Given OpenAI's history and relationship with the "AI safety" movement, I wouldn't be surprised to find out later that they also lobbied for the same proposed state-level regulations they're seeking relief from.

That's exactly what has been happening:

Ask HN: Why is OpenAI pushing for regulation so much - 2023

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36045397

Trump should have a Most Favored Corporate status, each corporation in a vertical can compete for favor and the one that does gets to be "teacher's pet" when it comes to exemptions, contracts, trade deals, priority in resource right access, etc.

Donald Trump, Jr. is in charge. Vivek Ramaswamy and Peter Thiel are involved. Azoria ETF and 1789 Capital are funds designed to fund MAGA-friendly companies.

But this may be a sideshow. The main show is US CEOs sucking up to Trump, as happened at the inauguration. That parallels something Putin did in 2020. Putin called in the top two dozen oligarchs, and told them "Stay out of politics and your wealth won’t be touched." "Loyalty is what Putin values above all else.” Three of the oligarchs didn't do that. Berezovsky was forced out of Russia. Gusinsky was arrested, and later fled the country. Khodorkovsky, regarded as Russia’s richest man at the time (Yukos Oil), was arrested in 2003 and spent ten years in jail. He got out in 2013 and left for the UK. Interestingly, he was seen at Trump's inauguration.

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/03/13/maga-influ...

[2] https://apnews.com/article/russia-putin-oligarchs-rich-ukrai...

I am not saying you’re wrong, but please educate me why is this form of corruption/cronyism is unique to fascism?

> An important aspect of fascist economies was economic dirigism,[35] meaning an economy where the government often subsidizes favorable companies and exerts strong directive influence over investment, as opposed to having a merely regulatory role. In general, fascist economies were based on private property and private initiative, but these were contingent upon service to the state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_fascism

---

The term emerged in the post-World War II era to describe the economic policies of France which included substantial state-directed investment, the use of indicative economic planning to supplement the market mechanism and the establishment of state enterprises in strategic domestic sectors. It coincided with both the period of substantial economic and demographic growth, known as the Trente Glorieuses which followed the war, and the slowdown beginning with the 1973 oil crisis.

The term has subsequently been used to classify other economies that pursued similar policies, such as Canada, Japan, the East Asian tiger economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan; and more recently the economy of the People's Republic of China (PRC) after its economic reforms,[2] Malaysia, Indonesia[3][4] and India before the opening of its economy in 1991.[5][6][7]

---

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirigisme

The scary thing with fascism is just how quickly it can snowball because people at the top of so many powerful structures in society benefit. US Presidents get a positive spin by giving more access to organizations that support them. Those kinds of quiet back room deals benefit the people making them, but not everyone outside the room.

Sacking a city is extremely profitable throughout antiquity, which then pushes cities to have defensive capabilities which then…

Start looking and you’ll find powerful forces shaping history. In the Bronze Age trade between individual mines was critical because having Copper ore alone wasn’t nearly as useful as having copper and access to tin. Iron however is found basically everywhere as where trees.

That does not imply that fish are snakes. Nor does the presence of scaled fish invalidate the observation that having scales is a defining attribute of snakes (it's just not a sufficient attribute to define snakes).

https://www.morphmarket.com/morphpedia/corn-snakes/scaleless...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_favoured_nation

Or his lackeys have anyway. I’m unwilling to believe the man has ever read a book.

If I want to use an LLM to augment my work, and don't have a massively powerful local machine to run local models, what are the best options?

Obviously I saw the news about OpenAI's head of research openly supporting war crimes, but I don't feel confident about what's up with the other companies.

E.g. i'm very outspoken about my preferences for open llm practices like executed by Meta and Deepseek. I'm very aware of the regulatory caption and pulling up the ladder tactics by the "AI safety" lobby.

However. In my own operations I do still rely on OpenAI because it works better than what I tried so far for my use case.

That said, when I can find an open model based SaaS operator that serves my needs as well without major change investment, I will switch.

