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People keep throwing this idea around haphazardly, but U.S. courts have pretty consistently decided that training on copyrighted works falls under fair use. You
by next_xibalba 3mo ago
People keep throwing this idea around haphazardly, but U.S. courts have pretty consistently decided that training on copyrighted works falls under fair use. You may not like it, but that doesn't make it "illegal".
- rowanG077 3mo agoRight, so it seems that distilling an AI model is legal too then. At least it is somewhat similar.
- pixl97 3mo agoLegal vs "They aren't going to let you do it with their service" are two different things.
- next_xibalba 3mo agoIt is a violation of their terms of service. There are plenty of good reasons to not use Anthropic's services. If you don't like their terms of service, do stop using them! I personally think Anthropic's increasingly successful attempts at regulatory capture are even more distasteful.
- danlitt 3mo agoYou have to admit that "downloading every book ever written for free from a repository of books that is itself illegal to compile and to run, in order to write a text generation tool" being legal is at least unintuitive, to put it mildly.
- usef- 3mo agoIt wasnt, that's why they paid a >billion dollar settlement over it, and now license/purchase them. I don't know if the people distilling are licensing those books/etc today, though
- usef- 3mo agoI'd appreciate if the down voters explain why. I wasn't making a value judgement. Anthropic did pay more than a billion: https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/nx-s1-5529404/anthropic-settlement-authors-copyright-ai https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/nx-s1-5529404/anthropic-settl... And is now buying up a lot of books (controversially, as scanning involves cutting their spines) because that's what the law deems the legal method: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthropic-ai-scan-destroy-books/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthrop... We know that models like Deepseek are trained on copyrighted books too: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20957 https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20957 The looser use of IP (eg, any characters/celebrities in AI video models) is increasingly mentioned as an advantage of overseas models.
- tripzilch 3mo agoClearly paying that fine didn't do anything to stop Anthropic from doing it again. Buying a book doesn't make it legal to publish lossy compressed copies of it. Also, the vast majority of authors whose work was copied against their wishes didn't receive any of that fine. It sounds like your argument is that they paid a fine for breaking the law, and therefore it is okay they reap the benefits of breaking the law and are allowed to continue to do so? > The looser use of IP (eg, any characters/celebrities in AI video models) is increasingly mentioned as an advantage of overseas models. UHmmm you remember when Sam Altman changed his profile pic to look like a Disney version of his own face? Yeah neither do I. Clearly US AI models are playing loose with the use of overseas IP just as much, and even publicly flaunting it, as if US-based IP is more worthy of protection but Gibli can suck it.
- malfist 3mo agoHas it? Because as far as I can tell those cases keep getting settled out of court before a legal precedent can be set. For record breaking amounts too.
- bsder 3mo ago> U.S. courts have pretty consistently decided that training on copyrighted works falls under fair use. I don't believe that this has been resolved at all, and there are quite a few pending lawsuits about it at this very moment.
- ethbr1 3mo ago> that training on [lawfully obtained] copyrighted works falls under fair use Fixed that for you.
- xydone 3mo agoWere the copyright owners contacted prior to this lawful obtaining that you speak of? Or after?
- brookst 3mo agoI miss the days when tech people were copyright skeptics. Remember when everyone was upset with Disney for our perpetual copyright regime and the destruction of public domain? Now many tech people are copyright maximalists and 100% converted to the church of Disney. It’s depressing.
- tripzilch 3mo agoI don't think that's right. The problem is that Anthropic is hoarding it and that's hypocritical. If copyright doesn't count for Anthropic, they should publish Claude. If they wanna hide Claude behind copyrights and/or TOS, they don't get to screw with other people's copyrights and TOS and then profit from it. To call that opinion "copyright maximalist 100% converted to the church of Disney" is, at the very least, hyperbole.
- brookst 3mo ago“Anthropic is hypocritical and hoarding data” is 100% compatible with “copyright has gotten out of control and we need less of it” But pearl clutching over the poor corporations who have their works trained on is much less compatible with a copyright-skeptical view. And I stand by copyright-maximalism as a rising trend in tech circles. It’s mostly anti-ai, but strange bedfellows and all that.
- ethbr1 3mo ago
- tedivm 3mo agoThe courts have never said piracy, which is how the training sets were originally built, is legal. There are several court cases still ongoing over this.
- tripzilch 3mo agoMaybe "U.S. courts have pretty consistently decided" used to mean something, but I don't think the opinion of US courts should be the standard for anything, anymore.