At some point in the future, people will look back at things like this in utter confusion - jail-time and a massive waste of police resources in order to stop people from sharing books…
They aren't worried about people sharing books at this point, or at least they shouldn't be. They're worried about people building their own models.
Here's something I'd pay for (probably with some sort of sketchy crypto, sadly): send me a huge-ass hard drive (or array of drives) with a complete mirror of Z-Library, Library Genesis, and sci-hub on it.
That will be a very reasonable thing to expect in a few years. Based
on the rate of advancement of memory density and LLM tech I wrote this
[0] a while back.
Containment of "the human corpus" (all significant written works since
antiquity) is a lost cause for the authorities. Stunts like this
Australian thing are symbolic rituals by the dying publishing industry
against a downhill battle.
For a brief window you'll have Fahrenheit 451 style police trying to
enforce physical warrants and seizure of "illegal reading materials",
but proliferation, diminishing size, sheer utility and cost of
enforcement will soon make the whole misadventure water under the
bridge.
Yeah, we will look back at early 21st century as a sorry bloody
episode to be embarrassed by.
Isn't anyone capable of building their own models technically sophisticated enough to get around basically any normal anti-piracy measure? Or for that matter has already downloaded all the books?
Eventually, someone is going to figure out how to train these things in a distributed fashion. When that happens, the more people who own as much data as possible, the better.
Yes. Many do. Dig deeper and it is often the publishers rather than creators pushing such bans. Authors want sales, but in such a competative industry the increased publicity from illegal sharing can be worth more than hypothetical lost sales. Publishers have different motivations as they manage catalogs rather than individual books.
Hopefully in the future we begin to understand that this way of supporting authors severely limits progress in our society due to our inability to share books as widely as possible.
