The process is not over yet. IA has been ruled against, but they announced they would appeal. Though I haven’t been following the case in the recent months, and according to the WP article the situation is unclear right now, the parties seem to be negotiating…

Either way, the outcome will definitely affect IA as a whole, and not selectively with regards to the user’s location. If the digitally lended books were distributed illegally in the USA, and IA is located in USA, they have to cease the illegal distribution in general. (It would be absurd if the plaintiffs would have to reassert their case in every country with internet access.)

If the outcome is negative for IA and the court fully accepts Hachette et al’s demands, IA will both have to recuperate the publishers’ supposed losses and legal expenses, and “destroy” all “unlawful copies” of the books under the publishers’ copyright. I paraphrase from the initial complaint by Hachette et al. (see here, first document, from 1st June 2020). This would mean that the books under copyright by publishers other than the four included in the process would not be directly affected. But the ruling may set a precedent, so other publishers might follow suit and demand the same - compensation, and removal of their books from the database.

I am not a legal expert, and not a native English speaker so I don’t know the terminology too well, I just followed the case for a while and this is what I’ve concluded.

Personally, I think IA was horribly stupid to play with fire with the “emergency library”, their legality was in a grey area even before that… And I don’t remember anyone asking for such a measure. But, as far as I’ve seen, the scans themselves will survive even if IA goes down.

Edit: I just saw https://lemmy.world/post/3077301, Jesus Christ…

it would reject invalid answers

Not quite. When I used to care and kind of tried to distort the training data, I would always select one additional picture that did not contain the desired object, and my answer would usually be accepted. I.e. they were aware that the images weren’t 100% lined up with the labels in their database, so they’d give some leeway to the users, letting them correct those potential mistakes and smooth out the data.

it won’t let me get past without clicking on the van

That’s your assumption. Had you not clicked on the van, maybe it would’ve let you through anyway, it’s not necessarily that strict. Or it would just give you a new captcha to solve. Either way, if your answer did not line up with what the system expected (your assumption being that they had already classified it as a bus) it would call attention to the image. So, they might send it over to a real human to check what it really is, or put it into some different combination with other vehicles to filter it out and reclassify.

besides the elite class of your country controls what happens in your country (media included), you have no say in it.

Is there any state, current or historical, that was not a dictatorship according to this metric?

Edit: ignore the question, I noticed the Stalin profile pic

That’s two twitter clones from two tech billionaires in just six months. Capitalism truly breeds innovation.

What’s the other Twitter clone (other than Threads)?

Bookwyrm is open-source, works similarly to Lemmy (i.e. is a federated platform). Storygraph and LibraryThing are also popular alternatives, but IIRC they’re both closed source.

Personally I think just creating a spreadsheet file with your reading data is better. (In LibreOffice, of course.)

The existence of Lemmy is a testament to this.

Lemmy has existed before the reddit shitshow.

over the past 2-3 years Amazon has slashed its budget

The site is now run by a skeleton crew

TBH it felt that way ever since I registered there, much more than 2-3 years ago. It’s been largely stagnating for over a decade with regards to design and functionality. It’s impressive if they somehow managed to reduce their budget even more and employ even fewer people. Which makes the recent half-baked redesign and similar interventions even weirder, they clearly don’t have the capabilities to do them properly…

Goodreads never made money

Was it meant to, though? I assume Amazon planned it to work (dunno if it really did) as a platform to advertise the books sold on Amazon.

Oh damn, I did realise it’s working again a few days ago, so I just assumed Twitter is open too.

Didn’t work when they blocked non-registered visitors.

no anonymity

I doubt that Instagram users who willingly install an another app made by Facebook care about that lol