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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

#571

Post by johnnyanmac »

Aeolun wrote: post #545
johnnyanmac wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and it's technically copyright infringement, even for private use. It's just that damages and enforcement is in feasible. But if you tried to open a black market selling that media: you'd be hunted down to the ends of the earth. Or to China/North Korea, at least.

> But if you tried to open a black market selling that media Why would you ever do that? Nobody would buy it. They'd just get it in the same place you did.

Undercut the competition, mainly. People will do a lot of things for a decent discount.

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

#572

Post by gruez »

franczesko wrote: post #434
dehrmann wrote: post #195

The important parts: > Alsup ruled that Anthropic's use of copyrighted books to train its AI models was "exceedingly transformative" and qualified as fair use > "All Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies…

Is fruit of the poisonous tree rule applicable here?

That's only really applicable to evidence in criminal cases obtained by the government. No such doctrine exists for civil cases, for instance. It doesn't even bar the government from using evidence that others have collected illegally of their own volition.

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

#573

Post by bongodongobob »

pyman wrote: post #556
markhahn wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a former musician, yes, we do. Any above average musician can play "Riders on the Storm" in the style of Johnny Cash, or Green Day, or Nirvana, etc. Successful above average musicians usually have almost encyclopedic knowledge of artists and albums at least in their favorite genre. This is how all art is made. Some artists will be more honest about this than others.

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

#574

Post by bongodongobob »

markhahn wrote: post #543
pier25 wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

really? so Suno or Midjourney can produce literal copies of works they were trained on?

Well I've been able to get Suno to do Beatles covers. It only works maybe 1/20 times, but you can do it. It's not an exact replica either, but you can get the same chords and melodies as the original.

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

#575

Post by JimDabell »

armada651 wrote: post #301
JimDabell wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> illegally copying and selling pirated software This is very different to what Anthropic did. Nobody was buying copies of books from Anthropic instead of the copyright holder.

I wouldn't be so sure about that statement, no one has ruled on the output of Anthropic's AI yet. If their AI spits out the original copy of the book then it is practically the same as buying a book from them instead of the copyright holder. We've only dealt with the fairly straight-forward legal questions so far. This legal battle is still far from being settled.

> If their AI spits out the original copy of the book

Not even the authors suing Anthropic have claimed it can do this, have they?

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

#577

Post by HelloImSteven »

homebrewer wrote: post #541
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…

I used to order books in English from the US before shipping costs became prohibitive and the cost of shipping the book went to about twice to thrice the cost of the book itself. Is it fair use for me to download books from Anna's Archive now considering that books in English are not available in my region through other means (including the vast majority of ebooks)? Rhetorical question, we all know that me reading bo…

In the U.S. at least (obviously not the same everywhere), fair use doesn’t necessarily require your work to be transformative. It’s one of several aspects that gets considered, albeit a fairly significant one in many cases. Downloading books/research articles/pirated works in general wouldn’t be fair use as the purpose of the act (obtaining a book to read) directly impacts the market for the work (selling books). There could still exceptions in some cases, mostly related to teaching I’d imagine.

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

#578

Post by freejazz »

conradev wrote: post #515
pier25 wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sure, but if you are just essentially making a copyright infringement tool, and then selling it to people so they can use it to infringe, and then they go and use it to infringe, you're a contributory infringer. Not saying this is exactly what Suno is doing, but just pointing out that you can be an infringer without "selling songs to consumers"

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

#579

Post by idonotknowwhy »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #208
marapuru wrote: post #31

Apparently it's a common business practice. Spotify (even though I can't find any proof) seems to have build their software and business on pirated music. There is some more in this Article [0]. https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files... Funky quote: > Rumors that early versions of Spotify used ‘pirate’ MP3s have been floating around the Internet for years. People who had access to the service in…

This isn't as meaningful as it sounds. Nintendo was apparently using scene roms for one of the official emulators on Wii (I think?). Spotify might have received legally-obtained mp3s from the record companies that were originally pulled from Napster or whatever, because the people who work for record companies are lazy hypocrites.

The Nes classic console. The roms had an iNes emulator header lol.

And the playstation classic used an opensource ps1 emulator.

There was also some steam game ported from GameCube, and it had the Dolphin Emulator FPS counter in the corner of part of the trailer :D

I also remember reading that 2 of the PCSX2 devs ended up working on the EmotionEngine chip emulator for PS3 consoles with partial software emulation of PS2 (The CECH 02 and later models where they removed the EmotionEngine chip)

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

#580

Post by const_cast »

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…

I think the notion that some sort of god-given right to "scale" can absolve you of laws is preposterous.

If your business model is not economically sustainable in the current legal landscape you operate in, the correct outcome is you go out of business.

There's lots and lots of potential businesses, infinite in fact, that fall into this understanding. They don't exist because they can't because we don't want them to, so you never see them. Which might give the impression of a right to scale, but no, it does not exist.

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