Comment by andai
2 hours ago
> there is no value in being a Public-Domain-Dumping-Ground.
First of all, isn't that the entire point of the Internet Archive? Sounds pretty valuable to me.
Second, doesn't the same issue effectively apply to everything written with the BSD or MIT license? I'm not sure I understand the point though, so I'm probably missing something.
You're not missing anything. I think this is a person trying to speak their opinion into fact by quoting themselves.
Did you believe that the Internet Archive hosts nothing but PD content?
The Internet Archive has lots of PD books and other works that have been scanned in. But the Internet Archive's web pages are all copyrighted. Only a small percentage of anything on the Internet is PD. All those news articles that HN bypasses paywall? Piracy of copyright.
How do you think the IA got in legal trouble during the pandemic lockdowns?
There are instances of purely PD archives: librivox.org and gutenberg.org. Their mandate means everything is PD, whether it was PD to begin, or whether it is novel work by modern creators. The archives are sustained by their donors and volunteers, who are scanning these works, fixing up the OCR, recording audiobooks, and otherwise donating their time, talent, and treasure to building the archives. Perhaps both are obsolete by now.
Everything written in BSD and MIT license is copyrighted. Copyright may be assigned, dual-license status may exist, non-exclusive rights may be assigned. None of this applies with purely PD works.
I stated no mere opinions, and I made no novel predictions, but I gave observations of current practices. The only prediction is that these two practices expand and escalate for as long as LLMs' legal status remains this way.