6 ms·

If you want to do this kind of thing, let authors opt-in (or publishers). Yes, it will take effort and probably go slow, but if the tool is really useful and a

by jmull 3y ago

If you want to do this kind of thing, let authors opt-in (or publishers). Yes, it will take effort and probably go slow, but if the tool is really useful and amazing, it should be doable. I suspect the authors are put-off by a couple things: - the text of the works scanned seems like it may be from pirated sources. That poisons the project, no matter what it does with the scans, for many authors. - the use of these scans in a commercial product The article itself is clueless… it doesn’t engage authors’ concerns at all, and just portrays authors as stoopid AI-fearful luddites.

macNchz 3y ago
> The article itself is clueless… it doesn’t engage authors’ concerns at all, and just portrays authors as stoopid AI-fearful luddites. Going off of some of the tweets about this that initially whipped up the outrage about this…it’s not like they were making a nuanced case about their concerns, they were basically just stomping their feet and shouting.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jmull 3y ago
  That's twitter generally. If your engagement only reaches the level of twitter, you aren't really engaging at all.
  - dnissley 3y ago
    So as long as that's all the engagement there is, we're free to ignore it and carry on, correct?
    - ineedasername 3y ago
      I would think so. If someone is shouting & stomping their feet in the public town square about my project, but I never go anywhere near the town square anyway, I don’t think I’m going to shutdown my project. It’s just too bad the person who created this tool happened to walk through the town square.
    - jmull 3y ago
      I think you're fishing for a way to dismiss the concerns of the authors without understanding or addressing them, which is pointless.
bogwog 3y ago
> If you want to do this kind of thing, let authors opt-in (or publishers). If it's fair use, why should you have to do that? The same copyright law protecting author's ownership rights over their art also provide "fair use" to other people. Someone may disagree with current fair use laws (and I suspect many outraged here do not), but that's a broader issue not related to this particular tool. It just 100% seems like misdirected AI outrage. > the text of the works scanned seems like it may be from pirated sources. Do you have a source for this? I didn't see that mentioned in the article.
- dingaling 3y ago
  > also provide "fair use" to other people "How much of someone else's work can I use without getting permission? Under the fair use doctrine of the U.S. copyright statute, it is permissible to use limited portions of a work including quotes, for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, and scholarly reports." https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-fairuse.html https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-fairuse.html Limited portions, not the entire work.
  - bogwog 3y ago
    Quote from the OP: > The Gizmodo article has a ridiculously wrong “fair use” analysis, saying “Fair Use does not, by any stretch of the imagination, allow you to use an author’s entire copyrighted work without permission as a part of a data training program that feeds into your own ‘AI algorithm.’” Except… it almost certainly does? Again, we’ve gone through this with the Google Book scanning case, and the courts said that you can absolutely do that because it’s transformative. Relevant article: https://www.techdirt.com/2013/11/14/google-gets-total-victory-over-authors-guild-book-scanning-is-fair-use/ https://www.techdirt.com/2013/11/14/google-gets-total-victor...
  - giantrobot 3y ago
    That's ludicrous. It's counting words in a book. You can't copyright facts and that is all the tool is doing. Pages that are reproduced are only excerpts which falls squarely under fair use. It's no different than you checking out the book from the library and counting all the words.
paulluuk 3y ago
While I would agree in theory that a project like this would be best with opt-in, in reality that would just not work. Publishers would never opt-in to it, if they even respond to your requests at all.
- wokwokwok 3y ago
  Then don't do it? Or, if you do it, do it privately and don't share it on the internet? I'm not sure why this is a difficult idea; if asking for something and getting permission to do it is so difficult that 'would just not work. Publishers would never opt-in to it' ...then, it seems really obvious that even if you want to do it, technically can do it and you could maybe make a legal argument to doing it doesn't violate any laws... ...why would you do it? Why would you post about doing it? Come on, that's literally being a selfish dick; spitting in people's faces and waving a 'too bad, you can't sue me' flag. There are so many things, so many mannnny things that you could work on, why would you choose to pick something that you knew would upset people and you knew you wouldn't get permission to do if you asked?
  - aoeusnth1 3y ago
    Because copyright in fact is not that strict (Google Books does far more) and you don’t need to respect someone’s boundaries when they don’t have a legal right to those boundaries. Why should we sympathize with people who want far stricter control over the cultural commons?
  - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
    Should I need the publisher's permission to write a review of a book? Personally, I find that idea abhorrent. This sounds like an interesting project, unambiguously protected under fair use doctrine, both as analysis and as transformative, and the authors got their knickers in a twist because they are scared of that which they do not understand.
  - ineedasername 3y ago
    Why ask permission to do something that doesn’t require permission? I see no more reason why an author should be upset about someone counting the words in their book & assigning sentiment than a builder should get upset about someone counting the # of bricks in a building and assigning subtle color shade differences to them. Neither the author nor the builder has lost anything by it.
dfxm12 3y ago
Yeah, the article represents the voice of the authors in two tweets, from authors not apparently notable enough to have a wikipedia page. One I couldn't even find on Goodreads. It's obvious there's more to this than just the tweets presented. The article is unhelpful in this regard.
- aredox 3y ago
  Jeff VanderMeer is not notable enough?
  - fullspectrumdev 3y ago
    Personally, I have no idea who he is except some loud prick on twitter.
jasonlotito 3y ago
> If you want to do this kind of thing, let authors opt-in (or publishers). "This kind of thing" is factual information about the book, such as page or word count, ly-adverb count, etc. Small snippets, something permissible under copyright law today, that were heavily editorialized and commented on were displayed. To suggest that counting words and pages is something that should not be allowed is silly. > The article itself is clueless… Says the person making stuff up to force a narrative. The person doing this had the rights to do this, and was very clearly within his rights to do this under copyright law. Counting words is not a crime.
tensor 3y ago
> The article itself is clueless… it doesn’t engage authors’ concerns at all, and just portrays authors as stoopid AI-fearful luddites. The authors quotes speak for themselves. They very clearly and ignorantly claimed that this was an "AI training project" when it was nothing of the sort.
OkayPhysicist 3y ago
Because the authors were AI-fearful luddites. From "Book" to "Program that judges books" lies well beyond any argument that the use of the derivative work could supersede the original. It's such clear cut transformative use that the authors come across as grossly misinformed about copyright law as a whole. Perhaps there is an argument for generative AI possibly superseding the original, in that people might start asking an AI to generate them stories "in the style of x" instead of buying the author's books, but this wasn't that. It was just some fun data analysis of books.
rockemsockem 3y ago
Statistical analysis is only useful if you have enough data to analyse, so there is in fact a threshold of number of books to cross before the tool can even really exist. If you read his post, the initial goal was to get stats about typical word count, typical amount of passive speech, etc. Requiring opt-in for these broad statistics, through outrage only since this project is CLEARLY legal in the United States, means that tools like this will never exist. Which seems net bad to me. If you are saying it should be opt-in only for the pages analyzing specific books, like the instigator of this outrage screen-shotted, well that seems to fall squarely into the critical analysis bucket, so that is also quite ridiculous. I understand some folks being unhappy that a portion of the works were pirated, but it seems like most of the outraged would be outraged even if he personally purchased each and every ebook. Also, if you read through the Twitter thread a lot of the authors (not 100%, but a LOT) are doing a really great job portraying themselves as "stoopid AI-fearful luddites". Many of them think the site is somehow like ChatGPT and they don't bother to dig any deeper, or really at all.
dxbydt 3y ago
> it doesn’t engage authors’ concerns at all, and just portrays authors as stoopid AI-fearful luddites. https://twitter.com/scumbelievable/status/1689154664787304449 https://twitter.com/scumbelievable/status/168915466478730444... So the two authors who are gloating about "killed that stupid fuckin AI thing" - I'm supposed to be engaged with their concerns ? Please.
zarzavat 3y ago
Authors are not demigods, they don’t have a right to control the use of their works, only the reproduction. When you publish a book you “consent” to the fact that people are going to take it apart, talk about it, review it, quote from it, and yes run statistics on it. If an author doesn’t want that to happen then they shouldn’t publish a book. Just keep it private, only distribute it to people you trust after they sign an NDA. As far as anyone knows, no piracy has occurred. In the US you are allowed to scan books, index them, and post excerpts - it’s called Google Books and there was a big case that affirmed that it is legal. Downloading a book from a pirate website for the purpose of indexing by a computer program is not piracy, you have simply outsourced the scanning stage to someone else. It is only an issue if you download from some p2p protocol (such as a torrent) that also uploads and shares the book.

