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I think the argument is less about piracy and more that the model(s output) is a derivative work of Harry Potter, and the rights holder should be paid according

I think the argument is less about piracy and more that the model(s output) is a derivative work of Harry Potter, and the rights holder should be paid accordingly when it’s reproduced.

paxys 1y ago
That may be relevant in the NYT vs OpenAI case, since NYT was supposedly able to reproduce entire articles in ChatGPT. Here Llama is predicting one sentence at a time when fed the previous one, with 50% accuracy, for 42% of the book. That can easily be written off as fair use.
- gpm 1y ago
  I'm pretty sure books.google.com does the exact same with much better reliability... and the US courts found that to be fair use. (Agreeing with parent comment)
  - pclmulqdq 1y ago
    If there is a circuit split between it and NYT vs OAI, the Google Books ruling (in the famously tech-friendly ninth circuit) may also find itself under review.
- echelon 1y ago
  > Here Llama is predicting one sentence at a time when fed the previous one, with 50% accuracy, for 42% of the book. That can easily be written off as fair use. Is that fair use, or is that compression of the verbatim source?
  - TeMPOraL 1y ago
    It doesn't let you recover the text without knowing it in advance, so no. You can't in particular iterate it sentence by sentence; you're unlikely to go past sentence 2 this way before it starts giving you back it's own ideas. The whole thing is a sleigh of hand, basically. There's 42% of the book there, in tiny pieces, which you can only identify if you know what you're looking for. The model itself does not.
- gamblor956 1y ago
  That can easily be written off as fair use. No, it really couldn't. In fact, it's very persuasive evidence that Llama is straight up violating copyright. It would be one thing to be able to "predict" a paragraph or two. It's another thing entirely to be able to predict 42% of a book that is several hundred pages long.
  - reedciccio 1y ago
    Is it Llama violating the "copyright" or is it the researcher pushing it to do so?
    - lern_too_spel 1y ago
      If you distribute a zip file of the book, are you violating copyright, or is it the person who unzips it?
      - TeMPOraL 1y ago
        If you walk through the N-gram database with a copy of Harry Potter in hand and observe that for N=7, you can find any piece of it in the database with above-average frequency, does that mean N-gram database is violating copyright?
        gamblor956 1y ago
        If the database is sharing those pieces, it might be yes. Copyright takes into account the use for such the copying is done. Commercial use will almost always be treated as not fair use, with limited exceptions.
        TeMPOraL 1y ago
        I'd say no, because you can't reasonably access and order those pieces without already having the work at your side to use as a reference.
        1y ago
- int_19h 1y ago
  If it can predict the next sentence reliably, that sentence then becomes part of the context, so if you just continue inference, it would eventually produce the entire text verbatim, no?
geysersam 1y ago
If the assertion in the parent comment is correct "nobody is using this as a substitute to buying the book" why should the rights holders get paid?
- riffraff 1y ago
  The argument is meta used the book so the LLM can be considered a derivative work in some sense. Repeat for every copyrighted work and you end up with publishers reasonably arguing meta would not be able to produce their LLM without copyrighted work, which they did not pay for. It's an argument for the courts, of course.
- w0m 1y ago
  The argument is whether the LLM training on the copyrighted work is Fair Use or not. Should META pay for the copyright on works it ingests for training purposes?
- sabellito 1y ago
  Facebook are using the contents of the book to make money.
psychoslave 1y ago
The main issue on an economical point of view is that copyright is not the framework we need for social justice and everyone florishing by enjoying pre-existing treasures of human heritage and fairly contributing back. There is no morale and justice ground to leverage on when the system is designed to create wealth bottleneck toward a few recipients. Harry Potter is a great piece of artistic work, and it's nice that her author could make her way out of a precarious position. But not having anyone in such a situation in the first place would be what a great society should strive to produce. Rowling already received more than all she needs to thrive I guess. I'm confident that there are plenty of other talented authors out there that will never have such a broad avenue of attention grabbing, which is okay. But that they are stuck in terrible economical situations is not okay. The copyright loto, or the startup loto are not that much different than the standard loto, they just put so much pression on the player that they get stuck in the narrative that merit for hard efforts is the key component for the gained wealth.
- kelseyfrog 1y ago
  Capitalism is allergic to second-order cybernetics. First-order systems drive outcomes. "Did it make money?" "Did it increase engagement?" "Did it scale?" These are tight, local feedback loops. They work because they close quickly and map directly to incentives. But they also hide a deeper danger: they optimize without questioning what optimization does to the world that contains it. Second-order cybernetics reason about systems. It doesn’t ask, "Did I succeed?" It asks, "What does it mean to define success this way?" "Is the goal worthy?" That’s where capital breaks. Capitalism is not simply incapable of reflection. In fact, it's structured to ignore it. It has no native interest in what emerges from its aggregated behaviors unless those emergent properties threaten the throughput of capital itself. It isn't designed to ask, "What kind of society results from a thousand locally rational decisions?" It asks, "Is this change going to make more or less money?" It's like driving by watching only the fuel gauge. Not speed, not trajectory, or whether the destination is the right one. Just how efficiently you’re burning gas. The system is blind to everything but its goal. What looks like success in the short term can be, and often is, a long-term act of self-destruction. Take copyright. Every individual rule, term length, exclusivity, royalty, can be justified. Each sounds fair on its own. But collectively, they produce extreme wealth concentration, barriers to creative participation, and a cultural hellscape. Not because anyone intended that, but because the emergent structure rewards enclosure over openness, hoarding over sharing, monopoly over multiplicity. That’s not a bug. That's what systems do when you optimize only at the first-order level. And because capital evaluates systems solely by their extractive capacity, it treats this emergent behavior not as misalignment but as a feature. It canonizes the consequences. A second-order system would account for the result by asking, "Is this the kind of world we want to live in?" It would recognize that wealth generated without regard to distribution warps everything it touches: art, technology, ecology, and relationships. Capitalism, as it currently exists, is not wise. It does not grow in understanding. It does not self-correct toward justice. It self-replicates. Cleverly, efficiently, with brutal resilience. It's emergently misaligned and no one is powerful enough to stop it.
bufferoverflow 1y ago
Do you personally pay every time you quote copyrighted books or song lyrics?
fennecfoxy 1y ago
But HP is derivative of Tolkien, English/Scottish/Welsh culture, Brothers Grimm and plenty of other sources. Barely any human works are not derivative in some form or fashion.

