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

Another good point, and it's a fine point as well.

You could split hairs over whether saving an item from the bin occurred after a procedure to remove covers and it was already dumped, or before any contemplation was made about if or when dumping would take place.

Saving either way would be preserving what would otherwise be lost, even if it was well premeditated in advance of any imminent risk.

What if it was the last remaining copy?

Or even the only copy ever in existence of an original manuscript?

It's just not a concept suitable for a black & white judgment.

That's a very good sign that probably an entire book of regulations needs to be thrown out instead, and a new law written to replace it with something more sensible.

> 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.

Can you point me to the US Supreme Court case where this is existing law?

It's pretty clear that if you have a physical copy of a book, you can lend it to someone. It also seems pretty reasonable that the person borrowing it could make fair use of it, e.g. if you borrow a book from the library to write a book review and then quote an excerpt from it. So the only thing that's left is, what if you do the same thing over the internet?

Shouldn't we be able to distinguish this from the case where someone is distributing multiple copies of a work without authorization and the recipients are each making and keeping permanent copies of it?

The solution has always been: show us the training data.

As a researcher I've been furious that we publish papers where the research data is unknown. To add insult to injury, we have the audacity to start making claims about "zero-shot", "low-shot", "OOD", and other such things. It is utterly laughable. These would be tough claims to make *even if we knew the data*, simply because of its size. But not knowing the data, it is outlandish. Especially because the presumptions are "everything on the internet." It would be like training on all of GitHub and then writing your own simple programming questions to test an LLM[0]. Analyzing that amount of data is just intractable, and we currently do not have the mathematical tools to do so. But this is a much harder problem to crack when we're just conjecturing and ultimately this makes interoperability more difficult.

On top of all of that, we've been playing this weird legal game. Where it seems that every company has had to cheat. I can understand how smaller companies turn to torrenting to compete, but when it is big names like Meta, Google, Nvidia, OpenAI (Microsoft), etc it is just wild. This isn't even following the highly controversial advice of Eric Schmidt "Steal everything, then if you get big, let the lawyers figure it out." This is just "steal everything, even if you could pay for it." We're talking about the richest companies in the entire world. Some of the, if not the, richest companies to ever exist.

Look, can't we just try to be a little ethical? There is, in fact, enough money to go around. We've seen unprecedented growth in the last few years. It was only 2018 when Apple became the first trillion dollar company, 2020 when it became the second two trillion, and 2022 when it became the first three trillion dollar company. Now we have 10 companies north of the trillion dollar mark![3] (5 above $2T and 3 above $3T) These values have exploded in the last 5 years! It feels difficult to say that we don't have enough money to do things better. To at least not completely screw over "the little guy." I am unconvinced that these companies would be hindered if they had to broker some deal for training data. Hell, they're already going to war over data access.

My point here is that these two things align. We're talking about how this technology is so dangerous (every single one of those CEOs has made that statement) and yet we can't remain remotely ethical? How can you shout "ONLY I CAN MAKE SAFE AI" while acting so unethically? There's always moral gray areas but is this really one of them? I even say this as someone who has torrented books myself![4] We are holding back the data needed to make AI safe and interpretable while handing the keys to those who actively demonstrate that they should not hold the power. I don't understand why this is even that controversial.

[0] Yes, this is a snipe at HumanEval. Yes, I will make the strong claim that the dataset was spoiled from day 1. If you doubt it, go read the paper and look at the questions (HuggingFace).

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/14/24220658/google-eric-schm...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...

[3] https://companiesmarketcap.com/

[4] I can agree it is wrong, but can we agree there is a big difference between a student torrenting a book and a billion/trillion dollar company torrenting millions of books? I even lean on the side of free access to information, and am a fan of Aaron Swartz and SciHub. I make all my works available on ArXiv. But we can recognize there's a big difference between a singular person doing this at a small scale and a huge multi-national conglomerate doing it at a large scale. I can't even believe we so frequently compare these actions!

I like to glance at the cover art. I can do ten per second when I really get into my flow state. Sometimes I read them also, but that's incidental.

Google Music originally let people upload their own digital music files. The argument at the time was that whether or not the files were legally obtained was not Google’s problem. I believe Amazon had a similar service.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/1447323/google-reporte...