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Libraries purchase books. One for every book they loan out at a time, digitally or physically.

The most recent noteworthy counter-example is archive.org breaching their "one purchase = one concurrent loan" limit during COVID, and they lost that court battle.

If you're equating libraries to LLMs, then every leading-model company would have purchased ~every book, newspaper, movie, and song in existence at least once. They have not.

Because libraries predate copyright and publishers and all the industry behind it. If libraries were to be invented nowadays, they won't let them purchase a single physical book to be enjoyed by several different physical persons over the course of time. What the publishing industry would like to have is 1 physical person = 1 or more physical copies, not the other way round.

So how do you explain LLM companies paying roughly none of it? If you're saying the protection is stronger now... how have they not been sued out of existence?

Honestly at this point a library might be an easy sell, in some ways. Copyright holders would be getting something rather than nothing (or the nearly-nothing they get from streaming), they might leap at that.

This can't be overstated! Libraries would never be allowed to come into existence today. I think we should all think long and hard about the society we have collectively created. It is not too late to make an effort to fight to reclaim the rights and norms we've ceded...

Many national libraries receive copies of “every” book published in the covered country. They don’t have to buy them.

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

If you're going by the broad definition and lack of "is this like 1 or 1,000,000 buildings" numbers, note that it also says:

>Unlike public libraries, these rarely allow citizens to borrow books.

Which would make them fairly irrelevant for this thread.

Libraries purchase books.

But not those who visit them and read for free.

And LLM companies purchase roughly nothing they train on (nor do their users), which is the point of the comparison here.

Yeah, I may give a whirl to those subreddits, but it does really show the dissonance between a sect's visceral hatred of AI relative to their interests when they're rejecting the progress of a game on the game's own franchise's subreddit.

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