Yup. The book torrenting case is pretty nuts.
If I can reproduce the entirety of most books off the top of my head and sell that to people as a service, it's a copyright violation. If AI does it, it's fair use.
Pants-on-head idiotic judge.
If I can reproduce the entirety of most books off the top of my head and sell that to people as a service, it's a copyright violation. If AI does it, it's fair use.
Pants-on-head idiotic judge.
Assuming you're referring to Bartz v. Anthropic, that is explicitly not what the ruling said, in fact it's almost the inverse. The judge said that output from an AI model which is a straight up reproduction of copyrighted material would likely be an explicit violation of copyright. This is on page 12/32 of the judgement[1].
But the vast majority of output from an LLM like Claude is not a word for word reproduction; it's a transformative use of the original work. In fact, the authors bringing the suit didn't even claim that it had reproduced their work. From page 7, "Authors do not allege that any infringing copy of their works was or would ever be provided to users by the Claude service." That's because Anthropic is already explicitly filtering out results that might contain copyrighted material. (I've run into this myself while trying to translate foreign language song lyrics to English. Claude will simply refuse to do this)[2]
[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69058235/231/bartz-v-an...
[2] https://claude.ai/share/d0586248-8d00-4d50-8e45-f9c5ef09ec81
Now, Anthropic was found to have pirated copyrighted work when they downloaded and trained Claude on the LibGen library. And they will likely pay substantial damages for this. So on those grounds, they're as screwed as the 12 year olds and their parents. The trial to determine damages hasn't happened yet though.
Agreed
> the Sony Betamax case, which found that it was legal and a transformative use of copyrighted material to create a copy of a publicly aired broadcast
Good thing libgen is not publicly aired in broadcast format.
> So on those grounds, they're as screwed as the 12 year olds and their parents.
Except they have deep enough pockets to actually pay the damages for each count of infringement. That's the blood most of us want to see shed.
You cannot have trained the model without possession of copyrighted works. Which we seem to be in agreement on.
Is the hinge that the tools can recall a huge portion (not perfectly of course) but usually don't? What seems even more straight forward is the substitute good idea, it seems reasonable to assume people will buy less copies of book X when they start generating books heavily inspired by book X.
But, this is probably just a case of a layman wandering into a complex topic, maybe it's the case that AI has just nestled into the absolute perfect spot in current copyright law, just like other things that seem like they should be illegal now but aren't.
I daresay the difference with AI is that pretty much no human can do that well enough to harm the copyright holder, whereas AI can churn it out.
Now there's precedent for future cases where theft of code or any other work of art can be considered fair use.