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0 pointsstevenAthompson1y ago0 comments

I would like to expand on this, since it seems to be a common misunderstanding. Lets imagine a hypothetical situation where one friend loans a book to another, who then makes a copy of it.

The lender owns the book, and it is within his rights to loan it to whoever he wants. That is legal. Making this illegal would end libraries.

The borrower is well within his rights to accept the book, and as the current owner he is even allowed to make a copy of the book (see the famous TIVO case). Making this illegal would end backups and format/time shifting.

When the borrower returns the book, he keeps the copy. Oh no! Surely he must now become a criminal? Nope. Possessing an unauthorized copy is also not illegal, despite what many copyright holders would like you to believe. Making this illegal would also criminalize a lot of legitimate format/time shifting, again see the famous TIVO case.

If the borrower were to loan his homemade copy to someone else THEN it would finally become illegal.

Nothing about AI changes any of this.

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leovander1y ago

Don't read too much into what I am saying. I am not even talking about the AI piece.

I download a torrent with movie that I didn't pay for. If I don't allow to seed it, then I don't get in trouble. If I let it seed either during the download process or after, I'd get a DMCA notice if that torrent/magnet link was getting tracked.

I don't need a hypothetical book, that is just how it works if I were to download illegally obtained documents/media.

As technical as people are in this thread, easy to tell when folks didn't have their parents wondering why they were getting scary letters from the ISP.

throwaway2901y ago

If you made a durable copy of a book in your example to keep for yourself and use later that's already a grey area. But no one does it with books. People do it with other media tho, and big surprise get prosecuted for it. As you may know, in developed countries people get served notices for torrenting

But if you make books contents available online via some service that regurgitates its contents you would be totally sus because you can be considered in a business of selling derivative works.

triceratops1y ago

Do you have any case law (other than Tivo or VHS time-shifting) that relates directly to books?

stevenAthompsonOP1y ago

There was a relatively famous Google case regarding their digitization of books without the authors consent in 2015. Although it's not a perfectly analogous to this situation.

In Googles case they were digitizing the books (that they did not own), and publishing snippets for search users to help them find books and other material that weren't indexed on the web. The court found they had that right, but did place some pretty strict limits on them.

Still, Google was allowed to keep their database of scanned material despite not owning the originals.

Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....

triceratops1y ago

According to your link and this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43899406 Google's scanning project was ruled fair use because it was "transformative" and didn't harm the market for the works. It allowed searching within books that was otherwise impossible at the time, but by not providing the full text of the books it didn't meaningfully reduce sales.

Someone photocopying a book to read on the toilet (and leave the original on their nightstand) isn't engaging in transformative use. They're also harming the market for the work because if they hadn't made this photocopy, they would've had to buy a second copy of the book to get the same benefit.

stevenAthompsonOP1y ago

> Someone photocopying a book to read on the toilet (and leave the original on their nightstand) isn't engaging in transformative use.

The situation you describe is more akin to "format shifting" or maybe "space shifting", which is converting copyrighted material to other formats or places as a backup, for preservation purposes, or just for convenience. It is legally protected in the US, and most of the rest of the world. I believe that was settled due to early litigation with VCR's, but there are mountains of relevant cases at this point.

I do recall reading that the UK recently changed their laws in that regard, and like most copyright law it can depend on the specifics of the situation and even (*yuck*) intent. So it's always worth checking if you're unsure.

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leovander1y ago

Don't read too much into what I am saying. I am not even talking about the AI piece.

I don't need a hypothetical book, that is just how it works if I were to download illegally obtained documents/media.

As technical as people are in this thread, easy to tell when folks didn't have their parents wondering why they were getting scary letters from the ISP.

throwaway2901y ago

But if you make books contents available online via some service that regurgitates its contents you would be totally sus because you can be considered in a business of selling derivative works.

triceratops1y ago

Do you have any case law (other than Tivo or VHS time-shifting) that relates directly to books?

stevenAthompsonOP1y ago

There was a relatively famous Google case regarding their digitization of books without the authors consent in 2015. Although it's not a perfectly analogous to this situation.

Still, Google was allowed to keep their database of scanned material despite not owning the originals.

Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....

triceratops1y ago

stevenAthompsonOP1y ago

> Someone photocopying a book to read on the toilet (and leave the original on their nightstand) isn't engaging in transformative use.

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