this isn’t romantasy but I had to share from {Dom Com by Adriana Anders}, which could maybe be a fantasy romance since the workplace environment seemed to be outside of a fever dream.
Sloopies, what are your preferred shoes to Dom in? Obviously one go to is Vans, thanks to their flat, soft-soled structure but a girl likes variety.
Okay, as previously mentioned in my Copyright Factor post, Shira Perlmutter (Register of Copyrights) had been abruptly fired from her position by Trump last year a day after the USCO released a pre-published version of their third report on AI and Copyright. No official reasons were given for her firing, but we can assume it is because the current admin has a very different view on LLMs and copyright.
The report specifically focused on the training data used to create these LLMs, and clearly stated that using large amounts of copyrighted works to produce “expressive content” that could compete with books and other materials, especially if “accomplished through illegal access,” would likely go beyond copyright fair use boundaries.
She had gotten her job back, but apparently Trump is trying to use recent Supreme Court decisions to try to get her fired again. Publishing Perspectives also notes that the House has apparently passed H.R. 6028, which would make the Register of Copyrights under the purview of the president rather than congress.
So, very small update, but the decision for this case could set the tone for copyright pertaining to LLMs.
CC librarians! I would love some anecdotal data, what are your circ stats like?
I just finished making my report for the school year and it’s… bad… so bad. But, this is the first year at my second librarian job and my first one was at a 4 year university, so my frame of reference is biased. Since I didn’t have a good comparison from experience, I went to the ALA/ACRL’s state of US Academic Library 2024 report stats and then felt like my circ stats were even worse than I was expecting. The report said 1.2K physical ckos and 31K electronic ckos… Is that normal for anyone??
If your library’s circ stats are high, please tell me what y’all are doing right. Is it relationships with faculty so they incorporate library lessons/visits or resources? Programs? Focus more on leisure reading? Workshops? Extreme weeding? Buying more eBooks or having a libby subscription?
if our library had the same circ stats as the ACRL report, it would be a miracle. I haven’t done a 5 year review yet, but our head librarian said that the numbers would look the same trend wise.
A lot of the courses offered at our campus require textbooks with the access codes/ancillary learning material that don’t require outside resources, and I didn’t realize how much that could impact things/I do wonder if that’s the main culprit.
I have mixed feelings about copyright itself, especially as a librarian, but I think the large-scale all-encompassing theft that was used to create these commercial products is something that should be discussed. At this point, I'm not sure if most/all of the current copyright lawsuits will just end in license agreements where publishers and vendors get richer while the actual creators get a small one-time payment. It all feels very grim.
The United States Copyright Office has written three reports on AI & Copyright: (1) Digital Replicas, (2) Copyrightability of Output, and (3) Training Data. I like this interpretation of Report #3 by Skadden LLP just because it is clear/pretty concise. One thing to note when reading Report #3, the third report was pre-published and the head of USCO (Perlmutter) was abruptly fired the day after it was published. She has gotten her job back since then, but not sure if the USCO will be changing their interpretation.
For a more encompassing list of all of the Copyright Legal Cases, here is a Tracker made by Mishcon de Reya, and AI Legal Cases in General by George Washington University. At this time, the concluded cases have been a mix of negative and positive (Bartz v. Anthropic [which might not be officially settled?], USCO's letter RE: Zarya of the Dawn, Thaler v. Perlmutter, and others). So, we will just have to wait and see if this mass theft of humanity is considered legally okay or not.
I've made an (incomplete) list of training data sources/sets specifically for text-based LLM content generation. I divided it between unlicensed vs licensed content, but this isn't specific to one company, so some points may be licensed to one company while unlicensed for another. This was mostly for me to understand what it means when people say "it uses all of our creative works", so please share your own sources and let me know if I've missed anything glaring.
Unlicensed Content aka Not Paid For
Licensed Content aka Paid For
Just asking questions for clarification!!
from {Song of the Abyss by Emma Hamm}
In the spirit of my past post with my Academic Sloopy Book Cover History Presentation (TM), I would like to complain about this marketing email I got from Library Journal.
At first glance, I thought this was a series but nope!
Where is the individuality? The pizzazz? How did they all choose some form of the same font? Was there a meeting about all books needing to be jewel-toned?
I give it 👍👍👍👍 0 stars.