> Alsup ruled that Anthropic's use of copyrighted books to train its AI models was "exceedingly transformative" and qualified as fair use
> "All Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies"
It was always somewhat obvious that pirating a library would be copyright infringement. The interesting findings here are that scanning and digitizing a library for internal use is OK, and using it to train models is fair use.
6gvONxR4sf7o · 2h ago
You skipped quotes about the other important side:
> But Alsup drew a firm line when it came to piracy.
> "Anthropic had no entitlement to use pirated copies for its central library," Alsup wrote. "Creating a permanent, general-purpose library was not itself a fair use excusing Anthropic's piracy."
That is, he ruled that
- buying, physically cutting up, physically digitizing books, and using them for training is fair use
- pirating the books for their digital library is not fair use.
AnthonyMouse · 14m ago
> That is, he ruled that
> - buying, physically cutting up, physically digitizing books, and using them for training is fair use
> - pirating the books for their digital library is not fair use.
That seems inconsistent with one another. If it's fair use, how is it piracy?
It also seems pragmatically trash. It doesn't do the authors any good for the AI company to buy one copy of their book (and a used one at that), but it does make it much harder for smaller companies to compete with megacorps for AI stuff, so it's basically the stupidest of the plausible outcomes.
jonas21 · 2h ago
As they mentioned, the piracy part is obvious. It's the fair use part that will set an important precedent for being able to train on copyrighted works as long as you have legally acquired a copy.
pier25 · 21m ago
> buying, physically cutting up, physically digitizing books, and using them for training is fair use
So Suno would only really need to buy the physical albums and rip them to be able to generate music at an industrial scale?
theteapot · 17m ago
Yes.
throwawayffffas · 2h ago
So all they have to do is go and buy a copy of each book they pirated. They will have ceased and desisted.
superfrank · 2h ago
I'm trying to find the quote, but I'm pretty sure the judge specifically said that going and buying the book after the fact won't absolve them of liability. He said that for the books they pirated they broke the law and should stand trial for that and they cannot go back and un-break in by buying a copy now.
> “That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft,” [Judge] Alsup wrote, “but it may affect the extent of statutory damages.”
freejazz · 1h ago
They also argued that they in no way could ever actually license all the materials they ingested
dmd · 1h ago
I love this argument so much. "But judge, there's no way I could ever afford to buy those jewels, so stealing them must be OK."
AnthonyMouse · 20m ago
The argument is more along the lines of, negotiating with millions of individuals each over a single copy of a work would cause the transaction costs to exceed the payments, and that kind of efficiency loss is the sort of thing fair use exists to prevent. It's not socially beneficial for the law to require you to create $2 in deadweight loss in order to transfer $1, and the cost to the author of not selling a single additional copy is not the thing they were really objecting to.
zoklet-enjoyer · 1h ago
Did they really steal if they didn't deprive anyone of their copy? I don't think copying is theft.
hadlock · 1h ago
It's copyright infringement, which is not theft, they're legally distinct in the eyes of the law. This is partly why the "you wouldn't download a car" copyright ads were so widely mocked.
axus · 1h ago
Agreed, the judge should avoid slang or even commonly accepted synonyms in an official ruling. The charge is not for theft.
Substitute infringement for theft.
fortran77 · 29m ago
It's fine that you think that way. But this is a discusion of the laws of the United States of America and ruling by American courts, not a discussion of your own legal theories.
kjkjadksj · 1h ago
You may not think it is but the law does.
buildbot · 1h ago
The law says it’s copyright infringement, not theft.
badlibrarian · 1h ago
"Tell it to the Judge..."
dragonwriter · 2h ago
> So all they have to do is go and buy a copy of each book they pirated.
No, that doesn't undo the infringement. At most, that would mitigate actual damages, but actual damages aren't likely to be important, given that statutory damages are an alternative and are likely to dwarf actual damages. (It may also figure into how the court assigns statutory damages within the very large range available for those, but that range does not go down to $0.)
> They will have ceased and desisted.
"Cease and desist" is just to stop incurring additional liability. (A potential plaintiff may accept that as sufficient to not sue if a request is made and the potential defendant complies, because litigation is uncertain and expensive. But "cease and desist" doesn't undo wrongs and neutralize liability when they've already been sued over.)
rockemsockem · 1h ago
> So all they have to do is go and buy a copy of each book they pirated.
For anyone else who wants to do the same thing though this is likely all they need to do.
Cutting up and scanning books is hard work and actually doing the same thing digitally to ebooks isn't labor free either, especially when they have to be downloaded from random sites and cleaned from different formats. Torrenting a bunch of epubs and paying for individual books is probably cheaper
tzs · 36m ago
Generally you don't want laws to work that way. You want to set the penalties so that they discourage violating the law.
Setting the penalty to what it would have cost to obey the law in the first place does the opposite.
AnthonyMouse · 26s ago
That's for criminal laws where prosecutorial discretion can then (in principle) be used in borderline cases to prevent unjust outcomes.
If you give people a claim for damages which is an order of magnitude larger than their actual damages, it encourages litigiousness and becomes a vector for shakedowns because the excessive cost of losing pressures innocent defendants to settle even if there was a 90% chance they would have won.
Meanwhile both parties have the incentive to settle in civil cases when it's obvious who is going to win, because a settlement to pay the damages is cheaper than the cost of going to court and then having to pay the same damages anyway. Which also provides a deterrent to doing it, because even having to pay lawyers to negotiate a settlement is a cost you don't want to pay when it's clear that what you're doing is going to have that result.
jasonlotito · 1h ago
From my understanding:
> pirating the books for their digital library is not fair use.
"Pirating" is a fuzzy word and has no real meaning. Specifically, I think this is the cruz:
> without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies
Essentially: downloading is fine, sharing/uploading up is not. Which makes sense. The assertion here is that Anthropic (from this line) did not distribute the files they downloaded.
AlotOfReading · 1h ago
The legal context here is that "format shifting" has not previously been held to be sufficient for fair use on its own, and downloading for personal use has also been considered infringing. Just look at the numerous media industry lawsuits against individuals that only mention downloading, not sharing for examples.
It's a bit surprising that you can suddenly download copyrighted materials for personal use and and it's kosher as long as you don't share them with others.
codedokode · 1h ago
Downloading and using pirated software in a company is fine then as long as it is not shared outside? If what you describe is legal it makes no sense to pay for software.
pyrale · 53m ago
sci-hub suddenly becomes legal if all researchers adhere to one big company, apparently.
After all, illegally downloading research papers in order to write new ones is highly transformative.
jasonlotito · 1h ago
> Downloading a document is fine as long as it is not shared outside?
I've fixed your question so that it accurately represents what I said and doesn't put words in my mouth.
If I click on a link and download a document, is that illegal?
I do not know if the person has the right to distribute it or not. IANAL, but when people were getting sued by the RIAA years back, it was never about downloading, but also distribution.
As I said, IANAL, but feel free to correct me, but my understanding is that downloading a document from the internet is not illegal.
CaptainFever · 55m ago
> it was never about downloading, but also distribution.
Did you mean to write "but about distribution" here?
eikenberry · 1h ago
Given that downloading requires you to copy the data to download it, I'd think it would fall under "adding new copies".
jpalawaga · 3h ago
I don't think that's new. google set precedent for that more than a decade ago. you're allowed to transform a book to digital.
alok-g · 1h ago
AFAIK, Judge Vince Chhabria has countered that Fair Use argument in a later order involving Meta.
Swartz wasn't charged with copyright infringement.
arandomhuman · 2h ago
No but he coincidentally passed away after he was accused of it.
kube-system · 1h ago
No, the CFAA was the law that had him facing 35 years in prison and $1m+ fines. It wasn't a copyright case.
tzs · 53m ago
He wasn't facing anywhere near that. When the DOJ charges someone with a set of charges they like to say in the press release that the person is facing N years, where they get N by simply adding up the maximums for each charge that it is possible for a hypothetical defendant that has all the possible sentence enhancing factors to get. They also ignore that some charges group for sentencing--your sentence for the group is the maximum sentence for the individual charges in the group.
Here's an article explaining in more detail [1].
Most experts say that if Swartz had gone to trial and the prosecution had proved everything they alleged and the judge had decided to make an example of Swartz and sentence harshly it would have been around 7 years.
Swartz's own attorney said that if they had gone to trail and lost he thought it was unlikely that Swartz would get any jail time.
Swartz also had at least two plea bargain offers available. One was for a guilty plea and 4 months. The other was for a guilty plea and the prosecutors would ask for 6 months but Swartz could ask the judge for less or for probation instead and the judge would pick.
Yes, I meant "up to" that amount, which is implied when many people say "facing" before a trial happens. But it's not really relevant to my point, which was that it wasn't a copyright case.
natch · 3h ago
*technically
kube-system · 1h ago
If you're discussing law, an entirely different law in a different title of US code is more than a technicality.
JimDabell · 3h ago
> illegally copying and selling pirated software
This is very different to what Anthropic did. Nobody was buying copies of books from Anthropic instead of the copyright holder.
armada651 · 1h ago
I wouldn't be so sure about that statement, no one has ruled on the output of Anthropic's AI yet. If their AI spits out the original copy of the book then it is practically the same as buying a book from them instead of the copyright holder.
We've only dealt with the fairly straight-forward legal questions so far. This legal battle is still far from being settled.
KoolKat23 · 1h ago
It is extremely likely this will be declared fair use in the end.
There's already one decision on a competitor.
It makes sense, if you think of how the model works.
rvnx · 2h ago
At the very least, they should have purchased the originals once
arandomhuman · 2h ago
Yeah, people have gone to jail for a few copies of content. Taking that large of a corpus and getting off without penalty would be a farce of the justice system.
rockemsockem · 1h ago
Bad decisions should not be repeated in the name of fair application.
impossiblefork · 41m ago
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 they are even a tiny bit reasonable.
Aurornis · 53m ago
> Here is how individuals are treated for massive copyright infringement:
When I clicked the link, I got an article about a business that was selling millions of dollars of pirated software.
This guy made millions of dollars in profit by selling pirated software. This wasn't a case of transformative works, nor of an individual doing something for themselves. He was plainly stealing and reselling something.
farceSpherule · 3h ago
Peterson was copying and selling pirated software.
Come up with a better comparison.
organsnyder · 2h ago
Anthropic is selling a service that incorporates these pirated works.
adolph · 2h ago
That a service incorporating the authors' works exists is not at issue. The plaintiffs' claims are, as summarized by Alsup:
First, Authors argue that using works to train Claude’s underlying LLMs
was like using works to train any person to read and write, so Authors
should be able to exclude Anthropic from this use (Opp. 16).
Second, to that last point, Authors further argue that the training was
intended to memorize their works’ creative elements — not just their
works’ non-protectable ones (Opp. 17).
Third, Authors next argue that computers nonetheless should not be
allowed to do what people do.
The first paragraph sounds absurd, so I looked into the PDF, and here's the full version I found:
> First, Authors argue that using works to train Claude’s underlying LLMs was like using
works to train any person to read and write, so Authors should be able to exclude Anthropic
from this use (Opp. 16). But Authors cannot rightly exclude anyone from using their works for
training or learning as such. Everyone reads texts, too, then writes new texts. They may need
to pay for getting their hands on a text in the first instance. But to make anyone pay
specifically for the use of a book each time they read it, each time they recall it from memory,
each time they later draw upon it when writing new things in new ways would be unthinkable.
For centuries, we have read and re-read books. We have admired, memorized, and internalized
their sweeping themes, their substantive points, and their stylistic solutions to recurring writing
problems.
Couldn't have put it better myself (though $deity knows I tried many times on HN). Glad to see Judge Alsup continues to be the voice of common sense in legal matters around technology.
codedokode · 2h ago
Computers cannot learn and are not subjects to laws. What happens, is a human takes a copyrighted work, makes an unauthorized digital copy, and loads it into a computer without authorization from copyright owner.
KoolKat23 · 1h ago
And they are not selling this or distributing this.
The model is very different.
adolph · 1h ago
It can't be "unauthorized" if no authorization was needed.
xdennis · 1h ago
> That a service incorporating the authors' works exists is not at issue.
It's not an issue because it's not currently illegal because nobody could have foreseen this years ago.
But it is profiting off of the unpaid work of millions. And there's very little chance of change because it's so hard to pass new protection laws when you're not Disney.
TeMPOraL · 35m ago
It's not an issue because it's not what this case was about, as the linked document explicitly states. The Authors did not contest the legality of the model's outputs, only the inputs used in training.
megaman821 · 3m ago
Correct, the New York Times and Disney are suing for the output side. I am going to hazard a guess that you won't be able to circumvent copyright and trademark just because you are using AI. Where that line is has yet to be determined though.
CaptainFever · 53m ago
Let's not expand copyright law.
adolph · 1h ago
Marx wrote The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an Alp on the brains of the living. and that would be true if one were obligated to pay the full freight of one's antecedents. The more positive truth is that the brains of the living reach new heights from that Alp and build ever new heights for those who come afterwards.
lawlessone · 1h ago
> underlying LLMs
was like using works to train any person to read and write
I don't think humans learn via backprop or in rounds/batches, our learning is more "online".
If I input text into an LLM it doesn't learn from that unless the creators consciously include that data in the next round of teaching their model.
Humans also don't require samples of every text in history to learn to read and write well.
Hunter S Thompson didn't need to ingest the Harry Potter books to write.
nh23423fefe · 3h ago
What point are you making? 20 years ago, someone sold pirated copies of software (wheres the transformation here) and that's the same as using books in a training set? Judge already said reading isnt infringement.
This is reaching at best.
amlib · 26m ago
Aren't you comparing the wrong things? First example is about the output/outcome, what is the equivalent for LLMs? Also, not all "pirated" things are sold, most are in fact distributed for free.
"Pirates" also transform the works they distribute. They crack it, translate it, compress it to decrease download times, remove unnecessary things, make it easier to download by splitting it in chunks (essential with dial-up, less so nowadays), change distribution formats, offer it trough different channels, bundle extra software and media that they themselves might have coded like trainers, installers, sick chiptunes and so on. Why is the "transformation" done by a big corpo more legal in your views?
chourobin · 4h ago
copyright is not the same as piracy
asadotzler · 3h ago
piracy isn't a thing, except on the high seas. what you're thinking about is copyright violation.
downrightmike · 3h ago
Yup, piracy sounds better than copyright violation.
“Piracy” is mostly a rhetorical term in the context of copyright. Legally, it’s still called infringement or unauthorized copying. But industries and lobbying groups (e.g., RIAA, MPAA) have favored “piracy” for its emotional weight.
collingreen · 3h ago
Emotional weight or because it's intentionally misleading.
admissionsguy · 3h ago
Does piracy have negative connotations? I thought everyone thought pirates were cool
accrual · 1h ago
Everyone but the person(s) affected by the pirates, I suppose.
achierius · 3h ago
Can you explain why? What makes them categorically different or at the very least why is "piracy" quantitatively worse than 'just' copyright violation?
arrosenberg · 3h ago
Piracy is theft - you have taken something and deprived the original owner of it.
Copyright infringement is unauthorized reproduction - you have made a copy of something, but you have not deprived the original owner of it. At most, you denied them revenue although generally less than the offended party claims, since not all instances of copying would have otherwise resulted in a sale.
ddingus · 1h ago
Yes, and the struggle with this back in the day was the *IAA and related organizations wanted to equate infringement with theft.
