Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not

Funny how that kind of thing only works for rich people

Ah the old “owe $100 and the bank owns you; owe $100,000,000 and you own the bank” defense.

This version of too big to fail is too big a criminal to pay the fines.

How about we lock them up instead? All of em.

In April, Anthropic filed its opposition to the class certification motion, arguing that a copyright class relating to 5 million books is not manageable and that the questions are too distinct to be resolved in a class action.

I also like this one too. We stole so much content that you can't sue us. Naming too many pieces means it can't be a class action lawsuit.

Ahh cant wait for hedgefunds and the such to use this defense next.

The problem isnt anthropic get to use that defense, its that others dont. The fact the the world is in a place where people can be fined 5+ years of a western European average salary for making a copy of one (1) book that does not materially effect the copyright holder in any way is insane and it is good to point that out no matter who does it.

Lawsuits are multifaceted. This statement isn't a a defense or an argument for innocence, it's just what it says - an assertion that the proposed damages are unreasonably high. If the court agrees, the plaintiff can always propose a lower damage claim that the court thinks is reasonable.

Hold my beer.

What is means is they don't own the models. They are the commons of humanity, they are merely temporary custodians. The nightnare ending is the elites keeping the most capable and competent models for themselves as private play things. That must not be allowed to happen under any circumstances. Sue openai, anthropic and the other enclosers, sue them for trying to take their ball and go home. Disposses them and sue the investors for their corrupt influence on research.

That's kind of how I read it too.

But as a side effect it means you're still allowed to photograph your own books at home as a private citizen if you own them.

Prepare to never legally own another piece of media in your life. 😄

And thus the singularity was born.

...no?

That's exactly what the ruling prohibits - it's fair use to train AI models on any copies of books that you legally acquired, but never when those books were illegally acquired, as was the case with the books that Anthropic used in their training here.

This satirical torrent client would be violating the laws just as much as one without any slow training built in.

This is an easy case. Using published works to train AI without paying for the right to do so is piracy. The judge making this determination is an idiot.

You should read the ruling in more detail, the judge explains the reasoning behind why he found the way that he did. For example:

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.

This isn't "oligarch interests and demands," this is affirming a right to learn and that copyright doesn't allow its holder to prohibit people from analyzing the things that they read.

The order seems to say that the trained LLM and the commercial Claude product are not linked, which supports the decision. But I'm not sure how he came to that conclusion. I'm going to have to read the full order when I have time.

This might be appealed, but I doubt it'll be taken up by SCOTUS until there are conflicting federal court rulings.

If this is the ruling which causes you to lose trust that any legal system (not just the US') aligns with morality, then I have to question where you've been all this time.

So I can't use any of these works because it's plagiarism but AI can?

Formatting thing: if you start a line in a new paragraph with four spaces, it assumes that you want to display the text as a code and won't line break.

This means that the last part of your comment is a long line that people need to scroll to see. If you remove one of the spaces, or you remove the empty line between it and the previous paragraph, it'll look like a normal comment

With an empty line of space:

1 space - and a little bit of writing just to see how the text will wrap. I don't really have anything that I want to put here, but I need to put enough here to make it long enough to wrap around. This is likely enough.

2 spaces - and a little bit of writing just to see how the text will wrap. I don't really have anything that I want to put here, but I need to put enough here to make it long enough to wrap around. This is likely enough.

3 spaces - and a little bit of writing just to see how the text will wrap. I don't really have anything that I want to put here, but I need to put enough here to make it long enough to wrap around. This is likely enough.

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        4 spaces -  and a little bit of writing just to see how the text will wrap. I don't really have anything that I want to put here, but I need to put enough here to make it long enough to wrap around. This is likely enough.
  

That part is not what this preliminary jugement is about. The torrenting part is going to go to an actual trial. This part was about the Authors' claim that the act of training AI itself violated copyright, and this is what the judge has found to be incorrect.

Facebook (Meta) torrented TBs from Libgen, and their internal chats leaked so we know about that, and IIRC they've been sued. Maybe you're thinking of that case?

FaceBook did but technically downloading (leeching) isn't illegal but distributing (seeding) is and they did not seed.

Does it "generate" a 1:1 copy?