by jmull 3y ago

macNchz 3y ago

> The article itself is clueless… it doesn’t engage authors’ concerns at all, and just portrays authors as stoopid AI-fearful luddites. Going off of some of the tweets about this that initially whipped up the outrage about this…it’s not like they were making a nuanced case about their concerns, they were basically just stomping their feet and shouting.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jmull 3y ago
That's twitter generally. If your engagement only reaches the level of twitter, you aren't really engaging at all.
- dnissley 3y ago
  So as long as that's all the engagement there is, we're free to ignore it and carry on, correct?
  - ineedasername 3y ago
    I would think so. If someone is shouting & stomping their feet in the public town square about my project, but I never go anywhere near the town square anyway, I don’t think I’m going to shutdown my project. It’s just too bad the person who created this tool happened to walk through the town square.
  - jmull 3y ago
    I think you're fishing for a way to dismiss the concerns of the authors without understanding or addressing them, which is pointless.

bogwog 3y ago

> If you want to do this kind of thing, let authors opt-in (or publishers). If it's fair use, why should you have to do that? The same copyright law protecting author's ownership rights over their art also provide "fair use" to other people. Someone may disagree with current fair use laws (and I suspect many outraged here do not), but that's a broader issue not related to this particular tool. It just 100% seems like misdirected AI outrage. > the text of the works scanned seems like it may be from pirated sources. Do you have a source for this? I didn't see that mentioned in the article.

dingaling 3y ago
> also provide "fair use" to other people "How much of someone else's work can I use without getting permission? Under the fair use doctrine of the U.S. copyright statute, it is permissible to use limited portions of a work including quotes, for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, and scholarly reports." https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-fairuse.html https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-fairuse.html Limited portions, not the entire work.
- bogwog 3y ago
  Quote from the OP: > The Gizmodo article has a ridiculously wrong “fair use” analysis, saying “Fair Use does not, by any stretch of the imagination, allow you to use an author’s entire copyrighted work without permission as a part of a data training program that feeds into your own ‘AI algorithm.’” Except… it almost certainly does? Again, we’ve gone through this with the Google Book scanning case, and the courts said that you can absolutely do that because it’s transformative. Relevant article: https://www.techdirt.com/2013/11/14/google-gets-total-victory-over-authors-guild-book-scanning-is-fair-use/ https://www.techdirt.com/2013/11/14/google-gets-total-victor...
- giantrobot 3y ago
  That's ludicrous. It's counting words in a book. You can't copyright facts and that is all the tool is doing. Pages that are reproduced are only excerpts which falls squarely under fair use. It's no different than you checking out the book from the library and counting all the words.

paulluuk 3y ago

While I would agree in theory that a project like this would be best with opt-in, in reality that would just not work. Publishers would never opt-in to it, if they even respond to your requests at all.

wokwokwok 3y ago
Then don't do it? Or, if you do it, do it privately and don't share it on the internet? I'm not sure why this is a difficult idea; if asking for something and getting permission to do it is so difficult that 'would just not work. Publishers would never opt-in to it' ...then, it seems really obvious that even if you want to do it, technically can do it and you could maybe make a legal argument to doing it doesn't violate any laws... ...why would you do it? Why would you post about doing it? Come on, that's literally being a selfish dick; spitting in people's faces and waving a 'too bad, you can't sue me' flag. There are so many things, so many mannnny things that you could work on, why would you choose to pick something that you knew would upset people and you knew you wouldn't get permission to do if you asked?
- aoeusnth1 3y ago
  Because copyright in fact is not that strict (Google Books does far more) and you don’t need to respect someone’s boundaries when they don’t have a legal right to those boundaries. Why should we sympathize with people who want far stricter control over the cultural commons?
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  Should I need the publisher's permission to write a review of a book? Personally, I find that idea abhorrent. This sounds like an interesting project, unambiguously protected under fair use doctrine, both as analysis and as transformative, and the authors got their knickers in a twist because they are scared of that which they do not understand.
- ineedasername 3y ago
  Why ask permission to do something that doesn’t require permission? I see no more reason why an author should be upset about someone counting the words in their book & assigning sentiment than a builder should get upset about someone counting the # of bricks in a building and assigning subtle color shade differences to them. Neither the author nor the builder has lost anything by it.

