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It must be stressful being told you belong in prison, I hope you're doing OK.

FWIW, I think you -- and anyone else who collects, organises and makes this sort of stuff available -- are doing God's work. Archivists are heroes. It's the people who try to ruin the lives of those providing public goods that belong in prison.

sillysaurusx, I salute you.

Thanks. It is really stressful. I can’t even mention our newborn at this point without being told I’m a horrible father and that I only talk about her to manipulate public opinion. Meanwhile we just pulled up to the ER at 1am to find out why she’s not eating enough, and we have an echocardiogram in 7 hours to try to diagnose why her heart isn’t pumping enough.

The Silverman folks served me papers a few days ago. https://x.com/theshawwn/status/1704559992135717238?s=61&t=jQ...

I’ve made negative dollars from books3. Thus far it’s been an impressive exercise in self harm.

At this point I’m just living each day to the fullest. Whatever happens will happen. I’ve been making a thread of firsts to capture the magic moments. https://x.com/theshawwn/status/1706375699756384318?s=61&t=jQ...

I take solace in that people like you can benefit from my work. It was always intended for hackers.

Those papers are only so you don't delete anything. They are asking you for a soft "legal hold" in case they'd subpoena you later.

You can let them know everything was lost in a backup mishap last year and have nothing to hold for them and they can stick it where it doesn't shine.

I’ve been giving it a lot of thought.

The reason I reacted so strongly was out of genuine surprise for what they want here. The books3 dataset was public from day one. I’ve done interviews being totally transparent where the data came from. I also made it in my wife’s parents’ basement, so this letter seems to imply that their basement is under legal hold.

In other words, there is no data. There’s no evidence of anything. All the evidence was released openly — it’s how science is replicated.

So it seems like it’s a precursor for more actions in the future. And whatever those are, they’ll likely not be friendly.

I'll be praying for you, man. If there's anything else I or anyone can do, please let us know.

> “as far as I can tell, it’s had zero economic impact on authors”

Why are you the right person in the world to make these decisions on the behalf of thousands of living authors?

I can understand distributing old works and abandonware. Copyright protection is far too long. But I don’t understand taking the recent creative work of somebody who’s alive and trying to make a living, and packaging it so that trillion-dollar corporations have a plausible excuse to use the work without permission.

Who are authors to decide that their work should be forbidden from being fed into ML models?

Everyone does it. And until the laws change, people will continue to.

You could make the same argument about LAION (and people do). The difference is that people have to scrape LAION themselves.

Google itself would be copyright infringement by that standard. They spider massive amounts of copyrighted content, and serve ads while doing so.

My goal was to make it possible for people like you and me to train a ChatGPT competitor.

> Who are authors to decide that their work should be forbidden from being fed into ML models?

That's how copyright works. To create a derivative work, you need a license.

> They spider massive amounts of copyrighted content

That's how copyright works. To create a derivative work, you need a license.

It's no more derivative than the works the authors produce, publicize and sell on their open source software platforms. Are they also going to be charged for every book released that has in some way contributed to their cultural hinterland?

We're talking about building a cultural context en-masse - not taking individual books to enjoy for free and plagiarise.

That single vs mass use of the books makes a significant ethical difference.

https://spawning.ai seems to have the right idea. They propose creating an ai.txt standard. I’m also working with them to make an opt out for books3, for whatever that’s worth. Which given the current climate of “sue or jail anyone who disagrees” might only stoke the flames.

Copyright is a deal with society. One might just as well ask why an author has any say over transactions between two independent third parties. The answer is because it has been deemed useful for the encouragement of creative works to provide for that say. It's not immutable and the rules can easily be changed if society thinks they should be.

> Why are you the right person in the world to make these decisions on the behalf of thousands of living authors?

This is a good argument. Why would anyone focus on the fact that no harm has been caused when we could be talking about theoretical harms that we can’t describe or quantify??

Because there is such a thing as moral rights?

Can I start writing books in your name and selling them on Kindle using your reputation with made-up quotes from your professional associates? Why not? How can you quantify the harm?

That's shifting the goalposts. They're totally different things.

I know the comments I post here are probably going to end up in more than a dozen web scrape databases, and I'm personally fine with that. I'm not fine with somebody impersonate me and steal my identity.

Are there any allegations at all that the books3 database misrepresents any works of any authors? Not even the generative models do that -- if it was obvious that the models had a tendency to misattribute authorship of works, they'd have been sued for that (among other things) already.

You don't get to respond to "why would anyone focus on the fact that no harm has been caused when we could be talking about theoretical harms that we can’t describe or quantify??" by making up more fictional harms that you have no evidence happened.

> “Are there any allegations at all that the books3 database misrepresents any works of any authors?”

It’s a misrepresentation to include these works in a database when the authors didn’t choose to do so.

