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The important parts: > Alsup ruled that Anthropic's use of copyrighted books to train its AI models was "exceedingly transformative" and qualified as fair use
by dehrmann 1y ago
The important parts:
> Alsup ruled that Anthropic's use of copyrighted books to train its AI models was "exceedingly transformative" and qualified as fair use
> "All Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies"
It was always somewhat obvious that pirating a library would be copyright infringement. The interesting findings here are that scanning and digitizing a library for internal use is OK, and using it to train models is fair use.
- jpalawaga 1y agoI don't think that's new. google set precedent for that more than a decade ago. you're allowed to transform a book to digital.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 1y agoYou skipped quotes about the other important side: > But Alsup drew a firm line when it came to piracy. > "Anthropic had no entitlement to use pirated copies for its central library," Alsup wrote. "Creating a permanent, general-purpose library was not itself a fair use excusing Anthropic's piracy." That is, he ruled that - buying, physically cutting up, physically digitizing books, and using them for training is fair use - pirating the books for their digital library is not fair use.
- throwawayffffas 1y agoSo all they have to do is go and buy a copy of each book they pirated. They will have ceased and desisted.
- superfrank 1y agoI'm trying to find the quote, but I'm pretty sure the judge specifically said that going and buying the book after the fact won't absolve them of liability. He said that for the books they pirated they broke the law and should stand trial for that and they cannot go back and un-break in by buying a copy now. Found it: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/federal-judge-rules-copyrighted-books-are-fair-use-ai-training-rcna214766 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/federal-judge-rules-c... > “That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft,” [Judge] Alsup wrote, “but it may affect the extent of statutory damages.”
- zoklet-enjoyer 1y agoDid they really steal if they didn't deprive anyone of their copy? I don't think copying is theft.
- badlibrarian 1y ago"Tell it to the Judge..."
- kjkjadksj 1y agoYou may not think it is but the law does.
- buildbot 1y agoThe law says it’s copyright infringement, not theft.
- axus 1y agoAgreed, the judge should avoid slang or even commonly accepted synonyms in an official ruling. The charge is not for theft. Substitute infringement for theft.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- hadlock 1y agoIt's copyright infringement, which is not theft, they're legally distinct in the eyes of the law. This is partly why the "you wouldn't download a car" copyright ads were so widely mocked.
- __MatrixMan__ 1y agoFun fact, they didn't have the rights to use the font they used for those commercials: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43775926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43775926
- dragonwriter 1y ago> So all they have to do is go and buy a copy of each book they pirated. No, that doesn't undo the infringement. At most, that would mitigate actual damages, but actual damages aren't likely to be important, given that statutory damages are an alternative and are likely to dwarf actual damages. (It may also figure into how the court assigns statutory damages within the very large range available for those, but that range does not go down to $0.) > They will have ceased and desisted. "Cease and desist" is just to stop incurring additional liability. (A potential plaintiff may accept that as sufficient to not sue if a request is made and the potential defendant complies, because litigation is uncertain and expensive. But "cease and desist" doesn't undo wrongs and neutralize liability when they've already been sued over.)
- rockemsockem 1y ago> So all they have to do is go and buy a copy of each book they pirated. For anyone else who wants to do the same thing though this is likely all they need to do. Cutting up and scanning books is hard work and actually doing the same thing digitally to ebooks isn't labor free either, especially when they have to be downloaded from random sites and cleaned from different formats. Torrenting a bunch of epubs and paying for individual books is probably cheaper
- tzs 1y agoGenerally you don't want laws to work that way. You want to set the penalties so that they discourage violating the law. Setting the penalty to what it would have cost to obey the law in the first place does the opposite.
