5 ms·

One aspect of this ruling [1] that I find concerning: on pages 7 and 11-12, it concedes that the LLM does substantially "memorize" copyrighted works, but rules

One aspect of this ruling [1] that I find concerning: on pages 7 and 11-12, it concedes that the LLM does substantially "memorize" copyrighted works, but rules that this doesn't violate the author's copyright because Anthropic has server-side filtering to avoid reproducing memorized text. (Alsup compares this to Google Books, which has server-side searchable full-text copies of copyrighted books, but only allows users to access snippets in a non-infringing manner.) Does this imply that distributing open-weights models such as Llama is copyright infringement, since users can trivially run the model without output filtering to extract the memorized text? [1]: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.434709/gov.uscourts.cand.434709.231.0_2.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...

deadbabe 1y ago
You can use the copyrighted text for personal purposes.
- layer8 1y ago
  But you can’t distribute it, which in the scenario mentioned in the parent’s final paragraph arguably happens.
  - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
    You can't distribute the copyrighted works, but that isn't inherently the same thing as the model. It's sort of like distributing a compendium of book reviews. Many of the reviews have quotes from the book. If there are thousands of reviews, you could potentially reconstruct the whole book, but that's not the point of the thing and so it makes sense for the infringing thing to be "using it to reconstruct the whole book" rather than "distributing the compendium". And then Anthropic fended off the argument that their service was intended for doing the former because they were explicitly taking measures to prevent that.
    - layer8 1y ago
      The premise was that the model is able to reproduce the memorized text, and that what saved Anthropic was them having server-side filtering to avoid reproducing that text. So the presumption is that without those filters, the model would be able to reproduce text substantial enough to constitute a copyright violation (otherwise they wouldn’t need the filter argument). Distributing a “machine” producing such output would constitute copyright infringement. Maybe this is a misrepresentation of the actual Anthropic case, I have no idea, but it’s the scenario I was addressing.
      - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
        > Distributing a “machine” producing such output would constitute copyright infringement. This is the thing you haven't established. Any ordinary general purpose computer is a "machine" that can produce copyrighted text, if you tell it to. But isn't it pretty important whether you actually do that with it or not, since it's a general purpose tool that can also do a large variety of other things?
- AtlasBarfed 1y ago
  Hey can I have a fake llm "trained" on a set of copyrighted works to ask what those works are? So it totally isn't a warez streaming media server but AI? I'm guessing since my net worth isn't a billion plus, the answer is no
  - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
    People have been coming up with convoluted piracy loopholes since the invention of copyright. If you xor some data with random numbers, both the result and the random numbers are indistinguishably random and there is no way to tell which one came out of a random number generator and which one is "derived" from a copyrighted work. But if you xor them together again the copyrighted work comes out. So if you have Alice distribute one of the random looking things and Bob distribute the other one and then Carol downloads them both and reconstructs the copyrighted work, have you created a scheme to copy whatever you want with no infringement occurring? Of course not, at least Carol is reproducing an infringing work, and then there are going to be claims of contributory infringement etc. for the others if the scheme has no other purpose than to do this. Meanwhile this problem is also boring because preventing anyone from being the source of infringing works isn't a thing anybody has been able to do since at least as long as the internet has allowed anyone to set up a server in another jurisdiction.
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  You can also, in the US, use it for any purposes which fall within the domain of "fair use", which while now also incorporated in the copyright statute, was first identified as an application of the first amendment and, as such, a constitutional limit on what Congress even had the power to prohibit with copyright law (the odd parameters of the statutory exception are largely because it attempted to codify the existing Constitutional case law.) Purposes which are fair use are very often not at all personal. (Also, "personal use" that involves copying, creating a derivative work, or using any of the other exclusive rights of a copyright holder without a license or falling into either fair use or another explicit copyright exception are not, generally, allowed, they are just hard to detect and unlikely to be worth the copyright holder's time to litigate even if they somehow were detected.)
ticulatedspline 1y ago
Yep, broadly capable open models are on track for annihilation. The cost of legally obtaining all the training materials will require hefty backing. Additionally that if you download a model file that contains enough of the source material to be considered infringing (even without using the LLM, assume you can extract the contents directly out of the weights) then it might as well be a .zip with a PDF in it, the model file itself becomes an infringing object whereas closed models can be held accountable by not what they store but what they produce.
- CamperBob2 1y ago
  Yep, broadly capable open models are on track for annihilation. The cost of legally obtaining all the training materials will require hefty backing. This will have the effect of empowering countries (and other entities) that don't respect copyright law, of course. The copyright cartel cannot be allowed to yank the handbrake on AI. If they insist on a fight, they must lose.
  - throwaway562if1 1y ago
    For that matter, how dare the government fine me for dumping waste in the river, and stop me from employing minors? Don't they know it will ruin the economy?
    - CamperBob2 1y ago
