Copyright news (28 June)
US district judge: training AI with legally acquired content is fair use
I’d like to say I’m on ‘summer schedule’, but on my academic calendar that means the busy period. I spent the last week overseeing Book and Digital Media Studies masters’ defenses, mostly acting as first marker for the students I’ve been supervising. I can’t wait to share their work more widely when everything is in the Leiden University repository - and when I’m back from the Digital Games Research Association’s annual conference in Malta to present on copyright, postcoloniality and video game preservation with my co-author, legal scholar Abby Rekas. Which is to say: even though the news never stops, expect somewhat irregular posting for a bit - Matt
Open
Diamond Open Access Book Publishers List (Strengthening Diamond OA in the Netherlands / Lena Ryzhová & Benedetta Siviero, 19 June)
A curated, manually verified list of Diamond Open Access book publishers compiled by the Diamond OA Expertise Center. The list includes Dutch and European publishers that do not charge BPCs and are open to authors regardless of institutional affiliation.
CommonsDB Feasibility Study: Laying the Groundwork for a Rights Registry (CommonsDB / Doug McCarthy, 19 June)
Today, the first part of the CommonsDB Feasibility Study has been published, giving insights into the conceptual, legal and technical considerations for a system designed to enhance legal certainty around the reuse of digital content…
providing verifiable rights information from trusted sources, CommonsDB will allow people to confidently identify and use Public Domain and openly licensed works. This will empower users to legally reuse and remix works, supporting creativity and innovation….
What Can We Learn From Open Access Journals in the Arab States? (Katina, 6 June)
Using data kindly provided by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), together with information collected during investigations of bibliometric databases and journal websites, I am currently working to map the open access journal landscape of the Arab region by subject, language, location, indexes, and financial model. My goal is to improve understanding of the region’s scholarly communications ecosystems; I plan to make this analysis and the underlying datasets freely available for the region’s stakeholders.
Excluding Iran (which accounts for a hefty 22 percent of the journals within the geographic region but which is not considered an Arab state), 2,509 active journals have been mapped.
Education
How Zombies are helping kids stay interested in learning (QC News, 26 June)
The students learned to prepare for disasters by prepping for a Zombie apocalypse. The 4-day course offered an alternative way to get kids interested in learning. The course’s instructor told Our Quad Cities News that students learned about disaster preparedness, epidemiology, biology, philosophy, and ethics.
“If you come at it from reality and thinking about your house being destroyed by a tornado or a scary situation happening, that gets kids really stressed. If you frame it with Zombies, then all of a sudden it becomes a game.” Said the teacher of the course Brett Monnard.
Publishing
Scoop: Trump admin cuts contracts with scientific publishing giant (Axios, 25 June)
The Trump administration has terminated millions worth of funding for Springer Nature, a German-owned scientific publishing giant that has long received payments for subscriptions from National Institutes of Health and other agencies
Infrastructure for Non-Traditional Research Outputs and Processes (Infra4NTROs) Statement of Work (Research Data Alliance, 13 June)
The Infrastructure for Non-Traditional Research Outputs and Processes (Infra4NTROs) Interest Group will provide a dedicated space for all those interested in seeing Non-Traditional Research Outputs and Processes better characterized within the structure of the global scholarly communications landscape. This includes:
What Non-Traditional Research Outputs and Processes are – including the need to consider narrative, context, provenance, rights and contributorship and the associated relationships between them
That these are not well served by the scholarly communications landscape
Preservation
Backpacks and Suitcases-9 (Helen Womack, 12 June)
“It had six rooms,” Hakam said. “Dad renovated it with love and we all helped. I remember literally plastering the walls with my own hands. I hammered and chiseled in the bathroom and for this Dad gave me 10 US cents extra pocket money.”
When he was telling me this in 2016, Hakam was not just indulging in his personal nostalgia. At the time, he was a research fellow on a project at the Central European University to collect detailed information about Aleppo, which could one day be used to rebuild the UNESCO world heritage city. The Aleppo Project was both a virtual city for displaced Aleppians and a forum for discussion on how it could recover.
The Hagley Digital Archives is currently offline due to a sustained bot attack. Our support team reports that "bots have accelerated to levels not previously seen," as AI systems increasingly target sites like ours to train machine learning models.
We are actively migrating to a new platform that will address this issue
Federal judge declines to order Trump officials to recover deleted Signal messages (NPR, 20 June)
A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has issued a preliminary injunction ordering top national security officials who discussed military operations on the encrypted messaging service Signal to notify the acting archivist of the United States of any messages they have that may be at risk of being deleted. But in calling for those records to be preserved, the ruling stopped short of ordering the government to recover past messages that may already have been lost.