The database itself is a creative work. It’s directly using the reputation of thousands of other authors. Having your work included in another creative work without your approval is textbook infringement.

> It’s a misrepresentation to include these works in a database when the authors didn’t choose to do so.

That's not how any of this works. You can't opt-out from my database of "50 Books that are Overrated", or "50 Books that are Great" no matter how much you claim copyright.

Are you really including the entire text of the books in your "50 Books" lists?

There's a difference between "Having your work included in another creative work without your approval", and "writing books in your name and selling them on Kindle using your reputation".

I'm surprised that you seem to fail to see the distinction.

> Because there is such a thing as moral rights?

The inalienable right to protect us from a computer using statistical math to output the word “embiggens” when given a Simpsons prompt is as obvious as free speech and liberty.

Edit

>Can I start writing books in your name and selling them on Kindle using your reputation with made-up quotes from your professional associates? Why not? How can you quantify the harm?

You make a very compelling point here. The books3 torrent has made so much money by doing what you’ve described. Quantifying the harm is easy, simply take all of the money from books3 (the file archive)’s ill-gotten-gains checking account and give it to its victims.

Excellent comparison because the implementation details of free speech are far from obvious and have been constantly tuned and tweaked over the centuries. (“Liberty” isn’t any specific right.)

It’s easy to pick an example that you consider benevolent and harmless. But have you considered that authors simply may not want their work included in a Simpsons meme generator?

Samuel Beckett dictated the set design for his plays to every last detail. Because of long copyright, you still can’t perform your own version of “En attendant Godot” today. I don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing. But I have to respect Beckett’s obsessive creative vision and that the law doesn’t let me (or Disney) make our own versions of Godot yet.

Re: your edit —

You wouldn’t have written the books I’m selling on Kindle in your name. So by the same logic that there’s no harm to authors when Meta and Google and OpenAI sell products derived from pirated books, there’s no harm to you when I use your name for my own ventures.

Sillysaurusx created a database whose only appeal is that it contains works by famous authors. This is not fundamentally different from me writing a book in your name.

> But have you considered that authors simply may not want their work included in a Simpsons meme generator?

Ironically copyright law seems to explicitly allow this under fair use for parody...

I totally understand that authors need to put food on the table, and economic rights are important. What I don't get is why we should worry that some author might be unhappy that their works end up in a meme. It seems to be the last thing we should worry about in the grand scheme of things.

it's not explicit, it has to be argued in court whether it was a parody or not

see: 2 Live Crew's cover of Pretty Woman ending up in the supreme court

https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/92-1292.ZO.html

the law is explicit, the application of such is of course subject to interpretation of the facts

>(“Liberty” isn’t any specific right.)

> But have you considered that authors simply may not want their work included in a Simpsons meme generator?

“Liberty” isn’t a right. What is the word that you would use to describe the specific right to have your possible wishes be enforced as a matter of law?

I’m fascinated to learn that rights (which are universal) include the right to stop anyone from doing anything I don’t like.

Edit:

Wait what

> Samuel Beckett dictated the set design for his plays to every last detail. Because of long copyright, you still can’t perform your own version of “En attendant Godot” today. I don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing. But I have to respect Beckett’s obsessive creative vision and that the law doesn’t let me (or Disney) make our own versions of Godot yet.

You believe that your inability to perform Godot extends from a moral right? I am assuming you wouldn’t bring up moral rights and then immediately point out that you’re actually talking about your untested interpretation of a law that you don’t actually find to be just.

> “You believe that your inability to perform Godot extends from a moral right?”

Yes, absolutely.

“Moral rights” in this context is a specific term:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights

It includes “the right to the integrity of the work”, which is how the Beckett estate prevents me from making my own set design for “Godot” even if I pay for the rights to perform the piece.

If we're talking about law the discussion is meaningless unless and until the jurisdiction is explicitly stated.

Moral rights are dealt with differently in different jurisdictions.

> Can I start writing books in your name and selling them on Kindle using your reputation

Yes: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/08/autho...

One fucked-up thing doesn’t justify another.

Or do you really think what happened to Jane Friedman (the author in that Ars article) is right?

Note how it was Amazon resisting her takedown request. The giant tech corporations love copyright infringement because it gives more power to them, as with the books3 case.

> One fucked-up thing doesn’t justify another.

Correct. My intent was to acknowledge it was possible to do so (& is being done) not to give permission for it. :)

> Or do you really think what happened to Jane Friedman [...] is right?

Not at all.

> The giant tech corporations love copyright infringement because it gives more power to them [...]

I agree. One of the problems I have with the AI training situation is that corporations appear to be able to avoid complying with the onerous copyright regime they themselves created/support but demand individuals still adhere to it.