I think the argument is less about piracy and more that the model(s output) is a derivative work of Harry Potter, and the rights holder should be paid accordingly when it’s reproduced.

paxys 1y ago

That may be relevant in the NYT vs OpenAI case, since NYT was supposedly able to reproduce entire articles in ChatGPT. Here Llama is predicting one sentence at a time when fed the previous one, with 50% accuracy, for 42% of the book. That can easily be written off as fair use.

gpm 1y ago
I'm pretty sure books.google.com does the exact same with much better reliability... and the US courts found that to be fair use. (Agreeing with parent comment)
- pclmulqdq 1y ago
  If there is a circuit split between it and NYT vs OAI, the Google Books ruling (in the famously tech-friendly ninth circuit) may also find itself under review.
echelon 1y ago
> Here Llama is predicting one sentence at a time when fed the previous one, with 50% accuracy, for 42% of the book. That can easily be written off as fair use. Is that fair use, or is that compression of the verbatim source?
- TeMPOraL 1y ago
  It doesn't let you recover the text without knowing it in advance, so no. You can't in particular iterate it sentence by sentence; you're unlikely to go past sentence 2 this way before it starts giving you back it's own ideas. The whole thing is a sleigh of hand, basically. There's 42% of the book there, in tiny pieces, which you can only identify if you know what you're looking for. The model itself does not.
gamblor956 1y ago
That can easily be written off as fair use. No, it really couldn't. In fact, it's very persuasive evidence that Llama is straight up violating copyright. It would be one thing to be able to "predict" a paragraph or two. It's another thing entirely to be able to predict 42% of a book that is several hundred pages long.
- reedciccio 1y ago
  Is it Llama violating the "copyright" or is it the researcher pushing it to do so?
  - lern_too_spel 1y ago
    If you distribute a zip file of the book, are you violating copyright, or is it the person who unzips it?
    - TeMPOraL 1y ago
      If you walk through the N-gram database with a copy of Harry Potter in hand and observe that for N=7, you can find any piece of it in the database with above-average frequency, does that mean N-gram database is violating copyright?
      - gamblor956 1y ago
        If the database is sharing those pieces, it might be yes. Copyright takes into account the use for such the copying is done. Commercial use will almost always be treated as not fair use, with limited exceptions.
        TeMPOraL 1y ago
        I'd say no, because you can't reasonably access and order those pieces without already having the work at your side to use as a reference.
      - 1y ago
int_19h 1y ago
If it can predict the next sentence reliably, that sentence then becomes part of the context, so if you just continue inference, it would eventually produce the entire text verbatim, no?

