Let me make a clarifying statement since people confuse (purposely or just out of ignorance) what violating copyright for AI training can refer to:
1. Training AI on freely available copyright - Ambiguous legality, not really tested in court. AI doesn't actually directly copy the material it trains on, so it's not easy to make this ruling.
2. Circumventing payment to obtain copyright material for training - Unambiguously illegal.
Meta is charged with doing the latter, but it seems the plaintiffs want to also tie in the former.
triceratops · 14m ago
> AI doesn't actually directly copy the material it trains on
Of course it does. Large models are trained on gigantic clusters. How can you train without copying the material to machines in the cluster?
thethimble · 9m ago
“Copy” is ambiguous here. Of course data is copied during training. That said, OP is referring to whether the resulting model is able to produce verbatim copies of the data.
xyzzy_plugh · 1m ago
Why does it have to be verbatim? Seriously, this I don't understand.
If I produce a terrible shakycam recording of a film while sitting in a movie theater, it's not a verbatim copy, nor is it even necessarily representative of the original work -- muddied audio, audience sounds, cropped screen, backs of heads -- and yet it would be considered copyright infringement?
How many times does one need to compress the JPEG before it's fair use? I'm legitimately curious what the test is here.
triceratops · 7m ago
Copyright is the right to make copies. Why is copying during training is any different from producing copies of training data after training?
If we're going that way, let me torrent every movie and TV show ever to "train" myself.
foota · 41s ago
I don't think this is a reasonable argument. I don't think copyright is actually defined in that sense, but is perhaps more focused on consuming the content. Is an http proxy making a copy of something? What about computing an md5 of it as it's streamed through the proxy? Or maybe counting the words in the thing being served in order to track stats? I'd argue none of these fall under copyright, but each is an incremental step towards what it means to train a model.
flessner · 27m ago
If the former ever gets tested in court, it's the end of the road. All major AI companies have trained on copyrighted work, one way or another.
What is inspiration? What is imitation? What is plagiarism? The lines aren't clearly drawn for humans... much less for LLMs.
ekidd · 3m ago
> If the former ever gets tested in court, it's the end of the road. All major AI companies have trained on copyrighted work, one way or another.
I can absolutely guarantee you that neither DeepSeek nor Alibaba's highly talented Qwen group will care even a little bit, in the long run. Not if there's value to be had in AI. (And I can tell you down to the dollar what LLMs can save in certain business use cases.)
If the US decides to unilaterally shut down LLMs, that just means that the rest of the world will route around us.
nickpsecurity · 21m ago
The FairTrained models claim to train with only public domain and legal works. Companies are also licensing works. This company has a lawful, foundation model:
So, it's really the majority of companies breaking the law who will be affected. Companies using permissible and licensed works will be fine. The other companies would finally have to buy large collections of content, too. Their billions will have go to something other than GPU's.
bilbo0s · 14m ago
I don't know?
Not really sure a claim is good enough. I don't know that you can just go into court and say, "Trust me, I don't use copyrighted material."
And I also can't see any way, other than providing training data and training an identically structured model on that data, that a company can conclusively show that they got the weights in an allegedly copyright free model from the copyright free training data a company provides.
317070 · 5m ago
I do hope people are still innocent until proven guilty?
If you did not use copyrighted materials for training, people will not be able to prove that you did, and that should be good enough.
hobs · 7m ago
Civil courts work by you proving damages (at least in the USA), not by you going on fishing expeditions because they "might" have done something.
So good luck finding the thing that looks exactly like your copyrighted work that's not in the corpus, if you can yeah, you might be able to prove it.
At the end of the day its like a lot of business, where a liability shell game is played out, and if the chain of evidence cant be drawn quite brightly then lawsuits would be frivolous at best.
giancarlostoro · 8m ago
I have a weird controversial view on this in terms of how to legally do it, and that is, for your 1 model, you should be only required to buy a digital copy of the work, maybe publishers should make digital copies that are tailored for LLMs to churn through, but then price it at a reasonable rate, and make the format basically perfect for LLMs.
Lerc · 33m ago
I'm not sure if Meta did anything illegal in 2. either.
I thought the copyright infringement was by the people who provided the copyrighted material when they did not have the rights to do so.
I may be wrong on this, but it would seem a reasonable protection for consumers in general. Meta is hardly an average consumer, but I doubt that matters in the case of the law. Having grounds to suspect that the provider did not have the rights might though.
CyberMacGyver · 15m ago
The source being illegal doesn’t make your use legal. Infact one could argue that it’s equally illegal or worse since a corporation knowingly engaged in illegal activity.
ndiddy · 1h ago
The title for this submission is somewhat misleading. The judge didn't make any sort of ruling, this is just reporting on a pretrial hearing. He also doesn't seem convinced as to how relevant downloading books from LibGen is to the case:
> At times, it sounded like the case was the authors’ to lose, with [Judge] Chhabria noting that Meta was “destined to fail” if the plaintiffs could prove that Meta’s tools created similar works that cratered how much money they could make from their work. But Chhabria also stressed that he was unconvinced the authors would be able to show the necessary evidence. When he turned to the authors’ legal team, led by high-profile attorney David Boies, Chhabria repeatedly asked whether the plaintiffs could actually substantiate accusations that Meta’s AI tools were likely to hurt their commercial prospects. “It seems like you’re asking me to speculate that the market for Sarah Silverman’s memoir will be affected,” he told Boies. “It’s not obvious to me that is the case.”