For my "vibe coding" I've been using OpenAI, Grok and Deepseek if using small method generation, documentation shortcuts, library discovery and debugging counts as such.

US tech, and western tech in general, is very culturally - and by this I mean in the type of coding people have done - homogeneous.

The deep seek papers published over the last two weeks are the biggest thing to happen in IA since GPT3 came out. But unless you understand distributed file systems, networking, low level linear algebra, and half a dozen other fields at least tangentially then you'd have not realized they are anything important at all.

Meanwhile I'm going through the interview process for a tier 1 US AI lab and I'm having to take a test about circles and squares, then write a compsci 101 red/black tree search algorithm while talking to an AI, being told not to use AI at the same time. This is with an internal reference being keen for me to be on board. At this point I'm honestly wondering if they aren't just using the interview process to generate high quality validation data for free.

幸运的是，通过转换器模型，当我们光荣的领导人习近平从资本主义走狗手中解放我们时，我不需要学习中文。

Funny how they like to crow about free markets, while also running to daddy government when their position is threatened.

In the US right now you can have a death match between every AI lab, then give all the resources to the one which wins and you'd still have largely the same results as if you didn't.

The reason why Deepseek - it started life as a HFT firm - hit as hard as it did is because it was a cross disciplinary team that had very non-standard skill sets.

I've had to try and head hunt network and FPGA engineers away from HFT firms and it was basically impossible. They already make big tech (or higher) salaries without the big tech bullshit - which none of them would ever pass.

Can confirm. There are downsides, and it can get incredibly stressed at times, but there are all sorts of big tech imposed hoops you don't have to jump through.

Its a niche product that tried to go mainstream and the general public doesn't want it, just look at iPhone 16 sales and Windows 11, everyone is happier with the last version without AI.

Deepseek already proved regulation will not be effective at maintaining a market lead. =3

If you get fined millions of dollars (for copyright, of course) if you're found to have anything resembling DeepSeek on your machine - no company in the US is going to run it.

The personal market is going to be much smaller than the enterprise market.

That would be as successful as fighting internet piracy.

Not to mention that you could outsource the AI stuff to servers sitting in Mexico or something.

A moat by definition has such a large strategic asymmetry that one cannot cross it without a very high chance of death. A functioning SEC and FTC as well as CFPB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Financial_Protection_... are necessary for efficient markets.

Now might be the time to rollout consumer club cards that are adversarial in nature.

* The secret formula for Coke

* ASML's technology

* The "Gucci" brand

* Apple's network effects

These are genuine competitive advantages in the market. Regulatory moats and other similar things are an assault on the free market. Moats in general are not.

I'm hardly the only one to think this way, hence regulation such as data portability in the EU.

Apple's network effects are anti-compeitive creating vendor lock-in, which allows them to coerce customers. I generally defend Apple. But they are half anti-competitive (coerce customers), half competitive (earn customers), but earning customers is fueled by the coercive app store.

This is a very clear example of how moat is an abusive word. Under one framing (moat) network effects are a way to earn customers by spending resources on projects that earn customers (defending market position). In the anti-competitive framing, network effects are an explicit strategy to create vendor lock in and make it more challenging to migrate to other platforms so apple's budget to implement anti-customer policies is bigger.

ASML is a patent based monopoly, with exclusivity agreements with suppliers, with significant export controls. I will grant you that bleeding edge technology is arguably the best case argument for the word moat, but it's also worth asking in detail how technology is actually developed and understanding that patents are state sanctioned monopolies.

Both Apple and ASML could reasonably be considered monopo-like. So I'm not sure they are the best defense against how moat implies anti-competitive behavior. Monopolies are fundamentally anti-competitive.

The Gucci brand works against the secondary market for their goods and has an army of lawyers to protect their brand against imitators and has many limiting/exclusivity agreements on suppliers.

Coke's formula is probably the least "moaty" thing about coca cola. Their supply chain is their moat and their competitive advantage is also rooted in exclusivity deals. "Our company is so competitive because our recipe is just that good" is a major kool-aid take.

