> There's a difference between being in public and being available for public use. Books in a book shop are "in public", but only those out of copyright are available for public use
Copying books can be fair use if it is sufficiently transformative, copyright doesn't block all use of copyrighted material. A major case on this was around Google building a search index for books:
Open AI is currently attempting to argue that training a model is more transformative than building a search index, whether they win that argument or not is still to be seen.
Building and granting access to a generative model is far more damaging to the market prospects of the infringed works, which is also a factor. Like…the whole goal is for it to be able to replace what humans do, which is about as market-damaging as I can imagine. I’m not a lawyer, though.
This is true for some types of transformative work, but aggregating to make money off others work is not generally allowed. I think Open AI are in for a hard time with this when people look at the results and see their work clearly.
Copying books can be fair use if it is sufficiently transformative, copyright doesn't block all use of copyrighted material. A major case on this was around Google building a search index for books:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....
Open AI is currently attempting to argue that training a model is more transformative than building a search index, whether they win that argument or not is still to be seen.