what is it about things being gender neutral having to also be ‘masculine’. like, why can you wear a suit and tie and call it gender neutral but not a dress cause that’s feminine. why can you call people dude or guy as a gender neutral term but not girl cause that’s feminine. short hair is neutral but long hair is feminine. i mean i know why this is fully a rhetorical question but let’s think about that
You have probably seen this article and people being unbelievably mad about it:
AI companies are quietly obtaining rare books, ingesting their contents, and then destroying them -- even if they're exceedingly rare.
but, like, I have a lot of problems with this panic. The process of digitization does necessarily involve destroying the book, or at least, if you want to go fast. The fastest way to scan books is to remove the pages from the spine and having them go through the scanner. If the book was getting digitized at a mass level, it was getting destroyed one way or another. Now, I could agree that this should be made available on a public pdf repository, but if any other organization undertook the same amount of digitization, you can bet that the books are not making it out of the process, either.
Also, like, this sort of shit pisses me off so much as a (former) librarian:
One small book seller said that in April, he suddenly went from selling no more than 20 books a week to hundreds, and he’s almost certain that the customers are AI labs, noting the random selection of the books and how they all have ISBNs. He added that his inventory is full with rare and out of print books, meaning that an AI company could be destroying some of the few remaining copies that can be found.
like, these people were 1) not seeing the books circulate via sale or 2) making the effort to make the content be available to the public. From the point of view of the general public, you were not getting access to the book either way. These companies are not ripping books off the shelves of public libraries to do this; they are buying books that were not circulating, and they are, as of this reporting, not competing with preservation groups that are trying to digitize the books. This is just blatantly stroking panic when the person that's being interviewed and stroking the panic was also not doing anything about the problem at hand. Why should this be considered a loss, when this small business tyrant is also not diong anything for the public?
On top of that, the article says:
This process took advantage of a legal concept known as first-sale doctrine, which allows a buyer to do what they want with a purchase without the original copyright holder’s say-so.
Like, are we suddenly against first-sale doctrine? Do they know how hard it will be libaries to operate without it? I am just going to take ALA's website's block quote on this matter here:
The “first sale” doctrine (17 U.S.C. § 109(a)) gives the owners of copyrighted works the rights to sell, lend, or share their copies without having to obtain permission or pay fees. The copy becomes like any piece of physical property; you’ve purchased it, you own it. You cannot make copies and sell them—the copyright owner retains those rights. But the physical book is yours. First sale has long been important for libraries, as it allows them to lend books without legal hurdles. (Jenkins, Jennifer. 2014. "Last Sale? Libraries’ Rights In The Digital Age". College & Research Libraries News 75 (2): 69-75.)
In other words, as ALA says, "first sale is what allows libraries to do what we do – lend books and materials to our patrons, the public." The way that futurism goes after first sales as an underlying cause for this "evil" phenomenon while elevating the voices of small business owners that had no problem keeping the rare books out of the public in the first place shows that this is not out of legitimate concern for the future of public access of/dissemination of past information, but for getting people riled up in cheap moral panic.
I do have legitimate concern about the usage of man hours and construction contracts on stuff that might never pan out (and thus artificially inflating the perception of level of activity that's happening in the economy), but doing this without understanding the process invovled blunts all the legitimate criticisms.
inspired by me spacing out on a long drive & staring at trees. this happened earlier this year, and birches ended up growing leaves before i finished the doll.
all branches & roots are made of metal wire + hot glue, which makes them poseable and also keeps them from snapping.
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
gamechangershow
snowghoul
vaporwave
gracieabrams