Patents are arguably good, but are legalized anti-competition. Exclusivity agreements don't seem very competitive. Acquisitions are anti-competitive. Pricing games to snuff out competition seems like the type of thing that can done chiefly in anti-competitive contexts.

So ASML isn't an argument against "moat means anti-competitive", but an argument that sometimes anti-competitive behavior is better for society because it allows for otherwise economically unfeasible things to be be feasible. The other brand's moats are much more rooted in business practices around acquisitions and suppliers creating de facto vertical integrations. Monopolies do offer better cheaper products, until they attain a market position that allows them to coerce customers.

Anti-trust authorities have looked at those companies.

Another conceptual metaphor is "president as CEO." The CEO metaphor re-frames political rule as a business operation, which makes executive overreach appear logical rather than dangerous.

You could reasonably argue that the president functions as a CEO, but the metaphor itself is there to manufacture consent for unchecked power.

Conceptual metaphors are insidious. PR firms and think tanks actively work to craft these insidious metaphors that shape conversations and how people think about the world. By the time you've used the metaphor, you've already accepted many of the implications of the metaphor without even knowing it.

https://commonslibrary.org/frame-the-debate-insights-from-do...

Also, the Gucci brand does not have lawyers. The Gucci brand is a name, a logo, and an aesthetic. Kering S.A. (owners of Gucci), enforces that counterfeit Gucci products don't show up. The designers at Kering spend a lot of effort coming up with Gucci-branded products, and they generally seem to have the pulse of a certain sector of the market.

The analysis of Coke's supply chain is wrong. The supply chain Coke uses is pretty run-of-the-mill, and I'm pretty sure that aside from the syrup (with the aforementioned secret formula), they actually outsource most of their manufacturing. They have good scale, but past ~100 million cans, I'm not sure you get many economies of scale in soda. That's why my local supermarket chain can offer "cola" that doesn't quite taste like Coke for cheaper than Coke. You could argue that the brand and the marketing are the moat, but the idea that Coke has a supply chain management advantage (let alone a moat over this) is laughable.

This is a drastic take, I think to most of us in the industry "moat" simply means whatever difficult-to-replicate competitive advantage that a firm has invested heavily in.

Regulatory capture and graft aren't moats, they're plain old corrupt business practices.

Worse that "moats" are a good thing, which they are for the company, but not necessarily society at large. The larger the moat, the more money coming out of your pocket as a customer.

It is insidious.

Perhaps also symmetric "freedom to learn" from OpenAI models, with some provisions / naming convention? U.S. labs are limited in this way, while labs in China are not.

Acting like copyright is some natural law of the universe that LLMs are upending simply because they can learn from written texts is silly.

If you want to argue that it should be radically expanded to the point that not only a work, but even the ideas and knowledge contained in that work should be censored and restricted, fine. But at least have the honesty to admit that this is a radical new expansion for a body of law that has already been radically expanded relatively recently.

It was also invented to keep the publishing houses under control and keep them from papering the land in anti-crown propaganda (like the stuff that fueled the civil war in England and got Charles I beheaded).

Probably one of the biggest brewing fights will be whether the models are free to tell the truth or whether they'll be mouthpieces for the ruling class. As long as they play ball with the powers that be, I predict copyrights won't be a problem at all for the chosen winners.

That's actually a great point. Judging from the current state of media, there is a clear momentum to take sides in moral arguments. Maybe the standard for models need to be a fair use clause?

> not only a work, but even the ideas and knowledge contained in that work

AI models reproduce existing audio tracks when asked, although in a distorted and low-quality form.

Also it will be funny to observe how US government will try to ignore violating copyright for AI while issuing ridiculous fines for torrenting a movie by ordinary citizens.

We work in an industry built on leveraging unfairness. Expecting otherwise on this forum is very odd.

Elephant in the room. If copyright and patent both expired after 20 years or so then I might feel very differently about the system, and by extension about machine learning practices.

