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A one time payment like 1.5B doesn’t do anything. There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing ideas. That is probably the corre

A one time payment like 1.5B doesn’t do anything. There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing ideas. That is probably the correct way to legislate this. If anything a human does can instantly be copied by an LLM, and then sent to all its subscribers, things need to change

nikanj 3mo ago
It doesn't do anything? Au contraire! Now the creations of the LLMs stand on legal ground. This was an excellent deal for Anthropic
- usef- 3mo ago
  Yeah, it's always interesting the two-sides of a situation like this. Add regulation/enforcement to the big companies and you often shut out the smaller ones following. Meta also has copyright lawsuits for the open models they released, so open models are not immune. ... unless the line we want to draw is "american orgs pay, others don't", as currently seems to be happening.
  - Arkhaine_kupo 3mo ago
    > Add regulation/enforcement to the big companies and you often shut out the smaller ones following. That is the case, any regulation increases the cost to enter a market. But in this case, its irrelevant because the moat of cost to enter is already unfathomable and secondly, they are not adding regulation but fining them for committing a crime. So yeah, adding that every food compnay needs 3 health inspectors that they pay for would benefit coca cola over you mom and pop bakery. But telling someone they cannot start a Space agency with money laundered from ransom and drug sales payments would not affect much the competition markets
    - vovavili 3mo ago
      >the moat of cost to enter is already unfathomable At the moment.
      - Arkhaine_kupo 3mo ago
        There are multiple ways to respond to that and I will try and summarise them. Current believe is that its a "winner takes all market", so companies are acting rationally and using Brute Force compute to get there first. Training costs scale linearly, which means the moat is directly related to compute cost There are theories that they are wasting 90% of training costs and there are more efficient ways to do it than throw compute at the problem. But if thats the case then chances are the market is not "winner takes all". Which then means the valuation of the ENTIRE market is overvalued. Basically the only way for the assertion "at the moment" to be true is if the market is a bubble, else if the current theory of winner takes all market means a monopoly will make it so that cost isnt even the worst of the moats to enter.
- chvid 3mo ago
  It is legal to train LLMs on books but illegal to train on output of LLMs. Perfect - an absolute steal for 1.5B.
  - TeMPOraL 3mo ago
    > but illegal to train on output of LLMs. Since when?
    - inigyou 3mo ago
      They're probably confused with anthropic seething about "distillation attacks" coming from "fraud accounts". But that is not the law, that is just Anthropic being upset.
    - chvid 3mo ago
      Typically the big LLM providers write in the their ToS that it is prohibited to use their output to train another LLM. Whereas for a book it is fair use.
      - TeMPOraL 3mo ago
        ToS are usually not worth the toilet paper they're printed on. They're not legally binding.
- remify 3mo ago
  The legal ground is: If you're rich enough you can do it. Now only big tech companies can train models
  - wraptile 3mo ago
    AFAIK this does not set a legal precedent as it has been settled and last summer finding is that Anthropic was wrong for "acquiring books illegally" not for training which is fair use. With model distillation being so effective now nobody actually needs to pirate books to train their models. You can get an open-weight Chinese model and get all that. Or you can just buy the books or buy a library - there are many creative solutions here that aren't piracy and not going to cost you billions of dollars. The moat right now seems to be the compute resources which might actually be worse for us common folk than a legal moat as we need compute for many more things that aren't LLMs too.
- Maxatar 3mo ago
  Settlements do not in any way establish legal precedent or any legal standing. This is simply an agreement between two parties.
agilob 3mo ago
> and then sent to all its subscribers, things need to change and then sell to all its subscribers, things need to change. Fixed that for you. Imagine being able to pay a fraction of your savings to download all Netflix shows and then sell 1 minute chunk of every media to your paid subscribers.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
Llamamoe 3mo ago
Exactly. This is a slap on the wrist. They need to either be banned from profiting from the egregious piracy, meaning charging money for anything trained on pirated works, or at least be forced to pay major royalties.
olalonde 3mo ago
Regurgitating existing ideas is not copyright infringement. Reproducing works verbatim is and AI companies already implement guardrails to prevent that.
- rzmmm 3mo ago
  It depends. In music for example it's often question whether the artist has been exposed to the original work. In that spirit, small language models are less likely to infringe copyright.
