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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 n

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)
        jncfhnb 2y ago
        It absolutely is fair use to copy a book for your personal archives. The fair use criteria considers whether it is commercial in nature (in this case it is not) and the “ the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work” for which a personal copy of a personally owned book is non existent. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107 You would get laughed at by the legal system trying to prosecute an individual owner for copying a book they bought just to keep.
        triceratops 2y ago
        > It absolutely is fair use to copy a book for your personal archives. There's no legal precedent for this. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43356042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43356042 > the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work A copyright holder's lawyer would argue that having and using a photocopy of a book keeps the original from wearing out. This directly affects the potential market for the work, since the owner could resell the book in mint condition, after reading and burning their photocopies. > You would get laughed at by the legal system trying to prosecute an individual owner for copying a book they bought just to keep. I mean maybe this is true. But the affected individual will have a very bad year and spend a ton of money on lawyers.
        MostlyStable 2y ago
        >No legal precedent Why do you interpret this to mean "absolutely can't do this"? "No precedent" seems to equally support both sides of the argument (that is, it provides no evidence; courts have not ruled). The other commenters arguments on the actual text of the statute seem more convincing to me than what you have so far provided.
        triceratops 2y ago
        I was responding to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43356240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43356240 which said it "absolutely is fair use". > The other commenters arguments...seem more convincing Because you (and I) want it to be fair use. But as I already said in my comment, it potentially fails one leg of fair use. Keeping your purchased physical copy of the book pristine and untouched while you read the photocopy allows you to later, after destroying the copies you made, resell the book as new or like-new. This directly affects the market for that book. Do you want to spend time and money in court to find out if it's really fair use? That's what "no precedent" means.
    - observationist 2y ago
      It seems reasonably within the bounds described by fair use, but nobody's ever tested that particular constellation of factors in a lawsuit, so there's no precedent - hand copying a book, that is. 17 U.S.C. § 107 is the fair use carveout. Interestingly, digitizing and copying a book on your own, for your own private use, has also not been brought to court. Major rights holders seem to not want this particular fair use precedent to be established, which it likely would be, and might then invalidate crucial standing for other cases in which certain interpretations of fair use are preferred. Digitally copying media you own is fair use. I'll die on that hill. It doesn't grant commercial rights, you can't resell a copy as if it were the original, and so on, and so forth. There's even a good case to be made that sharing a digitally copied work purchased legally, even to millions of people, 5 years after a book is first sold - for a vast majority of books, after 5 years, they've sold about 99.99% of the copies they're going to sell. By sharing after the ~5 year mark, you're arguably doing marketing for the book, and if we cultivated a culture of direct donation to authors and content creators, it invalidates any of the reasons piracy is made illegal in the first place. Right now publishers, studios, and platforms have a stranglehold on content markets, and the law serves them almost exclusively. It is exceedingly rare for the law to be invoked in defending or supporting an author or artist directly. It's very common for groups of wealthy lawyers LARPing as protectors of authors and artists to exploit the law and steal money from regular people. Exclusively digital content should have a 3 year protected period, while physical works should get 5, whether it's text, audio, image, or video. Once something is outside the protected period, it should be considered fair game for sharing until 20 years have passed, at which point it should enter public domain. Copyright law serves two purposes - protecting and incentivizing content creators, and serving the interests of the public. Situations where a bunch of lawyers get rich by suing the pants off of regular people over technicalities is a despicable outcome.
      - triceratops 2y ago
        > there's no precedent - hand copying a book, that is Thank you! I had looked this up myself last week, so I knew this. I had long believed, as GP does, that copying anything you own without distribution is either allowed or fair use. I wanted GP to learn as I did.
    - mjmas 2y ago
      This is a specific exception in Australia Copyright law. It allows reproducing works in books, newspapers and periodical publications in different form for private and domestic use. (Copyright Act 1968 Part III div. 1, section 43C) https://www.legislation.gov.au/C1968A00063/latest/text https://www.legislation.gov.au/C1968A00063/latest/text
  - paulddraper 2y ago
    Leaving aside the broader discussion... You cannot legally photocopy copy an entire book even if you own a physical copy. Internet people say you can, but there's no actual legal argument or case law to support that.
    - sidewndr46 2y ago
      I believe the post you are replying to is suggesting the copy is made by hand, one word at a time.
      - paulddraper 2y ago
        I don't see how that would be different, as the meaningful material is text not images.
    - fc417fc802 2y ago
      At home? Without ever sharing it with anyone? I thought making backups of things that you personally own was protected, at least in the US. Could you elaborate on my apparent misunderstanding?
      - paulddraper 2y ago
        > Could you elaborate on my apparent misunderstanding? One of the six exclusive rights of copyright holders is "to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords." (In certain circumstances, the Fair Use doctrine contravenes this right, but reproduction in whole is not such a circumstance.)
    - stale2002 2y ago
      > Internet people say you can, but there's no actual legal argument or case law to support that. Quite the opposite. The burden of proof is on you to show a single person ever, in history, who has been prosecuted for that. If nobody in the world has ever been prosecuted for this, then that means it is either legal, or it is something else that is so effectively equivalent to "legal" that there is little point in using a different word. If you want to take the position that, "uhhhhhhh, there is exactly 0% chance of anyone ever getting in trouble or being prosecuted for this, but I still don't think its legal, technically!" Then I guess go ahead. But for those in the real world, those two things are almost equivalent.
- croes 2y ago
  You may copy, but you may not circumvent the copy protection.
  - triceratops 2y ago
    Correct. For electronic media.
croes 2y ago
> Yes, you're allowed to make personal copies of copyright works that you own. That’s not the point. It’s about books you don’t own. Are you allowed to download books from Z-Library, Sci-Hub etc. because you want to learn?
- falcor84 2y ago
  To the best of my knowledge, no individual has ever been sued or prosecuted specifically for downloading books. As long as you're not massively sharing them with others, it's not an issue in practice. Enjoy your reading and learning.
  - jlev 2y ago
    Aaron Swartz, cofounder of Reddit and inventor of RSS and Markdown, was hounded to death by an overzealous prosecutor for downloading articles from JSTOR, with the intent to learn from them. He was charged with over a million dollars in fines and could have faced 35 years in prison. He and Sam Altman were in the same YC class. OpenAI is doing the same thing at a larger scale, and their technology actually reproduces and distributes copyrighted material. It's shameful that they are making claims that they aren't infringing creator's rights when they have scraped the entire internet. https://flaminghydra.com/sam-altman-and-aaron-swartz-saw-the-future/ https://flaminghydra.com/sam-altman-and-aaron-swartz-saw-the... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
    - kgdiem 2y ago
      Will what OpenAI & others serve as precedent for Alexandra Elbakyan of SciHub and avenge Aaron? Cynically, I imagine it will not but I hope that it could.
      - concerndc1tizen 2y ago
        You could argue that they are avenging him in doing exactly what he did, or worse, and not being punished for it. They are establishing precedent.
timeon 2y ago
I'm moving goal-post here since it was not OpenAI (as far as we know): Where Meta training on torrented data fits into this?

