• Your friend has no license to the content at all, so they can’t legally use it in the first place. If I drive a car you stole, that doesn’t mean I’m let off the hook once I get caught just because you were the one committing the actual crime.

    Your friend knows you don’t work for the New York Times so he should know you don’t have the authority to grant any license. From a copyright standpoint, you can’t even download an HTML copy of an article you paid for and share it with your friends, no matter what they do with it.

    In practice you’ll get caught and forced to pay up while your friend will probably be let off the hook, just like when you’re sharing your stash of pirated movies with the neighbourhood.

    Copyright forbids much more than people think it does. You can assume all digital reproduction (which includes copying files to a flash drive or uploading the to a file sharing website) you don’t own or have explicit permission to use (i.e. public domain stuff) to be illegal. There are exemptions (academic exemptions are the strongest ones in this case) but the often cited “fair use” argument usually isn’t a solid defence unless you’re willing to prove in court that you do comply with every single pillar of fair use.

    • Beej Jorgensen@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      I’ll simplify, then. Can I download an article that I’ve paid for and have permission to download, then have an algorithm operate on that data?

    • Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      I think you are oversimplifying this issue and ignoring the context and purpose of using their content. Original analysis of data is not illegal, and that’s all these models are, a collection of observations in relation to each other. As long as you can prove that your storage was noncommercial, and no more than necessary to achieve your fair use objectives, you can get by.

      Fair use protects reverse engineering, indexing for search engines, and other forms of analysis that create new knowledge about works or bodies of works. Moreover, Fair use is a flexible and context-specific doctrine, and you don’t have to prove in court that you comply with every single pillar of fair use. It depends on the situation and four things: why, what, how much, and how it affects the work. No one thing is more important than the others, and it is possible to have a fair use defense even if you do not meet all the criteria of fair use.

      You’re right about copyright forbidding much more than people think, but it also allows much more than people think. Fair use is also not a weak or unreliable defense, but a vital one that protects creativity, innovation, and freedom of expression. It’s not something that you have to prove in court, but something you assert as a right.