National Archives at College Park public access restriction notice sparks confusion (Baltimore Sun, 26 June)
The initial website alert notified visitors that beginning July 7, the National Archives College Park site would be “a restricted-access federal facility with access only for visitors with a legitimate business need.” Monday’s statement also said that the site “would no longer be open to the general public.” But the U.S. National Archives said the opposite, claiming that the College Park archives “will ALWAYS remain open to the public.”
Jim Byron, the Senior Advisor to the Acting Archivist, posted on X Wednesday that Monday’s website alert “contained many inaccuracies.” The Acting Archivist of the U.S. is Marco Rubio, who was appointed by Trump to head the archives, in addition to serving as the U.S. Secretary of State.
Reporting
I was once a journalist in Gaza – now I’m a refugee in Egypt (Index on Censorship, 18 June)
More than 250 journalists from Gaza are now living in Egypt after fleeing the Israeli military campaign that began in October 2023, according to figures from the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, which now has a presence in Cairo…
Most of these journalists were freelancers, with no long-term contracts, no medical insurance, no institutional protection, and no guarantee of employment after evacuation. Their cameras are packed away. Their microphones sit unused. Without work permits, they can’t be legally employed in Egypt, and with little to no support, many are struggling to survive.
Remembering acclaimed public TV journalist Bill Moyers (PBS, 26 June)
Bill Moyers, a legend in the world of journalism and a longtime member of the extended PBS family, died Thursday at the age of 91. Moyers was perhaps best known for his long-running programs and documentaries he produced at PBS. Some of those programs included the weekly "Bill Moyers Journal," and documentary series, including "Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth," which drew 30 million viewers.
Libraries
Finland proposes a very novel idea — invest in the public library (The Times, 20 June)
In the €100 million Oodi library, which looms over central Helsinki like a cruise ship from the future, robots called Tatu, Patu and Veera trundle back and forth between the shelves and the reading rooms…
Last year the average Finn visited them nine times and borrowed 15 books, resulting in the highest lending figures for 20 years.
Every Glasgow secondary school set to lose its librarian (BBC, 20 June)
Librarians will be removed from all of Glasgow's 30 secondary schools next year if council budget cuts are approved.
The plans would see the school service headed up by a principal librarian along with three area-based librarians.
AI
In a first-of-its-kind decision, an AI company wins a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by authors (NPR, 25 June)
AI companies could have the legal right to train their large language models on copyrighted works — as long as they obtain copies of those works legally.
That's the upshot of a first-of-its-kind ruling by a federal judge in San Francisco on Monday…
In Monday's order, Senior U.S. District Judge William Alsup supported Anthropic's argument, stating the company's use of books by the plaintiffs to train their AI model was acceptable.
"The training use was a fair use," he wrote. "The use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative."
Anthropic’s multi-billion dollar loss in Bartz v. Anthropic is really a win (for AI) (Matthew Sag, 24 June)
The court held that the plaintiffs’ rights had indeed been violated, not by the AI training itself, but by the simple fact that Anthropic downloaded millions of books from pirate sites like LibGen (a notorious “shadow library” of pirated books)… And yet, while Judge Alsup condemned the use of pirated books, he also embraced a view long promoted by the tech industry: that the intermediate copies generated in the course of training large language models are highly transformative and almost invariably fair use…
Judge Alsup’s reasoning hinges on a fundamental distinction in copyright law. At its core, copyright is not a ban on copying for its own sake; copyright is a way of protecting the author’s interest in how their original expression is communicated to the public. Numerous doctrines in copyright law point to the centrality of original expression in determining when something is copyrightable, who gets to claim to be an author, and when that copyright is infringed. For a deeper explanation, you can read The New Legal Landscape for Text Mining and Machine Learning.
Denmark to tackle deepfakes by giving people copyright to their own features (Guardian, 27 June)
The Danish government is to clamp down on the creation and dissemination of AI-generated deepfakes by changing copyright law to ensure that everybody has the right to their own body, facial features and voice.
The Danish government said on Thursday it would strengthen protection against digital imitations of people’s identities with what it believes to be the first law of its kind in Europe.
The Death of the Student Essay—and the Future of Cognition (Brian Klaas, 14 June)
Miraculously, in the last year, mistakes of spelling and grammar have mostly disappeared—poof!—revealing sparkling error-free prose, even from students who speak English as a second or third language. The writing is getting better. The ideas are getting worse…
It would be a catastrophically unwise decision for humanity to abandon a key step in training young brains simply because they can now clack a few keys and produce something that sounds intelligent even as they never become intelligent.
