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.

As a civil matter, the publishing houses are more likely to get the full money if anthropic stays in business (and does well). So it might be bad, but I'm really skeptical about bankruptcy (and I'm not hearing anyone seriously floating it?)

Anakin: “Judge backs AI firm over use of copyrighted books”
Padme: “But they’ll be held accountable when they reproduce parts of those works or compete with the work they were trained on, right?”
Anakin: “…”
Padme: “Right?”

I agree that we need open-source and emancipate ourselves. The main issue I see is: The entire approach doesn't work. I'd like to give the internet as an example. It's meant to be very open, connect everyone and enable them to share information freely. It is set up to be a level playing field... Now look what that leads to. Trillion dollar mega-corporations, privacy issues everywhere and big data silos. That's what the approach promotes. I agree with the goal. But in my opinion the approach will turn out to lead to less open source and more control by rich companies. And that's not what we want.

Plus nobody even opens the walled gardes. Last time I looked, Reddit wanted money for data. Other big platforms aren't open either. And there's kind of a small war going on with the scrapers and crawlers and anti-measures. So it's not as if it's open as of now.

Pirate everything!

I have a freely accessible document that I have a cc license for that states it is not to be used for commercial use. This is commercial use. Your policy would allow for that document to be used though since it is accessible. This kind of policy discourages me from easily sharing my works as others profit from my efforts and my works are more likely to be attributed to a corporate beast I want nothing to do with then to me.

I'm all for copyright reform and simpler copyright law, but these companies need to be held to standard copyright rules and not just made up modifications.
I'm convinced a perfectly decent LLM could be built without violating copyrights.

I'd also be ok sharing works with a not for profit open source LLM and I think others might as well.

A lot of our laws are indeed obsolete. I think the best solution would be to force copy left licenses on anything using public created data.

But I'll take the wild west we have now with no walls then any kind of copyright dystopia. Reddit did successfully sell it's data to Google for 60 million. Right now, you can legally scrape anything you want off reddit, it is an open garden in every sense of the word (even if they dont like it). It's a lot more legal then using pirated books, but Google still bet 60 million that copyright laws would swing broadly in their favor.

I think it's very foolhardy to even hint at a pro copyright stance right now. There is a very real chance of AI getting monopolized and this is how they will do it.

I agree a copyright dystopia wouldn't be any good. Just mind that wild west or law of the jungle is the "right of the strongest". You're advantaging big companies and disadvantaging smaller players or people with ethics or who are more open/transparent.

And I don't think legality with web scraping is the biggest issue. Sure I maybe could do it if it were possible. But I'm occasionally doing some weird stuff and most services have countermeasures in place. In reality I just can't scrape Reddit. Lot's of bots and crawlers just don't work any more. I'm getting rate limited left and right from all big platforms. Lots of things require an account these days, and services are quick banning me for "suspicious activity". It's barely possible to download Youtube videos these days. So, no. I can't. While Google can just pay for it and have the data.

Also Reddit isn't really the benevolent underdog here. They're a big company as well. And they're not selling their data... They're selling their user's data. They're mainly monetizing other people's creations.

as it is already

Copies of copyrighted works cannot be regarded as "stolen property" for the purposes of a prosecution under the National Stolen Property Act of 1934.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v.United_States(1985)

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

I was questioning whether or not you would see that as a benefit. Clearly you don't.

Are you also against libraries letting people borrow books since those are also lost sales for the authors, or are you just a luddite?

libraries letting people borrow books

This is so far from analogous that it's almost a nonsequitur.

are you just a luddite?

No, and you don't even believe such nonsense. You're grasping, ineffectively.