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

161–170 of 352 posts

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

#161

Post by ksynwa »

triceratops wrote: post #65
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…

> AI doesn't actually directly copy the material it trains on Of course it does. Large models are trained on gigantic clusters. How can you train without copying the material to machines in the cluster?

Don't they mean that LLMs cannot perfectly reproduce the source material?

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

#162

Post by triceratops »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #145
triceratops wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But also, you are allowed to make them. Not of physical media. You're allowed to make archival copies of digital media. > Or reading a book via a computer would be illegal No you purchased a license (or your library did, in the case of e-borrowing) to read the book on a computer. That makes it legal.

I am allowed to point a webcam at my physical book and read off the screen, even though that makes digital copies of all the text.

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_Cos.,_In....

This case was about pointing at and making a copy to transmit it to . The Supreme Court held it to be illegal. There was a lot of money on the line, which is why it went so far.

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

#163

Post by nradov »

diggan wrote: post #119
flessner wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the former ever gets tested in court, it's the end of the road. All major AI companies have trained on copyrighted work, one way or another. What is inspiration? What is imitation? What is plagiarism? The lines aren't clearly drawn for humans... much less for LLMs.

> If the former ever gets tested in court, it's the end of the road. All major AI companies have trained on copyrighted work, one way or another. End of the road for major AI companies, and hopefully something better can be created once it's declared illegal without any murky waters. There are LLMs trained on data that isn't illegally obtained, OLMo by Ai2 is one such model, that is actually open source and uses open…

That would hardly be the end of the road. If copyright enforcement gets stricter then that will give a market advantage to the largest, best funded major AI companies like OpenAI because they can afford to simply buy licenses from copyright holders. I predict that we'll see new middlemen arise specifically to handle this licensing, much like the agencies that handle most music licensing today.

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

#165

Post by nickpsecurity »

bilbo0s wrote: post #67
nickpsecurity wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FairTrained models claim to train with only public domain and legal works. Companies are also licensing works. This company has a lawful, foundation model: https://273ventures.com/kl3m-the-first-legal-large-language-... So, it's really the majority of companies breaking the law who will be affected. Companies using permissible and licensed works will be fine. The other companies would finally have to buy large co…

I don't know? Not really sure a claim is good enough. I don't know that you can just go into court and say, "Trust me, I don't use copyrighted material." And I also can't see any way, other than providing training data and training an identically structured model on that data, that a company can conclusively show that they got the weights in an allegedly copyright free model from the copyright free training data a co…

While the others are correct, I'm with you in the sense that I don't know if what they claim is true. I've also found others, like one in Singapore, that didn't use it on data that was as legal as news reports claimed. It might turn out to have problems.

There is benefit to using them, though. For one, they've tried really hard to be legal. That sets a positive example, shows good faith if they were sued, and reduces risk for those using them (good faith on our part). Also, one can be sure that they can ditch or replace any outputs in the long term if they're ruled illegal. So, we try not to use the A.I.'s in a way where losing access to them seriously damages our business.

That's the best I can offer until legal reforms happen.

If training, one can train it in Singapore on material you he or she has legal access to. Their law pretty much let's you use anything for AI purposes so long as you legally can access it yourself. To further reduce the risk, they should crawl it themselves, too, taking care to avoid risky sources.

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

#166

Post by [deleted] »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #83
triceratops wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright is the right to make copies. Why is copying during training is any different from producing copies of training data after training? If we're going that way, let me torrent every movie and TV show ever to "train" myself.

It's almost like information wants to be free

[deleted]

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

#167

Post by jamiek88 »

ekidd wrote: post #77
flessner wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the former ever gets tested in court, it's the end of the road. All major AI companies have trained on copyrighted work, one way or another. What is inspiration? What is imitation? What is plagiarism? The lines aren't clearly drawn for humans... much less for LLMs.

> If the former ever gets tested in court, it's the end of the road. All major AI companies have trained on copyrighted work, one way or another. I can absolutely guarantee you that neither DeepSeek nor Alibaba's highly talented Qwen group will care even a little bit, in the long run. Not if there's value to be had in AI. (And I can tell you down to the dollar what LLMs can save in certain business use cases.) If the…

> And I can tell you down to the dollar what LLMs can save in certain business use cases.)

Please do!!

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

#168

Post by Dylan16807 »

triceratops wrote: post #162
Dylan16807 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am allowed to point a webcam at my physical book and read off the screen, even though that makes digital copies of all the text.

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.

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

#169

Post by pessimizer »

ryandrake wrote: post #68

AI hucksters vs. the Copyright Cartel. When two evil villains fight, who do you root for? Here's hoping they somehow destroy each other.

Last time they fought, it was google vs. the publishers, and it resulted in the scanning and archiving of all of those books in the first place.

Neither of them died, though, both parties just kept all the books from the public and used them for their own purposes, while normal people had to squirrel them away and trade them illegally. It's the Tech Cartels vs. the Copyright Trolls. It'll end up as a romance.

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

#170

Post by adingus »

mtlynch wrote: post #39
adingus wrote: post #7

I'm wondering if authors are making the same mistakes that the music industry did with Napster and kazaa. Using AI has led to more book purchases for me. If I discover and enjoy a book via AI I'm more inclined to buy it. The cats out of the bag, so pet him.

Can you share more about how you sample books with AI?

I don't really sample them, but if I want to know more about a subject I will normally ask for a book recommendation to go along with it.
Post reply on HN