Back in the day, text mining for science was mostly ignored, even though it was technically illegal. Authors didn't feel threatened by models for spam detection or sentiment classification. Demanding money from poor academics was pointless (they'd just move on to a different author) and bad PR.
I mean, books3 contained hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books, and people released it under their own name.
My guess is HP makes such an enormous amount of money already from movies, games, toys, and other tie-ins, that they can't be bothered to chase down the odd digital infringement of a plain text copy of the original books.
I'm sure the scripts of Star Wars would be similarly ignored if they were used.
It is just very hard problem when you are very popular work. Trying to find and track and take down all copies of certain work online is constant fight. Sometimes things just slip especially if they are not that popular.
Something like Harry Potter might be shared every day. And I mean as pirate work distributed as new copy. Staying on top of that will be very hard work.
How soon before someone will be able to make an online library which generates the original books using LLMs? Surely popular titles like Harry Potter may end up so well represented in the training that we'll get the full books out of the LLM with a close to 100% accuracy?
I feel like the title is a bit misleading, unless the person who put all HP books on Kaggle as a (supposedly) CC0-licensed data set did so as a Microsoft employee.
Nevertheless pretty egregious oversight (incompetence?) and something that shouldn't have been published.
The real cherry on top, is that the Microsoft link from the blog post by the Microsoft senior product manager goes to a Kaggle dataset page claiming the dataset is CC0: Public Domain.
Wow, that is a great catch. I looked at the Kaggle page. It has been up for two years. From the hamburger menu (top right), I tried: Report Dataset. When I click the button "Report illegal content", I am redirected to a Google page (huh?): https://support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905?prod...
When I try to fill the questionaire, my request is rejected with this message:
We understand that you are not legally authorized to file a copyright complaint on behalf of the copyright owner.
In accordance with applicable copyright laws, we only accept copyright complaints from copyright owners or their authorized representatives. If you have legal questions about copyright law, please consult your own legal counsel.
We are sorry we cannot assist you further.
Hysterical. What a farce. That data set is pure theft.
Since IP law is apparently dead, does anyone want to invest in my ai generated novel startup where it just spits out Harry Potter verbatim but uses a bunch of power to do so.
The lesson that I am taking away from AI companies (and their billionaire investors and founders), is that property theft is perfectly fine. Which is a _goofy_ position to have, if you are a billionaire, or even a millionaire. Like, if property theft is perfectly acceptable, and if they own most of the property (intellectual or otherwise), then there can only be _upside_ for less fortunate people like us.
The implicit motto of this class of hyper-wealthy people is: "it's not yours if you cannot keep it". Well, game on.
(There are 56.5e6 millionaires, and 3e3 billionaires -- making them 0.7% of the global population. They are outnumbered 141.6 to 1. And they seem to reside and physically congregate in a handful of places around the world. They probably wouldn't even notice that their property is being stolen, and even if they did, a simple cycle of theft and recovery would probably drive them into debt).
You guys are talking about copyright but I think a bigger takeaway is there is a process breakdown at Microsoft. Nobody is reading or reviewing these documentation so what hope is there that anybody is reading or reviewing their new code?
I guess the question to leadership is that two of the three pillars , namely security and quality are at odds with the third pillar— AI innovation. Which side do you pick?
(I know you mean well and I love you, Scott Hanselman but please don't answer this yourself. Please pass this on to the leadership.)
I recall the source code for Windows XP was leaked some years ago; not just isolated parts of the code base, like with the earlier Windows NT4/2000 source code leak, but a completely buildable repository.
If I write an article on training an LLM on the leaked Windows XP source code, blithely mark the source code repo as in 'the public domain', but used Azure resources for the how-to steps, would that would make it OK Microsoft? You know, your Azure division might get some money...
Seriously, this is just so...blatant. It's like we've all collectively decided that copyright just doesn't matter anymore. Just readin this article, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
I... There are parts of the world where certain developers don't understand the way the west tends to work with regard to copyright, or not blindly copying anything that is out there.
This however is a very, VERY poor situation when you end up placing your employer at risk because you think copyright doesn't matter and everything on the internet is fair game.
This is probably the most polite way I would describe this to most, UG. For the rest, jus stop acting like cheating through a situation to get a step up is the norm, it's just dirty behaviour.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 73.4 ms ] threadI'm surprised that JKR's people haven't come down like a tonne of bricks on Kaggle / Microsoft.
Does anyone know whether there is some special reason why this has lasted so long without being taken down?
I mean, books3 contained hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books, and people released it under their own name.
I'm sure the scripts of Star Wars would be similarly ignored if they were used.
Something like Harry Potter might be shared every day. And I mean as pirate work distributed as new copy. Staying on top of that will be very hard work.
https://archive.is/7WLho
Nevertheless pretty egregious oversight (incompetence?) and something that shouldn't have been published.
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/shubhammaindola/harry-potter...
More than just using the data, it seems linking to a copy that claims the dataset is public domain, would be problematic copyright-wise.
Also interesting, this blog post has been up since November of 2024, very surprising to me that Microsoft hasn't taken it down yet.
When I try to fill the questionaire, my request is rejected with this message:
Hysterical. What a farce. That data set is pure theft.The implicit motto of this class of hyper-wealthy people is: "it's not yours if you cannot keep it". Well, game on.
(There are 56.5e6 millionaires, and 3e3 billionaires -- making them 0.7% of the global population. They are outnumbered 141.6 to 1. And they seem to reside and physically congregate in a handful of places around the world. They probably wouldn't even notice that their property is being stolen, and even if they did, a simple cycle of theft and recovery would probably drive them into debt).
Everyone should torrent and rip off those books, anyway.
I guess the question to leadership is that two of the three pillars , namely security and quality are at odds with the third pillar— AI innovation. Which side do you pick?
(I know you mean well and I love you, Scott Hanselman but please don't answer this yourself. Please pass this on to the leadership.)
https://archive.is/D9vEN
If I write an article on training an LLM on the leaked Windows XP source code, blithely mark the source code repo as in 'the public domain', but used Azure resources for the how-to steps, would that would make it OK Microsoft? You know, your Azure division might get some money...
Seriously, this is just so...blatant. It's like we've all collectively decided that copyright just doesn't matter anymore. Just readin this article, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
This however is a very, VERY poor situation when you end up placing your employer at risk because you think copyright doesn't matter and everything on the internet is fair game.
This is probably the most polite way I would describe this to most, UG. For the rest, jus stop acting like cheating through a situation to get a step up is the norm, it's just dirty behaviour.
Yes, like USA. Copyright, and laws in general, are for you but not for me.
Rowling is known for actively protecting her rights as an author, they couldn't have picked a worse author to slop up