Legally obtaining a book for reading it yourself is different from legally obtaining a book for copying and republishing/reselling. If I buy a book for $5 at a sale I can read it myself or even sell it for $10 on craigslist, but I can't scan it and make a million copies and sell each of those.
They aren't republishing or reselling. In fact, they buy huge amounts of books and then destroy them, which is better for the rights holders than to resell them.
Since whole chunks of these books can be recited verbatim by these models, to which they sell access, they absolutely are republishing and reselling these books' content in a way.
Like I remember a research paper that managed to recreate the whole of a Harry Potter book from a model?
> Since whole chunks of these books can be recited verbatim by these models, to which they sell access, they absolutely are republishing and reselling these books' content in a way.
They are absolutely not "republishing" in any meaningful sense of the term. A chunk is not a whole book, and even getting a modern LLM to reproduce such a large chunk of an arbitrary book is not a trivial task. I have never heard of anyone who actively used LLMs for book piracy.
> Like I remember a research paper that managed to recreate the whole of a Harry Potter book from a model?
Even if that is true (it may well be false), this is likely far too difficult for any normal person to exploit, and moreover, even less likely to succeed for the great majority of other books who aren't nearly as famous.
Just because it's not a reasonable way to pirate stuff, doesn't make it legal -- just try your luck with Disney and let's see when they bite. Why would we let one company ignore the law, while rudelessly enforcing it in other cases? That's just state sponsorship with extra steps.
If we assume on average $20 per legally obtained book, 1.5 billion dollars are enough for 75 million books. That's approximately every non-fiction book in existence.