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)
      - jncfhnb 2y ago
        It absolutely is fair use to copy a book for your personal archives. The fair use criteria considers whether it is commercial in nature (in this case it is not) and the “ the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work” for which a personal copy of a personally owned book is non existent. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107 You would get laughed at by the legal system trying to prosecute an individual owner for copying a book they bought just to keep.
        triceratops 2y ago
        > It absolutely is fair use to copy a book for your personal archives. There's no legal precedent for this. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43356042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43356042 > the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work A copyright holder's lawyer would argue that having and using a photocopy of a book keeps the original from wearing out. This directly affects the potential market for the work, since the owner could resell the book in mint condition, after reading and burning their photocopies. > You would get laughed at by the legal system trying to prosecute an individual owner for copying a book they bought just to keep. I mean maybe this is true. But the affected individual will have a very bad year and spend a ton of money on lawyers.
        MostlyStable 2y ago
        >No legal precedent Why do you interpret this to mean "absolutely can't do this"? "No precedent" seems to equally support both sides of the argument (that is, it provides no evidence; courts have not ruled). The other commenters arguments on the actual text of the statute seem more convincing to me than what you have so far provided.
        triceratops 2y ago
        I was responding to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43356240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43356240 which said it "absolutely is fair use". > The other commenters arguments...seem more convincing Because you (and I) want it to be fair use. But as I already said in my comment, it potentially fails one leg of fair use. Keeping your purchased physical copy of the book pristine and untouched while you read the photocopy allows you to later, after destroying the copies you made, resell the book as new or like-new. This directly affects the market for that book. Do you want to spend time and money in court to find out if it's really fair use? That's what "no precedent" means.
  - observationist 2y ago
    It seems reasonably within the bounds described by fair use, but nobody's ever tested that particular constellation of factors in a lawsuit, so there's no precedent - hand copying a book, that is. 17 U.S.C. § 107 is the fair use carveout. Interestingly, digitizing and copying a book on your own, for your own private use, has also not been brought to court. Major rights holders seem to not want this particular fair use precedent to be established, which it likely would be, and might then invalidate crucial standing for other cases in which certain interpretations of fair use are preferred. Digitally copying media you own is fair use. I'll die on that hill. It doesn't grant commercial rights, you can't resell a copy as if it were the original, and so on, and so forth. There's even a good case to be made that sharing a digitally copied work purchased legally, even to millions of people, 5 years after a book is first sold - for a vast majority of books, after 5 years, they've sold about 99.99% of the copies they're going to sell. By sharing after the ~5 year mark, you're arguably doing marketing for the book, and if we cultivated a culture of direct donation to authors and content creators, it invalidates any of the reasons piracy is made illegal in the first place. Right now publishers, studios, and platforms have a stranglehold on content markets, and the law serves them almost exclusively. It is exceedingly rare for the law to be invoked in defending or supporting an author or artist directly. It's very common for groups of wealthy lawyers LARPing as protectors of authors and artists to exploit the law and steal money from regular people. Exclusively digital content should have a 3 year protected period, while physical works should get 5, whether it's text, audio, image, or video. Once something is outside the protected period, it should be considered fair game for sharing until 20 years have passed, at which point it should enter public domain. Copyright law serves two purposes - protecting and incentivizing content creators, and serving the interests of the public. Situations where a bunch of lawyers get rich by suing the pants off of regular people over technicalities is a despicable outcome.
    - triceratops 2y ago
      > there's no precedent - hand copying a book, that is Thank you! I had looked this up myself last week, so I knew this. I had long believed, as GP does, that copying anything you own without distribution is either allowed or fair use. I wanted GP to learn as I did.
  - mjmas 2y ago
    This is a specific exception in Australia Copyright law. It allows reproducing works in books, newspapers and periodical publications in different form for private and domestic use. (Copyright Act 1968 Part III div. 1, section 43C) https://www.legislation.gov.au/C1968A00063/latest/text https://www.legislation.gov.au/C1968A00063/latest/text
- paulddraper 2y ago
  Leaving aside the broader discussion... You cannot legally photocopy copy an entire book even if you own a physical copy. Internet people say you can, but there's no actual legal argument or case law to support that.
  - sidewndr46 2y ago
    I believe the post you are replying to is suggesting the copy is made by hand, one word at a time.
    - paulddraper 2y ago
      I don't see how that would be different, as the meaningful material is text not images.
  - fc417fc802 2y ago
    At home? Without ever sharing it with anyone? I thought making backups of things that you personally own was protected, at least in the US. Could you elaborate on my apparent misunderstanding?
    - paulddraper 2y ago
      > Could you elaborate on my apparent misunderstanding? One of the six exclusive rights of copyright holders is "to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords." (In certain circumstances, the Fair Use doctrine contravenes this right, but reproduction in whole is not such a circumstance.)
  - stale2002 2y ago
    > Internet people say you can, but there's no actual legal argument or case law to support that. Quite the opposite. The burden of proof is on you to show a single person ever, in history, who has been prosecuted for that. If nobody in the world has ever been prosecuted for this, then that means it is either legal, or it is something else that is so effectively equivalent to "legal" that there is little point in using a different word. If you want to take the position that, "uhhhhhhh, there is exactly 0% chance of anyone ever getting in trouble or being prosecuted for this, but I still don't think its legal, technically!" Then I guess go ahead. But for those in the real world, those two things are almost equivalent.
croes 2y ago
You may copy, but you may not circumvent the copy protection.
- triceratops 2y ago
  Correct. For electronic media.

