13 ms·

This is what the copyright laws dictate no ?

by whatever1 2mo ago

bena 2mo ago
No. A copy is still a copy even if you destroy the original.
- nkurz 2mo ago
  Until about a year ago this would have been a reasonable and respectable argument, but at least in California you are arguing against current legal precedent: https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/jnvwbgqlzpw/ANTHROPIC%20fair%20use.pdf https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/jnvwbgqlzpw/...
  - bena 2mo ago
    That's a bit of a wild interpretation of copyright law. I mean, Anthropic isn't going to fight it because it lets them do the thing they want to do, so I can see how this never gets beyond the court that allows them to do the thing they want to do. But would this argument would have flown in the past? It wasn't even attempted in Sony v Universal. Or any copyright suit up until this point. That doesn't smell funny to you?
    - nkurz 2mo ago
      Sure, it's a bit wild, and no, the same outcome may not have been reached if the case came up earlier. And if it makes it to the Supreme Court, who knows what they will turn it into. The flip side is that Alsup (the judge who wrote the opinion) is probably the smartest district court judge we have when it comes to technology, and one of the people I'd trust most to come up good decision. He's a treasure, and my instinct is that he got it right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Alsup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Alsup
exhumet 2mo ago
i would assume that would come into play if they were uploading scans of the books? there must be some gray area where training like this doesnt apply to that. or ya know, just do it and face the consequences later because you already have the data and know that ai obsessed government will just shrug their shoulders.
Glyptodon 2mo ago
Not to my understanding. To begin with, it's far from given that "rare" books are all covered by copyright. But if they are, it's at best murky: whether you destroy the original doesn't really have anything to do with what you're doing with scanned contents. The scanned contents themselves may be inherently a copyright issue, regardless of destroying the original. The actual trained model has separate arguments more in its favor, so if no scanned contents exist - IE the data is read once for training and not stored or saved, they have a better argument. But in that case the destruction is totally disconnected from copyright, as they'd be totally okay to rescan the material.
thenewnewguy 2mo ago
Bias disclaimer: Amazon is my current employer, but I don't work on AI or anything else mentioned in the article. Yes, this is a result of copyright laws. The other commenters are wrong/uninformed. If it was up to the companies training LLMs, they wouldn't destroy the books: It's a waste of company resources, it's needlessly destructive/evil, it generates bad PR, etc etc. There are essentially zero advantages, other than it is what is required under US copyright law (or at least, it is what their highly paid lawyers believe is required under US copyright law).
- spencerflem 2mo ago
  Isn’t it being destroyed because it makes the scanning process easier?
  - bpodgursky 2mo ago
    No. A judge a while ago decided that as long as the physical copy is destroyed, and "transformed" into an electronic copy, you can do the upload. But if you preserve the physical copy after scanning it, you are in violation of copyright because you "copied" the book. That's literally the only reason they are trashing them. It's a legal requirement.
    - ashT15 2mo ago
      Ah, so I can buy and scan a dvd, destroy it and then legally distribute the legal copy via torrents. Good to know, because that is what the LLM thieves are doing.
      - jagraff 2mo ago
        Distributing an exact copy of the text would be illegal; if you could get an LLM trained on a book to output the exact copy of the text from the book then that would be illegal as well.
        yywwbbn 2mo ago
waffleiron 2mo ago
Those laws are lobbied for by large corporations, these are not just laws that exist outside of that context. They can also be changed, or Amazon could just incur the fines. Large corporations will move fast and break things when it’s convenient; they don’t care much about the law - just about profit.

This is what the copyright laws dictate no ?

bena 2mo ago

No. A copy is still a copy even if you destroy the original.

nkurz 2mo ago
Until about a year ago this would have been a reasonable and respectable argument, but at least in California you are arguing against current legal precedent: https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/jnvwbgqlzpw/ANTHROPIC%20fair%20use.pdf https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/jnvwbgqlzpw/...
- bena 2mo ago
  That's a bit of a wild interpretation of copyright law. I mean, Anthropic isn't going to fight it because it lets them do the thing they want to do, so I can see how this never gets beyond the court that allows them to do the thing they want to do. But would this argument would have flown in the past? It wasn't even attempted in Sony v Universal. Or any copyright suit up until this point. That doesn't smell funny to you?
  - nkurz 2mo ago
    Sure, it's a bit wild, and no, the same outcome may not have been reached if the case came up earlier. And if it makes it to the Supreme Court, who knows what they will turn it into. The flip side is that Alsup (the judge who wrote the opinion) is probably the smartest district court judge we have when it comes to technology, and one of the people I'd trust most to come up good decision. He's a treasure, and my instinct is that he got it right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Alsup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Alsup

exhumet 2mo ago

i would assume that would come into play if they were uploading scans of the books? there must be some gray area where training like this doesnt apply to that. or ya know, just do it and face the consequences later because you already have the data and know that ai obsessed government will just shrug their shoulders.

Glyptodon 2mo ago

Not to my understanding. To begin with, it's far from given that "rare" books are all covered by copyright. But if they are, it's at best murky: whether you destroy the original doesn't really have anything to do with what you're doing with scanned contents. The scanned contents themselves may be inherently a copyright issue, regardless of destroying the original. The actual trained model has separate arguments more in its favor, so if no scanned contents exist - IE the data is read once for training and not stored or saved, they have a better argument. But in that case the destruction is totally disconnected from copyright, as they'd be totally okay to rescan the material.

thenewnewguy 2mo ago

Bias disclaimer: Amazon is my current employer, but I don't work on AI or anything else mentioned in the article. Yes, this is a result of copyright laws. The other commenters are wrong/uninformed. If it was up to the companies training LLMs, they wouldn't destroy the books: It's a waste of company resources, it's needlessly destructive/evil, it generates bad PR, etc etc. There are essentially zero advantages, other than it is what is required under US copyright law (or at least, it is what their highly paid lawyers believe is required under US copyright law).

spencerflem 2mo ago
Isn’t it being destroyed because it makes the scanning process easier?
- bpodgursky 2mo ago
  No. A judge a while ago decided that as long as the physical copy is destroyed, and "transformed" into an electronic copy, you can do the upload. But if you preserve the physical copy after scanning it, you are in violation of copyright because you "copied" the book. That's literally the only reason they are trashing them. It's a legal requirement.
  - ashT15 2mo ago
    Ah, so I can buy and scan a dvd, destroy it and then legally distribute the legal copy via torrents. Good to know, because that is what the LLM thieves are doing.
    - jagraff 2mo ago
      Distributing an exact copy of the text would be illegal; if you could get an LLM trained on a book to output the exact copy of the text from the book then that would be illegal as well.
      - yywwbbn 2mo ago

waffleiron 2mo ago

Those laws are lobbied for by large corporations, these are not just laws that exist outside of that context. They can also be changed, or Amazon could just incur the fines. Large corporations will move fast and break things when it’s convenient; they don’t care much about the law - just about profit.