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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ASchmidt" data-source="post: 9617031" data-attributes="member: 6729334">I've worked in software development for almost 40 years and deal with IP laws on a fairly regular basis as a result. Hey, software developers are authors too and the code they write is covered under the same IP laws as books and films. And you haven't had fun until you've had to really dive into a licensing agreement for a code library.It's piracy. Period. There are emails now public that show they pursued getting the texts legally and opted not to because of cost and time. That's when they downloaded LibGen. I'm sure we all remember those stupid commercials about downloading a car, downloading the torrent was the first illegal act because at that moment they stole the works. They knew it, and did it intentionally. Whether you share them or not from there isn't the point, you've already committed piracy.Next, there's what they did with it. I'm going to have a hard time with a fair use defense because at the heart of fair use is how much of the original content did you reuse? That's why reviews and reactions only show short clips of things or quote small sections. They used 100% of each and every text. And they're trying to squeak in under a fair use argument under the "research and training" aspect except that another aspect is whether you're making commercial use of the work you're using. As long as these companies were non-profits, they could kinda squeak by on the "research" aspect of that. But once you've got Meta, Google, and so on trying to monetize it, they're now making profit off the works they've acquired illegally. Keep in mind, they still haven't acquired legal copies of the texts, they only have the copies they pirated off the net.And to be specific to your point about the PHB... Does Wizards allow non-open content from the PHB to be reprinted elsewhere? I can look it up on ChatGPT. That's specifically theft of WotC's IP.</blockquote>

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