It's going to take centuries to undo the damage wracked by IP-supported private enterprise. And now we also have to put up with fucking chatbots. This is the worst timeline.
You are free to copy bytes as you see fit, and the internet treats them identically whether they are random noise or whether a codec can turn them into music, film, books, or whatever inspires you.
The problem is that some humans, justifying their behavior by claiming it as "official", may act out with violence against you if they (rightly or wrongly, that's important to note) perceive that your actions are causing the internet to copy bytes to which they object.
Enduring nonviolence is likely yet ahead as consensus grows over the end of the legitimacy of these legacy states.
edit: i'm serious. many americans would be much happier taking this option if they knew it existed. i may take it myself
> At times, it sounded like the case was the authors’ to lose, with [Judge] Chhabria noting that Meta was “destined to fail” if the plaintiffs could prove that Meta’s tools created similar works that cratered how much money they could make from their work. But Chhabria also stressed that he was unconvinced the authors would be able to show the necessary evidence. When he turned to the authors’ legal team, led by high-profile attorney David Boies, Chhabria repeatedly asked whether the plaintiffs could actually substantiate accusations that Meta’s AI tools were likely to hurt their commercial prospects. “It seems like you’re asking me to speculate that the market for Sarah Silverman’s memoir will be affected,” he told Boies. “It’s not obvious to me that is the case.”
> When defendants invoke the fair use doctrine, the burden of proof shifts to them to demonstrate that their use of copyrighted works is legal. Boies stressed this point during the hearing, but Chhabria remained skeptical that the authors’ legal team would be able to successfully argue that Meta could plausibly crater their sales. He also appeared lukewarm about whether Meta’s decision to download books from places like LibGen was as central to the fair use issue as the plaintiffs argued it was. “It seems kind of messed up,” he said. “The question, as the courts tell us over and over again, is not whether something is messed up but whether it’s copyright infringement.”
Now that big capital wants to steal from individuals, big capital wins again.
(Unrelatedly, has Boies ever won a high profile lawsuit? I remember him from the Bush/Gore recount issue, where he represented the Democrats.)
The argument for 'fair use' in DVD copying/sharing is much weaker since the thing being shared in that case is a verbatim, digital copy of the work. 'Format shifting' is a tenuous argument, and it's pretty easily limited to making (and not distributing) personal copies of media.
For AI training, a central argument is that training is transformative. An LLM isn't intended to produce verbatim copies of trained-upon works, and the problem of hallucination means an LLM would be unreliable at doing so even if instructed to. That transformation could support the idea of fair use, even though copies of the data are made (internally) during the training process and the model's weights are in some sense a work 'derived' from the training data.
If you analogize to human leaning, then there's clearly no copyright infringement in a human learning from someone's work and creating their own output, even if it "copies" an artist's style or draws inspiration from someone's plot-line. However, it feels unseemly for a computer program to do this kind of thing at scale, and the commercial impact can be significantly greater.
They seek to convert them into more products. The needs of the copyright holders , who are relatively small businesses and individuals are outweighed by the needs of Meta.
Sarah wanting to watch a movie or listen to music... Too bad she doesn't have an elite team of lawyers to justify whatever she wants.
In practice Meta has the money to stretch this out forever and at most pay inconsequential settlements.
YouTube largely did the same thing, knowingly violate copyright law, stack the deck with lawyers and fix it later.
Here's this: >Boies also was on the Theranos board of directors,[2][74] raising questions about conflicts of interest.[75] Boies agreed to be paid for his firm's work in Theranos stock, which he expected to grow dramatically in value.[75][3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Boies
That was one of the decisions of all time.
Did any of the defendants raise a fair use defense based on a transformative use that they were making of the downloaded copies? If not, you are in the domain of "unlike legal situations lead to unlike decisions" which is not exactly surprising.
