Casually worth noting the obvious: There are also services like Libgen and Anna's archive that are completely DRM free and have pretty much anything you can get on Amazon except, well, for free, aside from also being DRM-free.
Also worth noting that such sites technically are piracy. I am not making any moral or ethical assertions about it, but people need to know that so they can make an informed decision before doing so. And no, it's not inherently obvious to everyone.
Libgen, Anna's Archive, et al do however provide a valuable service in maintaining access to works out of distribution or blocked by censorship.
I'm not an absolutist on piracy in either direction, but when X or Y megacorp and all its affiliates can claim to "sell" you goods and then whimsically restrict access to them in such a way that further, future whimsies let them take away your purchased products, i'd hardly blame anyone for pirating.
Also, a company like Meta can pirate over 80 fucking TB of ebook content for indirectly commercial purposes, have its chief lie about being aware of this, and an average person who just wants content without so much bullshit DRM lock-in hassle should feel guilty about their choice?
Also consider checking your local public library services.
You can request physical books (inter-library loans) and they often offer ebooks as well, although the service is likely to be cumbersome and hard to use because DRM (but if is too complicated you can still borrow the ebook legally in your phone and read a copy from "piracy" sites anywhere you want, with the benefit that the author will get royalties).
It isn't perfect, as in you may not find what you want to read or when you want to read it, but if it works for me, it may work for you as well.
They were stating a fact that some people may not know yet need to be informed of when using these services (for various and personal reasons, not all linked to feeling guilty). As they said, they're not making any moral or ethical assertions about it.
These websites are piracy, and I've used them in the past, still use them, and will probably keep using them. No fuss.
I think part of the point of OP is that if your main concern is DRM (being able to actually own your books) and you also care to a non-zero extent about the author getting paid for their work (yes, authors receive a much smaller share of sale price than they should, but it's still a substantial percentage), then you should try to buy from DRM-free bookshops and only if that fails sail the high seas.
Regarding corporate piracy for AI, I don't think it's just Meta..
Some people are more concerned about a world so dumb or in such bad faith that can make and tolerate confusion between "questionable possession" and "theft".
Which, paradoxically, calls for the need for more and more intellectual practice, which is a key purpose in the access to culture we have valued for millennia.
(Similar confusion is in that mentioned idea of Meta having done something wrong in processing texts - we can access all available texts.)
Either Meta did nothing wrong and therefore individuals who pirate ebooks do nothing wrong as well and the concept of piracy should not exist/not be illegal;
Or piracy is actually theft (as it supposedly is when individuals do it) and Meta did millions of counts of it and therefore should pay trillions in damages, be dissolved, have Zuck go to jail, or all three.
What is the accusation: having had an automaton read a million books? I repeat from the previous post: we are entitled to having read all the published available books. (And more than entitled: encouraged to.) That is what libraries are for.
"Piracy" in that context is coming into possession of something you are not entitled to own. And this latter point is thin and a stub, just to say that they are different things - the one above is not (it could be expanded but would not change).
I think any answer to that question needs to be considered carefully, at least in a legal context, since it could end up having unintended consequences.
LLMs ingests works but does not regurgitate them, so the product can be considered transformative. From my understanding of these models, they do not retain the original works. (There are probably reasons for the companies to retain the original works, but that is an entirely different matter.) So equating a trained model to copyright violations is akin to suggesting the knowledge, rather than the content, is copyrightable. Do we really want to enter that territory?
The other route of attack is via how the materials were acquired. This can create problems from several perspectives. If companies had to purchase each work in order to train a model, the process would only be accessible to very well financed corporations. Libraries as well, since they are essentially in the business of purchasing works (albeit for an entirely different purpose). If you allowed borrowed works to be used while training models, the notion of lending would likely come under attack. I'm not sure we want to go there either. Then there is the question of online materials that are freely available. What would protect them?
I'm not a fan of AI and I am even less of a fan of Meta. I would love to see them have the book thrown at them. I'm just uncomfortable with the potential repercussions of throwing the book at them.
Critical points nailed. This current weird state of the world is missing the basic principles, which must be stressed. I find them trivial, but the social (and political) issue is, they are not to many actors.
There is a "right to learn". There is a "right to access". And there are values to pursue, and urgencies to tackle (a world collapsing on its own cognitive faults)...
We just need money that can be made to disappear from the seller and return to the buyer when the product that was "bought" is withdrawn and no longer exists...
Genuinely, what is your motivation here? People often justify piracy in terms of their opposition to DRM, but here someone is showing you how to get DRM-free books, and your response is "But over here they are free." They clearly aren't meant to be free, and people put substantial amounts of work into creating them. Don't you care?
For myself, I would never pirate a book that was still in print. Over the past so many years though a lot of books on archive.org (for example) are borrow only (and I like cultivating an offline-life).
Here's an odd, maybe edge-case example. Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus stories are clearly outside copyright. It's for sale on Amazon (the first link when I searched, becauseofcourseitis!) but I think we all know that the "copyright" on these published editions is only going to cover the Foreword or whatever the publishing company slapped on.
When I look for it on archive.org I initially thought I could only borrow it [1] but then searched harder and found another copy that I can in fact download [2].
My motivation? I'd think it's pretty clear. I'm offering (for those few who don't know) an options for obtaining books DRM-free and free in a landscape that has become positively shitty to any standard notion of owning the things you bought to supposedly own them. If Amazon and others want to do this, then I have no obligation to respect their DRM, and if authors want to sell their books through such a rigged format, I also shouldn't feel guilty about respecting rules against piracy.
All of this aside from very reasonable arguments that copyright shouldn't apply to consumer uses of information.
I don't really share your moral views on piracy, so why both browbeating with them?
I wasn’t browbeating. I was curious about your moral justification, and you’ve made that clear. You feel that anyone who publishes using DRM (whether they have any idea or not, or any choice or not) doesn’t deserve to be compensated for your enjoyment of their labour. You won’t boycott them or sacrifice anything, as a principled stand against this thing you object to. You’ll just read their books and not pay.
I bought a book on Amazon recently and when it got delivered, I was too lazy to get off the couch to get it and I just downloaded it. Now I have the physical book and a copy that's convenient to open/reference whenever and wherever I am.
Yes this approach is great. Everybody is being paid, and you have the freedom of multiple formats. No one is getting screwed, because no one expects people to buy books in multiple formats (except perhaps audiobooks, which are different because you also have the reader who deserves to be paid). It would be nice to see publishers embrace this sort of flexibility (e.g. with a download code printed in the book?), but the use case might be quite niche for most readers so it feels unlikely.
Have you read the news lately? Amazon is about to restrict the rights of kindle users. They are about to remove the ability to download and transfer books via USB.
I don’t support/condone piracy, but I also don’t support the current trend of taking away user rights.
Next on the list will be the removal of the ability to transfer via email. Just wait.
You can get an income for your work by many other way than getting it behind a paywall. Like another user said i'd rather download the book and send 10$ to a creator I like than paying a monthly subscription to a "digital library" that will only give crumbles to the author and prevent me from reading my book "offline".