> When defendants invoke the fair use doctrine, the burden of proof shifts to them to demonstrate that their use of copyrighted works is legal. Boies stressed this point during the hearing, but Chhabria remained skeptical that the authors’ legal team would be able to successfully argue that Meta could plausibly crater their sales. He also appeared lukewarm about whether Meta’s decision to download books from places like LibGen was as central to the fair use issue as the plaintiffs argued it was. “It seems kind of messed up,” he said. “The question, as the courts tell us over and over again, is not whether something is messed up but whether it’s copyright infringement.”
bgwalter · 1h ago
The RIAA lawyers never had to demonstrate that copying a DVD cratered the sales of their clients. They just got high penalties for infringers almost by default.
Now that big capital wants to steal from individuals, big capital wins again.
(Unrelatedly, has Boies ever won a high profile lawsuit? I remember him from the Bush/Gore recount issue, where he represented the Democrats.)
Majromax · 15m ago
> The RIAA lawyers never had to demonstrate that copying a DVD cratered the sales of their clients. They just got high penalties for infringers almost by default.
The argument for 'fair use' in DVD copying/sharing is much weaker since the thing being shared in that case is a verbatim, digital copy of the work. 'Format shifting' is a tenuous argument, and it's pretty easily limited to making (and not distributing) personal copies of media.
For AI training, a central argument is that training is transformative. An LLM isn't intended to produce verbatim copies of trained-upon works, and the problem of hallucination means an LLM would be unreliable at doing so even if instructed to. That transformation could support the idea of fair use, even though copies of the data are made (internally) during the training process and the model's weights are in some sense a work 'derived' from the training data.
If you analogize to human leaning, then there's clearly no copyright infringement in a human learning from someone's work and creating their own output, even if it "copies" an artist's style or draws inspiration from someone's plot-line. However, it feels unseemly for a computer program to do this kind of thing at scale, and the commercial impact can be significantly greater.
999900000999 · 44m ago
Meta needs these books.
They seek to convert them into more products. The needs of the copyright holders , who are relatively small businesses and individuals are outweighed by the needs of Meta.
Sarah wanting to watch a movie or listen to music... Too bad she doesn't have an elite team of lawyers to justify whatever she wants.
In practice Meta has the money to stretch this out forever and at most pay inconsequential settlements.
YouTube largely did the same thing, knowingly violate copyright law, stack the deck with lawyers and fix it later.
anshumankmr · 1h ago
Interesting figure that guy.
Here's this:
>Boies also was on the Theranos board of directors,[2][74] raising questions about conflicts of interest.[75] Boies agreed to be paid for his firm's work in Theranos stock, which he expected to grow dramatically in value.[75][3]
He was also the primary villain of John Carreyrou's account of Theranos' rise and fall -- Bad Blood -- as his firm attempted to bully and hound whistleblowers, and intimidate their families with baseless legal threats. Not a very nice or ethical guy.
kranke155 · 1h ago
Copyright was invented (in its modern form) by corporations. It will be uninvented if need be for corporations.
morkalork · 2m ago
The golden rule strikes again!
Zambyte · 33m ago
I'm curious what you mean by "in it's modern form". You seem to suggest there was a previous form that was not invented by corporations, but I don't believe that is the case.
ryoshu · 29m ago
Copyright was first established by governments and the Church prior to the invention of corporations.
ImPostingOnHN · 50m ago
If I remember correctly the legal precedent from that era, and if I'm summarizing correctly: Those who served or uploaded were considered to be infringing, since they were "making copies" by serving or uploading, whereas those who downloaded infringing copies were not themselves infringers. Meta in this case is at least described by the latter, and the question is whether LLM generation constitutes the former.
fmblwntr · 55m ago
ironically, he was the head lawyer on the legal team for napster (obviously a huge loss) but it accords well with your theory
And this is how Chinese model will win in long term, perhaps... They will be trained on everything and anything without consequences and we will all use it because these models are smarter (except for area like Chinese history and geography). I don't have the right answer on what can be done here to protect copyright or rather contributing back to authors of a paper without all these millions dollar wasted in lawsuits.
ryandrake · 12m ago
AI hucksters vs. the Copyright Cartel. When two evil villains fight, who do you root for? Here's hoping they somehow destroy each other.
caminanteblanco · 8m ago
I feel like this submission does a disservice by changing the title from the article's. It is misleading, and implied that the judge has already given a ruling, when they have not.
