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Comment by p0w3n3d | Hacker News Reader

Normally people get punished for downloading illegal books. Allegedly someone at meta downloaded hella ton of illegal books and taught the LLM on them and they said "oh it was for his/hers private usage". You won't get justice here

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This to me is the most ridiculous thing about the whole AI situation. Piracy is now apparently just okay as long as you do it on an industrial scale and with the expressed intention of hurting the economic prospects of the authors of the pirated work.

Seems completely ridiculous when compared to the trouble I was in that one time I pirated a single book that I was unable to purchase.

We've essentially given up on pretending that corporations are also held accountable for their crimes in the recent years, and I think that's more worrying than anything.

Hollywood and media publishers run entire franchises of legal bullies across developed world to harass individuals, and lobby for laws allowing easy prosecution of ISP contract owner. Even Google Books was castrated because of IP rights. Now I have hard time to imagine how this IP+AI cartel operates. Nowadays everyone and their cat throws millions on AI so I imagine IP owners get their share.

Well, so what the actual ruling was was that use of the books was okay, but only if they were legally obtained. And so the authors could proceed with a lawsuit for illegally downloading the books. But then presumably compensation for torrenting the books was included as part of the out of court settlement. So the lesson is something like AI is fine, but torrenting books is still not acceptable, m'kay wink wink.

Recently archive.org got into trouble for renting one book (or fixed amount of books) exclusively on the whole world, like in a library. Sad men from law office came and made an example of them, but it seems that if they used those books to teach AI and serve the content in "remembered" way, they would get away with it.

> Seems completely ridiculous when compared to the trouble I was in that one time I pirated a single book that I was unable to purchase.

How would one manage to get in trouble for pirating a book? Unless you mean with your employer for doing it on their network or something?

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