- AnthonyMouse 1y agoThat's for criminal laws where prosecutorial discretion can then (in principle) be used in borderline cases to prevent unjust outcomes. If you give people a claim for damages which is an order of magnitude larger than their actual damages, it encourages litigiousness and becomes a vector for shakedowns because the excessive cost of losing pressures innocent defendants to settle even if there was a 90% chance they would have won. Meanwhile both parties have the incentive to settle in civil cases when it's obvious who is going to win, because a settlement to pay the damages is cheaper than the cost of going to court and then having to pay the same damages anyway. Which also provides a deterrent to doing it to begin with, because even having to pay lawyers to negotiate a settlement is a cost you don't want to pay when it's clear that what you're doing is going to have that result. And when the result isn't clear, penalizing the defendant in a case of first impression isn't just either, because it wasn't clear and punitive measures should be reserved for instances of unambiguous wrongdoing.
- badlibrarian 1y agoStatutory damages were written into the first federal copyright law in 1790, and earlier in state law (specified in Pounds because the dollar hadn't been invented yet).
- AnthonyMouse 1y agoThe first federal copyright law in 1790: https://copyright.gov/about/1790-copyright-act.html https://copyright.gov/about/1790-copyright-act.html Specified in dollars because dollars had been invented (in 1789), but in the amount of one half of one dollar, i.e. $0.50. That's 1790 dollars, of course, so a little under $20 today. (There was basically no inflation for the first 100+ years of that because the US dollar was still backed by precious metals then; a dollar was worth slightly more in 1900 than in 1790.) That seems more like an attempt to codify some amount of plausible actual damages so people aren't arguing endlessly about valuations, rather than an attempt to impose punitive damages. Most notably because -- unlike the current method -- it scales with the number of sheets reproduced.
- jonas21 1y agoAs they mentioned, the piracy part is obvious. It's the fair use part that will set an important precedent for being able to train on copyrighted works as long as you have legally acquired a copy.
- wood_spirit 1y agoCue physical books being licensed not sold in the futur with restricted agreements …
- jasonlotito 1y agoFrom my understanding: > pirating the books for their digital library is not fair use. "Pirating" is a fuzzy word and has no real meaning. Specifically, I think this is the cruz: > without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies Essentially: downloading is fine, sharing/uploading up is not. Which makes sense. The assertion here is that Anthropic (from this line) did not distribute the files they downloaded.
- codedokode 1y agoDownloading and using pirated software in a company is fine then as long as it is not shared outside? If what you describe is legal it makes no sense to pay for software.
- jasonlotito 1y ago> Downloading a document is fine as long as it is not shared outside? I've fixed your question so that it accurately represents what I said and doesn't put words in my mouth. If I click on a link and download a document, is that illegal? I do not know if the person has the right to distribute it or not. IANAL, but when people were getting sued by the RIAA years back, it was never about downloading, but also distribution. As I said, IANAL, but feel free to correct me, but my understanding is that downloading a document from the internet is not illegal.
- CaptainFever 1y ago> it was never about downloading, but also distribution. Did you mean to write "but about distribution" here?
- jasonlotito 1y agoYes, thank you for catching that. Unfortunately, I cannot edit it now.
- pyrale 1y ago
- pier25 1y ago> buying, physically cutting up, physically digitizing books, and using them for training is fair use So Suno would only really need to buy the physical albums and rip them to be able to generate music at an industrial scale?
- theteapot 1y agoYes.
- pier25 1y agoActually it remains to be seen. If you read the ruling, training was considered fair use in part because Claude is not a book generation tool. Hence it was deemed transformative. Definitely not what Suno and Udio are doing.
- ohdeargodno 1y agoOnly if the physical albums don't have copy protection, otherwise you're circumenventing it and that's illegal. Or is it, against the right to private copy? If anything, AI at least shows that all of the existing copyright laws are utter bullshit made to make Disney happy. Do keep in mind though: this is only for the wealthy. They're still going to send the Pinkertons at your house if you dare copy a Blu-ray.
- zerocrates 1y agoWith some minor exceptions, CDs don't have copy protection.
- FateOfNations 1y agoMinor exception: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
- nilamo 1y ago> They're still going to send the Pinkertons at your house if you dare copy a Blu-ray. Hey woah now, that's a Hasbro play, not a Disney one.
