Publishing Pirated Books ("the AI newsletter")

All publishers (and writers) are thieves

First, let me state that I have not read enough on this issue to be confident in weighing in. So consider these thoughts provisional, conversational, oral even in the way that social media (aka twitter) is more an oral than a written form.

I am not finding myself cheering on the authors who are suing over copyright infringement due to AI and LLM training. My books are included in the Book3 database, and it doesn’t bother me.

Why? Well, I’m not sure. But I have been thinking a lot about the beginnings of the publishing industry in this county. It’s entirely rooted in piracy. (A few paragraphs below are from a newsletter I wrote a year ago, if it seems familiar. I am pirating myself!)

The first American publishers did not publish original works for which they had acquired the copyright. They based their business on piracy.

There was no international copyright law, so any book could be reprinted by any American and published under their business name. Publishers would literally race t…