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

Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 686 posts

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#161

Post by jimbob21 »

trinsic2 wrote: post #152

I'm not seeing how this is fair use in either case. Someone correct me if I am wrong but aren't these works being digitized and transformed in a way to make a profit off of the information that is included in these works? It would be one thing for an individual to make person use of one or more books, but you got to have some special blindness not to see that a for-profit company's use of this information to improve…

They clearly were being digitized, but I think its a more philosophical discussion that we're only banging our heads against for the first time to say whether or not it is fair use.

Simply, if the models can think then it is no different than a person reading many books and building something new from their learnings. Digitization is just memory. If the models cannot think then it is meaningless digital regurgitation and plagiarism, not to mention breach of copyright.

The quotes "consistent with copyright's purpose in enabling creativity and fostering scientific progress." and "Like any reader aspiring to be a writer" say, from what I can tell, that the judge has legally ruled the model can think as a human does, and therefore has the legal protections afforded to "creatives."

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#162

Post by downrightmike »

asadotzler wrote: post #156
chourobin wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

copyright is not the same as piracy

piracy isn't a thing, except on the high seas. what you're thinking about is copyright violation.

Yup, piracy sounds better than copyright violation.

“Piracy” is mostly a rhetorical term in the context of copyright. Legally, it’s still called infringement or unauthorized copying. But industries and lobbying groups (e.g., RIAA, MPAA) have favored “piracy” for its emotional weight.

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#163

Post by asadotzler »

dathinab wrote: post #123

as far as I understand while training on books is clearly not fair use (as the result will likely hurt the lively hood of authors, especially not "best of the best" authors). as long as you buy the book it still should be legal, that is if you actually buy the book and not a "read only" eBook but the 7_000_000 pirated books are a huge issue, and one from which we have a lot of reason to believe isn't just specific to…

Buying a copy of a book does not give you license to take the exact content of that book, repackage it as a web service, and sell it to millions of others. That's called theft.

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#164

Post by wrs »

trinsic2 wrote: post #152

I'm not seeing how this is fair use in either case. Someone correct me if I am wrong but aren't these works being digitized and transformed in a way to make a profit off of the information that is included in these works? It would be one thing for an individual to make person use of one or more books, but you got to have some special blindness not to see that a for-profit company's use of this information to improve…

Copyright is not on “information”, It’s on the tangible expression (i.e., the actual words). “Transformative use” is a defense in copyright infringement.

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#165

Post by asadotzler »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #137

Buying, scanning, and discarding was in my proposal to train under copyright restrictions. You are often allowed to nake a digital copy of a physical work you bought. There are tons of used, physical works thay would be good for training LLM's. They'd also be good for training OCR which could do many things, including improve book scanning for training. This could be reduced to a single act of book destruction per co…

[flagged]

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#166

Post by kristofferR »

trinsic2 wrote: post #152

I'm not seeing how this is fair use in either case. Someone correct me if I am wrong but aren't these works being digitized and transformed in a way to make a profit off of the information that is included in these works? It would be one thing for an individual to make person use of one or more books, but you got to have some special blindness not to see that a for-profit company's use of this information to improve…

What do you think fair use is? The whole point of the fair use clauses is that if you transform copyrighted works enough you don't have to pay the original copyright holder.

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#168

Post by collingreen »

downrightmike wrote: post #162
asadotzler wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

piracy isn't a thing, except on the high seas. what you're thinking about is copyright violation.

Yup, piracy sounds better than copyright violation. “Piracy” is mostly a rhetorical term in the context of copyright. Legally, it’s still called infringement or unauthorized copying. But industries and lobbying groups (e.g., RIAA, MPAA) have favored “piracy” for its emotional weight.

Emotional weight or because it's intentionally misleading.

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#169

Post by achierius »

covercash wrote: post #124
lofaszvanitt wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can bet that this never gonna happen...

When the rich and powerful face zero consequences for breaking laws and ignoring the social contracts that keep our society functioning, you wind up with extreme overcorrections. See Luigi.

How extreme is that, really? Not to justify murder: that is clearly bad. But "killing one man" is evidently something we, as a society, consider an "acceptable side-effect" when a corporation does it -- hell, you can kill thousands and get away scot-free if you're big enough.

Luigi was peanuts in comparison.

“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”

- Mark Twain

Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

#170

Post by arrosenberg »

achierius wrote: post #158
chourobin wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

copyright is not the same as piracy

Can you explain why? What makes them categorically different or at the very least why is "piracy" quantitatively worse than 'just' copyright violation?

Piracy is theft - you have taken something and deprived the original owner of it.

Copyright infringement is unauthorized reproduction - you have made a copy of something, but you have not deprived the original owner of it. At most, you denied them revenue although generally less than the offended party claims, since not all instances of copying would have otherwise resulted in a sale.

Post reply on HN