Category «Digital Rights»

Publishers sue to shut down alleged pirated book site WeLib

Reuters: “A group of major book publishers including the “Big Five” English-language book publishing houses — Hachette, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan and ​Simon & Schuster — sued an alleged pirated book website for copyright infringement ‌in New York federal court on Tuesday. The publishers said in the complaint, opens new tab that WeLib hosts …

Subjects: Copyright, Digital Rights, Intellectual Property, Internet, Legal Research, Libraries

Archiving with AI

Library Journal: “AI companies are offering some libraries funding for digitization projects, but archives and special collections are working through how to manage projects responsibly. “Imagine a world where you know things but cannot say where you learned them,” begins “Memory Without Origin,” a paper published in April by University of Virginia (UVA) Dean of …

Subjects: AI, Digital Rights, Education, Internet, Libraries

The Wayback Machine Has Been the Best Archive for Preserving Our Digital Lives

CounterSpin interview with Lia Holland on the Internet Archive. “Janine Jackson: A recent report by Wired‘s Kate Knibbs leads with the contradiction: USA Today published a story recently on how ICE is misinforming about its detainment policies, a case that the paper built on data from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, a nonprofit digital library …

Subjects: Censorship, Digital Rights, E-Records, Freedom of Information, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Libraries, Search Engines

Anthropic, the Pentagon Dispute, and War on Iran

“The Pentagon’s version of Claude could not be used to facilitate the mass surveillance of Americans, nor could it be used in fully autonomous weaponry—situations where computers, rather than humans, make the final decision about whom to kill. According to a source familiar with this week’s meeting, Hegseth made clear that if Anthropic did not …

Subjects: Censorship, Data Governance, Digital Rights, E-Government, E-Records, Government Documents, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Legislation

Major Data Brokers Tried to Hide Their Opt-Out Pages From Search Engines

PC Mag: “Four data brokers have made their opt-out pages easier for internet users to find after a US senator’s investigation found the pages had been hidden from search engines.  Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) made the announcement on Friday after she pressured data brokers to make changes. “Hiding or burying opt-out options for data collection” …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Congress, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Digital Rights, Financial System, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Privacy, Search Engines

Your Smartphone, Their Rules: How App Stores Enable Corporate-Government Censorship

ACLU: “Who controls what you can do on your mobile phone? What happens when your device can only run what the government decides is OK? We are dangerously close to this kind of totalitarian control, thanks to a combination of government overreach and technocratic infrastructure choices. Most Americans have a smartphone, and the average American …

Subjects: Censorship, Civil Liberties, Digital Rights, E-Records, Free Speech, Freedom of Information, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Privacy

How to Opt-Out of Airlines Selling Your Travel Data to the Government

404 Media: “Most people probably have no idea that when you book a flight through major travel websites, a data broker owned by U.S. airlines then sells details about your flight, including your name, credit card used, and where you’re flying to the government. The data broker has compiled billions of ticketing records the government …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Digital Rights, E-Commerce, E-Government, E-Records, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Privacy, Transportation

arXiv Changes Rules After Getting Spammed With AI-Generated ‘Research’ Papers

404 Media – “arXiv, a preprint publication for academic research that has become particularly important for AI research, has announced it will no longer accept computer science review articles and position papers. Why? A tide of AI slop has flooded the computer science category with low-effort papers that are “little more than annotated bibliographies, with …

Subjects: AI, Copyright, Cybercrime, Digital Rights, Education, Health Care, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Medicine, Search Engines

Libraries Pay More for E-Books. Some States Want to Change That

Follow up to Unlawful Orders: How Libraries Became the Front Line in the Fight for Democracy – See also The New York Times / no paywall – Proposed legislation would pressure publishers to adjust borrowing limits and find other ways to widen access. “It’s hard to imagine a library that doesn’t carry “Fahrenheit 451.” But …

Subjects: Copyright, Digital Rights, Education, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Legislation, Libraries

AI Scraping Bots Are Breaking Open Libraries, Archives, and Museums

404 Media: “This is a moment where that community feels collectively under threat and isn’t sure what the process is for solving the problem.” “Popular Information AI bots that scrape the internet for training data are hammering the servers of libraries, archives, museums, and galleries, and are in some cases knocking their collections offline, according …

Subjects: AI, Copyright, Digital Rights, Education, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Libraries

EFF Transition Memo to Trump Administration 2025

Contents  1. Introduction 2. Surveillance Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Section 702 Facial Recognition Technology Border Search and Immigration Surveillance Surveillance Tech at the Border and the Virtual Wall Reproductive Justice and Digital Surveillance 2. Encryption and Cybersecurity End-to-End Encryption Client-Side Scanning and Other Recent U.S. Attempts At Encryption Backdoors Government Cybersecurity 4. Consumer Privacy Consumer …

Subjects: AI, Censorship, Civil Liberties, Copyright, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Digital Rights, Health Care, Internet, Legal Research, Legislation, Medicine, Patent and Trademark, Privacy, Transportation

Condé Nast, other news orgs say AI firm stole articles, spit out “hallucinations”

Ars Technica: “Condé Nast and several other media companies sued the AI startup Cohere today, alleging that it engaged in “systematic copyright and trademark infringement” by using news articles to train its large language model. “Without permission or compensation, Cohere uses scraped copies of our articles, through training, real-time use, and in outputs, to power …

Subjects: AI, Copyright, Digital Rights, Government Documents, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Legislation