text: The Books3 controversy highlights a critical question at the heart of generative AI: what role 
  do books play in training AI models, and how might digitized books be made widely 
  accessible for the purposes of training AI? What dataset of books could be constructed and 
  under what circumstances? 
  
  In February 2024, Creative Commons, Open Future and Proteus Strategies convened a series 
  of workshops to investigate the concept of a responsibly designed, broadly accessible 
  dataset of digitized books to be used in training AI models. Conducted under the Chatham 
  House Rule, we set out to ask if there is a possible future in which a “books data commons 
  for AI training” might exist, and what such a commons might look like. The workshops 
  brought together practitioners on the front lines of building next-generation AI models, as 
  well as legal and policy scholars with expertise in the copyright and licensing challenges 
  surrounding digitized books. Our goal was also to bridge the perspective of stewards of 