this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2026
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tbh i'm thinking this alone isn't that bad from an archiver/datahoarder perspective
As long as the datasets are open, it is our best hope. I know it doesn't compensate the people whose work's copyright and licenses have been violated, but I think it's the only realistic hope we've got of getting out of this informational dystopia with a reasonably intact library of humanity's knowledge that hasn't been locked down and/or monetized. The AI scrapers and generators are in the process of burning down the great library of Alexandria that the Internet had become, and we are already starting to feel its loss. We cannot stop the wave of toxic pollution that is spreading through all our digital content now, but the archives from before this apocalypse started will become the most valuable thing humanity has ever produced. This is information war, and we are losing.
IA is a nonprofit and archives to preserve human history. shitty AI startups do this to monetize the data, and their end goal is to "replace" the people who made that data in the first place.
Thanks to these AI mfs the IA now prevents access to many items because they can be used as training material which fucking sucks
As a developer, you hold the copyright to your code. When you make it open-source, you grant a license to use the code and the resulting program under certain terms.
This is a contract. If you copy my code without following these terms, then that's theft.
The Internet Archive's use complies with these terms for all open-source licenses. These AI companies do not. In particular, here's a quote from the MIT license, which you will find in a similar wording in all open-source licenses:
https://mit-license.org/
In effect, what this means, is that when you copy my code, I demand that you also copy the license text along with it, so that anyone else looking at this code knows the permissions I grant and the terms I require.
And now guess what these AI companies are doing. They copy my code and reproduce substantial portions upon a user asking, yet they do not include my license terms. They violate the contract under which they obtained my source code.
I suspect you don't realize how shit that is, because source code is so abstract.
It's like spending hundreds of hours painting a great artwork and then deciding that everyone should be able to give a copy to everyone they know, under the simple condition that they inform those people that they have this right as well.
And then comes along a company and sells my artwork for money, without informing their customers that they can pass it on for free. That's, plain and simple, a criminal operation.
No one. What people give a shit about is the license that is supposed to keep the code open, which is being removed for profit without consequence.
In our current legal system, copyright is the basis for me to be able to set requirements on how my code can be shared. I do not care that I own it, I just care that it is shared under the conditions I set.
Without being able set these conditions, I would not open up my code.
If nobody owns the code, then then nobody can enforce the terms of the license it was released under, and free software under the FSF definition becomes impossible. All you have is public domain.
For example, a company could take the Linux kernel, modify it and distribute it with their gadgets. And they could simply not release the modifications they've made, as is required by the GNU Public License. But nobody would be able to do anything about it. Currently, copyright laws allow the people who wrote the Linux kernel to sue the company for breaking the license and violating the authors' copyrights
Internet Archive exists as a reference for your edification on a donation basis; AI companies intend to initiate a top down societal restructuring of jobs and thus access to benefits, paywall access to your own collective information, fund themselves through ouroboros leveraged deals and VC money (value that’s been stolen from the general populace over the years)