Because that's all the ai model is doing. It's reading the books.

How an entity (human or not) changes after reading those books is not in the purview of copyright.

It has not shared them (copied). It has read them, learned from them, and changed itself in response.

Why is an AI model allowed to read a book without paying for access to it, but I as a human have to pay for it to read it?

That's not the argument being made, is it? If the AI is trained on pirated data, it's a completely different case than the underlying principle of AI meaning all generated content is copyright infringement.

But I thought they were being trained on pirated data...

Seems like a problem to me.

They're being trained on copyrighted data that was publicly accessible. The lawsuits focus on whether or not this is copyright violation, not the legality of accessing the material (AFAICT).

So the world is just ignoring the legality of accessing the material in the way that they did?

Man, I wish as a human I could use the defense of "but it was publicly accessible in a torrent" as a valid reason that I acquired and consumed some content.

Sorry, do you have some proof that they pirated content that the scrupulous copyright holders themselves don't? That's not the issue at hand and, AFAICT, nobody is accusing them of doing it.

Nobody is ignoring it, that would be a crime if they did, but since there's no evidence of it... you're being upset at your own hypothetical.

I'm really confused.

I see articles all over that LLMs for example used books3, which the creator himself has admitted came from torrenting from bibliotik, and which contains at least some books that are not otherwise freely available.

The issue that content creators have with LLMs is not getting proper attribution for their creations and source material that went into training these LLMs, and it seems pretty clear to me that some of the content that was used to train LLMs was not legally obtained and licensed to consume.

The AI should, no doubt, pay to read the book!

In technical terms, these companies are trying to avoid the need to consider content licensing, which is a major violation to content creators.

You aren't licensing it. You are reading it. A machine reading it is no different than a human. I mean it really shouldn't be. Should a visually impaired person using a screen reader have to "license" the book?

But not all the works that have been consumed by LLMs are available to read without a license to do so.

That particular transformation of the book does well on a fair use analysis. If the blind person were to use the screen reader to put the book on Spotify, it would almost certainly fail a fair use analysis.

People come up with the most bizarre corner cases to justify freeloading on other’s intellectual property.

Content is obviously being relicensed as the models are not fully open.

On top of that, it is also being exposed as pay-for-use subscription models without paying anything to original authors. How is that fair use?

You can check the book out at the library and read it. Someone has to buy it, but not necessarily you personally.

You can check out some books at libraries for free, sure.

LLMs are trained on tons of books and papers that are not available to humans for free anywhere.

Can you give an example of something that they are trained on that a human can't somehow read without buying?

Textbooks for 1 example.

You are telling me that all the books in books2 and books3 can be acquired and read by myself completely free of charge legally without piracy?

If humans can get these books for free legally, why are so many people paying so much to buy them for their college courses?

I thought it's well known that LLMs are being trained on pirated content.

Textbooks aren't somehow banned from libraries. You'll find lots of textbooks in public libraries, school libraries, and other libraries where they can be read without paying for the book.

Now if you are saying they obtained the book from illegal sources that is a valid argument. But the issue there is orthogonal feeding the contents of the books into an LLM. It is legal for me to view and photograph the Mona Lisa. If I break into he Louvre to view the Mona Lisa, the issue isn't that I viewed the artwork. The issue is that I broke into the museum.

Yes but then the issue isn't whether copyrighted works can be used as training data, but how you can obtain those works to use them as training data. I agree that you can't justify copyright infringement based on the fact you are using it as training data. But I do not agree with those that say using a legally borrowed book as training data violates copyright.

But if you have an example of some types of books that it is impossible to borrow from anywhere on the planet please share. Textbooks are readily available from libraries.

No, they aren't banned, but not being able to find one at a library is not a legal justification for me to go and torrent it. It shouldn't be for a corporation training an LLM either.

It's widely known that some of the big LLMs were trained on book datasets that were acquired via torrents. And that those datasets do contain at least some books that are not available anywhere freely via legal channels.

There is nothing illegal about reading a book that you haven't paid for.

What's illegal is making and distributing copies of a book.

But the reader isn't in trouble for reading a book they don't own.

Really?

So I am free to torrent all the books that I want, and there is no legal action that can ever be taken against me?

If so that would be news to me.

If you start distributing torrents and copies to other people?