      Copyright is something we invented from thin air, and relatively recently at that. Meanwhile, refraining from fouling their own nests is something that most animals have accomplished instinctually for millions of years. So, not really comparable.
  - psunavy03 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - CamperBob2 1y ago
clvx 1y ago
Wouldn’t the issue be executing the models to third parties without filters? No idea if this is right but the same it would apply to Anthropic that they couldn’t run the model without the filter system having a chicken an egg problem. Can’t develop the filter without looking into the model.
- dr-detroit 1y ago
  [dead]
riskable 1y ago
A judge already ruled that models themselves don't constitute copyright infringement in Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc. (https://casetext.com/case/kadrey-v-meta-platforms-inc https://casetext.com/case/kadrey-v-meta-platforms-inc). The EFF has a good summary about it: > the court dismissed “nonsensical” claims that Meta’s LLaMA models are themselves infringing derivative works. See: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/copyright-and-ai-cases-and-consequences https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/copyright-and-ai-cases...
- qoez 1y ago
  Time to overfit on some books and publicize them as a libgen mirror.
  - londons_explore 1y ago
    I think this could lead to interesting results outside the legalities. Imagine you're getting it to spit out lord of the rings, but midway through you inject into the output 'Suddenly, the ring split in two. No longer one ring to rule them all, but two!'. You then let the model write the rest of the story!
    - esperent 1y ago
      I'm sure many people have imaged this - supposing that LLMs, while making no great strides towards AGI, consciousness, or any of that, nonetheless keep getting better and better at what they do now. Imagine a decade or two of steady improvements, throw in at least a couple of major breakthroughs. Much longer context by a few orders of magnitude. Much better quality, in terms of tone, consistency, hallucinations. Maybe we'll actually be able to say things like: write me a trilogy in the style of Lord of the Rings but with these changes: * Make it scifi * Add more female characters with greater depth * At least five rings * Hobbits are the bad guys ... Or whatever, specifying a version of the story tailored to your intersts, and that you would get out really high quality results, similar in quality to the source materials. Imagine you could do the same with movies, games, music. I'm not trying to assign a value judgement here. There's good and bad sides. However, this reality is becoming easier to imagine with each new model released. For sure, anyone who is a writer or artist will see this as bad. But perhaps our whole concept of what art is will become more fluid and personalized.
martin-t 1y ago
Copyright was codified in an age where plagiarism was time consuming. Even replacing words with synonyms on a mass scale was technically infeasible. The goal of copyright is to make sure people can get fair compensation for the amount of work they put in. LLMs automate plagiarism on a previously unfathomable scale. If humans spend a trillion hours writing books, articles, blog posts and code, then somebody (a small group of people) comes and spends a million hours building a machine that ingests all the previous work and produces output based on it, who should get the reward for the work put in? The original authors together spent a million times more effort (normalized for skill) and should therefore should get a million times bigger reward than those who build the machine. In other words, if the small group sells access to the product of the combined effort, they only deserve a millionth of the income. --- If "AI" is as transformative as they claim, they will have no trouble making so much money they they can fairly compensate the original authors while still earning a decent profit. But if it's not, then it's just an overpriced plagiarism automator and their reluctance to acknowledge they are making money on top of everyone else's work is indicative.
- bonoboTP 1y ago
  > get fair compensation for the amount of work This is a bit distorted. This is a better summary: The primary purpose of copyright is to induce and reward authors to create new works and to make those works available to the public to enjoy. The ultimate purpose is to foster the creation of new works that the public can read and written culture can thrive. The means to achieve this is by ensuring that the authors of said works can get financial incentives for writing. The two are not in opposition but it's good to be clear about it. The main beneficiary is intended to be the public, not the writers' guild. Therefore when some new factor enters the picture such as LLMs, we have to step back and see how the intent to benefit the reading public can be pursued in the new situation. It certainly has to take into account who and how will produce new written works, but it is not the main target, but can be an instrumental subgoal.
  - martin-t 1y ago
    As you point out, people make rules ("laws") which benefit them. I care about fairness and justice though, even if I am a minority. Fundamentally, fair compensation is based on the amount of work put in (obviously taking skill/competence into account but the differences between people in most disciplines probably don't span a single order of magnitude, let alone several). The ultimate goal should be to prevent people who don't produce value from taking advantage of those who do. And among those who do, that they get compensated according to the amount of work and skill they put in. Imagine you spend a year building a house. I have a machine that can take your house and materialize a copy anywhere on earth for free. I charge people (something between 0 and the cost of building your house the normal way) to make them a copy of your house. I can make orders of magnitude more money this way than you. Are you happy about this situation? Does it make a difference how much i charge them? What if my machine only works if I scan every house on the planet? What if I literally take pictures of it from all sides, then wait for your to not be home and xray it to see what it looks like inside? You might say that you don't care because now you can also afford many more houses. But it does not make you richer. In fact, it makes you poorer. Money is not a store of value. If everyone has more money but most people only have 2x more and a small group has a 1000x more, then the relative bargaining power changed so the small group is better off and the large group is worse off. This is what undetectable cheap mass plagiarism leads to for all intellectual work. --- I wrote a lot of open source code, some of it under permissive licenses, some GPL, some AGPL. The conditions of those licenses are that you credit me. Some of them also require that if you build on top of my work, you release your work with the same licence. LLMs launder my code to make profit off of it without giving me anything (while other people make profit, thus making me poorer) and without crediting me. LLMs also take away the rights of the users of my code - (A)GPL forced anyone who builds on top of my work to release the code when asked, with LLM-laundered code, this right no longer seems to exist because who do you even ask?
