Submitted 3 weeks ago by Davriellelouna@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
As Anthropic argued, it now “faces hundreds of billions of dollars in potential damages liability at trial in four months” based on a class certification rushed at “warp speed” that involves “up to seven million potential claimants, whose works span a century of publishing history,” each possibly triggering a $150,000 fine.
So you knew what stealing the copyrighted works could result in, and your defense is that you stole too much? That’s not how that works.
Actually that usually is how it works. Unfortunately.
*Too big to fail" was probably made up by the big ones.
The purpose of copyright is to drive works into the public domain. Works are only supposed to remain exclusive to the artist for a very limited time, not a “century of publishing history”.
The copyright industry should lose this battle. Copyright exclusivity should be shorter than patent exclusivity.
Copyright companies losing the case wouldn’t make copyright any shorter.
If scraping is illegal, so is the Internet Archive, and that would be an immense loss for the world.
This is the real concern. Copyright abuse has been rampant for a long time, and the only reason things like the Internet Archive are allowed to exist is because the copyright holders don't want to pick a fight they could potentially lose and lessen their hold on the IPs they're hoarding. The AI case is the perfect thing for them, because it's a very clear violation with a good amount of public support on their side, and winning will allow them to crack down even harder on all the things like the Internet Archive that should be fair use. AI is bad, but this fight won't benefit the public either way.
Oh no! Building a product with stolen data was a rotten idea after all. Well, at least the AI companies can use their fabulously genius PhD level LLMs to weasel their way out of all these lawsuits. Right?
I propose that anyone defending themselves in court over AI stealing data must be represented exclusively by AI.
That would be glorious. If the future of your company depends on the LLM keeping track of hundreds of details and drawing the right conclusions, it’s game over during the first day.
PhD level LLM = paying MAs $21/hr to write summaries of paragraphs for them to improve off of. Google Gemini outsourced their work like this, so I assume everyone else did too.
Let’s go baby! The law is the law, and it applies to everybody
If the “genie doesn’t go back in the bottle”, make him pay for what he’s stealing.
The law absolutely does not apply to everybody, and you are well aware of that.
Shouldn’t it?
The law applies to everybody, but the law-makers change the laws to benefit certain people. And then trump pardons the rest lol.
This would mean the copyright holders like Disney are now the AI companies, because they have the content to train them. That’s even worse, man.
It’s not because they would only train on things they own which is an absolute tiny fraction of everything that everyone owns. It’s like complaining that a rich person gets to enjoy their lavish estate when the alternative is they get to use everybody’s home in the world.
I just remembered the movie where the genie was released from the bottle of a real genie, he turned the world into chaos by freeing his own kind, and if it weren’t for the power of the plot, I’m afraid people there would have become slaves or died out.
Although here it is already necessary to file a lawsuit for theft of the soul in the literal sense of the word.
The law is not the law. I am the law.
insert awesome guitar riff here
Well maybe they shouldn’t have done of the largest violations of copyright and intellectual property ever.
Probably the largest single instance ever.
I feel like it can’t even be close. What would even compete? I know I’ve gone a little overboard with my external hard drive, but I don’t think even I’m to that level.
An important note here, the judge has already ruled in this case that "using Plaintiffs’ works “to train specific LLMs [was] justified as a fair use” because “[t]he technology at issue was among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes.” during the summary judgement order.
The plaintiffs are not suing Anthropic for infringing on their copyright, the court has already ruled that it was so obvious that they could not succeed with that argument that it could be dismissed. Their only remaining claim is that Anthropic downloaded the books from piracy sites using bittorrent
This isn’t about LLMs anymore, it’s a standard “You downloaded something on Bittorrent and made a company mad”-type case that has been going on since Napster.
Also, the headline is incredibly misleading. It’s ascribing feelings to an entire industry based on a common legal filing that is not by itself noteworthy. Unless you really care about legal technicalities, you can stop here.
The actual news, the new factual thing that happened, is that the Consumer Technology Association and the Computer and Communications Industry Association filed an Amicus Brief, in an appeal of an issue that Anthropic the court ruled against.
This is pretty normal legal filing about legal technicalities. This isn’t really newsworthy outside of, maybe, some people in the legal profession who are bored.
The issue was class certification.
Three people sued Anthropic. Instead of just suing Anthropic on behalf of themselves, they moved to be certified as class. That is to say that they wanted to sue on behalf of a larger group of people, in this case a “Pirated Books Class” of authors whose books Anthropic downloaded from the book piracy websites.
