There is also no standard way of buying a DRM free epub for personal use so I’m fine downloading them from Anna too :)

Yeah, no, this genuinely doesn't make sense as there are legitimate repositories for these books and can do business-to-business negotiations for access to them. Even libraries have access to ebooks at bulk scale.

Well, I suppose they could buy access to Amazon’s kindle servers

pumping oil out of pubic lands

this sounds really painful lol

wish meta had torrented all the viruses, too, would be fun to read the news of "facebook and instagram are offline as meta suffers from cyberattack"

Pirating books is not fair use. Using copyrighted works to train an AI model is not fair use. People seem to grossly misunderstand what fair use is, and how limited its scope is. Don't believe me? Here's legal the precedent

A business is not fair use. They’re taking someone’s intellectual property and using it to make their product useful.

chaotic neutral

Which, as I said, seems strange. Why don't those businesses just download the torrents?

Exactly

But my gbit seedbox is trying really hard ;-;

Interesting, I was using Deepseek for book recommendations and it was exceptionally good at recommending books that are similar to one I just read compared to other models.

This development will certainly not end with books - countless other creative and intellectual achievements have long been affected. That is precisely the problem with generative models, whether they involve text, code, video, images, or whatever else. All of this boils down to the fact that the already precarious situation for everyone who creates value by themselves is continuing to deteriorate. Professional work in all these areas will undoubtedly become even more precarious in the future, with artists, designers, and writers, who were already in a difficult position, now being joined by industries such as software development and administrative work.

Please don't get me wrong: I am anything but a technology pessimist, but the business model of the so-called AI companies is so exploitative and their owners so unscrupulous that, given the status quo (cloud models), I can hardly imagine that this will lead to even halfway fair working conditions or remuneration models for people who create value in the form of intellectual achievements. I mean, this post is a vivid example.

It’s 2026 in the worst timeline. You don’t ask that anymore. You ask if any entity faced consequences for doing it.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/meta-won-its-ai-fair-use-lawsuit-but-judge-says-authors-are-likely-to-often-win-going-forward/

Meta's use of copyrighted books to trains its Llama AI was fair use, a judge ruled.

"This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta's use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful," he wrote. "It stands only for the proposition that these plaintiffs made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one."

The plaintiffs focused their arguments on how Meta's AI models can reproduce exact snippets from their works and how the company's Llama models hurt their ability to license their books to AI companies. These arguments weren't as compelling in Chhabria's eyes -- he called them "clear losers" -- so he sided with Meta.

That's different from the Anthropic ruling, where Judge William Alsup focused on the "exceedingly transformative" nature of the use of the plaintiff's books in the results AI chatbots spit out. Chhabria wrote that while "there is no disputing" that the use of copyrighted material was transformative, the more urgent question was the effect AI systems had on the ecosystem as a whole.

Maybe? Not lawyer, but sound like train might fair use? And generate not?

Dont know, ask an LLM.