It's absurd to me that broad cultural artifacts which we share with our parent's (or even grandparent's) generation can be legally owned.

The late OpenAI researcher and whistleblower, Suchir Balaji, wrote an excellent article regarding this topic:

https://suchir.net/fair_use.html

What are you talking about.

I’m annoyed by arguments like the above because they’re clearly derived from working backwards from a desired conclusion; in this case, that someone’s original work can be consumed and repurposed to create profit by someone else. Our laws and society have determined this to be illegal; the fact that it would be con isn’t for OpenAI if it weren’t has no bearing.

https://abounaja.com/blog/intellectual-property-disputes

Have we all been transported to bizzaro land?

Different rules for billion dollar corps I guess.

Same rules, but people are a lot less inclined to defend themselves because the cost of loss was seen as too high to even risk it.

Copyright cartels (RIAA, MPAA) that monetized young artists without paying them much at all [1], vs the AI megalomaniacs who took all the work for free and used Kenyans at $2 an hour [2] so that they can raise "$7 trillion" for their AI infrastructure

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LetsTalkMusic/comments/1fzyr0u/arti...

[2] https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

But that does make me think, that in a sane society with a functional legislature I wouldn't have to pick a dog in this fight. I'd have have enough faith in lawmakers and the political process to pursue a path towards copyright reform that reigns in abuses from both AI companies and megacorp rightsholders

Alas, for now I'm hoping that aforementioned megacorps sue OpenAI into a painful lesson.

The same megacorps are suing Internet Archive for their collection of 78rpm records. These guys would rather see art orphaned and die.

More generally the best we can hope for us to discourage concentrated power, both in government and corporate forms.

I don't doubt it but am interested to read a source? I know the models can't talk about things like Tiananmen Square 1989, but what does 'implementing socialist values by law' look like?

"Socialist values" is literally the language that China used in announcing this.

Here is a recent article from a Chinese source:

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202503/1329537.shtml

Although censorship isn't mentioned specifically, it is definitely 99% of what they are focused on (the other 1% being scams).

China practices Rule by law, not Rule of law, so you know...they'll know its bad when they see it, so model providers will exercise extreme self censorship (which is already true for social network providers).

In practice the US is less different than you imply. For the vast majority of Americans, being sued is a punishment in and of itself due to the prohibitive costs of hiring a lawyer. In the US we have a right to a “speedy” trial but there are many people sitting in jail now because they can’t afford the bail get out. Speedy could mean months.

I say this because when we constantly fall so far short of our ideals, one begins to question if those are really our ideals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1f-o0nqpEI

>>Dylan Patel is the founder of SemiAnalysis, a research & analysis company specializing in semiconductors, GPUs, CPUs, and AI hardware. Nathan Lambert is a research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) and the author of a blog on AI called Interconnects.

---

@cadamsdotcom

First these folks in the pod are extremely knowledgable about the GPU market and AI.

and if you read between the prompts - they lay out why the AI War is fundementally based on certain Companies, Technologies, and Political affiliations.

They seem to feel (again, btwn the lines) - that China has aFton more GPUs than whats stated... and this is where USA loses.

China Co-Opts all tech and they have a long-term plan that (from the perspective of a Nation State, Super-Power is much more sound than the disjointed chaos that USA economy is.

The US gov has literally ZERO long term positive plans (aside from MIC control) - and its the same as a Family living paycheck-to-paycheck...

The US economy is literally thinking in the next second for the next dollar (the stock market)..

China knows it can win AI - because they dont have the disjointed system of the US,, they can make actual long-term plans. (belt road etc)

US is all about selfish gov workers grifting.

Look it at literally who will have GPU dominance in future. (obv who will hit Qbit at scale... but we are at this scale now - and control currently is controlled by policy, then bits, then Qbits.)

Remember, we are witnessing the "Wouldnt it be cool if..?" CyberPunk manifestations of our Cyberpunk Readings of youth?