TimPC · 2h ago
I think the headline is a bit misleading. Mets did pirate the works but may be entitled to use them under fair use. It seems like the authors are setting up for failure by making the case about whether the AI generation hinders the market for books. AI book writing is such a tiny segment what these models do that if needed Meta would simply introduce guard rails to prevent copying the style of an author and continue to ingest the books. I also don’t think AI generated fiction is anywhere near high quality enough to substantially reduce the market for the original author.
stego-tech · 1h ago
The problem is that "harm" as defined by copyright law is strictly limited to loss of sales due to breach of that copyright; it makes no allowment (that I know of) to livelihoods lost by the theft of the work indefinitely, as AI boosters suggest their tools can do (replace people). The way this court case is going, it's an uphill battle for the plaintiffs to prove concrete harm in that very narrow context, when the real harm is the potential elimination of their future livelihoods through theft, rather than immediately tangible harms.
As a (creative) friend of mine flatly said, they refuse to use an LLM until it can prove where it learned something from/cite its original source. Artists and creatives can cite their inspirational sources, while LLMs cannot (because their developers don't care about credit, only output) by design. To them, that's the line in the sand, and I think that's a reasonable one given that not a single creative in my circles has been cut payment from these multi-billion-dollar AI companies for the unauthorized use of their works in training these models.
lopis · 1h ago
> Artists and creatives can cite their inspirational sources
Even humans have a lot of internalized unconscious inspirational sources, but I get your point.
msabalau · 8m ago
AI Boosters can suggest whatever nonsense strikes their fancy, and creatives can give into fear for no reason, but the best estimates we have from the BLS is that the there are careers and ongoing demand for artists, writers, photographers.
Regardless, deep learning models are valuable because they generalize within the training data to uncover patterns and features and relationships that are implicit, rather (simply) present with the data. While they can return things that happen to be within the training set, there is no reason to believe that any particular output is literally found there or is something that could be attributable, or that a human would ever attribute. Human artists also make meaning from the broad texture of their life experiences and general diffuse unattributable experience of culture.
Sure, this is something a random artist is unlikely to know, but if they are simply refusing to pick up a useful tools that can't give credit--say avoiding LLMs for brainstorming, or generative selection tools for visual editing, or whatever, their particular careers will be harmed by their incurious sentimentality, and other human artists will thrive because they know that tools are just tools, and it is the humans using the tools that make meaning that people care about.
tedivm · 1h ago
Github does give free copilot access to open source developers it considers important enough (which is a pretty low bar). While not the same as actually paying, it's the only example I can think of where the company that used people's copyrighted material actually gave something back to those people.
bgwalter · 1h ago
They want to track and utilize the new code that those developers are writing. And they want to keep them on GitHub. And they want to claim in potential lawsuits:
"See, those developers themselves have used CoPilot, so they approve the copyright infringement."
_aavaa_ · 1h ago
What you’re describing is the Extend phase of Microsoft’s plan.
mistrial9 · 1h ago
the educated and erudite can wait in line near the Castle; every day due to the grace of our masters, unused bread from the master's table is available without prejudice. These people can have a fine life, and the people are fulfilled.
subscribed · 1h ago
Your friend might want to check Perplexity.
lopis · 1h ago
While Perplexity is able to show sources for the information it shows, the language part, and the body of text upon which it was trained, is a black box, and sources are not given, nor typically desirable as a user.
apercu · 1h ago
> but may be entitled to use them under fair use.
Why? Was it legal for me to download copyrighted songs from Limewire as "fair use"? Because a few people were made examples of.
I'm a musician, so 80% of the music I listen to is for learning so it's fair use, right? ;)
lukeschlather · 51m ago
I don't believe anyone was ever penalized for downloading only uploading which seems like a pretty similar principle to what the judge is saying here.
> I'm a musician, so 80% of the music I listen to is for learning so it's fair use, right? ;)
I would be happy with that outcome. I’m a fanfiction writer, and a lot of the stories I read are very much for learning. ;-)
BrawnyBadger53 · 50m ago
If the result of this becomes that substantial remixes and fanfiction can be commercialized without permission from authors then I am happy. This stuff should have been fair use to begin with. Granted it probably already is fair use but because of the way copyright is enforced online it is effectively banned regardless.
internetter · 1h ago
> Meta did pirate the works but may be entitled to use them under fair use
What fair use? Were the books promised to them by god or something?
TimPC · 1h ago
Fair use allows for certain uses of copyrighted works without a specific license for those works. One of the major criterion is how transformative the work is and an LLM model is very different from the original work so it seems likely that criterion at least is met.
SideburnsOfDoom · 1h ago
> an LLM model is very different from the original work
True, but not the only relevant thing.
If the output of the LLM is "not very different from the original work" then the output could be the infringement. Putting a hypercomplex black box between the source work and the plagiarised output does not in itself make it "not infringing". The "LLM output as a service" business is then based on selling something based other people's work, that they do not have rights to.
It's falling for misdirection, "pay no attention to the LLM behind the curtain" to think otherwise.
Filligree · 1h ago
The output of the LLM is very different from the original, though. It’s hard to look at this and claim it isn’t.
SideburnsOfDoom · 56m ago
> The output of the LLM is very different from the original, though
I will disagree with that characterisation. IMHO: In some cases no, it's not different, there are clear lines from inputs to output. In some cases yes, it's different from any one input work, it's distributed micro-plagiarism of a huge number of sources. In no case is it original.