comex 1y ago
Yes and no. In this case, the plaintiffs alleged that Anthropic's LLMs had memorized the works so completely that "if each completed LLM had been asked to recite works it had trained upon, it could have done so", "almost verbatim". The judge assumed for the sake of argument that the allegation was true, and ruled that the conduct was fair use anyway due to the existence of an effective filter. Therefore there was no need to determine whether the allegation was actually true. So - yes, in the sense that the ruling suggests that distributing an open-weight LLM that memorized copyrighted works to that extent would not be fair use. But no, in the sense that it's not clear whether any LLMs, especially open-weight LLMs, actually memorize book-length works to that extent. Even the recent study about Llama memorizing a Harry Potter book [1] only said that Llama could reproduce 50-token snippets a decent percentage of the time when given the preceding 50 tokens. That's different from actually being able to recite any substantial portion of the book. If you asked Llama for that, the output would quickly diverge from the original text, and it likely wouldn't be able to get back on track without being re-prompted from the ground truth as the study did. On the other hand, in the case where the New York Times is suing OpenAI, the NYT has alleged that ChatGPT was able to recite extensive portions of NYT articles verbatim. If true, this might be more dangerous, since news articles are not as long as books but they're equally eligible for copyright protection. So we'll see how that shakes out. Also note: - Nothing in the opinion sets formal precedent because it's a district court. But the opinion might still influence later judges. - See also riskable's sibling comment for another case where a judge addressed the issue more head-on (but wasn't facing the same kind of detailed allegations, I don't think; haven't checked). [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06370 https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06370
- ethbr1 1y ago
  Wouldn't a model that can recite training data verbatim be larger than necessary? Exact text isn't coming from nowhere, no matter how efficiently the bits are encoded, and the same effectiveness should be achievable by compressing those portions of the model.
  - zeven7 1y ago
    Maybe we are all just LLMs. If the books were written by a language producing algorithm in a human mind, maybe there’s not as much raw data there as it seems, and the total information can in fact be stored in a surprisingly small set of weights.
PeterStuer 1y ago
No. You are free to memorize any copyrighted work. You are just not free to distribute it. The model itself does not constitute a copy. Its intention is clearly not to reproduce verbatim texts. There would be far cheaper and infinitly more accurate ways to do that if that was the goal. Appart from the legalities, it would be horrifying if copyright reached into the AI realm to completely styfle progress for, lets be honest, mainly the profits of a few major IP corporations. I do however understand some creatives are worried about revenue, just like the rest of us. But just like the rest of us, they to live in a world that can only exist because 99.99% of what it took to build that world was automated or tool enhanced, impacting someone's previous employment or business. We are in a world of unprecedented change, only to be immediatly supassed by the next day's rate of change. This both scares and fascinates me. But that change and its benefits being held only in the bowels of corporate/government symbiotic entities would scare me a hell of a lott more. Open Source/weights is the only way to have a small chance to keep this at bay.
protocolture 1y ago
I am yet to have anyone explain to my why LLM memorisation is worse than Google images or a similar service caching thumbnails for faster image searches. Or caching blurbs of news stories for faster reproduction at search time.
dragonwriter 1y ago
> One aspect of this ruling [1] that I find concerning: on pages 7 and 11-12, it concedes that the LLM does substantially "memorize" copyrighted works, No, it doesn't. The order assumes that because it is an order on summary judgement, and the legal standard for such an order is that it must assume the least favorable position for the party for whom summart judgement is granted on every material contested issue of fact. Since it is a ruling for the defendant (Anthropic), it must be what the judge finds law demands when assuming all contested issues of fact are resolved in favor of the claims of the plaintiffs (the authors). > but rules that this doesn't violate the author's copyright because Anthropic has server-side filtering to avoid reproducing memorized text. No, it doesn't do that, either. It simply notes for clarity that the plaintiffs do not allege that that an infringement is created by the outputs for the reason you describe; the ruling does not in any way suggest that has any bearing on its findings as regards whether training the model infringes, it simply points out that that separate potential source of infringement is not at issue. > Does this imply that distributing open-weights models such as Llama is copyright infringemen No, it does not. At most, it implies, given the reason that rhe plaintiffs have not done so in this case, that the same plaintiffs might have alleged (without commenting at all as to whether they would prevail) that providing a hosted online service without filtering would constitute contributory infringement if that was what Anthropic did (which it isn’t) and if there was actual infringement committed by the users of the service.