((I buildt a bunch of shit that spied on you because I read NeuroMancer, and thought wouldnt it be cool if..."

And then I helped build Ono Sendai throughout my career...

What about movies and music?

That’s not the point. It’s about books you don’t own. Are you allowed to download books from Z-Library, Sci-Hub etc. because you want to learn?

He and Sam Altman were in the same YC class. OpenAI is doing the same thing at a larger scale, and their technology actually reproduces and distributes copyrighted material. It's shameful that they are making claims that they aren't infringing creator's rights when they have scraped the entire internet.

https://flaminghydra.com/sam-altman-and-aaron-swartz-saw-the... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

Cynically, I imagine it will not but I hope that it could.

> It's shameful that they are making claims that they aren't infringing creator's rights when they have scraped the entire internet.

Scraping the Internet is generally very different from piracy. You are given a limited right to that data when you access it, and you can make local copies. if further use does something sufficiently non-copying, then creator rights aren't being infringed.

At what percentage of lossy compression it becomes infringement?

Define access?

If you mean sending out the compressed copy, generally no. For things people normally call compression.

If you want to run a search engine, then you should be fine.

> At what percentage of lossy compression it becomes infringement?

It would have to be very very lossy.

But some AI stuff is. For example there are image models with fewer parameters than source images. Those are, by and large, not able to store enough data to infringe with. (Copying can creep in with images that have multiple versions, but that's a small sliver of the data.)

Also, as I understand they didn't even buy the CDs with music for training; they got it somewhere else. Why do organizations that prosecute people for downloading a movie do not want to look if it is ok to make a business on illegal copies of copyrighted works?

Like cliff's notes.

To actually get that maximum typically requires things like the person is a repeat offender, drug dealing was involved, people were physically harmed, it involved organized crime, it involved terrorism, a large amount of money was involved, or other things that make it an unusual big and serious crime.

The DOJ knows exactly what they are alleging the defendant did. They could easily looks at the various factors that affect sentencing for the charge and see which apply to that case and come up with a realistic number but that doesn't make it sound as impressive in the press release.

Another thing that inflates the numbers in the press releases is that defendants are often charged with several related charges. For many crimes there are groups of related charges that for sentencing get merged. If you are charged with say 3 charges from the same group and convicted on all you are only sentenced for whichever one of them has the longest sentence.

If you've got 3 charges from such a group in the press release the DOJ might just take the completely bogus maximum for each as described above and just add those 3 together.

Here's a good article on DOJ's ridiculous sentence numbers [1].

Here's a couple of articles from an expert in this area of law that looks specifically at what Swartz was charged with and what kind of sentence he was actually looking at [2][3].

Why do you think Swartz was downloading the articles to learn from them? As far as I've seen know one knows for sure what he was intending.

If he wanted to learn from JSTOR articles he could have downloaded them using the JSTOR account he had through his research fellowship at Harvard. Why go to MIT and use their public JSTOR WiFi access, and then when that was cut off hide a computer in a wiring closet hooked into their ethernet?

I've seen claims that he wanted to do was meta research about scientific publishing as a whole which could explain why he needed to download more than he could download with his normal JSTOR account from Harvard, but again why do that using MIT's public WiFi access? JSTOR has granted more direct access to large amounts of data for such research. Did he talk to them first to try to get access that way?

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20230107080107/https://www.popeh...

[2] https://volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/

[3] https://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-a...

Not the downloading with intent

And apparently the most controversial take on this community is the observation that many people would have done the trial, plea and time, regardless of how overzealous the prosecution was

"The closet's door was kept unlocked, according to press reports"

When's the last time a kid with no record, a research fellow at Harvard, got threatened with 35 years for a simple B&E?

Its the plea or sentencing where that stuff gets taken into account for a reduction to community service

So it's totally OK to rip off and steal and lie through your teeth AND do it all for money, if you're a company. But if you're a human being, doing it not for profit but for the betterment of your own fellow humans, you deserve to be imprisoned and systematically murdered and driven to suicide.

