5 ms·

Libraries would be illegal without centuries of precedent giving them a “legal inertia”. Google benefited from the exact same kind of bulk copyrighted data col

Libraries would be illegal without centuries of precedent giving them a “legal inertia”. Google benefited from the exact same kind of bulk copyrighted data collection. They made verbatim copies of the text of both web sites and just about every book in existence! This kind of argument seems disingenuous to me. Either ban Internet search or acknowledge that training an AI on copyrighted text is no different than a student reading every book in a public library. Speaking of which: We all have free access to GPT 4o without advertising. It feels like asking a knowledgeable librarian.

immibis 2y ago
Actually Google's faced this problem before. Caching is generally legal, and Google's just holding a cache to search through instead of requesting every site every time anyone searches.
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  They show snippets from web sites and show subsets of books as well, including artworks and other diagrams in their entirety. For comparison, I had to fight for a year to get copyright permission to show book cover artwork in a library enquiry system! If I simply Google the same book titles or ISBNs, Google will show me the pictures directly. E.g.: https://www.google.com/search?q=greg+egan+eon&udm=2 https://www.google.com/search?q=greg+egan+eon&udm=2 How is that legal!? We had to pay to get access! In public and school libraries! The law in most western countries is very clear that book covers are "entire" works of art, and can only be displayed by organisations that pay the copyright holders. Google, Bing, and others violate copyright on a mass scale on a daily basis. Not to mention YouTube, TikTok, and Reels, all of which are packed wall-to-wall with "movie clips" and "TV show highlights". They're publishing copyrighted content uploaded by random people and then distributing the advertising revenue to the copyright violators instead of the copyright holders. This isn't "caching" or "indexing", it's verbatim serving.
  - immibis 2y ago
    And they've faced legal battles over how much information they copy and display to users - not over the fact they do it at all.
saulpw 2y ago
A librarian which can't cite its sources, and whose services are only free while the VC funding is rolling in.

immibis 2y ago

Actually Google's faced this problem before. Caching is generally legal, and Google's just holding a cache to search through instead of requesting every site every time anyone searches.

jiggawatts 2y ago
They show snippets from web sites and show subsets of books as well, including artworks and other diagrams in their entirety. For comparison, I had to fight for a year to get copyright permission to show book cover artwork in a library enquiry system! If I simply Google the same book titles or ISBNs, Google will show me the pictures directly. E.g.: https://www.google.com/search?q=greg+egan+eon&udm=2 https://www.google.com/search?q=greg+egan+eon&udm=2 How is that legal!? We had to pay to get access! In public and school libraries! The law in most western countries is very clear that book covers are "entire" works of art, and can only be displayed by organisations that pay the copyright holders. Google, Bing, and others violate copyright on a mass scale on a daily basis. Not to mention YouTube, TikTok, and Reels, all of which are packed wall-to-wall with "movie clips" and "TV show highlights". They're publishing copyrighted content uploaded by random people and then distributing the advertising revenue to the copyright violators instead of the copyright holders. This isn't "caching" or "indexing", it's verbatim serving.
- immibis 2y ago
  And they've faced legal battles over how much information they copy and display to users - not over the fact they do it at all.

saulpw 2y ago

A librarian which can't cite its sources, and whose services are only free while the VC funding is rolling in.