deadbabe 1y ago

You can use the copyrighted text for personal purposes.

layer8 1y ago
But you can’t distribute it, which in the scenario mentioned in the parent’s final paragraph arguably happens.
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago
  You can't distribute the copyrighted works, but that isn't inherently the same thing as the model. It's sort of like distributing a compendium of book reviews. Many of the reviews have quotes from the book. If there are thousands of reviews, you could potentially reconstruct the whole book, but that's not the point of the thing and so it makes sense for the infringing thing to be "using it to reconstruct the whole book" rather than "distributing the compendium". And then Anthropic fended off the argument that their service was intended for doing the former because they were explicitly taking measures to prevent that.
  - layer8 1y ago
    The premise was that the model is able to reproduce the memorized text, and that what saved Anthropic was them having server-side filtering to avoid reproducing that text. So the presumption is that without those filters, the model would be able to reproduce text substantial enough to constitute a copyright violation (otherwise they wouldn’t need the filter argument). Distributing a “machine” producing such output would constitute copyright infringement. Maybe this is a misrepresentation of the actual Anthropic case, I have no idea, but it’s the scenario I was addressing.
    - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      > Distributing a “machine” producing such output would constitute copyright infringement. This is the thing you haven't established. Any ordinary general purpose computer is a "machine" that can produce copyrighted text, if you tell it to. But isn't it pretty important whether you actually do that with it or not, since it's a general purpose tool that can also do a large variety of other things?
AtlasBarfed 1y ago
Hey can I have a fake llm "trained" on a set of copyrighted works to ask what those works are? So it totally isn't a warez streaming media server but AI? I'm guessing since my net worth isn't a billion plus, the answer is no
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago
  People have been coming up with convoluted piracy loopholes since the invention of copyright. If you xor some data with random numbers, both the result and the random numbers are indistinguishably random and there is no way to tell which one came out of a random number generator and which one is "derived" from a copyrighted work. But if you xor them together again the copyrighted work comes out. So if you have Alice distribute one of the random looking things and Bob distribute the other one and then Carol downloads them both and reconstructs the copyrighted work, have you created a scheme to copy whatever you want with no infringement occurring? Of course not, at least Carol is reproducing an infringing work, and then there are going to be claims of contributory infringement etc. for the others if the scheme has no other purpose than to do this. Meanwhile this problem is also boring because preventing anyone from being the source of infringing works isn't a thing anybody has been able to do since at least as long as the internet has allowed anyone to set up a server in another jurisdiction.
dragonwriter 1y ago
You can also, in the US, use it for any purposes which fall within the domain of "fair use", which while now also incorporated in the copyright statute, was first identified as an application of the first amendment and, as such, a constitutional limit on what Congress even had the power to prohibit with copyright law (the odd parameters of the statutory exception are largely because it attempted to codify the existing Constitutional case law.) Purposes which are fair use are very often not at all personal. (Also, "personal use" that involves copying, creating a derivative work, or using any of the other exclusive rights of a copyright holder without a license or falling into either fair use or another explicit copyright exception are not, generally, allowed, they are just hard to detect and unlikely to be worth the copyright holder's time to litigate even if they somehow were detected.)

