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 ?

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.”

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:

So I can't use any of these works because it's plagiarism but AI can?

"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

LLMs don’t learn, and they’re not people. Applying the same logic doesn’t make much sense.

AI can “learn” from and “read” a book in the same way a person can and does

This statement is the basis for your argument and it is simply not correct.

Training LLMs and similar AI models is much closer to a sophisticated lossy compression algorithm than it is to human learning. The processes are not at all similar given our current understanding of human learning.

AI doesn’t reproduce a work that it “learns” from, so why would it be illegal?

The current Disney lawsuit against Midjourney is illustrative - literally, it includes numerous side-by-side comparisons - of how AI models are capable of recreating iconic copyrighted work that is indistinguishable from the original.

If a machine can replicate your writing style because it could identify certain patterns, words, sentence structure, etc then as long as it’s not pretending to create things attributed to you, there’s no issue.

An AI doesn't create works on its own. A human instructs AI to do so. Attribution is also irrelevant. 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).

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.

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?

As long as they don't use exactly the same words in the book, yeah, as I understand it.

True. And I will be happy if someone sue them and the judge say the same thing.

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)

Well, it would be interesting if this case would be used as precedence in a case invonving a single student that do the same thing. But you are right

You can “use” them to learn from, just like “AI” can.

What exactly do you think AI does when it “learns” from a book, for example? Do you think it will just spit out the entire book if you ask it to?

Your very first statement calling my basis for my argument incorrect is incorrect lol.

LLMs “learn” things from the content they consume. They don’t just take the content in wholesale and keep it there to regurgitate on command.

On your last part, unless someone uses AI to recreate the tone etc of a best selling author *and then markets their book/writing as being from said best selling author, and doesn’t use trademarked characters etc, there’s no issue. You can’t copyright a style of writing.

But I thought they admitted to torrenting terabytes of ebooks?

It cant speak or use any words without it being someone elses words it learned from? Unless its giving sources everything is always from something it learned because it cannot speak or use words without that source in the first place?

This was my understanding also, and why I think the judge is bad at their job.

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.

Not at all true. AI doesn’t just reproduce content it was trained on on demand.

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.