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago> That is, he ruled that > - buying, physically cutting up, physically digitizing books, and using them for training is fair use > - pirating the books for their digital library is not fair use. That seems inconsistent with one another. If it's fair use, how is it piracy? It also seems pragmatically trash. It doesn't do the authors any good for the AI company to buy one copy of their book (and a used one at that), but it does make it much harder for smaller companies to compete with megacorps for AI stuff, so it's basically the stupidest of the plausible outcomes.
- MrJohz 1y agoThese are two separate actions that Anthropic did: * They downloaded a massive online library of pirated books that someone else was distributing illegally. This was not fair use. * They then digitised a bunch of books that they physically owned copies of. This was fair use. This part of the ruling is pretty much existing law. If you have a physical book (or own a digital copy of a book), you can largely do what you like with it within the confines of your own home, including digitising it. But you are not allowed to distribute those digital copies to others, nor are you allowed to download other people's digital copies that you don't own the rights to. The interesting part of this ruling is that once Anthropic had a legal digital copy of the books, they could use it for training their AI models and then release the AI models. According to the judge, this counts as fair use (assuming the digital copies were legally sourced).
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago> This part of the ruling is pretty much existing law. If you have a physical book (or own a digital copy of a book), you can largely do what you like with it within the confines of your own home, including digitising it. But you are not allowed to distribute those digital copies to others, nor are you allowed to download other people's digital copies that you don't own the rights to. Can you point me to the US Supreme Court case where this is existing law? It's pretty clear that if you have a physical copy of a book, you can lend it to someone. It also seems pretty reasonable that the person borrowing it could make fair use of it, e.g. if you borrow a book from the library to write a book review and then quote an excerpt from it. So the only thing that's left is, what if you do the same thing over the internet? Shouldn't we be able to distinguish this from the case where someone is distributing multiple copies of a work without authorization and the recipients are each making and keeping permanent copies of it?
- icelancer 1y ago> You skipped quotes about the other important side: He said: > It was always somewhat obvious that pirating a library would be copyright infringement. ??
- alok-g 1y agoAFAIK, Judge Vince Chhabria has countered that Fair Use argument in a later order involving Meta. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67569326/598/kadrey-v-meta-platforms-inc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67569326/598/kadrey-v-m... Note: I am not a lawyer.
- franczesko 1y agoIs fruit of the poisonous tree rule applicable here?
- gruez 1y agoThat's only really applicable to evidence in criminal cases obtained by the government. No such doctrine exists for civil cases, for instance. It doesn't even bar the government from using evidence that others have collected illegally of their own volition.
- sershe 1y agoIm not sure how I feel about what anthropic did on merit as a matter of scale, but from a legalistic standpoint how is it different from using the book to train the meat model in my head? I could even learn bits by heart and quote them in context.
- melagonster 1y agoMachines do not have rights belonging to human now.
- mzmzmzm 1y agoNot sure about the law, but if you memorize and quote bits of a book and fail to attribute them, you could be accused of plagiarism. If for example you were a journalist or researcher, this could have professional consequences. Anthropic is building tools to do the same at immense scale with no concept of what plagiarism or attribution even is, let alone any method to track sourcing--and they're still willing to sell these tools. So even if your meat model and the trained model do something similar, you have a notably different understanding of what you're doing. Responsibility might ultimately fall to the end user, but it seems like something is getting laundered here.
- MaxPock 1y agoHow times change .They wanted to lock up Aaron Schwartz for life for essentially doing the same thing Anthropic is doing.
- m4x 1y agoAaron Swartz wanted to provide the public with open access to paywalled journal articles, while Anthropic want to use other people's copyrighted material to train their own private models that they restrict access to via a paywall. It's wild (but unsurprising) that Aaron Swartz was prosecuted under the CFAA for this while Anthropic is allowed to become commercially successful
- seuraughty 1y agoFeels like information laundering to me.