Here are a few stories to read this morning.

• Here’s an interesting AI story: The image processing software in Samsung’s smartphones have moved beyond touching up photos to adding detail that wasn’t in the original photo.
• This (paywalled) article explores why kids are reading less. 
• Draft2Digital’s print on demand offering is now open to everyone.
• Either Amazon is letting bots suspend accounts in KDP, or their employees are colossally stupid.
• I expected that the publishers would win the first round in the piracy lawsuit against the internet Archive (as well they should), but I didn’t expect it to happen the same week the trial started. On to the appeals court!

P.S. I think where the Internet Archive went wrong was that they took their years of experience as a research library (archiving content with little commercial value) and tried to apply the same practices as a public library (sharing commercially available works). The problem with this is that applying a research library’s preservation practices to commercially available content destroys that content’s value. This is why the IA got sued, and why internet lefties such as myself are opposing the IA.

The IA is trying to tear down a system where creators get paid without coming up with a replacement. Anyone on the side of creators really should oppose this. Furthermore, the kind of distributing that the IA was doing with the Open Library is so far removed from what other libraries do that it is almost not the same activity.

The IA’s supporters will try to distract you with the claim that libraries have always been able to copy, but what they hope you won’t notice is that they forgot to include a certain word: limited. Libraries have long had a fair use exception for _limited_ copying, but what the IA was doing by copying and distributing whole works was waaaaaay outside accepted practices.

The thing about fair use is that it is supposed to strike a balance between the needs of creators and the needs of the public (in this case, the library patrons). What the IA was doing tipped that balance 100% in favor of libraries. That lack of balance is why the Internet Archive is probably going to lose in the long run.