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A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

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Re: A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

#31

Post by tsumnia »

rcxdude wrote: post #14
derbOac wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But those training the LLMs are still using the works, and not just to discuss them, which I think is the point of fair use doctrine. I guess I fail to see how it's any different from me using it in some other way? If I wanted to write a play very loosely inspired by Blood Meridian, it might be transformative, but that doesn't justify me pirating the book. I tend to think copyright should be extremely limited compare…

>If I wanted to write a play very loosely inspired by Blood Meridian, it might be transformative, but that doesn't justify me pirating the book. I think that's the conclusion of the judge. If Anthropic were to buy the books and train on them, without extra permission from the authors, it would be fair use, much like if you were to be inspired by it (though in that case, it may not even count as a derivative work at a…

I think the issue is that its actually quite difficult to "unlearn" something once you've seen it. I'm speaking more from human-learning rather than AI-learning, but since AI is inspired by our view on nature, it will have similar qualities. If I see something that inspires, regardless of if I paid for that, I may not even know what specifically inspired me. If I sit on a park bench and an idea comes to me, it could come from a number of things - the bench, park, weather, what movie I watched last night, stuff on the wall of a restaurant while I was eating there, etc.

While humans don't have encyclopedic memories, our brain connects a few dots to make a thought. If I say "Luke, I am your father", it doesn't matter that isn't even the line is wrong, anyone that's seen Star Wars knows what I'm quoting. I may not be profiting from using that line, but that doesn't stop Star Wars from inspiring other elements of my life.

I do agree that copyright law is complicated and AI is going to create even more complexity as we navigate this growth. I don't have a solution on that front, just a recognition that AI is doing what humans do, only more precisely.

Re: A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

#32

Post by MyOutfitIsVague »

gbacon wrote: post #3

The HN crowd dislikes brick-and-mortar landlords but often sides with charging rent for certain bits. Which side will prevail? Interesting excerpt: > “We will have a trial on the pirated copies used to create Anthropic’s central library and the resulting damages,” Judge Alsup wrote in the decision. “That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the…

> The HN crowd dislikes brick-and-mortar landlords but often sides with charging rent for certain bits. Which side will prevail?

I don't think that's exactly the case. A lot of the HN crowd is very much against the current iterations of copyright law, but is much more against rules that they see as being unfairly applied. For most of us, we want copyright reform, but short of that, we want it to at least pretend to be used for what it is usually claimed to be for: protecting small artists from large, predatory companies.

Re: A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

#33

Post by ticulatedspline »

tgv wrote: post #26
ticulatedspline wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely seems reasonable to say "you can train on this data but you have to have a legal copy" Personally I like to frame most AI problems by substituting a human (or humans) for the AI. Works pretty well most of the time. In this case if you hired a bunch of artists/writers that somehow had never seen a Disney movie and to train them to make crappy Disney clones you made them watch all the movies it certainly wou…

> Definitely seems reasonable to say "you can train on this data but you have to have a legal copy" How many copies? They're not serving a single client. Libraries need to have multiple e-book licenses, after all.

In the human training case probably a Store DVD would still run afoul of that licensing issue. That's a broader topic of audience and I didn't want to muddy the analogy with that detail.

It changes the definition of what a "legal copy" is but the general idea that the copy must be legal still stands.

Re: A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

#34

Post by ncruces »

veggieroll wrote: post #27
3PS wrote: post #2

Broadly summarizing. This is OK and fair use: Training LLMs on copyrighted work, since it's transformative. This is not OK and not fair use: pirating data, or creating a big repository of pirated data that isn't necessarily for AI training. Overall seems like a pretty reasonable ruling?

BRB, I'm going to download all the TV shows and movies to train my vision model. Just to be sure it's working properly, I have to watch some for debugging purposes.

You need to buy one copy of each for the fair use to apply.

Re: A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

#35

Post by almatabata »

bananapub wrote: post #24
almatabata wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a publisher adds a "no AI training" clause to their contracts, does this ruling render it invalid?

what contract? with who? Meta at least just downloaded ENGLISH_LANGUAGUE_BOOKS_ALL_MEGATORRENT.torrent and trained on that.

I know, but the article mentions that a separate ruling will be made about that pirating.

quote: “We will have a trial on the pirated copies used to create Anthropic’s central library and the resulting damages,” Judge Alsup wrote in the decision. “That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages.”

This tells me Anthropic acquired these books legally afterwards. I was asking if during that purchase, the seller could add a no training close to the sales contract.

