Anakin: “Judge backs AI firm over use of copyrighted books”
Padme: “But they’ll be held accountable when they reproduce parts of those works or compete with the work they were trained on, right?”
Anakin: “…”
Padme: “Right?”
To anyone who is reading this comment without reading through the article. This ruling doesn't mean that it's okay to pirate for building a model. Anthropic will still need to go through trial for that:
But he rejected Anthropic's request to dismiss the case, ruling the firm would have to stand trial over its use of pirated copies to build its library of material.
An 80 year old judge on their best day couldn't be trusted to make an informed decision. This guy was either bought or confused into his decision. Old people gotta go.
It would harm the A.I. industry if Anthropic loses the next part of the trial on whether they pirated books — from what I’ve read, Anthropic and Meta are suspected of getting a lot off torrent sites and the like.
It’s possible they all did some piracy in their mad dash to find training material but Amazon and Google have bookstores and Google even has a book text search engine, Google Scholar, and probably everything else already in its data centers. So, not sure why they’d have to resort to piracy.
If you aren't allowed to freely use data for training without a license, then the fear is that only large companies will own enough works or be able to afford licenses to train models.
I've been pirating since Napster, never have hidden shit. It's usually not a crime, except in America it seems, to download content, or even share it freely. What is a crime is to make a business distributing pirated content.
Plantifs made that argument and the judge shoots it down pretty hard. That competition isn't what copyright protects from. He makes an analogy with teachers teaching children to write fiction: they are using existing fantasy to create MANY more competitors on the fiction market. Could an author use copyright to challenge that use?
Would love to hear your thoughts on the ruling itself (it's linked by reuters).