does embezzlement have to be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt?

There is no need for 'a majority of the world had access to every book ever digitized' - and it's deeply morally wrong (theft-adjacent) to take someone else's work without compensating them on their terms.

There's Wikipedia, Stack Exchange, the Internet Archive, and millions of small blogs and websites hosting content that is completely free. There's full K-12 textbooks on OpenStax and Wikibooks. There's lectures on YouTube and MIT OpenCourseWare. There's already tens (hundreds?) of thousands of books in the public domain, and tens of thousands more under Creative Commons licenses (where the author explicitly released their work for free distribution). books) need some protection for their work being taken without compensation.įundamentally, you are never entitled to someone else's work. More manipulation - 'think of the children!'Ĭopyright exists because people who produce content with low distribution costs (e.g.

> ~every child doesn't have access to ~every book ever written This is emotionally manipulative speech that provides no value to HN and only serves the purpose of bypassing peoples' logical reasoning circuits.

Kill one person and you're a murderer, kill a million and to ask you about it is a 'gotcha question' that you can react to with outrage. If you downloaded all of them, you would be liable for many billions of dollars in damages.īut companies like Google and Facebook get to play by different rules. If you downloaded a book from that website, you would be sued and found guilty of infringement. This is the makers of AI explicitly saying that they did use copyrighted works from a book piracy website. ThePile, the complaint points out, was described in an EleutherAI paper as being put together from “a copy of the contents of the Bibliotik private tracker.” Bibliotik and the other “shadow libraries” listed, says the lawsuit, are “flagrantly illegal.” The complaint lays out in steps why the plaintiffs believe the datasets have illicit origins - in a Meta paper detailing LLaMA, the company points to sources for its training datasets, one of which is called ThePile, which was assembled by a company called EleutherAI.

Does embezzlement have to be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt?