Judge backs AI firm over use of copyrighted books

I'm not pirating. I'm building my model.
- 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.
  
  I also read through the judgement, and I think it's better for anthropic than you describe. He distinguishes three issues:
  A) Use any written material they get their hands on to train the model (and the resulting model doesn't just reproduce the works).
  B) Buy a single copy of a print book, scan it, and retain the digital copy for a company library (for all sorts of future purposes).
  C) Pirate a book and retain that copy for a company library (for all sorts of future purposes).
  A and B were fair use by summary judgement. Meaning this judge thinks it's clear cut in anthropics favor. C will go to trial.

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.
- Did you read the actual order? The detailed conclusions begin on page 9. What specific bits did he get wrong?
  
  I'm on page 12 and I already saw a false equivalence between human learning and AI training.
- Funny, there's a lot of people on lemmy itself (especially around dbzer0) who would agree with the judge wholeheartedly.

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?”

IMO the focus should have always been on the potential for AI to produce copyright-violating output, not on the method of training.
- If you try to sell "the new adventures of Doctor Strange, Jonathan Strange and Magic Man." existing copyright laws are sufficient and will stop it. Really, training should be regulated by the same laws as reading. If they can get the material through legitimate means it should be fine, but pulling data that is not freely accessible should be theft, as it is already.
  
  That "freely" there really does a lot of hard work.
  
  I have a freely accessible document that I have a cc license for that states it is not to be used for commercial use. This is commercial use. Your policy would allow for that document to be used though since it is accessible. This kind of policy discourages me from easily sharing my works as others profit from my efforts and my works are more likely to be attributed to a corporate beast I want nothing to do with then to me.
  I'm all for copyright reform and simpler copyright law, but these companies need to be held to standard copyright rules and not just made up modifications. I'm convinced a perfectly decent LLM could be built without violating copyrights.
  I'd also be ok sharing works with a not for profit open source LLM and I think others might as well.
  
  as it is already
  Copies of copyrighted works cannot be regarded as "stolen property" for the purposes of a prosecution under the National Stolen Property Act of 1934.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v.United_States(1985)
- 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).
  
  Orcs and dwarves (with a v) are creations of Tolkien, if the fantasy stories include them, it's a violation of copyright the same as including Mickey mouse.
  My argument would have been to ask the ai for the bass line to Queen & David Bowie's Under Pressure. Then refer to that as a reproduction of copyrighted material. But then again, AI companies probably have better lawyers than vanilla ice.

Pirate everything!

Previous discussion from yesterday about the same topic: https://lemmy.world/post/31923154

I hate AI with a fire that keeps we warm at night. That is all.

80% of the book market is owned by 5 publishing houses.
They want to create a monopoly around AI and kill open source. The copyright industry is not our friend. This is a win, not a loss.
- What, how is this a win? Three authors lost a lawsuit to an AI firm using their works.
  
  The lawsuit would not have benefitted their fellow authors but their publishing houses and the big ai companies.
  
  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.
- How exactly does this benefit "us" ?
  
  Because books are used to train both commercial and open source language models?
- Keep in mind this isn't about open-weight vs other AI models at all. This is about how training data can be collected and used.
  
  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.
  
  Because of the vast amount of data needed, there will be no competitive viable open source solution if half the data is kept in a walled garden.
  This is about open weights vs closed weights.
- Cool than, try to do some torrenting out there and don't hide that. Tell us how it goes.
  The rules don't change. This just means AI overlords can do it, not that you can do it too
  
  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.