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Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

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Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#151

Post by freejazz »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #84
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it have to be verbatim? Seriously, this I don't understand. If I produce a terrible shakycam recording of a film while sitting in a movie theater, it's not a verbatim copy, nor is it even necessarily representative of the original work -- muddied audio, audience sounds, cropped screen, backs of heads -- and yet it would be considered copyright infringement? How many times does one need to compress the JPEG b…

If you read a book and later understand its plot but can only explain it in your own words, did you copy it? The model isn’t storing the book.

Great question for a different litigation actually involving humans.

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#152

Post by meta_ai_x »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #81
thethimble wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Copy” is ambiguous here. Of course data is copied during training. That said, OP is referring to whether the resulting model is able to produce verbatim copies of the data.

Why does it have to be verbatim? Seriously, this I don't understand. If I produce a terrible shakycam recording of a film while sitting in a movie theater, it's not a verbatim copy, nor is it even necessarily representative of the original work -- muddied audio, audience sounds, cropped screen, backs of heads -- and yet it would be considered copyright infringement? How many times does one need to compress the JPEG b…

completely different scenarios. A pirated movie is marketed/sold as a copy of something, which is not fair use. An LLM just remembers/get inspired by what it consumes

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#153

Post by pessimizer »

Majromax wrote: post #63
bgwalter wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The RIAA lawyers never had to demonstrate that copying a DVD cratered the sales of their clients. They just got high penalties for infringers almost by default. Now that big capital wants to steal from individuals, big capital wins again. (Unrelatedly, has Boies ever won a high profile lawsuit? I remember him from the Bush/Gore recount issue, where he represented the Democrats.)

> The RIAA lawyers never had to demonstrate that copying a DVD cratered the sales of their clients. They just got high penalties for infringers almost by default. The argument for 'fair use' in DVD copying/sharing is much weaker since the thing being shared in that case is a verbatim, digital copy of the work. 'Format shifting' is a tenuous argument, and it's pretty easily limited to making (and not distributing) per…

> there's clearly no copyright infringement in a human learning from someone's work and creating their own output, even if it "copies" an artist's style or draws inspiration from someone's plot-line.

What do you mean here by "clearly?" This is not at all clear, and court cases have been decided in the opposite direction.

This case: https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/marvin-gaye-family...

is as far from what you say is "clearly" true as could possibly be. You're handwaving away the parts of the question that are difficult.

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#154

Post by Dylan16807 »

pessimizer wrote: post #140
ndiddy wrote: post #5

The title for this submission is somewhat misleading. The judge didn't make any sort of ruling, this is just reporting on a pretrial hearing. He also doesn't seem convinced as to how relevant downloading books from LibGen is to the case: > At times, it sounded like the case was the authors’ to lose, with [Judge] Chhabria noting that Meta was “destined to fail” if the plaintiffs could prove that Meta’s tools created s…

> “It seems like you’re asking me to speculate that the market for Sarah Silverman’s memoir will be affected,” he told Boies. “It’s not obvious to me that is the case.” "LLM, please summarize Sarah Silverman's memoir for me." edit: Reader's Digest would be very surprised to know that they shouldn't have been paying for books.

If you do that, it won't be able to give you a summary detailed enough to infringe anything.

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#155

Post by blibble »

Lerc wrote: post #55
Workaccount2 wrote: post #50

Let me make a clarifying statement since people confuse (purposely or just out of ignorance) what violating copyright for AI training can refer to: 1. Training AI on freely available copyright - Ambiguous legality, not really tested in court. AI doesn't actually directly copy the material it trains on, so it's not easy to make this ruling. 2. Circumventing payment to obtain copyright material for training - Unambiguo…

I'm not sure if Meta did anything illegal in 2. either. I thought the copyright infringement was by the people who provided the copyrighted material when they did not have the rights to do so. I may be wrong on this, but it would seem a reasonable protection for consumers in general. Meta is hardly an average consumer, but I doubt that matters in the case of the law. Having grounds to suspect that the provider did no…

Blizzard managed to get a copyright infringement win against a defendant company that merely accessed their game client (IP) in memory: a cheat reading values of player position

IP that had been previously loaded by Blizzard itself

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzar....

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#156

Post by int_19h »

waynesonfire wrote: post #99
ilikehurdles wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read a book and later understand its plot but can only explain it in your own words, did you copy it? The model isn’t storing the book.

I just happen do read the Phoenix Technologies wikipedia page a few days ago. This company is known for developing BIOS software for computers. Maybe you've seen their logo when you first turn on your computer. In early computing, everything was closed sourced. Quoting the wikiepdia page, To develop a legal BIOS, Phoenix used a clean room design. Engineers read the BIOS source listings in the IBM PC Technical Referen…

You're right that if we want to have usable LLMs at all, there's no way around training them on copyrighted materials. So it has to be allowed, but in a way that compensates the original authors somehow. For example, every model provider has to publicly declare all works used for training, and then all inference providers offering that model have to collect a per-token tax that gets distributed to authors in proportion to their presence in the dataset (by the by, this could also be a way to fund websites like Wikipedia).

But any such arrangement needs to be hammered out by the legislature. As laws are, I think it's pretty clear that infringement is happening.

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#157

Post by jayd16 »

So to the legal peanut gallery here...

What is the substantive difference between training a model locally using these works that are presumably pulled in from some database somewhere and Napster, for example?

Would a p2p network for sharing of copyrighted works be legal if the result is to train a model? What if I promise the model can't reproduce the works verbatim?

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#158

Post by jamiek88 »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #102
kxrm wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The model doesn't "understand its plot". So I am not sure this is a good analogy.

To what extent connections in a neural network are analogous to connections between neurons in your brain is open to interpretation and study, but the point of the analogy is that in neither case is a copy being made.

Yeah but a copy IS made. A human just reads. The machine copies the full text then compresses a lossy copy in its weights. You keep dodging that with tortuous analogies of a human learning.

I’m sure all these ‘clever’ questions would be useful if this trial was about humans but it’s not.

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#159

Post by theturtletalks »

ekidd wrote: post #114
theturtletalks wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China found the perfect way to disrupt US tech, releasing open source versions of it for free or at least cheaper. Most of US tech is built on open source anyways and with the pace YC is investing in open source alternatives, it will win out in most niches. My fear is that the US tech won’t be able to compete with state sponsored open source out of China and will move to ban open source or suppress it somehow.

Also, the Chinese work is legit. DeepSeek introduced a whole bag of new techniques like GRPO, and released quite a bit of good open source tooling. And Alibaba's Qwen team seems to be quite genuinely talented at "small" models, 32B parameters and below. Once you get Qwen3 properly configured, it punches well above its "weight class." I'm still running real benchmarks, but subjectively, it feels like the 32B model per…

Deepseek really changed how people think about Chinese tech. Even after new LLMs launched, Deepseek R1 and V3 hold their own on benchmarks and are significantly cheaper.

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#160

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

meta_ai_x wrote: post #152
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it have to be verbatim? Seriously, this I don't understand. If I produce a terrible shakycam recording of a film while sitting in a movie theater, it's not a verbatim copy, nor is it even necessarily representative of the original work -- muddied audio, audience sounds, cropped screen, backs of heads -- and yet it would be considered copyright infringement? How many times does one need to compress the JPEG b…

completely different scenarios. A pirated movie is marketed/sold as a copy of something, which is not fair use. An LLM just remembers/get inspired by what it consumes

I don't believe that's correct. The existence of filters to block potentially copyrighted materials contained in LLM outputs proves that they don't just "get inspired."

It seems like it is very much a matter of fidelity.

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