And to be clear, we javelin the word infringement precisely because it is not theft.
In addition to the deprived revenue, piracy also improves on the general relevance the author has or may have in the public sphere. Essentially, one of the side effects of piracy is basically advertising.
Doctorow was one of the early ones to bring this aspect of it up.
fuzzfactor · 2h ago
I have about the same concept of piracy these days.
Real piracy always involves booty.
Naturally booty is wealth that has been hoarded.
Has nothing to do with wealth that may or may not come in the future, regardless of whether any losses due to piracy have taken place already or not.
Asked unironically: "What's worse, hijacking ships at sea and holding their crews hostage for ransom on threat of death, or downloading a song off the internet?" ...
charcircuit · 3h ago
Saying that piracy isn't copyright violation is an RMS talking point. It's not worth trying to ask why because the answer will be RMS said so and will not be backed by the common usage of the word.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF · 1h ago
> RMS
Referring to this? (Wikipedia's disambiguation page doesn't seem to have a more likely article.)
Stallman places great importance on the words and labels people use to talk about the world, including the relationship between software and freedom. He asks people to say free software and GNU/Linux, and to avoid the terms intellectual property and piracy (in relation to copying not approved by the publisher). One of his criteria for giving an interview to a journalist is that the journalist agrees to use his terminology throughout the article.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF · 54m ago
That seems rather agreeable, though. Stallman is essentially saying that words are meaningful and speakers/writers should be thoughtful about the meaning of the words they use. In that context, refusing to use terms like "intellectual property" and "piracy" because of their meaning and the effect their use has on culture, and especially insisting that journalists who interview you use the same language, seems to be a means of controlling the interpreted meaning of one's expressions.
(As an aside, it seems pointless to decry it as a "talking point". The reason it was brought up is presumably because the author agrees with it and thinks it's relevant. It's also entirely possible that the author, like me, made this argument without being aware that it was popularized by Richard Stallman. If it makes sense then you can hear the argument without hearing the person and still find it agreeable.)
"Piracy" is used to refer to copyright violation to make it sound scary and dangerous to people who don't know better or otherwise don't think about it too hard. Just imagine if they called it "banditry" instead; now tell me that pirates are not bandits with boats. They may as well have called it banditry and it's worth correcting that. (I also think it's worth ridiculing but that doesn't appear to be Stallman's primary point.) It's not banditry (how ridiculous would it be to call it that?), it's copyright infringement.
Edit:
Reading my comment again in the context of other things you wrote, I suspect the argument will not pass muster because you do not seem to see piracy's change in meaning as manufactured by PR work purchased by media industry leaders. I'm not really trying to convince you that it's true but it may be worth considering that it is the fundamental disagreement you seem to have with others on Stallman's point; again, not saying you're wrong, just that's where the disagreement is.
charcircuit · 7m ago
My point is that the 2 commenters are working off of different definitions. One is using the common definitions of words in English and the other is trying to advocate for their ideological rooted definitions by trying to correct people who use the normal English definitions. 99% of the time how this will play out is the idealog will preach about their values instead of acknowledging that they are purposefully using different definitions.
In short the post is bait.
buzzerbetrayed · 3h ago
You legitimately have it completely backwards. The word "piracy" was coopted to put a more severe spin on copyright violation. As a result, it became "the common usage of the word". But that was by design. And it's worth pushing back on.
carlhjerpe · 2h ago
Sweden has a political party called "The Pirate Party"(1), and "The Pirate Bay" is Swedish so I think a couple of Swedes memeing before it was cool has a significant impact on making the name stick but also taking the seriousness out of it.
I don't have it backwards. Language evolved, and piracy got a new definition. It's even in the dictionary. Trying to redefine words like this is futile and avoiding certain words or replacing them with others is a quirk that RMS has.
marapuru · 8h ago
Apparently it's a common business practice. Spotify (even though I can't find any proof) seems to have build their software and business on pirated music. There is some more in this Article [0].
> Rumors that early versions of Spotify used ‘pirate’ MP3s have been floating around the Internet for years. People who had access to the service in the beginning later reported downloading tracks that contained ‘Scene’ labeling, tags, and formats, which are the tell-tale signs that content hadn’t been obtained officially.
techjamie · 6h ago
Crunchyroll was originally an anime piracy site that went legit and started actually licensing content later. They started in mid-2006, got VC funding in 2008, then made their first licensing deal in 2009.
Yep, they were huge too - virtually anyone who watched free anime back then would have known about them.
My theory is that once they saw how much traffic they were getting, they realized how big of a market (subbed/dubbed) anime was.
haiku2077 · 4h ago
Good Old Games started out with the founders selling pirated games on disc at local markets.
techjamie · 1h ago
Pirated games translated to Polish if possible, because game devs weren't catering to the market with translations, and Poland didn't respect foreign copyright.
Shank · 3h ago
And now Crunchyroll is owned by (through a lot of companies, like Aniplex of America, Aniplex, A1 Pictures) Sony, who produces a large amount of anime!
dathinab · 4h ago
not just Spotify pretty much any (most?) current tech giant was build by
- riding a wave of change
- not caring too much about legal constraints (or like they would say now "distrupting" the market, which very very often means doing illigal shit which beings them far more money then any penalties they will ever face from it)
- or caring about ethics too much
- and for recent years (starting with Amazone) a lot of technically illegal financing (technically undercutting competitors prices long term based on money from else where (e.g. investors) is unfair competitive advantage (theoretically) clearly not allowed by anti monopoly laws. And before you often still had other monopoly issues (e.g. see wintel)
So yes not systematic not complying with law to get unfair competitive advantage knowing that many of the laws are on the larger picture toothless when applied to huge companies is bread and butter work of US tech giants
benced · 3h ago
As you point out, they mostly did this before they were large companies (where the public choice questions are less problematic). Seems like the breaking of these laws was good for everybody.
FirmwareBurner · 58m ago
>Seems like the breaking of these laws was good for everybody.
Are all music creators better off now than before Spotify?
pjc50 · 7h ago
"recording obtained unofficially" and "doesn't have rights to the recording" are separate things. So they could well have got a license to stream a publisher's music but that didn't come with an actual copy of some/all of the music.
pembrook · 3h ago
It wasn’t just the content being pirated, but the early Spotify UI was actually a 1:1 copy of Limewire.
KoolKat23 · 7h ago
There's plenty of startups gone legitimate.
Society underestimates the chasm that exists between an idea and raising sufficient capital to act on those ideas.
Plenty of people have ideas.
We only really see those that successfully cross it.
Small things EULA breaches, consumer licenses being used commercially for example.
hinterlands · 4h ago
The problem is that these "small things" are not necessarily small if you're an individual.
If you're an individual pirating software or media, then from the rights owners' perspective, the most rational thing to do is to make an example of you. It doesn't happen everyday, but it does happen and it can destroy lives.
If you're a corporation doing the same, the calculation is different. If you're small but growing, future revenues are worth more than the money that can be extracted out of you right now, so you might get a legal nastygram with an offer of a reasonable payment to bring you into compliance. And if you're already big enough to be scary, litigation might be just too expensive to the other side even if you answer the letter with "lol, get lost".
Even in the worst case - if Anthropic loses and the company is fined or even shuttered (unlikely) - the people who participated in it are not going to be personally liable and they've in all likelihood already profited immensely.
KoolKat23 · 1h ago
I agree, that was the point I was trying to make. It seems small but until the business is up and running at sufficient scale, the costs can be insurmountable.
And the system set up by society doesn't truly account for this or care.
dathinab · 4h ago
but it's not some small things
but systematic wide spread big things and often many of them, giving US giant a unfair combative advantage
and don't think if you are a EU company you can do the same in the US, nop nop
but naturally the US insist that US companies can do that in the EU and complain every time a US company is fined for not complying for EU law
jowea · 2h ago
Uber
pyman · 7h ago
There's no credible evidence Spotify built their company and business on pirated music.
This is a narrative that gets passed around in certain circles to justify stealing content.
YPPH · 7h ago
"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.
seadan83 · 1h ago
Then it is not possible to 'steal' an idea? Afaik 'to steal'is simply to take without permission. If the thing is abstract, then you might not have deprived the original owner of that thing. If the thing is a physical object, then the implication is tou now have physical possession (in which case your definition seemingly holds)
edit/addendum: considering this a bit more - the extent to which the original party is deprived of the stolen thing is pertinent for awarding damages. For example, imagine a small entity stealing from a large one, like a small creator steals dungeon and dragons rules. That doesn't deprive Hasbro of DnD, but it is still theft (we're assuming a verbatim copy here lifted directly from DnD books)
The example that I was pondering were shows in russia that were almost literally "the sampsons." Did that stop the Simpson's from airing in the US, its primary market? No, but it was still theft, something was taken without permission.
No comments yet
bumby · 1h ago
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).
KoolKat23 · 7h ago
Best/most succinct explanation I've seen to date.
lmm · 5h ago
> There's no credible evidence Spotify built their company and business on pirated music.
That's a statement carefully crafted to be impossible to disprove. Of course they shipped pirated music (I've seen the files). Of course anyone paying attention knew. Nothing in the music industry was "clean" in those days. But, sure, no credible evidence because any evidence anyone shows you you'll decide is not credible. It's not in anyone's interests to say anything and none of it matters.
Barrin92 · 3h ago
>Society underestimates the chasm that exists between an idea and raising sufficient capital to act on those ideas.
The AI sector, famously known for its inability to raise funding. Anthropic has in the last four years raised 17 billion dollars
KoolKat23 · 59m ago
Only once chatgpt 3.5 was released...
Other industries do not have it this easy.
Workaccount2 · 4h ago
The common meme is that megacorps are shamelessly criminalistic organizations that get away with doing anything they can to maximize profits, while true in some regard, totally pales in comparison to the illegal things small businesses and start-ups do.
reaperducer · 3h ago
Apparently it's a common business practice.
It's not a common business practice. That's why it's considered newsworthy.
People on the internet have forgotten that the news doesn't report everyday, normal, common things, or it would be nothing but a listing of people mowing their lawns or applying for business loans. The reason something is in the news is because it is unusual or remarkable.
"I saw it online, so it must happen all the time" is a dopy lack of logic that infects society.
marapuru · 1h ago
You are right on that. I’ll edit my post to reflect that.
Edit:
Apologies, I can’t edit it anymore.
NoMoreNicksLeft · 3h ago
This isn't as meaningful as it sounds. Nintendo was apparently using scene roms for one of the official emulators on Wii (I think?). Spotify might have received legally-obtained mp3s from the record companies that were originally pulled from Napster or whatever, because the people who work for record companies are lazy hypocrites.
lysace · 3h ago
You are missing the point. Spotify had permission from the copyright holders and/or their national proxies to use those songs in a limited beta in Sweden. They didn't have access to clean audio data directly from the record companies, so in many cases they used pirated rips instead.
What you really should be asking is whether they infringed on the copyrights of the rippers. /s
motbus3 · 8h ago
They had a second company (which I don't remember the name) that allowed users to backup and share their music.
When they were exposed they dug that as deep as they could
pyman · 7h ago
No. There's no credible evidence Spotify had any secret second company that allowed users to back up and share music without authorisation
pyman · 8h ago
It was the opposite. Their mission was to combat music piracy by offering a better, legal alternative.
Daniel Ek said: "my mission is to make music accessible and legal to everyone, while ensuring artists and rights holders got paid"
Also, the Swedish government has zero tolerance for piracy.
eviks · 3h ago
Mission is just words, they can mean the opposite of deeds, but they can't be the opposite, they live in different realms.
pyman · 7h ago
I know this might come as a shock to those living in San Francisco, but things are different in other parts of the world, like Uruguay, Sweden and the rest of Europe. From what I’ve read, the European committee actually cares about enforcing the law.
pmdr · 4m ago
They've all done that, it should be obvious by now. Training on just freely available data only gets you so far.
codedokode · 2h ago
If AI companies are allowed to use pirated material to create their products, does it mean that everyone can use pirated software to create products? Where is the line?
Also please don't use word "learning", use "creating software using copyrighted materials".
Also let's think together how can we prevent AI companies from using our work using technical measures if the law doesn't work?
whycome · 1h ago
But the AI used the content to learn how to copy and recreate it. Is ‘re-creation’ a better concept for us?
People already use pirated software for product creation.
Hypothetical:
I know a guy who learned photoshop on a pirated copy of Photoshop. He went on to be a graphic designer. All his earnings are ‘proceeds from crime’
He never used the pirated software to produce content.
timeon · 31m ago
So can we officially download pirated content to learn stuff now?
southernplaces7 · 5m ago
Sure, and I feel zero moral qualms about me or anyone else doing it. The vast majority of the shit flows flows from the other direction towards individuals and consumers when it comes to content delivery companies and worse still, software companies. Let's address that before wringing our hands about individual acts of "piracy", even at scale.
I could, right now in just a few minutes, go download a perfectly functional pirated copy of nearly any Adobe program, nearly any Microsoft program and a whole range of books and movies, yet I see zero real financial troubles affecting any of the companies behind these. All the contrary in fact.
rvnx · 2h ago
~1B USD in cash is the line where laws apply very differently
redcobra762 · 2h ago
It's abusive and wrong to try and prevent AI companies from using your works at all.
The whole point of copyright is to ensure you're paid for your work. AI companies shouldn't pirate, but if they pay for your work, they should be able to use it however they please, including training an LLM on it.
If that LLM reproduces your work, then the AI company is violating copyright, but if the LLM doesn't reproduce your work, then you have not been harmed. Trying to claim harm when you haven't been due to some philosophical difference in opinion with the AI company is an abuse of the courts.
xdennis · 1h ago
> It's abusive and wrong to try and prevent AI companies from using your works at all.
People don't view moral issues in the abstract.
A better perspective on this is the fact that human individuals have created works which megacorps are training on for free or for the price of a single book and creating models which replace individuals.
The megacorps are only partially replacing individuals now, but when the models get good enough they could replace humans entirely.
When such a future happens will you still be siding with them or with individual creators?
whycome · 1h ago
> A better perspective on this is the fact that human individuals have created works which megacorps are training on for free or for the price of a single book and creating models which replace individuals.
Those damn kind readers and libraries. Giving their single copy away when they just paid for the single.
DrillShopper · 1h ago
> The whole point of copyright is to ensure you're paid for your work.
No. The point of copyright is that the author gets to decide under what terms their works are copied. That's the essence of copyright. In many cases, authors will happily sell you a copy of their work, but they're under no obligation to do so. They can claim a copyright and then never release their work to the general public. That's perfectly within their rights, and they can sue to stop anybody from distributing copies.
redcobra762 · 1h ago
We're operating under a model where the owner of the copyright has already sold their work. And while it's within their rights to stipulate conditions of the sale, they did not do that, and fair use of the work as governed under the laws the book was sold under encompasses its conversion into an LLM model.
If the author didn't want their work to be included in an LLM, they should not have sold it, just like if an author didn't want their work to inspire someone else's work, they should not have sold it.
seadan83 · 53m ago
Yeah, this is part of the ruling. The judge decided that the usage was sufficiently transformative and thus fair use. The issue is the authors were selling their works and the company went to a black market instead.
