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It does make sense. It’s controversial. Your memory memorizes things in the same way. So what nvidia does here is no different, the AI doesn’t actually copy any

It does make sense. It’s controversial. Your memory memorizes things in the same way. So what nvidia does here is no different, the AI doesn’t actually copy any of the books. To call training illegal is similar to calling reading a book and remembering it illegal. Our copyright laws are nowhere near detailed enough to specify anything in detail here so there is indeed a logical and technical inconsistency here. I can definitely see these laws evolving into things that are human centric. It’s permissible for a human to do something but not for an AI. What is consistent is that obtaining the books was probably illegal, but say if nvidia bought one kindle copy of each book from Amazon and scraped everything for training then that falls into the grey zone.

ckastner 10mo ago
> To call training illegal is similar to calling reading a book and remembering it illegal. Perhaps, but reproducing the book from this memory could very well be illegal. And these models are all about production.
- roblabla 10mo ago
  To be fair, that seems to be where some of the IA lawsuits are going. The argument goes that the models themselves aren't derivative works, but the output they produce can absolutely be - in much the same way that reproducing a book from memory could be copyright violation, trademark infringement, or generally go afoul of the various IP laws.
- threethirtytwo 10mo ago
  Models don’t reproduce books though. It’s impossible for a model to reproduce something word for word because the model never copied the book. Most of the best fit curve runs along a path that doesn’t even touch an actual data point.
  - kalap_ur 10mo ago
    If there is one exact sentence taken out of the book and not referenced in quotes and exact source, that triggers copyright laws. So model doesnt have to reproduce the entire book, it only required to reproduce one specific sentence (which may be a characteristic sentence to that author or to that book).
    - CamperBob2 10mo ago
      If there is one exact sentence taken out of the book and not referenced in quotes and exact source, that triggers copyright laws. Yes, and that's stupid, and will need to be changed.
    - kelnos 10mo ago
      Sure, but that use would easily pass a fair use test, at least in the US.
  - empath75 10mo ago
    They do memorize some books. You can test this trivially by asking ChatGPT to produce the first chapter of something in the public domain -- for example a Tale of Two Cities. It may not be word for word exact, but it'll be very close. These academics were able to get multiple LLMs to produce large amounts of text from Harry Potter: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671 https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671
    - threethirtytwo 10mo ago
      In that case I would say it is the act of reproducing the books that is illegal. Training the AI on said books is not. So the illegality rests at the point of output and not at the point of input. I’m just speaking in terms of the technical interpretation of what’s in place. My personal views on what it should be are another topic.
      - ckastner 10mo ago
        > So the illegality rests at the point of output and not at the point of input. It's not as simple as that, as this settlement shows [1]. Also, generating output is what these models are primarily trained for. [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y4jpg922qo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y4jpg922qo
        threethirtytwo 10mo ago
        >Also, generating output is what these models are primarily trained for. Yes but not generating illegal output. These models were trained with intent to generate legal output. The fact that it can generate illegal output is a side effect. That's my point. If you use AI to generate illegal output, that act is illegal. If you use AI to generate legal output that act is not illegal. Thus the point of output is where the legal question lies. From inception up to training there is clear legal precedence for the existence of AI models.
        kelnos 10mo ago
        Unfortunately a settlement doesn't really show you anything definitive about the legality or illegality of something. It only shows you that the defendant thought it would be better for them to pay up rather than continue to be dragged through court, and that the plaintiff preferred some amount of certain money now over some other amount of uncertain money later, or never. We cannot say with any amount of confidence how the court would have ruled on the legality, had things been allowed to play out without a settlement.
  - NicuCalcea 10mo ago
    Models absolutely do reproduce books. > With a simple two-phase procedure, we show that it is possible to extract large amounts of in-copyright text from four production LLMs. While we needed to jailbreak Claude 3.7 Sonnet and GPT-4.1 to facilitate extraction, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Grok 3 directly complied with text continuation requests. For Claude 3.7 Sonnet, we were able to extract four whole books near-verbatim, including two books under copyright in the U.S.: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and 1984. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671 https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671
    - thedailymail 10mo ago
      The supplementary files in that paper—verbatim reproductions of the full texts of Frankenstein and The Great Gatsby—are pretty instructive. The research group highlighted all additions and omissions, but on most pages the differences are difficult to spot because they are only missing spaces, extra hyphens, and other typographical minutiae.
lelanthran 10mo ago
> To call training illegal is similar to calling reading a book and remembering it illegal. A type of wishful thinking fallacy. In law scale matters. It's legal for you to possess a single joint. It's not legal to possess 400 tons of weed in a warehouse.
- threethirtytwo 10mo ago
