Comment by cubefox
14 hours ago
No. It's actually way more than what they would have paid if they legally obtained those books. The 1.5 billion dollars amount to $3000 per book.
14 hours ago
No. It's actually way more than what they would have paid if they legally obtained those books. The 1.5 billion dollars amount to $3000 per book.
Legally obtaining a book for reading it yourself is different from legally obtaining a book for copying and republishing/reselling. If I buy a book for $5 at a sale I can read it myself or even sell it for $10 on craigslist, but I can't scan it and make a million copies and sell each of those.
They aren't republishing or reselling. In fact, they buy huge amounts of books and then destroy them, which is better for the rights holders than to resell them.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthrop...
Since whole chunks of these books can be recited verbatim by these models, to which they sell access, they absolutely are republishing and reselling these books' content in a way.
Like I remember a research paper that managed to recreate the whole of a Harry Potter book from a model?
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No https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6449179
That's terrifying waste of real world resouces for no other purpose than satisfying the letter i of the absurd rent-seeking-enabling laws.
Not reselling? What am I paying them for then?
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Anyone who destroys a book on purpose is a criminal.
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> obtain the rights of everything they pirated
They didn't just pirate those books...
If we assume on average $20 per legally obtained book, 1.5 billion dollars are enough for 75 million books. That's approximately every non-fiction book in existence.
Why would we assume $20 a book? Many books retail for more, and a licence to use the book for commercial purposes is more than retail.