[meindnoch]

They didn't just "read" the books. They scanned every single page of every single book in the library, then took the scans home.

Are humans allowed to do that?

[NoahZuniga]

Yes!

Creating personal copies of copyrighted works are allowed. (Also, libraries really don't mind if you take pictures of the content of works they have.)

[Lionga]

Well LLMs dont make personal copies they make commercial copies.

[NoahZuniga]

I didn't say if LLMs are allowed do that, I said that humans are allowed to do that.

[gield]

What do you mean with "then took the scans home"? Anthropic et al didn't buy all the books in the world and kept them for themselves.

[meindnoch]

Correct, they torrented them. I just wanted to stick to the library analogy of the parent comment.

[jachee]

Therein lies the rub: they didn't buy them... They pirated digital copies of them.

See, e.g.: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/libge...