Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

If AI companies are allowed to use pirated material to create their products, does it mean that everyone can use pirated software to create products? Where is the line?

Also please don't use word "learning", use "creating software using copyrighted materials".

Also let's think together how can we prevent AI companies from using our work using technical measures if the law doesn't work?

~1B USD in cash is the line where laws apply very differently

It's abusive and wrong to try and prevent AI companies from using your works at all.

The whole point of copyright is to ensure you're paid for your work. AI companies shouldn't pirate, but if they pay for your work, they should be able to use it however they please, including training an LLM on it.

If that LLM reproduces your work, then the AI company is violating copyright, but if the LLM doesn't reproduce your work, then you have not been harmed. Trying to claim harm when you haven't been due to some philosophical difference in opinion with the AI company is an abuse of the courts.

It is not wrong at all. The author decides what to do with their work. AI companies are rich and can simply buy the rights or hire people to create works.

I could agree with exceptions for non-commercial activity like scientific research, but AI companies are made for extracting profits and not for doing research.

> AI companies shouldn't pirate, but if they pay for your work, they should be able to use it however they please, including training an LLM on it.

It doesn't work this way. If you buy a movie it doesn't mean you can sell goods with movie characters.

> then you have not been harmed.

I am harmed because less people will buy the book if they can simply get an answer from LLM. Less people will hire me to write code if an LLM trained on my code can do it. Maybe instead of books we should start making applications that protect the content and do not allow copying text or making screenshots. ANd instead of open-source code we should provide binary WASM modules.

If you reproduce the material from a work you've purchased then of course you're in violation of copyright, but that's not what an LLM does (and when it does I already conceded it's in violation and should be stopped). An LLM that doesn't "sell goods with movie characters" is not in violation.

And the harm you describe is not a recognized harm. You don't own information, you own creative works in their entirety. If your work is simply a reference, then the fact being referenced isn't something you own, thus you are not harmed if that fact is shared elsewhere.

It is an abuse of the courts to attempt to prevent people who have purchased your works from using those works to train an LLM. It's morally wrong.

> The whole point of copyright is to ensure you're paid for your work.

No. The point of copyright is that the author gets to decide under what terms their works are copied. That's the essence of copyright. In many cases, authors will happily sell you a copy of their work, but they're under no obligation to do so. They can claim a copyright and then never release their work to the general public. That's perfectly within their rights, and they can sue to stop anybody from distributing copies.

To load a printed book into a computer one has to reproduce it in digital form without authorization. That's making a copy.

Making a digital copy of a physical book is fair use under every legal structure I am aware of.

When you do it for a transformative purpose (turning it into an LLM model) it's certainly fair use.

But more importantly, it's ethical to do so, as the agreement you've made with the person you've purchased the book from included permission to do exactly that.

We're operating under a model where the owner of the copyright has already sold their work. And while it's within their rights to stipulate conditions of the sale, they did not do that, and fair use of the work as governed under the laws the book was sold under encompasses its conversion into an LLM model.

If the author didn't want their work to be included in an LLM, they should not have sold it, just like if an author didn't want their work to inspire someone else's work, they should not have sold it.

Current copyright law is not remotely sophisticated enough to make determinations on AI fair use. Whether the courts say current AI use is fair is irrelevant to the discussion most people on this side would agree with: That we need new laws. The work the AI companies stole to train on was created under a copyright regime where the expectation was that, eh, a few people would learn from and be inspired from your work, and that feels great because you're empowering other humans. Scale does not amplify Good. The regime has changed. The expectations under what kinds of use copyright protects against has fundamentally changed. The AI companies invented New Horrors that no one could have predicted, Vader altered the deal, no reasonable artist except the most forward-thinking sci-fi authors would have remotely guessed what their work would be used for, and thus could never have conciously and fairly agreed to this exchange. Very few would have agreed to it.

> It's abusive and wrong to try and prevent AI companies from using your works at all.

People don't view moral issues in the abstract.

A better perspective on this is the fact that human individuals have created works which megacorps are training on for free or for the price of a single book and creating models which replace individuals.

The megacorps are only partially replacing individuals now, but when the models get good enough they could replace humans entirely.

When such a future happens will you still be siding with them or with individual creators?

But the AI used the content to learn how to copy and recreate it. Is ‘re-creation’ a better concept for us?

People already use pirated software for product creation.

Hypothetical:

I know a guy who learned photoshop on a pirated copy of Photoshop. He went on to be a graphic designer. All his earnings are ‘proceeds from crime’

He never used the pirated software to produce content.

> fair use of the work as governed under the laws the book was sold under encompasses its conversion into an LLM model

If that were the case then this court case would not be ongoing

> A better perspective on this is the fact that human individuals have created works which megacorps are training on for free or for the price of a single book and creating models which replace individuals.

Those damn kind readers and libraries. Giving their single copy away when they just paid for the single.

Per the ruling, the problem is the books were not purchased, they were downloaded from black market websites. It's akin to shoplifting, what you do later with the goods is a different matter.

Reasonable minds could debate the ethics of how the material was used, this ruling judged the usage was legal and fair use. The only problem is the material was in effect stolen.

Yeah, this is part of the ruling. The judge decided that the usage was sufficiently transformative and thus fair use. The issue is the authors were selling their works and the company went to a black market instead.

> It is worse than ineffective; it is wrong too, because software developers should not exercise such power over what users do. Imagine selling pens with conditions about what you can write with them; that would be noisome, and we should not stand for it. Likewise for general software. If you make something that is generally useful, like a pen, people will use it to write all sorts of things, even horrible things such as orders to torture a dissident; but you must not have the power to control people's activities through their pens. It is the same for a text editor, compiler or kernel.

Sorry for the long quote, but basically this, yeah. A major point of free software is that creators should not have the power to impose arbitrary limits on the users of their works. It is unethical.

It's why the GPL allows the user to disregard any additional conditions, why it's viral, and why the FSF spends so much effort on fighting "open source but..." licenses.

> Maybe instead of books we should start making applications that protect the content and do not allow copying text or making screenshots.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole

That seems to be a misunderstanding of what's disputed. One fact that is disputed is whether or not the use of the work qualifies as fair use and the judge determined that it is because the result is sufficiently transformative. Another disputed fact is whether the books were acquired legally and the judge determined that they were not. The reason the case is still ongoing is to determine Anthropic's liability for illegally acquiring copies of the books, not to determine the legal status of the LLMs.

So can we officially download pirated content to learn stuff now?

Sure, and I feel zero moral qualms about me or anyone else doing it. The vast majority of the shit flows flows from the other direction towards individuals and consumers when it comes to content delivery companies and worse still, software companies. Let's address that before wringing our hands about individual acts of "piracy", even at scale.

I could, right now in just a few minutes, go download a perfectly functional pirated copy of nearly any Adobe program, nearly any Microsoft program and a whole range of books and movies, yet I see zero real financial troubles affecting any of the companies behind these. All the contrary in fact.

Where are you reading that?

You are allowed to buy and scan books, and then used those scanned books to create products. I guess you are also allowed to pirate books and use the knowledge to create products if you are willing to pay the damages to the rights holders for copyright violations.

When I was young and poor I learned on pirated software. Do I owe Adobe, Microsoft and others a percentage of my today income?

How often does a link get posted here of content that is behind a paywall? If you bypass it to read it, didny't you just learn via illegal content? I'm not sure where the "official" comes in, but it's clearly widely accepted.

If you watch a YouTube video to learn something and it's later taken down for using copyrighted images, you learned from illegal content.

Going to the library and reading a book takes hours while AI companies chew thousands of books per second. It's different scale.

That would be "circumvention of DRM".