Above all, however, my eulogy for the student essay is a lamentation for what could be lost. Many of the greatest joys of my life have been unleashed inside my own head, from childhood nights devouring an entire book to the unrivalled feeling of intellectual discovery through the slow, contemplative process of exploring the ideas of countless people I’ll never meet.
What’s Happening to Reading? (New Yorker, 17 June)
The human version of reading involves finitude. It was thrilling to discover how much I could read, and studying for the exams put me on the path to becoming one of those people who’s “read everything.” Yet, even as I made my way through a substantial part of the canon, I couldn’t help noticing that I was reading only a small portion of what existed. The library at my university was comically vast, with many underground levels, and deep in the stacks the lights flickered on to reveal whole shelves of books that I doubted anyone had read, at least not anytime recently. And today, looking back, another kind of limitation reveals itself: memory. I may have read Edmund Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene,” but do I recall more than the gist? There’s a reason why, in midlife, I spend as much time rereading the great books I’ve read (like “Childhood, Boyhood, Youth”) as I do seeking out new ones.
Does A.I. fundamentally challenge these limitations? It’s certainly possible to imagine that intelligent reading machines will help us find value in texts that would otherwise go unread. (The process could be a little like fossil-fuel extraction: old, specialized, or difficult writing could be utilized, in condensed form, to power new thinking.) And there could also be scenarios in which L.L.M.s extend and deepen our reading memories. If I’d studied for my exams with an A.I. by my side, and then kept discussing my reading with that same A.I. year after year, I might build something like a living commonplace book, a thinking diary. As it happens, however, I’ve been blessed with a human conversational partner—my wife, who was in my graduate program, too. Our relationship has been shaped by our reading. Artificial intelligence, in itself, is unmotivated; it reads, but is not a reader; its “interests,” at any given time, depend fundamentally on the questions it’s asked. And so its usefulness as a reading tool depends on the existence of a culture of reading which it can’t embody or perpetuate.
LinkedIn’s CEO Has Advice to Help AI-Proof Your Career (Bloomberg, 20 June)
We have an ability where you write a post on LinkedIn. We are not going to write it for you from scratch, but if you’re like, “Hey, help me make this sound better,” you can push a button and we can give you some suggestions. It’s not as popular as I thought it would be, quite frankly…
Oftentimes, when something comes across as being very AI-obvious on the platform, the rest of the community will call you out. If you’re getting called out on X or TikTok, that’s one thing. But when you’re getting called out on LinkedIn, it really impacts your ability to create economic opportunity for yourself.
Study: Meta AI model can reproduce almost half of Harry Potter book (ArsTechnica, 20 June)
New research—focusing on books rather than newspaper articles and on different companies—provides surprising insights…
The paper was published last month by a team of computer scientists and legal scholars from Stanford, Cornell, and West Virginia University. They studied whether five popular open-weight models—three from Meta and one each from Microsoft and EleutherAI—were able to reproduce text from Books3, a collection of books that is widely used to train LLMs…
The chart shows how easy it is to get a model to generate 50-token excerpts from various parts of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. The darker a line is, the easier it is to reproduce that portion of the book.
This is not a drill
What to Know About New Social Media Screening Rules for Student Visas (Time, 19 June)
Prospective students applying for U.S. student visas must now unlock their social media accounts for government review, the State Department said Wednesday.
The notice instructs applicants for F, M, and J visas to change their social media profile privacy settings to “public.” A separate cable, obtained by multiple news outlets, directed embassies and consulates to vet applicants for “hostile attitudes towards our citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles,” while visa appointments, which had been suspended in May, are allowed to resume. The guidance comes amid the Trump Administration’s crackdown on universities, including by targeting international students.
Trump hails 'giant win' after Supreme Court curbs judges' power to block his orders (BBC, 27 June)
“The US Supreme Court issues a 6-3 ruling that will curb judges' power to block President Donald Trump's orders nationwide…
In a scathing dissent of the opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor says it is an "open invitation for the government to bypass the Constitution"
The New Three-Letter Culture War. How ‘DEI’ Became the Right’s Catch-All… (Jerry W Washington, Ed.D. [Substack], 7June)
It’s instructive to compare how different actors in American society are talking about DEI now. On the Right, the term is deployed as a convenient villain, invoked with an eye-roll or a snarl to rally voters against purported liberal excess…
Yet this narrative is being actively contested from multiple angles. Progressive and civil liberties advocates argue that the “war on DEI” is essentially a war on historical truth and equal opportunity. They point out that initiatives to widen college access or to make literature more inclusive grew out of real disparities.