No of course not.

Creating copies, and distributing them to other people is against the law.

That has nothing to do with what I said though.

What I said is that it is not illegal for a reader to read something that they havent paid for.

Do you see how that is different from distributing copies of something to other people?

That's not what I am asking though...

I am asking about reading content that is not available through any free means, and pirating it in order to read it instead of paying for it from the author.

> I am asking about reading content that is not available through any free means, and having to pirate it in order to read it.

Reading it is legal.

Distributing torrents is not though. That is the part of piracy that is illegal. The illegal part is when you create and distributing copies.

Copyright law has nothing to do with reading stuff that you have not paid for.

Instead, it is about the illegality of creating and distributing copies.

That's why it's called "copyright" law. Because it is about copies.

It is not "readright law".

No, there is nothing illegal about reading something that you havent paid for.

I didn't know it was legal to download books from torrents that are normally only available from the author for a cost.

What about movies and tv shows? I can download them via torrents to view without paying as well, completely legally?

Nobody can ever take any legal action against me ever for doing this?

How though would the creator of the content ever get paid for it if everyone can read and view it completely free? Why would they go through all the work of creating it with no gain to themselves?

Torrents are a somewhat special case since, by protocol, downloading and sharing happen at the same time. So by running a torrent of pirated media, you are necessarily infringing copyright (there are hacked clients that report bogus information that allow you to download only without sharing, but they are easily detectable and ~nobody uses them).

As far as I know, nobody in this country has ever been successfully prosecuted for the mere act of downloading, or even having obviously-illicitly-acquired pirated media in their possession.

As to your final question, the actual answer is because people are lazy. It requires more effort and technical sophistication to maintain a movie file collection than it does to run Netflix. Nearly any piece of remotely popular content is available for free with a bit of knowledge, but it's less hassle to just subscribe to services. There is no world in which piracy actually endangers creators.

I should have used an example other than torrenting, one that doesn't automatically distribute back.

Also, I'd say there is a difference between being illegal and whether someone has been successfully prosecuted or not.

I don't understand though how piracy doesn't endanger creators though. If a small time creator creates something, say a video game, and everyone pirates it instead of buys it, how has that not endangered him? Simply because you don't think it's plausible that enough people would refrain from paying?

Pretty much. For the simple reason that the "legitimate" way is always easier and the people that pirate are always a minority as a result.

> Nobody can ever take any legal action against me ever for doing this?

They can if you create or distribute copies.

That part is illegal and will get you in trouble, and is why people get in trouble for torrenting.

Just reading or watching other people's content isn't the illegal part.

I think it's safe to assume that AI has to pay for the book as well, sooner or later, as shown in the deals OpenAI has made with content publishers such as AP [0]. The question is how much they should pay.

[0] - https://www.pymnts.com/digital-payments/2023/58percent-of-co...

In order to present a book to a ML algorithm you need to copy it, either using a camera, or using other means (eg as a file). In USA that copying might be Fair Use, it's almost certainly not allowed in UK law AIUI.

Copying a webpage into a cache that allows presentation of the page to a user is only allowed because it is part of rendering the page to a user. Even if a computer only copies two words at a time from a source text, if it copies a substantial part overall then it still copied.

Honestly, I don't think slurping data to train ML models is allowed by copyright (but, I do, probably think it should be, as long as any significant reproductions are then prosecuted as infringements [also we should reduce copyright terms to ~7 years!]).

This is all my own opinion, unrelated to my employment.

> In order to present a book to a ML algorithm you need to copy it, either using a camera, or using other means

Almost all modern books are available as ebooks for the Kindle or otherwise. You aren't doing anything to the content itself that could be a violation.

So, you copy the Kindle book from a server to your local host to feed into your training algo (ie other means). Or you stream it piecewise into a buffer, still copying.

As long as you only train the network and never use it for inference, I suppose that's a reasonable argument. But a person is restricted in action by copyright regardless of the writing implement they choose to use. Whether they use a pencil or an LLM, they cannot freely reproduce copyrighted works in whole or in part, excepting some narrow conditions.

IMHO, an LLM is not "reading" a book in any way, certainly there is no parallel with how people read. It is encoding the book. That's how it can regurgitate chunks of that book later, including, in some contexts, by providing verbatim spans of text from the book.