This is a guest post for FFDW project partner The Authors Alliance, written by Dave Hansen, Executive Director of The Authors Alliance.

The Authors Alliance was founded in 2014. We were formed with the support of creators like Jonathan Leatham, Katie Hafner, Cory Doctorow, and Kevin Kelly, who understood the power of technology for authors, driving new forms of research and creative expression, and ensuring long-term access to their intellectual legacy. Since then, we have been advising and informing creators about their rights in a rapidly changing digital world and defending those principles in court. This year, the Authors Alliance celebrates its 10th anniversary, advancing the interests of authors who want to serve the public by sharing their creations—playing a vital role in helping authors understand the relationship between creativity and technology.

On the occasion of the Authors Alliance’s 10th anniversary, we are excited to work with the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW) to explore how the decentralized web and protocols like Filecoin can support the preservation of copyrighted works.

One particular challenge that the Authors Guild focuses on is text and data mining (TDM), which involves extracting information and deriving patterns from data sets. TDM research promises to bring new insights into human creativity and language, enabling research to identify hidden patterns in massive corpora ranging from computer code to scientific articles. The Authors Guild and many of its founding members played an important role in establishing the transformative nature of these uses in court as amici (outside expert “friends of the court”) in Authors Guild v. Google and Authors Guild v. HathiTrust.

Both cases have significantly impacted how copyrighted digital content can be used under the fair use doctrine, particularly for important educational and research purposes such as indexing, search, accessibility, and preservation. These precedents have shaped the landscape of digital copyright law, encouraging the proliferation of digital libraries and other scholarly resources. They also support a variety of other new, non-expressive uses of technology, such as data ingestion for artificial intelligence and machine learning, where decentralized networks and protocols like Filecoin can play a key role. We at the Authors Alliance hope to expand these exemptions in the upcoming triennial rulemaking for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), so that a collection of written texts created by one researcher can be shared with others.

The expansion of licenses that restrict fair use is another significant challenge we at the Authors Alliance are addressing. As increasingly centralized publishers control access to the vast majority of creative works online, their terms of service impose contractual restrictions on many downstream fair uses. The practical effect is that humanity’s most important information—millions of books, movies, songs—is locked up by contracts that restrict the productive uses permitted by the laws and policies behind fair use. Beyond TDM, these licenses present incredible challenges to another kind of fair use: preservation and access via decentralized networks. They also threaten to usurp fair use in a variety of other critical contexts, such as web scraping or using content as training data for generative AI. We hope to overcome this challenge by exposing the severity of the problem and advocating for legal strategies.

To learn more about the Authors Union and how our work intersects with the decentralized web, come to the Authors Union 10th Anniversary event, “Authorship in an Age of Monopoly and Moral Panic,” in person at the Internet Archive in San Francisco on May 17, 2024. FFDW President and Chair Marta Belcher will moderate a panel discussion on “Technology, Law, and Authorship,” exploring how technology and law can advance authors’ work. Register here to attend.

About the Authors Union

Founded in 2014, Authors Union is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to advocating for the interests of authors who want to serve the public by widely sharing their creations. Our vision and voice are unique among organizations engaged in debates over copyright, free speech, fair use, and other public policy issues that affect authors. While there are multiple nonprofits representing the interests of libraries and the public at large, Authors Union is the only membership-based nonprofit that applies a progressive author perspective to information policy issues. We offer an alternative to the protectionist positions of entertainment and big media lobbyists that represent only the narrow interests of authors. $FIL