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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

It's not:

> No portion of this script may be performed, or reproduced by any means, or quoted, or published in any medium without prior written consent of SONY PICTURES TELEVISION INC. * 10202 West Washington Boulevard * Culver City, CA 90232

Cease & Desist Notice coming in 3...2...1

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I suppose all those subtitle sites aren't exactly legal either, but I don't see them going anywhere.

Subtitles can be auto-generated. Screenplays, not really.

> Subtitles can be auto-generated.

Is that legally any different from OCRing a copyrighted book? Or maybe running an audiobook through speech-to-text..

Well OCRing books (for book search) was found to be fair use because “book search” and “books” are in different markets. So to the extent it is like book search that could be in its favor.

Your other example (text to speech and audio books) is significantly less transformative as audio books and books are basically the same or very related markets. (For example they are both sold in the same specialty stores)

Subtitle files are arguably transformative and have a more benign character and purpose. They would have a significantly better fair use argument vs this. The purpose tends to either be to help the disabled or to assist non-native speakers in understanding the spoken dialogue track of the film. They also don’t directly compete with the underlying piece of copyrighted material (the screenplay) in the same market (publishing). A subtitle site could still easily end up on the losing end of a copyright suit but my point is this is far from an apples to apples comparison just because they both deal with text and audio/visual media.

Just can be used to refine training of GPT3 model /s

Though the collection will live on in infamy, on archive.org, or a tracker near you

archive.org isn’t an illegal operation. You can even get other people’s websites scrubbed from it by pressuring them.

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