You’re poor? Fuck you you have to pay to breathe.
Millionaire? Whatever you want daddy uwu
It took me a few days to get the time to read the actual court ruling but here’s the basics of what it ruled (and what it didn’t rule on):
- It’s legal to scan physical books you already own and keep a digital library of those scanned books, even if the copyright holder didn’t give permission. And even if you bought the books used, for very cheap, in bulk.
- It’s legal to keep all the book data in an internal database for use within the company, as a central library of works accessible only within the company.
- It’s legal to prepare those digital copies for potential use as training material for LLMs, including recognizing the text, performing cleanup on scanning/recognition errors, categorizing and cataloguing them to make editorial decisions on which works to include in which training sets, tokenizing them for the actual LLM technology, etc. This remains legal even for the copies that are excluded from training for whatever reason, as the entire bulk process may involve text that ends up not being used, but the process itself is fair use.
- It’s legal to use that book text to create large language models that power services that are commercially sold to the public, as long as there are safeguards that prevent the LLMs from publishing large portions of a single copyrighted work without the copyright holder’s permission.
- It’s illegal to download unauthorized copies of copyrighted books from the internet, without the copyright holder’s permission.
Here’s what it didn’t rule on:
- Is it legal to distribute large chunks of copyrighted text through one of these LLMs, such as when a user asks a chatbot to recite an entire copyrighted work that is in its training set? (The opinion suggests that it probably isn’t legal, and relies heavily on the dividing line of how Google Books does it, by scanning and analyzing an entire copyrighted work but blocking users from retrieving more than a few snippets from those works).
- Is it legal to give anyone outside the company access to the digitized central library assembled by the company from printed copies?
- Is it legal to crawl publicly available digital data to build a library from text already digitized by someone else? (The answer may matter depending on whether there is an authorized method for obtaining that data, or whether the copyright holder refuses to license that copying).
So it’s a pretty important ruling, in my opinion. It’s a clear green light to the idea of digitizing and archiving copyrighted works without the copyright holder’s permission, as long as you first own a legal copy in the first place. And it’s a green light to using copyrighted works for training AI models, as long as you compiled that database of copyrighted works in a legal way.
Gist:
What’s new: The Northern District of California has granted a summary judgment for Anthropic that the training use of the copyrighted books and the print-to-digital format change were both “fair use” (full order below box). However, the court also found that the pirated library copies that Anthropic collected could not be deemed as training copies, and therefore, the use of this material was not “fair”. The court also announced that it will have a trial on the pirated copies and any resulting damages, adding:
“That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages.”
So I can’t use any of these works because it’s plagiarism but AI can?
My interpretation was that AI companies can train on material they are licensed to use, but the courts have deemed that Anthropic pirated this material as they were not licensed to use it.
In other words, if Anthropic bought the physical or digital books, it would be fine so long as their AI couldn’t spit it out verbatim, but they didn’t even do that, i.e. the AI crawler pirated the book.
Does buying the book give you license to digitise it?
Does owning a digital copy of the book give you license to convert it into another format and copy it into a database?
Definitions of “Ownership” can be very different.
It seems like a lot of people misunderstand copyright so let’s be clear: the answer is yes. You can absolutely digitize your books. You can rip your movies and store them on a home server and run them through compression algorithms.
Copyright exists to prevent others from redistributing your work so as long as you’re doing all of that for personal use, the copyright owner has no say over what you do with it.
You even have some degree of latitude to create and distribute transformative works with a violation only occurring when you distribute something pretty damn close to a copy of the original. Some perfectly legal examples: create a word cloud of a book, analyze the tone of news article to help you trade stocks, produce an image containing the most prominent color in every frame of a movie, or create a search index of the words found on all websites on the internet.
You can absolutely do the same kinds of things an AI does with a work as a human.
You can digitize the books you own. You do not need a license for that. And of course you could put that digital format into a database. As databases are explicit exceptions from copyright law. If you want to go to the extreme: delete first copy. Then you have only in the database. However: AIs/LLMs are not based on data bases. But on neural networks. The original data gets lost when “learned”.
If you want to go to the extreme: delete first copy.
You can; as I understand it, the only legal requirement is that you only use one copy at a time.
ie. I can give my book to a friend after I’m done reading it; I can make a copy of a book and keep them at home and at the office and switch off between reading them; I’m not allowed to make a copy of the book hand one to a friend and then both of us read it at the same time.