- timmb 3mo ago
  This is exactly why something more advanced than copyright is needed to protect human creative endeavour against AI appropriation. Copyright is demonstrated here not to be up to the job but it doesn’t mean there isn’t regulation needed to give human creators rights and a reward for their contribution
  - visarga 3mo ago
    What you are saying leads to "pulling the ladder behind you" effect on creativity. It's impossible to protect more than substantial similarity and still allow creativity to exist.
    - Jtarii 3mo ago
      If a human makes something there should be broad protection for creativity, if a LLM generates something there should be extremely limited protection for creativity. You should not be able to mass generate images in a particular artists style and claim it as fair use, even if a human making the same images would have protection.
      - docjay 3mo ago
        But the human made the LLM. An LLM is categorically “I built a thing that built a thing” and if the output of that category has no protections then all automation and ‘machine at the final step’ is in trouble. What about aleatory music (music left at least partially to chance)? Or Autechre - they have whole albums and live performances built on automation software. They built the logic and added randomization, necessarily removing themselves from the final output. Is spin art not copyrightable? If I build a simple machine that spins paper, then do no more than drop paint on it, the result is not mine to copyright? I didn’t choose the output, I merely built the machine and the rest was created by pure chance. “But you chose the paint” - and if I didn’t? What if my art uses AI to perform sentiment analysis on the top news articles of the day and it drops colors matching the emotional tone of the news onto the spin art machine. I have no control over it and the output is machine generated, but is the result not just the final step of an entire process I created? Was the result of the creative idea not part of the creativity itself? If I build an automated laboratory to test every combination of a problem space, is a resulting success not patentable? What if the problem is too large to permute, so I added a random selection process to it? I’m not even controlling what’s being tested, but if it finds success is that not my contribution? The machines did the work, the selection was random, there was no human in the loop; what then? The internals of an LLM may be mysterious to some, but I assure you it’s just fixed automation with a random number generator sometimes tacked onto it, but randomization is optional too. I built that LLM. I decided what text to input for training, I curated the information, I wrote the algorithm, I decided the layers and hyper-parameters, I decided the RLHF pairs to train, then I put a few drops of paint from my bottle of language into the automated machine. I decided and built every single step of the system, but that output is not part of my process? If I pipe the LLM text output to a paint dispenser hovering over paper, set to squeeze out drops based on syllables, would you protect my artwork then?
shevy-java 3mo ago
I think the only way to stop that is to put the responsible folks in prison permanently. Small criminals are being jailed permanently on repeated offence. I think big guns with a lot of money need to get much higher sentences by default. And no monetary way to avoid that. The whole prison system is kind of screwed up here. A leech system for lawyers and judges.
visarga 3mo ago
> There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing ideas. So, by that logic, you need to be paying every time you regurgitate any of my ideas. Or anyone else's. Copyright now protects abstractions and vibes. Substantial similarity test be damned. Nobody can write stories about wizard schools, the idea is taken.
- 21asdffdsa12 3mo ago
  Every morning we pay royalties to prometheus for we all are toast.
- runroader 3mo ago
  Humans are not computers. Humans are not a service. In the end, all laws are made up rules and can absolutely be written to have different outcomes and restrictions based on if a human is doing something or if a program is doing it.
  - pj_mukh 3mo ago
    Real question, if an LLM shouldn't be able to remix someone's written work, why should a robot be able to build a chair that kinda looks like a chair a carpenter built that one time? The carpenter was a human, and humans are not a service. Why this distinction only for intellectual work?
    - echelon_musk 3mo ago
      I suspect chairs have been public domain since the advent of man.
    - eloisius 3mo ago
      For the same reason that you can make a similar-looking chair, but you can’t distribute a fuzzy copy of Star Wars. The char isn’t a copyrighted work.
      - pj_mukh 3mo ago
TeMPOraL 3mo ago
It's not meant to do anything about LLMs. It addresses the procurement of training data. I'm glad the courts demonstrate some basic lucidity that sadly seems to have escaped tech discussion sites some time ago.
Lutger 3mo ago
