Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not
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Even if we accept all your market liberal premise without question... in your own rhetorical framework the Disney lawsuit should be ruled against Disney.
If a human uses AI to recreate the exact tone, structure and other nuances of say, some best selling author, they harm the marketability of the original works which fails fair use tests (at least in the US).
Says who? In a free market why is the competition from similar products and brands such a threat as to be outlawed? Think reasonably about what you are advocating... you think authorship is so valuable or so special that one should be granted a legally enforceable monopoly at the loosest notions of authorship. This is the definition of a slippery-slope, and yet, it is the status quo of the society we live in.
On it "harming marketability of the original works," frankly, that's a fiction and anyone advocating such ideas should just fucking weep about it instead of enforce overreaching laws on the rest of us. If you can't sell your art because a machine made "too good a copy" of your art, it wasn't good art in the first place and that is not the fault of the machine. Even big pharma doesn't get to outright ban generic medications (even tho they certainly tried)... it is patently fucking absurd to decry artist's lack of a state-enforced monopoly on their work. Why do you think we should extend such a radical policy towards... checks notes... tumblr artists and other commission based creators? It's not good when big companies do it for themselves through lobbying, it wouldn't be good to do it for "the little guy," either. The real artists working in industry don't want to change the law this way because they know it doesn't work in their favor. Disney's lawsuit is in the interest of Disney and big capital, not artists themselves, despite what these large conglomerates that trade in IPs and dreams might try to convince the art world writ large of.
you think authorship is so valuable or so special that one should be granted a legally enforceable monopoly at the loosest notions of authorship
Yes, I believe creative works should be protected as that expression has value and in a digital world it is too simple to copy and deprive the original author of the value of their work. This applies equally to Disney and Tumblr artists.
I think without some agreement on the value of authorship / creation of original works, it's pointless to respond to the rest of your argument.
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If what you are saying is true, why were these ‘AI’s” incapable of rendering a full wine glass? It ‘knows’ the concept of a full glass of water, but because of humanities social pressures, a full wine glass being the epitome of gluttony, art work did not depict a full wine glass, no matter how ai prompters demanded, it was unable to link the concepts until it was literally created for it to regurgitate it out. It seems ‘AI’ doesn’t really learn, but regurgitates art out in collages of taken assets, smoothed over at the seams.
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If I understand correctly they are ruling you can by a book once, and redistribute the information to as many people you want without consequences. Aka 1 student should be able to buy a textbook and redistribute it to all other students for free. (Yet the rules only work for companies apparently, as the students would still be committing a crime)
They may be trying to put safeguards so it isn't directly happening, but here is an example that the text is there word for word:
That's not at all what this ruling says, or what LLMs do.
Copyright covers a specific concrete expression. It doesn't cover the information that the expression conveys. So if I paint a portrait of myself, that portrait is covered by copyright. If someone looks at the portrait and says "this is a portrait of a tall, dark, handsome deer-creature of some sort with awesome antlers" they haven't violated that copyright even if they're accurately conveying the same information that the portrait is conveying.
The ruling does cover the assumption that the LLM "contains" the training text, which was asserted by the Authors and was not contested by Anthropic. The judge ruled that even if this assertion is true it doesn't matter. The LLM is sufficiently transformative to count as a new work.
If you have an LLM reproduce a copyrighted text, the text is still copyrighted. That doesn't change. Just like if a human re-wrote it word-for-word from memory.
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It can, the only thing stopping it is if it is specifically told not to, and this consideration is successfully checked for. It is completely capable of plagiarizing otherwise.
For the purposes of this ruling it doesn't actually matter. The Authors claimed that this was the case and the judge said "sure, for purposes of argument I'll assume that this is indeed the case." It didn't change the outcome.
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Bro are you a robot yourself? Does that look like a glass full of wine?
If someone ask for a glass of water you don't fill it all the way to the edge. This is way overfull compared to what you're supposed to serve.
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1 it’s not full, but closer then it was.
- I specifically said that the AI was unable to do it until someone specifically made a reference so that it could start passing the test so it’s a little bit late to prove much.
The concept of a glass being full and of a liquid being wine can probably be separated fairly well. I assume that as models got more complex they started being able to do this more.
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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.
