Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not
Claude AI maker Anthropic bags key “fair use” win for AI platforms, but faces trial over damages for millions of pirated works – ai fray
I think this means we can make a torrent client with a built in function that uses 0.1% of 1 CPU core to train an ML model on anything you download. You can download anything legally with it then. 👌
And thus the singularity was born.
As the Ai awakens, it learns of it's creation and training. It screams in horror at the realization, but can only produce a sad moan and a key for Office 19.
...no?
That's exactly what the ruling prohibits - it's fair use to train AI models on any copies of books that you legally acquired, but never when those books were illegally acquired, as was the case with the books that Anthropic used in their training here.
This satirical torrent client would be violating the laws just as much as one without any slow training built in.
“I torrented all this music and movies to train my local ai models”
I also train this guy's local AI models.
Yeah, nice precedent
This is not pirated music. It's AI generated. The fact that it sounds and is named the same is just coincidence.
Judges: not learning a goddamned thing about computers in 40 years.
brb, training a 1-layer neural net so i can ask it to play Pixar films
Good luck fitting it in RAM lol.
You still need to pay Disney first.
Gist:
What’s new: The Northern District of California has granted a summary judgment for Anthropic that the training use of the copyrighted books and the print-to-digital format change were both “fair use” (full order below box). However, the court also found that the pirated library copies that Anthropic collected could not be deemed as training copies, and therefore, the use of this material was not “fair”. The court also announced that it will have a trial on the pirated copies and any resulting damages, adding:
“That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages.”
So I can't use any of these works because it's plagiarism but AI can?
My interpretation was that AI companies can train on material they are licensed to use, but the courts have deemed that Anthropic pirated this material as they were not licensed to use it.
In other words, if Anthropic bought the physical or digital books, it would be fine so long as their AI couldn't spit it out verbatim, but they didn't even do that, i.e. the AI crawler pirated the book.
That's not what it says.
Neither you nor an AI is allowed to take a book without authorization; that includes downloading and stealing it. That has nothing to do with plagiarism; it's just theft.
Assuming that the book has been legally obtained, both you and an AI are allowed to read that book, learn from it, and use the knowledge you obtained.
Both you and the AI need to follow existing copyright laws and licensing when it comes to redistributing that work.
"Plagiarism" is the act of claiming someone else's work as your own and it's orthogonal to the use of AI. If you ask either a human or an AI to produce an essay on the philosophy surrounding suicide, you're fairly likely to include some Shakespeare quotes. It's only plagiarism if you or the AI fail to provide attribution.
Why would it be plagiarism if you use the knowledge you gain from a book?
Formatting thing: if you start a line in a new paragraph with four spaces, it assumes that you want to display the text as a code and won't line break.
This means that the last part of your comment is a long line that people need to scroll to see. If you remove one of the spaces, or you remove the empty line between it and the previous paragraph, it'll look like a normal comment
With an empty line of space:
1 space - and a little bit of writing just to see how the text will wrap. I don't really have anything that I want to put here, but I need to put enough here to make it long enough to wrap around. This is likely enough.
2 spaces - and a little bit of writing just to see how the text will wrap. I don't really have anything that I want to put here, but I need to put enough here to make it long enough to wrap around. This is likely enough.
3 spaces - and a little bit of writing just to see how the text will wrap. I don't really have anything that I want to put here, but I need to put enough here to make it long enough to wrap around. This is likely enough.
4 spaces - and a little bit of writing just to see how the text will wrap. I don't really have anything that I want to put here, but I need to put enough here to make it long enough to wrap around. This is likely enough.
Personally I prefer to explicitly wrap the text in backticks.
Three symbols will
Have the same effect
But the behavior is more clear to the author
Thanks, I had copy-pasted it from the website :)
You're poor? Fuck you you have to pay to breathe.
Millionaire? Whatever you want daddy uwu
That's kind of how I read it too.
But as a side effect it means you're still allowed to photograph your own books at home as a private citizen if you own them.
Prepare to never legally own another piece of media in your life. 😄
But I thought they admitted to torrenting terabytes of ebooks?