That sounds a lot like library ebook renting. Makes sense to me. Ty
Does buying the book give you license to digitise it?
Does owning a digital copy of the book give you license to convert it into another format and copy it into a database?
Yes. That’s what the court ruled here. If you legally obtain a printed copy of a book you are free to digitize it or archive it for yourself. And you’re allowed to keep that digital copy, analyze and index it and search it, in your personal library.
Anthropic’s practice of buying physical books, removing the bindings, scanning the pages, and digitizing the content while destroying the physical book was found to be legal, so long as Anthropic didn’t distribute that library outside of its own company.
That’s not what it says.
Neither you nor an AI is allowed to take a book without authorization; that includes downloading and stealing it. That has nothing to do with plagiarism; it’s just theft.
Assuming that the book has been legally obtained, both you and an AI are allowed to read that book, learn from it, and use the knowledge you obtained.
Both you and the AI need to follow existing copyright laws and licensing when it comes to redistributing that work.
“Plagiarism” is the act of claiming someone else’s work as your own and it’s orthogonal to the use of AI. If you ask either a human or an AI to produce an essay on the philosophy surrounding suicide, you’re fairly likely to include some Shakespeare quotes. It’s only plagiarism if you or the AI fail to provide attribution.
Why would it be plagiarism if you use the knowledge you gain from a book?
Formatting thing: if you start a line in a new paragraph with four spaces, it assumes that you want to display the text as a code and won’t line break.
This means that the last part of your comment is a long line that people need to scroll to see. If you remove one of the spaces, or you remove the empty line between it and the previous paragraph, it’ll look like a normal comment
With an empty line of space:
1 space - and a little bit of writing just to see how the text will wrap. I don’t really have anything that I want to put here, but I need to put enough here to make it long enough to wrap around. This is likely enough.
2 spaces - and a little bit of writing just to see how the text will wrap. I don’t really have anything that I want to put here, but I need to put enough here to make it long enough to wrap around. This is likely enough.
3 spaces - and a little bit of writing just to see how the text will wrap. I don’t really have anything that I want to put here, but I need to put enough here to make it long enough to wrap around. This is likely enough.
4 spaces - and a little bit of writing just to see how the text will wrap. I don't really have anything that I want to put here, but I need to put enough here to make it long enough to wrap around. This is likely enough.Personally I prefer to explicitly wrap the text in backticks.
Three ` symbols will
Have the same effectBut the behavior is more clear to the author
Thanks, I had copy-pasted it from the website :)
But I thought they admitted to torrenting terabytes of ebooks?
That part is not what this preliminary jugement is about. The torrenting part is going to go to an actual trial. This part was about the Authors’ claim that the act of training AI itself violated copyright, and this is what the judge has found to be incorrect.
Facebook (Meta) torrented TBs from Libgen, and their internal chats leaked so we know about that, and IIRC they’ve been sued. Maybe you’re thinking of that case?
Billions of dollars, and they can’t afford to buy ebooks?
FaceBook did but technically downloading (leeching) isn’t illegal but distributing (seeding) is and they did not seed.
Check out my new site TheAIBay, you search for content and an LLM that was trained on reproducing it gives it to you, a small hash check is used to validate accuracy. It is now legal.
The court’s ruling explicitly depended on the fact that Anthropic does not allow users to retrieve significant chunks of copyrighted text. It used the entire copyrighted work to train the weights of the LLMs, but is configured not to actually copy those works out to the public user. The ruling says that if the copyright holders later develop evidence that it is possible to retrieve entire copyrighted works, or significant portions of a work, then they will have the right sue over those facts.
But the facts before the court were that Anthropic’s LLMs have safeguards against distributing copies of identifiable copyrighted works to its users.
Does it “generate” a 1:1 copy?
thanks I hate it xD
Learning
Machine peepin’ is tha study of programs dat can improve they performizzle on a given task automatically.[41] It has been a part of AI from tha beginning.[e] In supervised peepin’, tha hustlin data is labelled wit tha expected lyrics, while up in unsupervised peepin’, tha model identifies patterns or structures up in unlabelled data.
There is nuff muthafuckin kindz of machine peepin’.