ticulatedspline 1y ago

Yep, broadly capable open models are on track for annihilation. The cost of legally obtaining all the training materials will require hefty backing. Additionally that if you download a model file that contains enough of the source material to be considered infringing (even without using the LLM, assume you can extract the contents directly out of the weights) then it might as well be a .zip with a PDF in it, the model file itself becomes an infringing object whereas closed models can be held accountable by not what they store but what they produce.

CamperBob2 1y ago
Yep, broadly capable open models are on track for annihilation. The cost of legally obtaining all the training materials will require hefty backing. This will have the effect of empowering countries (and other entities) that don't respect copyright law, of course. The copyright cartel cannot be allowed to yank the handbrake on AI. If they insist on a fight, they must lose.
- throwaway562if1 1y ago
  For that matter, how dare the government fine me for dumping waste in the river, and stop me from employing minors? Don't they know it will ruin the economy?
  - CamperBob2 1y ago
    Copyright is something we invented from thin air, and relatively recently at that. Meanwhile, refraining from fouling their own nests is something that most animals have accomplished instinctually for millions of years. So, not really comparable.
- psunavy03 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - CamperBob2 1y ago

clvx 1y ago

Wouldn’t the issue be executing the models to third parties without filters? No idea if this is right but the same it would apply to Anthropic that they couldn’t run the model without the filter system having a chicken an egg problem. Can’t develop the filter without looking into the model.

dr-detroit 1y ago
[dead]

riskable 1y ago

A judge already ruled that models themselves don't constitute copyright infringement in Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc. (https://casetext.com/case/kadrey-v-meta-platforms-inc https://casetext.com/case/kadrey-v-meta-platforms-inc). The EFF has a good summary about it: > the court dismissed “nonsensical” claims that Meta’s LLaMA models are themselves infringing derivative works. See: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/copyright-and-ai-cases-and-consequences https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/copyright-and-ai-cases...

qoez 1y ago
Time to overfit on some books and publicize them as a libgen mirror.
- londons_explore 1y ago
  I think this could lead to interesting results outside the legalities. Imagine you're getting it to spit out lord of the rings, but midway through you inject into the output 'Suddenly, the ring split in two. No longer one ring to rule them all, but two!'. You then let the model write the rest of the story!
  - esperent 1y ago
    I'm sure many people have imaged this - supposing that LLMs, while making no great strides towards AGI, consciousness, or any of that, nonetheless keep getting better and better at what they do now. Imagine a decade or two of steady improvements, throw in at least a couple of major breakthroughs. Much longer context by a few orders of magnitude. Much better quality, in terms of tone, consistency, hallucinations. Maybe we'll actually be able to say things like: write me a trilogy in the style of Lord of the Rings but with these changes: * Make it scifi * Add more female characters with greater depth * At least five rings * Hobbits are the bad guys ... Or whatever, specifying a version of the story tailored to your intersts, and that you would get out really high quality results, similar in quality to the source materials. Imagine you could do the same with movies, games, music. I'm not trying to assign a value judgement here. There's good and bad sides. However, this reality is becoming easier to imagine with each new model released. For sure, anyone who is a writer or artist will see this as bad. But perhaps our whole concept of what art is will become more fluid and personalized.