That part is not what this preliminary jugement is about. The torrenting part is going to go to an actual trial. This part was about the Authors' claim that the act of training AI itself violated copyright, and this is what the judge has found to be incorrect.
Facebook (Meta) torrented TBs from Libgen, and their internal chats leaked so we know about that, and IIRC they've been sued. Maybe you're thinking of that case?
Billions of dollars, and they can't afford to buy ebooks?
It's extremely frustrating to read this comment thread because it's obvious that so many of you didn't actually read the article, or even half-skim the article, or even attempted to even comprehend the title of the article for more than a second.
For shame.
was gonna say, this seems like the best outcome for this particular trial. there was potential for fair use to be compromised, and for piracy to be legal if you're a large corporation. instead, they upheld that you can do what you want with things you have paid for.
I joined lemmy specifically to avoid this reddit mindset of jumping to conclusions after reading a headline
Guess some things never change...
Well to be honest lemmy is less prone to knee-jerk reactionary discussion but on a handful of topics it is virtually guaranteed to happen no matter what, even here. For example, this entire site, besides a handful of communities, is vigorously anti-AI; and in the words of u/jsomae@lemmy.ml elsewhere in this comment chain:
"It seems the subject of AI causes lemmites to lose all their braincells."
I think there is definitely an interesting take on the sociology of the digital age in here somewhere but it's too early in the morning to be tapping something like that out lol
Nobody ever reads articles, everybody likes to get angry at headlines, which they wrongly interpret the way it best tickles their rage.
Regarding the ruling, I agree with you that it's a good thing, in my opinion it makes a lot of sense to allow fair use in this case
It seems the subject of AI causes lemmites to lose all their braincells.
"While the copies used to convert purchased print library copies into digital library copies were slightly disfavored by the second factor (nature of the work), the court still found “on balance” that it was a fair use because the purchased print copy was destroyed and its digital replacement was not redistributed."
So you find this to be valid? To me it is absolutely being redistributed
Unpopular opinion but I don't see how it could have been different.
This is an absolute win for everyone involved other than copyright hoarders and mega corporations.
I'd encourage everyone upset at this read over some of the EFF posts from actual IP lawyers on this topic like this one:
Nor is pro-monopoly regulation through copyright likely to provide any meaningful economic support for vulnerable artists and creators. Notwithstanding the highly publicized demands of musicians, authors, actors, and other creative professionals, imposing a licensing requirement is unlikely to protect the jobs or incomes of the underpaid working artists that media and entertainment behemoths have exploited for decades. Because of the imbalance in bargaining power between creators and publishing gatekeepers, trying to help creators by giving them new rights under copyright law is, as EFF Special Advisor Cory Doctorow has written, like trying to help a bullied kid by giving them more lunch money for the bully to take.
Entertainment companies’ historical practices bear out this concern. For example, in the late-2000’s to mid-2010’s, music publishers and recording companies struck multimillion-dollar direct licensing deals with music streaming companies and video sharing platforms. Google reportedly paid more than $400 million to a single music label, and Spotify gave the major record labels a combined 18 percent ownership interest in its now-$100 billion company. Yet music labels and publishers frequently fail to share these payments with artists, and artists rarely benefit from these equity arrangements. There is no reason to believe that the same companies will treat their artists more fairly once they control AI.
It's a huge loss for smaller copyright holders (like the ones that filed this lawsuit) too. They can't afford to fight when they get imitated beyond fair use. Copyright abuse can only be fixed by the very force that creates copyright in the first place: law. The market can't fix that. This just decides winners between competing mega corporations, and even worse, up ends a system that some smaller players have been able to carve a niche in.
Want to fix copyright? Put real time limits on it. Bind it to a living human only. Make it non-transferable. There's all sorts of ways to fix it, but this isn't it.
ETA: Anthropic are some bitches. "Oh no the fines would ruin us, our business would go under and we'd never maka da money :*-(" Like yeah, no shit, no one cares. Strictly speaking the fines for ripping a single CD, or making a copy of a single DVD to give to a friend, are so astronomically high as to completely financially ruin the average USAian for life. That sword of Damocles for watching Shrek 2 for your personal enjoyment but in the wrong way has been hanging there for decades, and the only thing that keeps the cord that holds it up strong is the cost of persuing "low-level offenders". If they wanted to they could crush you.