The judge ruled they can represent the class, Anthropic appealed the ruling. During this appeal an industry group filed an Amicus brief with arguments supporting Anthropic’s argument. This is not uncommon, The Onion famously filed an Amicus brief with the Supreme Court when they were about to rule on issues of parody. Like everything The Onion writes, it’s a good piece of satire: supremecourt.gov/…/20221003125252896_35295545_1-2…
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I was reading the article and thinking “suck a dick, AI companies” but then it mentions the EFF and ALA filed against the class action. I have found those organizations to be generally reputable and on the right side of history, so now I’m wondering what the problem is.
They don’t want copyright power to expand further. And I agree with them, despite hating AI vendors with a passion.
For an understanding of the collateral damage, check out How To Think About Scraping by Cory Doctorow.
Take scraping. Companies like Clearview will tell you that scraping is legal under copyright law. They’ll tell you that training a model with scraped data is also not a copyright infringement. They’re right.
I love Cory’s writing, but while he does a masterful job of defending scraping, and makes a good argument that in most cases, it’s laws other than Copyright that should be the battleground, he does, kinda, trip over the main point.
That is that training models on creative works and then selling access to the derivative “creative” works that those models output very much falls within the domain of copyright - on either side of a grey line we usually call “fair use” that hasn’t been really tested in courts.
Lets take two absurd extremes to make the point. Say I train an LLM directly on Marvel movies, and then sell movies (or maybe movie scripts) that are almost identical to existing Marvel movies (maybe with a few key names and features altered). I don’t think anyone would argue that is not a derivative work, or that falls under “fair use.” However, if I used literature to train my LLM to be able to read, and used that to read street signs for my self-driving car, well, yeah, that might be something you could argue is “fair use” to sell. It’s not producing copy-cat literature.
I agree with Cory that scraping, per se, is absolutely fine, and even re-distributing the results in some ways that are in the public interest or fall under “fair use”, but it’s hard to justify the slop machines as not a copyright problem.
In the end, yeah, fuck both sides anyway. Copyright was extended too far and used for far too much, and the AI companies are absolute thieves. I have no illusions this type of court case will do anything more than shift wealth from one robber-barron to another, and won’t help artists and authors.
Ahhh, it makes more sense now. Thank you!
Let’s give them this one last win. For spite.
I disagree with the EFF and ALA on this one.
These were entire sets of writing consumed and reworked into poor data without respecting the license to them.
Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if copyright wasn’t the only thing to be the problem here, but intellectual property as well. In that case, EFF probably has an interest in that instead. Regardless, I really think it need to be brought through court.
LLMs are harmful, full stop. Most other Machine Learning mechanisms use licensed data to train. In the case of software as a medical device, such as image analysis AI, that data is protected by HIPPA and special attention is already placed in order to utilize it.
My guess is that the EFF is mostly concerned with the fact this is a class action and also worried about expanding copyright in general.
AI coding tools are using the exact same backends as AI fiction writing tools, so it would hurt the fledgling vibe coder profession (which according to proper software developers should not be allowed to exist at all).
The same goes for the Internet Archive - if scraping is illegal, than the Internet Archive is as well.
I thought it was hilarious how there was a quote in the article that said
immense harm not only to a single AI company, but to the entire fledgling AI industry and to America’s global technological competitiveness
It will only do this because all these idiotic American companies fired all their employees to replace them with AI. Hire then back and the edge won't dull. But we all know that they won't do this and just cry and point fingers wondering how they ever lost a technology race.
Unfortunately, this will probably lead to nothing: in our world, only the poor seem to be punished for stealing. Well, corporations always get away with everything, so we sit on the couch and shout hurray for the fact that they are trying to console us with this.
This issue is not so cut and dry. The AI companies are stealing from other companies more than ftom individual people. Publishing companies are owned by some very rich people. And they want thier cut.
This case may have started out with authors, but it is mentioned that it could turn into publishing companies vs AI companies.
Good. Burn it down. Bankrupt them.
If it’s so “critical to national security” then nationalize it.
the “burn it down” variant would only lead to the scenario where the copyright holders become the AI companies, since they have the content to train it. AI will not go away, it might change ownership to someone worse tho.
nationalizing sounds better; even better were to put in under UNESCO-stewardship.
Hard to imagine worse than the insane techno-feudalists who currently own it.
Probably would have been cheaper to license everything you stole, eh, Anthropic?
Well, theft has never been the best foundation for a business, has it?
While I completely agree that copyright terms are completely overblown, they are valid law that other people suffer under, so it is 100% fair to make them suffer the same. Or worse, as they all broke the law for commercial gain.
Well, theft has never been the best foundation for a business, has it?
History would suggest otherwise.
People cheering for this have no idea of the consequence of their copyright-maximalist position.
If using images, text, etc to train a model is copyright infringement then there will NO open models because open source model creators could not possibly obtain all of the licensing for every piece of written or visual media in the Common Crawl dataset, which is what most of these things are trained on.
