A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

It's sort of like distributing a compendium of book reviews. Many of the reviews have quotes from the book. If there are thousands of reviews, you could potentially reconstruct the whole book, but that's not the point of the thing and so it makes sense for the infringing thing to be "using it to reconstruct the whole book" rather than "distributing the compendium".

And then Anthropic fended off the argument that their service was intended for doing the former because they were explicitly taking measures to prevent that.

If you xor some data with random numbers, both the result and the random numbers are indistinguishably random and there is no way to tell which one came out of a random number generator and which one is "derived" from a copyrighted work. But if you xor them together again the copyrighted work comes out. So if you have Alice distribute one of the random looking things and Bob distribute the other one and then Carol downloads them both and reconstructs the copyrighted work, have you created a scheme to copy whatever you want with no infringement occurring?

Of course not, at least Carol is reproducing an infringing work, and then there are going to be claims of contributory infringement etc. for the others if the scheme has no other purpose than to do this.

Meanwhile this problem is also boring because preventing anyone from being the source of infringing works isn't a thing anybody has been able to do since at least as long as the internet has allowed anyone to set up a server in another jurisdiction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

> The doctrine was first recognized by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1908 (see Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus) and subsequently codified in the Copyright Act of 1909. In the Bobbs-Merrill case, the publisher, Bobbs-Merrill, had inserted a notice in its books that any retail sale at a price under $1.00 would constitute an infringement of its copyright. The defendants, who owned Macy's department store, disregarded the notice and sold the books at a lower price without Bobbs-Merrill's consent. The Supreme Court held that the exclusive statutory right to "vend" applied only to the first sale of the copyrighted work.

> Today, this rule of law is codified in 17 U.S.C. § 109(a), which provides:

> Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106 (3), the owner of a particular copy or phonorecord lawfully made under this title, or any person authorized by such owner, is entitled, without the authority of the copyright owner, to sell or otherwise dispose of the possession of that copy or phonorecord.

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If I buy a copy of a book, you can't limit what I can do with the book beyond what copyright restricts me.