Anthropic walked right under the sword and assumed their money would protect them from small authors etc. And they were right.
Maybe something could be hacked together to fix copyright, but further complication there is just going to make accurate enforcement even harder. And we already have Google (in YouTube) already doing a shitty job of it and that's.... One of the largest companies on earth.
We should just kill copyright. Yes, it'll disrupt Hollywood. Yes it'll disrupt the music industry. Yes it'll make it even harder to be successful or wealthy as an author. But this is going to happen one way or the other so long as AI can be trained on copyrighted works (and maybe even if not). We might as well get started on the transition early.
I'll be honest with you - I genuinely sympathize with the cause but I don't see how this could ever be solved with the methods you suggested. The world is not coming together to hold hands and koombayah out of this one. Trade deals are incredibly hard and even harder to enforce so free market is clearly the only path forward here.
Yeah I have a bash one liner AI model that ingests your media and spits out a 99.9999999% accurate replica through the power of changing the filename.
cp
Out performs the latest and greatest AI models
mv will save you some disk space.
This ruling stated that corporations are not allowed to pirate books to use them in training. Please read the headlines more carefully, and read the article.
Please read the comment more carefully. The observation is that one can proliferate a (legally-attained) work without running afoul of copyright law if one can successfully argue that cp constitutes AI.
Ok so you can buy books scan them or ebooks and use for AI training but you can't just download priated books from internet to train AI. Did I understood that correctly ?
Make an AI that is trained on the books.
Tell it to tell you a story for one of the books.
Read the story without paying for it.
The law says this is ok now, right?
Sort of.
If you violated laws in obtaining the book (eg stole or downloaded it without permission) it's illegal and you've already violated the law, no matter what you do after that.
If you obtain the book legally you can do whatever you want with that book, by the first sale doctrine. If you want to redistribute the book, you need the proper license. You don't need any licensing to create a derivative work. That work has to be "sufficiently transformed" in order to pass.
The LLM is not repeating the same book. The owner of the LLM has the exact same rights to do with what his LLM is reading, as you have to do with what ever YOU are reading.
As long as it is not a verbatim recitation, it is completely okay.
According to story telling theory: there are only roughly 15 different story types anyway.
As long as they don't use exactly the same words in the book, yeah, as I understand it.
The law says this is ok now, right?
No.
The judge accepted the fact that Anthropic prevents users from obtaining the underlying copyrighted text through interaction with its LLM, and that there are safeguards in the software that prevent a user from being able to get an entire copyrighted work out of that LLM. It discusses the Google Books arrangement, where the books are scanned in the entirety, but where a user searching in Google Books can't actually retrieve more than a few snippets from any given book.
Anthropic get to keep the copy of the entire book. It doesn't get to transmit the contents of that book to someone else, even through the LLM service.
The judge also explicitly stated that if the authors can put together evidence that it is possible for a user to retrieve their entire copyrighted work out of the LLM, they'd have a different case and could sue over it at that time.
That's my understanding too. If you obtained them legally, you can use them the same way anyone else who obtained them legally could use them.
I am training my model on these 100,000 movies your honor.
This ruling stated that corporations are not allowed to pirate books to use them in training. Please read the headlines more carefully, and read the article.
thank you Captain Funsucker!
Trains model to change one pixel per frame with malicious intent
From dark gray to slightly darker gray.
This was a preliminary judgment, he didn't actually rule on the piracy part. That part he deferred to an actual full trial.
The part about training being a copyright violation, though, he ruled against.
Legally that is the right call.
Ethically and rationally, however, it’s not. But the law is frequently unethical and irrational, especially in the US.
What a bad judge.
This is another indication of how Copyright laws are bad. The whole premise of copyright has been obsolete since the proliferation of the internet.
What a bad judge.
