down while AI companies that trained their models on it will not only stay but be praised for preserving information in an ironic twist. Because one side does participate in capitalism and the other doesn’t. They will claim AI is transformative enough even when it isn’t because the overly rich invested too much money into the grift.
Archival is a fair use.
Scrapping the Internet is not illegal. All AI companies did much more beyond that, they accessed private writings, private code, copyrighted images. they scanned copyrighted books (and then destroyed them), downloaded terabytes of copyrighted torrents ... etc
So, the message is like piracy is OK when it's done massively by a big company. They're claiming "fair use" and most judges are buying it (or being bought?)
they should have done that long ago, and if they haven't already started a backup in both europe and china, it's high time