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by embedding-shape 158 days ago
What do you mean 'sucked up'? It's data on their machines already, people willingly give them the data, so Amazon can process and offer it to readers. No sucking needed, just use the data people uploaded to you already.
1 comments
sib 158 days ago
There's definitely a legal & contractual difference between (1) storing the books on your servers in order to provide them to end users who have purchased licenses to read them and (2) using that same data for training a model that might be used to create books that compete with the originals. I'm pretty sure that's why GP means by "sucking up."

This is analogous the difference between Gmail using search within your mail content to find messages that you are looking for vs Gmail providing ads inside Gmail based on the content of your email (which they don't do).

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embedding-shape 158 days ago
Yeah, I guess the "err" is on my side, I've always took "suck up" as a synonym for scraping, not just "using data for stuff".

And yeah, you're most likely right about the first, and the contract writers have with Amazon most certainly anticipates this, and includes both uses in their contract. But! Never published on Amazon, so don't know, but I'm guessing they already have the rights for doing so with what people been uploading these last few years.

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philipwhiuk 157 days ago
They may not serve ads but you don't know they don't train their models on them.

If I still used Gmail I'd read the terms of service real close.

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