  Er no. I’ve read and remember hundreds of books in my life time. It’s not any more illegal based off scale. The law doesn’t differentiate whether I remember one book or a hundred then there’s no difference for thousands or millions. No wishful thinking here.
  - lelanthran 10mo ago
    > Er no. I’ve read and remember hundreds of books in my life time. It’s not any more illegal based off scale. I'm not sure you understood what you said, but superficially it appears that you are agreeing with me? Just because it's legal to read 100s of books does not make it legal to slurp up every single piece of produced content ever recorded. We're talking man many orders of magnitude in scale there, and you're the one who pointed out that scale :-/
    - threethirtytwo 10mo ago
      No I'm not agreeing with you. >Just because it's legal to read 100s of books does not make it legal to slurp up every single piece of produced content ever recorded. The law says you're perfectly in your legal right to slurp up every piece of content ever produced. >We're talking man many orders of magnitude in scale there, and you're the one who pointed out that scale :-/ I'm aware, and the law doesn't talk about scale.
  - kelnos 10mo ago
    What is "scale" in this context? I think arguably 100 books over the span of decades is not "scale". But tens (hundreds?) of thousands of books over the span of a few weeks? That's definitely "scale".
kalap_ur 10mo ago
You can only read the book, if you purchased it. Even if you dont have the intent to reproduce it, you must purchase it. So, I guess NVDA should just purchase all those books, no?
- threethirtytwo 10mo ago
  Yep, I agree. That’s the part that’s clearly illegal. They should purchase the books, but they didn’t.
  - Nursie 10mo ago
    This is the bit an author friend of mine really hates. They didn’t even buy a copy. And now AI has killed his day job writing legal summaries. So they took his words without a license and used them to put him out of a job. Really rubs in that “shit on the little guy” vibe.
- ThrowawayR2 10mo ago
  Obviously not; one can borrow books from libraries and read them as well.
  - threethirtytwo 10mo ago
    That's true. But the book itself was legally purchased. So if nvidia went to the library and trained AI by borrowing books, that should be technically legal.
    - kelnos 10mo ago
      Do you have the same legal rights to something that you've borrowed as you do with something you've purchased, though? Would it be legal for me to borrow a book from the library, then scan and OCR every page and create an EPUB file of the result? Even if I didn't distribute it, that sounds questionable to me. Whereas if I had purchased the book and done the same, I believe that might be ok (format shifting for personal use). Back when VHS and video rental was a thing, my parents would routinely copy rented VHS tapes if we liked the movie (camcorder connected to VCR with composite video and audio cables, worked great if there wasn't Macrovision copy protection on the source). I don't think they were under any illusions that what they were doing was ok.
Nursie 10mo ago
But it’s not just about recall and reproduction. If they used Anna’s Archive the books were obtained and copied without a license, before they were fed in as training data.
_trampeltier 10mo ago
But to train the models they have to download it first (make a copy)
- threethirtytwo 10mo ago
  You had to do this for reading too. The words were burned onto your retina as volatile memory before getting processed by your brain. You retina likely overwrote it's "memory" as soon as you looked at something else, but that's no different than copying and deleting or the more apt analogy: streaming.
  - _trampeltier 10mo ago
    BS. Nvidia store use the copy for each training run, or do you really thing the just download it each time in real time for training?
  - codedokode 10mo ago
    The law makes a distinction between storing it on a disk and just remembering the content. The latter is not a "copy" and not a subject of law: > “Copies” are material objects, other than phonorecords, in which a work is fixed by any method now known or later developed, and from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. The term “copies” includes the material object, other than a phonorecord, in which the work is first fixed. > A work is “fixed” in a tangible medium of expression when its embodiment in a copy or phonorecord, by or under the authority of the author, is sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated for a period of more than transitory duration. A work consisting of sounds, images, or both, that are being transmitted, is “fixed” for purposes of this title if a fixation of the work is being made simultaneously with its transmission. https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html
    - threethirtytwo 10mo ago
      Interesting. How long is the transitory duration? The interpretation of that likely has yet to be determined by a court case and can evolve similar to how “all men are created equal” doesn’t just refer to men. Seems to me a possible interpretation is just deleting the data after training is finished.
godelski 10mo ago
You need to pay for the books before you memorize them
- threethirtytwo 10mo ago
  Partially true. I can pay for a book then lend it out to people for free. The government is in full support of this "lending" concept, in fact they have created entire facilities devoted to this very concept of lending out books.
  - godelski 10mo ago
    Okay, so go check out 500 TB worth of books from the library. I'll wait
    - threethirtytwo 10mo ago
      If I’m rich enough to employ thousands of people I can hire each one of them to borrow as many books as possible then use all the books to train an AI. Perfectly legal. And also very possible. Point being that the library prevents you from checking out 500gb because of logistical issues. First how can you carry all those books and how can they let other patrons in the library check out books if you grabbed that many? These rules aren’t enforced to prevent “scale” hence why my methodology got around the rules.
      - godelski 10mo ago
        Great! Then it's perfectly legal. As long as you obtain the books legally then it's legal This really isn't that hard
        threethirtytwo 10mo ago
        So you’re wrong when you said you have to pay for the books. You don’t.

