Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 352 posts

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

#171

Post by realusername »

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…

It's the same as a book or a film review, you can't get the film or the book back from it but the original material is still needed to produce it.

Needing the original material isn't enough for claiming copyright infringement as we have existing counter examples

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

#172

Post by amlib »

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.

I can arrange a series of bricks in many ways to try and build a wall but that doesn't mean I will automatically get a good result if my process (like a ML training algorithm) doesn't precisely arrange then in a manner that produces a rigid wall with the desired characteristics. In the same vein you can have a fancy neural network arranged by some fancy LLM training algorithm with gobs of data about a subject but current methods likely won't produce anything with the depth of "understanding" that a human can do. It's a crumbly wall that falls once you do any real inspection or put any real load into it.

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

#173

Post by realusername »

triceratops wrote: post #116
nilsbunger wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s something called a substantive transformation test in copyright law. When you write a summary of a book, you don’t infringe on copyright because it’s a “substantial transformation”. This goes along with the idea that you can copyright the text but not the ideas it expresses. When model training reads the text and creates weights internally, is that a substantial transformation? I think there’s a pretty strong…

The counterargument to that is model training is impossible without making copies. That's not true for humans.

It's also true for humans, you memorize only parts of what you read and see but you still had to view the whole thing first.

The computer model is working differently of course but functionally it's the same idea.

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

#174

Post by labrador »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #133
labrador wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you don't think I'm snarky because I'm serious. If you're an American citizen you can homestead in Alaska and cut yourself off from all this if you like. edit: i'm serious. many americans would be much happier taking this option if they knew it existed. i may take it myself

Homesteading is tremendously expensive, unfortunately. Most people can’t.

I didn't know that, but in that case there are a lot of young men and women on HN who are financically successful, but are tremendously unhappy. That's the case for me when I looked into it 25 years ago.

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

#175

Post by Workaccount2 »

triceratops wrote: post #116
nilsbunger wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s something called a substantive transformation test in copyright law. When you write a summary of a book, you don’t infringe on copyright because it’s a “substantial transformation”. This goes along with the idea that you can copyright the text but not the ideas it expresses. When model training reads the text and creates weights internally, is that a substantial transformation? I think there’s a pretty strong…

The counterargument to that is model training is impossible without making copies. That's not true for humans.

That's not really true. Models train (in greatly simplified way) by being shown an excerpt and being told to guess the next token from the excerpt. They push around their weights until the token they output matches the next token in the excerpt. Then the excerpt is no longer needed. You can think of it like the article is loaded, the LLM plays this token guessing game through it, then the article is discarded. On the face of it this is what happens, but it gets hairier depending on how exactly this process is done. But it is seemingly not far removed from how humans consume content (acquire, read, discard), hence the legal blur.

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

#176

Post by pessimizer »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #154
pessimizer wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “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.

It may give me a summary good enough that I don't have to buy the book, since it read the book. If there are any parts that aren't detailed enough for me, I can ask them to be expanded.

If you're telling me that's not "infringing," you should follow what up with the argument for why it is not.

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

#177

Post by leovander »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #122
nilsbunger wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s something called a substantive transformation test in copyright law. When you write a summary of a book, you don’t infringe on copyright because it’s a “substantial transformation”. This goes along with the idea that you can copyright the text but not the ideas it expresses. When model training reads the text and creates weights internally, is that a substantial transformation? I think there’s a pretty strong…

No transformation is needed. The point here is that book files have to be copied before they can be used for training. Copyright texts typically say something like "No unauthorised copying or transmission in any form (physical, electronic, etc.)" Individuals who torrented music and video files have been bankrupted for doing exactly this. The same laws should apply when a corporation downloads torrent files. What happ…

> have been bankrupted for doing exactly this.

Only if they seeded the data and some other entity downloaded it, i.e. they hosted the data. In a previous article I believe it was called out that Meta was being a leecher (not seeding back what they downloaded).

It's the hosting that gets you, not the act of downloading it.

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

#178

Post by triceratops »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #168
triceratops wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW the essence of copyright law AIUI is: copying is not permitted, unless done in a form explicitly allowed by the license holder. This scenario seems quite contrived but is there an actual court precedent allowing it? I'm 100% confident no one will ever prosecute you for doing it but that's not the same thing as "allowed". In another thread I already posted about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting…

As far as I can tell there is also a principle that you can have ephemeral copies as part of handling and processing the work. Your example involves transmission and mine doesn't, and that's a whole different can of worms. Also the result of that case was self-contradicting so it's not a great basis to build too much logic upon.

> there is also a principle that you can have ephemeral copies as part of handling and processing the work.

I'm not aware of this principle. Where is it spelled out?

> Also the result of that case was self-contradicting

I agree the verdict was a travesty. An innovative business went to ridiculous lengths to stay on the right side of the copyright mafia (data centers with tiny individual TV antennas for each subscriber FFS!) while providing a better product and experience. They still had the hammer brought down on them.

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

#179

Post by stevenAthompson »

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…

The purpose of copyright is it progress the arts and sciences. Not to guarantee profit. Guaranteeing profit is just the way we encourage people to progress the arts and sciences.

That is why so called derivative works are allowed (and even encouraged). If copyrighted material is ingested, modified or enhanced to add value, and then regurgitated that is legal, whereas copying it without adding value is not legal.

If derivative works weren't deemed acceptable copyright would have the opposite of it's intended effect and become an impediment to progress.

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

#180

Post by mrgoldenbrown »

nilsbunger wrote: post #97
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…

There’s something called a substantive transformation test in copyright law. When you write a summary of a book, you don’t infringe on copyright because it’s a “substantial transformation”. This goes along with the idea that you can copyright the text but not the ideas it expresses. When model training reads the text and creates weights internally, is that a substantial transformation? I think there’s a pretty strong…

Even if you argue the LLM's are merely summarizing content, they still had to illegally download that content in the first place. The model can't read and simmarize the texts unless the text was illegally downloaded and copied. Piracy isn't suddenly legal just because you promise to delete the movie you downloaded after watching it.
Post reply on HN