[crazygringo]

I'm not sure there's any legal distinction though.

Is a book publicly available? No, you have to purchase it. But once you do, you're legally allowed to let your friends and family and so forth read it too. As long as you don't sell copies of it (the "copy" part of "copyright"), or meaningfully take away the ability for the publisher to make money from sales (so you can't post it for the whole world to see on the internet).

And sure, there are lots of ToS for digital works, but are they actually enforceable? ToS can say you're not allowed to let anyone else read the book you purchased. But no court is going to say you can't lend your Kindle to your friend for them to read it too. Many ToS clauses are flat-out illegal.

Meta will argue that training on books is no different from reading all the books at a friend's house. That as long as Meta isn't reselling or making publicly available the original text, they're in the clear.

[Snild]

I don't know what the deal is in the relevant jurisdictions, but in Swedish copyright law, the provenance of the original matters ("lovlig förlaga").

This means that it's not legal to download a rip of e.g. a CD that was uploaded without consent, even if you own a copy.

(This exception to the general right to make copies for private use was added in 2005 to make downloading illegal -- previously, only uploading was infringing.)

I would assume just the act of downloading this content was illegal in the relevant US jurisdictions as well.

[wil421]

I believe the most famous cases in the US have only gone after the people sharing or seeding or uploading content. My ISP could care less what I download from use net but they will definitely care when I start seating.

[Terr_]

But they are making unauthorized copies: Their training data set is analogous to private collection of duplicates.

What do you think copyright law(suits) would do if a regular person made copies of every book and movie and song they saw, placing the duplicate media in a room of their house?