> If you want to do this kind of thing, let authors opt-in (or publishers).
If it's fair use, why should you have to do that? The same copyright law protecting author's ownership rights over their art also provide "fair use" to other people. Someone may disagree with current fair use laws (and I suspect many outraged here do not), but that's a broader issue not related to this particular tool. It just 100% seems like misdirected AI outrage.
> the text of the works scanned seems like it may be from pirated sources.
Do you have a source for this? I didn't see that mentioned in the article.
> Do you have a source for this? I didn't see that mentioned in the article.
The person who runs prosecraft says "I looked to the internet for more text that I could analyze, and I used web crawlers to find more books." [0]
I'm just inferring, but if they had, say, purchased each of these books, or borrowed them from the library, or only sourced from sites that ensure the copyright is satisfied, then they might have mentioned it.
(FWIW, the blog post says the other source for the 25K works was their personal library, so I'm assuming the bulk of the 25K come from the internet, though I know some people have prodigious personal libraries.)
"How much of someone else's work can I use without getting permission?
Under the fair use doctrine of the U.S. copyright statute, it is permissible to use limited portions of a work including quotes, for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, and scholarly reports."
> The Gizmodo article has a ridiculously wrong “fair use” analysis, saying “Fair Use does not, by any stretch of the imagination, allow you to use an author’s entire copyrighted work without permission as a part of a data training program that feeds into your own ‘AI algorithm.’” Except… it almost certainly does? Again, we’ve gone through this with the Google Book scanning case, and the courts said that you can absolutely do that because it’s transformative.
That's ludicrous. It's counting words in a book. You can't copyright facts and that is all the tool is doing. Pages that are reproduced are only excerpts which falls squarely under fair use.
It's no different than you checking out the book from the library and counting all the words.
Copyright pertains to reproduction of the work. The statistics this tool provided are not reproductions at all. It did also provide quotes, which were not extensive and certainly not the entire work.
If it's fair use, why should you have to do that? The same copyright law protecting author's ownership rights over their art also provide "fair use" to other people. Someone may disagree with current fair use laws (and I suspect many outraged here do not), but that's a broader issue not related to this particular tool. It just 100% seems like misdirected AI outrage.
> the text of the works scanned seems like it may be from pirated sources.
Do you have a source for this? I didn't see that mentioned in the article.