But I think that this is legally undecided and won't be decided by you or me, and it is going to be a more interesting and relevant question than "is the LLM model is very like the original work", which it clearly isn't. That's like asking "is this typewriter like this novel?" It can't be, but the words that came out of it could be.
matkoniecz · 59m ago
"fair use" is a specific legal term
internetter · 30m ago
I'm aware. I was unsure what doctrine of fair use meta's behaviour could be defended as.
What am I, if not an LLM, ingesting copyrighted materials so that I may improve my own future outputs? Why is my own piracy not protected in the same manner?
onlyrealcuzzo · 18m ago
> I also don’t think AI generated fiction is anywhere near high quality enough to substantially reduce the market for the original author.
Legal cases are often based on BS, really an open form of extortion.
The plaintiffs might've been hoping for a settlement.
Meta could pay $xM+ to defend itself.
Maybe they thought Meta would be happy to pay them $yM to go away.
The reality is, there's very little Meta couldn't just find a freely available substitute for if it had to, it might just take a little more digging on their end.
The idea that any one individual or small group is so valuable that can hold back LLMs by themselves is ridiculous.
But you'll find no end to people vain enough to believe themselves that important.
aurizon · 57m ago
Yes, current AI video/text product is inferior at this time. Youtube is full of all genres of inferior products - at this time!
The ramp of improvement is quite steeply pointing upwards. This is retrospective of the days of spinning jennies and knitting/weaving machines that soon made manual products un-economic - that said, excellent craft/art product endured on a smaller scale.
AI is also taking a toll on the movie arts, staring at the low end and climbing the same incremental improvement rungs. All the special effects(SFX) are in a similar boat. Prop rentals are hit hard. 100 high res photos of an old Studio Tv camera - all angles/sizes/lighting can be added to an AI prop library and with a green screen insert the prop can manifest as a true object in any aspect. There can be many. It still takes people to cull the hallucinations - a declining problem. Same with actors. They can be patterned after a famous actor - with likeness fees, or created de-novo. All the classic aspects of a studio production suffer the same incremental marginalisation - in 5 years = what will remain? - what new tech will emerge?
I feel that many forks will emerge, all fighting for a place in the sun = some will be weeded out, some will flower - but at a very high pace.
The old producers/directors/writers - the whole panoply of what makes a major studio will be scattered like dried bread crumbs,
gabriel666smith · 1h ago
I think there's a really fundamental misunderstanding of the playing field in this case. (Disclaimer that my day job is 'author', and I'm pro-piracy.)
We need to frame this case - and ongoing artist-vs-AI-stuff -using a pseudoscience headline I saw recently: 'average person reads 60k words/day'.
I won't bother sourcing this, because I don't think it's true, but it illustrates the key point: consumers spend X amount of time/day reading words.
> It seems like the authors are setting up for failure by making the case about whether the AI generation hinders the market for books. AI book writing is such a tiny segment what these models do that if needed Meta would simply introduce guard rails to prevent copying the style of an author and continue to ingest the books.
and from the article:
> When he turned to the authors’ legal team, led by high-profile attorney David Boies, Chhabria repeatedly asked whether the plaintiffs could actually substantiate accusations that Meta’s AI tools were likely to hurt their commercial prospects. “It seems like you’re asking me to speculate that the market for Sarah Silverman’s memoir will be affected,” he told Boies. “It’s not obvious to me that is the case.”
The market share an author (or any other artist type) is competing with for Meta is not 'what if an AI wrote celebrity memoirs?'. Meta isn't about to start a print publishing division.
Authors are competing with Meta for 'whose words did you read today?' Were they exclusively Meta's - Instagram comments, Whatsapp group chat messages, Llama-generated slop, whatever - or did an author capture any of that share?
The current framing is obviously ludicrous; it also does the developers of LLMs (the most interesting literary invention since....how long ago?) a huge disservice.
Unfortunately the other way of framing it (the one I'm saying is correct) is (probably) impossible to measure (unless you work for Meta, maybe?) and, also, almost equally ridiculous.
SideburnsOfDoom · 1h ago
Firstly, no kidding, of course it's "illegal" and "Piracy".
Secondly, there's an argument that the infringement happens only when the LLM produces output based in part of whole on the source material.
In other words, training a model is not infringing in itself. You could "research" with it. But selling the output as "from your model" is highly suspect. Your business is then based on selling something based other people's work, that you do not have rights to.
kazinator · 1h ago
Do you not understand that "fair use" is not some copyright free-for-all which lets you use works wholesale without attribution as if they were suddenly public domain?
To make fair use of a book's passage, you have to cite it. The except has to be reasonably small.
Without fair use, it would not be possible to write essays and book reviews that give quotes from books. That's what it's for. Not for having a machine read the whole book so it can regurgitate mashups of any part of it without attribution.
Making a parody is a kind of fair use, but parodies are original expression based on a certain structure of the work.
danaris · 42m ago
> To make fair use of a book's passage, you have to cite it.
