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.

So all they have to do is go and buy a copy of each book they pirated. They will have ceased and desisted.

I'm trying to find the quote, but I'm pretty sure the judge specifically said that going and buying the book after the fact won't absolve them of liability. He said that for the books they pirated they broke the law and should stand trial for that and they cannot go back and un-break in by buying a copy now.

Found it: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/federal-judge-rules-c...

> “That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft,” [Judge] Alsup wrote, “but it may affect the extent of statutory damages.”

They also argued that they in no way could ever actually license all the materials they ingested

I love this argument so much. "But judge, there's no way I could ever afford to buy those jewels, so stealing them must be OK."

The argument is more along the lines of, negotiating with millions of individuals each over a single copy of a work would cause the transaction costs to exceed the payments, and that kind of efficiency loss is the sort of thing fair use exists to prevent. It's not socially beneficial for the law to require you to create $2 in deadweight loss in order to transfer $1, and the cost to the author of not selling a single additional copy is not the thing they were really objecting to.

That's right, so I can't individually discuss terms with each and every media creator, so from now on, I can just pirate everything.

This is literally why a lot of people pirate content, yes. It’s pretty much always the only way to obtain the content, even if you are otherwise fine with paying for it.

Yes, and it's technically copyright infringement, even for private use. It's just that damages and enforcement is in feasible.

But if you tried to open a black market selling that media: you'd be hunted down to the ends of the earth. Or to China/North Korea, at least.

> But if you tried to open a black market selling that media

Why would you ever do that? Nobody would buy it. They'd just get it in the same place you did.