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

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

#91

Post by vinni2 »

ticulatedspline wrote: post #60
NobodyNada wrote: post #40

One aspect of this ruling [1] that I find concerning: on pages 7 and 11-12, it concedes that the LLM does substantially "memorize" copyrighted works, but rules that this doesn't violate the author's copyright because Anthropic has server-side filtering to avoid reproducing memorized text. (Alsup compares this to Google Books, which has server-side searchable full-text copies of copyrighted books, but only allows user…

Yep, broadly capable open models are on track for annihilation. The cost of legally obtaining all the training materials will require hefty backing. Additionally that if you download a model file that contains enough of the source material to be considered infringing (even without using the LLM, assume you can extract the contents directly out of the weights) then it might as well be a .zip with a PDF in it, the mode…

> extract the contents directly out of the weights

If you can successfully demonstrate that then yes it is a copyright infringement and successfully doing that would be worthy of NeurIPS or ACL paper.

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

#92

Post by doctorpangloss »

philipkglass wrote: post #74
doctorpangloss wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s similar to the Google Books ruling, which Google lost. Anthropic also lost. TechCrunch and others are very aspirational here.

Do you mean Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc.? Google won that case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,... . Maybe there's another big Google Books lawsuit that Google ultimately lost, but I don't know which one you mean in that case.

see, but if you ask a copyright attorney: Google lost. This is what I mean by aspirational. They won something, in very similar circumstances to Anthropic, "fair use," but everything else that made what they were doing a practical reality instead of purely theoretical required negotiation with Authors Guild, and indeed, they are not doing what they wanted to do, right? Anthropic has to go to trial still, they had to pirate the books to train, and they will not win on their right to commercialize the results of training, because neither did Google, so what good is the Fair Use ruling, besides allowing OpenAI v. NYTimes to proceed a little longer?

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

#93

Post by layer8 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #83
layer8 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can’t distribute it, which in the scenario mentioned in the parent’s final paragraph arguably happens.

You can't distribute the copyrighted works, but that isn't inherently the same thing as the model. 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 bo…

The premise was that the model is able to reproduce the memorized text, and that what saved Anthropic was them having server-side filtering to avoid reproducing that text. So the presumption is that without those filters, the model would be able to reproduce text substantial enough to constitute a copyright violation (otherwise they wouldn’t need the filter argument). Distributing a “machine” producing such output would constitute copyright infringement.

Maybe this is a misrepresentation of the actual Anthropic case, I have no idea, but it’s the scenario I was addressing.

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

#94

Post by martin-t »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #46
3PS wrote: post #2

Broadly summarizing. This is OK and fair use: Training LLMs on copyrighted work, since it's transformative. This is not OK and not fair use: pirating data, or creating a big repository of pirated data that isn't necessarily for AI training. Overall seems like a pretty reasonable ruling?

Agreed. If I memorize a book and I am deployed into the world to talk about what I memorized that is not a violation of copyright. Which is reasonable logically because essentially this is what an LLM is doing.

Except you can't do it at a massive scale. LLMs both memorize at a scale bigger than thousands, probably millions of humans AND reproduce at an essentially unlimited scale.

And who gets the money? Not the original author.

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

#95

Post by throwaway562if1 »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #90
ticulatedspline wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, broadly capable open models are on track for annihilation. The cost of legally obtaining all the training materials will require hefty backing. Additionally that if you download a model file that contains enough of the source material to be considered infringing (even without using the LLM, assume you can extract the contents directly out of the weights) then it might as well be a .zip with a PDF in it, the mode…

Yep, broadly capable open models are on track for annihilation. The cost of legally obtaining all the training materials will require hefty backing. This will have the effect of empowering countries (and other entities) that don't respect copyright law, of course. The copyright cartel cannot be allowed to yank the handbrake on AI. If they insist on a fight, they must lose.

For that matter, how dare the government fine me for dumping waste in the river, and stop me from employing minors? Don't they know it will ruin the economy?

