[spudlyo]

When I buy a book, I don't buy a license to read it, I don't sign an EULA that says I won't scan it, digitize it, or write a program to analyze the word frequencies it contains. Do you want buy a license to read a book, because this is how you get there.

[squokko]

The law has always been able to recognize a distinction between Hunter S. Thompson reading Ernest Hemingway and learning from his style and a billion GPUs reading a billion books to be able to produce it on demand. It takes time for the law to catch up to the technology but it will.

[tdb7893]

You don't sign an EULA saying you can't do those things because scanning then distributing is already prohibited by copyright. The way to start a license war is to keep the status quo of these companies being able to ingest and essentially reproduce human work for free. One of my big worries about AI is that it will accelerate companies locking everything down and hoarding their own data.

[pastel8739]

I suspect it’s already has a dampening effect on individuals sharing. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth to know that anything you share intending to help fellow humans will immediately be ripped and profited from by companies that want to take your job and profit from it.

[Gigachad]

The old rules were built on based on old capabilities and and old reality which no longer exists.

[squidbeak]

This is a deceptive line of dismissal. Sound principles needs to be figured out before imposing any kind of restriction on art - "things have changed" doesn't cut it.

[Gigachad]

Figuring things out is exactly what needs to happen. I think it is valid to dismiss arguments of “this is how copyright has always worked” when those rules were written before AI completely changed the game.

[aerhardt]

In Spain books include a copyright notice explicitly prohibiting reproduction and digitalization and alluding to article 270 of the Spanish criminal code.

[franciscop]

The book can say anything it wants, whenever it's true and/or applicable in court later on is a very different matter. Spain's SGAE is a very powerful lobby but still needs to follow the law.

Edit: haven't followed the law in a while, but you could definitely copy, digitalize and scan documents for yourself and your friends (copia privada).

[aerhardt]

In Spain EULAs cannot infringe upon the law either.

[add-sub-mul-div]

Perhaps it's that the transaction for you, an individual not explicitly profiting from the work, should be treated differently than a corporation using a work solely to profit from it.

[throwawaysoxjje]

Of course you don’t, because it’s not the EULA that enforces the copyright. Copyright law is what enforces the EULA. It’s right there in the fact it’s a Licensing Agreement.

[croes]

The problem isn’t the reading. The problem is the output based on somebody’s other work.

There is a reason why we call it styles, because it’s a recognizable pattern someone came up with maybe after decades of work.

[JAlexoid]

The "funny" thing is that we absolutely allow people to copy style... but somehow software isn't allowed to do that?

You don't even need to have a legally acquired source material to produce work in a certain style.

The new reality allows for original creators to actually track the chain, so we're in this situation.

[croes]

If people would have the same mass output as software we wouldn’t allow that too.

If one or two people take an apple from your tree it’s not a big deal, if a machine takes 10,000 it is.

[mitthrowaway2]

When I buy a patented product I don't sign an EULA that says I can't manufacture and sell a copy, but I still can't manufacture and sell a copy.

[esafak]

It is not an individual buying the book but a corporation, with the purpose of being able to create imitations of it, and all other books.

[squidbeak]

It's even worse than that. You then have to pay an additional fee to use its ideas as inspiration for your own book.

[saaaaaam]

Copyright quite literally protects the act of copying or reproducing a work protected by copyright. And you are technically entering into something akin to an end user licensing agreement when you buy a book, the only difference being that the EULA is incorporated into law on an international basis through reciprocal copyright treaties.

So if scan a book you are making a copy. In some copyright jurisdictions this is allowed for individuals under a private copying exception - a copyright opt out, if you like - but the important thing is private use. In some jurisdictions there is also a fair use exception, which allows you to exploit the rights protected by copyright under certain circumstances, but fair use is quite specific and one big issue with fair use is that the rights you are exploiting cannot result in something that competes with the original work.

Other acts restricted by copyright include distribution, adaptation, performance, communication and rental.

So if you copy a book, digitize it, and write a program to analyze the word frequencies it contains you may, in some jurisdictions but not all, be allowed to do this.

If you’re doing it locally on your own machine you are simply copying it. If you do it in the cloud you are copying it and communicating the copy. If you copy it, analyze it and train an AI model on it that could be considered fair use in certain jurisdictions. Whether the outputs are adaptations of the training data is a matter of debate in the copyright community.

But importantly if you commercialise that model and the resulting outputs compete with the copyright protected material you used to train, your fair use argument may fail.

So when you buy a book you are actually party to what is effectively a licence granted by the copyright holder, albeit it to the publisher. But as the end user of the book you are still restricted in what you can do with that copyright protected work, through a universal end user licence encoded in law.