5 ms·

Can I download a book without paying for it, and print copies of it? Stash copies in my bathroom, the gym, my office, my bedroom etc. to basically have a copy o

Can I download a book without paying for it, and print copies of it? Stash copies in my bathroom, the gym, my office, my bedroom etc. to basically have a copy on hand to study from whenever I have some free time? What about movies and music?

Terretta 2y ago
Is the book online and accessible to your eyeballs through your open standards client tool, such that you can learn from seeing it?
- triceratops 2y ago
  Most books aren't. Unless you pay for them.
- codedokode 2y ago
  Let's say Windows is downloadable from Microsoft website. Can you use it for free in your company to save on buying a license? Is it ok to use illegal copies of works in a business?
ajross 2y ago
> Can I download a book without paying for it, and print copies of it? No, but you can read a book, learn its contents, and then write and publish your own book to teach the information to others. The operation of an AI is rather closer to that than it is to copyright violation. "Should" there be protections against AI training? Maybe! But copyright law as it stands is woefully inadequate to the task, and IMHO a lot of people aren't really treating with this. We need a functioning government to write well-considered laws for the benefit of all here. We'll see what we get.
- triceratops 2y ago
  But I can't legally obtain the book to read and learn from without me (or a library) paying for it. Let's start there first.
  - ajross 2y ago
    Yes, but the learning isn't constrained by those laws. If I steal a book and read it, I'm guilty of the crime of theft. You can put me in jail, try me before a jury, fine me, and put me in prison according to whatever laws I broke. Nothing in my sentence constrains my ability to teach someone else the stuff I learned, though! In fact, the first amendment makes it pretty damn clear that nothing can constrain that freedom. Also, note that the example is malformed: in almost all these cases, Meta et. al. aren't "stealing" anything anyway. They're downloading and reading stuff on the internet that is available for free. If you or I can't be prosecuted for reading a preprint from arXiv.org or whatever, it's a very hard case to make that an AI can. Again, copyright isn't the tool here. We need better laws.
    - triceratops 2y ago
      > copyright isn't the tool here It's not the only tool. I agree that "use for ML" should be an additional right. What people are pissed about is that copyright only ever serves to constrain the little guys. > If I steal a book and read it, I'm guilty of the crime of theft You or I would never dare to do this in the first place.
    - tsimionescu 2y ago
      Sure, but OpenAI (same as Google, and Facebook, and all the others) is illegally copying the book, and they want this to be legal for them. It's perhaps arguable whether it's OK for an LLM to be trained on freely available but licensed works, such as the Linux source code. There you can get in arguments about learning vs machine processing, and whether the LLM is a derived work etc But it's not arguable that copying a book that you have not even bought to store in your corporate data lake to later use for training is a blatant violation of basic copyright. It's exactly like borrowing a book from a library, photocopying it, and then putting it in your employee-only corporate library.
    - riversflow 2y ago
      > Meta et. al. aren't "stealing" anything anyway They were caught downloading the entirety of libgen.
- zombiwoof 2y ago
  If you buy it
  - ajross 2y ago
    No, even if I steal it. I can teach you anything I know. Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, as it were.
    - tsimionescu 2y ago
      Yes, but this is not the right model. What OpenAI wants is to borrow a book, make a copy of it, and keep using that copy, in training their models. This is fully and simply illegal, under any basic copyright law.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
notatoad 2y ago