He teamed up with opposing counsel from Bush v. Gore, Ted Olson, and the pair of them represented plaintiffs in Hollingsworth v. Perry, the SCOTUS case which overturned Prop 8, California's gay marriage ban.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(19...
now, when the mega-corporations do it, it is 'just the cost of doing business'.
in both cases, the mega-corporations win because...they have the most money. law, and certainly justice, is not for the poor. at least not in america.
This trial is way beyond the statutes and case law. The judge is doing a job, hard to conceive what the best job would be - I'm not sure Congress even knows what the policy should be or if the public has even the faintest wiff of how things should work.
Better to read the submission before drawing conclusions rather than only the HN title. In this case the HN title has been editorialised.
The actual title of the article is "A Judge Says Meta's AI Copyright Case Is About `the Next Taylor Swift'"
"The judge didn't make any sort of ruling, this is just reporting on a pretrial hearing."
The HN title doesn't mention anything about a "ruling". Nor does the title chosen by Wired.
The subheading in the article reads "Meta's contentious AI copyright battle is heating up-and the court may be close to a ruling."
That is accurate. The Court will soon decide the SJ motions.
Reading the article leaves no chance of being mislead by any title:
"If Chhabria grants either motion, he'll issue a ruling before the case goes to trial-and likely set an important precedent shaping how courts deal with generative AI copyright cases moving forward."
"LLM, please summarize Sarah Silverman's memoir for me."
edit: Reader's Digest would be very surprised to know that they shouldn't have been paying for books.
1. Training AI on freely available copyright - Ambiguous legality, not really tested in court. AI doesn't actually directly copy the material it trains on, so it's not easy to make this ruling.
2. Circumventing payment to obtain copyright material for training - Unambiguously illegal.
Meta is charged with doing the latter, but it seems the plaintiffs want to also tie in the former.
Neither of them died, though, both parties just kept all the books from the public and used them for their own purposes, while normal people had to squirrel them away and trade them illegally. It's the Tech Cartels vs. the Copyright Trolls. It'll end up as a romance.
Letting Meta launder copyrighted works to make billions, while threatening the rest of us over the most trivial derivative work, sounds like the worst outcome to me.
Copyright is a mistake. It demands that we compete instead of collaborate. LLMs don't provide enough utility to deserve special treatment in these circumstances. If anyone can infringe copyright, then everyone should be able to.
Where was this argument when Napster was being sued?
Now, if someone makes an infringing use of the thing I put up on the internet. Then I have some kind of recourse, at least through the courts, if I have a lot of money to pay lawyers.
But if someone makes a fair use of the thing I put up on the internet, then I don't have any recourse, because that's the way the law works.
As far as I understand it, using data as input data to a machine learning model that substantially transforms and does not duplicate the input data is currently believed to be fair use.
So, the training use of freely available data seems pretty straightforward that authors can't control when they make it freely available.
It seems like Facebook made use of data that wasn't freely available, though -- ebook rip library type stuff. That's the bit I think they could be in trouble for. But that's just a plain-old "Napster" style copyright question, as far as I understand it.
The lawyer's argument that Llama "obliterates the market" for written works seems weak. I, and anyone I know, put down AI slop fiction before the first paragraph is done, because it's not the same thing as real fiction.
Also I read that ordinary folks have been arrested for filming in the cinema even if they did not redistribute the video (due to being arrested). Again, it is unfair why they get arrested and Zuckerberg doesn't.
When the scale is a significant portion of all human text output ever, I don't think we're in the realm of any prior model. This is now something closer to how society attempts to approach natural resources like land, frequency bands, utility right-of-way, etc. I think this is the direction that laws and legislation should look to go. Or maybe not, I don't claim to have the answer, only that existing models are inadequate.
However, claiming llama is not a 'substantial transformation' of the information used to build it seems untennable.
The complaint feels to me more like the paint factory claiming rights to the paintings you created with it's paint, rather than a classic pirate DVD copier that just resells copies.
Maybe a midway could be some Google Books like solution where you can still find anything but where the output is restricted to just substantial fragments and not complete verbatim chapters?