If they're not prepared to limit themselves to training data currently licensable to them or in the public domain maybe they shouldn't have supported copyright term extension/enforcement and/or work to ensure more works enter the public domain earlier.

Assuming you believe technological advancements are a good thing, there's a balance to be struck between depriving authors of revenue they wouldn't have had in the first place (when you write a book in 2010, do you actually do so with the intent that you'd get paid by companies developing an AI with that data?), and stifling technological progress because there's new money to be made and we haven't figured how to divide the pie. (Yes, I believe they should be paid, but I don't think authors should morally be allowed to hold their works for ransom in the 'a million dollars per book, take it or leave it' sense. There should be some more reasonable thing here.)

We're all members of society, it's not like you want to live in an authoritarian environment where only Big Brother has the rights to make that decision. Mind you, according to your logic, even the authors of the books themselves would not have the right to make a general decision, only that of their own works. But they wouldn't have any insight at all to how allowing the data be trained on models will advance our understanding of AI tech.

Who are publishers to do so? Because they're the ones that have decided for everyone right now.

There will be zero economic impact on authors because they're already being screwed by publishers.

That’s pointless whataboutism. The authors can decide for themselves if they want to be in a contract with a publisher.

Sure they can. Ask any academic how they feel about publishers.

> I love ML for the sake of ML. I wanted to prove that individual researchers can contribute in a way that matters.

Sounds like someone so focused on "if they could" but not giving much thought about "if they should".

I don't want you or any responsible ML researcher to go to prison. Responsible researchers make mistakes, but responsible researchers also consider the consequences of their actions. How much consideration was given to those? And given everything you know now, where would you draw the line? At what point do the consequences of this sort of research become indistinguishable from theft? Suppose the research enabled the piracy of a high fidelity copy of a single author's work without their permission? Would that be wrong? What about ~2e5 low fidelity copies of who knows how many man years of labor?

It's fairly clear to me that trained models are a transformative rather than derivative works. However, without distributing forms which are not transformed, open/distributed/permissionless work in this space is either severely hampered, or basically impossible. I think a lot of people instinctively feel that removing barriers to their work is particularly important, since if we don't it could remain impossible for anyone outside a few megacorps -- who have the resource to obtain whatever they need in multiple ways without the additional liability of distributing non-transformed copies externally -- to build highly scaled up machine learning models.

I largely agree. I would also like to see more research into how to give authors incentives to license their works for transformative purposes such as training and ways to credit them when the results of inference draw disproportionately on a particular author's work.

I’m not sure. Someone pointed out that I should’ve put a non commercial license on books3. But books3 isn’t my data to license.

As for actual impact, books3 made its way into BloombergGPT and LLaMA. I’m just happy it made LLaMA a little better.

Would I do it again? Well, given that there’s little benefit other than warm feelings about LLaMA and pride that hackers can make an open source ChatGPT competitor with this, that’s a tough question.

As for the line, I invite you to download books3 and try reading one of the books. The experience is positively awful. Notepad isn’t a good book reader; it’s missing images, which renders lots of the technical books less useful; and the markdown format isn’t even modern markdown syntax. Code snippets are indented with 4 spaces instead of surrounded with triple backticks.

Meanwhile anyone seriously interested in reading a book will go straight to libgen and get the real book themselves. So I’m skeptical of claims of harm.

As for whether it’s wrong, let history be my judge.

> As for the line, I invite you to download books3 and try reading one of the books.

I'm not going to and I suspect anyone who values their time won't either, especially when my public library meets my needs. But the line I'm asking you to look for isn't the one around a single book - it's the aggregate value previously locked in hundreds of thousands of them now released by the power of research like yours.

Even if you don't agree, I hope you appreciate that authors whose works are protected by copyright will feel entitled to a share of that value. Most of them didn't write their works to further ML research.

> Would I do it again? ... that’s a tough question.

I am reminded of when I was young how accessing an unprotected computer wasn't in itself a crime. People like me hacked into systems mainly out of curiosity. Then the media started making movies about teenagers starting nuclear wars with dial-up modems. Then journalists jumped on the hype train to sell their books and convinced people hackers needed to be punished. Then some went to jail and we got things like the CFAA. In a few short years what might have been wrong but wasn't explicitly illegal became so.

You are clearly a smart and intellectually honest person but society often treats such people poorly - especially when confronted by scary new technology - and the tone of your answers are giving me serious Aaron Swartz vibes. There's a lot of money at stake here.

Nobody cares until there’s someone’s making a billion dollars out of it.

Truth is your only mistake was that you made yourself traceable; someone would’ve done it anyway. Should’ve put the dataset on a magnet link and host via vpn.

> And as far as I can tell, it’s had zero economic impact on authors.

That doesn't matter. That's not your call to make without the permission of the copyright holders.