>Can I download a book without paying for it if you have evidence that openAI is doing this with books that are not freely available, i'm sure the publishers would absolutely love to hear about it.
- nickthegreek 2y ago
  We know Meta has done it. These companies have torrented or downloaded books that they did not pay for. Things like the The Pile, libgen, anna's library were scraped to build these models.
- lawlessone 2y ago
  >if you have evidence that openAI is doing this with books that are not freely available, i'm sure the publishers would absolutely love to hear about it. Lol, so why are OpenAI challenging these laws?
- croes 2y ago
  Do you think OpenAI used fewer sources than Meta?
ben_w 2y ago
To the extent that this is how libraries function, yes. The part of that which doesn't apply is "print copies", at least not complete copies, but libraries often have photocopiers in them for fragments needed for research. AI models shouldn't do that either, IMO. But unlimited complete copies is the mistake the Internet Archive made, too.
- triceratops 2y ago
  I missed the part where OpenAI got library cards for all the libraries in the world. Is having a library card a requirement for being hired over there?
  - ben_w 2y ago
    I don't need a card to read in the library, nor to use the photocopiers there, but it's merely one example anyway. (If it wasn't, you'd only need one library, any of the deposit libraries will do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit). You also don't need permission, as a human, to read (and learn from) the internet in general. Machines by standard practice require such permission, hence robots.txt, and OpenAI's GPTBot complies with the robots.txt file and the company gives advice to web operators about how to disallow their bot. How AI should be treated, more like a search index, or more like a mind that can learn by reading? Not my call. It's a new thing, and laws can be driven by economics or by moral outrage, and in this case those two driving forces are at odds.
    - triceratops 2y ago
      We started with libraries and books, now you're moving the goalposts to websites. Sidenote: I wouldn't even be mad if OpenAI built robots to go into all of the libraries and read all of the books. That would be amazing!
      - ben_w 2y ago
        I started with libraries. OpenAI started with the internet. The argument for both is identical, your objection is specific to libraries. IIRC, Google already did your sidenote. Or started to, may have had legal issues.
nightpool 2y ago
Yes, you're allowed to make personal copies of copyright works that you own. IANAL, but my understanding is that if you're using them for yourself, and you're not prevented from doing so by some sort of EULA or DRM, there's nothing in copyright law preventing you from e.g. photocopying a book and keeping a copy at home, as long as you don't distribute it. The test case here has always been CDs—you're allowed to make copies of CDs you legally own and keep one at home and one in your car.
- triceratops 2y ago
  CDs, software, and electronic media, yes. Physical books, no. You can't make archival copies.
  - bryanrasmussen 2y ago
    sure you can, you could take a physical book, and painstakingly copy each page at a time, that is totally fair use.
    - triceratops 2y ago
      Citation needed.
      - jncfhnb 2y ago
        You can make copies of things. You just can’t distribute them
        triceratops 2y ago
        You're repeating upthread comments. And no, you can't. There's an archival exception for electronic media. If you want to make copies of physical media you either: 1. Can't Or 2. Rely on fair use to protect you (archival by individuals isn't necessarily fair use)
        2y ago
carlosdp 2y ago
That's not a one-to-one analogy. The LLM isn't giving you the book, its giving you information it learned from the book. The analogous scenario is "Can I read a book and publish a blog post with all the information in that book, in my own words?", and under US copyright law, the answer is: Yes.
- triceratops 2y ago
