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Yes!

Creating personal copies of copyrighted works are allowed. (Also, libraries really don't mind if you take pictures of the content of works they have.)

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Well LLMs dont make personal copies they make commercial copies.
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I didn't say if LLMs are allowed do that, I said that humans are allowed to do that.
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What do you mean with "then took the scans home"? Anthropic et al didn't buy all the books in the world and kept them for themselves.
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Correct, they torrented them. I just wanted to stick to the library analogy of the parent comment.
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Therein lies the rub: they didn't buy them... They pirated digital copies of them.

See, e.g.: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/libge...

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