Save the Internet Archive - abolish private property

Leftists are trying to have it both ways on property, but it's a losing strategy.

The Internet Archive, the wildly popular site for pirating intellectual property, lost a decisive case in the Second Circuit’s Court of Appeals today. The Archive has provided users free access to over 500,000 books since 2020, arguing that the service qualified as “fair use” under US law; but a cartel of publishing houses disagreed, and the courts have now held in their favor. The ruling is likely to have massive reprecussions for intellectual property law in the United States, and for the IA as well, which is facing similar lawsuits for its music hosting service.

The court’s decision has sparked an understandable outcry from folks on the online left, who rightly see this as overturning longstanding norms about public access to intellectual property.

But I can’t help but notice how their complaint stands in tension with another discourse on the left: the discourse of grievance against property theft by AI. The gist is that “creators” (ugh) are at risk of having their work absorbed and redistributed by the AI machine without compensation. In other words, exactly what the IA does — except, of course, that the IA tends to redistribute entire pieces, whereas AI tends to redistribute bits and pieces of work remixed into hodgepodge of property theft.

One can make all kinds of other distinctions between the two but they don’t strike me as very relevant to the property question. Some leftists, for example, point out that the IA is merely a lending library, but that of course is only true in theory; in practice it’s trivially easy to keep a copy of any books one is lent from the archive. Others point out that companies are trying to profit off of AI, but what do you call it when a researcher cuts costs by pirating from the IA instead of buying the damn book? In both cases, one is ultimately seizing control of intellectual property and using it in a way that the author didn’t authorize.