  > The analogous scenario is "Can I read a book and publish a blog post with all the information in that book, in my own words?" The analogous scenario is actually "Can I read a book that I obtained illegally and face no consequences for obtaining it illegally?" The answer is "Yes" there are no consequences for reading said book, for individuals or machines. But individuals can face serious consequences for obtaining it illegally. And corporations are trying to argue those consequences shouldn't apply to them.
  - School-Cotton 2y ago
    > But individuals can face serious consequences for obtaining it illegally. Can they? Who has ever faced serious consequences for pirating books in the US?
    - triceratops 2y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz (Please no pedantry about how scientific papers aren't books)
      - drdaeman 2y ago
        Not to diminish the atrocity of what happened to Aaron, but is this a highly abnormal case of prosecutor overzeal or is it common for people to be charged and held liable for downloading and/or consuming (without distribution) of copyrighted materials (in any form) without obtaining a license? Asking because I genuinely don't know. I believe all I've ever read about persecution of "commonplace" copyright violations was either about distributors or tied to bidirectional nature of peer-to-peer exchange (torrents typically upload to others even as you download = redistribution).
paulddraper 2y ago
> Can I download a book without paying for it Yes, you can read books without paying, if that's how it is offered. And you can photocopy books you own for your own personal use. But again....the analogy is remembering/leaning from a book.
nickpsecurity 2y ago
To support your point, lawsuits are already coming in for illegal copying of books: https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/20/24224450/anthropic-copyright-lawsuit-pirated-books-ai https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/20/24224450/anthropic-copyri... https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/google-sued-by-top-textbook-publishers-over-ads-pirated-e-books-2024-06-05/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/google-sued-by-top-...
dylan604 2y ago
owning a copy and learning the information is not the same. you can learn 2+2=4 from a book, but you no longer need that book to get that answer. each year in school, I was issued a book for class, learned from it, returned the book. I did not return the learning. musicians can read the sheet music and memorize how to play it, and no longer need the music. they still have the information.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  But you still need to buy the sheet music first, all the AI Labs used pirated materials to learn from. There's two angles to the lawsuits that are getting confused - the largest one from the book publishers (Sarah Silverman et al) attacked from the angle that the models could reproduce copyrighted information. This was pretty easily quelled / RHLF'd out (used to be that if ChatGPT started producing lyrics a supervisor/censor would just cut off it's response early - tried it now and ChatGPT.com is now more eloquent, "Sorry, I can't provide the full lyrics to "Strawberry Fields Forever" as they are copyrighted. However, I can summarize the song or discuss its themes, meaning, and history if you're interested!") But there's also the angle of "why does OpenAI have Sarah Silverman's book on their hard drive if they never paid her for it? This is the lawsuit against Meta regarding books3 and torrenting, seems like they're getting away with the "we never redistributed/seeded!" but it's unclear to me why this is a defense against copyright infringement.
  - nunSpQyeJR 2y ago
    Not only would the musician have to buy the sheet music first, but if they were going to perform that piece for profit at an event or on an album they'd need a license of some sort. This whole mess seems to be another case of "if I can dance around the law fast enough, big enough, and with enough grey areas then I can get away with it".
  - dylan604 2y ago
    I was handed sheet music every year in band, and within a few weeks had it memorized. Books with music are also available in the library.