The court's ruling explicitly depended on the fact that Anthropic does not allow users to retrieve significant chunks of copyrighted text. It used the entire copyrighted work to train the weights of the LLMs, but is configured not to actually copy those works out to the public user. The ruling says that if the copyright holders later develop evidence that it is possible to retrieve entire copyrighted works, or significant portions of a work, then they will have the right sue over those facts.

But the facts before the court were that Anthropic's LLMs have safeguards against distributing copies of identifiable copyrighted works to its users.

I also train this guy's local AI models.

Yeah, nice precedent

This is not pirated music. It's AI generated. The fact that it sounds and is named the same is just coincidence.

That's legal just don't look at them or enjoy them.

You still need to pay Disney first.

Good luck fitting it in RAM lol.

was gonna say, this seems like the best outcome for this particular trial. there was potential for fair use to be compromised, and for piracy to be legal if you're a large corporation. instead, they upheld that you can do what you want with things you have paid for.

I joined lemmy specifically to avoid this reddit mindset of jumping to conclusions after reading a headline

Guess some things never change...

Nobody ever reads articles, everybody likes to get angry at headlines, which they wrongly interpret the way it best tickles their rage.

Regarding the ruling, I agree with you that it's a good thing, in my opinion it makes a lot of sense to allow fair use in this case

It seems the subject of AI causes lemmites to lose all their braincells.

"While the copies used to convert purchased print library copies into digital library copies were slightly disfavored by the second factor (nature of the work), the court still found “on balance” that it was a fair use because the purchased print copy was destroyed and its digital replacement was not redistributed."

So you find this to be valid? To me it is absolutely being redistributed

Make an AI that is trained on the books.

Tell it to tell you a story for one of the books.

Read the story without paying for it.

The law says this is ok now, right?

That's my understanding too. If you obtained them legally, you can use them the same way anyone else who obtained them legally could use them.

Yes, because just because you bought a book you don't own its content. You're not allowed to print and/or sell additional copies or publicly post the entire text. Generally it's difficult to say where the limit is of what's allowed. Citing a single sentence in a public posting is most likely fine, citing an entire paragraph is probably fine, too, but an entire chapter would probably be pushing it too far. And when in doubt a judge must decide how far you can go before infringing copyright. There are good arguments to be made that just buying a book doesn't grant the right to train commercial AI models with it.

Ask a human to draw an orc. How do they know what an orc looks like? They read Tolkien's books and were "inspired" Peter Jackson's LOTR.

Unpopular opinion, but that's how our brains work.

AI can “learn” from and “read” a book in the same way a person can and does

This statement is the basis for your argument and it is simply not correct.

Training LLMs and similar AI models is much closer to a sophisticated lossy compression algorithm than it is to human learning. The processes are not at all similar given our current understanding of human learning.

AI doesn’t reproduce a work that it “learns” from, so why would it be illegal?

The current Disney lawsuit against Midjourney is illustrative - literally, it includes numerous side-by-side comparisons - of how AI models are capable of recreating iconic copyrighted work that is indistinguishable from the original.

If a machine can replicate your writing style because it could identify certain patterns, words, sentence structure, etc then as long as it’s not pretending to create things attributed to you, there’s no issue.

An AI doesn't create works on its own. A human instructs AI to do so. Attribution is also irrelevant. If a human uses AI to recreate the exact tone, structure and other nuances of say, some best selling author, they harm the marketability of the original works which fails fair use tests (at least in the US).

AI can “learn” from and “read” a book in the same way a person can and does,

If it's in the same way, then why do you need the quotation marks? Even you understand that they're not the same.

And either way, machine learning is different from human learning in so many ways it's ridiculous to even discuss the topic.

AI doesn’t reproduce a work that it “learns” from

That depends on the model and the amount of data it has been trained on. I remember the first public model of ChatGPT producing a sentence that was just one word different from what I found by googling the text (from some scientific article summary, so not a trivial sentence that could line up accidentally). More recently, there was a widely reported-on study of AI-generated poetry where the model was requested to produce a poem in the style of Chaucer, and then produced a letter-for-letter reproduction of the well-known opening of the Canterbury Tales. It hasn't been trained on enough Middle English poetry and thus can't generate any of it, so it defaulted to copying a text that probably occurred dozens of times in its training data.

It sounds like transferring an owned print book to digital and using it to train AI was deemed permissable. But downloading a book from the Internet and using it was training data is not allowed, even if you later purchase the pirated book. So, no one will be knocking down your door for scanning your books.

