3 ms·

If the book was acquired illegally, the entity that suffered the loss may have a claim for the illegal acquisition. Meta and OpenAI have the money to buy a copy

If the book was acquired illegally, the entity that suffered the loss may have a claim for the illegal acquisition. Meta and OpenAI have the money to buy a copy of every book under copyright that they have their AI read for training. I have more sympathy for losses suffered by a living person that produced creative works than I do for textbook mills. I also have sympathy for open source software authors that applied their creativity to create source code that is spit out verbatim by Copilot without adhering to license terms. I see that Thomas’ Calculus is up to the 14th edition, priced at about 20x the hourly wage that a college student will earn. Thomas and Finney Calculus editions 6 - 8 are on shelves or in boxes somewhere in my house. Each of those cost me or my wife about 20x the student hourly wage back in the day. I bet calculus hasn’t changed a lot in the past 30 years to justify all of these editions. I blame universities for allowing this industry to thrive.

mgerdts 3y ago
Care to comment on the downvote? I want humans that apply their creativity to produce works to be able to earn a living. If you train your brain or your AI on some content, it seems reasonable to pay for at least one copy or borrow a copy from a friend or library. This is especially true when doing so is not a hardship for the individual or public interest organization. I think the GP and perhaps others that are downvoting are saying that poor Meta and VC backed startups need all of that creative output for free so that they can maximize their profits, likely with no attribution to their sources. This hurts the author a tiny bit by not purchasing a single copy, then dooms all human creatives that are not otherwise financially independent because the AI provides a view of the human’s creative output with no way for consumers of the AI’s output to seek out the human’s original or related works.

mgerdts 3y ago

Care to comment on the downvote? I want humans that apply their creativity to produce works to be able to earn a living. If you train your brain or your AI on some content, it seems reasonable to pay for at least one copy or borrow a copy from a friend or library. This is especially true when doing so is not a hardship for the individual or public interest organization. I think the GP and perhaps others that are downvoting are saying that poor Meta and VC backed startups need all of that creative output for free so that they can maximize their profits, likely with no attribution to their sources. This hurts the author a tiny bit by not purchasing a single copy, then dooms all human creatives that are not otherwise financially independent because the AI provides a view of the human’s creative output with no way for consumers of the AI’s output to seek out the human’s original or related works.