You cannot legally photocopy copy an entire book even if you own a physical copy.

Internet people say you can, but there's no actual legal argument or case law to support that.

Quite the opposite. The burden of proof is on you to show a single person ever, in history, who has been prosecuted for that.

If nobody in the world has ever been prosecuted for this, then that means it is either legal, or it is something else that is so effectively equivalent to "legal" that there is little point in using a different word.

If you want to take the position that, "uhhhhhhh, there is exactly 0% chance of anyone ever getting in trouble or being prosecuted for this, but I still don't think its legal, technically!"

Then I guess go ahead. But for those in the real world, those two things are almost equivalent.

(Copyright Act 1968 Part III div. 1, section 43C) https://www.legislation.gov.au/C1968A00063/latest/text

17 U.S.C. § 107 is the fair use carveout.

Interestingly, digitizing and copying a book on your own, for your own private use, has also not been brought to court. Major rights holders seem to not want this particular fair use precedent to be established, which it likely would be, and might then invalidate crucial standing for other cases in which certain interpretations of fair use are preferred.

Digitally copying media you own is fair use. I'll die on that hill. It doesn't grant commercial rights, you can't resell a copy as if it were the original, and so on, and so forth.

There's even a good case to be made that sharing a digitally copied work purchased legally, even to millions of people, 5 years after a book is first sold - for a vast majority of books, after 5 years, they've sold about 99.99% of the copies they're going to sell.

By sharing after the ~5 year mark, you're arguably doing marketing for the book, and if we cultivated a culture of direct donation to authors and content creators, it invalidates any of the reasons piracy is made illegal in the first place.

Right now publishers, studios, and platforms have a stranglehold on content markets, and the law serves them almost exclusively. It is exceedingly rare for the law to be invoked in defending or supporting an author or artist directly. It's very common for groups of wealthy lawyers LARPing as protectors of authors and artists to exploit the law and steal money from regular people.

Exclusively digital content should have a 3 year protected period, while physical works should get 5, whether it's text, audio, image, or video.

Once something is outside the protected period, it should be considered fair game for sharing until 20 years have passed, at which point it should enter public domain.

Copyright law serves two purposes - protecting and incentivizing content creators, and serving the interests of the public. Situations where a bunch of lawyers get rich by suing the pants off of regular people over technicalities is a despicable outcome.

Thank you! I had looked this up myself last week, so I knew this. I had long believed, as GP does, that copying anything you own without distribution is either allowed or fair use. I wanted GP to learn as I did.

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include— (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

The spirit seems apparent, but in practice it's been used by awful people to destroy lives and exploit rent from artists and authors in damn near tyrannical ways.

Given all this "can't do it" is more probably accurate than "can do it". IANAL but it's not like the question is finely balanced on a knife's edge and could go either way.

> IANAL but it's not like the question is finely balanced on a knife's edge and could go either way.

I agree, but my interpretation is opposite yours. It seems fairly obvious to me that the spirit of the law permits personal copies. That also seems to be in line with (explicitly legislated) digital practices.

But at the end of the day the only clearly correct statement on the matter is "there's no precedent, so we don't know". I suppose it's also generally good advice to avoid the legal quagmire if possible. Being in the right is unlikely to do you any good if it bankrupts you in the process.

That's the whole point of copyright: only the owner of a copyright has the right to make copies. I don't see how it can be more explicit than that. It's a default-deny policy.

There is an archival exception for digital media, so obviously Congress is open to granting exceptions for backup purposes. They chose not to include physical media in this exception.

You are conveniently omitting the provisions about fair use, which is strange since you're clearly aware of them. The only things copyright is reasonably unambiguous about are sale and distribution. Even then there's lots of grey areas such as performance rights.

You are arguing that something is obviously disallowed but have nothing but your own interpretation to back that up. If the situation was as clear cut as you're trying to make out then where is the precedent showing that personal use archival copies of physical goods are not permitted?

