It's not copyright infringement to digitize your DVDs for personal use, you're just not allowed to distribute them
this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2026
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Copyright laws are just state's monopoly on information, at this point.
It's machine learning not copying. They are not copying and reproducing your book - except by accident lol. And they will fix the accidents soon enough. It's meant to be not just transformative use but actually learning how to write. And clearly they are mostly successful with that goal, even if the quality of the generated text is subpar - it is generating new text by learning from your book.
So this meme is moving the goalpost of IP. If someone goes to university and learns from textbooks the university wrote, they will have to get a license to practice the skills they learn. Like some kind of rent. That is what the argument here seems to be.
Yeah the post is inaccurate because it skips over the fact that these companies don't even pay for the books.
False, they never bought your book.
Yep! Laws are literally only tools of oppression. They have never and will never protect you any time you need protecting. That is not what they're for.
They couldn't if they wanted to. Which they don't.
I'm not so sure about that. Murder being illegal is the only way to get justice when a family member is killed outside of retribution, and that opens a whole can of worms
Edit: Whether or not it's applied fairly is a different story and is likely the main issue, not that laws exist in general
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Missed a major part: the AI companies are buying rare books, scanning them and then burning them. It's not like buying a DVD which can easily be digitally copied with hardware that most people have at home, it's so mucn worse than that.
The AI company doesn't even have to buy it.
I agree with the conclusion, but that rationale is wrong. First, you can digitize a DVD. Second, it's not a double standard. You can grab copies of random stuff and jam it in an AI model too.
Our laws are written such that it's making a copy outside of reasonable use that's illegal, and AI training only makes a copy incidentally to what they're doing and then it's deleted. It's the same standard that makes viewing a photo on an artists website legal.
It's not bullshit because they're breaking the law, but because we need to refine the law to make it clear training an AI model isn't a reasonable usage anymore than a public broadcast of a DVD is a reasonable use.
Trying to shoehorn it into the existing laws will just create a nightmare of loopholes and complications.
First, you can digitize a DVD.
Nitpick: Why would anyone do that, DVDs are already digital mediums with a filesystem. So they first have to convert to analog media first... And that introduces losses...
You just put a DVD in your drive and now you can copy files from it to you HD... If copying files is now called 'digitizing' we live in a strange world...
If you have a large number of DVDs, digitising them makes them easier to browse and decouples you from the physical medium (so you don't have to bring them with you everywhere in order to watch them).
As for the conversion, maybe you're confusing this with ripping vinyl or tape. Ripping a CD or a DVD is easy and reproducible and gives you a 1:1 digital copy of it.
AI training only makes a copy incidentally to what they’re doing and then it’s deleted. It’s the same standard that makes viewing a photo on an artists website legal.
That's not what the U.S. Copyright office says about training. They hold that it does implicate the copyright of reproduction. Meaning: If you train on a protected work without a license you are violating copyright, and if that's not a fair use then you are breaking the law.
Training ~ viewing might be an analogy used by "AI" brands, but it is not legal reality.
Its a slopper who wants to project these spreadsheets as 'conscious' when what's happening is they're essentially being transcoded into statistical models.
Yup. Give a Markov chain multi-billion parameters and you can get some surprisingly cogent results.
I will freely admit that current LLM architectures include several innovations that make them not actually Markov chains, but it's still statistics and linear algebra. I don't know what thought is, but I'm quite unconvinced that LLMs (or any current generative AI architecture) is doing it.
I don’t know what thought is, but I’m quite unconvinced that LLMs (or any current generative AI architecture) is doing it.
Okay, why not? I also don't know what thought is, so I don't think it's possible to say if an LLM is or is not doing it. And giving wrong or incoherent answers doesn't invalidate it as thought or your local stoner buddy would be considered brain dead.
I've not seen evidence of it in any of my interactions with generative AI, which have pretty universally been bad. I feel like it has something to do with autonomous spontaneity. I recognize it in animals I can't communicate well with, but I found it lacking in the LLM that I tried to play a TTRPG with. It would be easier for me to be convinced, if I really had a better understanding of what thought is. It's hard for me to be convinced because while I understand LLMs and diffusion networks better than most people*, I don't think I understand thought so I recognize the gap.
Also I'm not sure I agree with your final assertion, the stoner buddy is plenty wrong, but there is a coherency there. When coherency disappears entirely from human thought that's usually a seizure or stroke. Even as confusing as they are dreams and acid trips often have a coherency while you are in them, if not one that's easily described when recalling the experience.
