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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

#651

Post by freejazz »

conradev wrote: post #646
freejazz wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think 1201 is invoked in this case and, as a copyright attorney, I don't really ever see it invoked anyway. I understand you have an axe to grind, but I don't see how your approach makes sense. Further, I'm not sure what obligation the law as to the "Hacker Manifesto" that it should be of any consequence anyway. All sorts of laws run against the manifesto. So what? The point of the manifesto wasn't to behave…

I'm genuinely trying to engage and I'm curious where my preconceptions are "fundamentally wrong" versus not understanding "what makes a dance copyrightable where a massage is not". Where are you on the continuum? Regarding training an AI model in my basement on purchased music, do you think I should: - Not be allowed to train it - Not be allowed to run it - Not be allowed to share outputs from it anywhere - Not be al…

>I'm genuinely trying to engage and I'm curious where my preconceptions are

Sure, I appreciate that. My point is that none of this has anything to do with § 1201 so there's really no point in coming to this with a kind of incredulity that is counterproductive stemming from your own beliefs about that one particular law. Not saying that is necessarily what you are doing, but I see that kind of approach so frequently here. A lot of not really knowing what a copyright protects, its limits, how they are adjudicated, etc, but then a lot of confidence about how it is all just wrong for society.

For starters, to answer your first question. Copyright protects creative artistic expressions. What is covered is defined in the copyright statute, and the list does not include massages. So, that would be the reason why a massage is not protected. Why is "massage" on that list? Probably because no one can reasonably consider a massage a creative artistic expression. Choreography is the art in which that form of expression exists and would be covered. Could you copyright a dance that included massage movements? Yeah, sure. Could you copyright a dance that consisted entirely of massage movements. Sure. Could you use that copyright to prevent massage therapists from "performing" massages? No.

That's obviously a very surface level take and what is actually protected in a copyright isn't necessarily the entirety of the work but the aspects of it that original expressions. There are other limitations too, like something being de minimis. You can't copyright "the sky was blue" (Scarlett Begonias, the Grateful Dead) and actually prohibit others from using the phrase. That phrase alone is too small (among other things). The Grateful Dead do have a copyright to the entirety of the lyrics to Scarlett Begonias and can control various kinds of uses of the the lyrics.

>Or are you primarily focused on the current legal precedent?

All litigators are focused on current legal precedent. You cannot make arguments for how things should be without regard for how things are as that is the fundamental basis for what should be changed and why.

>Where are you on the continuum? Regarding training an AI model in my basement on purchased music, do you think I should:

Personally, I find AI abhorrent. I think its wrong for it to be trained without any compensation to the authors of the works used in the training, and I think it's wrong for the output to be commercialized to the benefit of the owner of the model without any compensation to the authors of the works used in generating the outputs.

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

#652

Post by [deleted] »

freejazz wrote: post #626
ricardobeat wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 conc…

[deleted]

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

#654

Post by const_cast »

parliament32 wrote: post #636
const_cast wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I mean you're constructing very convoluted and weak examples. I think, in your example, the obvious answer is no , they're not entitled to any profits of Gravity. How could you possibly prove Gravity has anything to do with someone reading, or not reading, a textbook? You can't. However, AI participates in the exact same markets it trains from. That's obviously very different. It is INTENDED to DIRECTLY replace…

> It is INTENDED to DIRECTLY replace the things it trains on. Maybe this is where I'm having trouble. You say "exact same markets" -- how is a print book the exact same market as a web/mobile text-generating human-emulating chat companion? If that holds, why can't I say a textbook is the exact same market as a film? I could see the argument if someone published a product that was fine-tuned on a specific book, and ma…

> how is a print book the exact same market as a web/mobile text-generating human-emulating chat companion? If that holds, why can't I say a textbook is the exact same market as a film?

Because the medium is actually the same. The content of a book is not paper, or a cover. It's text, and specifically the information in that text.

LLMs are intended to directly compete with and outright replace that usecase. I don't need a textbook on, say, Anatomy, because ChatGPT can structure and tell me about Anatomy, and in fact with say the exact same content slightly re-arranged.

This doesn't really hold for fictional books, nor does it hold for movies.

Watching a movie and reading a book are inherently different experiences, which cannot replace one another. Reading a textbook and asking ChatGPT about topic X is, for all intents and purposes, the same experience. Especially since, remember, most textbooks are online today.

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

#655

Post by YPPH »

bumby wrote: post #614
YPPH wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Crashing your car is an error. Crashing your car while lecturing someone else about safe driving is irony. In this case it seemed like you were making a point about the strict legal sense of a word, but misusing a different legal term to do so.

