when it comes to real people, they get sued into oblivion for downloading copyrighted content, even for the purpose of learning.
but when facebook & openai do it, at a much larger scale, suddenly the laws must be changed.
Now, if you have eidetic memory and write out large chunks of the book from memory and publish them, that's what you could be sued for.
They're not talking about reading a book FFS. You absolutely can be sued for illegally obtaining a copy of the book.
What these companies are doing is:
1. Obtain a free copy of a work in some way.
2. Store this copy in a format that's amenable to training.
3. Train their models on the stored copy, months or years after step 1 happened.
The illegal part happens in steps 1 and/or 2. Step 3 is perhaps debatable - maybe it's fair to argue that the model is learning in the same sense as a human reading a book, so the model is perhaps not illegally created.
But the training set that the company is storing is full of illegally obtained or at least illegally copied works.
What they're doing before the training step is exactly like building a library by going with a portable copier into bookshops and creating copies of every book in that bookshop.
Even web browsing implies making copies of copyrighted pages, we can't tell the copyright status of a page without loading it, at which point a copy has been made in memory.
If this was legal, nobody would be paying for software.
Really? Or do they get sued for sharing as in republishing without transformation? Arguably a URL providing copyrighted content, is you offering a xerox machine.
It seems most "sued into oblivion" are the reshare problem, not the get one for myself problem.