*: My formal AI training ended before big data met ML, so it's woefully out of date. I am quite the computer geek tho, it's just my passion tends toward languages, type systems, and proof assistants. So, better than most, but not an expert by any means.
Nah. Shut the fuck up slopper. If you're going to insult us and then ask chatgpt to win the argument, which you always do and it always misses the point, I'm not going to answer your question.
The fact is these systems can do what a lot of humans do. That's not because the matrix multiplication is identical to thinking, but because most of these humans have never thought in their lives, do not have interiority, and are not people in any way that matters. Prove you're conscious if you want me to address you as such, fucking slopper.
I could've sworn a court case decided otherwise. Literally EVERY AI model in existence right now is commiting copyright theft on a massive scale if that's the interpretation the courts took. Which is why I have a hard time buying it. I fear it's reached the idea of normalcy in people's minds and we'll never see it illegal.
There's been a couple court cases (that I know of / at least), and one judge was accepting on the argument that model training was a "fair use" while the other was not. I think both of those rulings came down prior to the publication of the U.S. Copyright Office guidelines.
Also, I'm not 100% sure that the U.S. Copyright Office is an authority here. The DOJ and/or Federal judiciary would have the authority to interpret the copyright laws: The DOJ to decide to prosecute, and the judiciary to make binding rulings and/or advise juries. I'm sure both the DOJ and the judiciary will give a lot of weight to the guidelines, but the guidelines aren't actually the law.
In any case, you can read the guidelines and make your own decisions: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ Part 3 is about training, and I think the damning bits are III, B and D. Part 2 is about outputs, and I think the damning bits are II, B and D.2. (My summaries: 1. Training infringes 2. Outputs that are substantially similar infringe 3. models get no copyright 4. prompts are NOT 'human creative effort' and thus are insufficient to establish copyright 5. human creative effort still gets copyright protections, even when generative AI is used as a tool in the creative process.)
It is likely that commercial generative AI is in violation of a lot of copyrights, yes. Research projects are fair use, but only as long as they stay research projects.
The larger part of the infringement is probably its use commercially. I doubt that there would have been such a fuss if it was a fully-open, low-profit operation.
But as-is, the commercial products are being used to make money for the AI company in an unauthorised way.
Similar to how it's generally frowned upon for fan media to make money, because it starts being infringement. You can have a "support the fan media maker" button, but you generally can't do things like put your fan media behind a pay wall. The IP owners will come down hard on you for that.
Commercializing a work virtually guarantees it's creation isn't "fair use".
But also, "fair use" is actually quite a bit more narrow than just non-commercial.
There may be a limitation if the DVD is copy-protected, as is usually the case. There's too much to read for a single comment in DMCA: https://www.congress.gov/105/plaws/publ304/PLAW-105publ304.pdf
But it does fall under this definition (§1201):
‘‘(a)(3) As used in this subsection—
‘‘(A) to ‘circumvent a technological measure’ means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner;
and
‘‘(a) VIOLATIONS REGARDING CIRCUMVENTION OF TECHNOLOGICAL MEASURES.—(1)(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
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A story as old as time.
Which means unlimited corrupt folk to eat.
Whether or not we can make long term change, idk.
But seeing these folk suffer sure would be nice regardless.
Why don't you just buy a few senators and do something about it, if you're so upset?
Yup. Donors get policies, voters get apologies.
Donors get policies, voters get ~~apologies~~ fined.
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remember folks: the entire problem is capitalism. it can literally all be solved by dismantling capitalism and …undismantling some guillotines.
Now you have upgraded to a more limited number of rich assholes with even more concentrated power. Oh wait, a couple of decades later they reintroduce capitalism too.
It's unclear that is inevitable, but it does seem to be a common result of State socialism.
In libertarian socialism, hoarding resources will be recognized as an attack on the commons that can be answered with an attack (by the people) on the hoarder.
How in the world is that going to be policed?
In libertarian socialism, the people are the police. There's no States, so no state-organized and state-privileged police force. I could be wrong though, I still need a lot of education around libertarian socialism; I'm very much used to Capitalism.
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Yep. The "fine OR imprisonment" part means fines for the rich, and imprisonment for the poor.
The filthy rich only go to prison for stealing from other filthy rich assholes.
“If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class”
- Final Fantasy Tactics (1997)
97?! I was that old already... I thought this was older
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I'm not pirating, I'm building an AI model
Honestly, this sounds like the best test of copyright laws.
If corporations can train models on pirated data, and corporations are persons, then you, as a person, should be able to infringe copyright to train an AI model too.
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