Comment by MrJohz
6 months ago
I cannot point to the case, because my entire knowledge about the legality of this stuff comes from vaguely following the articles about this case. But feel free to read the judgement in this case where it will be spelled out in much more detail.
Also, I don't quite understand how your example is relevant to the case. If you give a book to a friend, they are now the owner of that book and can do what they like with it. If you photocopy that book and give them the photocopy, they are not the owner of the book and you have reproduced it without permission. The same is, I believe, true of digital copies - this is how ebook libraries work.
In this case, Anthropic were the legal owners of the physical books, and so could do what they wanted with them. They were not the legal owners of the digital books, which means they can get prosecuted for copyright infringement.
> If you give a book to a friend, they are now the owner of that book and can do what they like with it.
We're talking about lending rather than ownership transfers, though of course you could regard lending as a sort of ownership transfer with an agreement to transfer it back later.
> If you photocopy that book and give them the photocopy, they are not the owner of the book and you have reproduced it without permission.
But then the question is whether the copy is fair use, not who the owner of the original copy was, right? For example, you can make a fair use photocopy of a page from a library book.
> They were not the legal owners of the digital books, which means they can get prosecuted for copyright infringement.
Even if the copy they make falls under fair use and the person who does own that copy of the book has no objection to their doing this?
You are talking about lending, but I'm not really sure why because it's not that relevant to the case.
If you photocopy a single page from a library book, this is often (but not always) fair use because you're copying only a limited part of the book. In the same way, you can quote a section or paragraph of a book under fair use. You cannot copy the whole book, though. Therefore:
> Even if the copy they make falls under fair use and the person who does own that copy of the book has no objection to their doing this?
If the copy had been made under fair use, then yes, this wouldn't be illegal. But it wasn't, because it was a reproduction and distribution of the entire book by someone who did not have the right to do that.