martin-t 1y ago

Copyright was codified in an age where plagiarism was time consuming. Even replacing words with synonyms on a mass scale was technically infeasible. The goal of copyright is to make sure people can get fair compensation for the amount of work they put in. LLMs automate plagiarism on a previously unfathomable scale. If humans spend a trillion hours writing books, articles, blog posts and code, then somebody (a small group of people) comes and spends a million hours building a machine that ingests all the previous work and produces output based on it, who should get the reward for the work put in? The original authors together spent a million times more effort (normalized for skill) and should therefore should get a million times bigger reward than those who build the machine. In other words, if the small group sells access to the product of the combined effort, they only deserve a millionth of the income. --- If "AI" is as transformative as they claim, they will have no trouble making so much money they they can fairly compensate the original authors while still earning a decent profit. But if it's not, then it's just an overpriced plagiarism automator and their reluctance to acknowledge they are making money on top of everyone else's work is indicative.

bonoboTP 1y ago
> get fair compensation for the amount of work This is a bit distorted. This is a better summary: The primary purpose of copyright is to induce and reward authors to create new works and to make those works available to the public to enjoy. The ultimate purpose is to foster the creation of new works that the public can read and written culture can thrive. The means to achieve this is by ensuring that the authors of said works can get financial incentives for writing. The two are not in opposition but it's good to be clear about it. The main beneficiary is intended to be the public, not the writers' guild. Therefore when some new factor enters the picture such as LLMs, we have to step back and see how the intent to benefit the reading public can be pursued in the new situation. It certainly has to take into account who and how will produce new written works, but it is not the main target, but can be an instrumental subgoal.
- martin-t 1y ago
  As you point out, people make rules ("laws") which benefit them. I care about fairness and justice though, even if I am a minority. Fundamentally, fair compensation is based on the amount of work put in (obviously taking skill/competence into account but the differences between people in most disciplines probably don't span a single order of magnitude, let alone several). The ultimate goal should be to prevent people who don't produce value from taking advantage of those who do. And among those who do, that they get compensated according to the amount of work and skill they put in. Imagine you spend a year building a house. I have a machine that can take your house and materialize a copy anywhere on earth for free. I charge people (something between 0 and the cost of building your house the normal way) to make them a copy of your house. I can make orders of magnitude more money this way than you. Are you happy about this situation? Does it make a difference how much i charge them? What if my machine only works if I scan every house on the planet? What if I literally take pictures of it from all sides, then wait for your to not be home and xray it to see what it looks like inside? You might say that you don't care because now you can also afford many more houses. But it does not make you richer. In fact, it makes you poorer. Money is not a store of value. If everyone has more money but most people only have 2x more and a small group has a 1000x more, then the relative bargaining power changed so the small group is better off and the large group is worse off. This is what undetectable cheap mass plagiarism leads to for all intellectual work. --- I wrote a lot of open source code, some of it under permissive licenses, some GPL, some AGPL. The conditions of those licenses are that you credit me. Some of them also require that if you build on top of my work, you release your work with the same licence. LLMs launder my code to make profit off of it without giving me anything (while other people make profit, thus making me poorer) and without crediting me. LLMs also take away the rights of the users of my code - (A)GPL forced anyone who builds on top of my work to release the code when asked, with LLM-laundered code, this right no longer seems to exist because who do you even ask?