😗👌
You can train an LLM to generate 1:1 copies
It’s extremely frustrating to read this comment thread because it’s obvious that so many of you didn’t actually read the article, or even half-skim the article, or even attempted to even comprehend the title of the article for more than a second.
For shame.
Nobody ever reads articles, everybody likes to get angry at headlines, which they wrongly interpret the way it best tickles their rage.
Regarding the ruling, I agree with you that it’s a good thing, in my opinion it makes a lot of sense to allow fair use in this case
It seems the subject of AI causes lemmites to lose all their braincells.
“While the copies used to convert purchased print library copies into digital library copies were slightly disfavored by the second factor (nature of the work), the court still found “on balance” that it was a fair use because the purchased print copy was destroyed and its digital replacement was not redistributed.”
So you find this to be valid? To me it is absolutely being redistributed
Ok so you can buy books scan them or ebooks and use for AI training but you can’t just download priated books from internet to train AI. Did I understood that correctly ?
Make an AI that is trained on the books.
Tell it to tell you a story for one of the books.
Read the story without paying for it.
The law says this is ok now, right?
Sort of.
If you violated laws in obtaining the book (eg stole or downloaded it without permission) it’s illegal and you’ve already violated the law, no matter what you do after that.
If you obtain the book legally you can do whatever you want with that book, by the first sale doctrine. If you want to redistribute the book, you need the proper license. You don’t need any licensing to create a derivative work. That work has to be “sufficiently transformed” in order to pass.
As long as they don’t use exactly the same words in the book, yeah, as I understand it.
How they don’t use same words as in the book ? That’s not how LLM works. They use exactly same words if the probabilities align. It’s proved by this study. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12546
I’d say there are two issues with it.
FIrst, it’s a very new article with only 3 citations. The authors seem like serious researchers but the paper itself is still in the, “hot off the presses” stage and wouldn’t qualify as “proven” yet.
It also doesn’t exactly say that books are copies. It says that in some models, it’s possible to extract some portions of some texts. They cite “1984” and “Harry Potter” as two books that can be extracted almost entirely, under some circumstances. They also find that, in general, extraction rates are below 1%.
Yeah but it’s just a start to reverse the process and prove that there is no AI. We only started with generating text I bet people figure out how to reverse process by using some sort of Rosetta Stone. It’s just probabilities after all.
That’s possible but it’s not what the authors found.
They spend a fair amount of the conclusion emphasizing how exploratory and ambiguous their findings are. The researchers themselves are very careful to point out that this is not a smoking gun.
Yeah authors rely on the recent deep mind paper https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-long.469.pdf ( they even cite it ) that describes (n, p)-discoverable extraction. This is recent studies because right now there are no boundaries, basically people made something and now they study their creation. We’re probably years from something like gdpr for llm.
The LLM is not repeating the same book. The owner of the LLM has the exact same rights to do with what his LLM is reading, as you have to do with what ever YOU are reading.
As long as it is not a verbatim recitation, it is completely okay.
According to story telling theory: there are only roughly 15 different story types anyway.
The law says this is ok now, right?
No.
The judge accepted the fact that Anthropic prevents users from obtaining the underlying copyrighted text through interaction with its LLM, and that there are safeguards in the software that prevent a user from being able to get an entire copyrighted work out of that LLM. It discusses the Google Books arrangement, where the books are scanned in the entirety, but where a user searching in Google Books can’t actually retrieve more than a few snippets from any given book.
Anthropic get to keep the copy of the entire book. It doesn’t get to transmit the contents of that book to someone else, even through the LLM service.
The judge also explicitly stated that if the authors can put together evidence that it is possible for a user to retrieve their entire copyrighted work out of the LLM, they’d have a different case and could sue over it at that time.
That’s my understanding too. If you obtained them legally, you can use them the same way anyone else who obtained them legally could use them.
Sure, if your purchase your training material, it’s not a copyright infringement to read it.
We needed a judge for this?
Yes, because just because you bought a book you don’t own its content. You’re not allowed to print and/or sell additional copies or publicly post the entire text. Generally it’s difficult to say where the limit is of what’s allowed. Citing a single sentence in a public posting is most likely fine, citing an entire paragraph is probably fine, too, but an entire chapter would probably be pushing it too far. And when in doubt a judge must decide how far you can go before infringing copyright. There are good arguments to be made that just buying a book doesn’t grant the right to train commercial AI models with it.
