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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

#621

Post by immibis »

conradev wrote: post #615
immibis wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They charge you by the amount of music you get from them. That's selling music. Selling a tool would be if they charge you once, you download the tool, and you can use it on your computer to generate as much music as you want to pay electricity for.

I can’t buy the music you generate using Suno, though, unless you take action to list it somewhere for sale.

You also can't buy a massage I receive. Does that mean I was sold access to a massage generation tool instead of a massage?

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

#622

Post by freejazz »

conradev wrote: post #616
freejazz wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

When you use a DAW to recreate a favorite song for learning, should the DAW show a warning that you’re infringing on a copyrighted melody? Should it let you make it? Export it? You promise the DAW it’s for personal use? It’s only a matter of time until this stuff is in DAWs. When a general computer using agent recreates songs in Logic Pro in high fidelity, then what? It’s called Fair Use for a reason – we let humans…

I don't think anyone could reasonably characterize a DAW as a tool designed to infringe copyrights with so I don't think there is an issue. The fact that none of the labels have ever sued DAWs for this reason should be an intuition for you on this matter.

>It’s called Fair Use for a reason – we let humans Use things generally and ask them to be Fair.

So exhausted with people who come to these threads and try to discuss legal issues by only paying lip service to the words and not their meanings, let alone the actual law that they seem to want to debate. Then they go even further and turn it into some grand political statement, or hypothesize why copyright shouldn't exist at all. But there is absolutely no jurisprudence that would indicate a DAW is the kind of tool I described. I understand you came up with an argument in your head why it could be, but I'm letting you know that in the law, it's not what would be considered a reasonable argument and it would go nowhere.

DAWs are tools made to create music, generally. They do not contain banks of copyrighted materials to which the user ultimately pulls the copying "trigger" (that's the system I described).

I hope that helps.

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

#623

Post by immibis »

bongodongobob wrote: post #573
pyman wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And those bands can successfully sue you for that. Especially if you sell it for money. Double especially if your sales of their songs displace them in the market.

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

#624

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

jobs_throwaway wrote: post #618
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way you've presented this, the evidence is just "common sense", which isn't much evidence at all.

wrong https://news.iu.edu/live/news/25720-the-hidden-treasure-of-d...

"Wrong" would imply somehow the first post was better that it was. What you mean to say is "You're right, here's a link with some details".

That article also focuses on larger media and "moderate" amounts of piracy, so there's absolutely caveats in your claim.

"As with other studies, Kim and his colleagues found that when enforcement is low and piracy is rampant, both manufacturers and retailers suffer."

“'The implication is simply that, situated in a real-world context, our manufacturer and retailer should recognize that a certain level of piracy or its threat might actually be beneficial'..."

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

#625

Post by ricardobeat »

freejazz wrote: post #622
conradev wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you use a DAW to recreate a favorite song for learning, should the DAW show a warning that you’re infringing on a copyrighted melody? Should it let you make it? Export it? You promise the DAW it’s for personal use? It’s only a matter of time until this stuff is in DAWs. When a general computer using agent recreates songs in Logic Pro in high fidelity, then what? It’s called Fair Use for a reason – we let humans…

I don't think anyone could reasonably characterize a DAW as a tool designed to infringe copyrights with so I don't think there is an issue. The fact that none of the labels have ever sued DAWs for this reason should be an intuition for you on this matter. >It’s called Fair Use for a reason – we let humans Use things generally and ask them to be Fair. So exhausted with people who come to these threads and try to discu…

It’s easy to fall back to known concepts to frame new things, but that is not accurate. LLMs do not hold “banks of copyrighted materials”, though they can recreate popular bits, in the same way a human can recall and hum the X Files theme but doesn’t actually have a recording of it in their brain. They are just a lot better at it.