As it stands now, corporations don’t have a monopoly on AI specifically because copyright doesn’t apply to AI training. Everyone has access to Common Crawl and the other large, public, datasets made from crawling the public Internet and so anyone can train a model on their own without worrying about obtaining billions of different licenses from every single individual who has ever written a word or drawn a picture.
If there is a ruling that training violates copyright then the only entities that could possibly afford to train LLMs or diffusion models are companies that own a large amount of copyrighted materials. Sure, one company will lose a lot of money and/or be destroyed, but the legal president would be set so that it is impossible for anyone that doesn’t have billions of dollars to train AI.
People are shortsightedly seeing this as a victory for artists or some other nonsense. It’s not. This is a fight where large copyright holders (Disney and other large publishing companies) want to completely own the ability to train AI because they own most of the large stores of copyrighted material.
If the copyright holders win this the the open source training material, like Common Crawl, would be completely unusable to train models in the US/the West because any person who has ever posted anything to the Internet in the last 25 years could simply sue for copyright infringement.
Anybody can use copyrighted works under fair use for research, more so if your LLM model is open source. You are wrong.
We don’t need to break copyright rights that protect us from corporations in this case, or also incidentally protect open source and libre software.
In theory sure, but in practice who has the resources to do large scale model training on huge datasets other than large corporations?
Distributed computing projects, large non-profits, people in the near future with much more powerful and cheaper hardware, governments which are interested in providing public services to their citizens, etc.
Look at other large technology projects. The Human Genome Project spent $3 billion to sequence the first genome but now you can have it done for around $500. This cost reduction is due to the massive, combined, effort of tens of thousands of independent scientists working on the same problem. It isn’t something that would have happened if Purdue Pharma owned the sequencing process and required every scientist to purchase a license from them in order to do research.
LLM and diffusion models are trained on the works of everyone who’s ever been online (which is stored in the Common Crawl datasets). We should not be cheering for a world where it is illegal to use this dataset and, instead, we are forced to license massive datasets from publishing companies.
The amount of progress on these types of models would immediately stop, there would be 3-4 corporations would could afford the licenses. They would have a de facto monopoly on LLMs and could enshittify them without worry of competition.
Or it just happens overseas, where these laws don’t apply (or can’t be enforced).
But I don’t think it will happen. Too many countries are desperate to be “the AI country” that they’ll risk burning whole industries to the ground to get it.
Copyright is a leftover mechanism from slavery and it will be interesting to see how it gets challenged here, given that the wealthy view AI as an extension of themselves and not as a normal employee. Genuinely think the copyright cases from AI will be huge.
My last comment was wrong, I’ve read through the filings of the case.
The judge already ruled that training the LLMs using the books was so obviously fair use that it was dismissed in summary judgement (my bolds):
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. 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 without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies. However, Anthropic had no entitlement to use pirated copies for its central library, and creating a permanent, general-purpose library was not itself a fair use excusing Anthropic’s piracy.
The only issue remaining in this case is that they downloaded copyrighted material with bittorrent, the kind of lawsuits that have been going on since napster. They’ll probably be required to pay for all 196,640 books that they priated and some other damages.
I am holding my breath! Will they walk free, or get a $10 million fine and then keep doing what every other thieving, embezzling, looting, polluting, swindling, corrupting, tax evading mega-corporation have been doing for a century!
This is how corruption works - the fine is the cost of business. Being given only a fine of $10 million is such a win that they’ll raise $10 billion in new investment on its back.
Would be better if the fee were nominal, but that all their training data must never be used. Start them over from scratch and make it illegal to use anything that it knows now. Knee cap these frivolous little toys
No it won’t. Just their companies. Which are the ones making slop. If your AI does something actually useful it will survive.
You know, if they lose, their tech will probably become the property of copyright holders, which means your new AI Overlord has the first name Walt.
Meanwhile some Italian YouTuber was raided because some portable consoles already came with roms in their memory, they only go after individuals.
Fucking good!! Let the AI industry BURN!
What um, what court system do you think is going to make that happen? Cause the current one is owned by an extremely pro-AI administration. If anything gets appealed to SCOTUS they will rule for AI.
The people who literally own this planet have investigated the people who literally own this planet and found that they literally own this planet and what the FUCK are you going to do about it, bacteria of the planet?
^
We just need to show that ChatGPT and alike can generate Nintendo based content and let it fight out between them
They will probably just merge into another mega-golem controlled by one of the seven people who own the planet.
Mario, voiced by Chris Pratt, will become the new Siri, then the new persona for all AI.
In the future, all global affairs will be divided across the lines of Team Mario and Team Luigi. Then the final battle, then the end.
Only 80% of it, the other 7 billion of us own anything from nothing to a few hundred square metres each.
Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.
And yet, despite 20 years of experience, the only side Ashley presents is the technologists’ side.