DrillShopper · 1h ago
> fair use of the work as governed under the laws the book was sold under encompasses its conversion into an LLM model
If that were the case then this court case would not be ongoing
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF · 36m ago
That seems to be a misunderstanding of what's disputed. One fact that is disputed is whether or not the use of the work qualifies as fair use and the judge determined that it is because the result is sufficiently transformative. Another disputed fact is whether the books were acquired legally and the judge determined that they were not. The reason the case is still ongoing is to determine Anthropic's liability for illegally acquiring copies of the books, not to determine the legal status of the LLMs.
827a · 1h ago
Current copyright law is not remotely sophisticated enough to make determinations on AI fair use. Whether the courts say current AI use is fair is irrelevant to the discussion most people on this side would agree with: That we need new laws. The work the AI companies stole to train on was created under a copyright regime where the expectation was that, eh, a few people would learn from and be inspired from your work, and that feels great because you're empowering other humans. Scale does not amplify Good. The regime has changed. The expectations under what kinds of use copyright protects against has fundamentally changed. The AI companies invented New Horrors that no one could have predicted, Vader altered the deal, no reasonable artist except the most forward-thinking sci-fi authors would have remotely guessed what their work would be used for, and thus could never have conciously and fairly agreed to this exchange. Very few would have agreed to it.
codedokode · 2h ago
It is not wrong at all. The author decides what to do with their work. AI companies are rich and can simply buy the rights or hire people to create works.
I could agree with exceptions for non-commercial activity like scientific research, but AI companies are made for extracting profits and not for doing research.
> AI companies shouldn't pirate, but if they pay for your work, they should be able to use it however they please, including training an LLM on it.
It doesn't work this way. If you buy a movie it doesn't mean you can sell goods with movie characters.
> then you have not been harmed.
I am harmed because less people will buy the book if they can simply get an answer from LLM. Less people will hire me to write code if an LLM trained on my code can do it. Maybe instead of books we should start making applications that protect the content and do not allow copying text or making screenshots. ANd instead of open-source code we should provide binary WASM modules.
CaptainFever · 37m ago
> Maybe instead of books we should start making applications that protect the content and do not allow copying text or making screenshots.
If you reproduce the material from a work you've purchased then of course you're in violation of copyright, but that's not what an LLM does (and when it does I already conceded it's in violation and should be stopped). An LLM that doesn't "sell goods with movie characters" is not in violation.
And the harm you describe is not a recognized harm. You don't own information, you own creative works in their entirety. If your work is simply a reference, then the fact being referenced isn't something you own, thus you are not harmed if that fact is shared elsewhere.
It is an abuse of the courts to attempt to prevent people who have purchased your works from using those works to train an LLM. It's morally wrong.
CaptainFever · 38m ago
> It is worse than ineffective; it is wrong too, because software developers should not exercise such power over what users do. Imagine selling pens with conditions about what you can write with them; that would be noisome, and we should not stand for it. Likewise for general software. If you make something that is generally useful, like a pen, people will use it to write all sorts of things, even horrible things such as orders to torture a dissident; but you must not have the power to control people's activities through their pens. It is the same for a text editor, compiler or kernel.
Sorry for the long quote, but basically this, yeah. A major point of free software is that creators should not have the power to impose arbitrary limits on the users of their works. It is unethical.
It's why the GPL allows the user to disregard any additional conditions, why it's viral, and why the FSF spends so much effort on fighting "open source but..." licenses.
codedokode · 1h ago
To load a printed book into a computer one has to reproduce it in digital form without authorization. That's making a copy.
redcobra762 · 1h ago
Making a digital copy of a physical book is fair use under every legal structure I am aware of.
When you do it for a transformative purpose (turning it into an LLM model) it's certainly fair use.
But more importantly, it's ethical to do so, as the agreement you've made with the person you've purchased the book from included permission to do exactly that.
seadan83 · 1h ago
Per the ruling, the problem is the books were not purchased, they were downloaded from black market websites. It's akin to shoplifting, what you do later with the goods is a different matter.
Reasonable minds could debate the ethics of how the material was used, this ruling judged the usage was legal and fair use. The only problem is the material was in effect stolen.
guywithahat · 2h ago
If you own a book, it should be legal for your computer to take a picture of it. I honestly feel bad for some of these AI companies because the rules around copyright are changing just to target them. I don't owe copyright to every book I read because I may subconsciously incorporate their ideas into my future work.
Bjorkbat · 2h ago
Something missed in arguments such as these is that in measuring fair use there's a consideration of impact on the potential market for a rightsholder's present and future works. In other words, can it be proven that what you are doing is meaningfully depriving the author of future income.
Now, in theory, you learning from an author's works and competing with them in the same market could meaningfully deprive them of income, but it's a very difficult argument to prove.
On the other hand, with AI companies it's an easier argument to make. If Anthropic trained on all of your books (which is somewhat likely if you're a fairly popular author) and you saw a substantial loss of income after the release of one of their better models (presumably because people are just using the LLM to write their own stories rather than buy your stuff), then it's a little bit easier to connect the dots. A company used your works to build a machine that competes with you, which arguably violates the fair use principle.
Gets to the very principle of copyright, which is that you shouldn't have to compete against "yourself" because someone copied you.
parliament32 · 2h ago
> a consideration of impact on the potential market for a rightsholder's present and future works
This is one of those mental gymnastics exercises that makes copyright law so obtuse and effectively unenforceable.
As an alternative, imagine a scriptwriter buys a textbook on orbital mechanics, while writing Gravity (2013). A large number of people watch the finished film, and learn something about orbital mechanics, therefore not needing the textbook anymore, causing a loss of revenue for the textbook author. Should the author be entitled to a percentage of Gravity's profit?
We'd be better off abolishing everything related to copyright and IP law alltogether. These laws might've made sense back in the days of the printing press but they're just nonsensical nowadays.
Bjorkbat · 1h ago
Personally I think a more effective analogy would be if someone used a textbook and created an online course / curriculum effective enough that colleges stop recommending the purchase of said textbook. It's honestly pretty difficult to imagine a movie having a meaningful impact on the sale of textbooks since they're required for high school / college courses.
So here's the thing, I don't think a textbook author going against a purveyor of online courseware has much of a chance, nor do I think it should have much of a chance, because it probably lacks meaningful proof that their works made a contribution to the creation of the courseware. Would I feel differently if the textbook author could prove in court that a substantial amount of their material contributed to the creation of the courseware, and when I say "prove" I mean they had receipts to prove it? I think that's where things get murky. If you can actually prove that your works made a meaningful contribution to the thing that you're competing against, then maybe you have a point. The tricky part is defining meaningful. An individual author doesn't make a meaningful contribution to the training of an LLM, but a large number of popular and/or prolific numbers can.
You bring up a good point, interpretation of fair use is difficult, but at the end of the day I really don't think we should abolish copyright and IP altogether. I think it's a good thing that creative professionals have some security in knowing that they have legal protections against having to "compete against themselves"
raincole · 2h ago
Are we reading the same article? The article explicitly states that it's okay to cut up and scan the books you own to train a model from them.
> I honestly feel bad for some of these AI companies because the rules around copyright are changing just to target them
The ruling would be a huge win for AI companies if held. It's really weird that you reached the opposite conclusion.
atomicnumber3 · 2h ago
The core problem here is that copyright already doesn't actually follow any consistent logical reasoning. "Information wants to be free" and so on. So our own evaluation of whether anything is fair use or copyrighted or infringement thereof is always going to be exclusively dictated by whatever a judge's personal take on the pile of logical contradictions is. Remember, nominally, the sole purpose of copyright is not rooted in any notions of fairness or profitability or anything. It's specifically to incentivize innovation.
So what is the right interpretation of the law with regards to how AI is using it? What better incentivizes innovation? Do we let AI companies scan everything because AI is innovative? Or do we think letting AI vacuum up creative works to then stochastically regurgitate tiny (or not so tiny) slices of them at a time will hurt innovation elsewhere?
But obviously the real answer here is money. Copyright is powerful because monied interests want it to be. Now that copyright stands in the way of monied interests for perhaps the first time, we will see how dedicated we actually were to whatever justifications we've been seeing for DRM and copyright for the last several decades.
rapind · 2h ago
Everything is different at scale. I'm not giving a specific opinion on copyright here, but it just doesn't make sense when we try to apply individual rights and rules to systems of massive scale.
I really think we need to understand this as a society and also realize that moneyed interests will downplay this as much as possible. A lot of the problems we're having today are due to insufficient regulation differentiating between individuals and systems at scale.
organsnyder · 2h ago
The difference here is that an LLM is a mechanical process. It may not be deterministic (at least, in a way that my brain understands determinism), but it's still a machine.
What you're proposing is considering LLMs to be equal to humans when considering how original works are created. You could make the argument that LLM training data is no different from a human "training" themself over a lifetime of consuming content, but that's a philosophical argument that is at odds with our current legal understanding of copyright law.
kevinpet · 2h ago
That's not a philosophical argument at odds with our current understanding of copyright law. That's exactly what this judge found copyright law currently is and it's quoted in the article being discussed.
organsnyder · 1h ago
Thanks for pointing that out. Obviously I hadn't read the whole article. That is an interesting determination the judge made:
> Alsup ruled that Anthropic's use of copyrighted books to train its AI models was "exceedingly transformative" and qualified as fair use, a legal doctrine that allows certain uses of copyrighted works without the copyright owner's permission.
JoeAltmaier · 1h ago
There are still questions: is an AI a 'user' in the copyright sense?
Or even, is an individual operating within the law as fair use, the same as a voracious all-consuming AI training bot consuming everything the same in spirit?
Consider a single person in a National Park, allowed to pick and eat berries, compared to bringing a combine harvester to take it all.
zerotolerance · 2h ago
"Judge says training Claude on books was fair use, but piracy wasn't."
pyman · 9h ago
These are the people shaping the future of AI? What happened to all the ethical values they love to preach about?
We've held China accountable for counterfeiting products for decades and regulated their exports. So why should Anthropic be allowed to export their products and services after engaging in the same illegal activity?
ffsm8 · 4h ago
> We've held China accountable for counterfeiting products for decades and regulated their exports
We have? Are we from different multi-verses?
The one I've lived in to date has not done anything against Chinese counterfeits beyond occasionally seizing counterfeit goods during import. But that's merely occasionally enforcing local counterfeit law, a far cry from punishing the entity producing it.
As a matter of fact, the companies started outsourcing everything to China, making further IP theft and quasi-copies even easier
Workaccount2 · 4h ago
I was gonna say, the enforcement is so weak that it's not even really worth it to pursue consumer hardware here in the US. Make product that is a hit, patent it, and still 1 month later IYTUOP will be selling an identical copy for 1/3rd the price on Amazon.
delfinom · 4h ago
Patent enforcement requires the patent holder to go after violators. The said thing is, there are grounds to sue Amazon facilitating it, just nobody has had the money to do it. And no big company ever will because of the threat of being locked out of AWS.
It's quite the mafia operation over at Amazon.
wmf · 3h ago
The unethical ones didn't buy any books.
benjiro · 5h ago
One rule for you, one rule for me ...
You never noticed the hypocrite behavior all over society?
* O, you drunk drive, big fine, lots of trouble.
* O, you drunk drive and are a senator, cop, mayor, ... Well, lets look the other way.
* You have anger management issues and slam somebody to the ground. Jail time.
* You as a cop have anger management issues and slams somebody to the ground. Well, paid time off while we investigate and maybe a reprimand. Qualified immunity boy!
* You tax fraud for 10k, felony record, maybe jail time.
* You as a exec of a company do tax fraud for 100 million. After 10 years lawyering around, maybe you get something, maybe, ... o, here is a fine of 5 million.
I am sorry but the idea of everybody being equal under the law has always been a illusion.
We are holding China accountable for counterfeiting products because it hurts OUR companies, and their income. But when its "us vs us", well, then it becomes a bit more messy and in general, those with the biggest backing (as in $$$, economic value, and lawyers), tends to win.
Wait, if somebody steal my book, i can sue that person in court, and get a payout (lawyers will cost me more but that is not the point). If some AI company steals my book, well, the chance you win is close to 1%, simply because lots of well paid lawyers will make your winning hard to impossible.
Our society has always been based upon power, wealth and influence. The more you have of it, the more you get away (or reduced) with things, that gets other fined or jailed.
seydor · 5h ago
break things and move fast
carlosjobim · 3h ago
Why is it unethical of them to use the information in all these books? They are clearly not reselling the books in any way, shape, or form. The information itself in a book can never be copyrighted. You can also publish and sell material where you quote other books within it.
lofaszvanitt · 7h ago
This is the underlying caste system coming to life right before your eyes :D.
stephenitis · 7h ago
I think caste system is the wrong analogy here.
Comment is more about the pseudo ethical high ground
MangoToupe · 4h ago
Companies being above the law does create a stratified system in this country for those who can benefit from said companies and those who cannot. Call it what you like.
bmitc · 3h ago
Silicon Valley has always been the antithesis of ethics. It's foundations are much more right wing and libertarian, along the extremist lines.
pyman · 10h ago
Anthropic's cofounder, Ben Mann, downloaded million copies of books from Library Genesis in 2021, fully aware that the material was pirated.
Stealing is stealing. Let's stop with the double standards.
kube-system · 58m ago
> Stealing is stealing. Let's stop with the double standards.
I get the sentiment, but that statement as is, is absurdly reductive. Details matter. Even if someone takes merchandise from a store without paying, their sentence will vary depending on the details.
originalvichy · 9h ago
At least most pirates just consume for personal use. Profiting from piracy is a whole other level beyond just pirating a book.
pyman · 9h ago
Someone on Twitter said: "Oh well, P2P mp3 downloads, although illegal, made contributions to the music industry"
That's not what's happening here. People weren't downloading music illegally and reselling it on Claude.ai. And while P2P networks led to some great tech, there's no solid proof they actually improved the music industry.
Imustaskforhelp · 7h ago
I really feel as if Youtube is the best sort of convenience for music videos where most people watch ads whereas some people can use an ad blocker.
I use an adblocker and tbh I think so many people on HN are okay with ad blocking and not piracy when basically both just block the end user from earning money.
I kind of believe that if you really like a software, you really like something. Just ask them what their favourite charity is and donate their or join their patreon/a direct way to support them.
timeon · 25m ago
I think that critique of this case is not about piracy in itself but how these companies are treated by courts vs. how individuals are treated.
Workaccount2 · 4h ago
If you are someone who can think clearly, it's extremely obvious that the conversation around copyright, LLMs, piracy, and ad-blocking is
"What serves me personally the best for any given situation" for 95% of people.
I feel like profit was always a central motive of pirates. At least from the historical documents known as, "The Pirates of the Caribbean".
KoolKat23 · 8h ago
This isn't really profiting from piracy. They don't make money off the raw input data. It's no different to consuming for personal use.
They make money off the model weights, which is fair use (as confirmed by recent case law).
j_w · 7h ago
This is absurd. Remove all of the content from the training data that was pirated and what is the quality of the end product now?
KoolKat23 · 7h ago
That's the law.
Please keep in mind, copyright is intended as a compromise between benefit to society and to the individual.
A thought experiment, students pirating textbooks and applying that knowledge later on in their work?
j_w · 7h ago
When you say that's the law, as far as I'm aware a single ruling by a lower court has been issued which upholds that application. Hardly settled case law.
KoolKat23 · 6h ago
True, until then best to act as if it is the case.
In my opinion, it will be upheld.
Looking at what is stored and the manner which it is stored. It makes sense that it's fair use.
j_w · 1h ago
We're talking about a summary judgement issued that has not yet been appealed. That doesn't make it "settled."