That's not true. That's what's required for something not to be plagiarism, not for something not to be copyright infringement.
Fair use is not at all the same as academic integrity, and while academic use is one of the fair use exceptions, it's only one. The most you would have to do with any of the other fair use exceptions is credit where you got the material (not cite individual passages), because you're not necessarily even using those passages verbatim.
labrador · 2h ago
"Chhabria is cutting through the moral noise and zeroing in on economics. He doesn't seem all that interested in how Meta got the data or how “messed up” it feels—he’s asking a brutally simple question: Can you prove harm?"
Where was this argument when Napster was being sued?
RajT88 · 1h ago
> “What about the next Taylor Swift?” he asked, arguing that a “relatively unknown artist” whose work was ingested by Meta would likely have their career hampered if the model produced “a billion pop songs” in their style.
I have this debate with a friend of mine. He's terrified of AI making all of our jobs obsolete. He's a brilliant musician and programmer both, so he's both enthused and scared. So let's go with the Swift example they use.
Performance Artists have always tried to cultivate an image, an ideal, a mythos around the character(s). I've observed that as the music biz has gotten more tough, that the practice of selling merch at shows has ramped up. Social media is monetized now. There's been a big diversification in the effort to make more money from everything surrounding the music itself. So too will it be with artists.
You're starting to see this already. Artists which got big not necessarily because of the music, but because of the weird cult of personality they built. One who comes to minds is Poppy, who ironically enough built a cult of personality around her being a fake AI bot...
You've definitely got counter-examples like Hatsune Miku - but the novelty of Miku was because of the artificiality (within a culture that, like, really loves robots and shit). AI pop stars will undoubtedly produce listenable records and make some money, but I don't expect that they will be able to replace the experience of fans looking for a connection with an artist. Watch the opening of a Taylor Swift concert, and you'll probably get it.
atrus · 1h ago
I think that argument is further hampered (taylor being an exception) by the fact that most pop stars already don't write their own songs. If people like Max Martin can pump out multiple hit songs for multiple groups, it kinda shows that who wrote the song doesn't matter.
Has making music for a living ever not been tough?
RajT88 · 1h ago
> Has making music for a living ever not been tough?
Fair.
> I think that argument is further hampered (taylor being an exception) by the fact that most pop stars already don't write their own songs.
That accounts for the big artists on the radio (yes some people listen to that). But, what about everyone else? I would posit that most artists (the one-hit wonders, the ones without radio success, etc.) write their own songs. It seems like there's such acts who make a go of it just fine, who write their own songs and really nail the connection with fans. I would point to a regional band near me: Mr. Blotto.
reverendsteveii · 49m ago
counterpoint: Gorillaz is a band specifically designed around the idea that the artist doesn't have to exist in order to do all of the things you mention above. Gorillaz has an image, a style, a mythos, all of that. Granted, when they started at the time (2000) there needed to be human creativity in order to create all of that but with AI everything about this can now be generated. I suspect it won't be long before all of our theorizing goes out the window because someone actually did create an act where everything, the music, the stage show, interviews, looks, all of it, is just AI-generated. That's when we'll get dollar votes on whether AI can actually generate a meaningful musical experience that people want to have.
RajT88 · 20m ago
Very relevant point. My own counter-example of Hatsune Miku is not totally AI generated - just generated using very sophisticated musical tools (see: Vocaloid).
There's some very impressive youtubers who are claiming to be generating new music with AI. The one I listen to the most I very much doubt has everything 100% generated - he probably generates a bunch of melodies and other bits of track and stiches the best candidates together. They do crank out a new album basically every 2 weeks though - and has just a scant few thousand followers. They are not making money, but the music is pretty on par with bands which sell hundreds of thousands or millions of albums.
This is part of what makes me think it's the people who can cultivate the mythos, the personality, the whole experience, who are going to be the big winners in the AI music economy. Sure, maybe Gorillaz obfuscates the identity of the artists (side note: do they though? it's well known to be a supergroup), but it still is a curated experience that human creativity was leveraged to create the whole experience.
adingus · 1h ago
I'm wondering if authors are making the same mistakes that the music industry did with Napster and kazaa. Using AI has led to more book purchases for me. If I discover and enjoy a book via AI I'm more inclined to buy it. The cats out of the bag, so pet him.
tacheiordache · 1h ago
Just look at the state of the music industry.
mtlynch · 58m ago
Can you share more about how you sample books with AI?
nickpsecurity · 1m ago
It can tell you about authors, books, useful techniques, etc. If it cites references, that can generate page views on their site ir sales. It can also replace that, though, with AI supplier benefiting commercially.
kazinator · 1h ago
The legal system is not going to be kind to the AI hucksters. Why? Because, quite stupidly and counterproductively, they have stepped on its toes by claiming that AI can replace lawyers. On top of that, there have been incidents of lawyers getting in hot water for generating slop instead of doing their work. So, this isn't just some distant, abstract tech issue for the lawyers and judges, like whether APIs should be copyrighted. If you're in any kind of business, you generally want these people to be on your side. Oopsies!
throwacct · 58m ago
Only Facebook?!!
steele · 1h ago
In a just world, this would shutter the organization.