Ideas are not protected by copyright, nor are facts. You need to have a very specific and 'creative' / 'substantial' expression of an idea for copyright to apply. The output of an LLM can be easily be such, but usually not.
- jagged-chisel 3mo ago
  > … very specific … That phrase is doing a lot of work. In the US, any writing is automatically protected by copyright. (This comment, for example.) Whether the author can claim infringement is a can of worms: legal costs, fair use … but your “very specific” phrasing makes it sound like there’s a prescription for exactly what is protected by copyright - there is not. > Ideas are not protected by copyright. The expression of the idea is, however. Same with facts. The fact that I live at a specific street address is not protected. My sentence construction explaining my specific street address is protected. > The output of an LLM … … is not protected, not matter its shape. The US Copyright Office has declared as much.
- ethbr1 3mo ago
  I'll link to a previous comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48968156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48968156 > You need to have a very specific and 'creative' / 'substantial' expression of an idea for copyright to apply. The output of an LLM can be easily be such, but usually not. This is incomplete with current US law. You need the above (the typical copyright qualifiers) AND evidence of substantial human involvement in the creation. Minimally directing an autonomous agent does not qualify.
  - neuronexmachina 3mo ago
    Just to be clear, what you're referring to is the current US standard for whether a work is copywritable, not whether training on data and "regurgitating existing ideas" is fair-use. The latter is what the GP comment was about: > There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing ideas. That is probably the correct way to legislate this. If anything a human does can instantly be copied by an LLM, and then sent to all its subscribers, things need to change
pixlmint 3mo ago
if they had any intention of doing things "the right way", they would have gone to every publisher individually and asked for a proper license.
phire 3mo ago
This settlement has basically nothing to do with LLMs. At least not as far as the courts are concerned. Alsup ruled [0] that feeding a book into an LLM is transformative and counts as fair use. Especially when they purchased a physical copy of the book, scanned it, and destroyed the original. But if I'm reading the ruling correctly, Anthropic might have been fine even with feeding pirated books into their LLM (as long as they planned to eventually deleted them afterwards) Where Anthropic ran into problems is that they put all their pirated books into a big central library (file on a server), and planned to keep those copies forever. Including copies they never actually fed into the LLM (a point that seriously worked against them). Alsup ruled this central library of pirated books was copyright infringement. And it's this "pirated central library" that Anthropic are now paying a a 1.5B settlement for, nothing else. The fact that the pirated books were also used to train LLMs is legally irrelevant. Though... I suspect a non AI company could have negotiated a significantly smaller settlement. [0] https://copyrightalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bartz-v.-Anthropic-Order.pdf https://copyrightalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bar...
- embedding-shape 3mo ago
  > At least not as far as the courts are concerned. Alsup ruled [0] that feeding a book into an LLM is transformative and counts as fair use. Especially when they purchased a physical copy of the book, scanned it, and destroyed the original. > But if I'm reading the ruling correctly, Anthropic might have been fine even with feeding pirated books into their LLM (as long as they eventually deleted them afterwards) The way I understood it, was that essentially the entire case rested on if Anthropics use was "transformative" or not. And since they literally destroyed the books (not just delete files, which would be copied), that made it transformative. Regardless if they deleted files or not, if nothing existing was transformed, it would have been illegal. But because of the destruction of k̶n̶o̶w̶l̶e̶d̶g̶e̶ physical property, this ended up being legal.
  - phire 3mo ago
    > And since they literally destroyed the books (not just delete files, which would be copied), that made it transformative. You have to be careful, just because the judge points a factor out as notable, doesn't mean that factor was required. The destruction of source books makes Anthropic's fair use argument [2] especially air tight, but it would be a mistake to assume that act was required, or is what made it transformative. In the previous google books case [1] (which this case cites), google borrowed books from libraries, scanned them, then returned them. They were not destroyed, google didn't even keep the physical copy. Yet Google Books was ruled fair use, because it was transformative. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,.... [2] Note... This part of the ruling is still not about LLMs. This was about Anthropic's right to scan books and then keep a digital library of them.