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

#626

Post by freejazz »

ricardobeat wrote: post #625
freejazz wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone could reasonably characterize a DAW as a tool designed to infringe copyrights with so I don't think there is an issue. The fact that none of the labels have ever sued DAWs for this reason should be an intuition for you on this matter. >It’s called Fair Use for a reason – we let humans Use things generally and ask them to be Fair. So exhausted with people who come to these threads and try to discu…

It’s easy to fall back to known concepts to frame new things, but that is not accurate. LLMs do not hold “banks of copyrighted materials”, though they can recreate popular bits, in the same way a human can recall and hum the X Files theme but doesn’t actually have a recording of it in their brain. They are just a lot better at it.

I didn't describe an LLM. Read the thread. I decsribed a particular type of service or machine where the maker would liable as a contributory infringer without directly infringing. That's all. Read my post, I even said "Not saying this is exactly what Suno is doing"

Someone responded and said "Why not DAWs, then?" The answer is because a DAW is not that kind of service or machine.

>t’s easy to fall back to known concepts to frame new things, but that is not accurate. LLMs do not hold a “banks of copyrighted materials”,

As an aside. That's clearly not true in some models given that in a number of the cases, the plaintiffs can recreate their works verbatim.

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

#628

Post by tpmoney »

shrubble wrote: post #214

Let’s say my AI company is training an AI on woodworking books and at the end, it will describe in text and wireframe drawings (but not the original or identical photos) how to do a particular task. If I didn’t license all the books I trained on, am I not depriving the publisher of revenue, given people will pay me for the AI instead of buying the book?

Copyright doesn’t cover facts and methods. It specifically covers creative expressions. That’s why patents are different from copyright. If you read some woodworking books and then write your own online tutorial about building a chair using the methods and procedures described in that book, it doesn’t matter that you now compete with the books that you used, provided you didn’t copy the creative elements. How much of a chair design is creative and how much is function is an ambiguous question that might still land you in court, but it won’t be over your right to make the tutorial in the first place.

As the judge noted in this ruling, copyright isn’t intended to protect authors from competition. Copyright doesn’t protect Rowling from other authors writing YA wizard books cutting into her revenue streams. Or from TV producers making YA wizard shows that reduce the demand for books. Copyright doesn’t protect the Tolkien estate from Terry Brooks, or Tracy Hickman or Margret Weiss reducing the demand for Tolkien fantasy by supplanting it with their own fantasies.

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

#629

Post by tpmoney »

wmeredith wrote: post #438
stocksinsmocks wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic isn’t selling copies of the material to its users though. I would think you couldn’t lock someone up for reading a book and summarizing or reciting portions of the contents. Seven years for thumbing your nose at Autodesk when armed robbery would get you less time says some interesting things about the state of legal practice.

> summarizing or reciting portions of the contents This absolutely falls under copyright law as I understand it (not a lawyer). E.g. the disclaimer that rolls before every NFL broadcast. The notice states that the broadcast is copyrighted and any unauthorized use, including pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game, is prohibited. There is wiggle room for fair use by news organizations, critics, artists, etc.

They might say that, but it doesn’t mean it has the force of law behind it. Copyright does not cover and has never covered facts. So as much as the NFL might wish you can’t tell people what the final score of the game is, or describe the events of the last minute clutch play, they can’t actually prevent you from doing that because that’s not protected by copyright.

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

#630

Post by tpmoney »

NHQ wrote: post #141

The farce of treating a corporation as an individual precludes common sense legal procedure to investigate people who are responsible for criminal action taken by the company. Its obviously premeditated and in all ways an illicit act knowingly perpetrated by persons. The only discourse should be about upending this penthouse legalism.

The “farce” of treating a corporation as a legal individual is the reason you can have this case in the first place. Otherwise the authors would have had to discover and individually sue each specific individual in the company for each specific claim. They would have to find the specific individual that downloaded their specific book and sue that person. Then they would need to find the specific individual that digitized their specific book and sue that person. Then they would need to find the specific person that loaded that digital copy into an AI model and sue that person. And on and on for each alleged act of infringement.

Or we could recognize that’s silly when we’re talking about a group of people acting in concert and treat them as a single entity for the purpose of alleged crimes. Which is what we do when we treat a corporation as an individual for legal purposes.

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