If you own a book, it should be legal for your computer to take a picture of it. I honestly feel bad for some of these AI companies because the rules around copyright are changing just to target them. I don't owe copyright to every book I read because I may subconsciously incorporate their ideas into my future work.
Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge
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Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge
#212The important parts: > Alsup ruled that Anthropic's use of copyrighted books to train its AI models was "exceedingly transformative" and qualified as fair use > "All Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies…
You skipped quotes about the other important side:
> But Alsup drew a firm line when it came to piracy.
> "Anthropic had no entitlement to use pirated copies for its central library," Alsup wrote. "Creating a permanent, general-purpose library was not itself a fair use excusing Anthropic's piracy."
That is, he ruled that
- buying, physically cutting up, physically digitizing books, and using them for training is fair use
- pirating the books for their digital library is not fair use.
Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge
#213If you own a book, it should be legal for your computer to take a picture of it. I honestly feel bad for some of these AI companies because the rules around copyright are changing just to target them. I don't owe copyright to every book I read because I may subconsciously incorporate their ideas into my future work.
Are we reading the same article? The article explicitly states that it's okay to cut up and scan the books you own to train a model from them.
> I honestly feel bad for some of these AI companies because the rules around copyright are changing just to target them
The ruling would be a huge win for AI companies if held. It's really weird that you reached the opposite conclusion.
Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge
#214Let’s say my AI company is training an AI on woodworking books and at the end, it will describe in text and wireframe drawings (but not the original or identical photos) how to do a particular task.
If I didn’t license all the books I trained on, am I not depriving the publisher of revenue, given people will pay me for the AI instead of buying the book?
Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge
#215Pirate and pay the fine is probably hell of a lot cheaper than individually buying all these books. I'm not saying this is justified, but what would you have done in their situation? Sayi "they have the money" is not an argument. It's about the amount of effort that is needed to individually buy, scan, process millions of pages. If that's done for you, why re-do it all?
At minimum they should have to buy the book they are deriving weights from.
But should the purchase be like a personal license? Or like a commercia license that costs way more?
Because for example if you buy a movie on disc, that's a personal license and you can watch it yourself at home. But you can't like play it at a large public venue that sell tickets to watch it. You need a different and more expensive license to make money off the usage of the content in a larger capacity like that.
Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge
#216Let’s say my AI company is training an AI on woodworking books and at the end, it will describe in text and wireframe drawings (but not the original or identical photos) how to do a particular task. If I didn’t license all the books I trained on, am I not depriving the publisher of revenue, given people will pay me for the AI instead of buying the book?
The same argument applies to someone who learned from the book and wrote an article explaining the idea to someone else.
Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge
#217Pirate and pay the fine is probably hell of a lot cheaper than individually buying all these books. I'm not saying this is justified, but what would you have done in their situation? Sayi "they have the money" is not an argument. It's about the amount of effort that is needed to individually buy, scan, process millions of pages. If that's done for you, why re-do it all?
The problem with this thinking is that hundreds of thousands of teachers who spent years writing great, useful books and sharing knowledge and wisdom probably won't sue a billion dollar company for stealing their work. What they'll likely do is stop writing altogether. I'm against Anthropic stealing teacher's work and discouraging them from ever writing again. Some teachers are already saying this (though probably no…
Stealing? In what way?
Training a generative model on a book is the mechanical equivalent of having a human read the book and learn from it. Is it stealing if a person reads the book and learns from it?
Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge
#218If you own a book, it should be legal for your computer to take a picture of it. I honestly feel bad for some of these AI companies because the rules around copyright are changing just to target them. I don't owe copyright to every book I read because I may subconsciously incorporate their ideas into my future work.
Everything is different at scale. I'm not giving a specific opinion on copyright here, but it just doesn't make sense when we try to apply individual rights and rules to systems of massive scale.
I really think we need to understand this as a society and also realize that moneyed interests will downplay this as much as possible. A lot of the problems we're having today are due to insufficient regulation differentiating between individuals and systems at scale.
Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I have about the same concept of piracy these days.
Real piracy always involves booty.
Naturally booty is wealth that has been hoarded.
Has nothing to do with wealth that may or may not come in the future, regardless of whether any losses due to piracy have taken place already or not.
Re: Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge
#220Let’s say my AI company is training an AI on woodworking books and at the end, it will describe in text and wireframe drawings (but not the original or identical photos) how to do a particular task. If I didn’t license all the books I trained on, am I not depriving the publisher of revenue, given people will pay me for the AI instead of buying the book?
If you paid a human author to do the same you’d be breaking no law. Learning is the point of books existing in the first place.