one33seven 3mo ago
If it is based on all our data, we should all own it and democratically chose what is done with it or profits it generates
Zambyte 3mo ago
The correct way to legislate this is to abolish copyright. It is strictly a negative force. Nobody makes art because of copyright, only in spite of it.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  Commercial enterprises make content, like Marvel movies and Netflix series, because of copyright.
  - Zambyte 3mo ago
    Commercial enterprises stand on the shoulders of lax copyright laws. For example, foundational Disney works would have been illegal for them to make under the copyright laws they have since purchased. https://drewdevault.com/blog/Alice-in-Wonderland/ https://drewdevault.com/blog/Alice-in-Wonderland/ Copyright is a textbook ladder pull.
  - YetAnotherNick 3mo ago
    What copyright law helps them? They have the least to worry about copyright as even if someone copies the movie script or something it's not like their views will be gone because of that. I am not against trademark. e.g. Disney has a right on who can sell Mickey Mouse figurine, or Marvel has right over Iron man character and franchise.
- ivell 3mo ago
  People make art to also get recognized for that art. Otherwise they would keep that art secret at home. Without copyright, anyone can copy the art and call it their own. What is then the incentive for the creator to share the art, if there is neither monetory gain and nor fame. And worse than them being recognized, they might even get accused of copying their own art if someone else became famous due to a copy. Society would miss out a lot.
  - Zambyte 3mo ago
    There are lots of famous artists that are older than copyright. > And worse than them being recognized, they might even get accused of copying their own art if someone else became famous due to a copy. You mean like right now? Here is A24 claiming copyright for Backrooms related media that came out before their Backrooms related film: https://kotaku.com/backrooms-a24-copyright-strikes-kane-parsons-2000716667 https://kotaku.com/backrooms-a24-copyright-strikes-kane-pars... Being "accused" of copying literally does not matter if copyright didn't exist. This framing is only an issue under copyright. > Society would miss out a lot. Society actively misses out a lot. We could have had tons of derivative art that has been buried for the sake of propping up companies. We could have had Aaron Swartz. Abolish copyright.
jstummbillig 3mo ago
> There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing ideas This does not do enough to fix the root problem. People who live right now, who happen to have written or produced anything that AI works with, build on the back of humanities combined knowledge, will become outsized beneficiaries of AI, with the AI wave offering new ways of monetizing their work – while everyone who has not, won't be. It's simply not good enough. We have to make sure people broadly benefit first and foremost.
crest 3mo ago
It's easy to beat up on OpenAI and Anthropic, because they have lots of money and knowingly broke the law, but writing the book was onetime work too. Do we really want to turn everything into recurring revenue stream to skim of? How would that even work for an open weights model? Would you say the same about a human educating themselves from a book? The answer has to be more than pearl clutching for poor starving little authors (and the not so poor class action lawyers).
nobleach 3mo ago
I agree. If I pirate a book and share it on the web, and I get busted for doing so, and subsequently pay a fine, I don't get to KEEP sharing it on the web. Now, if I license the book, I might be able to come to an agreement with the author/publisher whereby I can share some of it.
- drngdds 3mo ago
  The post specifically proposes royalties for ideas from books, not royalties for the books themselves. You would absolutely still be able to share ideas you learned from the books you pirated in that situation. It'd be insanely draconian if you couldn't. (Then again, US copyright law often is insanely draconian.)
andsoitis 3mo ago
> royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing ideas That doesn’t make sense. You cannot copyright an idea, only the specific expression of the idea.
dec0dedab0de 3mo ago
There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing ideas. We're trying to own ideas now?
freejazz 3mo ago
> There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing ideas. The settlement does not pertain to any outputs
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
giancarlostoro 3mo ago
I'd rather see AI studios do the same as the film industry, pay a one-time up front cost per major model (or major.minor?) depending on how they contract it out. This also allows smaller startups to license books for less than a larger frontier studio would. In theory and hopefully, the pricing would not be too insane per book, you want them to rent more books and spend more, not go back to pirating right?
efficax 3mo ago
how would you do that? you can copyright words, but you can't copyright an idea (you can patent some ideas, but not all of them)

