Reconsider sharing
The recent FTC round table (https://www.ftc.gov/media/creative-economy-generative-ai-discussion-october-4-2023) highlighted for me how Books3 distribution in particular could be a net harm, and there was discussion about whether the content was legal to distribute.
I wonder if this is a dataset that should not be further shared.
For books3 alternative:
- Install IPFS and launch it.
- pip3 install stc-geck && geck - documents
- You downloading tons of books and papers
Thank you, @mmitchell .
Indeed the source data of this dataset is no longer accessible since some months ago. See comment here: https://huggingface.co/datasets/the_pile_books3/discussions/5#64be8b19cf4f379eebc4dba8
We thought about just keeping the dataset metadata card for historical purposes.
We are adding a warning to the dataset card and also will raise a specific error.
Please note, also for the record, that the pirate website hosting the content itself (the-eye.eu) removed the compressed archive that this script relied on because of a DMCA / EUCD takedown request. As far as I can tell, this dataset was not functional from July 13th onwards.
FWIW, the content of this dataset was never legal to redistribute like this; even its original creator admitted this. HuggingFace: please be more careful with the datasets that are hosted on your platform — especially these top-level datasets (maintained directly by HF) and other third-party datasets that have had serious legal issues & reports on them. This is not the only one with severe problems.
We also raise a DefunctDatasetError.
See: #9