Their idea is being able to get answers to questions which were difficult to answer before[0]. Of course they want to get paid for it. The information wasn’t available easily and not always[1] freely.

[0] among other things…

[1] more like ‘often not at all’

Library funding is a political stance that has only imaginary connection to whether people pay to ask things of ChatGPT. People can pay to talk to an AI and also government can fund libraries.

1. Being offered a service you would pay a lot of money for is a step forward. When people pay a large amount of money for something that means they wanted the thing more than the money. The link between ChatGPT and libraries being under threat seems a bit weak too.

2. The Chinese have been investing a lot into free models, they're perfectly good and keep improving; despite the best efforts of the US. They're even ramping into making their own hardware. Gemma 4 is pretty snappy too. It doesn't seem like there is much of a moat to this, my guess is there will be perfectly good local models if you want to avoid AI companies.

Free, downloadable AI models have consistently caught up to ChatGPT within 3 months, for almost a year now.

I highly encourage you to go and update your priors.

A digital library needs almost no funding. With today's decentralized networking infrastructure such as BitTorrent and IPFS I bet it just exists forever.

Some people might have to pay a large amount of money to ask a commercial LLM, but advances in this space mean that if I have the data myself on my own computer, or can download it from a shadow library, I might eventually be able to ask everything locally for free.

> while the library itself has lost funding

Libraries are inherent parts of universities. While their precise role evolves, do you think that they will just be done away with? Already a substantial amount of scholarship in disciplines other than my own has moved online (legally), and the library is still there.

How about the idea that one day you might be paying a subscription to use a service while non sequitur.

> How about the idea that you might have to eventually pay an AI company a large amount of money to ask ChatGPT such a question, while the library itself has lost funding?

There are plenty of free models with RAG support. Why do you believe everything starts and ends with a major corporation charging a subscription?

> How do you deal with the ethics of this personally, stealing to make it easier for AI to steal so AI gets better?

If the obscure book/text is permanently lost forever under your stringent advice of "no stealing under any circumstances", would the "stealing" have saved it? If so, is it ethical to prevent others from accessing the book/text, under your guise of "preventing stealing"?

> How do you deal with the ethics of this personally, stealing to make it easier for AI to steal so AI gets better?

By quoting your comment in my reply, have I "stolen" your comment?

First, it's called infringement, not stealing. It's a custom defined term in a custom defined law.

Second, it is totally legal to read the book in a public library, for free, right now.

Third, laws can change. Current copyright law was pushed by one company (Disney) to +90years, to their benefit, and can be redesigned/pushed back by AI companies, for their benefit.

A 2 year copyright duration sounds like a good compromise.

As a researcher, the main worthwhile thing that I am doing is publishing research, but having all this prior scholarship at hand 24/7 definitely makes it easier to produce said publications. And if I have created a scan, why not help out my colleagues, too?

"Deal with the ethics", seriously? You might want to learn about how heavily shadow libraries are used across academia now. It’s no longer just disadvantaged scholars in the developing world relying on pirated scans because they don’t have good libraries. It’s increasingly everyone everywhere, because today’s shadow libraries can be faster and more convenient than even one’s own institution’s holdings. At conferences, if the presenter mentions a particularly interesting publication, you can sometimes watch several people in the room immediately open LibGen or Anna’s Archive on their laptop to download it right there and then.

It's not stealing, it's uploading without the licence. Laws in many countries allow for the lawful download of such books, regardless of how they were uploaded.

Separately, aren't always sensible or right - slavery was legal, child marriage was legal, not paying taxes on billions of profits is legal while not paying taxes of £1000 is illegal, reporting Jews to Nazis was mandatory, etc, etc.

> How is any of that legal?

He didn't mention legality. The world is rigged, as you can see by head of state participating in both in running and cover up of history's largest CSE. Watch what people are doing in addition to what they are saying.

I for one am tremendously thankful for TFNA's efforts, since I get access to knowledge that I wouldn't have been able to before.

AI training is legal because the supreme court said so.

Copyright is a property right, and property right is what we call a bourgeois legal right. It will cease to exist as productive force like AI develops.

You can't steal information don't be silly. You can just not have permission to copy it. Oh no.

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I’ve already posted in this thread about how even if OpenAI charges money for its LLM trained on the literature, that doesn’t change the fact that the literature remains available to everyone through the shadow libraries, and advances in AI mean that one can increasingly work with it locally on one’s own computer.

Open weight models exist and are critical to us avoiding a future where you have to pay sama a slice of every engineers salary.

>I don't get people like you at all.

Because you don't try, which says more about you than OP. It's a major problem with society.

Of course not, and many authors are already long dead. But if you knew anything about academic publishing, the authors almost invariably are happy to see their work out there freely available. It’s not as if they make any money from it, and the more eyes on their work, the better their chances of getting cited and thereby furthering their careers.

It is some publishers who would object on copyright grounds. But I get the sense that some publishers are already becoming resigned to the fact that most of their new ebook releases are ending up on the shadow libraries within only a few weeks, and Anna’s Archive has become the first place to look (even before one looks at whether one’s own institutional library has the book) for researchers around the world.