If by "what is stored and the manner which it is stored" is intended to signal model weights, I'm not sure what the argument is? The four factors of copyright in no way mention a storage medium for data, lossless or loss-y.
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
In my opinion, this will likely see a supreme court ruling by the end of the decade.
KoolKat23 · 41m ago
The use is to train an AI model.
A trillion parameter SOTA model is not substantially comprised of the one copyrighted piece. (If it was a Harry Potter model trained only on Harry Potter books this would be a different story).
Embeddings are not copy paste.
The last point about market impact would be where they make their argument but it's tenuous. It's not the primary use of AI models and built in prompts try to avoid this, so it shouldn't be commonplace unless you're jail breaking the model, most folk aren't.
pyman · 7h ago
With Claude, people are paying Anthropic to access answers that are generated from pirated books, without the authors permission, credit, or compensation.
KoolKat23 · 7h ago
There is no copyright on knowledge.
If it outputs parts of the book verbatim then that's a different story.
pyman · 6h ago
Let's don't change the focus of the debate.
Pirating 7 million books, remixing their content, and using that to power Claude.ai is like counterfeiting 7 million branded products and selling them on your personal website. The original creators don't get credit or payment, and someone’s profiting off their work.
All this happens while authors, many of them teachers, are left scratching their heads with four kids to feed
KoolKat23 · 6h ago
That may be the case, but you'd have to have laws changed.
SirMaster · 2h ago
>If it outputs parts of the book verbatim then that's a different story.
But it does...
mrcwinn · 4h ago
> At least most pirates just consume for personal use.
Easy for the pirate to say. Artists might argue their intent was to trade compensation for one's personal enjoyment of the work.
Workaccount2 · 4h ago
The gut punch of being a photographer selling your work on display, someone walks by and lines up their phone to take a perfect picture of your photograph, and then exclaims to you "Your work is beautiful! I can't wait to print this out and put it on my wall!"
jobs_throwaway · 4h ago
All the evidence shows that piracy is good for artists' business. You make a good work, people are exposed to it through piracy, and they end up buying more of your stuff than they would otherwise. But keep crying about the artist's plight
SketchySeaBeast · 3h ago
The way you've presented this, the evidence is just "common sense", which isn't much evidence at all.
dathinab · 4h ago
stealing with the intent to gain a unfair marked advantage so that you can effectively kill any ethically legally correctly acting company in a way which is very likely going to hurt many authors through the products you create is far worse then just stealing for personal use
that isn't "just" stealing, it's organized crime
1970-01-01 · 3h ago
Let's get actual definitions of 'theft' before we leap into double standards.
NoMoreNicksLeft · 2h ago
>Stealing is stealing.
Yes, but copying isn't stealing, because the person you "take" from still has their copy.
If you're allowed to call copying stealing, then I should be allowed to call hysterical copyright rabblerousing rape. Quit being a rapist, pyman.
x3n0ph3n3 · 8h ago
Copyright infringement is not stealing.
pyman · 8h ago
Pirating a book and selling it on claude.ai is stealing, both legally and morally.
BlackFly · 7h ago
Making a copy differs from taking an existing object in all aspects: literally, technically, legally and ethically. Piracy is making a copy you have no legal right to. Stealing is taking a physical object that you have no legal right to. While the "no legal right to" seems the same superficially, in practice the laws differ quite a bit because the literal, technical and ethical aspects differ.
thedevilslawyer · 2h ago
Where can I download Harry Potter on claude.ai pls?
slater · 2h ago
Why would you want to download a shitty book?
TiredOfLife · 7h ago
They are not selling it on claude.ai. If you can prove that they are you will be rich.
zb3 · 8h ago
Who got robbed? Just because I'd pay for AI it doesn't mean I'd buy these books.
pyman · 7h ago
You should ask the teachers who spent years writing those books.
azangru · 3h ago
You keep saying the word "teachers"; but that word does not appear in the text of the article. Why focus on the teachers in particular?
Also, there are various incentives for teachers to publish books. Money is just one of them (I wonder how much revenue books bring to the teachers). Prestige and academic recognition is another. There are probably others still. How realistic is the depiction of a deprived teacher whose livelihood depended on the books he published once every several years?
zb3 · 2h ago
I did not ask them to write those books, and I wouldn't buy those.
impossiblefork · 5h ago
It's very similar to theft of service.
There's so many texts, and they're so sparse that if I could copyright a work and never publish it, the restriction would be irrelevant. The probability that you would accidentally come upon something close enough that copyright was relevant is almost infinitesimal.
Because of this copyright is an incredibly weak restriction, and that it is as weak as it is shows clearly that any use of a copyrighted work is due to the convenience that it is available.
That is, it's about making use of the work somebody else has done, not about that restricting you somehow.
Therefore copyright is much more legitimate than ordinary property. Ordinary property, especially ownership of land, can actually limit other people. But since copyright is so sparse infringing on it is like going to world with near-infinite space and picking the precise place where somebody has planted a field and deciding to harvest from that particular field.
Consequently I think copyright infringement might actually be worse than stealing.
CaptainFever · 1h ago
> Consequently I think copyright infringement might actually be worse than stealing.
I remember when piracy wasn't theft, and information wanted to be free.
jpalawaga · 3h ago
you've created a very obvious category mistake in your final summary by confusing intellectual property--which can be copied at no penalty to an owner (except nebulous 'alternate universe' theories)--with actual property, and a farmer and his land, with a crop that cannot be enjoyed twice.
you're saying copying a book is worse than robbing a farmer of his food and/or livelihood, which cannot be replaced to duplicated. Meanwhile, someone who copies a book does not deprive the author of selling the book again (or a tasty proceedings from harvest).
I can't say I agree, for obvious reasons.
impossiblefork · 2h ago
With this special infinite-land-land though, what's special about the farmer's land is that he's expended energy to make it that way, just as the author has expended energy to find his text.
Just as the farmer obtains his livelihood from the investment-of-energy-to-raise-crops-to-energy cycle the author has his livelihood by the investment-of-energy-to-finding-a-useful-work-to-energy cycle.
So he is in fact robbed in a very similar way.
seydor · 5h ago
property infringement isn't either?
eviks · 3h ago
If you infringe by destroying property, then yes, it's not stealing
1oooqooq · 8h ago
actually, the Only time it's a (ethical) crime is when a corporation does it at scale for profit.
damnesian · 9h ago
oh well, the product has a cute name and will make someone a billionaire, let's just give it the green light. who cares about copyright in the age of AI?
Der_Einzige · 4h ago
Information wants to be free.
troyvit · 3h ago
Then why does Claude cost money?
ramon156 · 8h ago
Pirate and pay the fine is probably hell of a lot cheaper than individually buying all these books. I'm not saying this is justified, but what would you have done in their situation?
Sayi "they have the money" is not an argument. It's about the amount of effort that is needed to individually buy, scan, process millions of pages. If that's done for you, why re-do it all?
pyman · 8h ago
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 not in California).
js8 · 1h ago
> 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 he got a bad deal (or the book was bad), but I don't think hundreds of thousands of authors do significantly better. The reality is, people overwhelmingly write because they want to, not because of money.
NoMoreNicksLeft · 2h ago
Stealing? In what way?
Training a generative model on a book is the mechanical equivalent of having a human read the book and learn from it. Is it stealing if a person reads the book and learns from it?
blocko · 59m ago
Depends on how closely that person can reproduce the original work without license or attribution
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF · 33m ago
It actually depends on whether or not they reproduce it and especially what they do with the copy after making it.
lofaszvanitt · 7h ago
They won't be needed anymore, once singularity is reached. This might be their thought process. This also exemplifies that the loathed caste system found in India is indeed in place in western societies.
There is no equality, and seemingly there are worker bees who can be exploited, and there are privileged ones, and of course there are the queens.
SketchySeaBeast · 4h ago
> They won't be needed anymore, once singularity is reached.
And it just so happens that that belief says they can burn whatever they want down because something in the future might happen that absolves them of those crimes.
pyman · 7h ago
:D
Note: My definition of singularity isn't the one they use in San Francisco. It's the moment founders who stole the life's work of thousands of teachers finally go to prison, and their datacentres get seized.
lofaszvanitt · 7h ago
You can bet that this never gonna happen...
covercash · 4h ago
When the rich and powerful face zero consequences for breaking laws and ignoring the social contracts that keep our society functioning, you wind up with extreme overcorrections. See Luigi.
achierius · 3h ago
How extreme is that, really? Not to justify murder: that is clearly bad. But "killing one man" is evidently something we, as a society, consider an "acceptable side-effect" when a corporation does it -- hell, you can kill thousands and get away scot-free if you're big enough.
Luigi was peanuts in comparison.
“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”
- Mark Twain
glimshe · 7h ago
That will be sad, although there will still be plenty of great people who will write books anyway.
When it comes to a lot of these teachers, I'll say, copyright work hand in hand with college and school course book mandates. I've seen plenty of teachers making crazy money off students' backs due to these mandates.
A lot of the content taught in undergrad and school hasn't changed in decades or even centuries. I think we have all the books we'll ever need in certain subjects already, but copyright keeps enriching people who write new versions of these.
CuriouslyC · 7h ago
If you care so little about writing that AI puts you off it, TBH you're probably not a great writer anyhow.
Writers that have an authentic human voice and help people think about things in a new way will be fine for a while yet.
4b11b4 · 6h ago
Yeah, people will still want to write. They might need new ways to monetize it... that being said, even if people still want to write they may not consider it a viable path. Again, have to consider other monetization.
TimorousBestie · 8h ago
150K per work is the maximum fine for willful infringement (which this is).
105B+ is more than Anthropic is worth on paper.
Of course they’re not going to be charged to the fullest extent of the law, they’re not a teenager running Napster in the early 2000s.
dragonwriter · 57m ago
> 150K per work is the maximum fine for willful infringement
No, its not.
It's the maximum statutory damages for willful infringement, which this has not be adjudicated to be. it is not a fine, its an alternative to basis of recovery to actual damages + infringers profits attributable to the infringement.
Of course, there's also a very wide range of statutory damages, the minimum (if it is not "innocent" infringement) is $750/work.
> 105B+ is more than Anthropic is worth on paper.
The actual amount of 7 million works times $150,000/work is $1.05 trillion, not $105 billion.
TimorousBestie · 40m ago
> It's the maximum statutory damages for willful infringement, which this has not be adjudicated to be. it is not a fine, its an alternative to basis of recovery to actual damages + infringers profits attributable to the infringement.
Yeah, you’re probably right, I’m not a lawyer. The point is that it doesn’t matter what number the law says they should pay, Anthropic can afford real lawyers and will therefore only pay a pittance, if anything.
I’m old enough to remember what the feds did to Aaron Schwarz, and I don’t see what Anthropic did that was so different, ethically speaking.
voxic11 · 5h ago
Even if they don't qualify for willful infringement damages (lets say they have a good faith belief their infringement was covered by fair use) the standard statutory damages for copyright infringement are $750-$30,000 per work.
eikenberry · 1h ago
Plus they did it with a profit motive which would entail criminal proceedings.
glimshe · 8h ago
Isn't "pirating" a felony with jail time, though? That's what I remember from the FBI warning I had to see at the beginning of every DVD I bought (but not "pirated" ones).
voxic11 · 5h ago
Yes criminal copyright infringement (willful copyright infringement done for commercial gain or at a large scale) is a felony.
suyjuris · 7h ago
Just downloading them is of course cheaper, but it is worth pointing out that, as the article states, they did also buy legitimate copies of millions of books. (This includes all the books involved in the lawsuit.) Based on the judgement itself, Anthropic appears to train only on the books legitimately acquired. Used books are quite cheap, after all, and can be bought in bulk.
asadotzler · 3h ago
Buying a book is not license to re-sell that content for your own profit. I can't buy a copy of your book, make a million Xeroxes of it and sell those. The license you get when you buy a book is for a single use, not a license to do what ever you want with the contents of that book.
suyjuris · 2h ago
Yes, of course! In this case, the judge identified three separate instances of copying: (1) downloading books without authorisation to add to their internal library, (2) scanning legitimately purchased books to add to their internal library, and (3) taking data from their internal library for the purposes of training LLMs. The purchasing part is only relevant for (2) — there the judge ruled that this is fair use. This makes a lot of sense to me, since no additional copies were created (they destroyed the physical books after scanning), so this is just a single use, as you say. The judge also ruled that (3) is fair use, but for a different reason. (They declined to decide whether (1) is fair use at this point, deferring to a later trial.)
thedevilslawyer · 2h ago
What are you on about - the judge has literally said this was not resell, and is transformative and fair use.
darkoob12 · 6h ago
This is not about paying for a single copy. It would still be wrong even if they have bought every single one of those books.
It is a form of plagiarism. The model will use someone else's idea without proper attribution.
jeroenhd · 4h ago
Legally speaking, we don't know that yet. Early signs are pointing at judges allowing this kind of crap because it's almost impossible for most authors to point out what part of the generated slop was originally theirs.
maeln · 7h ago
If you wanted to be legit with 0 chance of going to court, you would contact publisher and ask to pay a license to get access to their catalog for training, and negotiate from that point.
This is what every company using media are doing (think Spotify, Netflix, but also journal, ad agency, ...). I don't know why people in HN are giving a pass to AI company for this kind of behavior.
CaptainFever · 28m ago
> I don't know why people in HN are giving a pass to AI company for this kind of behavior.
As mentioned in The Fucking Article, there's a legal difference between training an AI which largely doesn't repeat things verbatim (ala Anthropic) and redistributing media as a whole (ala Spotify, Netflix, journal, ad agency).
ohashi · 4h ago
Because they are mostly software developers who think it's different because it impacts them.
blibble · 2h ago
> Pirate and pay the fine is probably hell of a lot cheaper than individually buying all these books.
$500,000 per infringement...
jandrese · 1h ago
And the crazy thing is that might be cheaper when you consider the alternative is to have your lawyers negotiate with the lawyers for the publishing companies for the right to use the works as training data. Not only is it many many billable hours just to draw up the contract, but you can be sure that many companies would either not play ball or set extremely high rates. Finally, if the publishing companies did bring a suit against Anthropic they might be asked to prove each case of infringement, basically to show that a specific work was used in training, which might be difficult since you can't reverse a model to get the inputs. When you're a billion dollar company it's much easier to get the courts to take your side. This isn't like the music companies suing teenagers who had a Kazaa account.
tmaly · 5h ago
At minimum they should have to buy the book they are deriving weights from.
SirMaster · 2h ago
But should the purchase be like a personal license? Or like a commercia license that costs way more?
Because for example if you buy a movie on disc, that's a personal license and you can watch it yourself at home. But you can't like play it at a large public venue that sell tickets to watch it. You need a different and more expensive license to make money off the usage of the content in a larger capacity like that.
kevingadd · 8h ago
Google did it the legal way with Google Books, didn't they?
No comments yet
bmitc · 3h ago
> I'm not saying this is justified, but what would you have done in their situation?
Individuals would have their lives ruined either from massive fines or jail time.
hellohihello135 · 2h ago
It’s easy to point fingers at others. Meanwhile the top comment in this thread links to stolen content from Business Insider.
fakeBeerDrinker · 48m ago
How is it stolen from Business Insider? When I visit businessinsider.com/anthropic-cut-pirated-millions-used-books-train-claude-copyright-2025-6 I get the same story. My browser caches the story, and I save it for archival purposes. How is this theft?
codedokode · 1h ago
By the way I wonder if recent advancement in protecting Youtube videos from downloaders like yt-d*p are caused by unwillingness to help rival AI companies gather the datasets.