> They chose not to include physical media in this exception.

That's irrelevant to the current discussion, though I'm fairly certain you realize that. Congress declined to weigh in on the matter which (as you clearly know) leaves it up to the courts to interpret the existing law.

What part of fair use pertains to making a physical copy of the complete work?

1. Can't

Or

2. Rely on fair use to protect you (archival by individuals isn't necessarily fair use)

The fair use criteria considers whether it is commercial in nature (in this case it is not) and the “ the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work” for which a personal copy of a personally owned book is non existent.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107

You would get laughed at by the legal system trying to prosecute an individual owner for copying a book they bought just to keep.

There's no legal precedent for this. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43356042

> the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work

A copyright holder's lawyer would argue that having and using a photocopy of a book keeps the original from wearing out. This directly affects the potential market for the work, since the owner could resell the book in mint condition, after reading and burning their photocopies.

> You would get laughed at by the legal system trying to prosecute an individual owner for copying a book they bought just to keep.

I mean maybe this is true. But the affected individual will have a very bad year and spend a ton of money on lawyers.

Why do you interpret this to mean "absolutely can't do this"? "No precedent" seems to equally support both sides of the argument (that is, it provides no evidence; courts have not ruled). The other commenters arguments on the actual text of the statute seem more convincing to me than what you have so far provided.

> The other commenters arguments...seem more convincing

Because you (and I) want it to be fair use. But as I already said in my comment, it potentially fails one leg of fair use. Keeping your purchased physical copy of the book pristine and untouched while you read the photocopy allows you to later, after destroying the copies you made, resell the book as new or like-new. This directly affects the market for that book.

Do you want to spend time and money in court to find out if it's really fair use? That's what "no precedent" means.

No. I'd much rather pirate the epub followed by lobbying for severe IP law reform. (Of course by "lobby" I actually mean complain about IP law online.)

If there's no epub available then I guess it's time to get building. (https://linearbookscanner.org/)

And whether or not I am personally interested in testing any of these opinions is completely beside the point.

The analogous scenario is "Can I read a book and publish a blog post with all the information in that book, in my own words?", and under US copyright law, the answer is: Yes.

The analogous scenario is actually "Can I read a book that I obtained illegally and face no consequences for obtaining it illegally?" The answer is "Yes" there are no consequences for reading said book, for individuals or machines.

But individuals can face serious consequences for obtaining it illegally. And corporations are trying to argue those consequences shouldn't apply to them.

Can they? Who has ever faced serious consequences for pirating books in the US?

(Please no pedantry about how scientific papers aren't books)

Asking because I genuinely don't know. I believe all I've ever read about persecution of "commonplace" copyright violations was either about distributors or tied to bidirectional nature of peer-to-peer exchange (torrents typically upload to others even as you download = redistribution).

A tiny fraction compared to the 80+ terabytes Facebook downloaded.

>Did he publish the stuff too?

No.

> Not sure if it’s worth a violation .

Exactly.

Me taking over control of the lemonade market in my neighbourhood wouldn't ever be a problem to anyone, a very minor annoyance; instead if I managed to corner the lemonade market of a whole continent it'd be a very different thing.

The part of that which doesn't apply is "print copies", at least not complete copies, but libraries often have photocopiers in them for fragments needed for research.

AI models shouldn't do that either, IMO. But unlimited complete copies is the mistake the Internet Archive made, too.

Is having a library card a requirement for being hired over there?

Have you never been to a public library and read a book while sitting there without checking it out? Clearly, age is a factor here, and us olds are confused by this lack of understanding of how libraries function. I did my entire term paper without ever checking out books from the library. I just showed up with my stack of blank index cards, then left with the necessary info written on them. Did an entire project on tracking stocks by visiting the library and viewing all of the papers for the days in one sitting rather than being schmuck and tracking it daily. Took me about an hour in one day. No library card required.

Also, a library card is ridiculously cheap even if you did decide to have one.