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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

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.

Lerc 2y 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 2y 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.
  - Lerc 2y ago
    Well obviously, but the converse is also true. The source being illegal doesn't make your use illegal. In the eyes of the law it doesn't matter if something is better or worse, it's the law, it shouldn't be confused with morality. An act is illegal if the law says it is and isn't if it isn't. Just by being involved as a party does not make you culpable. Murderers are criminals, the murdered, less so. Choosing to be a party might not make you culpable. You may be an active participant but unaware of the law breaking (being defrauded). Or the law may explicitly state that you can engage with people committing criminal acts and reap the benefits so long as you don't break those laws (or encourage them to be broken) yourself. Some forms of journalism are protected in this way. Ultimately to have a case you have to state. 1. What law was broken 2. How an action by a party is in violation of that law. 3. That the action actually happened. The largest problem with this case is not that 3. is in doubt but showing which 1. and 2. they are talking about.
- rixthefox 2y ago
  > but it would seem a reasonable protection for consumers in general. The final say may ultimately come from the Cox vs Record Labels case from 2019 that is still working it's way through the appeal courts. If the record labels win their appeal, anyone who helped facilitate the infringement can be brought into a lawsuit. The record labels sued Cox for infringement by it's users. It's not out of the question that any ISP that provides Internet connectivity to Facebook could be pulled in for damages. For Meta these two cases could result in an existential threat to the company, and rightly so because the record labels do not play games. The blood is already in the water.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    So they promise to all their ISPs not to torrent again, and the ISPs keep accepting big piles of money to provide service? I don't see how that's a threat to Meta.
- singron 2y ago
  The original complaint alleges that the training process requires copying the material into the model and thus requires consent of the copyright holder. (Copyright protects copying but notably not use, so the complaint has to say they copied it in order to have standing). Then it says they didn't have consent. They also mention Books3, but they don't appear to actually allege anything against Meta in regards to it and are just providing context. I don't think it actually changes anything material about this complaint if Meta bought all the books at a bookstore since that also doesn't give you the right to copy the works. The original complaint is 2 years old though, so I don't really know the current state of argumentation. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67569326/1/kadrey-v-meta-platforms-inc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67569326/1/kadrey-v-met... Note that incidental copying (i.e. temporary copies made by computers in order to perform otherwise legal actions) is generally legal, so "copying" in the complaint can't refer merely to this and must refer more broadly to the model itself being a copy in order to have standing.
- knowitnone 2y ago
  So you're saying I can legally download movies as long as I don't provide them to others? Sweet!
- blibble 2y ago
  Blizzard managed to get a copyright infringement win against a defendant company that merely accessed their game client (IP) in memory: a cheat reading values of player position IP that had been previously loaded by Blizzard itself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzard_Entertainment,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzar....
  - Lerc 2y ago
    That link says that 'win' was a summary judgement that was reversed upon appeal. It seems the case is ongoing, but the case against the company is not one of them committing copyright infringement, but that copyright infringement occurred that they encouraged, enabled, and profited from.
- lsaferite 2y ago
  Even if your belief that only the person *providing* the content is liable, do you honestly think a single person found all the content, downloaded it, directly trained the model themselves, and then deleted the content? If at any step the content was given or shared to anyone else for any reason, have they not converted into a provider themselves?
  - Lerc 2y ago
    That in itself is a complicated issue, but I would suspect that this does not count as copyright infringement. The entity in possession of the data does not change, the copies and manipulation are performed by employees but at no time do they own what they are manipulating. If it were true that this constitutes a transfer of possession, then the targets for the lawsuit should be the individual employees, and I don't think anyone wants that.
    - lsaferite 2y ago
      I would counter that they were operating under the direction of the corporation and, as such, the corporation should be liable. But, I'm not a lawyer. My overall point is just that a corporation willfully violating copyright should be treated wholly differently than an individual. I still think that, regardless of any copyright violation by the corporation in acquiring the content, that training with the data doesn't (or shouldn't) somehow taint the resulting model.
      - Lerc 2y ago
        >I still think that, regardless of any copyright violation by the corporation in acquiring the content, that training with the data doesn't (or shouldn't) somehow taint the resulting model. Yes. Building the data set, acquiring the data set, training the model, using the model, and using the output of a model are all separate actions, it is not necessarily the case that any legal standing in one act transfers down the chain. It's certainly not going to be resolved by a single case.
flessner 2y 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.
- nickpsecurity 2y 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: https://273ventures.com/kl3m-the-first-legal-large-language-model/ 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.
  - bilbo0s 2y 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.
    - hobs 2y 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.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
triceratops 2y 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 2y 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.
  - triceratops 2y 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 2y 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.
      - triceratops 2y ago
        > I don't think copyright is actually defined in that sense, but is perhaps more focused on consuming the content. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_Inc._v._Aereo,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_In.... I'm not a legal expert. My layman's understanding of the case above is Aereo was in violation because they made copies of content - content that the receiver was already allowed to access - available over the Internet to the intended receiver. That is to say, the copying was the problem.
giancarlostoro 2y 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.
- romanzubenko 2y ago
  This is actually clever, let the market decide the price and the worth of each book for training. Pricing per model might be tricky, instead annual licensing for training might be better pricing structure. Very quickly all big publishers and big labs might find very precisely what the fair price is to pay per book/catalogue.
  - giancarlostoro 2y ago
    Yeah, you dont want to price them way too high to where nobody will pay for them, maybe even have the dreaded "Contact us for Pricing" thing setup.
alangibson 2y ago
> AI doesn't actually directly copy the material it trains on, so it's not easy to make this ruling. IANAL, but it doesn't look that hard. On first glance this is a fair use issue. What an LLM spits out is pretty clearly transformative use. But the fact that it pulls not only the entirety of the work, but the entirety of MOST works means that the amount is way beyond what could be fair use. Plus it's commercial use. Put it together and all LLMs are way illegal.
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  > the fact that it pulls not only the entirety of the work What do you mean by "pulls"? What matters in traditional fair use is how substantially your output copies the work (among other factors). Your input is generally assumed to be reading/watching/listening to the entire work, and there is no problem with that.
dragonwriter 2y ago
> Circumventing payment to obtain copyright material for training - Unambiguously illegal. The judge in this case seems to disagree with you, not accepting the premise that downloading the material from pirate sites for this use inherently gets the plaintiffs an out from having to address fair use defense as to the actual use. > the plaintiffs want to also tie in the former. No, the defense wants to and the judge hasn't let the plaintiffs avoid it the way you argue they automatically can.
- aidenn0 2y ago
  > The judge in this case seems to disagree with you, not accepting the premise that downloading the material from pirate sites for this use inherently gets the plaintiffs an out from having to address fair use defense as to the actual use. This is a good point, as a reminder, the Folsom tests (failing or passing any one is not conclusive, they are to be holistically considered) are: - the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes (Note also that whether or not the use is transformative is part of this test). - the nature of the copyrighted work - the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole - the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors
startupsfail 2y ago
It’s weird that you are saying it’s unambiguously illegal. AFAIK, in some cases used for training were initially created by non-profits and transformed sufficiently to strip the copyrights.
nashashmi 2y ago
All AI is “trained” on existing works. But it also works by outputting altered copied data. This output part is a copyright violation.

