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Judge Alsup issued the original order that determined they were liable for piracy but that training LLMs on books was fair use. It's worth reading if you're int
by driverdan 3mo ago
Judge Alsup issued the original order that determined they were liable for piracy but that training LLMs on books was fair use. It's worth reading if you're interested in the topic. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69058235/231/bartz-v-anthropic-pbc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69058235/231/bartz-v-an...
- tzs 3mo agoAlsup is an interesting judge. He has handled several important tech cases, such as Oracle v Google, and Waymo v Uber. He's also a longtime hobbyist programmer working in BASIC, much of it in support of his ham radio hobby. Screenshots of his shortwave propagation prediction program here [1]. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16503076/oracle-vs-google-judge-william-alsup-interview-waymo-uber https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16503076/oracle-vs-googl...
- brlewis 3mo agoYes, that is interesting. It sounds like he was aware of the theoretical possibility of a book being regurgitated verbatim. Do you know if he was aware it had been done? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49000742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49000742 If he was not aware, I wonder if he still would have described the process as "exceedingly transformative" had he been aware.
- FeepingCreature 3mo agoNote that they're testing for 100-word passages. This is a level of memorization that avid readers can credibly also reach. Note also that Sonnet 3.7 had to be jailbroken. Note also that they got high memorization for a few books that were widely quoted. The books in question can probably also be "retrieved" by putting phrase prefixes into Google, which is probably why Sonnet 3.7 knows them with the precision of a fanboy. Material being widely repeated in the training set is a well-known cause of memorization.
- globular-toast 3mo agoNo "avid reader" could recall anywhere near that much text. That takes dedicated effort to commit to memory. Copyright was never meant to stop people copying books anyway, it was meant to stop machines (ie. printing presses) copying them. Edit: Apologies, I misread it as "100 pages". My point about copyright still stands, though.
- FeepingCreature 3mo agoI disagree that avid readers cannot complete entire passages from books they've read several times when fed a prefix.
- leni536 3mo agoAnd can these avid readers publish these recited passages without infringing copyright?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- penguin_booze 3mo agoSo, continuing to profit--forever--from someone's else work, at scale, without their prior consent, is fair use? It's funny that crimes can be settled in cash. IOW, everything has a price; and the price is always right. Settlement ought to be the euphemism for blood money. In addition to the settlement, what I'd consider fair is to have these companies pay royalties in perpetuity. Of course, that's not tractable.
- owenfi 3mo agoYeah, I feel like penalties here should be something like 10% of revenue in perpetuity. Then companies might think twice about asking forgiveness instead of permission.
- simianwords 3mo agoWhy do they need prior consent? What sort of rent seeking do you want?
- gspr 3mo agoAre you saying that if someone writes a book or records a song, anyone should be able to use it for anything forever without consent? How does intellectual work get funded in this insane world if yours, pray tell?
- 0x3f 3mo agoYou assume your premise. But plenty of "intellectual work" is already done without legal cover. It just typically attracts normal profits, rather than super-normal rent-seeking ones.
- gspr 3mo agoI, too, hate rentseeking. Owning one's intellectual output, however, is not in and of itself rentseeking.
- 3mo ago