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Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not

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  • Trains model to change one pixel per frame with malicious intent

    From dark gray to slightly darker gray.

  • Yeah I have a bash one liner AI model that ingests your media and spits out a 99.9999999% accurate replica through the power of changing the filename.

    cp

    Out performs the latest and greatest AI models

    I call this legally distinct, this is legal advice.

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    Unpopular opinion but I don't see how it could have been different.

    • There's no way the west would give AI lead to China which has no desire or framework to ever accept this.
    • Believe it or not but transformers are actually learning by current definitions and not regurgitating a direct copy. It's transformative work - it's even in the name.
    • This is actually good as it prevents market moat for super rich corporations only which could afford the expensive training datasets.

    This is an absolute win for everyone involved other than copyright hoarders and mega corporations.

  • calm down everyone.
    its only legal for parasitic mega corps, the normal working people will be harassed to suicide same as before.

    its only a crime if the victims was rich or perpetrator was not rich.

    Right. Where's the punishment for Meta who admitted to pirating books?

  • mv will save you some disk space.

    Unless you're moving across partitions it will change the filesystem metadata to move the path, but not actually do anything to the data. Sorry, you failed, it's jail for you.

  • I think this means we can make a torrent client with a built in function that uses 0.1% of 1 CPU core to train an ML model on anything you download. You can download anything legally with it then. 👌

    ...no?

    That's exactly what the ruling prohibits - it's fair use to train AI models on any copies of books that you legally acquired, but never when those books were illegally acquired, as was the case with the books that Anthropic used in their training here.

    This satirical torrent client would be violating the laws just as much as one without any slow training built in.

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    This 240TB JBOD full of books? Oh heavens forbid, we didn’t pirate it. It uhh… fell of a truck, yes, fell off a truck.

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    It's extremely frustrating to read this comment thread because it's obvious that so many of you didn't actually read the article, or even half-skim the article, or even attempted to even comprehend the title of the article for more than a second.

    For shame.

  • ...no?

    That's exactly what the ruling prohibits - it's fair use to train AI models on any copies of books that you legally acquired, but never when those books were illegally acquired, as was the case with the books that Anthropic used in their training here.

    This satirical torrent client would be violating the laws just as much as one without any slow training built in.

    But if one person buys a book, trains an "AI model" to recite it, then distributes that model we good?

  • But if one person buys a book, trains an "AI model" to recite it, then distributes that model we good?

    I don't think anyone would consider complete verbatim recitement of the material to be anything but a copyright violation, being the exact same thing that you produce.

    Fair use requires the derivative work to be transformative, and no transformation occurs when you verbatim recite something.

  • Unpopular opinion but I don't see how it could have been different.

    • There's no way the west would give AI lead to China which has no desire or framework to ever accept this.
    • Believe it or not but transformers are actually learning by current definitions and not regurgitating a direct copy. It's transformative work - it's even in the name.
    • This is actually good as it prevents market moat for super rich corporations only which could afford the expensive training datasets.

    This is an absolute win for everyone involved other than copyright hoarders and mega corporations.

    1. Idgaf about China and what they do and you shouldn't either, even if US paranoia about them is highly predictable.
    2. Depending on the outputs it's not always that transformative.
    3. The moat would be good actually. The business model of LLMs isn't good, but it's not even viable without massive subsidies, not least of which is taking people's shit without paying.

    It's a huge loss for smaller copyright holders (like the ones that filed this lawsuit) too. They can't afford to fight when they get imitated beyond fair use. Copyright abuse can only be fixed by the very force that creates copyright in the first place: law. The market can't fix that. This just decides winners between competing mega corporations, and even worse, up ends a system that some smaller players have been able to carve a niche in.

    Want to fix copyright? Put real time limits on it. Bind it to a living human only. Make it non-transferable. There's all sorts of ways to fix it, but this isn't it.

    ETA: Anthropic are some bitches. "Oh no the fines would ruin us, our business would go under and we'd never maka da money :*-(" Like yeah, no shit, no one cares. Strictly speaking the fines for ripping a single CD, or making a copy of a single DVD to give to a friend, are so astronomically high as to completely financially ruin the average USAian for life. That sword of Damocles for watching Shrek 2 for your personal enjoyment but in the wrong way has been hanging there for decades, and the only thing that keeps the cord that holds it up strong is the cost of persuing "low-level offenders". If they wanted to they could crush you.

    Anthropic walked right under the sword and assumed their money would protect them from small authors etc. And they were right.

  • I don't think anyone would consider complete verbatim recitement of the material to be anything but a copyright violation, being the exact same thing that you produce.

    Fair use requires the derivative work to be transformative, and no transformation occurs when you verbatim recite something.

    "Recite the complete works of Shakespeare but replace every thirteenth thou with this"

    1. Idgaf about China and what they do and you shouldn't either, even if US paranoia about them is highly predictable.
    2. Depending on the outputs it's not always that transformative.
    3. The moat would be good actually. The business model of LLMs isn't good, but it's not even viable without massive subsidies, not least of which is taking people's shit without paying.

    It's a huge loss for smaller copyright holders (like the ones that filed this lawsuit) too. They can't afford to fight when they get imitated beyond fair use. Copyright abuse can only be fixed by the very force that creates copyright in the first place: law. The market can't fix that. This just decides winners between competing mega corporations, and even worse, up ends a system that some smaller players have been able to carve a niche in.

    Want to fix copyright? Put real time limits on it. Bind it to a living human only. Make it non-transferable. There's all sorts of ways to fix it, but this isn't it.