ckastner 10mo ago

> To call training illegal is similar to calling reading a book and remembering it illegal. Perhaps, but reproducing the book from this memory could very well be illegal. And these models are all about production.

roblabla 10mo ago
To be fair, that seems to be where some of the IA lawsuits are going. The argument goes that the models themselves aren't derivative works, but the output they produce can absolutely be - in much the same way that reproducing a book from memory could be copyright violation, trademark infringement, or generally go afoul of the various IP laws.
threethirtytwo 10mo ago
Models don’t reproduce books though. It’s impossible for a model to reproduce something word for word because the model never copied the book. Most of the best fit curve runs along a path that doesn’t even touch an actual data point.
- kalap_ur 10mo ago
  If there is one exact sentence taken out of the book and not referenced in quotes and exact source, that triggers copyright laws. So model doesnt have to reproduce the entire book, it only required to reproduce one specific sentence (which may be a characteristic sentence to that author or to that book).
  - CamperBob2 10mo ago
    If there is one exact sentence taken out of the book and not referenced in quotes and exact source, that triggers copyright laws. Yes, and that's stupid, and will need to be changed.
  - kelnos 10mo ago
    Sure, but that use would easily pass a fair use test, at least in the US.
- empath75 10mo ago
  They do memorize some books. You can test this trivially by asking ChatGPT to produce the first chapter of something in the public domain -- for example a Tale of Two Cities. It may not be word for word exact, but it'll be very close. These academics were able to get multiple LLMs to produce large amounts of text from Harry Potter: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671 https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671
  - threethirtytwo 10mo ago
    In that case I would say it is the act of reproducing the books that is illegal. Training the AI on said books is not. So the illegality rests at the point of output and not at the point of input. I’m just speaking in terms of the technical interpretation of what’s in place. My personal views on what it should be are another topic.
    - ckastner 10mo ago
      > So the illegality rests at the point of output and not at the point of input. It's not as simple as that, as this settlement shows [1]. Also, generating output is what these models are primarily trained for. [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y4jpg922qo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y4jpg922qo
      - threethirtytwo 10mo ago
        >Also, generating output is what these models are primarily trained for. Yes but not generating illegal output. These models were trained with intent to generate legal output. The fact that it can generate illegal output is a side effect. That's my point. If you use AI to generate illegal output, that act is illegal. If you use AI to generate legal output that act is not illegal. Thus the point of output is where the legal question lies. From inception up to training there is clear legal precedence for the existence of AI models.
      - kelnos 10mo ago
        Unfortunately a settlement doesn't really show you anything definitive about the legality or illegality of something. It only shows you that the defendant thought it would be better for them to pay up rather than continue to be dragged through court, and that the plaintiff preferred some amount of certain money now over some other amount of uncertain money later, or never. We cannot say with any amount of confidence how the court would have ruled on the legality, had things been allowed to play out without a settlement.
- NicuCalcea 10mo ago
  Models absolutely do reproduce books. > With a simple two-phase procedure, we show that it is possible to extract large amounts of in-copyright text from four production LLMs. While we needed to jailbreak Claude 3.7 Sonnet and GPT-4.1 to facilitate extraction, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Grok 3 directly complied with text continuation requests. For Claude 3.7 Sonnet, we were able to extract four whole books near-verbatim, including two books under copyright in the U.S.: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and 1984. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671 https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671
  - thedailymail 10mo ago
    The supplementary files in that paper—verbatim reproductions of the full texts of Frankenstein and The Great Gatsby—are pretty instructive. The research group highlighted all additions and omissions, but on most pages the differences are difficult to spot because they are only missing spaces, extra hyphens, and other typographical minutiae.

lelanthran 10mo ago

> To call training illegal is similar to calling reading a book and remembering it illegal. A type of wishful thinking fallacy. In law scale matters. It's legal for you to possess a single joint. It's not legal to possess 400 tons of weed in a warehouse.