1970-01-01 · 3h ago
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.
nickpsecurity · 1h ago
I'm hoping they fail to incentivize using legal, open, and/or licensed data. Then, thry might have to attempt to train a Claude-class model on legal data. Then, I'll have a great, legal model to use. :)
koolala · 2h ago
Anyone read the 2006 sci-fi book Rainbow's End that has this? It was set in 2025.
solfox · 2h ago
I was 100% thinking this. GREAT book. And they, too, shredded books to ingest them into the digital library! I don't recall if it was an attempt to bypass copyright though; in Rainbow's End, it was more technical, as it was easier to shred, scan the pieces, and reassemble them in software, rather than scanning each page.
jimnotgym · 1h ago
Hang on, it is OK under copyright law to scan a book I bought second hand, destroy the hard copy and keep the scan in my online library? That doesn't seem to chime with the copyright notices I have read in books.
kube-system · 1h ago
Fair use can be a pretty gray area and details matter, but copying for personal use is frequently okay.
> That doesn't seem to chime with the copyright notices I have read in books.
You shouldn't get your legal advice from someone with skin in the game.
badlibrarian · 1h ago
First sale doctrine gives the person who sold the book you bought the right to sell it to you. Fair Use permits you to scan your copy, used or new. It's your book, you can destroy it. But you have to delete your digital copy if you sell it or give it away. And you can't distribute your digital copy.
platunit10 · 1h ago
Every time an article like this surfaces, it always seems like the majority of tech folks believe that training AI on copyrighted material is NOT fair use, but the legal industry disagrees.
Which of the following are true?
(a) the legal industry is susceptible to influence and corruption
(b) engineers don't understand how to legally interpret legal text
(c) AI tech is new, and judges aren't technically qualified to decide these scenarios
Most likely option is C, as we've seen this pattern many times before.
standardUser · 11m ago
I don't understand at all the resistance to training LLMs on any and all materials available. Then again, I've always viewed piracy as a compatible with markets and a democratizing force upon them. I thought (wrongly?) that this was the widespread progressive/leftist perspective, to err on the side of access to information.
OkayPhysicist · 1h ago
There's a lot of conflation of "should/shouldn't" and "is/isn't". The comments by tech folk you're alluding to mostly think that it "shouldn't" be fair use, out of concern about the societal consequences, whereas judges are looking at it and saying that it "is" fair use, based on the existing law.
Any reasonable reading of the current state of fair use doctrine makes it obvious that the process between Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and "A computer program that outputs responses to user prompts about a variety of topics" is wildly transformative, and thus the usage of the copyrighted material is probably covered by fair use.
CaptainFever · 1h ago
> Every time an article like this surfaces, it always seems like the majority of tech folks believe that training AI on copyrighted material is NOT fair use
Where are you getting your data from? My conclusions are the exact opposite.
(Also, aren't judges by definition the only ones qualified to declare if it is actually fair use? You could make a case that it shouldn't be fair use, but that's different from it being not fair use.)
rockemsockem · 1h ago
Idk, I think most people in tech I talk to IRL think it is fair use?
I think the overly liberal, non-tech crowd has become really vocal on HN as of late and your sample is likely biased by these people.
kube-system · 52m ago
I know for sure (b) is true. Way too many people on technical forums read legal texts as if the process to interpret laws is akin to a compiler generating a binary.
redcobra762 · 1h ago
It's not likely you've actually gotten the opinion of the "majority of tech folks", just the most outspoken ones, and only in specific bubbles you belong to.
827a · 1h ago
Armchair commentators, including myself, tend to be imprecise when speaking about whether something is illegal, versus something should be illegal. Sometimes due to a misunderstanding of the law, or an over-estimation of the court's authority, or an over-estimation of our legislature's productivity, or just because we're making conversation and like talking.
trinsic2 · 4h ago
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 a for-profit model is clearly going against what copyright stands for.
skybrian · 3h ago
Copyright is largely about distributing copies. It’s not about making something vaguely similar or about referencing copyrighted work to make something vaguely similar.
Although, there’s an exception for fictional characters:
> to make a profit off of the information that is included in these works?
Isn't that what a lot of companies are doing, just through employees? I read a lot of books, and took a lot of courses, and now a company is profiting off that information.
wrs · 3h ago
Copyright is not on “information”, It’s on the tangible expression (i.e., the actual words). “Transformative use” is a defense in copyright infringement.
jimbob21 · 3h ago
They clearly were being digitized, but I think its a more philosophical discussion that we're only banging our heads against for the first time to say whether or not it is fair use.
Simply, if the models can think then it is no different than a person reading many books and building something new from their learnings. Digitization is just memory. If the models cannot think then it is meaningless digital regurgitation and plagiarism, not to mention breach of copyright.
The quotes "consistent with copyright's purpose in enabling creativity and fostering scientific progress." and "Like any reader aspiring to be a writer" say, from what I can tell, that the judge has legally ruled the model can think as a human does, and therefore has the legal protections afforded to "creatives."
palmotea · 3h ago
> Simply, if the models can think then it is no different than a person reading many books and building something new from their learnings.
No, that's fallacious. Using anthropomorphic words to describe a machine does not give it the same kinds of rights and affordances we give real people.
pavon · 2h ago
The judge did use some language that analogized the training with human learning. I don't read it as basing the legal judgement on anthropomorphizing the LLM though, but rather discussing whether it would be legal for a human to do the same thing, then it is legal for a human to use a computer to do so.
First, Authors argue that using works to train Claude’s underlying LLMs was like using
works to train any person to read and write, so Authors should be able to exclude Anthropic
from this use (Opp. 16). But Authors cannot rightly exclude anyone from using their works for
training or learning as such. Everyone reads texts, too, then writes new texts. They may need
to pay for getting their hands on a text in the first instance. But to make anyone pay
specifically for the use of a book each time they read it, each time they recall it from memory,
each time they later draw upon it when writing new things in new ways would be unthinkable.
For centuries, we have read and re-read books. We have admired, memorized, and internalized
their sweeping themes, their substantive points, and their stylistic solutions to recurring writing
problems.
...
In short, the purpose and character of using copyrighted works to train LLMs to generate
new text was quintessentially transformative. Like any reader aspiring to be a writer,
Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but
to turn a hard corner and create something different. If this training process reasonably
required making copies within the LLM or otherwise, those copies were engaged in a
transformative use.
Actually, it does, at least for this case. The judge just said so.
NoOn3 · 2h ago
People have rights, machines don't. Otherwise, maybe give machines the right to vote, for example?...
kube-system · 47m ago
This case is more like:
If a human uses a voting machine, they still have a right to vote.
Machines don't have rights. The human using the machine does.
pavon · 2h ago
There is another case where companies slurped up all of the internet and profited off the information, that makes a good comparison - search engines.
Judges consider a four factor when examining fair use[1]. For search engines,
1) The use is transformative, as a tool to find content is very different purpose than the content itself.
2) Nature of the original work runs the full gamut, so search engines don't get points for only consuming factual data, but it was all publicly viewable by anyone as opposed to books which require payment.
3) The search engine store significant portions of the work in the index, but it only redistributes small portions.
4) Search engines, as original devised, don't compete with the original, in fact they can improve potential market of the original by helping more people find them. This has changed over time though, and search engines are increasingly competing with the content they index, and intentionally trying to show the information that people want on the search page itself.
So traditional search which was transformative, only republished small amounts of the originals, and didn't compete with the originals fell firmly on the side of fair use.
Google News and Books on the other hand weren't so clear cut, as they were showing larger portions of the works and were competing with the originals. They had to make changes to those products as a result of lawsuits.
So now lets look at LLMs:
1) LLM are absolutely transformative. Generating new text at users request is a very different purpose and character from the original works.
2) Again runs the full gamut (setting aside the clear copyright infringement downloading of illegally distributed books which is a separate issue)
3) For training purposes, LLMs don't typically preserve entire works, so the model is in a better place legally than a search index, which has precedent that storing entire works privately can be fair use depending on the other factors. For inference, even though they are less likely to reproduce the originals in their outputs than search engines, there are failure cases where an LLM over-trained on a work, and a significant amount the original can be reproduced.
4) LLMs have tons of uses some of which complement the original works and some of which compete directly with them. Because of this, it is likely that whether LLMs are fair use will depend on how they are being used - eg ignore the LLM altogether and consider solely the output and whether it would be infringing if a human created it.
This case was solely about whether training on books is fair use, and did not consider any uses of the LLM. Because LLMs are a very transformative use, and because they don't store original verbatim, it weighs strongly as being fair use.
I think the real problems that LLMs face will be in factors 3 and 4, which is very much context specific. The judge himself said that the plaintiffs are free to file additional lawsuits if they believe the LLM outputs duplicate the original works.
Digitizing the books is the equivalent of a blind person doing something to the book to make it readable to them... the software can't read analog pages.
Learning from the book is, well, learning from the book. Yes, they intended to make money off of that learning... but then I guess a medical student reading medical textbooks intends to profit off of what they learn from them. Guess that's not fair use either (well, it's really just use, as in the intended use for all books since they were first invented).
Once a person has to believe that copyright has any moral weight at all, I guess all rational though becomes impossible for them. Somehow, they're not capable of entertaining the idea that copyright policy was only ever supposed to be this pragmatic thing to incentivize creative works... and that whatever little value it has disappears entirely once the policy is twisted to consolidate control.
kristofferR · 3h ago
What do you think fair use is? The whole point of the fair use clauses is that if you transform copyrighted works enough you don't have to pay the original copyright holder.
kube-system · 43m ago
Fair use is not, at its core, about transformation. It's about many types of uses that do not interfere with the reasons for the rights we ascribe to authors. Fair use doesn't require transformation.
m4rtink · 2h ago
Anyone else thinks destroying books for any reason is wrong ?
Or is it perhaps not an universal cultural/moral aspect ?
I guess for example in Europe people could be more sensitive to it.
lawlessone · 1h ago
If they aren't one of a kind and they digitally preserved them in some way i think i would be ok with it.
Saying that though there are tools for digitizing books that don't require destroying them
tliltocatl · 8h ago
If the AI movement will manage to undermine Imaginary Property, it would redeem it's externalities threefold.
57473m3n7Fur7h3 · 8h ago
I don’t think that’s gonna happen. I think they will manage to get themselves out of trouble for it, while the rest of us will still face serious problems if we are caught torrenting even one singular little book.
CaptainFever · 1h ago
It's already quite widespread and likely legal for average people to train AI models on copyrighted material, in the open weight AI communities like SD and LocalLLaMa.
Please, please differentiate between pirating books (which Anthrophic is liable for, and is still illegal) and training on copyrighted material (which was found to be legal, for both corporations and average people).
tliltocatl · 8h ago
Even so, would be hard to prove that this particular little book wasn't generated by Claude (oopsie, it happens to be a verbatim copy of a copyrighted work, that happens sometimes, those pesky LLMs).
pyman · 7h ago
You just need to audit their system. Shouldn't take more than a couple of hours.
2OEH8eoCRo0 · 5h ago
The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls
ttoinou · 8h ago
It would be great, but I think some are worried that new AI BigTech will find a way to continue enforcing IP on the rest of society while it won't exist for them
Imustaskforhelp · 8h ago
I think that we are worried because I think that's exactly what's going to happen/ is happening.
bayindirh · 7h ago
What are your feelings about how the small fish is stripped of their arts, and their years of work becomes just a prompt? Mainly comic artists and small musicians who are doing things they like and putting out for people, but not for much money?
tliltocatl · 7h ago
"But think about the children". The copyright system is doing too much damage to culture and society. Yes, it does provides a pond for some small fish, but the overall damage outweighs this. Like the fact that first estate provided sustainable for arts and crafts to flourish doesn't make the ancient régime any less screwed up.
bayindirh · 5h ago
I think I have worded my question wrong. I asked about not about how AI affects the financials of these smaller artists, but their wellbeing in general.
There are many small artists who do this not for money, but for fun and have their renowned styles. Even their styles are ripped off by these generative AI companies and turned into a slot machine to earn money for themselves. These artists didn't consent to that, and this affects their (mental) well-beings.
With that context in mind, what do you think about these people who are not in this for money is ripped out of their years of achievement and their hard work exploited for money by generative AI companies?
It's not about IP (with whatever expansion you prefer) or laws, but ethics in general.
Substitute comics for any medium. Code, music, painting, illustration, literature, short movies, etc.
tliltocatl · 4h ago
I see your point, "AI art" sucks in general and this is ethically sketchy as hell, but AIAK style copying has never been covered by copyright in the first place. Yea, it sucks to be alienated form your works. That's one of the externalites I mentioned in the original comment. But there is simply no remedy there. That's how the reality is.
bayindirh · 4h ago
Thanks for your answer, and taking your time for writing it!
Yes, style copying is generally considered legal, but as another commenter posted in a related thread "scale matters".
Maybe this will be reconsidered in the near future as the scale is in a much more different level with Generative AI. While there can be no technological solution to this (since it's a social problem to begin with), maybe public opinion about this issue will evolve over time.
To be crystal clear: I'm not against the tech. I'm against abusing and exploiting people for solely monetary profit.
frozenseven · 2h ago
(1) You can't copyright an art style. That's not a thing.
(2) Once you make something publicly available, anyone can learn from it. No consent necessary.
(3) Being upset does not grant you special privileges under the law.
(4) If you don't like the idea of paying for AI art, free software is both plentiful and competitive with just about anything proprietary.
CamperBob2 · 5h ago
(Shrug) If you want things to stay the same, both art and technology are bad career choices.
bayindirh · 5h ago
(Huh) What if you are in the field to advance it, and somebody steals your work and claims it as their own?
It's true that intellectual property is a flawed and harmful mechanism for supporting creative work, and it needs to change, but I don't think ensuring a positive outcome is as simple as this. Whether or not such a power struggle between corporate interests benefits the public rather than just some companies will be largely accidental.
I do support intellectual property reform that would be considered radical by some, as I imagine you do. But my highest hopes for this situation are more modest: if AI companies are told that their data must be in the public domain to train against, we will finally have a powerful faction among capitalists with a strong incentive to push back against the copyright monopolists when it comes to the continuous renewal of copyright terms.
If the "path of least resistance" for companies like Google, Microsoft, and Meta becomes enlarging the public domain, we might finally begin to address the stagnation of the public domain, and that could be a good thing.
But I think even such a modest hope as that one is unlikely to be realized. :-\
karel-3d · 8h ago
That would render GPL and friends redundant too... copyleft depends on copyright.
CaptainFever · 1h ago
Copyleft nullifies copyright. Abolishing copyright and adding right to repair laws (mandatory source files) would give the same effect as everyone using copylefted licenses.
Der_Einzige · 5h ago
Yup.
My response to this whole thread is just “good”
Aaron Swartz is a saint and a martyr.
LtWorf · 4h ago
It will undermine it only for the rich owner of AI companies, not for everyone.
russell_h · 4h ago
The title is clearly meant to generate outrage, but what is wrong with cutting up a book that you own?
No comments yet
shrubble · 2h ago
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?
mrkstu · 2h ago
If you paid a human author to do the same you’d be breaking no law. Learning is the point of books existing in the first place.
mathiaspoint · 2h ago
The same argument applies to someone who learned from the book and wrote an article explaining the idea to someone else.
No comments yet
Kim_Bruning · 7h ago
actual title:
"Anthropic cut up millions of used books to train Claude — and downloaded over 7 million pirated ones too, a judge said."
A not-so-subtle difference.
That said, in a sane world, they shouldn't have needed to cut up all those used books yet again when there's obviously already an existing file that does all the work.
CaptainFever · 1h ago
Yeah, I'm not sure if people realize that the whole reason they had to cut up the books was because they wanted to comply with copyright law. Artificial scarcity.
kube-system · 1h ago
The importance of acquiring the physical book was the transfer of compensation to the author.
codedokode · 2h ago
> "Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic's LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different," he wrote.
But this analogy seems wrong. First, LLM is not a human and cannot "learn" or "train" - only human can do it. And LLM developers are not aspiring to become writers and do not learn anything, they just want to profit by making software using copyrighted material. Also people do not read millions of books to become a writer.
CaptainFever · 17m ago
> But this analogy seems wrong. First, LLM is not a human and cannot "learn" or "train" - only human can do it.
The analogy refers to humans using machines to do what would already be legally if they did it manually.
> And LLM developers are not aspiring to become writers and do not learn anything, they just want to profit by making software using copyrighted material.
[Citation needed], and not a legal argument.
> Also people do not read millions of books to become a writer.
But people do hear millions of words as children.
carlosjobim · 3h ago
If ingesting books into an AI makes Anthropic criminals, then Google et al are also criminals alike for making search indexes of the Internet. Anything published online is equally copyrighted.
kristofferR · 3h ago
Yeah, we can all agree that ingesting books is fair use and transformative, but you gotta own what you ingest, you can't just pirate it.
I can read 100 books and write a book based on the inspiration I got from the 100 books without any issue. However, if I pirate the 100 books I've still committed copyright infringement despite my new book being fully legal/fair use.
carlosjobim · 3h ago
I disagree that it has anything to do with copyright. It is at most theft. If I steal a bunch of books from the library, I haven't committed any breach of copyright.
lvl155 · 1h ago
It’s marginally better than Meta torrenting z-lib.
dathinab · 4h ago
as far as I understand while training on books is clearly not fair use (as the result will likely hurt the lively hood of authors, especially not "best of the best" authors).
as long as you buy the book it still should be legal, that is if you actually buy the book and not a "read only" eBook
but the 7_000_000 pirated books are a huge issue, and one from which we have a lot of reason to believe isn't just specific to Anthropic
asadotzler · 3h ago
Buying a copy of a book does not give you license to take the exact content of that book, repackage it as a web service, and sell it to millions of others. That's called theft.
sidewndr46 · 5h ago
So using the standard industry metrics for calculating the financial impact of piracy, this would equate to something like trillions of damages to the book publishing industry?
ruffrey · 3h ago
Two of the top AI companies flouted ethics with regard to training data. In OpenAI's case, the whistleblower probably got whacked for exposing it.
Can anyone make a compelling argument that any of these AI companies have the public's best interest in mind (alignment/superalignment)?
No comments yet
nickpsecurity · 4h ago
Buying, scanning, and discarding was in my proposal to train under copyright restrictions.
You are often allowed to nake a digital copy of a physical work you bought. There are tons of used, physical works thay would be good for training LLM's. They'd also be good for training OCR which could do many things, including improve book scanning for training.
This could be reduced to a single act of book destruction per copyrighted work or made unnecessary if copyright law allowed us to share others' works digitally with their licensed customers. Ex: people who own a physical copy or a license to one. Obviously, the implementation could get complex but we wouldn't have to destroy books very often.
No comments yet
motbus3 · 8h ago
It is shocking how courts have being ruling towards the benefits of ai companies despite the obvious problem of allowing automatic plagiarism
jobs_throwaway · 4h ago
Information wants to be free
kristofferR · 3h ago
Not really, plagiarism is not a legal concept.
adolph · 2h ago
Alsup detailed Anthropic's training process with books: The OpenAI rival
spent "many millions of dollars" buying used print books, which the
company or its vendors then stripped of their bindings, cut the pages,
and scanned into digital files.
I've noticed an increase in used book prices in the recent past and now wonder if there is an LLM effect in the market.
greenavocado · 6h ago
Should have listened to those NordVPN ads on YouTube
k__ · 3h ago
So, how should we as a society handle this?
Ensure the models are open source, so everyone can use them, as everyones data is in there?
Close those companies and force them to delete the models, as they used copyright material?
dandanua · 8h ago
Same did Meta and probably other big companies. People who praise AGI are very short sighted. It will ruin the world with our current morals and ethics. It's like a nuclear weapon in the hands of barbarians (shit, we have that too, actually).
2OEH8eoCRo0 · 5h ago
I've begun to wonder if this is why some large torrent sites haven't been taken down. They are essentially able to crowdsource all the work. There are some users who spend ungodly amounts of time and money on these sites that I suspect are rich industry benefactors.
neo__ · 9h ago
Hopefully they were all good books at least.
pyman · 9h ago
they pirated the best ones, according to the authors
1oooqooq · 8h ago
Aaron Swartz rolling
pyman · 8h ago
He downloaded millions of academic articles and the government charged him with multiple felonies.
The difference is, Aaron Swartz wasn't planning to build massive datacenters with expensive Nvidia servers all over the world.
mikewarot · 8h ago
>the government charged him with multiple felonies.
This was the result of a cruel and zealous overreach by the prosecutor to try to advance her political career. It should never have gone that far.
The failure of MIT to rally in support of Aaron will never be forgiven.
pyman · 7h ago
I agree
omnimus · 7h ago
It's even worse considering all he downloaded was in public domain so it was much less problematic considering copyright.
Lesson is simple. If you want to break a law make sure it is very profitable because then you can find investors and get away with it. If you play robin hood you will be met with a hammer.
Lionga · 8h ago
Based on the fact people went to jail for downloading some music or movies, this guy will face a lifetime in prison for 7 million books that he then used for commercial profit right?
Right guys we don't have rules for thee but not for me in the land of the free?
outside1234 · 4h ago
So if you incorporate you can do whatever you want without criminal charges?
NHQ · 4h ago
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.
NHQ · 4h ago
The irony is that actually litigating copyright law would lead to the repeal of said copyright law. And so in all cases of backwaters laws that are used to "protect interests" of "corporations" yet criminalize petty individual cases.
This of course cannot be allowed to happen, so the the legal system is just a limbo, a bar which regular individuals must strain to pass under but that corporations regularly overstep.
booleandilemma · 8h ago
So if I'm working on an LLM can I just steal millions of copyrighted books? Is that how our farcical justice system works?
famahar · 4h ago
Make sure you have a few billion dollars ready so you can pay a few million on the lawsuits. A volcano getting a cup of water poured into it.
Uhhrrr · 2h ago
From Vinge's "Rainbow's End":
> In fact this business was the ultimate in deconstruction: First one and then the other would pull books off the racks and toss them into the shredder's maw. The maintenance labels made calm phrases of the horror: The raging maw was a "NaviCloud custom debinder." The fabric tunnel that stretched out behind it was a "camera tunnel...." The shredded fragments of books and magazine flew down the tunnel like leaves in tornado, twisting and tumbling. The inside of the fabric was stitched with thousands of tiny cameras. The shreds were being photographed again and again, from every angle and orientation, till finally the torn leaves dropped into a bin just in front of Robert. Rescued data. BRRRRAP! The monster advanced another foot into the stacks, leaving another foot of empty shelves behind it.
microtherion · 10m ago
Yes, I was thinking of this passage as well. The technology does not seem to have advanced to this particular point yet.
Zufriedenheit · 40m ago
Maybe to give something back to the pirates, Anthropic could upload all the books they have digitized to the archive? /s
randomNumber7 · 1h ago
I will never feel bad again for learning from copied books /S
aaron695 · 9h ago
Good, this is what Aaron Swartz was fighting for.
Against companies like Elsevier locking up the worlds knowledge.
Authors are no different to scientists, many had government funding at one point, and it's the publishing companies that got most of the sales.
You can disagree and think Aaron Swartz was evil, but you can't have both.
You can take what Anthropic have show you is possible and do this yourself now.
> Alsup ruled that Anthropic's use of copyrighted books to train its AI models was "exceedingly transformative" and qualified as fair use
> "All Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies"
It was always somewhat obvious that pirating a library would be copyright infringement. The interesting findings here are that scanning and digitizing a library for internal use is OK, and using it to train models is fair use.
> But Alsup drew a firm line when it came to piracy.
> "Anthropic had no entitlement to use pirated copies for its central library," Alsup wrote. "Creating a permanent, general-purpose library was not itself a fair use excusing Anthropic's piracy."
That is, he ruled that
- buying, physically cutting up, physically digitizing books, and using them for training is fair use
- pirating the books for their digital library is not fair use.
> - buying, physically cutting up, physically digitizing books, and using them for training is fair use
> - pirating the books for their digital library is not fair use.
That seems inconsistent with one another. If it's fair use, how is it piracy?
It also seems pragmatically trash. It doesn't do the authors any good for the AI company to buy one copy of their book (and a used one at that), but it does make it much harder for smaller companies to compete with megacorps for AI stuff, so it's basically the stupidest of the plausible outcomes.
So Suno would only really need to buy the physical albums and rip them to be able to generate music at an industrial scale?
Found it: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/federal-judge-rules-c...
> “That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft,” [Judge] Alsup wrote, “but it may affect the extent of statutory damages.”
Substitute infringement for theft.
No, that doesn't undo the infringement. At most, that would mitigate actual damages, but actual damages aren't likely to be important, given that statutory damages are an alternative and are likely to dwarf actual damages. (It may also figure into how the court assigns statutory damages within the very large range available for those, but that range does not go down to $0.)
> They will have ceased and desisted.
"Cease and desist" is just to stop incurring additional liability. (A potential plaintiff may accept that as sufficient to not sue if a request is made and the potential defendant complies, because litigation is uncertain and expensive. But "cease and desist" doesn't undo wrongs and neutralize liability when they've already been sued over.)
For anyone else who wants to do the same thing though this is likely all they need to do.
Cutting up and scanning books is hard work and actually doing the same thing digitally to ebooks isn't labor free either, especially when they have to be downloaded from random sites and cleaned from different formats. Torrenting a bunch of epubs and paying for individual books is probably cheaper
Setting the penalty to what it would have cost to obey the law in the first place does the opposite.
If you give people a claim for damages which is an order of magnitude larger than their actual damages, it encourages litigiousness and becomes a vector for shakedowns because the excessive cost of losing pressures innocent defendants to settle even if there was a 90% chance they would have won.
Meanwhile both parties have the incentive to settle in civil cases when it's obvious who is going to win, because a settlement to pay the damages is cheaper than the cost of going to court and then having to pay the same damages anyway. Which also provides a deterrent to doing it, because even having to pay lawyers to negotiate a settlement is a cost you don't want to pay when it's clear that what you're doing is going to have that result.
> pirating the books for their digital library is not fair use.
"Pirating" is a fuzzy word and has no real meaning. Specifically, I think this is the cruz:
> without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies
Essentially: downloading is fine, sharing/uploading up is not. Which makes sense. The assertion here is that Anthropic (from this line) did not distribute the files they downloaded.
It's a bit surprising that you can suddenly download copyrighted materials for personal use and and it's kosher as long as you don't share them with others.
After all, illegally downloading research papers in order to write new ones is highly transformative.
I've fixed your question so that it accurately represents what I said and doesn't put words in my mouth.
If I click on a link and download a document, is that illegal?
I do not know if the person has the right to distribute it or not. IANAL, but when people were getting sued by the RIAA years back, it was never about downloading, but also distribution.
As I said, IANAL, but feel free to correct me, but my understanding is that downloading a document from the internet is not illegal.
Did you mean to write "but about distribution" here?
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67569326/598/kadrey-v-m...
Note: I am not a lawyer.
https://investors.autodesk.com/news-releases/news-release-de...
Here's an article explaining in more detail [1].
Most experts say that if Swartz had gone to trial and the prosecution had proved everything they alleged and the judge had decided to make an example of Swartz and sentence harshly it would have been around 7 years.
Swartz's own attorney said that if they had gone to trail and lost he thought it was unlikely that Swartz would get any jail time.
Swartz also had at least two plea bargain offers available. One was for a guilty plea and 4 months. The other was for a guilty plea and the prosecutors would ask for 6 months but Swartz could ask the judge for less or for probation instead and the judge would pick.
[1] https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...
This is very different to what Anthropic did. Nobody was buying copies of books from Anthropic instead of the copyright holder.
We've only dealt with the fairly straight-forward legal questions so far. This legal battle is still far from being settled.
There's already one decision on a competitor.
It makes sense, if you think of how the model works.
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 they are even a tiny bit reasonable.
When I clicked the link, I got an article about a business that was selling millions of dollars of pirated software.
This guy made millions of dollars in profit by selling pirated software. This wasn't a case of transformative works, nor of an individual doing something for themselves. He was plainly stealing and reselling something.
Come up with a better comparison.
> First, Authors argue that using works to train Claude’s underlying LLMs was like using works to train any person to read and write, so Authors should be able to exclude Anthropic from this use (Opp. 16). But Authors cannot rightly exclude anyone from using their works for training or learning as such. Everyone reads texts, too, then writes new texts. They may need to pay for getting their hands on a text in the first instance. But to make anyone pay specifically for the use of a book each time they read it, each time they recall it from memory, each time they later draw upon it when writing new things in new ways would be unthinkable. For centuries, we have read and re-read books. We have admired, memorized, and internalized their sweeping themes, their substantive points, and their stylistic solutions to recurring writing problems.
Couldn't have put it better myself (though $deity knows I tried many times on HN). Glad to see Judge Alsup continues to be the voice of common sense in legal matters around technology.
The model is very different.
It's not an issue because it's not currently illegal because nobody could have foreseen this years ago.
But it is profiting off of the unpaid work of millions. And there's very little chance of change because it's so hard to pass new protection laws when you're not Disney.
I don't think humans learn via backprop or in rounds/batches, our learning is more "online".
If I input text into an LLM it doesn't learn from that unless the creators consciously include that data in the next round of teaching their model.
Humans also don't require samples of every text in history to learn to read and write well.
Hunter S Thompson didn't need to ingest the Harry Potter books to write.
This is reaching at best.
"Pirates" also transform the works they distribute. They crack it, translate it, compress it to decrease download times, remove unnecessary things, make it easier to download by splitting it in chunks (essential with dial-up, less so nowadays), change distribution formats, offer it trough different channels, bundle extra software and media that they themselves might have coded like trainers, installers, sick chiptunes and so on. Why is the "transformation" done by a big corpo more legal in your views?
“Piracy” is mostly a rhetorical term in the context of copyright. Legally, it’s still called infringement or unauthorized copying. But industries and lobbying groups (e.g., RIAA, MPAA) have favored “piracy” for its emotional weight.
Copyright infringement is unauthorized reproduction - you have made a copy of something, but you have not deprived the original owner of it. At most, you denied them revenue although generally less than the offended party claims, since not all instances of copying would have otherwise resulted in a sale.
And to be clear, we javelin the word infringement precisely because it is not theft.