dfxm12 3y ago

Yeah, the article represents the voice of the authors in two tweets, from authors not apparently notable enough to have a wikipedia page. One I couldn't even find on Goodreads. It's obvious there's more to this than just the tweets presented. The article is unhelpful in this regard.

aredox 3y ago
Jeff VanderMeer is not notable enough?
- fullspectrumdev 3y ago
  Personally, I have no idea who he is except some loud prick on twitter.

jasonlotito 3y ago

> If you want to do this kind of thing, let authors opt-in (or publishers). "This kind of thing" is factual information about the book, such as page or word count, ly-adverb count, etc. Small snippets, something permissible under copyright law today, that were heavily editorialized and commented on were displayed. To suggest that counting words and pages is something that should not be allowed is silly. > The article itself is clueless… Says the person making stuff up to force a narrative. The person doing this had the rights to do this, and was very clearly within his rights to do this under copyright law. Counting words is not a crime.

tensor 3y ago

> The article itself is clueless… it doesn’t engage authors’ concerns at all, and just portrays authors as stoopid AI-fearful luddites. The authors quotes speak for themselves. They very clearly and ignorantly claimed that this was an "AI training project" when it was nothing of the sort.

OkayPhysicist 3y ago

Because the authors were AI-fearful luddites. From "Book" to "Program that judges books" lies well beyond any argument that the use of the derivative work could supersede the original. It's such clear cut transformative use that the authors come across as grossly misinformed about copyright law as a whole. Perhaps there is an argument for generative AI possibly superseding the original, in that people might start asking an AI to generate them stories "in the style of x" instead of buying the author's books, but this wasn't that. It was just some fun data analysis of books.

rockemsockem 3y ago

Statistical analysis is only useful if you have enough data to analyse, so there is in fact a threshold of number of books to cross before the tool can even really exist. If you read his post, the initial goal was to get stats about typical word count, typical amount of passive speech, etc. Requiring opt-in for these broad statistics, through outrage only since this project is CLEARLY legal in the United States, means that tools like this will never exist. Which seems net bad to me. If you are saying it should be opt-in only for the pages analyzing specific books, like the instigator of this outrage screen-shotted, well that seems to fall squarely into the critical analysis bucket, so that is also quite ridiculous. I understand some folks being unhappy that a portion of the works were pirated, but it seems like most of the outraged would be outraged even if he personally purchased each and every ebook. Also, if you read through the Twitter thread a lot of the authors (not 100%, but a LOT) are doing a really great job portraying themselves as "stoopid AI-fearful luddites". Many of them think the site is somehow like ChatGPT and they don't bother to dig any deeper, or really at all.

dxbydt 3y ago

> it doesn’t engage authors’ concerns at all, and just portrays authors as stoopid AI-fearful luddites. https://twitter.com/scumbelievable/status/1689154664787304449 https://twitter.com/scumbelievable/status/168915466478730444... So the two authors who are gloating about "killed that stupid fuckin AI thing" - I'm supposed to be engaged with their concerns ? Please.

zarzavat 3y ago

Authors are not demigods, they don’t have a right to control the use of their works, only the reproduction. When you publish a book you “consent” to the fact that people are going to take it apart, talk about it, review it, quote from it, and yes run statistics on it. If an author doesn’t want that to happen then they shouldn’t publish a book. Just keep it private, only distribute it to people you trust after they sign an NDA. As far as anyone knows, no piracy has occurred. In the US you are allowed to scan books, index them, and post excerpts - it’s called Google Books and there was a big case that affirmed that it is legal. Downloading a book from a pirate website for the purpose of indexing by a computer program is not piracy, you have simply outsourced the scanning stage to someone else. It is only an issue if you download from some p2p protocol (such as a torrent) that also uploads and shares the book.