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AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified

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  • IA doesn't make any money off the content. Not that LLM companies do, but that's what they'd want.

    Profit (or even revenue) is not required for it to be considered an infringement, in the current legal framework.

  • Hilarious.

    "ooh, so sorry, but your LLM was trained on proprietary documents stolen from several major law firms, and they are all suing you now"

  • do you know how much content disney has? go scrolling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_the_Walt_Disney_Company
    e: that's the tip of the iceberg, because if they band together with others from the MPAA & RIAA, they can suffocate the entire Movie, Book and Music world with it.

    good, then I can just ignore Disney instead of EVERYTHING else.

  • do you know how much content disney has? go scrolling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_the_Walt_Disney_Company
    e: that's the tip of the iceberg, because if they band together with others from the MPAA & RIAA, they can suffocate the entire Movie, Book and Music world with it.

    They have 0.2T in assets the world has around 660T in assets which as I said before is a tiny fraction. Obviously both hold a lot of assets that aren’t worthwhile to AI training such as theme parks but when you consider a single movie that might be worth millions or billions has the same benefit for AI training as another movie worth thousands. the amount of assets Disney owned is not nearly as relevant as you are making it out to be

  • 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.

    I remember that X-Files episode!

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    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.

  • I remember that X-Files episode!

    Damn, what did you watch those masterpieces on? What kind of smoke were you sitting on then? Although I don't know what secret materials you're talking about. Maybe I watched something wrong... And what an episode?

  • 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.

    Ahhh, it makes more sense now. Thank you!

  • Do you think that would rescue the IA from the type of people who made the IA already pull 300k books?

    No. But going after LLMs wont make the situation for IA any worse, not directly anyway.

  • 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.

  • 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 "YES!!!" 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.

  • No. But going after LLMs wont make the situation for IA any worse, not directly anyway.

    if the courts decide that scraping is illegal, IA can close up shop.

  • 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.

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    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 then 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.

  • The law absolutely does not apply to everybody, and you are well aware of that.

    Shouldn't it?

  • 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.

    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.”

    I think you're failing to differentiate between a work, which is protected by copyright, vs a tool which is not affected by copyright.

    Say I use Photoshop and Adobe Premiere to create a script and movie which are almost identical to existing Marvel movies. I don't think anyone would argue that is not a derivative work, or that falls under "fair use".

    The important part here is that the subject of this sentence is 'a work which has been created which is substantially similar to an existing copyrighted work'. This situation is already covered by copyright law. If a person draws a Mickey Mouse and tries to sell it then Disney will sue them, not their pencil.

    Specific works are copyrighted and copyright laws create a civil liability for a person who creates works that are substantially similar to a copyrighted work.

    Copyright doesn't allow publishers to go after Adobe because a person used Photoshop to make a fake Disney poster. This is why things like Bittorrent can legally exist despite being used primarily for copyright violation. Copyright laws apply to people and the works that they create.

    A generated Marvel movie is substantially similar to a copyrighted Marvel movie and so copyright law protects it. A diffusion model is not substantially similar to any copyrighted work by Disney and so copyright laws don't apply here.

  • The law absolutely does not apply to everybody, and you are well aware of that.

    The law applies to everybody, but the law-makers change the laws to benefit certain people. And then trump pardons the rest lol.

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    Would really love to see IP law get taken down a notch out of this.

  • 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.”

    I think you're failing to differentiate between a work, which is protected by copyright, vs a tool which is not affected by copyright.

    Say I use Photoshop and Adobe Premiere to create a script and movie which are almost identical to existing Marvel movies. I don't think anyone would argue that is not a derivative work, or that falls under "fair use".

    The important part here is that the subject of this sentence is 'a work which has been created which is substantially similar to an existing copyrighted work'. This situation is already covered by copyright law. If a person draws a Mickey Mouse and tries to sell it then Disney will sue them, not their pencil.

    Specific works are copyrighted and copyright laws create a civil liability for a person who creates works that are substantially similar to a copyrighted work.

    Copyright doesn't allow publishers to go after Adobe because a person used Photoshop to make a fake Disney poster. This is why things like Bittorrent can legally exist despite being used primarily for copyright violation. Copyright laws apply to people and the works that they create.

    A generated Marvel movie is substantially similar to a copyrighted Marvel movie and so copyright law protects it. A diffusion model is not substantially similar to any copyrighted work by Disney and so copyright laws don't apply here.

    @FauxLiving @Jason2357

    I take a bold stand on the whole topic:

    I think AI is a big Scam ( pattern matching has nothing to do with !!! intelligence !!! ).

    And this Scam might end as Dot-Com bubble in the late 90s ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble ) including the huge economic impact cause to many people have invested in an "idea" not in an proofen technology.

    And as the Dot-Com bubble once the AI bubble has been cleaned up Machine Learning and Vector Databases will stay forever ( maybe some other part of the tech ).

