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

The important parts:

> Alsup ruled that Anthropic's use of copyrighted books to train its AI models was "exceedingly transformative" and qualified as fair use

> "All Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies"

It was always somewhat obvious that pirating a library would be copyright infringement. The interesting findings here are that scanning and digitizing a library for internal use is OK, and using it to train models is fair use.

You skipped quotes about the other important side:

> But Alsup drew a firm line when it came to piracy.

> "Anthropic had no entitlement to use pirated copies for its central library," Alsup wrote. "Creating a permanent, general-purpose library was not itself a fair use excusing Anthropic's piracy."

That is, he ruled that

- buying, physically cutting up, physically digitizing books, and using them for training is fair use

- pirating the books for their digital library is not fair use.

From my understanding:

> pirating the books for their digital library is not fair use.

"Pirating" is a fuzzy word and has no real meaning. Specifically, I think this is the cruz:

> without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies

Essentially: downloading is fine, sharing/uploading up is not. Which makes sense. The assertion here is that Anthropic (from this line) did not distribute the files they downloaded.

The legal context here is that "format shifting" has not previously been held to be sufficient for fair use on its own, and downloading for personal use has also been considered infringing. Just look at the numerous media industry lawsuits against individuals that only mention downloading, not sharing for examples.

It's a bit surprising that you can suddenly download copyrighted materials for personal use and and it's kosher as long as you don't share them with others.

> the numerous media industry lawsuits against individuals that only mention downloading,

I never saw any of these. All the cases I saw were related to people using torrents or other P2P software (which aren't just downloading). These might exist, but I haven't seen them.

> It's a bit surprising that you can suddenly download copyrighted materials for personal use and it's kosher as long as you don't share them with others.

Every click on a link is a risk of downloading copyrighted material you don't have the rights to.

Searching the internet, it appears that it's a civil infraction, but it's also confused with the notion that "piracy" is illegal, a term that's used for many different purposes. I see "It is illegal to download any music or movies that are copyrighted." under legal advice, which I know as a statement is not true.

Hence my confusion.

I should note: I'm not arguing from the perspective of whether it's morally or ethically right. Only that even in the context of this thread, things are phrased that aren't clear.

I just checked first individual suit I could find, which was BMG v. Gonzalez. She used P2P, but the case was specifically about her downloading, not redistributing.