Yeah I have a bash one liner AI model that ingests your media and spits out a 99.9999999% accurate replica through the power of changing the filename.
cpOut performs the latest and greatest AI models
I call this legally distinct, this is legal advice.
mvwill save you some disk space.Unless you’re moving across partitions it will change the filesystem metadata to move the path, but not actually do anything to the data. Sorry, you failed, it’s jail for you.
stupid inodes preventing me from burning though my drive life
This ruling stated that corporations are not allowed to pirate books to use them in training. Please read the headlines more carefully, and read the article.
But, corporations are allowed to buy books normally and use them in training.
Please read the comment more carefully. The observation is that one can proliferate a (legally-attained) work without running afoul of copyright law if one can successfully argue that
cpconstitutes AI.
i will train my jailbroken kindle too…display and storage training… i’ll just libgen them…no worries…it is not piracy
Of course we have to have a way to manually check the training data, in detail, as well. Not reading the book, im just verifying training data.
why do you even jailbreak your kindle? you can still read pirated books on them if you connect it to your pc using calibre
- .mobi sucks
- koreader doesn’t
when not in use i have it load images from my local webserver that are generated by some scripts and feature local news or the weather. kindle screensaver sucks.
Hehe jailbreak an Android OS. You mean “rooting”.
Unpopular opinion but I don’t see how it could have been different.
- There’s no way the west would give AI lead to China which has no desire or framework to ever accept this.
- Believe it or not but transformers are actually learning by current definitions and not regurgitating a direct copy. It’s transformative work - it’s even in the name.
- This is actually good as it prevents market moat for super rich corporations only which could afford the expensive training datasets.
This is an absolute win for everyone involved other than copyright hoarders and mega corporations.
I’d encourage everyone upset at this read over some of the EFF posts from actual IP lawyers on this topic like this one:
Nor is pro-monopoly regulation through copyright likely to provide any meaningful economic support for vulnerable artists and creators. Notwithstanding the highly publicized demands of musicians, authors, actors, and other creative professionals, imposing a licensing requirement is unlikely to protect the jobs or incomes of the underpaid working artists that media and entertainment behemoths have exploited for decades. Because of the imbalance in bargaining power between creators and publishing gatekeepers, trying to help creators by giving them new rights under copyright law is, as EFF Special Advisor Cory Doctorow has written, like trying to help a bullied kid by giving them more lunch money for the bully to take.
Entertainment companies’ historical practices bear out this concern. For example, in the late-2000’s to mid-2010’s, music publishers and recording companies struck multimillion-dollar direct licensing deals with music streaming companies and video sharing platforms. Google reportedly paid more than $400 million to a single music label, and Spotify gave the major record labels a combined 18 percent ownership interest in its now-$100 billion company. Yet music labels and publishers frequently fail to share these payments with artists, and artists rarely benefit from these equity arrangements. There is no reason to believe that the same companies will treat their artists more fairly once they control AI.
You’re getting douchevoted because on lemmy any AI-related comment that isn’t negative enough about AI is the Devil’s Work.
Some communities on this site speak about machine learning exactly how I see grungy Europeans from pre-18th century manuscripts speaking about witches, Satan, and evil… as if it is some pervasive, black-magic miasma.
As someone who is in the field of machine learning academically/professionally it’s honestly kind of shocking and has largely informed my opinion of society at large as an adult. No one puts any effort into learning if they see the letters “A” and “I” in all caps, next to each other. Immediately turn their brain off and start regurgitating points and responding reflexively, on Lemmy or otherwise. People talk about it so confidently while being so frustratingly unaware of their own ignorance on the matter, which, for lack of a better comparison… reminds me a lot of how historically and in fiction human beings have treated literal magic.
That’s my main issue with the entire swath of “pro vs anti AI” discourse… all these people treating something that, to me, is simple & daily reality as something entirely different than my own personal notion of it.
Large AI companies themselves want people to be ignorant of how AI works, though. They want uncritical acceptance of the tech as they force it everywhere, creating a radical counterreaction from people. The reaction might be uncritical too, I’d prefer to say it’s merely unjustified in specific cases or overly emotional, but it doesn’t come from nowhere or from sheer stupidity. We have been hearing about people treating their chatbots as sentient beings since like 2022 (remember that guy from Google?), bombarded with doomer (or, from AI companies’ point of view, very desirable) projections about AI replacing most jobs and wreaking havoc on world economy - how are ordinary people supposed to remain calm and balanced when hearing such stuff all the time?