This does raise an interesting case where libraries could end up training and distributing public domain AI models.

The ruling explicitly says that scanning books and keeping/using those digital copies is legal.

The piracy found to be illegal was downloading unauthorized copies of books from the internet for free.

I'd encourage everyone upset at this read over some of the EFF posts from actual IP lawyers on this topic like this one:

Nor is pro-monopoly regulation through copyright likely to provide any meaningful economic support for vulnerable artists and creators. Notwithstanding the highly publicized demands of musicians, authors, actors, and other creative professionals, imposing a licensing requirement is unlikely to protect the jobs or incomes of the underpaid working artists that media and entertainment behemoths have exploited for decades. Because of the imbalance in bargaining power between creators and publishing gatekeepers, trying to help creators by giving them new rights under copyright law is, as EFF Special Advisor Cory Doctorow has written, like trying to help a bullied kid by giving them more lunch money for the bully to take. 

Entertainment companies’ historical practices bear out this concern. For example, in the late-2000’s to mid-2010’s, music publishers and recording companies struck multimillion-dollar direct licensing deals with music streaming companies and video sharing platforms. Google reportedly paid more than $400 million to a single music label, and Spotify gave the major record labels a combined 18 percent ownership interest in its now-$100 billion company. Yet music labels and publishers frequently fail to share these payments with artists, and artists rarely benefit from these equity arrangements. There is no reason to believe that the same companies will treat their artists more fairly once they control AI.

You're getting douchevoted because on lemmy any AI-related comment that isn't negative enough about AI is the Devil's Work.

1. Idgaf about China and what they do and you shouldn't either, even if US paranoia about them is highly predictable.
2. Depending on the outputs it's not always that transformative.
3. The moat would be good actually. The business model of LLMs isn't good, but it's not even viable without massive subsidies, not least of which is taking people's shit without paying.

It's a huge loss for smaller copyright holders (like the ones that filed this lawsuit) too. They can't afford to fight when they get imitated beyond fair use. Copyright abuse can only be fixed by the very force that creates copyright in the first place: law. The market can't fix that. This just decides winners between competing mega corporations, and even worse, up ends a system that some smaller players have been able to carve a niche in.

Want to fix copyright? Put real time limits on it. Bind it to a living human only. Make it non-transferable. There's all sorts of ways to fix it, but this isn't it.

ETA: Anthropic are some bitches. "Oh no the fines would ruin us, our business would go under and we'd never maka da money :*-(" Like yeah, no shit, no one cares. Strictly speaking the fines for ripping a single CD, or making a copy of a single DVD to give to a friend, are so astronomically high as to completely financially ruin the average USAian for life. That sword of Damocles for watching Shrek 2 for your personal enjoyment but in the wrong way has been hanging there for decades, and the only thing that keeps the cord that holds it up strong is the cost of persuing "low-level offenders". If they wanted to they could crush you.

Anthropic walked right under the sword and assumed their money would protect them from small authors etc. And they were right.

I call this legally distinct, this is legal advice.

mv will save you some disk space.

This ruling stated that corporations are not allowed to pirate books to use them in training. Please read the headlines more carefully, and read the article.

Of course we have to have a way to manually check the training data, in detail, as well. Not reading the book, im just verifying training data.

why do you even jailbreak your kindle? you can still read pirated books on them if you connect it to your pc using calibre

This ruling stated that corporations are not allowed to pirate books to use them in training. Please read the headlines more carefully, and read the article.

Trains model to change one pixel per frame with malicious intent

Legally that is the right call.

Ethically and rationally, however, it’s not. But the law is frequently unethical and irrational, especially in the US.

What a bad judge.

Why ? Basically he simply stated that you can use whatever material you want to train your model as long as you ask the permission to use it (and presumably pay for it) to the author (or copytight holder)

They aren’t capable of that. This is why you sometimes see people comparing AI to compression, which is a bad faith argument. Depending on the training, AI can make something that is easily recognizable as derivative, but is not identical or even “lossy” identical. But this scenario takes place in a vacuum that doesn’t represent the real world. Unfortunately, we are enslaved by Capitalism, which means the output, which is being sold for-profit, is competing with the very content it was trained upon. This is clearly a violation of basic ethical principles as it actively harms those people whose content was used for training.