Re: A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

#36

Post by almatabata »

heavyset_go wrote: post #29
almatabata wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a publisher adds a "no AI training" clause to their contracts, does this ruling render it invalid?

Fair use overrides licensing

thanks for clarifying.

Re: A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

#37

Post by dragonwriter »

derbOac wrote: post #10
3PS wrote: post #2

Broadly summarizing. This is OK and fair use: Training LLMs on copyrighted work, since it's transformative. This is not OK and not fair use: pirating data, or creating a big repository of pirated data that isn't necessarily for AI training. Overall seems like a pretty reasonable ruling?

But those training the LLMs are still using the works, and not just to discuss them, which I think is the point of fair use doctrine. I guess I fail to see how it's any different from me using it in some other way? If I wanted to write a play very loosely inspired by Blood Meridian, it might be transformative, but that doesn't justify me pirating the book. I tend to think copyright should be extremely limited compare…

> I tend to think copyright should be extremely limited compared to what it is now, but to me the logic of this ruling is illogical other than "it's ok for a corporation to use lots of works without permission but not for an individual to use a single work without permission."

That's not what the ruling says.

It says that training a generative AI system not designed primarily as a direct replacement for a work on one or more works is fair use, and that print-to-digital destructive scanning for storage and searchability is fair use.

These are both independent of whether one person or a giant company or something in between is doing it, and independent of the number of works involved (there's maybe a weak practical relationship to the number of works involved, since a gen AI tool that is trained on exactly one work is probably somewhat less likely to have a real use beyond a replacement for that work.)

Re: A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

#38

Post by klabb3 »

derbOac wrote: post #10
3PS wrote: post #2

Broadly summarizing. This is OK and fair use: Training LLMs on copyrighted work, since it's transformative. This is not OK and not fair use: pirating data, or creating a big repository of pirated data that isn't necessarily for AI training. Overall seems like a pretty reasonable ruling?

But those training the LLMs are still using the works, and not just to discuss them, which I think is the point of fair use doctrine. I guess I fail to see how it's any different from me using it in some other way? If I wanted to write a play very loosely inspired by Blood Meridian, it might be transformative, but that doesn't justify me pirating the book. I tend to think copyright should be extremely limited compare…

> But those training the LLMs are still using the works, and not just to discuss them, which I think is the point of fair use doctrine.

Worse, they’re using it for massive commercial gain, without paying a dime upstream to the supply chain that made it possible. If there is any purpose of copyright at all, it’s to prevent making money from someone’s else’s intellectual work. The entire thing is based on economic pragmatism, because just copying does obviously not deprive the creator of the work itself, so the only justification in the first place is to protect those who seek to sell immaterial goods, by allowing them to decide how it can be used.

Coming to the conclusion that you can ”fair use” yourself out of paying for the most critical part of your supply makes me upset for the victims of the biggest heist of the century. But in the long term it can have devastating chilling effects, where information silos will become the norm, and various forms of DRM will be even more draconian.

Plus, fair use bypasses any licensing, no? Meaning even if today you clearly specify in the license that your work cannot be used in training commercial AI, it isn’t legally enforceable?

Re: A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

#39

Post by MyOutfitIsVague »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #17
thedevilslawyer wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While no one wants anyone to steal a car, almost no one would mind freely cloning a car. The trouble truly is that 3d-printing hasn't gotten that good yet.

If 3d printing was that good, stealing a car would be moot because production costs would come way down and only need to cover cost/procurement of materials and paying back the black box. Regardless, I don't think the car is an apt metaphor here. Cars are an important utility and gatekeeping cars arguably holds society back., art is creative expression, and no one is going hungry because they didn't have $10 for the…

I dislike framing art as something unimportant. Art is a vital part of being a human and part of a culture. We've grown accustomed to our culture being commoditized and rented back to us, but that doesn't mean the culture is unimportant, or such a state of affairs is acceptable.

Re: A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

#40

Post by NobodyNada »

One aspect of this ruling [1] that I find concerning: on pages 7 and 11-12, it concedes that the LLM does substantially "memorize" copyrighted works, but rules that this doesn't violate the author's copyright because Anthropic has server-side filtering to avoid reproducing memorized text. (Alsup compares this to Google Books, which has server-side searchable full-text copies of copyrighted books, but only allows users to access snippets in a non-infringing manner.)

Does this imply that distributing open-weights models such as Llama is copyright infringement, since users can trivially run the model without output filtering to extract the memorized text?

[1]: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...

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