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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

#381

Post by AnthonyMouse »

dmd wrote: post #340
freejazz wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also argued that they in no way could ever actually license all the materials they ingested

I love this argument so much. "But judge, there's no way I could ever afford to buy those jewels, so stealing them must be OK."

The argument is more along the lines of, negotiating with millions of individuals each over a single copy of a work would cause the transaction costs to exceed the payments, and that kind of efficiency loss is the sort of thing fair use exists to prevent. It's not socially beneficial for the law to require you to create $2 in deadweight loss in order to transfer $1, and the cost to the author of not selling a single additional copy is not the thing they were really objecting to.

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

#382

Post by [deleted] »

seadan83 wrote: post #330
YPPH wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Stealing" isn't an apt term here. Stealing a thing permanently deprives the owner of the thing. What you're describing is copyright infringement, not stealing. In this context, stealing is often used as a pejorative term to make piracy sound worse than it is. Except for mass distribution, piracy is often regarded as a civil wrong, and not a crime.

Then it is not possible to 'steal' an idea? Afaik 'to steal'is simply to take without permission. If the thing is abstract, then you might not have deprived the original owner of that thing. If the thing is a physical object, then the implication is tou now have physical possession (in which case your definition seemingly holds) edit/addendum : considering this a bit more - the extent to which the original party is d…

[deleted]

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

#383

Post by theteapot »

pier25 wrote: post #380
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> buying, physically cutting up, physically digitizing books, and using them for training is fair use So Suno would only really need to buy the physical albums and rip them to be able to generate music at an industrial scale?

Yes.

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

#384

Post by CaptainFever »

codedokode wrote: post #255

> "Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic's LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different," he wrote. But this analogy seems wrong. First, LLM is not a human and cannot "learn" or "train" - only human can do it. And LLM developers are not aspiring to become writers and do not learn anything, they just want to profit by m…

> But this analogy seems wrong. First, LLM is not a human and cannot "learn" or "train" - only human can do it.

The analogy refers to humans using machines to do what would already be legally if they did it manually.

> And LLM developers are not aspiring to become writers and do not learn anything, they just want to profit by making software using copyrighted material.

[Citation needed], and not a legal argument.

> Also people do not read millions of books to become a writer.

But people do hear millions of words as children.

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

#385

Post by bumby »

fuzzfactor wrote: post #280
pyman wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be legal in the US, but not in the rest of the world. The trial is scheduled for December 2025. That’s when a jury will decide how much Anthropic owes for copying and storing over seven million pirated books

You make some good points, this really is going to take some careful judgment and chances are it's too complex for an actual courtroom to yield an ideal outcome. Now places like Flea markets have been known to have a counterfeit DVD or two. And there is more than one way to compare to non-digital content. Regular books and periodicals can be sold out and/or out-of-print, but digital versions do not have these same ex…

>If you save it from the bin you should be able to do whatever you want with it either way, scan it how you see fit.

Don’t we already have laws covering this? For example, sometimes excess books can be thrown in the bin. Often, they have the covers removed. Some will say something to the effect that “if you’ve received this without a cover it is a copyright violation.” I think one of the points of the lawsuit is it gives copyright holders discretion as to how their works are used/sold etc. The idea that “if you saved it from the bin you can do with it whatever you want” strips them of that right.

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

#386

Post by AnthonyMouse »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #212
dehrmann wrote: post #195

The 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…

> 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.

That seems inconsistent with one another. If it's fair use, how is it piracy?

It also seems pragmatically trash. It doesn't do the authors any good for the AI company to buy one copy of their book (and a used one at that), but it does make it much harder for smaller companies to compete with megacorps for AI stuff, so it's basically the stupidest of the plausible outcomes.

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

#387

Post by standardUser »

platunit10 wrote: post #284

Every time an article like this surfaces, it always seems like the majority of tech folks believe that training AI on copyrighted material is NOT fair use, but the legal industry disagrees. Which of the following are true? (a) the legal industry is susceptible to influence and corruption (b) engineers don't understand how to legally interpret legal text (c) AI tech is new, and judges aren't technically qualified to d…

I don't understand at all the resistance to training LLMs on any and all materials available. Then again, I've always viewed piracy as a compatible with markets and a democratizing force upon them. I thought (wrongly?) that this was the widespread progressive/leftist perspective, to err on the side of access to information.

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

#388

Post by microtherion »

Uhhrrr wrote: post #250

From Vinge's "Rainbow's End": > In fact this business was the ultimate in deconstruction: First one and then the other would pull books off the racks and toss them into the shredder's maw. The maintenance labels made calm phrases of the horror: The raging maw was a "NaviCloud custom debinder." The fabric tunnel that stretched out behind it was a "camera tunnel...." The shredded fragments of books and magazine flew do…

Yes, I was thinking of this passage as well. The technology does not seem to have advanced to this particular point yet.

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

#389

Post by charcircuit »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #351
charcircuit wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, quoting the following section: Stallman places great importance on the words and labels people use to talk about the world, including the relationship between software and freedom. He asks people to say free software and GNU/Linux, and to avoid the terms intellectual property and piracy (in relation to copying not approved by the publisher). One of his criteria for giving an interview to a journalist is that the…

That seems rather agreeable, though. Stallman is essentially saying that words are meaningful and speakers/writers should be thoughtful about the meaning of the words they use. In that context, refusing to use terms like "intellectual property" and "piracy" because of their meaning and the effect their use has on culture, and especially insisting that journalists who interview you use the same language, seems to be a…

My point is that the 2 commenters are working off of different definitions. One is using the common definitions of words in English and the other is trying to advocate for their ideological rooted definitions by trying to correct people who use the normal English definitions. 99% of the time how this will play out is the idealog will preach about their values instead of acknowledging that they are purposefully using different definitions.

In short the post is bait.

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

#390

Post by southernplaces7 »

timeon wrote: post #374
whycome wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the AI used the content to learn how to copy and recreate it. Is ‘re-creation’ a better concept for us? People already use pirated software for product creation. Hypothetical: I know a guy who learned photoshop on a pirated copy of Photoshop. He went on to be a graphic designer. All his earnings are ‘proceeds from crime’ He never used the pirated software to produce content.

So can we officially download pirated content to learn stuff now?

Sure, and I feel zero moral qualms about me or anyone else doing it. The vast majority of the shit flows flows from the other direction towards individuals and consumers when it comes to content delivery companies and worse still, software companies. Let's address that before wringing our hands about individual acts of "piracy", even at scale.

I could, right now in just a few minutes, go download a perfectly functional pirated copy of nearly any Adobe program, nearly any Microsoft program and a whole range of books and movies, yet I see zero real financial troubles affecting any of the companies behind these. All the contrary in fact.

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