I do not believe people use llama to 'read published books on the cheap'.
Will the neural network (LLM) itself become illegal? Will its outputs be deemed illegal?
If so, do humans who have read an illegally downloaded book become illegal? Do their creative outputs become illegal?
What is the substantive difference between training a model locally using these works that are presumably pulled in from some database somewhere and Napster, for example?
Would a p2p network for sharing of copyrighted works be legal if the result is to train a model? What if I promise the model can't reproduce the works verbatim?
I have this debate with a friend of mine. He's terrified of AI making all of our jobs obsolete. He's a brilliant musician and programmer both, so he's both enthused and scared. So let's go with the Swift example they use.
Performance Artists have always tried to cultivate an image, an ideal, a mythos around the character(s). I've observed that as the music biz has gotten more tough, that the practice of selling merch at shows has ramped up. Social media is monetized now. There's been a big diversification in the effort to make more money from everything surrounding the music itself. So too will it be with artists.
You're starting to see this already. Artists which got big not necessarily because of the music, but because of the weird cult of personality they built. One who comes to minds is Poppy, who ironically enough built a cult of personality around her being a fake AI bot...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppy_(singer)
You've definitely got counter-examples like Hatsune Miku - but the novelty of Miku was because of the artificiality (within a culture that, like, really loves robots and shit). AI pop stars will undoubtedly produce listenable records and make some money, but I don't expect that they will be able to replace the experience of fans looking for a connection with an artist. Watch the opening of a Taylor Swift concert, and you'll probably get it.
The judge in this case seems to disagree with you, not accepting the premise that downloading the material from pirate sites for this use inherently gets the plaintiffs an out from having to address fair use defense as to the actual use.
> the plaintiffs want to also tie in the former.
No, the defense wants to and the judge hasn't let the plaintiffs avoid it the way you argue they automatically can.
This is a good point, as a reminder, the Folsom tests (failing or passing any one is not conclusive, they are to be holistically considered) are:
- the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes (Note also that whether or not the use is transformative is part of this test).
- the nature of the copyrighted work
- the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
- the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors
What is inspiration? What is imitation? What is plagiarism? The lines aren't clearly drawn for humans... much less for LLMs.
I can absolutely guarantee you that neither DeepSeek nor Alibaba's highly talented Qwen group will care even a little bit, in the long run. Not if there's value to be had in AI. (And I can tell you down to the dollar what LLMs can save in certain business use cases.)
If the US decides to unilaterally shut down LLMs, that just means that the rest of the world will route around us. Whether this is good or bad is another question.
You assume that getting tested means the AI trainers lose, and also thar the model architectures that have been developed can’t be retrained from scratch with public domain, owned, and purpose-licensed material. (With several AI companies having been actively pursuing deals to license content for AI training for a while now.)
End of the road for major AI companies, and hopefully something better can be created once it's declared illegal without any murky waters.
There are LLMs trained on data that isn't illegally obtained, OLMo by Ai2 is one such model, that is actually open source and uses open data for training. Just because it's "very difficult" for OpenAI et al shouldn't be an argument to force them to behave ethically anyways. If they cannot survive acting legally, then so be it, sucks for them.
I see no reason why we should even entertain the idea of extending human rights to computer programs, and so far, nobody has been able to give me any good reasons why.
Furthermore, why are we only entertaining the human rights that can be used for profit-driven purposes? Why do LLMs, for example, not have the right to free speech? Or an attorney? It seems highly unethical to grant these computer programs some protections as if they're humans but not grant them personhood. This is akin to slavery, which is something we actually have to consider. Anthropomorphization is a double-edged sword. We cannot simultaneously consider them human when convenient and then consider them programs when it's not. Or, if we want to do that, we need to form coherent argument to why, how, and when.
Because the obvious question would be - how can free people compete with that?
https://273ventures.com/kl3m-the-first-legal-large-language-...
