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You 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

• throwawayffffas 1y ago
  So all they have to do is go and buy a copy of each book they pirated. They will have ceased and desisted.
  • superfrank 1y ago
    I'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 ago
      Did 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 ago
        You may not think it is but the law does.
        • buildbot 1y ago
          The law says it’s copyright infringement, not theft.
      • axus 1y ago
        Agreed, 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 ago
        It'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 ago
          Fun 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
          • gghffguhvc 1y ago
            Or the music. It was originally made as a one off for a film festival. Movie industry defended the lawsuit over the music.
      • fortran77 1y ago
        It's fine that you think that way. But this is a discusion of the laws of the United States of America and ruling by American courts, not a discussion of your own legal theories.
        • hnlmorg 1y ago
          The GP isn’t talking about some edge case legal dilemma that requires a lawyer or judge to comment. It’s already widely documented that copyright infringement is legally distinct from theft.
      • superfrank 1y ago
        They stole from the amount they would have legally paid to buy a copy from the copyright holder. Think about it like sneaking into a movie theater and watch a movie without paying. The theater was going to play the movie anyway and, assuming it wasn't a packed theatre, I didn't deprive anyone else of their ability to watch. It's still theft because I'm getting something that costs money for free and depriving the theater of the money that they're owed.
    • freejazz 1y ago
      They also argued that they in no way could ever actually license all the materials they ingested
      • dmd 1y ago
        I love this argument so much. "But judge, there's no way I could ever afford to buy those jewels, so stealing them must be OK."
        • AnthonyMouse 1y ago
          The argument is more along the lines of, negotiating with millions of individuals each over a single copy of a work would cause the transaction costs to exceed the payments, and that kind of efficiency loss is the sort of thing fair use exists to prevent. It's not socially beneficial for the law to require you to create $2 in deadweight loss in order to transfer $1, and the cost to the author of not selling a single additional copy is not the thing they were really objecting to.
          • exe34 1y ago
            That's right, so I can't individually discuss terms with each and every media creator, so from now on, I can just pirate everything.
            • AnthonyMouse 1y ago
              Needing a copy of one book you're going to spend a week reading has a lot less overhead than needing a copy of every book that you're going to process with a computer in bulk.
              • recursive 1y ago
                I like to glance at the cover art. I can do ten per second when I really get into my flow state. Sometimes I read them also, but that's incidental.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • irthomasthomas 1y ago
      Is copyright in America different to Britain? There, it is legal to download books you don't own. Only distribution is a crime, which most torrenters break by seeding.
      • rahimnathwani 1y ago
        What do you mean by 'it is legal'? Do you mean: A) It's not a criminal offence? B) The copyright owner cannot file a civil suit for damages? C) Something else?
        • irthomasthomas 1y ago
          > Only distribution is a crime
          • throwawayffffas 1y ago
            Only distribution with the intent to make money is a crime. If you are doing it for free you are not criminally liable. Unless I am missing something.
            • codedokode 1y ago
              Any distribution of copyrighted material can cause you a big trouble.
          • rahimnathwani 1y ago
            What relevance does that have to the present case? The judge, in this civil matter, said there would be a trial. He didn't say anything about it being a criminal trial. The strings 'crim' and 'felon' do not appear in the ruling. We will have a trial on the pirated copies used to create Anthropic’s central library and the resulting damages, actual or statutory (including for willfulness).
            • Aeolun 1y ago
              There can always be a trial, even if nothing was done to warrant it. I think the distinction between civil and criminal trials is smaller in my home country. The fact that there is a trial at all implies that someone commited a ‘crime’.
  • 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 ago
    Generally 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 ago
      That'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 ago
        Statutory 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 ago
          The 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 ago
  As 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 ago
    Cue physical books being licensed not sold in the futur with restricted agreements …
    • pier25 1y ago
      Also music, videos, photos, etc.
    • mormegil 1y ago
      See first-sale doctrine <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine>
• jasonlotito 1y ago
  From 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 ago
    Downloading 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 ago
          Yes, 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 ago
    Yes.
    • pier25 1y ago
      Actually 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 ago
    Only 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 ago
      With some minor exceptions, CDs don't have copy protection.
      • FateOfNations 1y ago
        Minor 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 ago
    These 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. ??