Re:Danish Students Face Legal Action and Fines over Textbook...
by gruez on Monday February 02, 2026 @03:27PM
(#46860988)
Right, because LLMs aren't spitting out textbooks verbatim, or at least are vaguely adding safeguards against it. The students aren't being sued for ingesting pirated books, they're getting sued for sharing them.
>The Rights Alliance confirmed it will begin filing civil lawsuits against individual students who are caught sharing even a single digital textbook.
Re:Danish Students Face Legal Action and Fines over Textbook...
by joe_mamba on Monday February 02, 2026 @04:12PM
(#46861605)
>because LLMs aren't spitting out textbooks verbatim
Except that via the right prompt injections, some LLMs were caught they could spit out chapters of LoTR or Harry Potter 90% verbatim.
Safeguards LLMs implemented to prevent the output from being verbatim and to be considered legally transformative, are not legitimizing the IP theft, they're just covering it up, kind of like evidence spoliation.
But that's just my opinion, the courts will have to decide this one.
Re:Danish Students Face Legal Action and Fines over Textbook...
by gruez on Monday February 02, 2026 @06:45PM
(#46864006)
>Safeguards LLMs implemented to prevent the output from being verbatim and to be considered legally transformative, are not legitimizing the IP theft, they're just covering it up, kind of like evidence spoliation.
Is it also "evidence spoliation" for Google Books to resist attempts to dumping out all pages of a book?
Re:Danish Students Face Legal Action and Fines over Textbook...
by gruez on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @05:43PM
(#46878439)
That's irrelevant on two counts:
1. Not all LLMs were trained on illegally obtained books, and there's at least one court case where the use of illegal obtained books has been ruled illegal (exact sanctions are TBD)
2. In the context of discussing LLMs or students illegally distributing books, whether they obtained it legally is irrelevant. If you bought a book legally, that still doesn't give you the right to photocopy it and send to your friends.
>The Rights Alliance confirmed it will begin filing civil lawsuits against individual students who are caught sharing even a single digital textbook.
Except that via the right prompt injections, some LLMs were caught they could spit out chapters of LoTR or Harry Potter 90% verbatim.
Safeguards LLMs implemented to prevent the output from being verbatim and to be considered legally transformative, are not legitimizing the IP theft, they're just covering it up, kind of like evidence spoliation.
But that's just my opinion, the courts will have to decide this one.
Is it also "evidence spoliation" for Google Books to resist attempts to dumping out all pages of a book?
1. Not all LLMs were trained on illegally obtained books, and there's at least one court case where the use of illegal obtained books has been ruled illegal (exact sanctions are TBD)
2. In the context of discussing LLMs or students illegally distributing books, whether they obtained it legally is irrelevant. If you bought a book legally, that still doesn't give you the right to photocopy it and send to your friends.