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Nvidia contacted Anna's Archive to access books

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Re: Nvidia contacted Anna's Archive to access books

#31

Post by sib »

embedding-shape wrote: post #23
philipwhiuk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean 'planning'. You think they haven't already been sucked up?

What do you mean 'sucked up'? It's data on their machines already, people willingly give them the data, so Amazon can process and offer it to readers. No sucking needed, just use the data people uploaded to you already.

There's definitely a legal & contractual difference between (1) storing the books on your servers in order to provide them to end users who have purchased licenses to read them and (2) using that same data for training a model that might be used to create books that compete with the originals. I'm pretty sure that's why GP means by "sucking up."

This is analogous the difference between Gmail using search within your mail content to find messages that you are looking for vs Gmail providing ads inside Gmail based on the content of your email (which they don't do).

Re: Nvidia contacted Anna's Archive to access books

#33

Post by embedding-shape »

sib wrote: post #31
embedding-shape wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean 'sucked up'? It's data on their machines already, people willingly give them the data, so Amazon can process and offer it to readers. No sucking needed, just use the data people uploaded to you already.

There's definitely a legal & contractual difference between (1) storing the books on your servers in order to provide them to end users who have purchased licenses to read them and (2) using that same data for training a model that might be used to create books that compete with the originals. I'm pretty sure that's why GP means by "sucking up." This is analogous the difference between Gmail using search within your…

Yeah, I guess the "err" is on my side, I've always took "suck up" as a synonym for scraping, not just "using data for stuff".

And yeah, you're most likely right about the first, and the contract writers have with Amazon most certainly anticipates this, and includes both uses in their contract. But! Never published on Amazon, so don't know, but I'm guessing they already have the rights for doing so with what people been uploading these last few years.

Re: Nvidia contacted Anna's Archive to access books

#34

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

skilled wrote: post #3

> In response, NVIDIA defended its actions as fair use, noting that books are nothing more than statistical correlations to its AI models. Does this even make sense? Are the copyright laws so bad that a statement like this would actually be in NVIDIA’s favor?

Yes, it's been discussed many times before. All the corporations training LLMs have to have done a legal analysis and concluded that it's defensible. Even one of the white papers commissioned by the FSF ( "Copyright Implications of the Use of Code Repositories to Train a Machine Learning Model" at https://www.fsf.org/licensing/copilot/copyright-implications... ), concluded that using copyrighted data to train AI was plausibly legally defensible and outlined the potential argument. You will notice that the FSF has not rushed out to file copyright infringement suits even though they probably have more reason to oppose LLMs trained on FOSS code than anyone else in the world.

Re: Nvidia contacted Anna's Archive to access books

#35

Post by threethirtytwo »

lelanthran wrote: post #26
threethirtytwo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does make sense. It’s controversial. Your memory memorizes things in the same way. So what nvidia does here is no different, the AI doesn’t actually copy any of the books. To call training illegal is similar to calling reading a book and remembering it illegal. Our copyright laws are nowhere near detailed enough to specify anything in detail here so there is indeed a logical and technical inconsistency here. I can…

> To call training illegal is similar to calling reading a book and remembering it illegal. A type of wishful thinking fallacy. In law scale matters. It's legal for you to possess a single joint. It's not legal to possess 400 tons of weed in a warehouse.

Er no. I’ve read and remember hundreds of books in my life time. It’s not any more illegal based off scale. The law doesn’t differentiate whether I remember one book or a hundred then there’s no difference for thousands or millions.

No wishful thinking here.

Re: Nvidia contacted Anna's Archive to access books

#36

Post by postexitus »

skilled wrote: post #3

> In response, NVIDIA defended its actions as fair use, noting that books are nothing more than statistical correlations to its AI models. Does this even make sense? Are the copyright laws so bad that a statement like this would actually be in NVIDIA’s favor?

A quite good explanation of what copyright laws cover and should (and should not) cover is here by Cory Doctorow: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/...

Re: Nvidia contacted Anna's Archive to access books

#37

Post by threethirtytwo »

ckastner wrote: post #25
threethirtytwo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does make sense. It’s controversial. Your memory memorizes things in the same way. So what nvidia does here is no different, the AI doesn’t actually copy any of the books. To call training illegal is similar to calling reading a book and remembering it illegal. Our copyright laws are nowhere near detailed enough to specify anything in detail here so there is indeed a logical and technical inconsistency here. I can…

> To call training illegal is similar to calling reading a book and remembering it illegal. Perhaps, but reproducing the book from this memory could very well be illegal. And these models are all about production.

Models don’t reproduce books though. It’s impossible for a model to reproduce something word for word because the model never copied the book.

Most of the best fit curve runs along a path that doesn’t even touch an actual data point.

Re: Nvidia contacted Anna's Archive to access books

#38

Post by JKCalhoun »

general1465 wrote: post #12
skilled wrote: post #3

> In response, NVIDIA defended its actions as fair use, noting that books are nothing more than statistical correlations to its AI models. Does this even make sense? Are the copyright laws so bad that a statement like this would actually be in NVIDIA’s favor?

Did you pirated this movie? No I did not, it is fair use because this movie is nothing more than a statistical correlation to my dopamine production.

I saw the movie, but I don't remember it now.

Re: Nvidia contacted Anna's Archive to access books

#39

Post by kalap_ur »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #19
skilled wrote: post #3

> In response, NVIDIA defended its actions as fair use, noting that books are nothing more than statistical correlations to its AI models. Does this even make sense? Are the copyright laws so bad that a statement like this would actually be in NVIDIA’s favor?

It does make sense. It’s controversial. Your memory memorizes things in the same way. So what nvidia does here is no different, the AI doesn’t actually copy any of the books. To call training illegal is similar to calling reading a book and remembering it illegal. Our copyright laws are nowhere near detailed enough to specify anything in detail here so there is indeed a logical and technical inconsistency here. I can…

You can only read the book, if you purchased it. Even if you dont have the intent to reproduce it, you must purchase it. So, I guess NVDA should just purchase all those books, no?

Re: Nvidia contacted Anna's Archive to access books

#40

Post by empath75 »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #37
ckastner wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To call training illegal is similar to calling reading a book and remembering it illegal. Perhaps, but reproducing the book from this memory could very well be illegal. And these models are all about production.

Models don’t reproduce books though. It’s impossible for a model to reproduce something word for word because the model never copied the book. Most of the best fit curve runs along a path that doesn’t even touch an actual data point.

They do memorize some books. You can test this trivially by asking ChatGPT to produce the first chapter of something in the public domain -- for example a Tale of Two Cities. It may not be word for word exact, but it'll be very close.

These academics were able to get multiple LLMs to produce large amounts of text from Harry Potter:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671

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