A Win for Fair Use Is a Win for Libraries: Recent legal decision has reaffirmed the power of fair use in the digital age, and it’s a big win for libraries and the future of public access to knowledge

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• underline960@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  This decision reinforces the idea that copying for non-commercial, transformative purposes—like making a book searchable, training an AI, or preserving web pages—can be lawful under fair use. That legal protection is essential to modern librarianship.

  I’m happy that this works out in libraries’ favor, I can’t see how Anthropic managed to slip through “copying for non-commercial, transformative purposes”. Are they a non-profit and I just didn’t know?

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  • General_Effort@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    When copying is legal for profit, it’s safe to assume that it’s also legal without profit.

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    • rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      That’s old logic that might not be as certain in the new era.

      What makes profit, can share it with those making laws.

      And one anti-monopoly thing that was at some point common was that it’s illegal to provide a service below market cost to capture markets. Probably if that were applied to the Internet and free services like Facebook and Reddit and Google, many things would go differently.

      But at the same time even today payments over the Internet are problematic. If you could pay for storage and computation the same way you pay for landline, without extra bother, maybe we’d have something better.

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• Korne127@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Actually, fair point. While the Anthropic judge case is awful for artists and such, it is actually a great thing for libraries and especially the internet archive, which has faced heavy pressure in the last years.
  It’s really ironic that the public good library that has been facing heavy pressure from giant corporations is now… being saved by other giant cooperations which are now deemed more important

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  • Loduz_247@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    The enemy of my enemy is my friend

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    • squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I wouldn’t go quite as far. This is just breacrumbs falling of the corporate table.

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• MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Funny, how things change as soon as the corporate overlords can make money from it.

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