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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

#471

Post by AnthonyMouse »

badlibrarian wrote: post #461
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first federal copyright law in 1790: https://copyright.gov/about/1790-copyright-act.html Specified in dollars because dollars had been invented (in 1789), but in the amount of one half of one dollar, i.e. $0.50. That's 1790 dollars, of course, so a little under $20 today. (There was basically no inflation for the first 100+ years of that because the US dollar was still backed by precious metals then; a dollar was…

My fault for the hanging clause: nearly a dozen state laws preceded it and used pounds. Mostly because they were based on the British law and also because the war made a mess of the currency situation. Statutory damages were added to reduce the burden on plaintiffs. Which encourages people to stay in line. How well this worked out and what it means when some company nobody heard of 4 years ago downloads a billion cop…

The > Statutory damages were added to reduce the burden on plaintiffs. Which encourages people to stay in line.

It encourages people to not spend a lot of resources speculating about damages. That doesn't mean you need the amount to be punitive rather than compensatory.

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

#472

Post by NoOn3 »

jobs_throwaway wrote: post #146
motbus3 wrote: post #33

It is shocking how courts have being ruling towards the benefits of ai companies despite the obvious problem of allowing automatic plagiarism

Information wants to be free

Then why do they sell their services instead of putting the model in open source?

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

#473

Post by pier25 »

itronitron wrote: post #453
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?

If it's fair use to train a model, that doesn't necessarily imply that the model can be legally used to generate anything.

I've been reading a bit more about this. The training might not be considered fair use if it's not considered transformative.

Claude has been considered transformative given it's not really meant to generate books but Suno or Midjourney are absolutely in another category.

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

#474

Post by make3 »

itronitron wrote: post #453
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?

If it's fair use to train a model, that doesn't necessarily imply that the model can be legally used to generate anything.

this is funny and potentially accurate

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

#475

Post by badlibrarian »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #471
badlibrarian wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My fault for the hanging clause: nearly a dozen state laws preceded it and used pounds. Mostly because they were based on the British law and also because the war made a mess of the currency situation. Statutory damages were added to reduce the burden on plaintiffs. Which encourages people to stay in line. How well this worked out and what it means when some company nobody heard of 4 years ago downloads a billion cop…

The > Statutory damages were added to reduce the burden on plaintiffs. Which encourages people to stay in line. It encourages people to not spend a lot of resources speculating about damages. That doesn't mean you need the amount to be punitive rather than compensatory.

Agree that a photo of a celebrity and a film containing that celebrity shouldn't have the same number. But a large punitive number in the context of willful infringement seems right to me. And in practice it's all negotiated down anyway, as evidenced by Internet Archive's fourth 30-day stay of its pending $600+ million lawsuit.

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

#476

Post by jbverschoor »

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?

Same how it works in the Netherlands.

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

#477

Post by gghffguhvc »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #404
hadlock wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's copyright infringement, which is not theft, they're legally distinct in the eyes of the law. This is partly why the "you wouldn't download a car" copyright ads were so widely mocked.

Fun fact, they didn't have the rights to use the font they used for those commercials: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43775926

Or the music. It was originally made as a one off for a film festival. Movie industry defended the lawsuit over the music.

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

#478

Post by losvedir »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #361
adolph wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That a service incorporating the authors' works exists is not at issue. The plaintiffs' claims are, as summarized by Alsup: First, Authors argue that using works to train Claude’s underlying LLMs was like using works to train any person to read and write, so Authors should be able to exclude Anthropic from this use (Opp. 16). Second, to that last point, Authors further argue that the training was intended to memorize…

The first paragraph sounds absurd, so I looked into the PDF, and here's the full version I found: > First, Authors argue that using works to train Claude’s underlying LLMs was like using works to train any person to read and write, so Authors should be able to exclude Anthropic from this use (Opp. 16). But Authors cannot rightly exclude anyone from using their works for training or learning as such. Everyone reads te…

> Glad to see Judge Alsup continues to be the voice of common sense in legal matters around technology

Yep, that name's a blast from the past! He was the judge on the big Google/Oracle case about Android and Java years ago, IIRC. I think he even learned to write some Java so he could better understand the case.

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

#479

Post by conradev »

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! Training and generation are fair use. You are free to train and generate whatever you want in your basement for whatever purpose you see fit. Build a music collection, go ham.

If the output from said model uses the voice of another person, for example, we already have a legal framework in place for determining if it is infringing on their rights, independent of AI.

Courts have heard cases of individual artists copying melodies, because melodies themselves are copyrightable: https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2020/02/every-possible-melod...

Copyright law is a lot more nuanced than anyone seems to have the attention span for.

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

#480

Post by freejazz »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #456
freejazz wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It kind of is though? No, it kinda isn't. Show me anything that supports this idea beyond your own immediate conjecture right now. >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. No, that's the transformative element of what a search engine provides. Search engines are not legal because they can't contact each licensor, they are…

> Show me anything that supports this idea beyond your own immediate conjecture right now It's inherent in the nature of the test. The most important fair use factor is the effect on the market for the work, so if the use would be uneconomical without fair use then the effect on the market is negligible because the alternative would be that the use doesn't happen rather than that the author gets paid for it. > No, th…

>It's inherent in the nature of the test. The most important fair use factor is the effect on the market for the work, so if the use would be uneconomical without fair use then the effect on the market is negligible because the alternative would be that the use doesn't happen rather than that the author gets paid for it.

No, that's not the most important factor. The transformative factor is the most important. Effect on market for the work doesn't even support your argument anyway. Your argument is about the cost of making the end product, which is totally distinct from the market effects on the copyright holder when the infringer makes and releases the infringing product.

>To make a search engine you have to do two things. One is to download a copy of the whole internet, the other is to create a search index. I'm talking about the first one, you're talking about the second one.

So? That doesn't make you right. Go read the opinions, dude. This isn't something that's actually up for debate. Search engines are fair uses because of their transformative effect, not because they are really expensive otherwise. Your argument doesn't even make sense. By that logic, anything that's expensive becomes a fair use. It's facially ridiculous. Them being expensive is neither sufficient nor necessary for them to be a fair use. Their transformative nature is both sufficient and necessary to be found a fair use. Full stop.

>Microsoft does this with an automated system. There is no single automated system where you can get every book ever written, and separately interfacing with all of the many systems needed in order to do it is the source of the overhead.

Okay, and? They don't need to get every single book ever written. The libraries they pirated do not consist of "every single book ever written". It's hard to take this argument in good faith because you're being so ridiculous.

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