US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

One aspect that I feel is ignored by the comments here is the geo-political forces at work. If the US takes the position that LLMs can't use copyrighted work or has to compensate all copyright holders – other countries (e.g. China) will not follow suit. This will mean that US LLM companies will either fall behind or be too expensive. Which means China and other countries will probably surge ahead in AI, at least in terms of how useful the AI is.

That is not to say that we shouldn't do the right thing regardless, but I do think there is a feeling of "who is going to rule the world in the future?" tha underlies governmental decision-making on how much to regulate AI.

Well hell, by that logic average citizens should be able to launder corporate intellectual property because China will never follow suit in adhering to intellectual property law. I'm game if you are.

Isn't that sort of logic precisely why China doesn't adhere to IP law?

Yes, I was being a bit facetious. It was snark intended to point out that corporations don't get to have their cake and eat it too. Either everything is free and there are no boundaries or we live by our own principles.

It’s barely facetious though. What is stopping me from “starting an AI company” (LLC, sure), torrenting all ebooks (which Facebook did), and as long as I don’t seed, I’m golden?

>What is stopping me from “starting an AI company” (LLC, sure), torrenting all ebooks (which Facebook did), and as long as I don’t seed, I’m golden?

Nothing. You don't even need the LLC. I don't think anyone got prosecuted for only downloading. All prosecutions were for distribution. Note that if you're torrenting, even if you stop the moment it's finished (and thus never goes to "seeding"), you're still uploading, and would count as distribution for the purposes of copyright law.

Which is still what Facebook did, if I'm not mistaken. There's no way they torrented and managed to upload less than 1 bit.

You're right. They claimed they made efforts to minimize seeding, but minimal is not none, as you say.

You can make a patched torrent client that never uploads any pieces to peers. It'd definitely be within Meta's capability to do so. The real problem is that unlike typical torrenting lawusits, they weren't caught red-handed in the act, and would therefore be hard to go after them. This might seem unfair, but it's not any different than you openly posting on Reddit that you torrent, but it'd be tough for rights holders to go after you even with such admission.

> Previously, a Meta executive in charge of project management, Michael Clark, had testified that Meta allegedly modified torrenting settings "so that the smallest amount of seeding possible could occur," which seems to support authors' claims that some seeding occurred. And an internal message from Meta researcher Frank Zhang appeared to show that Meta allegedly tried to conceal the seeding by not using Facebook servers while downloading the dataset to "avoid" the "risk" of anyone "tracing back the seeder/downloader" from Facebook servers. Once this information came to light, authors asked the court for a chance to depose Meta executives again, alleging that new facts "contradict prior deposition testimony."

>Meta allegedly modified torrenting settings "so that the smallest amount of seeding possible could occur,"

>Meta allegedly tried to conceal the seeding by not using Facebook servers while downloading the dataset to "avoid" the "risk" of anyone "tracing back the seeder/downloader" from Facebook servers

Sounds like they used a VPN, set the upload speed to 1kb/s and stopped after the download is done. If the average Joe copied that setup there's 0% chance he'd get sued, so I don't really see a double standard here. If anything, Meta might get additional scrutiny because they're big enough of a target that rights holders will go through the effort of suing them.

> If the average Joe copied that setup there's 0% chance he'd get sued

Citation needed. RIAA used to just watch torrents and sent cease and desists to everyone who connected, whether for a minute or for months. It was very much a dragnet, and I highly doubt there was any nuance of "but Your Honor, I only seeded 1MB back so it's all good".