Lerc 2y 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 2y 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.
- Lerc 2y ago
  Well obviously, but the converse is also true. The source being illegal doesn't make your use illegal. In the eyes of the law it doesn't matter if something is better or worse, it's the law, it shouldn't be confused with morality. An act is illegal if the law says it is and isn't if it isn't. Just by being involved as a party does not make you culpable. Murderers are criminals, the murdered, less so. Choosing to be a party might not make you culpable. You may be an active participant but unaware of the law breaking (being defrauded). Or the law may explicitly state that you can engage with people committing criminal acts and reap the benefits so long as you don't break those laws (or encourage them to be broken) yourself. Some forms of journalism are protected in this way. Ultimately to have a case you have to state. 1. What law was broken 2. How an action by a party is in violation of that law. 3. That the action actually happened. The largest problem with this case is not that 3. is in doubt but showing which 1. and 2. they are talking about.
rixthefox 2y ago
> but it would seem a reasonable protection for consumers in general. The final say may ultimately come from the Cox vs Record Labels case from 2019 that is still working it's way through the appeal courts. If the record labels win their appeal, anyone who helped facilitate the infringement can be brought into a lawsuit. The record labels sued Cox for infringement by it's users. It's not out of the question that any ISP that provides Internet connectivity to Facebook could be pulled in for damages. For Meta these two cases could result in an existential threat to the company, and rightly so because the record labels do not play games. The blood is already in the water.
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  So they promise to all their ISPs not to torrent again, and the ISPs keep accepting big piles of money to provide service? I don't see how that's a threat to Meta.
singron 2y ago
The original complaint alleges that the training process requires copying the material into the model and thus requires consent of the copyright holder. (Copyright protects copying but notably not use, so the complaint has to say they copied it in order to have standing). Then it says they didn't have consent. They also mention Books3, but they don't appear to actually allege anything against Meta in regards to it and are just providing context. I don't think it actually changes anything material about this complaint if Meta bought all the books at a bookstore since that also doesn't give you the right to copy the works. The original complaint is 2 years old though, so I don't really know the current state of argumentation. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67569326/1/kadrey-v-meta-platforms-inc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67569326/1/kadrey-v-met... Note that incidental copying (i.e. temporary copies made by computers in order to perform otherwise legal actions) is generally legal, so "copying" in the complaint can't refer merely to this and must refer more broadly to the model itself being a copy in order to have standing.
knowitnone 2y ago
So you're saying I can legally download movies as long as I don't provide them to others? Sweet!
blibble 2y ago
Blizzard managed to get a copyright infringement win against a defendant company that merely accessed their game client (IP) in memory: a cheat reading values of player position IP that had been previously loaded by Blizzard itself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzard_Entertainment,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzar....
- Lerc 2y ago
  That link says that 'win' was a summary judgement that was reversed upon appeal. It seems the case is ongoing, but the case against the company is not one of them committing copyright infringement, but that copyright infringement occurred that they encouraged, enabled, and profited from.
lsaferite 2y ago
Even if your belief that only the person *providing* the content is liable, do you honestly think a single person found all the content, downloaded it, directly trained the model themselves, and then deleted the content? If at any step the content was given or shared to anyone else for any reason, have they not converted into a provider themselves?
- Lerc 2y ago
  That in itself is a complicated issue, but I would suspect that this does not count as copyright infringement. The entity in possession of the data does not change, the copies and manipulation are performed by employees but at no time do they own what they are manipulating. If it were true that this constitutes a transfer of possession, then the targets for the lawsuit should be the individual employees, and I don't think anyone wants that.
  - lsaferite 2y ago
    I would counter that they were operating under the direction of the corporation and, as such, the corporation should be liable. But, I'm not a lawyer. My overall point is just that a corporation willfully violating copyright should be treated wholly differently than an individual. I still think that, regardless of any copyright violation by the corporation in acquiring the content, that training with the data doesn't (or shouldn't) somehow taint the resulting model.
    - Lerc 2y ago
      >I still think that, regardless of any copyright violation by the corporation in acquiring the content, that training with the data doesn't (or shouldn't) somehow taint the resulting model. Yes. Building the data set, acquiring the data set, training the model, using the model, and using the output of a model are all separate actions, it is not necessarily the case that any legal standing in one act transfers down the chain. It's certainly not going to be resolved by a single case.