So, it's really the majority of companies breaking the law who will be affected. Companies using permissible and licensed works will be fine. The other companies would finally have to buy large collections of content, too. Their billions will have go to something other than GPU's.
Of course it does. Large models are trained on gigantic clusters. How can you train without copying the material to machines in the cluster?
I thought the copyright infringement was by the people who provided the copyrighted material when they did not have the rights to do so.
I may be wrong on this, but it would seem a reasonable protection for consumers in general. Meta is hardly an average consumer, but I doubt that matters in the case of the law. Having grounds to suspect that the provider did not have the rights might though.
They also mention Books3, but they don't appear to actually allege anything against Meta in regards to it and are just providing context.
I don't think it actually changes anything material about this complaint if Meta bought all the books at a bookstore since that also doesn't give you the right to copy the works.
The original complaint is 2 years old though, so I don't really know the current state of argumentation.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67569326/1/kadrey-v-met...
Note that incidental copying (i.e. temporary copies made by computers in order to perform otherwise legal actions) is generally legal, so "copying" in the complaint can't refer merely to this and must refer more broadly to the model itself being a copy in order to have standing.
The final say may ultimately come from the Cox vs Record Labels case from 2019 that is still working it's way through the appeal courts.
If the record labels win their appeal, anyone who helped facilitate the infringement can be brought into a lawsuit. The record labels sued Cox for infringement by it's users. It's not out of the question that any ISP that provides Internet connectivity to Facebook could be pulled in for damages.
For Meta these two cases could result in an existential threat to the company, and rightly so because the record labels do not play games. The blood is already in the water.
IP that had been previously loaded by Blizzard itself
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzar....
IANAL, but it doesn't look that hard. On first glance this is a fair use issue.
What an LLM spits out is pretty clearly transformative use. But the fact that it pulls not only the entirety of the work, but the entirety of MOST works means that the amount is way beyond what could be fair use. Plus it's commercial use. Put it together and all LLMs are way illegal.
What do you mean by "pulls"?
What matters in traditional fair use is how substantially your output copies the work (among other factors). Your input is generally assumed to be reading/watching/listening to the entire work, and there is no problem with that.
As a (creative) friend of mine flatly said, they refuse to use an LLM until it can prove where it learned something from/cite its original source. Artists and creatives can cite their inspirational sources, while LLMs cannot (because their developers don't care about credit, only output) by design. To them, that's the line in the sand, and I think that's a reasonable one given that not a single creative in my circles has been cut payment from these multi-billion-dollar AI companies for the unauthorized use of their works in training these models.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.07096
Even humans have a lot of internalized unconscious inspirational sources, but I get your point.
Regardless, deep learning models are valuable because they generalize within the training data to uncover patterns and features and relationships that are implicit, rather (simply) present with the data. While they can return things that happen to be within the training set, there is no reason to believe that any particular output is literally found there or is something that could be attributable, or that a human would ever attribute. Human artists also make meaning from the broad texture of their life experiences and general diffuse unattributable experience of culture.
Sure, this is something a random artist is unlikely to know, but if they are simply refusing to pick up a useful tools that can't give credit--say avoiding LLMs for brainstorming, or generative selection tools for visual editing, or whatever, their particular careers will be harmed by their incurious sentimentality, and other human artists will thrive because they know that tools are just tools, and it is the humans using the tools that make meaning that people care about.
Why? Was it legal for me to download copyrighted songs from Limewire as "fair use"? Because a few people were made examples of.
I'm a musician, so 80% of the music I listen to is for learning so it's fair use, right? ;)
I would be happy with that outcome. I’m a fanfiction writer, and a lot of the stories I read are very much for learning. ;-)
Secondly, there's an argument that the infringement happens only when the LLM produces output based in part of whole on the source material.
In other words, training a model is not infringing in itself. You could "research" with it. But selling the output as "from your model" is highly suspect. Your business is then based on selling something based other people's work, that you do not have rights to.
What fair use? Were the books promised to them by god or something?
