Just to clarify, the most valuable company in the world refuses to pay for digital media?
I assume you're expecting that they'll reach out and cut a deal with each publishing house separately, and then those publishing houses will have to somehow transfer their data over to NVIDIA. But that's a very custom set of discussions and deals that have to be struck.
I think they're going to the pirate libraries because the product they want doesn't exist.
I know this comes across as pedantic, but theft doesn't even come into the equation. Thousands and judges and lawyers have examined this, and there is no argument for theft, at all, in any jurisdiction. Why use such lazy language like this? Just to inflame the discussion?
Your use of the word "stealing" is incorrect, but regardless, I'm not condoning piracy, merely examining the incentives we've set up to lead massive, multi-billion dollar corporations from engaging in it.
If this is the only legal way for them to train, then yes that is what they should do instead of breaking the law... just because its not easy doesn't mean piracy is fine.
Existing rulings are beginning to suggest that if the books can be obtained legally, a separate license is not required for training. So I'm naturally interested in legal ways folks training models would get a lot of books, and whether the publishing industry has even considered the value there.
If it isn't distributed in a manner to your liking, the only legal thing you can do is not have a copy of it at all.
Wasn't asking for advice on copyright, but since we're here, your statement is slightly too strict, at least with respect to US copyright law. The copyright holder has sole distribution authority over the first sale of the work in the United States, but thereafter the first-sale doctrine allows it to be distributed by anyone thereafter. It is limited to the US, though, as far as I know. This is what allowed anthropic to train on printed books, which they then destroyed: they were able to purchase them in bulk because of the first-sale doctrine, as the publishers and authors would likely try to destroy the first-sale doctrine if they could, as evidenced by what's happened in the world of digital books.
That would be the end of discussion if we lived in a world governed by the rule of law but we're repeatedly reminded that we don't.