It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use, but the pirating of the books is the issue at hand here, and is what Anthropic “whoopsied” into in acquiring the training data.
Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine.
Rainbows End was prescient in many ways.
It remains deranged.
Everyone has more than a right to freely have read everything is stored in a library.
(Edit: in fact initially I wrote 'is supposed to' in place of 'has more than a right to' - meaning that "knowledge is there, we made it available: you are supposed to access it, with the fullest encouragement").
Every human has the right to read those books.
And now, this is obvious, but it seems to be frequently missed - an LLM is not a human, and does not have such rights.
Additionally:
> Every human has the right to read those books.
Since when?
I strongly disagree - knowledge should be free.
I don't think the author's arrangement of the words should be free to reproduce (ie, I think some degree of copyright protection is ethical) but if I want to use a tool to help me understand the knowledge in a book then I should be able to.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....
Since in our legal system, only humans and groups of humans (the corporation is a convenient legal proxy for a group of humans that have entered into an agreement) have rights.
Property doesn't have rights. Land doesn't have rights. Books don't have rights. My computer doesn't have rights. And neither does an LLM.
If you use the commons to create your model, perhaps you should be obligated to distribute the model for free (or I guess for the cost of distribution) too.
That is false. As a direct consequence of LLMs:
1. The web is increasingly closed to automated scraping, and more marginally to people as well. Owners of websites like reddit now have a stronger incentive to close off their APIs and sell access.
2. The web is being inundated with unverified LLM output which poisons the well
3. More profoundly, increasingly basing our production on LLM outputs and making the human merely "in the loop" rather than the driver, and sometimes eschewing even the human in the loop, leads to new commons that are less adapted to the evolutions of our world, less original and of lesser quality
(The "for sale" side does not limit the purpose to sales only, before somebody wants to attack that.)
I presume you (people do) have exploited that knowledge that society has made in principle and largely practice freely accessible to build a professionality, which is now for-profit: you will charge parties for the skills that available knowledge has given you.
The "profit" part is not the problem.
They'll either go out of business or make better models paid while providing only weaker models for free despite both being trained on the same data.
It does not matter that your screwdriver does not have rights: you will be using it for the purpose consistent with the principle of your freedom and encouragement to fix your cabling. You are not required to "hand-screw them drives".
In context, for example, you can take notes. That has nothing to do with the "rights of the paper".
Nothing forbids an automated reader by principle - especially when the automated reader is an intermediate tool for human operation.