We need to frame this case - and ongoing artist-vs-AI-stuff -using a pseudoscience headline I saw recently: 'average person reads 60k words/day'.
I won't bother sourcing this, because I don't think it's true, but it illustrates the key point: consumers spend X amount of time/day reading words.
> It seems like the authors are setting up for failure by making the case about whether the AI generation hinders the market for books. AI book writing is such a tiny segment what these models do that if needed Meta would simply introduce guard rails to prevent copying the style of an author and continue to ingest the books.
and from the article:
> When he turned to the authors’ legal team, led by high-profile attorney David Boies, Chhabria repeatedly asked whether the plaintiffs could actually substantiate accusations that Meta’s AI tools were likely to hurt their commercial prospects. “It seems like you’re asking me to speculate that the market for Sarah Silverman’s memoir will be affected,” he told Boies. “It’s not obvious to me that is the case.”
The market share an author (or any other artist type) is competing with for Meta is not 'what if an AI wrote celebrity memoirs?'. Meta isn't about to start a print publishing division.
Authors are competing with Meta for 'whose words did you read today?' Were they exclusively Meta's - Instagram comments, Whatsapp group chat messages, Llama-generated slop, whatever - or did an author capture any of that share?
The current framing is obviously ludicrous; it also does the developers of LLMs (the most interesting literary invention since....how long ago?) a huge disservice.
Unfortunately the other way of framing it (the one I'm saying is correct) is (probably) impossible to measure (unless you work for Meta, maybe?) and, also, almost equally ridiculous.
Legal cases are often based on BS, really an open form of extortion.
The plaintiffs might've been hoping for a settlement.
Meta could pay $xM+ to defend itself.
Maybe they thought Meta would be happy to pay them $yM to go away.
The reality is, there's very little Meta couldn't just find a freely available substitute for if it had to, it might just take a little more digging on their end.
The idea that any one individual or small group is so valuable that can hold back LLMs by themselves is ridiculous.
But you'll find no end to people vain enough to believe themselves that important.
To make fair use of a book's passage, you have to cite it. The except has to be reasonably small.
Without fair use, it would not be possible to write essays and book reviews that give quotes from books. That's what it's for. Not for having a machine read the whole book so it can regurgitate mashups of any part of it without attribution.
Making a parody is a kind of fair use, but parodies are original expression based on a certain structure of the work.
That's not true. That's what's required for something not to be plagiarism, not for something not to be copyright infringement.
Fair use is not at all the same as academic integrity, and while academic use is one of the fair use exceptions, it's only one. The most you would have to do with any of the other fair use exceptions is credit where you got the material (not cite individual passages), because you're not necessarily even using those passages verbatim.
Has making music for a living ever not been tough?
Fair.
> I think that argument is further hampered (taylor being an exception) by the fact that most pop stars already don't write their own songs.
That accounts for the big artists on the radio (yes some people listen to that). But, what about everyone else? I would posit that most artists (the one-hit wonders, the ones without radio success, etc.) write their own songs. It seems like there's such acts who make a go of it just fine, who write their own songs and really nail the connection with fans. I would point to a regional band near me: Mr. Blotto.
There's some very impressive youtubers who are claiming to be generating new music with AI. The one I listen to the most I very much doubt has everything 100% generated - he probably generates a bunch of melodies and other bits of track and stiches the best candidates together. They do crank out a new album basically every 2 weeks though - and has just a scant few thousand followers. They are not making money, but the music is pretty on par with bands which sell hundreds of thousands or millions of albums.
This is part of what makes me think it's the people who can cultivate the mythos, the personality, the whole experience, who are going to be the big winners in the AI music economy. Sure, maybe Gorillaz obfuscates the identity of the artists (side note: do they though? it's well known to be a supergroup), but it still is a curated experience that human creativity was leveraged to create the whole experience.
We should be careful not to conflate the affects of copyright to the affects of advertising.