Mbwagava · 1h ago
Whether or not Meta wins this case, I'm never going to support any government that supports both LLMs and IP. Like we have to put up with IP despite having no clear value to a digital society but as soon as it becomes inconvenient it goes out the window? Nah, let's just trash the state and start over.
It's going to take centuries to undo the damage wracked by IP-supported private enterprise. And now we also have to put up with fucking chatbots. This is the worst timeline.
labrador · 1h ago
I hope you don't think I'm snarky because I'm serious. If you're an American citizen you can homestead in Alaska and cut yourself off from all this if you like.
edit: i'm serious. many americans would be much happier taking this option if they knew it existed. i may take it myself
jMyles · 1h ago
The good news is that the internet is, fundamentally and in a way that no legacy state can alter, not a place where IP is cognizable.
You are free to copy bytes as you see fit, and the internet treats them identically whether they are random noise or whether a codec can turn them into music, film, books, or whatever inspires you.
The problem is that some humans, justifying their behavior by claiming it as "official", may act out with violence against you if they (rightly or wrongly, that's important to note) perceive that your actions are causing the internet to copy bytes to which they object.
Enduring nonviolence is likely yet ahead as consensus grows over the end of the legitimacy of these legacy states.
1. Training AI on freely available copyright - Ambiguous legality, not really tested in court. AI doesn't actually directly copy the material it trains on, so it's not easy to make this ruling.
2. Circumventing payment to obtain copyright material for training - Unambiguously illegal.
Meta is charged with doing the latter, but it seems the plaintiffs want to also tie in the former.
Of course it does. Large models are trained on gigantic clusters. How can you train without copying the material to machines in the cluster?
If I produce a terrible shakycam recording of a film while sitting in a movie theater, it's not a verbatim copy, nor is it even necessarily representative of the original work -- muddied audio, audience sounds, cropped screen, backs of heads -- and yet it would be considered copyright infringement?
How many times does one need to compress the JPEG before it's fair use? I'm legitimately curious what the test is here.
If we're going that way, let me torrent every movie and TV show ever to "train" myself.
What is inspiration? What is imitation? What is plagiarism? The lines aren't clearly drawn for humans... much less for LLMs.
I can absolutely guarantee you that neither DeepSeek nor Alibaba's highly talented Qwen group will care even a little bit, in the long run. Not if there's value to be had in AI. (And I can tell you down to the dollar what LLMs can save in certain business use cases.)
If the US decides to unilaterally shut down LLMs, that just means that the rest of the world will route around us.
https://273ventures.com/kl3m-the-first-legal-large-language-...
So, it's really the majority of companies breaking the law who will be affected. Companies using permissible and licensed works will be fine. The other companies would finally have to buy large collections of content, too. Their billions will have go to something other than GPU's.
Not really sure a claim is good enough. I don't know that you can just go into court and say, "Trust me, I don't use copyrighted material."
And I also can't see any way, other than providing training data and training an identically structured model on that data, that a company can conclusively show that they got the weights in an allegedly copyright free model from the copyright free training data a company provides.
If you did not use copyrighted materials for training, people will not be able to prove that you did, and that should be good enough.
So good luck finding the thing that looks exactly like your copyrighted work that's not in the corpus, if you can yeah, you might be able to prove it.
At the end of the day its like a lot of business, where a liability shell game is played out, and if the chain of evidence cant be drawn quite brightly then lawsuits would be frivolous at best.
I thought the copyright infringement was by the people who provided the copyrighted material when they did not have the rights to do so.
I may be wrong on this, but it would seem a reasonable protection for consumers in general. Meta is hardly an average consumer, but I doubt that matters in the case of the law. Having grounds to suspect that the provider did not have the rights might though.
> At times, it sounded like the case was the authors’ to lose, with [Judge] Chhabria noting that Meta was “destined to fail” if the plaintiffs could prove that Meta’s tools created similar works that cratered how much money they could make from their work. But Chhabria also stressed that he was unconvinced the authors would be able to show the necessary evidence. When he turned to the authors’ legal team, led by high-profile attorney David Boies, Chhabria repeatedly asked whether the plaintiffs could actually substantiate accusations that Meta’s AI tools were likely to hurt their commercial prospects. “It seems like you’re asking me to speculate that the market for Sarah Silverman’s memoir will be affected,” he told Boies. “It’s not obvious to me that is the case.”
> When defendants invoke the fair use doctrine, the burden of proof shifts to them to demonstrate that their use of copyrighted works is legal. Boies stressed this point during the hearing, but Chhabria remained skeptical that the authors’ legal team would be able to successfully argue that Meta could plausibly crater their sales. He also appeared lukewarm about whether Meta’s decision to download books from places like LibGen was as central to the fair use issue as the plaintiffs argued it was. “It seems kind of messed up,” he said. “The question, as the courts tell us over and over again, is not whether something is messed up but whether it’s copyright infringement.”
Now that big capital wants to steal from individuals, big capital wins again.