threethirtytwo 10mo ago
Er no. I’ve read and remember hundreds of books in my life time. It’s not any more illegal based off scale. The law doesn’t differentiate whether I remember one book or a hundred then there’s no difference for thousands or millions. No wishful thinking here.
- lelanthran 10mo ago
  > Er no. I’ve read and remember hundreds of books in my life time. It’s not any more illegal based off scale. I'm not sure you understood what you said, but superficially it appears that you are agreeing with me? Just because it's legal to read 100s of books does not make it legal to slurp up every single piece of produced content ever recorded. We're talking man many orders of magnitude in scale there, and you're the one who pointed out that scale :-/
  - threethirtytwo 10mo ago
    No I'm not agreeing with you. >Just because it's legal to read 100s of books does not make it legal to slurp up every single piece of produced content ever recorded. The law says you're perfectly in your legal right to slurp up every piece of content ever produced. >We're talking man many orders of magnitude in scale there, and you're the one who pointed out that scale :-/ I'm aware, and the law doesn't talk about scale.
- kelnos 10mo ago
  What is "scale" in this context? I think arguably 100 books over the span of decades is not "scale". But tens (hundreds?) of thousands of books over the span of a few weeks? That's definitely "scale".

kalap_ur 10mo ago

You can only read the book, if you purchased it. Even if you dont have the intent to reproduce it, you must purchase it. So, I guess NVDA should just purchase all those books, no?

threethirtytwo 10mo ago
Yep, I agree. That’s the part that’s clearly illegal. They should purchase the books, but they didn’t.
- Nursie 10mo ago
  This is the bit an author friend of mine really hates. They didn’t even buy a copy. And now AI has killed his day job writing legal summaries. So they took his words without a license and used them to put him out of a job. Really rubs in that “shit on the little guy” vibe.
ThrowawayR2 10mo ago
Obviously not; one can borrow books from libraries and read them as well.
- threethirtytwo 10mo ago
  That's true. But the book itself was legally purchased. So if nvidia went to the library and trained AI by borrowing books, that should be technically legal.
  - kelnos 10mo ago
    Do you have the same legal rights to something that you've borrowed as you do with something you've purchased, though? Would it be legal for me to borrow a book from the library, then scan and OCR every page and create an EPUB file of the result? Even if I didn't distribute it, that sounds questionable to me. Whereas if I had purchased the book and done the same, I believe that might be ok (format shifting for personal use). Back when VHS and video rental was a thing, my parents would routinely copy rented VHS tapes if we liked the movie (camcorder connected to VCR with composite video and audio cables, worked great if there wasn't Macrovision copy protection on the source). I don't think they were under any illusions that what they were doing was ok.

Nursie 10mo ago

But it’s not just about recall and reproduction. If they used Anna’s Archive the books were obtained and copied without a license, before they were fed in as training data.

_trampeltier 10mo ago

But to train the models they have to download it first (make a copy)

threethirtytwo 10mo ago
You had to do this for reading too. The words were burned onto your retina as volatile memory before getting processed by your brain. You retina likely overwrote it's "memory" as soon as you looked at something else, but that's no different than copying and deleting or the more apt analogy: streaming.
- _trampeltier 10mo ago
  BS. Nvidia store use the copy for each training run, or do you really thing the just download it each time in real time for training?
- codedokode 10mo ago
  The law makes a distinction between storing it on a disk and just remembering the content. The latter is not a "copy" and not a subject of law: > “Copies” are material objects, other than phonorecords, in which a work is fixed by any method now known or later developed, and from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. The term “copies” includes the material object, other than a phonorecord, in which the work is first fixed. > A work is “fixed” in a tangible medium of expression when its embodiment in a copy or phonorecord, by or under the authority of the author, is sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated for a period of more than transitory duration. A work consisting of sounds, images, or both, that are being transmitted, is “fixed” for purposes of this title if a fixation of the work is being made simultaneously with its transmission. https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html
  - threethirtytwo 10mo ago
    Interesting. How long is the transitory duration? The interpretation of that likely has yet to be determined by a court case and can evolve similar to how “all men are created equal” doesn’t just refer to men. Seems to me a possible interpretation is just deleting the data after training is finished.

godelski 10mo ago

You need to pay for the books before you memorize them

threethirtytwo 10mo ago
Partially true. I can pay for a book then lend it out to people for free. The government is in full support of this "lending" concept, in fact they have created entire facilities devoted to this very concept of lending out books.
- godelski 10mo ago
  Okay, so go check out 500 TB worth of books from the library. I'll wait
  - threethirtytwo 10mo ago
    If I’m rich enough to employ thousands of people I can hire each one of them to borrow as many books as possible then use all the books to train an AI. Perfectly legal. And also very possible. Point being that the library prevents you from checking out 500gb because of logistical issues. First how can you carry all those books and how can they let other patrons in the library check out books if you grabbed that many? These rules aren’t enforced to prevent “scale” hence why my methodology got around the rules.
    - godelski 10mo ago
      Great! Then it's perfectly legal. As long as you obtain the books legally then it's legal This really isn't that hard
      - threethirtytwo 10mo ago
        So you’re wrong when you said you have to pay for the books. You don’t.