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> The U.S. does NOT have copyright protections on the data that AI models were and are trained on, it was mass theft. Absolutely false. Courts have decided tha
by petilon 3mo ago
> The U.S. does NOT have copyright protections on the data that AI models were and are trained on, it was mass theft.
Absolutely false. Courts have decided that it is fair use [1]. That makes sense. It should not be used to justify Chinese theft.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-judge-approves-anthropics-15-billion-settlement-copyright-lawsuit-2026-07-20/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us-judge-approves-anthropics-1...
- harshalizee 3mo agoWhy is it not fair use for the Chinese models if all they are doing is distilling these fair use models? According to the courts, AI model output is not copyrighted or eligible for copyright.
- paulddraper 3mo agoDistillation does not violate copyright law. It violates contractual terms of use.
- paulddraper 3mo agoCorrect. This seems to be poorly understood. You can use an original work to write an encyclopedia (e.g. Wikipedia). That is fair use. You cannot copy an original work and distribute it. LLMs are an encyclopedia.
- adrian_b 3mo agoBut no Chinese company has copied and distributed an American LLM. Even if they had wanted that, it would have been impossible, because Anthropic et al. do not let anyone access them directly. Querying the available API can be used to extract only an extremely small part of the information stored in an LLM. That part can be used for the post-training of another LLM, to obtain some desirable properties, but the extracted information is far too little to be called "copying" or "distributing". Moreover, after the post-training it does not appear anywhere in the weights verbatim, so its use is at least as transformative as the training of the original American model. Besides these facts, there is no evidence that the Chinese companies have actually done this, even if it sounds plausible.
- petilon 3mo agoTerms of Use violation cannot be justified as "transformative" or "fair use".
- paulddraper 3mo agoWe’re talking past each other. No one has claimed Chinese models violated copyright law. Some have claimed they violated ToS, which is different.