nikanj 3mo ago

It doesn't do anything? Au contraire! Now the creations of the LLMs stand on legal ground. This was an excellent deal for Anthropic

usef- 3mo ago
Yeah, it's always interesting the two-sides of a situation like this. Add regulation/enforcement to the big companies and you often shut out the smaller ones following. Meta also has copyright lawsuits for the open models they released, so open models are not immune. ... unless the line we want to draw is "american orgs pay, others don't", as currently seems to be happening.
- Arkhaine_kupo 3mo ago
  > Add regulation/enforcement to the big companies and you often shut out the smaller ones following. That is the case, any regulation increases the cost to enter a market. But in this case, its irrelevant because the moat of cost to enter is already unfathomable and secondly, they are not adding regulation but fining them for committing a crime. So yeah, adding that every food compnay needs 3 health inspectors that they pay for would benefit coca cola over you mom and pop bakery. But telling someone they cannot start a Space agency with money laundered from ransom and drug sales payments would not affect much the competition markets
  - vovavili 3mo ago
    >the moat of cost to enter is already unfathomable At the moment.
    - Arkhaine_kupo 3mo ago
      There are multiple ways to respond to that and I will try and summarise them. Current believe is that its a "winner takes all market", so companies are acting rationally and using Brute Force compute to get there first. Training costs scale linearly, which means the moat is directly related to compute cost There are theories that they are wasting 90% of training costs and there are more efficient ways to do it than throw compute at the problem. But if thats the case then chances are the market is not "winner takes all". Which then means the valuation of the ENTIRE market is overvalued. Basically the only way for the assertion "at the moment" to be true is if the market is a bubble, else if the current theory of winner takes all market means a monopoly will make it so that cost isnt even the worst of the moats to enter.
chvid 3mo ago
It is legal to train LLMs on books but illegal to train on output of LLMs. Perfect - an absolute steal for 1.5B.
- TeMPOraL 3mo ago
  > but illegal to train on output of LLMs. Since when?
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    They're probably confused with anthropic seething about "distillation attacks" coming from "fraud accounts". But that is not the law, that is just Anthropic being upset.
  - chvid 3mo ago
    Typically the big LLM providers write in the their ToS that it is prohibited to use their output to train another LLM. Whereas for a book it is fair use.
    - TeMPOraL 3mo ago
      ToS are usually not worth the toilet paper they're printed on. They're not legally binding.
remify 3mo ago
The legal ground is: If you're rich enough you can do it. Now only big tech companies can train models
- wraptile 3mo ago
  AFAIK this does not set a legal precedent as it has been settled and last summer finding is that Anthropic was wrong for "acquiring books illegally" not for training which is fair use. With model distillation being so effective now nobody actually needs to pirate books to train their models. You can get an open-weight Chinese model and get all that. Or you can just buy the books or buy a library - there are many creative solutions here that aren't piracy and not going to cost you billions of dollars. The moat right now seems to be the compute resources which might actually be worse for us common folk than a legal moat as we need compute for many more things that aren't LLMs too.
Maxatar 3mo ago
Settlements do not in any way establish legal precedent or any legal standing. This is simply an agreement between two parties.

agilob 3mo ago

> and then sent to all its subscribers, things need to change and then sell to all its subscribers, things need to change. Fixed that for you. Imagine being able to pay a fraction of your savings to download all Netflix shows and then sell 1 minute chunk of every media to your paid subscribers.

