I know but you see what they're doing with ai, a small server used for piracy and sharing is punished, in some cases, worse than a theft. AI business are making bank (or are they? There is still no clear path to profitability) on troves pirated content. This (for small guys like us) is not going to change the situation. For instance, if we used the same dataset to train some AI in a garage and with no business or investor behind things would be different. We're at a stage where AI is quite literally to important to fail for somebody out there. I'd argue that AI is, in fact going to be shielded for this reason regardless of previous legal outcomes.

Agreed. And even if it were, it's always like this. Anthropic is a big company. They likely have millions available for good lawyers. While the small guy hasn't. So they're more able to just do stuff and do away with some legal restrictions. Or just pay a fine and that's pocket change for them. So big companies always have more options than the small guy.

I'm on page 12 and I already saw a false equivalence between human learning and AI training.

Is it this?

First, Authors argue that using works to train Claude’s underlying LLMs was like using works to train any person to read and write, so Authors should be able to exclude Anthropic from this use (Opp. 16).

That's the judge addressing an argument that the Authors made. If anyone made a "false equivalence" here it's the plaintiffs, the judge is simply saying "okay, let's assume their claim is true." As is the usual case for a preliminary judgment like this.

The lawsuit would not have benefitted their fellow authors but their publishing houses and the big ai companies.

Yes precisely.

I don't see a situation where the actual content creators get paid.

We either get open source ai, or we get closed ai where the big ai companies and copyright companies make bank.

I think people are having huge knee jerk reactions and end up supporting companies like Disney, Universal Music and Google.

Because of the vast amount of data needed, there will be no competitive viable open source solution if half the data is kept in a walled garden.

This is about open weights vs closed weights.

The companies like record studio who already own all the copyrights aren't going to pay creators for something they already owned.

All the data has already been signed away. People are really optimistic about an industry that has consistently fucked everyone they interact with for money.

I hate AI with a fire that keeps we warm at night. That is all.

Page 6 the judge writes the LLM “memorized” the content and could “recite” it.

Neither is true in training or use of LLMs

It means what it means, "freely" pulls its own weight. I didn't say "readily" accessible. Torrents could be viewed as "readily" accessible but it couldn't be viewed as "freely" accessible because at the very least you bear the guilt of theft. Library books are "freely" accessible, and if somehow the training involved checking out books and returning them digitally, it should be fine. If it is free to read into neurons it is free to read into neural systems. If payment for reading is expected then it isn't free.

I also read through the judgement, and I think it's better for anthropic than you describe. He distinguishes three issues:

A) Use any written material they get their hands on to train the model (and the resulting model doesn't just reproduce the works).

B) Buy a single copy of a print book, scan it, and retain the digital copy for a company library (for all sorts of future purposes).

C) Pirate a book and retain that copy for a company library (for all sorts of future purposes).

A and B were fair use by summary judgement. Meaning this judge thinks it's clear cut in anthropics favor. C will go to trial.

Depends on the content and the method. There are tons of ways to encrypt data, and under relevant law they may still count as copies. There are certainly weaker NN models where we can extract a lot of the training data, even if it's not easy, from the model parameters (even if we can't find a prompt that gets the model to regurgitate).

Plantifs made that argument and the judge shoots it down pretty hard. That competition isn't what copyright protects from. He makes an analogy with teachers teaching children to write fiction: they are using existing fantasy to create MANY more competitors on the fiction market. Could an author use copyright to challenge that use?

Would love to hear your thoughts on the ruling itself (it's linked by reuters).

Civil cases of copyright infringment are not theft, no matter what the MPIA have trained you to believe.

C could still bankrupt the company depending on how trial goes. They pirated a lot of books.

used to train both commercial

commercial training is, in this case, stealing people's work for commercial gain

and open source language models

so, uh, let us train open-source models on open-source text. There's so much of it that there's no need to steal.

?

I'm not sure why you added a question mark at the end of your statement.

But they are copyright infringement, which costs more than theft.

They haven't dewalled the garden yet. The copyright infringement part of the case will continue.

It would harm the A.I. industry if Anthropic loses the next part of the trial on whether they pirated books — from what I’ve read, Anthropic and Meta are suspected of getting a lot off torrent sites and the like.

It’s possible they all did some piracy in their mad dash to find training material but Amazon and Google have bookstores and Google even has a book text search engine, Google Scholar, and probably everything else already in its data centers. So, not sure why they’d have to resort to piracy.