My positive experiences with libraries is exactly what I’m drawing on. It seems to me that if physical libraries can be made free to use, nothing prevents a digital equivalent other than lack of the same sort of funding.
Ah yes. The amazing service where you have to wait for someone else to finish reading an ebook before you are allowed to "borrow" it ... because reasons. Because obviously reading an ebook is not thread-safe.
As opposed to freely being able to download a PDF on-demand regardless of who else is reading it.
I am pretty sure they do, this data is just too valuable. At least meta admitted using a dataset called "books3" which contains ~200k pirated ebooks for llama 1 and 2 [1].
Anna's archive provides datasets for LLM training, but who knows who they are working with..
I also wonder if google is using their own dataset from books.google.com .
LibGen is the library concept adapted to the digital age where copying is zero cost. It's what official government sponsored libraries should be providing today. Instead we have publishers controlling how libraries can distribute works digitally and on what devices the users can view them.
> LibGen manifests the idea that humanity and its progress are more important than copyright.
The only reason for copyright to exist in the first place is to further the progress of humanity. If it doesn't do that or even hinders it (and I tend to agree that it does) we should get rid of it.
Hah! It’s a bit different but kind of the same.
LibGen manifests the idea that humanity and its progress are more important than copyright.
I wonder if Anthropic, OpenAI, or Meta.ai have spent much time looking at LibGen…