Hacker News Reader

Comment by eschaton | Hacker News Reader

Not really, no. There have been many settlements of lawsuits, which means they are very explicitly not precedents. The LLM companies likely prefer to settle because of the existential risk being found liable for copyright infringement would result in, whereas even an expensive settlement doesn’t upend their entire business model.

Furthermore, I don’t think you can really assume that the courts will rule a certain way on this just because of the money involved; there’s a lot of money involved when it comes to the copyright holders too, and they’ve long enjoyed a rather favorable status with the courts and legislators. (For example, in the days of P2P file sharing lawsuits and attempts to legislate P2P file sharing, the software industry was already many times the size of the media industry, but the media industry consistently won.)

View on HN

> Furthermore, I don’t think you can really assume that the courts will rule a certain way on this just because of the money involved; there’s a lot of money involved when it comes to the copyright holders too, and they’ve long enjoyed a rather favorable status with the courts and legislators.

I don't think this is all that plausible, even though I agree with you that it's not settled law. The size of the AI industry is gigantic, and a ruling that they are infringing the copyright of every piece of content in their training set would essentially shut them down entirely. Such a decision, if final, would probably easily wipe out a few hundred billion dollars on the stock market. Even if any court was willing to go that far, almost certainly lawmakers would step in and modify copyright law to prevent this from happening - both in the USA and the EU.

I don't think there is any comparison to make with the file sharing battle. That was a much, much smaller industry, it was not a significant chunk of the total hardware and software industries. Plus, the software titans were not nearly as well connected politically as they are today.

A couple of things: The “AI industry” is nowhere near as large as it pretends to be, most of its valuation is in the form of IOUs being traded back and forth. However, the bubble popping probably will wipe a few hundred billion of value from the stock market, because that’s what happens when a speculative bubble pops.

The second thing is that I’m not necessarily talking about whether _a specific LLM itself_ infringes copyright, but whether _its output_ is covered by the copyright of _its training material_. Whether training an LLM is an activity that infringes copyright is not well-settled in any precedential way, whether the trained LLM as an artifact infringes copyright is even less settled, and whether the output of that LLM is either infringing or covered by copyright is also not settled. These are all still extremely open questions.

That means anyone doing reasonable risk management should not just blithely race ahead and assume that there’s no infringement, which appears to be the approach the GCC project is taking explicitly and which also appears to be the approach projects like Linux and LLVM are taking implicitly (mostly through weasel-language like accepting responsibility for code you’re submitting).

I was referring to this decision:

"To summarize the analysis that now follows, the use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative and was a fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act. And, the digitization of the books purchased in print form by Anthropic was also a fair use but not for the same reason as applies to the training copies. Instead, it was a fair use because 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."

https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/jnvwbgqlzpw/...

IANAL and don't know how significant this decision is, but it is, at the very least, how one judge views it.

Personally, I don't think judges will rule a certain way because of the money involved but because it seems clear that training a ML model is highly transformative.

Not quite the precedent that it may sound like. A district court judge ruled that using copyrighted materials for the training itself was not infringement, but that the materials must be obtained legally.

Anthropic is trying to settle the case with most plaintiffs with respect to obtaining their works in an infringing way, but there are still plaintiffs pursuing the case on both the grounds that the remedy is insufficient (being only about $3000/work, when it has been as high as $250K/work in other copyright infringement cases and via statutory damages) and also on the grounds that the ruling that training is fair use was an error of law on the district court judge’s part.

Notably it doesn’t cover whether the output of the trained LLM continues to attach the training set’s copyright, which is independent from whether the training itself was an infringing activity. And there’s a substantial argument that the judge erred, if it can be shown that the training works are stored in a recoverable manner (even with some loss/defredation) rather than more extensively transformed.

Let's hope judges are reasonable because if AIs aren't allowed to learn like humans do, we'll never get AGI.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com