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]

Llamamoe 3mo ago

Exactly. This is a slap on the wrist. They need to either be banned from profiting from the egregious piracy, meaning charging money for anything trained on pirated works, or at least be forced to pay major royalties.

olalonde 3mo ago

Regurgitating existing ideas is not copyright infringement. Reproducing works verbatim is and AI companies already implement guardrails to prevent that.

rzmmm 3mo ago
It depends. In music for example it's often question whether the artist has been exposed to the original work. In that spirit, small language models are less likely to infringe copyright.
timmb 3mo ago
This is exactly why something more advanced than copyright is needed to protect human creative endeavour against AI appropriation. Copyright is demonstrated here not to be up to the job but it doesn’t mean there isn’t regulation needed to give human creators rights and a reward for their contribution
- visarga 3mo ago
  What you are saying leads to "pulling the ladder behind you" effect on creativity. It's impossible to protect more than substantial similarity and still allow creativity to exist.
  - Jtarii 3mo ago
    If a human makes something there should be broad protection for creativity, if a LLM generates something there should be extremely limited protection for creativity. You should not be able to mass generate images in a particular artists style and claim it as fair use, even if a human making the same images would have protection.
    - docjay 3mo ago
      But the human made the LLM. An LLM is categorically “I built a thing that built a thing” and if the output of that category has no protections then all automation and ‘machine at the final step’ is in trouble. What about aleatory music (music left at least partially to chance)? Or Autechre - they have whole albums and live performances built on automation software. They built the logic and added randomization, necessarily removing themselves from the final output. Is spin art not copyrightable? If I build a simple machine that spins paper, then do no more than drop paint on it, the result is not mine to copyright? I didn’t choose the output, I merely built the machine and the rest was created by pure chance. “But you chose the paint” - and if I didn’t? What if my art uses AI to perform sentiment analysis on the top news articles of the day and it drops colors matching the emotional tone of the news onto the spin art machine. I have no control over it and the output is machine generated, but is the result not just the final step of an entire process I created? Was the result of the creative idea not part of the creativity itself? If I build an automated laboratory to test every combination of a problem space, is a resulting success not patentable? What if the problem is too large to permute, so I added a random selection process to it? I’m not even controlling what’s being tested, but if it finds success is that not my contribution? The machines did the work, the selection was random, there was no human in the loop; what then? The internals of an LLM may be mysterious to some, but I assure you it’s just fixed automation with a random number generator sometimes tacked onto it, but randomization is optional too. I built that LLM. I decided what text to input for training, I curated the information, I wrote the algorithm, I decided the layers and hyper-parameters, I decided the RLHF pairs to train, then I put a few drops of paint from my bottle of language into the automated machine. I decided and built every single step of the system, but that output is not part of my process? If I pipe the LLM text output to a paint dispenser hovering over paper, set to squeeze out drops based on syllables, would you protect my artwork then?

shevy-java 3mo ago

I think the only way to stop that is to put the responsible folks in prison permanently. Small criminals are being jailed permanently on repeated offence. I think big guns with a lot of money need to get much higher sentences by default. And no monetary way to avoid that. The whole prison system is kind of screwed up here. A leech system for lawyers and judges.

visarga 3mo ago

> There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing ideas. So, by that logic, you need to be paying every time you regurgitate any of my ideas. Or anyone else's. Copyright now protects abstractions and vibes. Substantial similarity test be damned. Nobody can write stories about wizard schools, the idea is taken.

21asdffdsa12 3mo ago
Every morning we pay royalties to prometheus for we all are toast.
runroader 3mo ago
Humans are not computers. Humans are not a service. In the end, all laws are made up rules and can absolutely be written to have different outcomes and restrictions based on if a human is doing something or if a program is doing it.
- pj_mukh 3mo ago
  Real question, if an LLM shouldn't be able to remix someone's written work, why should a robot be able to build a chair that kinda looks like a chair a carpenter built that one time? The carpenter was a human, and humans are not a service. Why this distinction only for intellectual work?
  - echelon_musk 3mo ago
    I suspect chairs have been public domain since the advent of man.
  - eloisius 3mo ago
    For the same reason that you can make a similar-looking chair, but you can’t distribute a fuzzy copy of Star Wars. The char isn’t a copyrighted work.
    - pj_mukh 3mo ago

TeMPOraL 3mo ago

It's not meant to do anything about LLMs. It addresses the procurement of training data. I'm glad the courts demonstrate some basic lucidity that sadly seems to have escaped tech discussion sites some time ago.

