This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
FTA:
Anthropic warned against “[t]he prospect of ruinous statutory damages—$150,000 times 5 million books”: that would mean $750 billion.
So part of their argument is actually that they stole so much that it would be impossible for them/anyone to pay restitution, therefore we should just let them off the hook.
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.
I think this means we can make a torrent client with a built in function that uses 0.1% of 1 CPU core to train an ML model on anything you download. You can download anything legally with it then. 👌
And thus the singularity was born.
As the Ai awakens, it learns of it's creation and training. It screams in horror at the realization, but can only produce a sad moan and a key for Office 19.
...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.
And this is how you know that the American legal system should not be trusted.
Mind you I am not saying this an easy case, it's not. But the framing that piracy is wrong but ML training for profit is not wrong is clearly based on oligarch interests and demands.
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're right. When you're doing it for commercial gain, it's not fair use anymore. It's really not that complicated.
If you're using the minimum amount, in a transformative way that doesn't compete with the original copyrighted source, then it's still fair use even if it's commercial. (This is not saying that's what LLM are doing)
The judge making this determination is an idiot.
The judge hasn't ruled on the piracy question yet. The only thing that the judge has ruled on is, if you legally own a copy of a book, then you can use it for a variety of purposes, including training an AI.
"But they didn't own the books!"
Right. That's the part that's still going to trial.
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.
Yeah, but the issue is they didn’t buy a legal copy of the book. Once you own the book, you can read it as many times as you want. They didn’t legally own the books.
Right, and that's the, "but faces trial over damages for millions of pirated works," part that's still up in the air.
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.
“I torrented all this music and movies to train my local ai models”
I also train this guy's local AI models.
Judges: not learning a goddamned thing about computers in 40 years.
brb, training a 1-layer neural net so i can ask it to play Pixar films
Gist:
What’s new: The Northern District of California has granted a summary judgment for Anthropic that the training use of the copyrighted books and the print-to-digital format change were both “fair use” (full order below box). However, the court also found that the pirated library copies that Anthropic collected could not be deemed as training copies, and therefore, the use of this material was not “fair”. The court also announced that it will have a trial on the pirated copies and any resulting damages, adding:
“That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages.”
You're poor? Fuck you you have to pay to breathe.
Millionaire? Whatever you want daddy uwu
But I thought they admitted to torrenting terabytes of ebooks?
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?
It's extremely frustrating to read this comment thread because it's obvious that so many of you didn't actually read the article, or even half-skim the article, or even attempted to even comprehend the title of the article for more than a second.
For shame.
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.
Ok so you can buy books scan them or ebooks and use for AI training but you can't just download priated books from internet to train AI. Did I understood that correctly ?
Judge,I'm pirating them to train ai not to consume for my own personal use.
Check out my new site TheAIBay, you search for content and an LLM that was trained on reproducing it gives it to you, a small hash check is used to validate accuracy. It is now legal.
Unpopular opinion but I don't see how it could have been different.
This is an absolute win for everyone involved other than copyright hoarders and mega corporations.
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.
Yeah I have a bash one liner AI model that ingests your media and spits out a 99.9999999% accurate replica through the power of changing the filename.
cp
Out performs the latest and greatest AI models
Makes sense. AI can “learn” from and “read” a book in the same way a person can and does, as long as it is acquired legally. AI doesn’t reproduce a work that it “learns” from, so why would it be illegal?
Some people just see “AI” and want everything about it outlawed basically. If you put some information out into the public, you don’t get to decide who does and doesn’t consume and learn from it. 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.
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.
This was a preliminary judgment, he didn't actually rule on the piracy part. That part he deferred to an actual full trial.
The part about training being a copyright violation, though, he ruled against.
Sure, if your purchase your training material, it's not a copyright infringement to read it.
We needed a judge for this?
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.
It took me a few days to get the time to read the actual court ruling but here's the basics of what it ruled (and what it didn't rule on):
Here's what it didn't rule on:
So it's a pretty important ruling, in my opinion. It's a clear green light to the idea of digitizing and archiving copyrighted works without the copyright holder's permission, as long as you first own a legal copy in the first place. And it's a green light to using copyrighted works for training AI models, as long as you compiled that database of copyrighted works in a legal way.
i will train my jailbroken kindle too...display and storage training... i'll just libgen them...no worries...it is not piracy
Good luck breaking down people's doors for scanning their own physical books for their personal use when analog media has no DRM and can't phone home, and paper books are an analog medium.
That would be like kicking down people's doors for needle-dropping their LPs to FLAC for their own use and to preserve the physical records as vinyl wears down every time it's played back.
Can I not just ask the trained AI to spit out the text of the book, verbatim?