    Both don't need copyright changes cause they will never try to be one solution for everything. Like a small model to transform text to speech ... like a small model to translate ... like a full text search using a vector db to index all local documents ...

    Like a small tool to sumarize text.

  • 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 then 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.

    In theory sure, but in practice who has the resources to do large scale model training on huge datasets other than large corporations?

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    Well that explains a lot about Lemmy's strong dislike for AI with a burning passion.
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    Personally when I use it, unless it's something trivial, I always end up doing exactly that.
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    Use a different print head, sections of print bed, or just entirely new print beds and you defeat this 'tracing'
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    All the tasks could have been easily solved with some basic APIs and algorithms.
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    They will say something like solar went from 600gw to 1000 thats a 66% increase this year and coal only increased 40% except coal is 3600gw to 6400. Hrmmmm, maybe these numbers are outdated? Based on this coal and gas are down: In Q1 2025, solar generation rose 48% compared to the same period in 2024. Solar power reached 254 TWh, making up 10% of total electricity. This was the largest increase among all clean energy sources. Coal-fired electricity dropped by 4%, falling to 1,421 TWh. Gas-fired power also went down by 4%, reaching 67 TWh https://carboncredits.com/china-sets-clean-energy-record-in-early-2025-with-951-tw/ are no where close to what is required to meet their climate goals Which ones in particular are you talking about? Trump signs executive order directing US withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement — again https://apnews.com/article/trump-paris-agreement-climate-change-788907bb89fe307a964be757313cdfb0 China vowed on Tuesday to continue participating in two cornerstone multinational arrangements -- the World Health Organization and Paris climate accord -- after newly sworn-in US President Donald Trump ordered withdrawals from them. https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250121-china-says-committed-to-who-paris-climate-deal-after-us-pulls-out What's that saying? You hate it when the person you hate is doing good? I can't remember what it is I can't fault them for what they're doing at the moment, even if they are run by an evil dictatorship and do pollute the most I’m not sure how european defense spending is relevant It suggests there is money available in the bank to fund solar/wind/battery, but instead they are preparing for? something? what? who knows. France can make a fighter jet at home but not solar panels apparently. Prehaps they would be made in a country with environmental and labour laws if governments legislated properly to prevent companies outsourcing manufacturing. However this doesnt absolve china. China isnt being forced at Gunpoint to produce these goods with low labour regulation and low environmental regulation. You're right, it doesn't absolve china, and I avoid purchasing things from them wherever possible, my solar panels and EV were made in South Korea, my home battery was made in Germany, there are only a few things in my house made in China, most of them I got second hand but unfortunately there is no escaping the giant of manufacturing. With that said it's one thing for me to sit here and tut tut at China, but I realise I am not most people, the most clearest example is the extreme anti-ai, anti-billionaire bias on this platform, in real life most people don't give a fuck, they love Amazon/Microsoft/Google/Apple etc, they can't go a day without them. So I consider myself a realist, if you want people to buy your stuff then you will need to make the conditions possible for them to WANT to buy your stuff, not out of some moral lecture and Europe isn't doing that, if we look at energy prices: Can someone actually point out to me where this comes from? ... At the end of the day energy is a small % of EU household spending I was looking at corporate/business energy use: Major European companies are already moving to cut costs and retain their competitive edge. For example, Thyssenkrupp, Germany’s largest steelmaker, said on Monday it would slash 11,000 jobs in its steel division by 2030, in a major corporate reshuffle. https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/High-Energy-Costs-Continue-to-Plague-European-Industry.html Prices have since fallen but are still high compared to other countries. A poll by Germany's DIHK Chambers of Industry and Commerce of around 3,300 companies showed that 37% were considering cutting production or moving abroad, up from 31% last year and 16% in 2022. For energy-intensive industrial firms some 45% of companies were mulling slashing output or relocation, the survey showed. "The trust of the German economy in energy policy is severely damaged," Achim Dercks, DIHK deputy chief executive said, adding that the government had not succeeded in providing companies with a perspective for reliable and affordable energy supply. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/more-german-companies-mull-relocation-due-high-energy-prices-survey-2024-08-01/ I've seen nothing to suggest energy prices in the EU are SO cheap that it's worth moving manufacturing TO Europe, and this is what annoys me the most. I've pointed this out before but they have an excellent report on the issues: https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/97e481fd-2dc3-412d-be4c-f152a8232961_en?filename=The+future+of+European+competitiveness+_+A+competitiveness+strategy+for+Europe.pdf Then they put out this Competitive Compass: https://commission.europa.eu/topics/eu-competitiveness/competitiveness-compass_en But tbh every week in the EU it seems like they are chasing after some other goal. This would be great, it would have been greater 10 years ago. Agreed
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    Ah yeah, that doesn't look like my cup of tea.