(Unrelatedly, has Boies ever won a high profile lawsuit? I remember him from the Bush/Gore recount issue, where he represented the Democrats.)
The argument for 'fair use' in DVD copying/sharing is much weaker since the thing being shared in that case is a verbatim, digital copy of the work. 'Format shifting' is a tenuous argument, and it's pretty easily limited to making (and not distributing) personal copies of media.
For AI training, a central argument is that training is transformative. An LLM isn't intended to produce verbatim copies of trained-upon works, and the problem of hallucination means an LLM would be unreliable at doing so even if instructed to. That transformation could support the idea of fair use, even though copies of the data are made (internally) during the training process and the model's weights are in some sense a work 'derived' from the training data.
If you analogize to human leaning, then there's clearly no copyright infringement in a human learning from someone's work and creating their own output, even if it "copies" an artist's style or draws inspiration from someone's plot-line. However, it feels unseemly for a computer program to do this kind of thing at scale, and the commercial impact can be significantly greater.
They seek to convert them into more products. The needs of the copyright holders , who are relatively small businesses and individuals are outweighed by the needs of Meta.
Sarah wanting to watch a movie or listen to music... Too bad she doesn't have an elite team of lawyers to justify whatever she wants.
In practice Meta has the money to stretch this out forever and at most pay inconsequential settlements.
YouTube largely did the same thing, knowingly violate copyright law, stack the deck with lawyers and fix it later.
Here's this: >Boies also was on the Theranos board of directors,[2][74] raising questions about conflicts of interest.[75] Boies agreed to be paid for his firm's work in Theranos stock, which he expected to grow dramatically in value.[75][3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Boies
That was one of the decisions of all time.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(19...
As a (creative) friend of mine flatly said, they refuse to use an LLM until it can prove where it learned something from/cite its original source. Artists and creatives can cite their inspirational sources, while LLMs cannot (because their developers don't care about credit, only output) by design. To them, that's the line in the sand, and I think that's a reasonable one given that not a single creative in my circles has been cut payment from these multi-billion-dollar AI companies for the unauthorized use of their works in training these models.
Even humans have a lot of internalized unconscious inspirational sources, but I get your point.
Regardless, deep learning models are valuable because they generalize within the training data to uncover patterns and features and relationships that are implicit, rather (simply) present with the data. While they can return things that happen to be within the training set, there is no reason to believe that any particular output is literally found there or is something that could be attributable, or that a human would ever attribute. Human artists also make meaning from the broad texture of their life experiences and general diffuse unattributable experience of culture.
Sure, this is something a random artist is unlikely to know, but if they are simply refusing to pick up a useful tools that can't give credit--say avoiding LLMs for brainstorming, or generative selection tools for visual editing, or whatever, their particular careers will be harmed by their incurious sentimentality, and other human artists will thrive because they know that tools are just tools, and it is the humans using the tools that make meaning that people care about.
"See, those developers themselves have used CoPilot, so they approve the copyright infringement."
Why? Was it legal for me to download copyrighted songs from Limewire as "fair use"? Because a few people were made examples of.
I'm a musician, so 80% of the music I listen to is for learning so it's fair use, right? ;)
[0] https://torrentfreak.com/meta-says-it-made-sure-not-to-seed-...
I would be happy with that outcome. I’m a fanfiction writer, and a lot of the stories I read are very much for learning. ;-)
What fair use? Were the books promised to them by god or something?
True, but not the only relevant thing.
If the output of the LLM is "not very different from the original work" then the output could be the infringement. Putting a hypercomplex black box between the source work and the plagiarised output does not in itself make it "not infringing". The "LLM output as a service" business is then based on selling something based other people's work, that they do not have rights to.
It's falling for misdirection, "pay no attention to the LLM behind the curtain" to think otherwise.
I will disagree with that characterisation. IMHO: In some cases no, it's not different, there are clear lines from inputs to output. In some cases yes, it's different from any one input work, it's distributed micro-plagiarism of a huge number of sources. In no case is it original.
But I think that this is legally undecided and won't be decided by you or me, and it is going to be a more interesting and relevant question than "is the LLM model is very like the original work", which it clearly isn't. That's like asking "is this typewriter like this novel?" It can't be, but the words that came out of it could be.
What am I, if not an LLM, ingesting copyrighted materials so that I may improve my own future outputs? Why is my own piracy not protected in the same manner?
Legal cases are often based on BS, really an open form of extortion.
The plaintiffs might've been hoping for a settlement.
Meta could pay $xM+ to defend itself.
Maybe they thought Meta would be happy to pay them $yM to go away.
The reality is, there's very little Meta couldn't just find a freely available substitute for if it had to, it might just take a little more digging on their end.
The idea that any one individual or small group is so valuable that can hold back LLMs by themselves is ridiculous.
But you'll find no end to people vain enough to believe themselves that important.
We need to frame this case - and ongoing artist-vs-AI-stuff -using a pseudoscience headline I saw recently: 'average person reads 60k words/day'.
I won't bother sourcing this, because I don't think it's true, but it illustrates the key point: consumers spend X amount of time/day reading words.
