Earlier quoted context omitted.
“The content industries.” Why would people invest in destroying what they love?
There is no destruction.
He meant, the stream of free money from unsuspecting monkeys.
OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules
171–180 of 256 posts
Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a point that I don't see discussed enough. I think anthropic decided to purchase books in bulk, tear them apart to scan them, and then destroy those copies. And that's the only source of copyrighted material I've ever heard of that is actually legal to use for training LLMs. Most LLMs were trained on vast troves of pirated copyrighted material. Folks point this out, but they don't ever talk about what the alt…
You're using the phrase "actually legal" when the ruling in fact meant it wasn't piracy after the change. Training on the shredded books was not piracy. Training on the books they downloaded was piracy. That is where the damages come from. Nothing in the ruling says it is legal to start outputting and selling content based off the results of that training process.
>Nothing in the ruling says it is legal to start outputting and selling content based off the results of that training process.
Nothing says it's illegal, either. If anything the courts are leaning towards it being legal, assuming it's not trained on pirated materials.
>A federal judge dealt the case a mixed ruling in June, finding that training AI chatbots on copyrighted books wasn't illegal but that Anthropic wrongfully acquired millions of books through pirate websites.
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/g-s1-87367/anthropic-authors-...
Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Had a couple of drive-by downvotes... Is it that stupid an opinion? Granted I know nothing about the case except for what's in TFA
I'm not one of the downvoters, but it may be this: "Many sites have been doing that for decades and as far as I know record companies haven't gone after them." Record companies have in fact, for decades, been going after sites for showing lyrics. If you play guitar, for example, it's almost impossible to find chords/tabs that include the lyrics because sites get shut down for doing that.
Hmm, alright. I actually do play guitar and used to find chords/tabs with lyrics easily. I haven't been doing that for maybe 10-15 years. Anyway, maybe those sites were paying for a license and I just never considered it
Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Had a couple of drive-by downvotes... Is it that stupid an opinion? Granted I know nothing about the case except for what's in TFA
If anything, AI would scramble the lyrics more than a human "taking lyrics to make a new song from them".
Maybe, but it's also possible to get an AI to produce a song with the exact same lyrics. And a human copying lyrics would also be a copyright issue in any case.
But anyway it seems I misinterpreted the issue and record companies have always been against reproduction of lyrics whether an AI or human is doing it
Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a point that I don't see discussed enough. I think anthropic decided to purchase books in bulk, tear them apart to scan them, and then destroy those copies. And that's the only source of copyrighted material I've ever heard of that is actually legal to use for training LLMs. Most LLMs were trained on vast troves of pirated copyrighted material. Folks point this out, but they don't ever talk about what the alt…
You're using the phrase "actually legal" when the ruling in fact meant it wasn't piracy after the change. Training on the shredded books was not piracy. Training on the books they downloaded was piracy. That is where the damages come from. Nothing in the ruling says it is legal to start outputting and selling content based off the results of that training process.
I think your first paragraph is entirely congruent with my first two paragraphs.
Your second paragraph is not what I'm discussing right now, and was not ruled on in the case you're referring to. I fully expect that, generally speaking, infringement will be on the users of the AI, rather than the models themselves, when it all gets sorted out.
Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think having the lyrics reproducible in text form isn't the problem. Many sites have been doing that for decades and as far as I know record companies haven't gone after them. But these days with generative AI, they can take lyrics and just make a new song with them, and you can probably see why artists and record companies would want to stop that. Plus, from TFA, "GEMA hoped discussions could now take place with O…
Had a couple of drive-by downvotes... Is it that stupid an opinion? Granted I know nothing about the case except for what's in TFA
It's like saying that movie studios haven't gone after Netflix over movies, so what's the issue with hosting pirated movies on your own site. The reason movie studios don't go after Netflix is that they have a license to show it.
Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules
#177The obsession with protecting access to lyrics is one of the strangest long-running legal battles to me. I will skip tracks on Spotify sometimes specifically because there are no lyrics available. Easy access to lyrics is practically an advertisement for the music. Why do record companies not want lyrics freely available? In most cases, it means they aren't available at all. How is that a good business decision?
This is a tough one for the HN crowd. It's like that man not sure which button to push meme. 1) RIAA is evil for enforcing copyrights on lyrics? 2) OpenAI is evil for training on lyrics?
I know nuance takes the fun out of most online discussions, but there's a qualitative difference between a bunch of college kids downloading mp3's on a torrent site and a $500 billion company who's goal among other things is to become the primary access point to all things digital.
Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules
#178The obsession with protecting access to lyrics is one of the strangest long-running legal battles to me. I will skip tracks on Spotify sometimes specifically because there are no lyrics available. Easy access to lyrics is practically an advertisement for the music. Why do record companies not want lyrics freely available? In most cases, it means they aren't available at all. How is that a good business decision?
One amusing part of lyrics on Spotify to me is how they don't seem to track which songs are instrumentals or not and use that to skip the message about them not knowing the lyrics. An instrumental will pop up and it will say something like "Sorry, we don't have the lyrics to this one yet". The only thing funnier than that is when they do have the lyrics to a song that probably doesn't need them, like Hocus Pocus by F…
Oh they track that, it's in their API as the "instrumentalness" score: https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...
The fact that they don't do anything with that information is unrelated.
Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
All AI companies know they're breaking the law. They all have prompts effectively saying "Don't show that we broke the law!". That we continue to have tech companies consistently breaking the law and nothing happens is an indictment of our current economy.
Training on copyright is not illegal. Even in the lawsuit against anthropic it was found to be fair use. Pirating material is a violation of copyright, which some labs have done, but that has nothing to do with training AI and everything to do with piracy.
There is US precedent for training being deemed not fair use. https://www.dglaw.com/court-rules-ai-training-on-copyrighted...
Why wouldn’t training be illegal? It’s illegal for me to acquire and watch movies or listen to songs without paying for them*. If consuming copyrighted material isn’t fair use, then it doesn’t make sense that AI training would be fair use.
* I hope it’s obvious but I feel compelled to qualify that, of course, I’m talking about downloading (for example torrenting) media, and not about borrowing from the library or being gifted a DVD, CD, book or whatever, and not listening/watching one time with friends. People have been successfully prosecuted for consuming copyrighted material, and that’s what I’m referring to.
Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a tough one for the HN crowd. It's like that man not sure which button to push meme. 1) RIAA is evil for enforcing copyrights on lyrics? 2) OpenAI is evil for training on lyrics?
I know nuance takes the fun out of most online discussions, but there's a qualitative difference between a bunch of college kids downloading mp3's on a torrent site and a $500 billion company who's goal among other things is to become the primary access point to all things digital.
Should young adults be allowed to violate copyright and no one else? The damages caused seem far worse than an LLM being able to reproduce song lyrics.
Is it simply "we like college kids" and "we hate OpenAI"? that dictates this?
I'm ready, hit me with the nuance.