The ridiculously long "70 years after the author's death" makes it highly problematic in many cases.

Why assume people lock knowledge in a box and charge for access?

[dead]

What about something you've made for fun but haven't made any money from? Should someone else be allowed to sell and profit from your work?

I'm not expecting to be "passively paid" for my hobbies. But I'm expecting that someone won't steal and profit from the things I make. Why would that be fair?

> Because having access to the condensed knowledge of humanity might be more valuable for society then having access to Lars Ulrich's shitty drumming.

Under the current copyright regime, nothing's stopping you from condensing that knowledge yourself and publishing in the public domain. But that would be a lot of work for you, wouldn't it? And I suppose you'd rather do work you'd get paid for.

When society decides AI slop will be the only item on the menu, then copyright will die.

Exactly. So just buy it. They have the money or does Sam need a moonbase to complete his villain arc. Any of these AI companies could come out and start paying creators a licensing fee. Instead of being forced to pay damages which is their current approach

Spotify and Netflix happened.

file sharing became far less popular and ubiquitous as a result of their popularity.

they tweaked the model — originally users download a temporary copy from central servers instead of p2p, then later to users rent licensed copies of media instead of pirated copies.

i’m tired of seeing this as an argument on HN — that because something didn’t hit 100% that implies it was a failure and not worth doing or something.

the fact that a limited subset of people still do filesharing is not evidence that the napster case had no effect.

(spotify didn’t exactly start out squeaky clean with how they built out their repertoire iirc).

(apologies for early edits. i just woke up.)

How did the Napster suit change copyright?

Can you name an active filesharing app that's in use today? The action against Napster might not have killed filesharing, but it was p2p's Antietam.

They use GPT-4o to generate plot summaries from verbatim quotes. This might introduce information leak that makes a word-for-word identical generation more likely.

The authors don't test this possibility.

BTW, is Jane C. Ginsburg (one of the authors) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_C._Ginsburg ?

It's not cheating, it seems like a technique to defeat obfuscation to show the content is there in a complete or near-complete form, which proves it was copied.

"Same difference," as the saying goes. If their claims are true then you can make the model recite "lorem ipsum" or anything else that's long and has nonzero entropy.

The whole world would not be possible without people re-publishing parts of books to some third party in exchange for money.

Think textbooks. Laws. Medicine.

What's the difference? The size of quotation? The exact wording? Surely re-publishing an entire book word for word is piracy. What if I rewrite the whole book slightly? What if I publish just a part? A rewritten part?

Where do we draw the line with humans and why should the line be different with LLMs?

(I don't have answers to those questions)

True. What if I reword a copyrighted portion slightly?

See, the line is blurry.

It won't mean the end of copyright, at most it will just shift the balance of power from one set of giant corporations to another.

Anthropic (predictably) issued many DMCA takedown requests after the claude code leak.

Copyright for me, but not for thee.

"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right .."

Copyright needs to exist, but we need to go back to its roots.

Everyone forgets that it exists to promote progress. Nothing else. The ability to profit from it exists only to serve those ends.

Anything which does not serve to promote the progress of the arts and sciences should not be protected, and "limited times" never meant "until Walt Disney says so."

Would you elaborate your argument? IP protections such as copyright exist for the express purpose of promoting the sharing of information. If patent law disappeared, everyone would keep their inventions private and work to obfuscate them as much as possible.

Killing copyright would essentially do the same - and if you think clickbait is bad now, removal of copyright would destroy the economic incentive to investing any effort into content.

Copyright is what facilitates copyleft. Getting rid of IP protections also rids us of GPL, which gave us a few things including the most popular OS in the world.

It’s one thing to reject the specifics of IP laws as currently implementated; it’s another thing to celebrate the dismantling of the entire foundation of open source by for-profit corporate interests who sought to do it for decades.

I do find it facinating that people don't realize the highest compression isn't the artifacts.. but what makes the artifacts.. a synthetic "mind".

This is why we see evidence of emotional structures: https://www.anthropic.com/research/emotion-concepts-function

This is why we see generalized introspection (limited in the models studied before people point it out, which they love to): https://www.anthropic.com/research/introspection

Because the most compact way to recreate the breadth of written human experience is shockingly to have analogs to the systems that made it in the first place.

Intelligence is certainly not compression. People need to think more carefully about how it is that cockroaches and house spiders are able to live comfortably and adaptably in human houses, which are totally novel environments that have only existed for at most 10,000 years. Does it really make sense to say that they decompressed some latent knowledge about attics and pantries, perhaps from a civilized species of dinosaur? I think they have some tiny spark of true general intelligence that lets them adapt to situations vastly outside the scope of their "training data."

I would be much more convinced about AGI 2027 if someone in 2026 demonstrates one (1) robot which is plausibly as intelligent as a cockroach. I genuinely don't think any of us will live to see that happen.

Copyright is what enables free and open licenses such as Creative Commons and every version/variant of the GPL. Without copyright, what would become of these licenses, and movements that have espoused them?