In addition to the deprived revenue, piracy also improves on the general relevance the author has or may have in the public sphere. Essentially, one of the side effects of piracy is basically advertising.
Doctorow was one of the early ones to bring this aspect of it up.
Real piracy always involves booty.
Naturally booty is wealth that has been hoarded.
Has nothing to do with wealth that may or may not come in the future, regardless of whether any losses due to piracy have taken place already or not.
Referring to this? (Wikipedia's disambiguation page doesn't seem to have a more likely article.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman#Copyright_red...
(As an aside, it seems pointless to decry it as a "talking point". The reason it was brought up is presumably because the author agrees with it and thinks it's relevant. It's also entirely possible that the author, like me, made this argument without being aware that it was popularized by Richard Stallman. If it makes sense then you can hear the argument without hearing the person and still find it agreeable.)
"Piracy" is used to refer to copyright violation to make it sound scary and dangerous to people who don't know better or otherwise don't think about it too hard. Just imagine if they called it "banditry" instead; now tell me that pirates are not bandits with boats. They may as well have called it banditry and it's worth correcting that. (I also think it's worth ridiculing but that doesn't appear to be Stallman's primary point.) It's not banditry (how ridiculous would it be to call it that?), it's copyright infringement.
Edit:
Reading my comment again in the context of other things you wrote, I suspect the argument will not pass muster because you do not seem to see piracy's change in meaning as manufactured by PR work purchased by media industry leaders. I'm not really trying to convince you that it's true but it may be worth considering that it is the fundamental disagreement you seem to have with others on Stallman's point; again, not saying you're wrong, just that's where the disagreement is.
In short the post is bait.
1: https://piratpartiet.se/en/
https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files...
Funky quote:
> Rumors that early versions of Spotify used ‘pirate’ MP3s have been floating around the Internet for years. People who had access to the service in the beginning later reported downloading tracks that contained ‘Scene’ labeling, tags, and formats, which are the tell-tale signs that content hadn’t been obtained officially.
https://www.forbes.com/2009/08/04/online-anime-video-technol...
https://venturebeat.com/business/crunchyroll-for-pirated-ani...
My theory is that once they saw how much traffic they were getting, they realized how big of a market (subbed/dubbed) anime was.
- riding a wave of change
- not caring too much about legal constraints (or like they would say now "distrupting" the market, which very very often means doing illigal shit which beings them far more money then any penalties they will ever face from it)
- or caring about ethics too much
- and for recent years (starting with Amazone) a lot of technically illegal financing (technically undercutting competitors prices long term based on money from else where (e.g. investors) is unfair competitive advantage (theoretically) clearly not allowed by anti monopoly laws. And before you often still had other monopoly issues (e.g. see wintel)
So yes not systematic not complying with law to get unfair competitive advantage knowing that many of the laws are on the larger picture toothless when applied to huge companies is bread and butter work of US tech giants
Are all music creators better off now than before Spotify?
Society underestimates the chasm that exists between an idea and raising sufficient capital to act on those ideas.
Plenty of people have ideas.
We only really see those that successfully cross it.
Small things EULA breaches, consumer licenses being used commercially for example.
If you're an individual pirating software or media, then from the rights owners' perspective, the most rational thing to do is to make an example of you. It doesn't happen everyday, but it does happen and it can destroy lives.
If you're a corporation doing the same, the calculation is different. If you're small but growing, future revenues are worth more than the money that can be extracted out of you right now, so you might get a legal nastygram with an offer of a reasonable payment to bring you into compliance. And if you're already big enough to be scary, litigation might be just too expensive to the other side even if you answer the letter with "lol, get lost".
Even in the worst case - if Anthropic loses and the company is fined or even shuttered (unlikely) - the people who participated in it are not going to be personally liable and they've in all likelihood already profited immensely.
And the system set up by society doesn't truly account for this or care.
but systematic wide spread big things and often many of them, giving US giant a unfair combative advantage
and don't think if you are a EU company you can do the same in the US, nop nop
but naturally the US insist that US companies can do that in the EU and complain every time a US company is fined for not complying for EU law
This is a narrative that gets passed around in certain circles to justify stealing content.
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.
edit/addendum: considering this a bit more - the extent to which the original party is deprived of the stolen thing is pertinent for awarding damages. For example, imagine a small entity stealing from a large one, like a small creator steals dungeon and dragons rules. That doesn't deprive Hasbro of DnD, but it is still theft (we're assuming a verbatim copy here lifted directly from DnD books)
The example that I was pondering were shows in russia that were almost literally "the sampsons." Did that stop the Simpson's from airing in the US, its primary market? No, but it was still theft, something was taken without permission.
No comments yet
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).
That's a statement carefully crafted to be impossible to disprove. Of course they shipped pirated music (I've seen the files). Of course anyone paying attention knew. Nothing in the music industry was "clean" in those days. But, sure, no credible evidence because any evidence anyone shows you you'll decide is not credible. It's not in anyone's interests to say anything and none of it matters.
The AI sector, famously known for its inability to raise funding. Anthropic has in the last four years raised 17 billion dollars
Other industries do not have it this easy.
It's not a common business practice. That's why it's considered newsworthy.
People on the internet have forgotten that the news doesn't report everyday, normal, common things, or it would be nothing but a listing of people mowing their lawns or applying for business loans. The reason something is in the news is because it is unusual or remarkable.
"I saw it online, so it must happen all the time" is a dopy lack of logic that infects society.
Edit: Apologies, I can’t edit it anymore.
What you really should be asking is whether they infringed on the copyrights of the rippers. /s
Daniel Ek said: "my mission is to make music accessible and legal to everyone, while ensuring artists and rights holders got paid"
Also, the Swedish government has zero tolerance for piracy.
Also please don't use word "learning", use "creating software using copyrighted materials".
Also let's think together how can we prevent AI companies from using our work using technical measures if the law doesn't work?
People already use pirated software for product creation.
Hypothetical:
I know a guy who learned photoshop on a pirated copy of Photoshop. He went on to be a graphic designer. All his earnings are ‘proceeds from crime’
He never used the pirated software to produce content.
I could, right now in just a few minutes, go download a perfectly functional pirated copy of nearly any Adobe program, nearly any Microsoft program and a whole range of books and movies, yet I see zero real financial troubles affecting any of the companies behind these. All the contrary in fact.
The whole point of copyright is to ensure you're paid for your work. AI companies shouldn't pirate, but if they pay for your work, they should be able to use it however they please, including training an LLM on it.
If that LLM reproduces your work, then the AI company is violating copyright, but if the LLM doesn't reproduce your work, then you have not been harmed. Trying to claim harm when you haven't been due to some philosophical difference in opinion with the AI company is an abuse of the courts.
People don't view moral issues in the abstract.
A better perspective on this is the fact that human individuals have created works which megacorps are training on for free or for the price of a single book and creating models which replace individuals.
The megacorps are only partially replacing individuals now, but when the models get good enough they could replace humans entirely.
When such a future happens will you still be siding with them or with individual creators?
Those damn kind readers and libraries. Giving their single copy away when they just paid for the single.
No. The point of copyright is that the author gets to decide under what terms their works are copied. That's the essence of copyright. In many cases, authors will happily sell you a copy of their work, but they're under no obligation to do so. They can claim a copyright and then never release their work to the general public. That's perfectly within their rights, and they can sue to stop anybody from distributing copies.
If the author didn't want their work to be included in an LLM, they should not have sold it, just like if an author didn't want their work to inspire someone else's work, they should not have sold it.
If that were the case then this court case would not be ongoing
I could agree with exceptions for non-commercial activity like scientific research, but AI companies are made for extracting profits and not for doing research.
> AI companies shouldn't pirate, but if they pay for your work, they should be able to use it however they please, including training an LLM on it.
It doesn't work this way. If you buy a movie it doesn't mean you can sell goods with movie characters.
> then you have not been harmed.
I am harmed because less people will buy the book if they can simply get an answer from LLM. Less people will hire me to write code if an LLM trained on my code can do it. Maybe instead of books we should start making applications that protect the content and do not allow copying text or making screenshots. ANd instead of open-source code we should provide binary WASM modules.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole
And the harm you describe is not a recognized harm. You don't own information, you own creative works in their entirety. If your work is simply a reference, then the fact being referenced isn't something you own, thus you are not harmed if that fact is shared elsewhere.
It is an abuse of the courts to attempt to prevent people who have purchased your works from using those works to train an LLM. It's morally wrong.
Sorry for the long quote, but basically this, yeah. A major point of free software is that creators should not have the power to impose arbitrary limits on the users of their works. It is unethical.
It's why the GPL allows the user to disregard any additional conditions, why it's viral, and why the FSF spends so much effort on fighting "open source but..." licenses.
When you do it for a transformative purpose (turning it into an LLM model) it's certainly fair use.
But more importantly, it's ethical to do so, as the agreement you've made with the person you've purchased the book from included permission to do exactly that.
Reasonable minds could debate the ethics of how the material was used, this ruling judged the usage was legal and fair use. The only problem is the material was in effect stolen.
Now, in theory, you learning from an author's works and competing with them in the same market could meaningfully deprive them of income, but it's a very difficult argument to prove.
On the other hand, with AI companies it's an easier argument to make. If Anthropic trained on all of your books (which is somewhat likely if you're a fairly popular author) and you saw a substantial loss of income after the release of one of their better models (presumably because people are just using the LLM to write their own stories rather than buy your stuff), then it's a little bit easier to connect the dots. A company used your works to build a machine that competes with you, which arguably violates the fair use principle.
Gets to the very principle of copyright, which is that you shouldn't have to compete against "yourself" because someone copied you.
This is one of those mental gymnastics exercises that makes copyright law so obtuse and effectively unenforceable.
As an alternative, imagine a scriptwriter buys a textbook on orbital mechanics, while writing Gravity (2013). A large number of people watch the finished film, and learn something about orbital mechanics, therefore not needing the textbook anymore, causing a loss of revenue for the textbook author. Should the author be entitled to a percentage of Gravity's profit?
We'd be better off abolishing everything related to copyright and IP law alltogether. These laws might've made sense back in the days of the printing press but they're just nonsensical nowadays.
So here's the thing, I don't think a textbook author going against a purveyor of online courseware has much of a chance, nor do I think it should have much of a chance, because it probably lacks meaningful proof that their works made a contribution to the creation of the courseware. Would I feel differently if the textbook author could prove in court that a substantial amount of their material contributed to the creation of the courseware, and when I say "prove" I mean they had receipts to prove it? I think that's where things get murky. If you can actually prove that your works made a meaningful contribution to the thing that you're competing against, then maybe you have a point. The tricky part is defining meaningful. An individual author doesn't make a meaningful contribution to the training of an LLM, but a large number of popular and/or prolific numbers can.
You bring up a good point, interpretation of fair use is difficult, but at the end of the day I really don't think we should abolish copyright and IP altogether. I think it's a good thing that creative professionals have some security in knowing that they have legal protections against having to "compete against themselves"
> I honestly feel bad for some of these AI companies because the rules around copyright are changing just to target them
The ruling would be a huge win for AI companies if held. It's really weird that you reached the opposite conclusion.
So what is the right interpretation of the law with regards to how AI is using it? What better incentivizes innovation? Do we let AI companies scan everything because AI is innovative? Or do we think letting AI vacuum up creative works to then stochastically regurgitate tiny (or not so tiny) slices of them at a time will hurt innovation elsewhere?
But obviously the real answer here is money. Copyright is powerful because monied interests want it to be. Now that copyright stands in the way of monied interests for perhaps the first time, we will see how dedicated we actually were to whatever justifications we've been seeing for DRM and copyright for the last several decades.
I really think we need to understand this as a society and also realize that moneyed interests will downplay this as much as possible. A lot of the problems we're having today are due to insufficient regulation differentiating between individuals and systems at scale.
What you're proposing is considering LLMs to be equal to humans when considering how original works are created. You could make the argument that LLM training data is no different from a human "training" themself over a lifetime of consuming content, but that's a philosophical argument that is at odds with our current legal understanding of copyright law.
> Alsup ruled that Anthropic's use of copyrighted books to train its AI models was "exceedingly transformative" and qualified as fair use, a legal doctrine that allows certain uses of copyrighted works without the copyright owner's permission.
Or even, is an individual operating within the law as fair use, the same as a voracious all-consuming AI training bot consuming everything the same in spirit?
Consider a single person in a National Park, allowed to pick and eat berries, compared to bringing a combine harvester to take it all.
We've held China accountable for counterfeiting products for decades and regulated their exports. So why should Anthropic be allowed to export their products and services after engaging in the same illegal activity?
We have? Are we from different multi-verses?
The one I've lived in to date has not done anything against Chinese counterfeits beyond occasionally seizing counterfeit goods during import. But that's merely occasionally enforcing local counterfeit law, a far cry from punishing the entity producing it.
As a matter of fact, the companies started outsourcing everything to China, making further IP theft and quasi-copies even easier
It's quite the mafia operation over at Amazon.
You never noticed the hypocrite behavior all over society?
* O, you drunk drive, big fine, lots of trouble. * O, you drunk drive and are a senator, cop, mayor, ... Well, lets look the other way.
* You have anger management issues and slam somebody to the ground. Jail time. * You as a cop have anger management issues and slams somebody to the ground. Well, paid time off while we investigate and maybe a reprimand. Qualified immunity boy!
* You tax fraud for 10k, felony record, maybe jail time. * You as a exec of a company do tax fraud for 100 million. After 10 years lawyering around, maybe you get something, maybe, ... o, here is a fine of 5 million.
I am sorry but the idea of everybody being equal under the law has always been a illusion.
We are holding China accountable for counterfeiting products because it hurts OUR companies, and their income. But when its "us vs us", well, then it becomes a bit more messy and in general, those with the biggest backing (as in $$$, economic value, and lawyers), tends to win.
Wait, if somebody steal my book, i can sue that person in court, and get a payout (lawyers will cost me more but that is not the point). If some AI company steals my book, well, the chance you win is close to 1%, simply because lots of well paid lawyers will make your winning hard to impossible.
Our society has always been based upon power, wealth and influence. The more you have of it, the more you get away (or reduced) with things, that gets other fined or jailed.
Comment is more about the pseudo ethical high ground
Stealing is stealing. Let's stop with the double standards.
I get the sentiment, but that statement as is, is absurdly reductive. Details matter. Even if someone takes merchandise from a store without paying, their sentence will vary depending on the details.
That's not what's happening here. People weren't downloading music illegally and reselling it on Claude.ai. And while P2P networks led to some great tech, there's no solid proof they actually improved the music industry.
I use an adblocker and tbh I think so many people on HN are okay with ad blocking and not piracy when basically both just block the end user from earning money.
I kind of believe that if you really like a software, you really like something. Just ask them what their favourite charity is and donate their or join their patreon/a direct way to support them.
"What serves me personally the best for any given situation" for 95% of people.
https://gizmodo.com/early-spotify-was-built-on-pirated-mp3-f...
They make money off the model weights, which is fair use (as confirmed by recent case law).
Please keep in mind, copyright is intended as a compromise between benefit to society and to the individual.
A thought experiment, students pirating textbooks and applying that knowledge later on in their work?
In my opinion, it will be upheld.
Looking at what is stored and the manner which it is stored. It makes sense that it's fair use.
If by "what is stored and the manner which it is stored" is intended to signal model weights, I'm not sure what the argument is? The four factors of copyright in no way mention a storage medium for data, lossless or loss-y.
