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I'm not a lawyer and obviously we won't get any definite answer unless it actually goes to court, all of this is just hand waving and guessing.

But I think that unless GPT starts reciting large parts outside of the context of learning/education/research, reciting smaller snippets would fall into "fair use" and not be illegal.

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For it to be fair use, they still have to have legally owned the book (as far as I understand).

You can't steal a book, photocopy some pages, then claim the photocopied pages are fair use.

I think you can. It is a separate "crime". You would get 2 cases one for fair use (which if you are quoting, commenting, reviewing, generally repurposing content and it is in fact fair) and second case for license/terms breach and/or illegally obtaining this piece of work(for example if you stolen it from bookstore).

If you recite enough small snippets, you make a large one.

Especially with ChatGPT you can probe the model by asking certain questions about the material at hand to see if it has seen the entire book.

Also you don’t have to be able to recite the book verbatim for it to have been in your training set. The snippets I am referring to are on the side of the training data

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