flessner 2y 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.

nickpsecurity 2y 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: https://273ventures.com/kl3m-the-first-legal-large-language-model/ 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.
- bilbo0s 2y 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.
  - hobs 2y 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.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]

triceratops 2y 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 2y 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.
- triceratops 2y 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 2y 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.
    - triceratops 2y ago
      > I don't think copyright is actually defined in that sense, but is perhaps more focused on consuming the content. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_Inc._v._Aereo,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_In.... I'm not a legal expert. My layman's understanding of the case above is Aereo was in violation because they made copies of content - content that the receiver was already allowed to access - available over the Internet to the intended receiver. That is to say, the copying was the problem.

giancarlostoro 2y 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.

romanzubenko 2y ago
This is actually clever, let the market decide the price and the worth of each book for training. Pricing per model might be tricky, instead annual licensing for training might be better pricing structure. Very quickly all big publishers and big labs might find very precisely what the fair price is to pay per book/catalogue.
- giancarlostoro 2y ago
  Yeah, you dont want to price them way too high to where nobody will pay for them, maybe even have the dreaded "Contact us for Pricing" thing setup.

alangibson 2y ago

> AI doesn't actually directly copy the material it trains on, so it's not easy to make this ruling. IANAL, but it doesn't look that hard. On first glance this is a fair use issue. What an LLM spits out is pretty clearly transformative use. But the fact that it pulls not only the entirety of the work, but the entirety of MOST works means that the amount is way beyond what could be fair use. Plus it's commercial use. Put it together and all LLMs are way illegal.

Dylan16807 2y ago
> the fact that it pulls not only the entirety of the work What do you mean by "pulls"? What matters in traditional fair use is how substantially your output copies the work (among other factors). Your input is generally assumed to be reading/watching/listening to the entire work, and there is no problem with that.

dragonwriter 2y ago

> Circumventing payment to obtain copyright material for training - Unambiguously illegal. The judge in this case seems to disagree with you, not accepting the premise that downloading the material from pirate sites for this use inherently gets the plaintiffs an out from having to address fair use defense as to the actual use. > the plaintiffs want to also tie in the former. No, the defense wants to and the judge hasn't let the plaintiffs avoid it the way you argue they automatically can.

aidenn0 2y ago
> The judge in this case seems to disagree with you, not accepting the premise that downloading the material from pirate sites for this use inherently gets the plaintiffs an out from having to address fair use defense as to the actual use. This is a good point, as a reminder, the Folsom tests (failing or passing any one is not conclusive, they are to be holistically considered) are: - the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes (Note also that whether or not the use is transformative is part of this test). - the nature of the copyrighted work - the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole - the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors

startupsfail 2y ago

It’s weird that you are saying it’s unambiguously illegal. AFAIK, in some cases used for training were initially created by non-profits and transformed sufficiently to strip the copyrights.

nashashmi 2y ago

All AI is “trained” on existing works. But it also works by outputting altered copied data. This output part is a copyright violation.