Lutger 3mo ago

Ideas are not protected by copyright, nor are facts. You need to have a very specific and 'creative' / 'substantial' expression of an idea for copyright to apply. The output of an LLM can be easily be such, but usually not.

jagged-chisel 3mo ago
> … very specific … That phrase is doing a lot of work. In the US, any writing is automatically protected by copyright. (This comment, for example.) Whether the author can claim infringement is a can of worms: legal costs, fair use … but your “very specific” phrasing makes it sound like there’s a prescription for exactly what is protected by copyright - there is not. > Ideas are not protected by copyright. The expression of the idea is, however. Same with facts. The fact that I live at a specific street address is not protected. My sentence construction explaining my specific street address is protected. > The output of an LLM … … is not protected, not matter its shape. The US Copyright Office has declared as much.
ethbr1 3mo ago
I'll link to a previous comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48968156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48968156 > You need to have a very specific and 'creative' / 'substantial' expression of an idea for copyright to apply. The output of an LLM can be easily be such, but usually not. This is incomplete with current US law. You need the above (the typical copyright qualifiers) AND evidence of substantial human involvement in the creation. Minimally directing an autonomous agent does not qualify.
- neuronexmachina 3mo ago
  Just to be clear, what you're referring to is the current US standard for whether a work is copywritable, not whether training on data and "regurgitating existing ideas" is fair-use. The latter is what the GP comment was about: > There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing ideas. That is probably the correct way to legislate this. If anything a human does can instantly be copied by an LLM, and then sent to all its subscribers, things need to change

pixlmint 3mo ago

if they had any intention of doing things "the right way", they would have gone to every publisher individually and asked for a proper license.

phire 3mo ago

This settlement has basically nothing to do with LLMs. At least not as far as the courts are concerned. Alsup ruled [0] that feeding a book into an LLM is transformative and counts as fair use. Especially when they purchased a physical copy of the book, scanned it, and destroyed the original. But if I'm reading the ruling correctly, Anthropic might have been fine even with feeding pirated books into their LLM (as long as they planned to eventually deleted them afterwards) Where Anthropic ran into problems is that they put all their pirated books into a big central library (file on a server), and planned to keep those copies forever. Including copies they never actually fed into the LLM (a point that seriously worked against them). Alsup ruled this central library of pirated books was copyright infringement. And it's this "pirated central library" that Anthropic are now paying a a 1.5B settlement for, nothing else. The fact that the pirated books were also used to train LLMs is legally irrelevant. Though... I suspect a non AI company could have negotiated a significantly smaller settlement. [0] https://copyrightalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bartz-v.-Anthropic-Order.pdf https://copyrightalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bar...

embedding-shape 3mo ago
> At least not as far as the courts are concerned. Alsup ruled [0] that feeding a book into an LLM is transformative and counts as fair use. Especially when they purchased a physical copy of the book, scanned it, and destroyed the original. > But if I'm reading the ruling correctly, Anthropic might have been fine even with feeding pirated books into their LLM (as long as they eventually deleted them afterwards) The way I understood it, was that essentially the entire case rested on if Anthropics use was "transformative" or not. And since they literally destroyed the books (not just delete files, which would be copied), that made it transformative. Regardless if they deleted files or not, if nothing existing was transformed, it would have been illegal. But because of the destruction of k̶n̶o̶w̶l̶e̶d̶g̶e̶ physical property, this ended up being legal.
- phire 3mo ago
  > And since they literally destroyed the books (not just delete files, which would be copied), that made it transformative. You have to be careful, just because the judge points a factor out as notable, doesn't mean that factor was required. The destruction of source books makes Anthropic's fair use argument [2] especially air tight, but it would be a mistake to assume that act was required, or is what made it transformative. In the previous google books case [1] (which this case cites), google borrowed books from libraries, scanned them, then returned them. They were not destroyed, google didn't even keep the physical copy. Yet Google Books was ruled fair use, because it was transformative. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,.... [2] Note... This part of the ruling is still not about LLMs. This was about Anthropic's right to scan books and then keep a digital library of them.

one33seven 3mo ago

If it is based on all our data, we should all own it and democratically chose what is done with it or profits it generates