Terretta 2y ago

Is the book online and accessible to your eyeballs through your open standards client tool, such that you can learn from seeing it?

triceratops 2y ago
Most books aren't. Unless you pay for them.
codedokode 2y ago
Let's say Windows is downloadable from Microsoft website. Can you use it for free in your company to save on buying a license? Is it ok to use illegal copies of works in a business?

ajross 2y ago

> Can I download a book without paying for it, and print copies of it? No, but you can read a book, learn its contents, and then write and publish your own book to teach the information to others. The operation of an AI is rather closer to that than it is to copyright violation. "Should" there be protections against AI training? Maybe! But copyright law as it stands is woefully inadequate to the task, and IMHO a lot of people aren't really treating with this. We need a functioning government to write well-considered laws for the benefit of all here. We'll see what we get.

triceratops 2y ago
But I can't legally obtain the book to read and learn from without me (or a library) paying for it. Let's start there first.
- ajross 2y ago
  Yes, but the learning isn't constrained by those laws. If I steal a book and read it, I'm guilty of the crime of theft. You can put me in jail, try me before a jury, fine me, and put me in prison according to whatever laws I broke. Nothing in my sentence constrains my ability to teach someone else the stuff I learned, though! In fact, the first amendment makes it pretty damn clear that nothing can constrain that freedom. Also, note that the example is malformed: in almost all these cases, Meta et. al. aren't "stealing" anything anyway. They're downloading and reading stuff on the internet that is available for free. If you or I can't be prosecuted for reading a preprint from arXiv.org or whatever, it's a very hard case to make that an AI can. Again, copyright isn't the tool here. We need better laws.
  - triceratops 2y ago
    > copyright isn't the tool here It's not the only tool. I agree that "use for ML" should be an additional right. What people are pissed about is that copyright only ever serves to constrain the little guys. > If I steal a book and read it, I'm guilty of the crime of theft You or I would never dare to do this in the first place.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    Sure, but OpenAI (same as Google, and Facebook, and all the others) is illegally copying the book, and they want this to be legal for them. It's perhaps arguable whether it's OK for an LLM to be trained on freely available but licensed works, such as the Linux source code. There you can get in arguments about learning vs machine processing, and whether the LLM is a derived work etc But it's not arguable that copying a book that you have not even bought to store in your corporate data lake to later use for training is a blatant violation of basic copyright. It's exactly like borrowing a book from a library, photocopying it, and then putting it in your employee-only corporate library.
  - riversflow 2y ago
    > Meta et. al. aren't "stealing" anything anyway They were caught downloading the entirety of libgen.
zombiwoof 2y ago
If you buy it
- ajross 2y ago
  No, even if I steal it. I can teach you anything I know. Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, as it were.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    Yes, but this is not the right model. What OpenAI wants is to borrow a book, make a copy of it, and keep using that copy, in training their models. This is fully and simply illegal, under any basic copyright law.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

notatoad 2y ago

>Can I download a book without paying for it if you have evidence that openAI is doing this with books that are not freely available, i'm sure the publishers would absolutely love to hear about it.

nickthegreek 2y ago
We know Meta has done it. These companies have torrented or downloaded books that they did not pay for. Things like the The Pile, libgen, anna's library were scraped to build these models.
lawlessone 2y ago
>if you have evidence that openAI is doing this with books that are not freely available, i'm sure the publishers would absolutely love to hear about it. Lol, so why are OpenAI challenging these laws?
croes 2y ago
Do you think OpenAI used fewer sources than Meta?

ben_w 2y ago

To the extent that this is how libraries function, yes. The part of that which doesn't apply is "print copies", at least not complete copies, but libraries often have photocopiers in them for fragments needed for research. AI models shouldn't do that either, IMO. But unlimited complete copies is the mistake the Internet Archive made, too.

triceratops 2y ago
I missed the part where OpenAI got library cards for all the libraries in the world. Is having a library card a requirement for being hired over there?
- ben_w 2y ago
  I don't need a card to read in the library, nor to use the photocopiers there, but it's merely one example anyway. (If it wasn't, you'd only need one library, any of the deposit libraries will do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit). You also don't need permission, as a human, to read (and learn from) the internet in general. Machines by standard practice require such permission, hence robots.txt, and OpenAI's GPTBot complies with the robots.txt file and the company gives advice to web operators about how to disallow their bot. How AI should be treated, more like a search index, or more like a mind that can learn by reading? Not my call. It's a new thing, and laws can be driven by economics or by moral outrage, and in this case those two driving forces are at odds.
  - triceratops 2y ago
    We started with libraries and books, now you're moving the goalposts to websites. Sidenote: I wouldn't even be mad if OpenAI built robots to go into all of the libraries and read all of the books. That would be amazing!
    - ben_w 2y ago
      I started with libraries. OpenAI started with the internet. The argument for both is identical, your objection is specific to libraries. IIRC, Google already did your sidenote. Or started to, may have had legal issues.

nightpool 2y ago

Yes, you're allowed to make personal copies of copyright works that you own. IANAL, but my understanding is that if you're using them for yourself, and you're not prevented from doing so by some sort of EULA or DRM, there's nothing in copyright law preventing you from e.g. photocopying a book and keeping a copy at home, as long as you don't distribute it. The test case here has always been CDs—you're allowed to make copies of CDs you legally own and keep one at home and one in your car.

