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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

#411

Post by freejazz »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #381
dmd wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> and that kind of efficiency loss is the sort of thing fair use exists to prevent.

No it's not. And you ever heard of a publishing house? They don't need to negotiate with every single author individually. That's preposterous.

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

#412

Post by irthomasthomas »

superfrank wrote: post #247
throwawayffffas wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So all they have to do is go and buy a copy of each book they pirated. They will have ceased and desisted.

I'm trying to find the quote, but I'm pretty sure the judge specifically said that going and buying the book after the fact won't absolve them of liability. He said that for the books they pirated they broke the law and should stand trial for that and they cannot go back and un-break in by buying a copy now. Found it: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/federal-judge-rules-c... > “That Anthropic later bought a cop…

Is copyright in America different to Britain? There, it is legal to download books you don't own. Only distribution is a crime, which most torrenters break by seeding.

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

#413

Post by badlibrarian »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #393
tzs wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally you don't want laws to work that way. You want to set the penalties so that they discourage violating the law. Setting the penalty to what it would have cost to obey the law in the first place does the opposite.

That's for criminal laws where prosecutorial discretion can then (in principle) be used in borderline cases to prevent unjust outcomes. If you give people a claim for damages which is an order of magnitude larger than their actual damages, it encourages litigiousness and becomes a vector for shakedowns because the excessive cost of losing pressures innocent defendants to settle even if there was a 90% chance they wou…

Statutory damages were written into the first federal copyright law in 1790, and earlier in state law (specified in Pounds because the dollar hadn't been invented yet).

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

#414

Post by MrJohz »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #386
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…

> 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), bu…

These are two separate actions that Anthropic did:

* They downloaded a massive online library of pirated books that someone else was distributing illegally. This was not fair use.

* They then digitised a bunch of books that they physically owned copies of. This was fair use.

This part of the ruling is pretty much existing law. If you have a physical book (or own a digital copy of a book), you can largely do what you like with it within the confines of your own home, including digitising it. But you are not allowed to distribute those digital copies to others, nor are you allowed to download other people's digital copies that you don't own the rights to.

The interesting part of this ruling is that once Anthropic had a legal digital copy of the books, they could use it for training their AI models and then release the AI models. According to the judge, this counts as fair use (assuming the digital copies were legally sourced).

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

#415

Post by AnthonyMouse »

freejazz wrote: post #411
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> and that kind of efficiency loss is the sort of thing fair use exists to prevent. No it's not. And you ever heard of a publishing house? They don't need to negotiate with every single author individually. That's preposterous.

It kind of is though?

It's not the only reason fair use exists, but it's the thing that allows e.g. search engines to exist, and that seems pretty important.

> And you ever heard of a publishing house? They don't need to negotiate with every single author individually. That's preposterous.

There are thousands of publishing houses and millions of self-published authors on top of that. Many books are also out of print or have unclear rights ownership.

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

#416

Post by wood_spirit »

jonas21 wrote: post #263
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…

As they mentioned, the piracy part is obvious. It's the fair use part that will set an important precedent for being able to train on copyrighted works as long as you have legally acquired a copy.

Cue physical books being licensed not sold in the futur with restricted agreements …

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

#417

Post by TeMPOraL »

megaman821 wrote: post #392
TeMPOraL wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not an issue because it's not what this case was about, as the linked document explicitly states. The Authors did not contest the legality of the model's outputs, only the inputs used in training.

Correct, the New York Times and Disney are suing for the output side. I am going to hazard a guess that you won't be able to circumvent copyright and trademark just because you are using AI. Where that line is has yet to be determined though.

Right, but where that line will be drawn will have major impact on the near-term future of those models. If the user is liable for distributing infringing output that came from AI, that's not a problem for the field (and IMHO a reasonable approach) - but if they succeed in making the model vendors liable for the possibility of users generating infringing output, it'll shake things up pretty seriously.

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

#418

Post by ysofunny »

bgwalter wrote: post #119

Here is how individuals are treated for massive copyright infringement: https://investors.autodesk.com/news-releases/news-release-de...

before breaking the law, set up a corporation to absorb the liability!

in other words, provided you have enough spare capital to spin up a corporation, you can break the law!!!!

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

#419

Post by zerocrates »

ohdeargodno wrote: post #407
pier25 wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Only if the physical albums don't have copy protection, otherwise you're circumenventing it and that's illegal. Or is it, against the right to private copy? If anything, AI at least shows that all of the existing copyright laws are utter bullshit made to make Disney happy. Do keep in mind though: this is only for the wealthy. They're still going to send the Pinkertons at your house if you dare copy a Blu-ray.

With some minor exceptions, CDs don't have copy protection.

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

#420

Post by stocksinsmocks »

bgwalter wrote: post #119

Here is how individuals are treated for massive copyright infringement: https://investors.autodesk.com/news-releases/news-release-de...

Anthropic isn’t selling copies of the material to its users though. I would think you couldn’t lock someone up for reading a book and summarizing or reciting portions of the contents.

Seven years for thumbing your nose at Autodesk when armed robbery would get you less time says some interesting things about the state of legal practice.

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