Zambyte 3mo ago

The correct way to legislate this is to abolish copyright. It is strictly a negative force. Nobody makes art because of copyright, only in spite of it.

inigyou 3mo ago
Commercial enterprises make content, like Marvel movies and Netflix series, because of copyright.
- Zambyte 3mo ago
  Commercial enterprises stand on the shoulders of lax copyright laws. For example, foundational Disney works would have been illegal for them to make under the copyright laws they have since purchased. https://drewdevault.com/blog/Alice-in-Wonderland/ https://drewdevault.com/blog/Alice-in-Wonderland/ Copyright is a textbook ladder pull.
- YetAnotherNick 3mo ago
  What copyright law helps them? They have the least to worry about copyright as even if someone copies the movie script or something it's not like their views will be gone because of that. I am not against trademark. e.g. Disney has a right on who can sell Mickey Mouse figurine, or Marvel has right over Iron man character and franchise.
ivell 3mo ago
People make art to also get recognized for that art. Otherwise they would keep that art secret at home. Without copyright, anyone can copy the art and call it their own. What is then the incentive for the creator to share the art, if there is neither monetory gain and nor fame. And worse than them being recognized, they might even get accused of copying their own art if someone else became famous due to a copy. Society would miss out a lot.
- Zambyte 3mo ago
  There are lots of famous artists that are older than copyright. > And worse than them being recognized, they might even get accused of copying their own art if someone else became famous due to a copy. You mean like right now? Here is A24 claiming copyright for Backrooms related media that came out before their Backrooms related film: https://kotaku.com/backrooms-a24-copyright-strikes-kane-parsons-2000716667 https://kotaku.com/backrooms-a24-copyright-strikes-kane-pars... Being "accused" of copying literally does not matter if copyright didn't exist. This framing is only an issue under copyright. > Society would miss out a lot. Society actively misses out a lot. We could have had tons of derivative art that has been buried for the sake of propping up companies. We could have had Aaron Swartz. Abolish copyright.

jstummbillig 3mo ago

> There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing ideas This does not do enough to fix the root problem. People who live right now, who happen to have written or produced anything that AI works with, build on the back of humanities combined knowledge, will become outsized beneficiaries of AI, with the AI wave offering new ways of monetizing their work – while everyone who has not, won't be. It's simply not good enough. We have to make sure people broadly benefit first and foremost.

crest 3mo ago

It's easy to beat up on OpenAI and Anthropic, because they have lots of money and knowingly broke the law, but writing the book was onetime work too. Do we really want to turn everything into recurring revenue stream to skim of? How would that even work for an open weights model? Would you say the same about a human educating themselves from a book? The answer has to be more than pearl clutching for poor starving little authors (and the not so poor class action lawyers).

nobleach 3mo ago

I agree. If I pirate a book and share it on the web, and I get busted for doing so, and subsequently pay a fine, I don't get to KEEP sharing it on the web. Now, if I license the book, I might be able to come to an agreement with the author/publisher whereby I can share some of it.

drngdds 3mo ago
The post specifically proposes royalties for ideas from books, not royalties for the books themselves. You would absolutely still be able to share ideas you learned from the books you pirated in that situation. It'd be insanely draconian if you couldn't. (Then again, US copyright law often is insanely draconian.)

andsoitis 3mo ago

> royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing ideas That doesn’t make sense. You cannot copyright an idea, only the specific expression of the idea.

dec0dedab0de 3mo ago

There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing ideas. We're trying to own ideas now?

freejazz 3mo ago

> There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing ideas. The settlement does not pertain to any outputs

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

giancarlostoro 3mo ago

I'd rather see AI studios do the same as the film industry, pay a one-time up front cost per major model (or major.minor?) depending on how they contract it out. This also allows smaller startups to license books for less than a larger frontier studio would. In theory and hopefully, the pricing would not be too insane per book, you want them to rent more books and spend more, not go back to pirating right?

efficax 3mo ago

how would you do that? you can copyright words, but you can't copyright an idea (you can patent some ideas, but not all of them)