oh look, a scanning method that doesn’t destroy the books. Surely it’s science fiction.
The dumbest thing we could do in response to AI is make copyright worse.
If any published work is at risk of becoming lost media, just because several companies each bought a copy - that work should be public-domain. Plainly it’s not making the author any money. Tell these companies to put it on Archive.org and they’ll brag about how much media they’re preserving, rather than trying to quietly do what copyright law demands but people still flip out over.
They are buying them? That’s actually surprising. I thought stealing them was deemed legal already.
No, that was never the case. Anthropic got told in court that using copyrighted works that they had legally procured for model training was fair use, but since they had used a pirated data set, they got ruled against - there’s no fair use protection for things you haven’t actually bought. Subsequently, they settled that lawsuit for $1.5B
It would be cool if those sorts of settlements hurt them the same way it would hurt your average person.
There does indeed seem to be some level of disproportionality going on here, yeah.
You can quote from a book you shoplifted and it’s still fair use.
The settlement was only about the piracy.
Yeah, thanks for clarifying. I was more saying it with tongue in cheek as a jab at meta’s bittorrenting books, which even itself isn’t settled.
The legal justification being made by these companies to give themselves cover is that because they’re destroying the books after scanning and training the AI, they’re transforming the work, not copying, and thus it is covered by fair use.