A 1960s training film, aimed at store clerks, says “To the criminally inclined, free enterprise means freedom to take anything without paying for it.”
Nothing has changed. To the criminally inclined, democratize means trillionaires are free to take anything without paying for it.
Via NiemanLab, several publishers have blocked Archive.org from scraping their material. They’ve figured out that Archive is acting as a front for Altman and the other AI thieves.
Archive uses “democratize” in the criminally inclined sense. After noticing that Altman was occupying all their bandwidth, Archive sweetly asked Altman to slow down:
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“We got in contact with them. They ended up giving us a donation,” Graham said. “They ended up saying that they were sorry and they stopped doing it.”
“Those wanting to use our materials in bulk should start slowly, and ramp up,” wrote Kahle in a blog post shortly after the incident. “Also, if you are starting a large project please contact us …we are here to help.”
[Deepstate-run UK Guardian] stopped short of an all-out block on the Internet Archive’s crawlers because it supports Archive’s mission to democratize information, though that position remains under review as part of its routine bots management.
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Nieman also mentions that several papers are learning to archive their own outputs. WHAT???? In previous decades every paper carefully maintained a morgue for the use of its own writers, and for police and courts when properly requested. They shouldn’t have to learn!
FWIW, Archive.org didn’t help in the one case when I needed it. I always backup my own work at intervals. In 2021 when Blogspot deleted some of my items for opposing the Bush-Trump “virus” torture chamber, I hadn’t yet run my periodic backup. Archive.org contained older stuff but not the most recent.
Polistra's Mill 