By US law, cccording to Author's Guild vs Google[1] on the Google book scanning project, scanning books for indexes is fair use.
Additionally:
> Every human has the right to read those books.
Since when?
I strongly disagree - knowledge should be free.
I don't think the author's arrangement of the words should be free to reproduce (ie, I think some degree of copyright protection is ethical) but if I want to use a tool to help me understand the knowledge in a book then I should be able to.
Knowledge should be free. Unfortunately, OpenAI and most other AI companies are for-profit, and so they vacuum up the commons, and produce tooling which is for-profit.
If you use the commons to create your model, perhaps you should be obligated to distribute the model for free (or I guess for the cost of distribution) too.
> The commons are still as available as they ever were,
That is false. As a direct consequence of LLMs:
1. The web is increasingly closed to automated scraping, and more marginally to people as well. Owners of websites like reddit now have a stronger incentive to close off their APIs and sell access.
2. The web is being inundated with unverified LLM output which poisons the well
3. More profoundly, increasingly basing our production on LLM outputs and making the human merely "in the loop" rather than the driver, and sometimes eschewing even the human in the loop, leads to new commons that are less adapted to the evolutions of our world, less original and of lesser quality
I presume you (people do) have exploited that knowledge that society has made in principle and largely practice freely accessible to build a professionality, which is now for-profit: you will charge parties for the skills that available knowledge has given you.
Since in our legal system, only humans and groups of humans (the corporation is a convenient legal proxy for a group of humans that have entered into an agreement) have rights.
Property doesn't have rights. Land doesn't have rights. Books don't have rights. My computer doesn't have rights. And neither does an LLM.
The right to access knowledge remains human oriented even when the reading is automated.
It does not matter that your screwdriver does not have rights: you will be using it for the purpose consistent with the principle of your freedom and encouragement to fix your cabling. You are not required to "hand-screw them drives".
In context, for example, you can take notes. That has nothing to do with the "rights of the paper".
Nothing forbids an automated reader by principle - especially when the automated reader is an intermediate tool for human operation.
That is an elision for "public knowledge". Of course there are nuances. In the case of books, there is little doubt: printed for sale is literally named "published".
(The "for sale" side does not limit the purpose to sales only, before somebody wants to attack that.)
Again and again: the "book", the item, is a private object, access to the text is freely available - to those member of societies that have decided that knowledge be freely available and have thus established libraries. (They have collected the books - their own - so that we can freely access the texts.)
Every human has the right to read those books.
And now, this is obvious, but it seems to be frequently missed - an LLM is not a human, and does not have such rights.