triceratops 2y ago
CDs, software, and electronic media, yes. Physical books, no. You can't make archival copies.
- bryanrasmussen 2y ago
  sure you can, you could take a physical book, and painstakingly copy each page at a time, that is totally fair use.
  - triceratops 2y ago
    Citation needed.
    - jncfhnb 2y ago
      You can make copies of things. You just can’t distribute them
      - triceratops 2y ago
        You're repeating upthread comments. And no, you can't. There's an archival exception for electronic media. If you want to make copies of physical media you either: 1. Can't Or 2. Rely on fair use to protect you (archival by individuals isn't necessarily fair use)
        2y ago

carlosdp 2y ago

That's not a one-to-one analogy. The LLM isn't giving you the book, its giving you information it learned from the book. The analogous scenario is "Can I read a book and publish a blog post with all the information in that book, in my own words?", and under US copyright law, the answer is: Yes.

triceratops 2y ago
> The analogous scenario is "Can I read a book and publish a blog post with all the information in that book, in my own words?" The analogous scenario is actually "Can I read a book that I obtained illegally and face no consequences for obtaining it illegally?" The answer is "Yes" there are no consequences for reading said book, for individuals or machines. But individuals can face serious consequences for obtaining it illegally. And corporations are trying to argue those consequences shouldn't apply to them.
- School-Cotton 2y ago
  > But individuals can face serious consequences for obtaining it illegally. Can they? Who has ever faced serious consequences for pirating books in the US?
  - triceratops 2y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz (Please no pedantry about how scientific papers aren't books)
    - drdaeman 2y ago
      Not to diminish the atrocity of what happened to Aaron, but is this a highly abnormal case of prosecutor overzeal or is it common for people to be charged and held liable for downloading and/or consuming (without distribution) of copyrighted materials (in any form) without obtaining a license? Asking because I genuinely don't know. I believe all I've ever read about persecution of "commonplace" copyright violations was either about distributors or tied to bidirectional nature of peer-to-peer exchange (torrents typically upload to others even as you download = redistribution).

paulddraper 2y ago

> Can I download a book without paying for it Yes, you can read books without paying, if that's how it is offered. And you can photocopy books you own for your own personal use. But again....the analogy is remembering/leaning from a book.

nickpsecurity 2y ago

To support your point, lawsuits are already coming in for illegal copying of books: https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/20/24224450/anthropic-copyright-lawsuit-pirated-books-ai https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/20/24224450/anthropic-copyri... https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/google-sued-by-top-textbook-publishers-over-ads-pirated-e-books-2024-06-05/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/google-sued-by-top-...

dylan604 2y ago

owning a copy and learning the information is not the same. you can learn 2+2=4 from a book, but you no longer need that book to get that answer. each year in school, I was issued a book for class, learned from it, returned the book. I did not return the learning. musicians can read the sheet music and memorize how to play it, and no longer need the music. they still have the information.

jazzyjackson 2y ago
But you still need to buy the sheet music first, all the AI Labs used pirated materials to learn from. There's two angles to the lawsuits that are getting confused - the largest one from the book publishers (Sarah Silverman et al) attacked from the angle that the models could reproduce copyrighted information. This was pretty easily quelled / RHLF'd out (used to be that if ChatGPT started producing lyrics a supervisor/censor would just cut off it's response early - tried it now and ChatGPT.com is now more eloquent, "Sorry, I can't provide the full lyrics to "Strawberry Fields Forever" as they are copyrighted. However, I can summarize the song or discuss its themes, meaning, and history if you're interested!") But there's also the angle of "why does OpenAI have Sarah Silverman's book on their hard drive if they never paid her for it? This is the lawsuit against Meta regarding books3 and torrenting, seems like they're getting away with the "we never redistributed/seeded!" but it's unclear to me why this is a defense against copyright infringement.
- nunSpQyeJR 2y ago
  Not only would the musician have to buy the sheet music first, but if they were going to perform that piece for profit at an event or on an album they'd need a license of some sort. This whole mess seems to be another case of "if I can dance around the law fast enough, big enough, and with enough grey areas then I can get away with it".
- dylan604 2y ago
  I was handed sheet music every year in band, and within a few weeks had it memorized. Books with music are also available in the library.