croes 2y ago

> Yes, you're allowed to make personal copies of copyright works that you own. That’s not the point. It’s about books you don’t own. Are you allowed to download books from Z-Library, Sci-Hub etc. because you want to learn?

falcor84 2y ago
To the best of my knowledge, no individual has ever been sued or prosecuted specifically for downloading books. As long as you're not massively sharing them with others, it's not an issue in practice. Enjoy your reading and learning.
- jlev 2y ago
  Aaron Swartz, cofounder of Reddit and inventor of RSS and Markdown, was hounded to death by an overzealous prosecutor for downloading articles from JSTOR, with the intent to learn from them. He was charged with over a million dollars in fines and could have faced 35 years in prison. He and Sam Altman were in the same YC class. OpenAI is doing the same thing at a larger scale, and their technology actually reproduces and distributes copyrighted material. It's shameful that they are making claims that they aren't infringing creator's rights when they have scraped the entire internet. https://flaminghydra.com/sam-altman-and-aaron-swartz-saw-the-future/ https://flaminghydra.com/sam-altman-and-aaron-swartz-saw-the... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
  - kgdiem 2y ago
    Will what OpenAI & others serve as precedent for Alexandra Elbakyan of SciHub and avenge Aaron? Cynically, I imagine it will not but I hope that it could.
    - concerndc1tizen 2y ago
      You could argue that they are avenging him in doing exactly what he did, or worse, and not being punished for it. They are establishing precedent.

timeon 2y ago

I'm moving goal-post here since it was not OpenAI (as far as we know): Where Meta training on torrented data fits into this?