So, the US now has a choice: rescue AI and fix their fucked up copyright system, or rescue the fucked up copyright system and fuck up AI companies. I’m interested in the decision.
Good fuck those fuckers
Is this how Disney becomes the owner of all of the AI companies too? Lol
I hope LLMs and generative AI crash and burn.
I’m thinking, honestly, what if that’s the planned purpose of this bubble.
I’m explaining - those “AI”'s involve assembling large datasets and making them available, poisoning the Web, and creating demand for for a specific kind of hardware.
When it bursts, not everything bursts.
Suddenly there will be plenty of no longer required hardware usable for normal ML applications like face recognition, voice recognition, text analysis to identify its author, combat drones with target selection, all kinds of stuff. It will be dirt cheap, compared to its current price, as it was with Sun hardware after the dotcom crash.
There still will be those datasets, that can be analyzed for plenty of purposes. Legal or not, they are already processed into usable and convenient state.
There will be the Web covered with a great wall of China tall layer of AI slop.
There will likely be a bankrupt nation which will have a lot of things failing due to that.
And there will still be all the centralized services. Suppose on that day you go search something in Google, and there’s only the Google summary present, no results list (or maybe even a results list, whatever, but suddenly weighed differently), saying that you’ve been owned by domestic enemies yadda-yadda and the patriotic corporations are implementing a popular state of emergency or something like that. You go to Facebook, and when you write something there, your messages are premoderated by an AI so that you’d not be able to god forbid say something wrong. An LLM might not be able to support a decent enough conversation, but to edit out things you say, or PGP keys you send, in real time without anything appearing strange - easily. Or to change some real person’s style of speech to yours.
Suppose all of not-degoogled Android installations start doing things like that, Amazon’s logistics suddenly start working to support a putsch, Facebook and WhatsApp do what I described or just fail, Apple makes a presentation of a new, magnificent, ingenious, miraculous, patriotic change to a better system of government, maybe even with Johnny Ive as the speaker, and possibly does the same unnoticeable censorship, Microsoft pushes one malicious update 3 months earlier with a backdoor to all Windows installations doing the same, and commits its datacenters to the common effort, and let’s just say it’s possible that a similar thing is done by some Linux developer believing in an idea and some of the major distributions - don’t need it doing much, just to provide a backdoor usable remotely.
I don’t list Twitter because honestly it doesn’t seem to work well enough or have coverage good enough.
So - this seems a pretty possible apocalypse scenario which does lead to a sudden installation of a dictatorial regime with all the necessary surveillance, planning, censorship and enforcement already being functioning systems.
So - of course apocalypse scenarios were a normal thing in movies for many years and many times, but it’s funny how the more plausible such become, the less often they are described in art.
It’s so very, very, deeply, fucking bleak. I can’t sleep at night, because I see this clear as day, I feel like a jew in 1938’s Berlin, only unlike that guy I can’t get out, because this is global. There is literally nowhere to run.
Either society is going to crash and burn, or we will see global war, which will crash and burn society.
There is no escape, the writing is on the fucking wall.
I love this. I hope big-tech/big-AI destroys big-copyright industry.
Nah, the only thing that could realistically happen is that copyright doesn’t apply to AI hosted by large corporations. In no way will this destroy copyright claims against individuals or small companies.
Would really love to see IP law get taken down a notch out of this.
The bill comes due 🤷🏻
Now they’re in the “finding out” phase of the “fucking around and finding out”.
Too late. The systems we are building as a species will soon become sentient. We’ll have aliens right here, no UFOs required. Where the music comes from will no longer be relevant.
Ok perfect so since AGI is right around the corner and this is all irrelevant, then I’m sure the AI companies won’t mind paying up.
That’s not the way it works. Do you think the Roman Empire just picked a particular Tuesday to collapse? It’s a process and will take a while.
With the amount of money pouring in you’d think they’d just pay for it
Now now. You know that’s not how capitalism works.
Let them fight!
nulluser@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
No. Just the LLM industry and AI slop image and video generation industries. All of the legitimate uses of AI (drug discovery, finding solar panel improvements, self driving vehicles, etc) are all completely immune from this lawsuit, because they’re not dependent on stealing other people’s work.
a_wild_mimic_appears@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
But it would also mean that the Internet Archive is illegal, even tho they don’t profit, but if scraping the internet is a copyright violation, then they are as guilty as Anthropic.
magikmw@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
IA doesn't make any money off the content. Not that LLM companies do, but that's what they'd want.
umbrella@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
omxxi@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
Scrapping the Internet is not illegal. All AI companies did much more beyond that, they accessed private writings, private code, copyrighted images. they scanned copyrighted books (and then destroyed them), downloaded terabytes of copyrighted torrents … etc
So, the message is like piracy is OK when it’s done massively by a big company. They’re claiming “fair use” and most judges are buying it (or being bought?)