You're describing hypocrisy.

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

#656

Post by bumby »

YPPH wrote: post #655
bumby wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crashing your car is an error. Crashing your car while lecturing someone else about safe driving is irony. In this case it seemed like you were making a point about the strict legal sense of a word, but misusing a different legal term to do so.

You're describing hypocrisy.

Irony is the opposite of what you’d expect, or incongruity between what is expected and what occurs. I expect someone lecturing on safe driving to…well, know how to drive safely.

Hypocrisy requires deception, not ignorance.

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

#657

Post by fragmede »

const_cast wrote: post #654
parliament32 wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is INTENDED to DIRECTLY replace the things it trains on. Maybe this is where I'm having trouble. You say "exact same markets" -- how is a print book the exact same market as a web/mobile text-generating human-emulating chat companion? If that holds, why can't I say a textbook is the exact same market as a film? I could see the argument if someone published a product that was fine-tuned on a specific book, and ma…

> how is a print book the exact same market as a web/mobile text-generating human-emulating chat companion? If that holds, why can't I say a textbook is the exact same market as a film? Because the medium is actually the same. The content of a book is not paper, or a cover. It's text, and specifically the information in that text. LLMs are intended to directly compete with and outright replace that usecase. I don't n…

Is it? If a teacher reads a book, then gives a lecture on that topic, that's decidedly not the same experience. Which step about that process makes it not the same experience? Is it the fact that they read the book using their human brain and then formed words in a specific order? Is it the fact that they're saying it out loud that's transformative? If we use ChatGPT's TTS feature, why is that not the same thing as a human talking about a topic after they read a book since it's been rearranged?

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

#658

Post by const_cast »

fragmede wrote: post #657
const_cast wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how is a print book the exact same market as a web/mobile text-generating human-emulating chat companion? If that holds, why can't I say a textbook is the exact same market as a film? Because the medium is actually the same. The content of a book is not paper, or a cover. It's text, and specifically the information in that text. LLMs are intended to directly compete with and outright replace that usecase. I don't n…

Is it? If a teacher reads a book, then gives a lecture on that topic, that's decidedly not the same experience. Which step about that process makes it not the same experience? Is it the fact that they read the book using their human brain and then formed words in a specific order? Is it the fact that they're saying it out loud that's transformative? If we use ChatGPT's TTS feature, why is that not the same thing as a…

Well there's multiple reasons why it's not the same experience. It's a different medium, but it's also different content. The textbook may be used as a jumping-off point, supplemented by decades of real-life experience the professor has.

And, I think, elephant in the room with these discussions: we cannot just compare ChatGPT to a human. That's not a foregone conclusions and, IMO, no, you can't just do that. You have to justify it.

Humans are special. Why? Because we are Human. Humans have different and additional rights which machines, and programs, do not have. If we want to extend our rights to machines, we can do that... but not for free. Oh no, you must justify that, and it's quiet hard. Especially when said machines appear to work against Humans.

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

#659

Post by Greed »

conradev wrote: post #612
Greed wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be reaching the limits of the metaphor here, but restaurants are absolutely responsible for the e coli if it's found in significant quantities whether it's in the initial ingredients or the cooked end product. A restaurant is required to vet its suppliers and ensure food safety protocols throughout the entire process with several independent checks at many points, and is ultimately directly responsible if a c…

The problem here is there is no “test” that is known to work here other than checking for direct infringement, which they have a responsibility to do (as they don’t have a license to the originals). Anything remotely beyond that and we have teams of humans adjudicating specific cases: https://library.mi.edu/musiccopyright/currentcases

I mean, I was speaking more to the breakdown of the metaphor than the argument itself but if that's your response then it tells me that there is no reasonable way that Suno can ever really claim fair-use. I can't imagine being one of the artists whose material Suno has trained on and being told: "We have no idea when or if it will generate copyrighted content, or how to test for it. But we will continue to use your material and arbitrate on a case-by-case basis as it is brought to our attention." That sounds insane.

Surely, for Suno to claim fair usage and be given free reign to build a commercial business off of literally anyone's original works then the bare minimum bar for allowing that usage would be: make a satisfactory test to prove that you're always doing something transformative and original, within practical limits.

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

#660

Post by trinsic2 »

protocolture wrote: post #519
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 o…

Available to the public is one thing, but a for-profit company is not "the public". They are providing a service that makes that work, regardless of what ever form it is in, available to the public. This seems like a middle man situation that makes a profit off of access to information, regardless of what form it is in.
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