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

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

#511

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 10:38 PM UTC

cmiles74 wrote: post #443

KoolKat23 wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright is concerned with the the actual physical copy. The model isn't this. The end user would have to carefully prompt the models algorithm to output a copyright infringing piece. This argument is more along the lines of: blaming Microsoft Word for someone typing characters into the word processors algorithm, and outputting a copy of an existing book. (Yes, it is a lot easier, but the rationale is the same). In…

FWIW, I don’t think there is a prompt that would reliably produce, verbatim, a copyrighted work. I do think that a big part of the reason Anthropic downloaded millions of books from pirate torrents was because they needed that input data in order to generate the output, their product. I don’t know what that is, but, IMHO, not sharing those dollars with the creators of the content is clearly wrong.

[deleted]

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

#512

Post by dathinab » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 10:38 PM UTC

megaman821 wrote: post #397

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Seems like the breaking of these laws was good for everybody. Are all music creators better off now than before Spotify?

The music pie is bigger now but it is split between more people. Spotify brings in the most revenue for musicians as a whole.

Yeah, but like another post said it killed a lot of other income streams.

And Spotify is a bad example as it ran into another psudo monopoly with very unreasonable/unhealthy power (the few large music labels holding rights to the majority of main stream music).

They pretty much forced very bad terms onto Spotify which is to some degree why Spotify is pushing podcasts, as they can't be long term profitable with Music (raising prices doesn't help if the issue is a percent cut which rises too :/ )

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

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Post by bigyabai » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 10:43 PM UTC

burnt-resistor wrote: post #503

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?

So not only did they pirate works but they destroyed possibly collectible physical copies too. Kafkaesque.

Google set the precedent for this with an even less transformative use case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....

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

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Post by protocolture » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 10:47 PM UTC

1970-01-01 wrote: post #190

The buried lede here is Antrhopic will need to attempt to explain to a judge that it is impossible to de-train 7M books from their models.

Or they could be forced to settle a price for access to the books.

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

#515

Post by conradev » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 10:51 PM UTC

pier25 wrote: post #481

conradev wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> Yes! But Suno is definitely not training models in their basement for fun. They are a private company selling music, using music made by humans to train their models, to replace human musicians and artists. We'll see what the courts say but that doesn't sound like fair use.

My understanding is that Suno does not sell music, but instead makes a tool for musicians to generate music and sells access to this tool.

The law doesn't distinguish between basement and cloud – it's a service. You can sell access to the service without selling songs to consumers.

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

#516

Post by protocolture » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 10:52 PM UTC

bayindirh wrote: post #53

tliltocatl wrote: post #12

If the AI movement will manage to undermine Imaginary Property, it would redeem it's externalities threefold.

What are your feelings about how the small fish is stripped of their arts, and their years of work becomes just a prompt? Mainly comic artists and small musicians who are doing things they like and putting out for people, but not for much money?

>Mainly comic artists and small musicians who are doing things they like and putting out for people, but not for much money?

The number of these artists I have seen receiving some bogus DMCA takedown notice for fan art is crazy.

I saw a bloke give away some of his STL's because he received a takedown request from games workshop and didnt have the funds to fight it.

Its not that I want small artists to lose, its that I want them to gain access to every bloody copyright and trademark so they are more free to create.

Shit Conde Nast managed to pull something like 400 pulps off the market, so they didnt interfere with their newly launched James Patterson collaborations.

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

#517

Post by Aeolun » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 10:52 PM UTC

rahimnathwani wrote: post #492

irthomasthomas wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only distribution is a crime

What relevance does that have to the present case? The judge, in this civil matter, said there would be a trial. He didn't say anything about it being a criminal trial. The strings 'crim' and 'felon' do not appear in the ruling. We will have a trial on the pirated copies used to create Anthropic’s central library and the resulting damages, actual or statutory (including for willfulness).

There can always be a trial, even if nothing was done to warrant it.

I think the distinction between civil and criminal trials is smaller in my home country. The fact that there is a trial at all implies that someone commited a ‘crime’.

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

#518

Post by Aeolun » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 10:54 PM UTC

exe34 wrote: post #396

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…

That's right, so I can't individually discuss terms with each and every media creator, so from now on, I can just pirate everything.

This is literally why a lot of people pirate content, yes. It’s pretty much always the only way to obtain the content, even if you are otherwise fine with paying for it.

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

#519

Post by protocolture » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 10:55 PM UTC

trinsic2 wrote: post #152

I'm not seeing how this is fair use in either case. Someone correct me if I am wrong but aren't these works being digitized and transformed in a way to make a profit off of the information that is included in these works? It would be one thing for an individual to make person use of one or more books, but you got to have some special blindness not to see that a for-profit company's use of this information to improve…

>clearly going against what copyright stands for.

Copyright isnt a digital moat. Its largely an agreement that the work is available to the public, but the creator has a limited amount of time to exploit it at market.

If you sell an AI model, or access to an AI model, theres usually around 0% of the training data redistributed with the model. You cant decompile it and find the book. As you aren't redistributing the original work copyright is barely relevant.

Imagine suggesting that because you own the design of a hammer, that all works created with the hammer belong to you and cant be sold?

That someone came up with a new method of using books as a tool to create a different work, does not entitle the original book author to a cut of the pie.

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

#520

Post by protocolture » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 10:59 PM UTC

NoOn3 wrote: post #236

jimbob21 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it does, at least for this case. The judge just said so.

People have rights, machines don't. Otherwise, maybe give machines the right to vote, for example?...

If I can use my brain to learn, I as a human can use my computer to learn.

Its like, taking notes, or google image search caching thumbnails. Honestly we dont even need the learning metaphor to see this is obviously not an infringement.