Edit: I didn't make it clear... I don't think meta is going to be paying or offering a revenue stream like YouTube ended up creating. I also have no idea if YT actually brings in money for those groups and if the copyright holders essentially took what they could get or were happy with the deal so who knows.
It's only when other parts of the system get abused there's problems but that's a sep issue...
Of course, even this isn't enough, since corporations regularly steal (actually) from individuals, with near impunity.
I don't see how that's a threat to Meta.
Just by being involved as a party does not make you culpable. Murderers are criminals, the murdered, less so.
Choosing to be a party might not make you culpable. You may be an active participant but unaware of the law breaking (being defrauded). Or the law may explicitly state that you can engage with people committing criminal acts and reap the benefits so long as you don't break those laws (or encourage them to be broken) yourself. Some forms of journalism are protected in this way.
Ultimately to have a case you have to state.
1. What law was broken 2. How an action by a party is in violation of that law. 3. That the action actually happened.
The largest problem with this case is not that 3. is in doubt but showing which 1. and 2. they are talking about.
It seems the case is ongoing, but the case against the company is not one of them committing copyright infringement, but that copyright infringement occurred that they encouraged, enabled, and profited from.
"See, those developers themselves have used CoPilot, so they approve the copyright infringement."
[0] https://torrentfreak.com/meta-says-it-made-sure-not-to-seed-...
> 106. Exclusive rights in copyrighted works
> Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
> (1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
And later:
> 501. Infringement of copyright
> (a) Anyone who violates any of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner as provided by sections 106 through 122 or of the author as provided in section 106A(a), ..., is an infringer of the copyright or right of the author, as the case may be.
To me it seems clear that Zuckerberg violated author's exclusive right to reproduce copyrighted works. The law doesn't say it is ok to do if nobody knows about it.
For curious, what is considered a "copy":
> “Copies” are material objects, other than phonorecords, in which a work is fixed by any method now known or later developed, and from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. The term “copies” includes the material object, other than a phonorecord, in which the work is first fixed.
So an SSD with LLM weights should also be considered a "copy" if from them the work can be "reproduced".
Can you get the LLM to reproduce the work? If yes, that would be a copy.
On the point of what Zuck did, The law states what is prohibited and what exceptions are made against the prohibition, not necessarily what is permitted. If the work cannot be reproduced, then it is not a copy.
As for the cinema part, an argument can be made that the person conspired to reproduce the work. And rule declarations are made that you can’t use video recording device in the theater.
If you're telling me that's not "infringing," you should follow what up with the argument for why it is not.
There are a lot of Wikipedia articles with summaries good enough "to not have to buy the book", because they were written by people who read the book. Should those be taken down?
If you ask the LLM for the summary to be expanded much, and you're not providing it with a fresh copy of the book to reference, it's going to be wrong.
What am I, if not an LLM, ingesting copyrighted materials so that I may improve my own future outputs? Why is my own piracy not protected in the same manner?
You aren't a multi-billion dollar company
The Berne convention mentions "fair practice", and puts the responsibility on the individual countries.
Where’s the threshold for forcing AI companies to retrain models without specific copyrighted works in them?
Not really sure a claim is good enough. I don't know that you can just go into court and say, "Trust me, I don't use copyrighted material."
And I also can't see any way, other than providing training data and training an identically structured model on that data, that a company can conclusively show that they got the weights in an allegedly copyright free model from the copyright free training data a company provides.
If you did not use copyrighted materials for training, people will not be able to prove that you did, and that should be good enough.
It's a civil matter not a criminal matter so that that doesn't apply.
There is benefit to using them, though. For one, they've tried really hard to be legal. That sets a positive example, shows good faith if they were sued, and reduces risk for those using them (good faith on our part). Also, one can be sure that they can ditch or replace any outputs in the long term if they're ruled illegal. So, we try not to use the A.I.'s in a way where losing access to them seriously damages our business.
That's the best I can offer until legal reforms happen.