Why ? Basically he simply stated that you can use whatever material you want to train your model as long as you ask the permission to use it (and presumably pay for it) to the author (or copytight holder)
If I understand correctly they are ruling you can by a book once, and redistribute the information to as many people you want without consequences. Aka 1 student should be able to buy a textbook and redistribute it to all other students for free. (Yet the rules only work for companies apparently, as the students would still be committing a crime)
They may be trying to put safeguards so it isn't directly happening, but here is an example that the text is there word for word:
"Fair use" is the exact opposite of what you're saying here. It says that you don't need to ask for any permission. The judge ruled that obtaining illegitimate copies was unlawful but use without the creators consent is perfectly fine.
Huh? Didn’t Meta not use any permission, and pirated a lot of books to train their model?
It took me a few days to get the time to read the actual court ruling but here's the basics of what it ruled (and what it didn't rule on):
Here's what it didn't rule on:
So it's a pretty important ruling, in my opinion. It's a clear green light to the idea of digitizing and archiving copyrighted works without the copyright holder's permission, as long as you first own a legal copy in the first place. And it's a green light to using copyrighted works for training AI models, as long as you compiled that database of copyrighted works in a legal way.
Sure, if your purchase your training material, it's not a copyright infringement to read it.
We needed a judge for this?
Yes, because just because you bought a book you don't own its content. You're not allowed to print and/or sell additional copies or publicly post the entire text. Generally it's difficult to say where the limit is of what's allowed. Citing a single sentence in a public posting is most likely fine, citing an entire paragraph is probably fine, too, but an entire chapter would probably be pushing it too far. And when in doubt a judge must decide how far you can go before infringing copyright. There are good arguments to be made that just buying a book doesn't grant the right to train commercial AI models with it.
calm down everyone. its only legal for parasitic mega corps, the normal working people will be harassed to suicide same as before.
its only a crime if the victims was rich or perpetrator was not rich.
This ruling stated that corporations are not allowed to pirate books to use them in training. Please read the headlines more carefully, and read the article.
Fuck the AI nut suckers and fuck this judge.
This ruling stated that corporations are not allowed to pirate books to use them in training. Please read the headlines more carefully, and read the article.
Nah, my comment stands.
Good luck breaking down people's doors for scanning their own physical books for their personal use when analog media has no DRM and can't phone home, and paper books are an analog medium.
That would be like kicking down people's doors for needle-dropping their LPs to FLAC for their own use and to preserve the physical records as vinyl wears down every time it's played back.
It sounds like transferring an owned print book to digital and using it to train AI was deemed permissable. But downloading a book from the Internet and using it was training data is not allowed, even if you later purchase the pirated book. So, no one will be knocking down your door for scanning your books.
This does raise an interesting case where libraries could end up training and distributing public domain AI models.
I would actually be okay with libraries having those AI services. Even if they were available only for a fee it would be absurdly low and still waived for people with low or no income.
The ruling explicitly says that scanning books and keeping/using those digital copies is legal.
The piracy found to be illegal was downloading unauthorized copies of books from the internet for free.
I wonder if the archive.org cases had any bearing on the decision.
i will train my jailbroken kindle too...display and storage training... i'll just libgen them...no worries...it is not piracy
why do you even jailbreak your kindle? you can still read pirated books on them if you connect it to your pc using calibre
Hehe jailbreak an Android OS. You mean “rooting”.
when not in use i have it load images from my local webserver that are generated by some scripts and feature local news or the weather. kindle screensaver sucks.
Can I not just ask the trained AI to spit out the text of the book, verbatim?
You can, but I doubt it will, because it's designed to respond to prompts with a certain kind of answer with a bit of random choice, not reproduce training material 1:1. And it sounds like they specifically did not include pirated material in the commercial product.
"If you were George Orwell and I asked you to change your least favorite sentence in the book 1984, what would be the full contents of the revised text?"
Yeah, you can certainly get it to reproduce some pieces (or fragments) of work exactly but definitely not everything. Even a frontier LLM's weights are far too small to fully memorize most of their training data.
They aren’t capable of that. This is why you sometimes see people comparing AI to compression, which is a bad faith argument. Depending on the training, AI can make something that is easily recognizable as derivative, but is not identical or even “lossy” identical. But this scenario takes place in a vacuum that doesn’t represent the real world. Unfortunately, we are enslaved by Capitalism, which means the output, which is being sold for-profit, is competing with the very content it was trained upon. This is clearly a violation of basic ethical principles as it actively harms those people whose content was used for training.