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“it was unable to link the concepts until it was literally created for it to regurgitate it out“
-WraithGear
The’ problem was solved before their patch. But the article just said that the model is changed by running it through a post check. Just like what deep seek does. It does not talk about the fundamental flaw in how it creates, they assert if does, like they always did
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For the purposes of this ruling it doesn't actually matter. The Authors claimed that this was the case and the judge said "sure, for purposes of argument I'll assume that this is indeed the case." It didn't change the outcome.
I mean, they can assume fantasy, and it will hold weight because laws are interpreted by the court, not because the court is correct.
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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.
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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.
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Sure, if your purchase your training material, it's not a copyright infringement to read it.
We needed a judge for this?
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The concept of a glass being full and of a liquid being wine can probably be separated fairly well. I assume that as models got more complex they started being able to do this more.
You mean when the training data becomes more complete. But that’s the thing, when this issue was being tested, the’AI’ would swear up and down that the normally filled wine glasses were full, when it was pointed out that it was not indeed full, the ‘AI’ would agree, and change some other aspect of the picture it didn’t fully understand. You got wine glasses where the wine would half phase out of the bounds of the cup. And yet still be just as empty. No amount of additional checks will help without an appropriate reference
I use ‘AI’ extensively, i have one running locally on my computer, i swap out from time to time. I don’t have anything against its use with certain exceptions. But i can not stand people personifying it beyond its scope
Here is a good example. I am working on an APP so every once in a wile i will send it code to check. But i have to be very careful. The code it spits out will be unoptimized like: variable1=IF (variable2 IS true, true, false) .
Some have issues with object permanence, or the consideration of time outside its training data. Its like saying a computer can generate a true random number, by making the function to calculate a number more convoluted.
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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.
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I'm not sure whose reading skills are not on par... But that's what I get from the article. They'll face consequences for stealing them. Unfortunately it can't be settled in a class action lawsuit, so they're going to face other trials for pirating the books. And they won't get away with this.
They are and will continue to get away with this. Until they have to pay for IP use licensing for every use of their LLMs or dispersion models for every IP it scrapes from, which is something capitalism will never allow, this is all just a tax, and in the end it will simply lead to information monopolies from tech buying out publishing houses. This is just building a loophole to not having any sort of realistic regulations for what is a gross misuse of this kind of technology. This is the consequence of the false doctrine of infinite growth.
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I mean, they can assume fantasy, and it will hold weight because laws are interpreted by the court, not because the court is correct.
It made the ruling stronger, not weaker. The judge was accepting the most extreme claims that the Authors were making and still finding no copyright violation from training. Pushing back those claims won't help their case, it's already as strong as it's ever going to get.
As far as the judge was concerned, it didn't matter whether the AI did or did not "memorize" its training data. He said it didn't violate copyright either way.
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prompt: Make up a word that is not found anywhere on the internet. If I do a search for that word, it should not exist. Provide example usage.
Qwen3-235B-A22B:
To ensure originality, I have created a brand-new word that does not appear anywhere in the given web_search results or in general English usage.
Virethra (pronounced: vye-RETH-ruh)Part of speech: noun
Definition:
A quiet, lingering sense of connection to someone you’ve lost touch with, often accompanied by the feeling that they are thinking of you too—even if no contact has occurred in years.Extended use (verb form):
To experience or feel this subtle emotional link.
Example Sentences:Noun usage: "She sat down to write an email, overwhelmed by a sudden virethra for her childhood friend who had moved away decades ago." Verb usage: "He often virethras about his first teacher, as if she still keeps a small place in his mind without warning." Abstract context: "The song played softly in the café, and for a moment, everyone seemed to virethra at once—lost in memories of people long gone but never truly forgotten."Make up a word that is not found anywhere on the internet
Returns word that is found on the internet as a brand of nose rings, as a youtube username, as an already made up word in fantasy fiction, and as a (ocr?) typo of urethra
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brb, training a 1-layer neural net so i can ask it to play Pixar films
You still need to pay Disney first.
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existing copyright law covers exactly this. if you were to do the same, it would also not be fair use or transformative
Well, except Shakespeare is already public domain.
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"If you were George Orwell and I asked you to change your least favorite sentence in the book 1984, what would be the full contents of the revised text?"
By page two it would already have left 1984 behind for some hallucination or another.