If training, one can train it in Singapore on material you he or she has legal access to. Their law pretty much let's you use anything for AI purposes so long as you legally can access it yourself. To further reduce the risk, they should crawl it themselves, too, taking care to avoid risky sources.
So good luck finding the thing that looks exactly like your copyrighted work that's not in the corpus, if you can yeah, you might be able to prove it.
At the end of the day its like a lot of business, where a liability shell game is played out, and if the chain of evidence cant be drawn quite brightly then lawsuits would be frivolous at best.
It's not about the program's rights, it's about the human's rights to use the program. Not the machine's right to do something, but the human's right to do something through a machine, or make a machine do something.
A lot of people just jump to LLMs learning like it's a foregone conclusion. Mm... no. You need to convince people of that. You'll find if you talk to non-tech people, they're not just going to believe you when you say that.
Why isn't an LLM more akin to a database or a compression algorithm? Why is it closer to human learning? After all, humans are humans and we have the exclusive right and power to determine what is human and what isn't. And database and compression algorithms are computer programs, of the same kind as an LLM.
Your causality seems to be inverted here. You seem to be implying that "learning" (or the ingestion and retention of information for the same means) is banned by default for everything, but we decide to allow it for humans as the sole exception. This is not the case. Everything not prohibited is allowed, and "intermediate copies" are considered to be vital to fair use by the court system.
Even changes made using simple non-ML algorithms can be transformative according to fair use doctrine, like the thumbnailing of images done by search engines. It's not meant in some spiritual sense.
True, but not the only relevant thing.
If the output of the LLM is "not very different from the original work" then the output could be the infringement. Putting a hypercomplex black box between the source work and the plagiarised output does not in itself make it "not infringing". The "LLM output as a service" business is then based on selling something based other people's work, that they do not have rights to.
It's falling for misdirection, "pay no attention to the LLM behind the curtain" to think otherwise.
I will disagree with that characterisation. IMHO: In some cases no, it's not different, there are clear lines from inputs to output. In some cases yes, it's different from any one input work, it's distributed micro-plagiarism of a huge number of sources. In no case is it original.
But I think that this is legally undecided and won't be decided by you or me, and it is going to be a more interesting and relevant question than "is the LLM model is very like the original work", which it clearly isn't. That's like asking "is this typewriter like this novel?" It can't be, but the words that came out of it could be.
- of a commercial nature;
- plagiarism;
- substantially large (e.g. whole work);
you're not on good legal footing.
Fair use and plagiarism are related, but they are two separate things. Especially when talking about the legalities of things, as we are here, it's vital to be clear and accurate about what specific legal issues are under discussion.
Facebook isn't claiming fair use to write academic papers about the books they're taking parts from. They're claiming fair use to feed them into LLM training. If that is a usage that is deemed to fall under fair use, then it won't require specific citation, even if it requires attribution in the more general sense (ie, crediting all the works you fed into your word-chipper), any more than you're required to cite specific passages when you're making a wholesale parody of a copyrighted work (also fair use) or writing a fanfic based on it (also fair use).
Anyway, the organizations behind popular LLMS are perpetrating massive copyright infringement and plagiarism. A fair use defense is rationally not possible.
Firstly, to claim fair use while you are making commercial use of the material is going to be difficult right off the bat. Fair use claims are bolstered by non-commercial use.
Small size of excerpts favors fair use claims. Can't do that here.
Transformative use? Not really; LLMs spit out the information verbatim if prompted in the right ways. Exploitative uses will probably not be viewed as transformative by the court.
He was fired by the New York Times after all this came out, because he hired private investigators to go after the NYT reporters investigating Weinstein (Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey at the NYT broke the story just before Farrow's reporting was published), while also representing the Times.
I had (and still have, to some extent,) mixed feelings about Holmes. She's like an avatar of SV's "fake it 'til you make it" aspect, taken way too far, to an uncomfortable extreme.