geysersam 1y ago

If the assertion in the parent comment is correct "nobody is using this as a substitute to buying the book" why should the rights holders get paid?

riffraff 1y ago
The argument is meta used the book so the LLM can be considered a derivative work in some sense. Repeat for every copyrighted work and you end up with publishers reasonably arguing meta would not be able to produce their LLM without copyrighted work, which they did not pay for. It's an argument for the courts, of course.
w0m 1y ago
The argument is whether the LLM training on the copyrighted work is Fair Use or not. Should META pay for the copyright on works it ingests for training purposes?
sabellito 1y ago
Facebook are using the contents of the book to make money.

psychoslave 1y ago

The main issue on an economical point of view is that copyright is not the framework we need for social justice and everyone florishing by enjoying pre-existing treasures of human heritage and fairly contributing back. There is no morale and justice ground to leverage on when the system is designed to create wealth bottleneck toward a few recipients. Harry Potter is a great piece of artistic work, and it's nice that her author could make her way out of a precarious position. But not having anyone in such a situation in the first place would be what a great society should strive to produce. Rowling already received more than all she needs to thrive I guess. I'm confident that there are plenty of other talented authors out there that will never have such a broad avenue of attention grabbing, which is okay. But that they are stuck in terrible economical situations is not okay. The copyright loto, or the startup loto are not that much different than the standard loto, they just put so much pression on the player that they get stuck in the narrative that merit for hard efforts is the key component for the gained wealth.

kelseyfrog 1y ago
Capitalism is allergic to second-order cybernetics. First-order systems drive outcomes. "Did it make money?" "Did it increase engagement?" "Did it scale?" These are tight, local feedback loops. They work because they close quickly and map directly to incentives. But they also hide a deeper danger: they optimize without questioning what optimization does to the world that contains it. Second-order cybernetics reason about systems. It doesn’t ask, "Did I succeed?" It asks, "What does it mean to define success this way?" "Is the goal worthy?" That’s where capital breaks. Capitalism is not simply incapable of reflection. In fact, it's structured to ignore it. It has no native interest in what emerges from its aggregated behaviors unless those emergent properties threaten the throughput of capital itself. It isn't designed to ask, "What kind of society results from a thousand locally rational decisions?" It asks, "Is this change going to make more or less money?" It's like driving by watching only the fuel gauge. Not speed, not trajectory, or whether the destination is the right one. Just how efficiently you’re burning gas. The system is blind to everything but its goal. What looks like success in the short term can be, and often is, a long-term act of self-destruction. Take copyright. Every individual rule, term length, exclusivity, royalty, can be justified. Each sounds fair on its own. But collectively, they produce extreme wealth concentration, barriers to creative participation, and a cultural hellscape. Not because anyone intended that, but because the emergent structure rewards enclosure over openness, hoarding over sharing, monopoly over multiplicity. That’s not a bug. That's what systems do when you optimize only at the first-order level. And because capital evaluates systems solely by their extractive capacity, it treats this emergent behavior not as misalignment but as a feature. It canonizes the consequences. A second-order system would account for the result by asking, "Is this the kind of world we want to live in?" It would recognize that wealth generated without regard to distribution warps everything it touches: art, technology, ecology, and relationships. Capitalism, as it currently exists, is not wise. It does not grow in understanding. It does not self-correct toward justice. It self-replicates. Cleverly, efficiently, with brutal resilience. It's emergently misaligned and no one is powerful enough to stop it.

bufferoverflow 1y ago

Do you personally pay every time you quote copyrighted books or song lyrics?

fennecfoxy 1y ago

But HP is derivative of Tolkien, English/Scottish/Welsh culture, Brothers Grimm and plenty of other sources. Barely any human works are not derivative in some form or fashion.