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.
Ah the old “owe $100 and the bank owns you; owe $100,000,000 and you own the bank” defense.
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.
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.
You're poor? Fuck you you have to pay to breathe.
Millionaire? Whatever you want daddy uwu
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. 😄
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.
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.”
So I can't use any of these works because it's plagiarism but AI can?
My interpretation was that AI companies can train on material they are licensed to use, but the courts have deemed that Anthropic pirated this material as they were not licensed to use it.
In other words, if Anthropic bought the physical or digital books, it would be fine so long as their AI couldn't spit it out verbatim, but they didn't even do that, i.e. the AI crawler pirated the book.
Does buying the book give you license to digitise it?
Does owning a digital copy of the book give you license to convert it into another format and copy it into a database?
Definitions of "Ownership" can be very different.
It seems like a lot of people misunderstand copyright so let's be clear: the answer is yes. You can absolutely digitize your books. You can rip your movies and store them on a home server and run them through compression algorithms.
Copyright exists to prevent others from redistributing your work so as long as you're doing all of that for personal use, the copyright owner has no say over what you do with it.
You even have some degree of latitude to create and distribute transformative works with a violation only occurring when you distribute something pretty damn close to a copy of the original. Some perfectly legal examples: create a word cloud of a book, analyze the tone of news article to help you trade stocks, produce an image containing the most prominent color in every frame of a movie, or create a search index of the words found on all websites on the internet.
You can absolutely do the same kinds of things an AI does with a work as a human.
Does buying the book give you license to digitise it?
Does owning a digital copy of the book give you license to convert it into another format and copy it into a database?
Yes. That's what the court ruled here. If you legally obtain a printed copy of a book you are free to digitize it or archive it for yourself. And you're allowed to keep that digital copy, analyze and index it and search it, in your personal library.
Anthropic's practice of buying physical books, removing the bindings, scanning the pages, and digitizing the content while destroying the physical book was found to be legal, so long as Anthropic didn't distribute that library outside of its own company.
You can digitize the books you own. You do not need a license for that. And of course you could put that digital format into a database. As databases are explicit exceptions from copyright law. If you want to go to the extreme: delete first copy. Then you have only in the database. However: AIs/LLMs are not based on data bases. But on neural networks. The original data gets lost when "learned".
If you want to go to the extreme: delete first copy.
You can; as I understand it, the only legal requirement is that you only use one copy at a time.
ie. I can give my book to a friend after I'm done reading it; I can make a copy of a book and keep them at home and at the office and switch off between reading them; I'm not allowed to make a copy of the book hand one to a friend and then both of us read it at the same time.
That sounds a lot like library ebook renting. Makes sense to me. Ty
That's not what it says.
Neither you nor an AI is allowed to take a book without authorization; that includes downloading and stealing it. That has nothing to do with plagiarism; it's just theft.
Assuming that the book has been legally obtained, both you and an AI are allowed to read that book, learn from it, and use the knowledge you obtained.
Both you and the AI need to follow existing copyright laws and licensing when it comes to redistributing that work.
"Plagiarism" is the act of claiming someone else's work as your own and it's orthogonal to the use of AI. If you ask either a human or an AI to produce an essay on the philosophy surrounding suicide, you're fairly likely to include some Shakespeare quotes. It's only plagiarism if you or the AI fail to provide attribution.
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?
Billions of dollars, and they can't afford to buy ebooks?
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.
I joined lemmy specifically to avoid this reddit mindset of jumping to conclusions after reading a headline
Guess some things never change...
Well to be honest lemmy is less prone to knee-jerk reactionary discussion but on a handful of topics it is virtually guaranteed to happen no matter what, even here. For example, this entire site, besides a handful of communities, is vigorously anti-AI; and in the words of u/jsomae@lemmy.ml elsewhere in this comment chain:
"It seems the subject of AI causes lemmites to lose all their braincells."
I think there is definitely an interesting take on the sociology of the digital age in here somewhere but it's too early in the morning to be tapping something like that out lol
brb, training a 1-layer neural net so i can ask it to play Pixar films
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 ?
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.
Judges: not learning a goddamned thing about computers in 40 years.
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.
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.
I would actually be okay with libraries having those AI services. Even if they were available only for a fee it would be absurdly low and still waived for people with low or no income.
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
What a bad judge.
This is another indication of how Copyright laws are bad. The whole premise of copyright has been obsolete since the proliferation of the internet.
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)
i will train my jailbroken kindle too...display and storage training... i'll just libgen them...no worries...it is not piracy
calm down everyone. its only legal for parasitic mega corps, the normal working people will be harassed to suicide same as before.
its only a crime if the victims was rich or perpetrator was not rich.
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.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