comex 1y ago

Yes and no. In this case, the plaintiffs alleged that Anthropic's LLMs had memorized the works so completely that "if each completed LLM had been asked to recite works it had trained upon, it could have done so", "almost verbatim". The judge assumed for the sake of argument that the allegation was true, and ruled that the conduct was fair use anyway due to the existence of an effective filter. Therefore there was no need to determine whether the allegation was actually true. So - yes, in the sense that the ruling suggests that distributing an open-weight LLM that memorized copyrighted works to that extent would not be fair use. But no, in the sense that it's not clear whether any LLMs, especially open-weight LLMs, actually memorize book-length works to that extent. Even the recent study about Llama memorizing a Harry Potter book [1] only said that Llama could reproduce 50-token snippets a decent percentage of the time when given the preceding 50 tokens. That's different from actually being able to recite any substantial portion of the book. If you asked Llama for that, the output would quickly diverge from the original text, and it likely wouldn't be able to get back on track without being re-prompted from the ground truth as the study did. On the other hand, in the case where the New York Times is suing OpenAI, the NYT has alleged that ChatGPT was able to recite extensive portions of NYT articles verbatim. If true, this might be more dangerous, since news articles are not as long as books but they're equally eligible for copyright protection. So we'll see how that shakes out. Also note: - Nothing in the opinion sets formal precedent because it's a district court. But the opinion might still influence later judges. - See also riskable's sibling comment for another case where a judge addressed the issue more head-on (but wasn't facing the same kind of detailed allegations, I don't think; haven't checked). [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06370 https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06370

ethbr1 1y ago
Wouldn't a model that can recite training data verbatim be larger than necessary? Exact text isn't coming from nowhere, no matter how efficiently the bits are encoded, and the same effectiveness should be achievable by compressing those portions of the model.
- zeven7 1y ago
  Maybe we are all just LLMs. If the books were written by a language producing algorithm in a human mind, maybe there’s not as much raw data there as it seems, and the total information can in fact be stored in a surprisingly small set of weights.

PeterStuer 1y ago

No. You are free to memorize any copyrighted work. You are just not free to distribute it. The model itself does not constitute a copy. Its intention is clearly not to reproduce verbatim texts. There would be far cheaper and infinitly more accurate ways to do that if that was the goal. Appart from the legalities, it would be horrifying if copyright reached into the AI realm to completely styfle progress for, lets be honest, mainly the profits of a few major IP corporations. I do however understand some creatives are worried about revenue, just like the rest of us. But just like the rest of us, they to live in a world that can only exist because 99.99% of what it took to build that world was automated or tool enhanced, impacting someone's previous employment or business. We are in a world of unprecedented change, only to be immediatly supassed by the next day's rate of change. This both scares and fascinates me. But that change and its benefits being held only in the bowels of corporate/government symbiotic entities would scare me a hell of a lott more. Open Source/weights is the only way to have a small chance to keep this at bay.

protocolture 1y ago

I am yet to have anyone explain to my why LLM memorisation is worse than Google images or a similar service caching thumbnails for faster image searches. Or caching blurbs of news stories for faster reproduction at search time.

dragonwriter 1y ago

> One aspect of this ruling [1] that I find concerning: on pages 7 and 11-12, it concedes that the LLM does substantially "memorize" copyrighted works, No, it doesn't. The order assumes that because it is an order on summary judgement, and the legal standard for such an order is that it must assume the least favorable position for the party for whom summart judgement is granted on every material contested issue of fact. Since it is a ruling for the defendant (Anthropic), it must be what the judge finds law demands when assuming all contested issues of fact are resolved in favor of the claims of the plaintiffs (the authors). > but rules that this doesn't violate the author's copyright because Anthropic has server-side filtering to avoid reproducing memorized text. No, it doesn't do that, either. It simply notes for clarity that the plaintiffs do not allege that that an infringement is created by the outputs for the reason you describe; the ruling does not in any way suggest that has any bearing on its findings as regards whether training the model infringes, it simply points out that that separate potential source of infringement is not at issue. > Does this imply that distributing open-weights models such as Llama is copyright infringemen No, it does not. At most, it implies, given the reason that rhe plaintiffs have not done so in this case, that the same plaintiffs might have alleged (without commenting at all as to whether they would prevail) that providing a hosted online service without filtering would constitute contributory infringement if that was what Anthropic did (which it isn’t) and if there was actual infringement committed by the users of the service.