this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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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.
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.
Fair use does cover creative endeavors, that is true, but on the internet everyone claims fair use about just about everything. The silliest examples are the people pasting fair use case text underneath entire videos and songs they've ripped and uploaded to Youtube as if it's some kind of spell to keep the RIAA away.
Creative work, like parodies, reviews, and quotes, are allowed, but there are also strong limits on this depending on the context. Music sampling, for example, is not fair use, even if you use short bits, and is subjected to licensing deals from music studios, even if you recorded them from the radio.
What I was responding to here is the idea that of running an automated program on information shared without permission. In that case, the fair use argument becomes very difficult to make, in my opinion. Search engines and other forms of analysis is definitely allowed, but those copies are provided through legitimate means. Downloading articles from behind a paywall and sharing them isn't the same as indexing publicly available web pages.
I'm not saying you should get anything through illicit means, you could just view the web page yourself rather than sending it to anyone else. For example LAION, provides links to internet data, they don't download or copy content from sites. By visiting it yourself, you'd dodge all those problems.