Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Have you never been to a public library and read a book while sitting there without checking it out? See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43355723 . If OpenAI built a robot that physically went into libraries, pulled books off shelves by itself, and read them...that's so cool I wouldn't even be mad.
What about checking out eBooks? If you had an app that checked those out and scanned it at robot speed vs human feed, that would be the same thing. The idea that reading something that does not belong to you directly means stealing is just weird and very strained. theGoogs essentially did that by having the robot that turned each page and scanned the pages. that's no different than having the librarian pull material…
You mean...made a copy? Do you really not see the problem?
> How they acquired the text would be a better thing to critique
Well...yeah that's what I said in the comment that started this discussion branch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43355147
This isn't about humans or robots reading books. It's that robots are allowed to violate copyright law to read the books, and us humans are not.