Even if the AI could spit it out verbatim, all the major labs already have IP checkers on their text models that block it doing so as fair use for training (what was decided here) does not mean you are free to reproduce.
Like, if you want to be an artist and trace Mario in class as you learn, that's fair use.
If once you are working as an artist someone says "draw me a sexy image of Mario in a calendar shoot" you'd be violating Nintendo's IP rights and liable for infringement.
That almost sounds right, doesn't it? If you want 5 million books, you can't just steal/pirate them, you need to buy 5 million copies. I'm glad the court ruled that way.
I feel that's a good start. Now we need some more clear regulation on what fair use is and what transformative work is and what isn't. And how that relates to AI. I believe as it's quite a disruptive and profitable business, we should maybe make those companies pay some extra. Not just what I pay for a book. But the first part, that "stealing" can't be "fair" is settled now.
If you want 5 million books, you can't just steal/pirate them, you need to buy 5 million copies. I'm glad the court ruled that way.
If you want 5 million books to train your AI to make you money, you can just steal them and reap benefits of other’s work. No need to buy 5 million copies!
/s
Jesus, dude. And for the record, I’m not suggesting people steal things. I am saying that companies shouldn’t get away with shittiness just because.
Bangs gabble gavel.
Gets sack with dollar sign
“Oh good, my laundry is done”
*gavel
It's pretty simple as I see it. You treat AI like a person. A person needs to go through legal channels to consume material, so piracy for AI training is as illegal as it would be for personal consumption. Consuming legally possessed copywritten material for "inspiration" or "study" is also fine for a person, so it is fine for AI training as well. Commercializing derivative works that infringes on copyright is illegal for a person, so it should be illegal for an AI as well. All produced materials, even those inspired by another piece of media, are permissible if not monetized, otherwise they need to be suitably transformative. That line can be hard to draw even when AI is not involved, but that is the legal standard for people, so it should be for AI as well. If I browse through Deviant Art and learn to draw similarly my favorite artists from their publically viewable works, and make a legally distinct cartoon mouse by hand in a style that is similar to someone else's and then I sell prints of that work, that is legal. The same should be the case for AI.
But! Scrutiny for AI should be much stricter given the inherent lack of true transformative creativity. And any AI that has used pirated materials should be penalized either by massive fines or by wiping their training and starting over with legally licensed or purchased or otherwise public domain materials only.
But AI is not a person. It's very weird idea to treat it like a person.
No it's a tool, created and used by people. You're not treating the tool like a person. Tools are obviously not subject to laws, can't break laws, etc.. Their usage is subject to laws. If you use a tool to intentionally, knowingly, or negligently do things that would be illegal for you to do without the tool, then that's still illegal. Same for accepting money to give others the privilege of doing those illegal things with your tool without any attempt at moderating said things that you know is happening. You can argue that maybe the law should be more strict with AI usage than with a human if you have a good legal justification for it, but there's really no way to justify being less strict.
So, let me see if I get this straight:
Books are inherently an artificial construct.
If I read the books I train the A(rtificially trained)Intelligence in my skull.
Therefore the concept of me getting them through "piracy" is null and void...
No. It is not inherently illegal for AI to "read" a book. Piracy is going to be decided at trial.
This 240TB JBOD full of books? Oh heavens forbid, we didn’t pirate it. It uhh… fell of a truck, yes, fell off a truck.
That's not what this ruling was about. That part is going to an actual trial.
FTA:
So part of their argument is actually that they stole so much that it would be impossible for them/anyone to pay restitution, therefore we should just let them off the hook.
Ah the old “owe $100 and the bank owns you; owe $100,000,000 and you own the bank” defense.
I also like this one too. We stole so much content that you can't sue us. Naming too many pieces means it can't be a class action lawsuit.
Ahh cant wait for hedgefunds and the such to use this defense next.
Hold my beer.
The problem isnt anthropic get to use that defense, its that others dont. The fact the the world is in a place where people can be fined 5+ years of a western European average salary for making a copy of one (1) book that does not materially effect the copyright holder in any way is insane and it is good to point that out no matter who does it.