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

#96

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

ticulatedspline wrote: post #60
NobodyNada wrote: post #40

One aspect of this ruling [1] that I find concerning: on pages 7 and 11-12, it concedes that the LLM does substantially "memorize" copyrighted works, but rules that this doesn't violate the author's copyright because Anthropic has server-side filtering to avoid reproducing memorized text. (Alsup compares this to Google Books, which has server-side searchable full-text copies of copyrighted books, but only allows user…

Yep, broadly capable open models are on track for annihilation. The cost of legally obtaining all the training materials will require hefty backing. Additionally that if you download a model file that contains enough of the source material to be considered infringing (even without using the LLM, assume you can extract the contents directly out of the weights) then it might as well be a .zip with a PDF in it, the mode…

> broadly capable open models are on track for annihilation

I'm not so sure about this one. In particular, presuming that it is found that models which can produce infringing material are themselves infringing material, the ability to distill models from older models seems to suggest that the older models can actually produce the new, infringing model. It seems like that should mean that all output from the older model is infringing because any and all of it can be used to make infringing material (the new model, distilled from the old).

I don't think it's really tenable for courts to treat any model as though it is, in itself, copyright-infringing material without treating every generative model like that and, thus, killing the GPT/diffusion generation business (that could happen but it seems very unlikely). They will probably stick to being critical of what people generate with them and/or how they distribute what they generate.

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

#97

Post by riskable »

NobodyNada wrote: post #40

One aspect of this ruling [1] that I find concerning: on pages 7 and 11-12, it concedes that the LLM does substantially "memorize" copyrighted works, but rules that this doesn't violate the author's copyright because Anthropic has server-side filtering to avoid reproducing memorized text. (Alsup compares this to Google Books, which has server-side searchable full-text copies of copyrighted books, but only allows user…

A judge already ruled that models themselves don't constitute copyright infringement in Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc. (https://casetext.com/case/kadrey-v-meta-platforms-inc). The EFF has a good summary about it:

> the court dismissed “nonsensical” claims that Meta’s LLaMA models are themselves infringing derivative works.

See: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/copyright-and-ai-cases...

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

#98

Post by martin-t »

NobodyNada wrote: post #40

One aspect of this ruling [1] that I find concerning: on pages 7 and 11-12, it concedes that the LLM does substantially "memorize" copyrighted works, but rules that this doesn't violate the author's copyright because Anthropic has server-side filtering to avoid reproducing memorized text. (Alsup compares this to Google Books, which has server-side searchable full-text copies of copyrighted books, but only allows user…

Copyright was codified in an age where plagiarism was time consuming. Even replacing words with synonyms on a mass scale was technically infeasible.

The goal of copyright is to make sure people can get fair compensation for the amount of work they put in. LLMs automate plagiarism on a previously unfathomable scale.

If humans spend a trillion hours writing books, articles, blog posts and code, then somebody (a small group of people) comes and spends a million hours building a machine that ingests all the previous work and produces output based on it, who should get the reward for the work put in?

The original authors together spent a million times more effort (normalized for skill) and should therefore should get a million times bigger reward than those who build the machine.

In other words, if the small group sells access to the product of the combined effort, they only deserve a millionth of the income.

---

If "AI" is as transformative as they claim, they will have no trouble making so much money they they can fairly compensate the original authors while still earning a decent profit. But if it's not, then it's just an overpriced plagiarism automator and their reluctance to acknowledge they are making money on top of everyone else's work is indicative.

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

#99

Post by [deleted] »

ticulatedspline wrote: post #60
NobodyNada wrote: post #40

One aspect of this ruling [1] that I find concerning: on pages 7 and 11-12, it concedes that the LLM does substantially "memorize" copyrighted works, but rules that this doesn't violate the author's copyright because Anthropic has server-side filtering to avoid reproducing memorized text. (Alsup compares this to Google Books, which has server-side searchable full-text copies of copyrighted books, but only allows user…

Yep, broadly capable open models are on track for annihilation. The cost of legally obtaining all the training materials will require hefty backing. Additionally that if you download a model file that contains enough of the source material to be considered infringing (even without using the LLM, assume you can extract the contents directly out of the weights) then it might as well be a .zip with a PDF in it, the mode…

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