    ETA: Anthropic are some bitches. "Oh no the fines would ruin us, our business would go under and we'd never maka da money :*-(" Like yeah, no shit, no one cares. Strictly speaking the fines for ripping a single CD, or making a copy of a single DVD to give to a friend, are so astronomically high as to completely financially ruin the average USAian for life. That sword of Damocles for watching Shrek 2 for your personal enjoyment but in the wrong way has been hanging there for decades, and the only thing that keeps the cord that holds it up strong is the cost of persuing "low-level offenders". If they wanted to they could crush you.

    Anthropic walked right under the sword and assumed their money would protect them from small authors etc. And they were right.

    I'll be honest with you - I genuinely sympathize with the cause but I don't see how this could ever be solved with the methods you suggested. The world is not coming together to hold hands and koombayah out of this one. Trade deals are incredibly hard and even harder to enforce so free market is clearly the only path forward here.

  • "Recite the complete works of Shakespeare but replace every thirteenth thou with this"

    I'd be impressed with any model that succeeds with that, but assuming one does, the complete works of Shakespeare are not copyright protected - they have fallen into the public domain since a very long time ago.

    For any works still under copyright protection, it would probably be a case of a trial to determine whether a certain work is transformative enough to be considered fair use. I'd imagine that this would not clear that bar.

    1. Idgaf about China and what they do and you shouldn't either, even if US paranoia about them is highly predictable.
    2. Depending on the outputs it's not always that transformative.
    3. The moat would be good actually. The business model of LLMs isn't good, but it's not even viable without massive subsidies, not least of which is taking people's shit without paying.

    It's a huge loss for smaller copyright holders (like the ones that filed this lawsuit) too. They can't afford to fight when they get imitated beyond fair use. Copyright abuse can only be fixed by the very force that creates copyright in the first place: law. The market can't fix that. This just decides winners between competing mega corporations, and even worse, up ends a system that some smaller players have been able to carve a niche in.

    Want to fix copyright? Put real time limits on it. Bind it to a living human only. Make it non-transferable. There's all sorts of ways to fix it, but this isn't it.

    ETA: Anthropic are some bitches. "Oh no the fines would ruin us, our business would go under and we'd never maka da money :*-(" Like yeah, no shit, no one cares. Strictly speaking the fines for ripping a single CD, or making a copy of a single DVD to give to a friend, are so astronomically high as to completely financially ruin the average USAian for life. That sword of Damocles for watching Shrek 2 for your personal enjoyment but in the wrong way has been hanging there for decades, and the only thing that keeps the cord that holds it up strong is the cost of persuing "low-level offenders". If they wanted to they could crush you.

    Anthropic walked right under the sword and assumed their money would protect them from small authors etc. And they were right.

    Maybe something could be hacked together to fix copyright, but further complication there is just going to make accurate enforcement even harder. And we already have Google (in YouTube) already doing a shitty job of it and that's.... One of the largest companies on earth.

    We should just kill copyright. Yes, it'll disrupt Hollywood. Yes it'll disrupt the music industry. Yes it'll make it even harder to be successful or wealthy as an author. But this is going to happen one way or the other so long as AI can be trained on copyrighted works (and maybe even if not). We might as well get started on the transition early.

  • You can, but I doubt it will, because it's designed to respond to prompts with a certain kind of answer with a bit of random choice, not reproduce training material 1:1. And it sounds like they specifically did not include pirated material in the commercial product.

    Yeah, you can certainly get it to reproduce some pieces (or fragments) of work exactly but definitely not everything. Even a frontier LLM's weights are far too small to fully memorize most of their training data.

  • Unless you're moving across partitions it will change the filesystem metadata to move the path, but not actually do anything to the data. Sorry, you failed, it's jail for you.

    stupid inodes preventing me from burning though my drive life

  • It's extremely frustrating to read this comment thread because it's obvious that so many of you didn't actually read the article, or even half-skim the article, or even attempted to even comprehend the title of the article for more than a second.

    For shame.

    was gonna say, this seems like the best outcome for this particular trial. there was potential for fair use to be compromised, and for piracy to be legal if you're a large corporation. instead, they upheld that you can do what you want with things you have paid for.

  • Unpopular opinion but I don't see how it could have been different.

    • There's no way the west would give AI lead to China which has no desire or framework to ever accept this.
    • Believe it or not but transformers are actually learning by current definitions and not regurgitating a direct copy. It's transformative work - it's even in the name.
    • This is actually good as it prevents market moat for super rich corporations only which could afford the expensive training datasets.

    This is an absolute win for everyone involved other than copyright hoarders and mega corporations.

    You're getting douchevoted because on lemmy any AI-related comment that isn't negative enough about AI is the Devil's Work.

  • It's extremely frustrating to read this comment thread because it's obvious that so many of you didn't actually read the article, or even half-skim the article, or even attempted to even comprehend the title of the article for more than a second.

    For shame.

    Nobody ever reads articles, everybody likes to get angry at headlines, which they wrongly interpret the way it best tickles their rage.

    Regarding the ruling, I agree with you that it's a good thing, in my opinion it makes a lot of sense to allow fair use in this case

  • The effects of AI on firms and workers

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    brobot9000@lemmy.worldB
    Your response is: want to be more productive? Replace the CEO and pointless middle management with Ai! Image how much money the shareholders would save!
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    eyekaytee@aussie.zoneE
    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
  • Fatphobia Is Fueled by AI-Created Images, Study Finds

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    K
    I pretty much agree. The only thing I would add is that it's not our place to tell others to lose weight or to point out their weight; people already know they are overweight and that it's unhealthy. We shouldn't be policing other people's bodies. It's also possible to be overweight and have body positivity; being overweight doesn't equate to being unattractive.
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    M
    Ha, thanks for searching!
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  • Napster/BitTorrent for machine learning?

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    G
    What would a use case look like? I assume that the latency will make it impractical to train something that's LLM-sized. But even for something small, wouldn't a data center be more efficient?
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    N
    Part of the reason for my use of "might".