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
In my opinion, this will likely see a supreme court ruling by the end of the decade.
A trillion parameter SOTA model is not substantially comprised of the one copyrighted piece. (If it was a Harry Potter model trained only on Harry Potter books this would be a different story).
Embeddings are not copy paste.
The last point about market impact would be where they make their argument but it's tenuous. It's not the primary use of AI models and built in prompts try to avoid this, so it shouldn't be commonplace unless you're jail breaking the model, most folk aren't.
If it outputs parts of the book verbatim then that's a different story.
Pirating 7 million books, remixing their content, and using that to power Claude.ai is like counterfeiting 7 million branded products and selling them on your personal website. The original creators don't get credit or payment, and someone’s profiting off their work.
All this happens while authors, many of them teachers, are left scratching their heads with four kids to feed
But it does...
Easy for the pirate to say. Artists might argue their intent was to trade compensation for one's personal enjoyment of the work.
that isn't "just" stealing, it's organized crime
Yes, but copying isn't stealing, because the person you "take" from still has their copy.
If you're allowed to call copying stealing, then I should be allowed to call hysterical copyright rabblerousing rape. Quit being a rapist, pyman.
Also, there are various incentives for teachers to publish books. Money is just one of them (I wonder how much revenue books bring to the teachers). Prestige and academic recognition is another. There are probably others still. How realistic is the depiction of a deprived teacher whose livelihood depended on the books he published once every several years?
There's so many texts, and they're so sparse that if I could copyright a work and never publish it, the restriction would be irrelevant. The probability that you would accidentally come upon something close enough that copyright was relevant is almost infinitesimal.
Because of this copyright is an incredibly weak restriction, and that it is as weak as it is shows clearly that any use of a copyrighted work is due to the convenience that it is available.
That is, it's about making use of the work somebody else has done, not about that restricting you somehow.
Therefore copyright is much more legitimate than ordinary property. Ordinary property, especially ownership of land, can actually limit other people. But since copyright is so sparse infringing on it is like going to world with near-infinite space and picking the precise place where somebody has planted a field and deciding to harvest from that particular field.
Consequently I think copyright infringement might actually be worse than stealing.
I remember when piracy wasn't theft, and information wanted to be free.
you're saying copying a book is worse than robbing a farmer of his food and/or livelihood, which cannot be replaced to duplicated. Meanwhile, someone who copies a book does not deprive the author of selling the book again (or a tasty proceedings from harvest).
I can't say I agree, for obvious reasons.
Just as the farmer obtains his livelihood from the investment-of-energy-to-raise-crops-to-energy cycle the author has his livelihood by the investment-of-energy-to-finding-a-useful-work-to-energy cycle.
So he is in fact robbed in a very similar way.
Sayi "they have the money" is not an argument. It's about the amount of effort that is needed to individually buy, scan, process millions of pages. If that's done for you, why re-do it all?
I'm against Anthropic stealing teacher's work and discouraging them from ever writing again. Some teachers are already saying this (though probably not in California).
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 he got a bad deal (or the book was bad), but I don't think hundreds of thousands of authors do significantly better. The reality is, people overwhelmingly write because they want to, not because of money.
Training a generative model on a book is the mechanical equivalent of having a human read the book and learn from it. Is it stealing if a person reads the book and learns from it?
There is no equality, and seemingly there are worker bees who can be exploited, and there are privileged ones, and of course there are the queens.
And it just so happens that that belief says they can burn whatever they want down because something in the future might happen that absolves them of those crimes.
Note: My definition of singularity isn't the one they use in San Francisco. It's the moment founders who stole the life's work of thousands of teachers finally go to prison, and their datacentres get seized.
Luigi was peanuts in comparison.
“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”
- Mark Twain
When it comes to a lot of these teachers, I'll say, copyright work hand in hand with college and school course book mandates. I've seen plenty of teachers making crazy money off students' backs due to these mandates.
A lot of the content taught in undergrad and school hasn't changed in decades or even centuries. I think we have all the books we'll ever need in certain subjects already, but copyright keeps enriching people who write new versions of these.
Writers that have an authentic human voice and help people think about things in a new way will be fine for a while yet.
105B+ is more than Anthropic is worth on paper.
Of course they’re not going to be charged to the fullest extent of the law, they’re not a teenager running Napster in the early 2000s.
No, its not.
It's the maximum statutory damages for willful infringement, which this has not be adjudicated to be. it is not a fine, its an alternative to basis of recovery to actual damages + infringers profits attributable to the infringement.
Of course, there's also a very wide range of statutory damages, the minimum (if it is not "innocent" infringement) is $750/work.
> 105B+ is more than Anthropic is worth on paper.
The actual amount of 7 million works times $150,000/work is $1.05 trillion, not $105 billion.
Yeah, you’re probably right, I’m not a lawyer. The point is that it doesn’t matter what number the law says they should pay, Anthropic can afford real lawyers and will therefore only pay a pittance, if anything.
I’m old enough to remember what the feds did to Aaron Schwarz, and I don’t see what Anthropic did that was so different, ethically speaking.
This is what every company using media are doing (think Spotify, Netflix, but also journal, ad agency, ...). I don't know why people in HN are giving a pass to AI company for this kind of behavior.
As mentioned in The Fucking Article, there's a legal difference between training an AI which largely doesn't repeat things verbatim (ala Anthropic) and redistributing media as a whole (ala Spotify, Netflix, journal, ad agency).
$500,000 per infringement...
Because for example if you buy a movie on disc, that's a personal license and you can watch it yourself at home. But you can't like play it at a large public venue that sell tickets to watch it. You need a different and more expensive license to make money off the usage of the content in a larger capacity like that.
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Individuals would have their lives ruined either from massive fines or jail time.
> That doesn't seem to chime with the copyright notices I have read in books.
You shouldn't get your legal advice from someone with skin in the game.
Which of the following are true?
(a) the legal industry is susceptible to influence and corruption
(b) engineers don't understand how to legally interpret legal text
(c) AI tech is new, and judges aren't technically qualified to decide these scenarios
Most likely option is C, as we've seen this pattern many times before.
Any reasonable reading of the current state of fair use doctrine makes it obvious that the process between Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and "A computer program that outputs responses to user prompts about a variety of topics" is wildly transformative, and thus the usage of the copyrighted material is probably covered by fair use.
Where are you getting your data from? My conclusions are the exact opposite.
(Also, aren't judges by definition the only ones qualified to declare if it is actually fair use? You could make a case that it shouldn't be fair use, but that's different from it being not fair use.)
I think the overly liberal, non-tech crowd has become really vocal on HN as of late and your sample is likely biased by these people.
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 a for-profit model is clearly going against what copyright stands for.
Although, there’s an exception for fictional characters:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_fic...
Isn't that what a lot of companies are doing, just through employees? I read a lot of books, and took a lot of courses, and now a company is profiting off that information.
Simply, if the models can think then it is no different than a person reading many books and building something new from their learnings. Digitization is just memory. If the models cannot think then it is meaningless digital regurgitation and plagiarism, not to mention breach of copyright.
The quotes "consistent with copyright's purpose in enabling creativity and fostering scientific progress." and "Like any reader aspiring to be a writer" say, from what I can tell, that the judge has legally ruled the model can think as a human does, and therefore has the legal protections afforded to "creatives."
No, that's fallacious. Using anthropomorphic words to describe a machine does not give it the same kinds of rights and affordances we give real people.
If a human uses a voting machine, they still have a right to vote.
Machines don't have rights. The human using the machine does.
Judges consider a four factor when examining fair use[1]. For search engines,
1) The use is transformative, as a tool to find content is very different purpose than the content itself.
2) Nature of the original work runs the full gamut, so search engines don't get points for only consuming factual data, but it was all publicly viewable by anyone as opposed to books which require payment.
3) The search engine store significant portions of the work in the index, but it only redistributes small portions.
4) Search engines, as original devised, don't compete with the original, in fact they can improve potential market of the original by helping more people find them. This has changed over time though, and search engines are increasingly competing with the content they index, and intentionally trying to show the information that people want on the search page itself.
So traditional search which was transformative, only republished small amounts of the originals, and didn't compete with the originals fell firmly on the side of fair use.
Google News and Books on the other hand weren't so clear cut, as they were showing larger portions of the works and were competing with the originals. They had to make changes to those products as a result of lawsuits.
So now lets look at LLMs:
1) LLM are absolutely transformative. Generating new text at users request is a very different purpose and character from the original works.
2) Again runs the full gamut (setting aside the clear copyright infringement downloading of illegally distributed books which is a separate issue)
3) For training purposes, LLMs don't typically preserve entire works, so the model is in a better place legally than a search index, which has precedent that storing entire works privately can be fair use depending on the other factors. For inference, even though they are less likely to reproduce the originals in their outputs than search engines, there are failure cases where an LLM over-trained on a work, and a significant amount the original can be reproduced.
4) LLMs have tons of uses some of which complement the original works and some of which compete directly with them. Because of this, it is likely that whether LLMs are fair use will depend on how they are being used - eg ignore the LLM altogether and consider solely the output and whether it would be infringing if a human created it.
This case was solely about whether training on books is fair use, and did not consider any uses of the LLM. Because LLMs are a very transformative use, and because they don't store original verbatim, it weighs strongly as being fair use.
I think the real problems that LLMs face will be in factors 3 and 4, which is very much context specific. The judge himself said that the plaintiffs are free to file additional lawsuits if they believe the LLM outputs duplicate the original works.
[1] https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/
Learning from the book is, well, learning from the book. Yes, they intended to make money off of that learning... but then I guess a medical student reading medical textbooks intends to profit off of what they learn from them. Guess that's not fair use either (well, it's really just use, as in the intended use for all books since they were first invented).
Once a person has to believe that copyright has any moral weight at all, I guess all rational though becomes impossible for them. Somehow, they're not capable of entertaining the idea that copyright policy was only ever supposed to be this pragmatic thing to incentivize creative works... and that whatever little value it has disappears entirely once the policy is twisted to consolidate control.
Or is it perhaps not an universal cultural/moral aspect ?
I guess for example in Europe people could be more sensitive to it.
Saying that though there are tools for digitizing books that don't require destroying them
Please, please differentiate between pirating books (which Anthrophic is liable for, and is still illegal) and training on copyrighted material (which was found to be legal, for both corporations and average people).
There are many small artists who do this not for money, but for fun and have their renowned styles. Even their styles are ripped off by these generative AI companies and turned into a slot machine to earn money for themselves. These artists didn't consent to that, and this affects their (mental) well-beings.
With that context in mind, what do you think about these people who are not in this for money is ripped out of their years of achievement and their hard work exploited for money by generative AI companies?
It's not about IP (with whatever expansion you prefer) or laws, but ethics in general.
Substitute comics for any medium. Code, music, painting, illustration, literature, short movies, etc.
Yes, style copying is generally considered legal, but as another commenter posted in a related thread "scale matters".
Maybe this will be reconsidered in the near future as the scale is in a much more different level with Generative AI. While there can be no technological solution to this (since it's a social problem to begin with), maybe public opinion about this issue will evolve over time.
To be crystal clear: I'm not against the tech. I'm against abusing and exploiting people for solely monetary profit.
(2) Once you make something publicly available, anyone can learn from it. No consent necessary.
(3) Being upset does not grant you special privileges under the law.
(4) If you don't like the idea of paying for AI art, free software is both plentiful and competitive with just about anything proprietary.
e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44460552
I do support intellectual property reform that would be considered radical by some, as I imagine you do. But my highest hopes for this situation are more modest: if AI companies are told that their data must be in the public domain to train against, we will finally have a powerful faction among capitalists with a strong incentive to push back against the copyright monopolists when it comes to the continuous renewal of copyright terms.
If the "path of least resistance" for companies like Google, Microsoft, and Meta becomes enlarging the public domain, we might finally begin to address the stagnation of the public domain, and that could be a good thing.
But I think even such a modest hope as that one is unlikely to be realized. :-\
My response to this whole thread is just “good”
Aaron Swartz is a saint and a martyr.
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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?
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"Anthropic cut up millions of used books to train Claude — and downloaded over 7 million pirated ones too, a judge said."
A not-so-subtle difference.
That said, in a sane world, they shouldn't have needed to cut up all those used books yet again when there's obviously already an existing file that does all the work.
But this analogy seems wrong. First, LLM is not a human and cannot "learn" or "train" - only human can do it. And LLM developers are not aspiring to become writers and do not learn anything, they just want to profit by making software using copyrighted material. Also people do not read millions of books to become a writer.
The analogy refers to humans using machines to do what would already be legally if they did it manually.
> And LLM developers are not aspiring to become writers and do not learn anything, they just want to profit by making software using copyrighted material.
[Citation needed], and not a legal argument.
> Also people do not read millions of books to become a writer.
But people do hear millions of words as children.
I can read 100 books and write a book based on the inspiration I got from the 100 books without any issue. However, if I pirate the 100 books I've still committed copyright infringement despite my new book being fully legal/fair use.
as long as you buy the book it still should be legal, that is if you actually buy the book and not a "read only" eBook
but the 7_000_000 pirated books are a huge issue, and one from which we have a lot of reason to believe isn't just specific to Anthropic
Can anyone make a compelling argument that any of these AI companies have the public's best interest in mind (alignment/superalignment)?
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You are often allowed to nake a digital copy of a physical work you bought. There are tons of used, physical works thay would be good for training LLM's. They'd also be good for training OCR which could do many things, including improve book scanning for training.
This could be reduced to a single act of book destruction per copyrighted work or made unnecessary if copyright law allowed us to share others' works digitally with their licensed customers. Ex: people who own a physical copy or a license to one. Obviously, the implementation could get complex but we wouldn't have to destroy books very often.
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Ensure the models are open source, so everyone can use them, as everyones data is in there?
Close those companies and force them to delete the models, as they used copyright material?
The difference is, Aaron Swartz wasn't planning to build massive datacenters with expensive Nvidia servers all over the world.
This was the result of a cruel and zealous overreach by the prosecutor to try to advance her political career. It should never have gone that far.
The failure of MIT to rally in support of Aaron will never be forgiven.
Lesson is simple. If you want to break a law make sure it is very profitable because then you can find investors and get away with it. If you play robin hood you will be met with a hammer.
Right guys we don't have rules for thee but not for me in the land of the free?
This of course cannot be allowed to happen, so the the legal system is just a limbo, a bar which regular individuals must strain to pass under but that corporations regularly overstep.
> In fact this business was the ultimate in deconstruction: First one and then the other would pull books off the racks and toss them into the shredder's maw. The maintenance labels made calm phrases of the horror: The raging maw was a "NaviCloud custom debinder." The fabric tunnel that stretched out behind it was a "camera tunnel...." The shredded fragments of books and magazine flew down the tunnel like leaves in tornado, twisting and tumbling. The inside of the fabric was stitched with thousands of tiny cameras. The shreds were being photographed again and again, from every angle and orientation, till finally the torn leaves dropped into a bin just in front of Robert. Rescued data. BRRRRAP! The monster advanced another foot into the stacks, leaving another foot of empty shelves behind it.
Against companies like Elsevier locking up the worlds knowledge.
Authors are no different to scientists, many had government funding at one point, and it's the publishing companies that got most of the sales.
You can disagree and think Aaron Swartz was evil, but you can't have both.
You can take what Anthropic have show you is possible and do this yourself now.
isohunt: freedom of information