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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

#591

Post by pyman »

dmix wrote: post #102
pyman wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

A court just ruled on Anthropic and said an LLM response wasn't a form of counterfeiting (ie, essentially selling pirate books on the black market). Although tbf that is the most radical interpretation still being put forward by the lawyers of publishers like NYTimes, despite the obvious flaws.

Anthropic still faces billions of dollars in damages for pirating over 7 million books to build a digital library.

The trial is scheduled for December 2025. That's when a jury will decide how much Anthropic owes for copying and storing those pirated books

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

#592

Post by pyman »

js8 wrote: post #318
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…

> 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 think this is a fantasy. My father cowrote a Springer book about physics. For the effort, he got like $400 and 6 author copies. Now, you might say…

I see where you are coming from: "My 8-yo son can also build websites".

Writing books is a profession.

Some people write full-time and make a living from it, through book sales, speaking gigs, teaching, or other related work.

Maybe ask Tim O’Reilly what he thinks about this so-called fantasy.

Like I said, Anthropic needs to stop stealing books or face the consequences.

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

#593

Post by timeon »

whycome wrote: post #458
timeon wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So can we officially download pirated content to learn stuff now?

How often does a link get posted here of content that is behind a paywall? If you bypass it to read it, didny't you just learn via illegal content? I'm not sure where the "official" comes in, but it's clearly widely accepted. If you watch a YouTube video to learn something and it's later taken down for using copyrighted images, you learned from illegal content.

"Official" comes in court cases for LLMs with "fair use" result. That is my point. I was not talking about de facto but about de jure. I wasn't hinting to the morality of the action but morality of the two-tier judgement.

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

#594

Post by bongodongobob »

pyman wrote: post #588
bongodongobob wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Again, you are comparing machines with humans. We're built for depth, not scale. Machines are built for scale, not depth. I also play the guitar, and it took me 10 years to learn 30 or 40 songs. So I don't see how anyone can learn 7 million songs in a couple of minutes.

I have learned 100s of songs in a summer for various fill in gigs. Most music is extremely similar. You don't need to learn every song in existence to write suno pop.

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

#595

Post by ranguna »

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.

How come? They just need to delete the model and train a new one without those books.

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

#596

Post by impossiblefork »

rockemsockem wrote: post #557
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…

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.

I don't assume discrimination on the basis of group affiliation. I give it as an example of why it is much more important that the law is applied consistently than that it is sound.

Furthermore, group affiliation based differences in judicial decisions are very common, both when it comes to ethnic origin, wealth and profession.

In this case group affiliation is also directly relevant: individuals who have infringed copyright are typically not treated in the way that these firms that have infringed copyright are. The group affiliation in question is thus 'are you an employer/wealth person owning part of a large firm' vs 'a normal, non-employer/non-wealthy person'.

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

#597

Post by impossiblefork »

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.

They should apply it consistently.

If there are precedents with a certain application, then they must continue or be overturned generally.

Correct but uneven application of a law is more dangerous than incorrect but even application.

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

#598

Post by impossiblefork »

jpalawaga wrote: post #540
impossiblefork wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference here though is that the copyright holder sustains himself by the sales of his particular chosen text, so it doesn't matter that the text can be reproduced infinitely.

If you assume only way people are obtaining the media is by unlicensed reproduction, then it doesn’t matter. Big if. Practically, the movie studios aren’t poor because their product has instances of infringement.

Many people who write books are small-time. Apparently the median total income of full-time book authors is 20k.

So the median person who is harmed when something competes with his book authorship is someone making 20k p.a., not someone who is a major shareholder of a big firm.

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

#599

Post by YPPH »

bumby wrote: post #307
YPPH wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Stealing" isn't an apt term here. Stealing a thing permanently deprives the owner of the thing. What you're describing is copyright infringement, not stealing. In this context, stealing is often used as a pejorative term to make piracy sound worse than it is. Except for mass distribution, piracy is often regarded as a civil wrong, and not a crime.

I think you make a good point, but there is some irony in pointing out the distinction between colloquial and legal use of the term “stealing” while also misusing the term “piracy” to describe legal matters. It would be more clear if you stick to either legal or colloquial variants, instead of switching back and forth. (Tbf, the judge in this case also used the term “piracy” colloquially).

I'm not sure that's irony. Just an plain error on my part, which you're right to point out. Piracy is also a pejorative label for copyright infringement.

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

#600

Post by belorn »

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…

The wast majority of piracy are not literal copies. Movies and music get constantly transformed into different sizes and scales, with the majority using lossy transformations that changes the work. A movie taken as raw format and transformed into 144p has far less than 1% of the original work, and is barely recognizable. Copyright law seems to recognize that as infringement.

Most AI seems much better at reproducing a semi-identical copies of an original work than existing video/audio encoders.

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