text: **Implications of the The Overall Approach**
  
  Stepping back from The Pile v2 speciﬁcally, or any particular existing collection of books or 
  dataset built on their basis, we want to understand the implications of relying on public 
  domain works and expressly licensed works in building a books commons. 
  
  The beneﬁts are relatively straightforward. Both categories, by deﬁnition come with express 
  permission to use the books in AI training. The cost of acquiring the books for this use may 
  be effectively zero or close to it, when considering public domain and “openly” licensed 
  books that allow redistribution and that have already been digitized. 
  
  But this approach comes with some clear limitations. First, as noted above, for many books 
  in the public domain, their status as such is not always clear. And with respect to 
  permissively licensed books, it is not always clear whether and how to comply with the 
  license obligations in this context. 
  
  Setting aside those challenges, the simple fact is that relying on public domain and existing 
  permissively licensed books would limit the quantity and diversity of data available for 
  training, impacting performance along different dimensions. Only a small fraction of books 
  ever published fall into this category, and the corpus of books in this category is likely to be 
  skewed heavily towards older public domain books. This skew would, in turn, impact the 
   For instance, relying on books from before 1929 would not 
  content available for AI training. 
  only incorporate outdated language patterns, but also a range of biases and misconceptions 
  about race and gender, among other things. Efforts could be made to get people to 
  permissively license more material — a book drive for permissive licensing, so to speak; this 
  approach would still not encompass most books, at least when it comes to past works. 
  
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