[anonymous908213]

The title does not shame piracy. It factually describes that the linked article is a Microsoft-published guide to piracy, wherein the instructions tell readers to commit the (illegal for normal people) act of downloading pirated material, while linking to said pirated material (also illegal for normal people), with further instructions on how to use that just-downloaded pirated material for LLM inference (maybe even illegal for corporations; Anthropic settled for $1.5B for using pirated books in its training) and publishing derivative works without license (illegal for normal people).

I hate the current copyright environment as much as anyone, but I do not abide double-standards, with a two-tier justice system wherein a corporation gets to freely enforce the draconian copyright regime against individuals while also getting to abuse individuals' creative works in ways much more egregious.

[waffletower]

Read Section 107 of the Copyright Act. Microsoft lawyers would, and may have to, argue that their use of Harry Potter without permission is for valid research purposes. You are actively trying to negate Fair Use with your specious argument. That document may have been naive but it certainly isn't a piracy manual.

[anonymous908213]

There is absolutely no world where a judge is going to rule that linking to the full text of a book for people to download is Fair Use for research purposes. Successful arguments for Fair Use are significantly more limited in scope than people think, but this isn't even close. They might be able to argue it for their own use (unproven in court since Anthropic settled rather than taking it to trial, but the 1.5 billion dollar settlement indicates Anthropic had little faith in their odds), but there is no possible way you could argue that giving anyone on the internet downloads of the full book is Fair Use or necessary for research.

Out of curiosity, what would you describe a piracy manual as, if providing information as to where and how to illegally download copyrighted material is not it? What additional information would Microsoft have to have provided for it to cross the line into piracy? The only thing more illegal they could have done would be hosting the files themselves, but linking to files hosted otherwhere is still illegal, otherwise the loophole would make it child's play to ignore copyright laws. The Pirate Bay is the most famous example of attempting the legal strategy of "we don't host the copyrighted files, we just link to them", and it resulted in prison time for the founders.