> It seems like the authors are setting up for failure by making the case about whether the AI generation hinders the market for books. AI book writing is such a tiny segment what these models do that if needed Meta would simply introduce guard rails to prevent copying the style of an author and continue to ingest the books.
and from the article:
> When he turned to the authors’ legal team, led by high-profile attorney David Boies, Chhabria repeatedly asked whether the plaintiffs could actually substantiate accusations that Meta’s AI tools were likely to hurt their commercial prospects. “It seems like you’re asking me to speculate that the market for Sarah Silverman’s memoir will be affected,” he told Boies. “It’s not obvious to me that is the case.”
The market share an author (or any other artist type) is competing with for Meta is not 'what if an AI wrote celebrity memoirs?'. Meta isn't about to start a print publishing division.
Authors are competing with Meta for 'whose words did you read today?' Were they exclusively Meta's - Instagram comments, Whatsapp group chat messages, Llama-generated slop, whatever - or did an author capture any of that share?
The current framing is obviously ludicrous; it also does the developers of LLMs (the most interesting literary invention since....how long ago?) a huge disservice.
Unfortunately the other way of framing it (the one I'm saying is correct) is (probably) impossible to measure (unless you work for Meta, maybe?) and, also, almost equally ridiculous.
Secondly, there's an argument that the infringement happens only when the LLM produces output based in part of whole on the source material.
In other words, training a model is not infringing in itself. You could "research" with it. But selling the output as "from your model" is highly suspect. Your business is then based on selling something based other people's work, that you do not have rights to.
To make fair use of a book's passage, you have to cite it. The except has to be reasonably small.
Without fair use, it would not be possible to write essays and book reviews that give quotes from books. That's what it's for. Not for having a machine read the whole book so it can regurgitate mashups of any part of it without attribution.
Making a parody is a kind of fair use, but parodies are original expression based on a certain structure of the work.
That's not true. That's what's required for something not to be plagiarism, not for something not to be copyright infringement.
Fair use is not at all the same as academic integrity, and while academic use is one of the fair use exceptions, it's only one. The most you would have to do with any of the other fair use exceptions is credit where you got the material (not cite individual passages), because you're not necessarily even using those passages verbatim.
https://archive.is/Hg4Xr
Where was this argument when Napster was being sued?
I have this debate with a friend of mine. He's terrified of AI making all of our jobs obsolete. He's a brilliant musician and programmer both, so he's both enthused and scared. So let's go with the Swift example they use.
Performance Artists have always tried to cultivate an image, an ideal, a mythos around the character(s). I've observed that as the music biz has gotten more tough, that the practice of selling merch at shows has ramped up. Social media is monetized now. There's been a big diversification in the effort to make more money from everything surrounding the music itself. So too will it be with artists.
You're starting to see this already. Artists which got big not necessarily because of the music, but because of the weird cult of personality they built. One who comes to minds is Poppy, who ironically enough built a cult of personality around her being a fake AI bot...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppy_(singer)
You've definitely got counter-examples like Hatsune Miku - but the novelty of Miku was because of the artificiality (within a culture that, like, really loves robots and shit). AI pop stars will undoubtedly produce listenable records and make some money, but I don't expect that they will be able to replace the experience of fans looking for a connection with an artist. Watch the opening of a Taylor Swift concert, and you'll probably get it.
Has making music for a living ever not been tough?
Fair.
> I think that argument is further hampered (taylor being an exception) by the fact that most pop stars already don't write their own songs.
That accounts for the big artists on the radio (yes some people listen to that). But, what about everyone else? I would posit that most artists (the one-hit wonders, the ones without radio success, etc.) write their own songs. It seems like there's such acts who make a go of it just fine, who write their own songs and really nail the connection with fans. I would point to a regional band near me: Mr. Blotto.
There's some very impressive youtubers who are claiming to be generating new music with AI. The one I listen to the most I very much doubt has everything 100% generated - he probably generates a bunch of melodies and other bits of track and stiches the best candidates together. They do crank out a new album basically every 2 weeks though - and has just a scant few thousand followers. They are not making money, but the music is pretty on par with bands which sell hundreds of thousands or millions of albums.
This is part of what makes me think it's the people who can cultivate the mythos, the personality, the whole experience, who are going to be the big winners in the AI music economy. Sure, maybe Gorillaz obfuscates the identity of the artists (side note: do they though? it's well known to be a supergroup), but it still is a curated experience that human creativity was leveraged to create the whole experience.
It's going to take centuries to undo the damage wracked by IP-supported private enterprise. And now we also have to put up with fucking chatbots. This is the worst timeline.
edit: i'm serious. many americans would be much happier taking this option if they knew it existed. i may take it myself
You are free to copy bytes as you see fit, and the internet treats them identically whether they are random noise or whether a codec can turn them into music, film, books, or whatever inspires you.
The problem is that some humans, justifying their behavior by claiming it as "official", may act out with violence against you if they (rightly or wrongly, that's important to note) perceive that your actions are causing the internet to copy bytes to which they object.
Enduring nonviolence is likely yet ahead as consensus grows over the end of the legitimacy of these legacy states.