How My Reporting on the Columbia Protests Led to My Deportation (New Yorker, 19 June)
Then began the first “interview.” The questions focussed almost entirely on my reporting about the Columbia student protests. From 2022 to 2024, I attended Columbia for an M.F.A. program, on a student visa, and when the encampment began in April of last year I began publishing daily missives to my Substack, a blog that virtually no one (except, apparently, the U.S. government) seemed to read. To Officer Martinez, the pieces were highly concerning…
Martinez came out and said that I needed to unlock the Hidden folder in my photo album. I told him it would be better for him if I did not. He insisted. I felt I had no choice. I did have a choice, of course: the choice of noncompliance and deportation. But by then my bravery had left me. I was afraid of this man and of the power that he represented. So instead I unlocked the folder and watched as he scrolled through all of my most personal content in front of me. We looked at a photo of my penis together.
Trump attacks Watergate laws in massive shift to ethics system (Washington Post, 21 June)
Trump has also disregarded post-Watergate safeguards intended to prevent the unjustified firings of federal workers. His U.S. DOGE Service has skirted rules on government secrecy and personal data. He has declared numerous emergencies despite Congress’s efforts to rein them in…
“There has been a collapse, at least temporarily, of the kind of outrage and ethical standards that were prevalent during the days of Watergate,” said Richard Ben-Veniste, who headed the special counsel’s Watergate Task Force. “The excesses of Watergate now seem naive. They have been overtaken by a system that is based on quid pro quo.”
J.D. Vance Joins Bluesky, Immediately Becomes Most Blocked Account on App (Rolling Stone, 19 June)
“Vance wasted no time trolling this community. “I’ve been told this app has become the place to go for common sense political discussion and analysis,” he wrote in his first Bluesky post on Wednesday. “So I’m thrilled to be here to engage with all of you.” The image shared with this comment was a screenshot from Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion on the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in U.S. v. Skrmetti, in which he argued that there was “no medical consensus on how best to treat gender dysphoria in children” and that “recent revelations suggest that leading voices in this area have relied on questionable evidence, and have allowed ideology to influence their medical guidance.”…
After his reinstatement, Vance quickly surpassed a record for the website: he now operates the most blocked account on Bluesky. The dubious achievement was noted with some sarcastic dismay by journalist Jesse Singal, the most blocked user prior to Vance’s debut on the site. (Singal’s deeply skeptical coverage of gender-affirming care for trans adolescents was cited in an amicus brief on Skrmetti by the Family Research Council, an evangelical think tank that opposes abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.)
A White Nationalist Wrote a Law School Paper Promoting Racist Views. It Won Him an Award. (NYTimes, 21 June)
In his capstone paper for the class, Mr. Damsky argued that the framers had intended for the phrase “We the People,” in the Constitution’s preamble, to refer exclusively to white people. From there, he argued for the removal of voting rights protections for nonwhites, and for the issuance of shoot-to-kill orders against “criminal infiltrators at the border.”…
At the end of the semester, Mr. Damsky, 29, was given the “book award,” which designated him as the best student in the class. According to the syllabus, the capstone counted the most toward final grades.
Columbia activist Mahmoud Khalil released on bail (NPR, 20 June)
Mahmoud Khalil was released from federal custody on Friday, more than three months after immigration agents arrested and detained him as the first student targeted for deportation by President Trump's crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters
Video games
Nintendo Switch 2 may be the last of its kind. The video game industry as we knew it is over. (Slate, 25 June)
The new normal of gaming is now shaped by the likes of Fortnite or Roblox, online offerings that are less games than platforms for users to make their own content or for other companies to advertise their wares. For every blockbuster film like James Gunn’s Superman, there is a corresponding Fortnite promotion, and it’s not always clear who pays for it, and how much. Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, does not disclose the terms of its brand deals, but the ceiling for them appears to be astronomical. In 2024, Disney acquired a $1.5 billion stake in Epic to deepen a partnership that already saw Marvel, Star Wars, and other Disney characters appear in the game. That’s enough money to fund several video games of Disney’s own, and it’s telling that Disney found Fortnite a better place to spend its money.
A rather alarmist headline and tone for an article that presents a lot of data suggesting there’s room in the video game marketplace for games of a variety of production scales - Matt