This so very much. I’ve been saying it since 2020. People who think the big corporations (even the ones that use AI), aren’t playing both sides of this issue from the very beginning just aren’t paying attention.
It’s in their interest to have those positive to AI defend them by association by energizing those negative to AI to take on an “us vs them” mentality, and the other way around as well. It’s the classic divide and conquer.
Because if people refuse to talk to each other about it in good faith, and refuse to treat each other with respect, learn where they’re coming from or why they hold such opinions, you can keep them fighting amongst themselves, instead of banding together and demanding realistic, and fair policies in regards to AI. This is why bad faith arguments and positions must be shot down on both the side you agree with and the one you disagree with.
I see this exact mental non-process in so much social media. I think the endless firehose of memes and headlines is training people to glance at an item, spend minimal brain power processing it and forming a binary opinion, then up/downvote and scroll on. When that becomes people’s default mental process, you’ve got Idiocracy, and that’s what we’ve got. But I see no solution. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it spend more than two seconds before screaming at the water and calling it EVIL.
- Idgaf about China and what they do and you shouldn’t either, even if US paranoia about them is highly predictable.
- Depending on the outputs it’s not always that transformative.
- The moat would be good actually. The business model of LLMs isn’t good, but it’s not even viable without massive subsidies, not least of which is taking people’s shit without paying.
It’s a huge loss for smaller copyright holders (like the ones that filed this lawsuit) too. They can’t afford to fight when they get imitated beyond fair use. Copyright abuse can only be fixed by the very force that creates copyright in the first place: law. The market can’t fix that. This just decides winners between competing mega corporations, and even worse, up ends a system that some smaller players have been able to carve a niche in.
Want to fix copyright? Put real time limits on it. Bind it to a living human only. Make it non-transferable. There’s all sorts of ways to fix it, but this isn’t it.
ETA: Anthropic are some bitches. “Oh no the fines would ruin us, our business would go under and we’d never maka da money :*-(” Like yeah, no shit, no one cares. Strictly speaking the fines for ripping a single CD, or making a copy of a single DVD to give to a friend, are so astronomically high as to completely financially ruin the average USAian for life. That sword of Damocles for watching Shrek 2 for your personal enjoyment but in the wrong way has been hanging there for decades, and the only thing that keeps the cord that holds it up strong is the cost of persuing “low-level offenders”. If they wanted to they could crush you.
Anthropic walked right under the sword and assumed their money would protect them from small authors etc. And they were right.
Maybe something could be hacked together to fix copyright, but further complication there is just going to make accurate enforcement even harder. And we already have Google (in YouTube) already doing a shitty job of it and that’s… One of the largest companies on earth.
We should just kill copyright. Yes, it’ll disrupt Hollywood. Yes it’ll disrupt the music industry. Yes it’ll make it even harder to be successful or wealthy as an author. But this is going to happen one way or the other so long as AI can be trained on copyrighted works (and maybe even if not). We might as well get started on the transition early.
I’ll be honest with you - I genuinely sympathize with the cause but I don’t see how this could ever be solved with the methods you suggested. The world is not coming together to hold hands and koombayah out of this one. Trade deals are incredibly hard and even harder to enforce so free market is clearly the only path forward here.
calm down everyone. its only legal for parasitic mega corps, the normal working people will be harassed to suicide same as before.
its only a crime if the victims was rich or perpetrator was not rich.
This ruling stated that corporations are not allowed to pirate books to use them in training. Please read the headlines more carefully, and read the article.
Or, If a legal copy of the book is owned then it can be used for AI training.
The court is saying that no special AI book license is needed.
Right. Where’s the punishment for Meta who admitted to pirating books?
This judgment is implying that meta broke the law.
What a bad judge.
This is another indication of how Copyright laws are bad. The whole premise of copyright has been obsolete since the proliferation of the internet.
So authors must declare legally “this book must not be used for AI training unless a license is agreed on” as a clause in the book purchase.
Bangs
gabblegavel.Gets sack with dollar sign
“Oh good, my laundry is done”
*gavel
