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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

#551

Post by kelnos »

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?

Not sure we can infer that (or anything) about Suno from this ruling. The judge here said that Anthropic's usage was extremely transformative. Would Suno's also be considered that way?

Anthropic doesn't take books and use them to train a model that is intended to generate new books. (Perhaps it could do that, to some extent, but that's no its [sole] purpose.)

But Suno would be taking music to train a model in order to generate new music. Is that transformative enough? We don't know what a judge thinks, at least not yet.

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

#552

Post by kelnos »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #412
superfrank wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not a crime in the US, either, I believe, but you can certainly be sued in civil court for it.

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

#554

Post by kelnos »

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…

What do you mean by "negotiating"? They can buy the books in paperback form from Amazon. And for e-books available for sale without DRM, they get to skip the cutting and scanning part.

If the book is out of print, then tough luck. That's not a license to infringe on the publisher's copyright. If we're not ok with that, we have legislative means to change that. A judge shouldn't be rewriting law in that manner.

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

#555

Post by coffeefirst »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #217
pyman wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this thinking is that hundreds of thousands of teachers who spent years writing great, useful books and sharing knowledge and wisdom probably won't sue a billion dollar company for stealing their work. What they'll likely do is stop writing altogether. I'm against Anthropic stealing teacher's work and discouraging them from ever writing again. Some teachers are already saying this (though probably no…

Stealing? In what way? Training a generative model on a book is the mechanical equivalent of having a human read the book and learn from it. Is it stealing if a person reads the book and learns from it?

But a language model is not a person, it’s a copy machine with a blender inside.

Photocopying books in their entirety for commercial use is absolutely illegal.

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

#556

Post by pyman »

markhahn wrote: post #542
pyman wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does "fair use" even mean in a world where models can memorise and remix every book and song ever written? Are we erasing ownership? The problem is, copyright law wasn't written for machines. It was written for humans who create things. In the case of songs (or books, paintings, etc), only humans and companies can legally own copyright, a machine can't. If an AI-powered tool generates a song, there’s no author i…

why are you saying "memorize"? are people training AIs to regurgitate exact copies? if so, that's just copying. if they return something that is not a literal copy of the whole work, then there is established caselaw about how much is permitted. some clearly is, but not entire works. when you buy a book, you are not acceding to a license to only ever read it with human eyes, forbearing to memorize it, never to quote…

You are comparing AI to humans, but they're not the same. Humans don't memorise millions of copyrighted work and spit out similar content. AI does that.

Memorising isn't wrong but when machines memorise at scale and the people behind the original work get nothing, it raises big ethical questions.

The law hasn't caught up.

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

#557

Post by rockemsockem »

impossiblefork wrote: post #362
rockemsockem wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad decisions should not be repeated in the name of fair application.

They actually should, because generally an equal playing field is more important that correct law. As an extreme example, consider murder. Obviously it should be illegal, but if it's legal for one group and not for another, the group for which it's illegal will probably be wiped out, having lost the ability to avenge deaths in the group. It's much more important that laws are applied impartially and equally than that…

You're assuming discrimination on the basis of groups. That seems bad to me.

Laws and their enforcement are a clusterfuck. To achieve greater justice we should strive towards better judgements overall.

God, stop with the group on group bs please and engage with things the way they're written without injecting the entirety of your cynical worldview layered on top.

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

#558

Post by rockemsockem »

haneefmubarak wrote: post #405
impossiblefork wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They actually should, because generally an equal playing field is more important that correct law. As an extreme example, consider murder. Obviously it should be illegal, but if it's legal for one group and not for another, the group for which it's illegal will probably be wiped out, having lost the ability to avenge deaths in the group. It's much more important that laws are applied impartially and equally than that…

I think GP's point is that you should always seek to apply the law correctly, hopefully setting precedent for its correct application for everyone in the future.

Yep, exactly

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

#559

Post by downrightmike »

admissionsguy wrote: post #203
downrightmike wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, piracy sounds better than copyright violation. “Piracy” is mostly a rhetorical term in the context of copyright. Legally, it’s still called infringement or unauthorized copying. But industries and lobbying groups (e.g., RIAA, MPAA) have favored “piracy” for its emotional weight.

Does piracy have negative connotations? I thought everyone thought pirates were cool

I'll also point out that the Nazi hunters were able to bring the fugitive nazis to justice because the nazis were declared as pirates aka "enemies of humanity"

File sharing is not that.

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

#560

Post by codedokode »

CaptainFever wrote: post #384
codedokode wrote: post #255

> "Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic's LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different," he wrote. But this analogy seems wrong. First, LLM is not a human and cannot "learn" or "train" - only human can do it. And LLM developers are not aspiring to become writers and do not learn anything, they just want to profit by m…

> But this analogy seems wrong. First, LLM is not a human and cannot "learn" or "train" - only human can do it. The analogy refers to humans using machines to do what would already be legally if they did it manually. > And LLM developers are not aspiring to become writers and do not learn anything, they just want to profit by making software using copyrighted material. [Citation needed], and not a legal argument. > A…

> But people do hear millions of words as children.

At a rate 1000 words/day it takes 3 years to hear a million words. Also "million words" is not equal to "million books". Humans are ridiculously efficient in learning compared to LLMs.

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