AI Scraping Bots Are Breaking Open Libraries, Archives, and Museums
AI Scraping Bots Are Breaking Open Libraries, Archives, and Museums
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AI Scraping Bots Are Breaking Open Libraries, Archives, and Museums
33 comments
33 comments
AI Scraping Bots Are Breaking Open Libraries, Archives, and Museums
AI Scraping Bots Are Breaking Open Libraries, Archives, and Museums
This seems contradictory. On the one hand you're saying that these works are wrongly locked behind paywalls, but on the other you're saying that scraping them is an "assault on the cornerstones of our public knowledge." Is this information supposed to be freely viewable or not?
IMO the ideal solution would be the one Wikimedia uses, which is to make the information available in an easily-downloadable archive file. That lets anyone who wants the whole thing to have it without having to "hammer" the servers. Meanwhile the servers can be protected by standard load-balancing and DDOS prevention systems.
There's a difference between making information accessible to humans for the purposes of advancing our shared knowledge vs saying that public institutions should subsidize the needs of private for-profit organizations.
It's like, you can say, "Oh yeah, people should have access to freshwater for free," and also say, "Companies shouldn't be allowed to pump infinite freshwater from those sources to bottle it for profit."
Those aren't contradictory if your actual goal is the benefit of humankind and not, like, pendantic genie logic.
By whom and where?