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Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

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Re: Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

#51

Post by WillAdams »

yifanl wrote: post #34
WillAdams wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but the font changes won't be expressed in the (plain text) output of the LLM.

Presumably the font will represent letters to look like a different letter, making it not useful to LLMs scraping the site but useful for visual readers. This would have detrimental effects to people who use screen readers or have their own stylesheets of course.

For that it would make more sense to run a routine which replaces letters with visually identical glyphs at different encoding points.

Re: Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

#52

Post by simonw »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #48
echelon wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the copyright holders win, the model giants will just license. This effectively kills open source, which can't afford to license and won't be able to sublicense training data. This is very bad for democratized access to and development of AI. The giants will probably want this. The giants were already purchasing legacy media content enterprises (Amazon and MGM, etc.), so this will probably further consolidation an…

> If the copyright holders win, the model giants will just license. No, they won't. The biggest models want to train on literally every piece of human-written text ever written. You can pay to license small subsets of that at a time. You can't pay to license all of it. And some of it won't be available to license at all, at any price. If the copyright holders win, model trainers will have to pay attention to what the…

"The biggest models want to train on literally every piece of human-written text ever written"

They genuinely don't. There is a LOT of garbage text out there that they don't want. They want to train on every high quality piece of human-written text they can get their hands on (where the definition of "high quality" is a major piece of the secret sauce that makes some LLMs better than others), but that doesn't mean every piece of human-written text.

Re: Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

#53

Post by simonw »

Interesting to note from this 2020 story (when ROSS shut down) that the company was founded in 2014 and went out of business in 2020: https://www.lawnext.com/2020/12/legal-research-company-ross-...

The fact that it took until 2024 for the case to resolve shows how long the wheels of justice can take to turn!

Re: Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

#54

Post by jug »

I spontaneously feel like this is bad news for open AI, while playing in the hands of corporate behemoths able to strike expensive deals with major publishers and top it off with the public domain.

I’m not sure this signals the end of AI and a victory for the human, but rather who gets to train the models?

Re: Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

#56

Post by saulpw »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #26
saulpw wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So the models are legitimately not viable without massive copyright infringement. Copyright is not about acquisition, it is about publication and/or distribution. If I get a copy of Harry Potter from a dumpster, I can read it. If a company gets a copy of *all books from a torrent, they can use it to train their AI. The torrent providers may be in violation of copyright, and if the AI can be used to reproduce substa…

> simply training a model on illegally distributed text should not be copyright infringement You can train a model on copyrighted text, you just can't distribute the output in any way without violating copyright. (edit: depending on the other fair use factors). One of the big problems is that training is a mechanical process, so there is a direct line between the copyrighted works and the model's output, regardless o…

If that mechanical process is not reversible, then it's not a copyright violation. For instance, I can compute the SHA256 hashes for every book in existence and distribute the resulting table of (ISBN, SHA256) and that is not a copyright violation.

Re: Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

#57

Post by Ajedi32 »

JackC wrote: post #23

Here's the full decision, which (like most decisions!) is largely written to be legible to non-lawyers: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.721... The core story seems to be: Westlaw writes and owns headnotes that help lawyers find legal cases about a particular topic. Ross paid people to translate those headnotes into new text, trained an AI on the translations, and used those to make a model th…

Interestingly, almost the entirety of the judge's opinion seems to be focused on the question of whether the translated notes are subject to copyright. It seems to completely ignore the question of whether training an AI on copyrighted material constitutes making a copy of that work in the first place. Am I missing something?

The judge does note that no copyrighted material was distributed to users, because the AI doesn't output that information:

> There is no factual dispute: Ross’s output to an end user does not include a West headnote. What matters is not “the amount and substantiality of the portion used in making a copy, but rather the amount and substantiality of what is thereby made accessible to a public for which it may serve as a competing substitute.” Authors Guild, 804 F.3d at 222 (internal quotation marks omitted). Because Ross did not make West headnotes available to the public, Ross benefits from factor three.

But he only does so as part of an analysis of whether there's a valid fair use defense for Ross's copying of the head notes, ignoring the obvious (to me) point that if no copyrighted material was distributed to end users, how can this even be a violation of copyright in the first place?

Re: Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

#58

Post by synthetic-echo »

echoangle wrote: post #49
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

License what? Every available copyrighted work? Even getting a tiny fraction is not practical. To the contrary, this just means companies can't make money from these models. Those using models for research and personal use wouldn't be infringing under the fair use tests.

They didn’t train it on every available copyrighted work though, but on a specific set of legal questions and answers. And they did try to license them, and only did the workaround after not getting a license.

I think they were talking about the "model giants" like OpenAI you mentioned. Not saying they're correct, but I will concede the amount of copyrighted information someone like OpenAI would want is probably (at least) an order of magnitude more than this particular case.

Re: Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

#59

Post by currymj »

echoangle wrote: post #45
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The court emphasizes "Because the AI landscape is changing rapidly, I note for readers that only non-generative AI is before me today." But I'm not sure "generative" is that meaningful a distinction here. Also the judge makes that statement, it looks like he misunderstands the nature of the AI system and the inherent generative elements it includes.

How is the system inherently generative?

Generative is a technical term, meaning that a system models a full joint probability distribution.

For example, a classifier is a generative model if it models p(example, label) -- which is sufficient to also calculate p(label | example) if you want -- rather than just modeling p(label | example) alone.

Similar example in translation: a generative translation model would model p(french sentence, english sentence) -- implicitly including a language model of p(french) and p(english) in addition to allowing translation p(english | french) and p(french | english). A non-generative translation model would, for instance, only model p(french | english).

I don't exactly understand what this judge meant by "generative", it's presumably not the technical term.

Re: Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

#60

Post by ethbr1 »

simonw wrote: post #52
JoshTriplett wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the copyright holders win, the model giants will just license. No, they won't. The biggest models want to train on literally every piece of human-written text ever written. You can pay to license small subsets of that at a time. You can't pay to license all of it. And some of it won't be available to license at all, at any price. If the copyright holders win, model trainers will have to pay attention to what the…

"The biggest models want to train on literally every piece of human-written text ever written" They genuinely don't. There is a LOT of garbage text out there that they don't want. They want to train on every high quality piece of human-written text they can get their hands on (where the definition of "high quality" is a major piece of the secret sauce that makes some LLMs better than others), but that doesn't mean ev…

Even restricted to that narrower definition, the major commercial model companies wouldn't be able to afford to license all their high-quality human text.

OpenAI is Uber with a slightly less ethically despicable CEO.

It knows it's flaunting the spirit of copyright law -- it's just hoping it could bootstrap quickly enough to make the question irrelevant.

If every commercial AI company that couldn't prove training data provenance tomorrow was bankrupted, I wouldn't shed an ethical tear. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

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