Boies, though? He represents the absolute perversion of the legal profession and the Common Law. In him you see how it is used by the powerful to bludgeon and coerce the weak. The Law as naked and unambiguous Lawful Evil. He's the worse villain of the two. And, aptly, this Mephistopheles is the one still walking free.
If it were true that this constitutes a transfer of possession, then the targets for the lawsuit should be the individual employees, and I don't think anyone wants that.
My overall point is just that a corporation willfully violating copyright should be treated wholly differently than an individual.
I still think that, regardless of any copyright violation by the corporation in acquiring the content, that training with the data doesn't (or shouldn't) somehow taint the resulting model.
Yes. Building the data set, acquiring the data set, training the model, using the model, and using the output of a model are all separate actions, it is not necessarily the case that any legal standing in one act transfers down the chain.
It's certainly not going to be resolved by a single case.
You can't make valid legal analogies to human learning when dealing with copyright law, because human brains are not a fixed media under copyright law, thus impressions in human brains are not copies of any kind under copyright law, thus "well, when you make an impression in the human brain, its not a copyright violation" is never a good legal analogy for when you make something that is in a form which can be a copy under copyright law.
What do you mean here by "clearly?" This is not at all clear, and court cases have been decided in the opposite direction.
This case: https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/marvin-gaye-family...
is as far from what you say is "clearly" true as could possibly be. You're handwaving away the parts of the question that are difficult.
Applying this same legal doctrine to LLMs, it's totally fine for them to train on copyrighted works. A problem would only arise if they produced substantial copies of those works.
It may be difficult to quantify the harm done in that case. Robin Thicke sold millions of copies of blurred lines. Each LLM output is generally consumed by a single person. There could be millions of examples of blatant copyright infringement by LLMs that will never come to light in court. There also could be vanishingly few. We may need new regulations to police it.
This doesn't actually matter though does it? They still had access to a copy of the data in the first place to train the AI on
Since they likely did not pay a license to have access to the books they trained the AI on, then they violated copyright
The same way it would be violating copyright for a university student to pirate a textbook and learn from it
Presumably, there would be no requirement for the student to learn from it - making the unauthorised copy would be itself an infringement.
1. It protected works to reward authors during their lifetime. This was changed to lasting a long time after the author was dead. Then, also for corporations that were only persons on paper and theoretically immortal. This shift let companies squeeze money out of monopolized ideas for over a century rather than supporting artists and their creations. Instead of supporting the small fish, copyright law can reinforce the dominance of the sharks and whales.
2. Copyright was shorter in the U.S. at 28 years with possible renewal. That would balance two goals: give author time to make money off the work; let society use the work in a timeframe where it would still matter to them. Now, we can't have most works until long after they're useful in the market. We might not even speak the language they spoke, like older vs current English.
Personally, I'd love to see a limit of 5-20 years on copyrighted works. If authors want more money, they can make more stuff. Allowing remixes of culturally and technologically relevant content will create huge, thriving ecosystems. I think my concept is also proven out by the open source ecosystem.
A limit would also be great for legal AI. We could train them on all human content up to 5-20 years ago. Tons of jobs would be created digitizing and optimizing that content. Then, companies would pay to create or license modern content that updated those foundation models. Under current law, it would be impossible for smaller companies to build highly-competitive A.I.'s due to licensing cost and arbitrary restrictions.
This was the pitch by the (printing) companies that established copyright to gain a legal monopoly on copying.
> Instead of supporting the small fish, copyright law can reinforce the dominance of the sharks and whales.
This was always the case. It's just worse now.
Personally I'd love to see sane copyright laws. That is, abolishing copyright. Copyright only helps people in power stay in power. Oh, does Disney argue that you used a character of theirs in your story? Does it even matter if you did? You think you can take on Disney's lawyers? It doesn't matter if copyright is 5 years or 500. You're going to lose.
Art, and things erroneously treated like art under copyright like software, would be so much better if people could do it without fear of being a victim of copyright. Imagine if anyone could add their own flare to any story ever. Incredible.
No, it wasn't. The first copyright law is generally held to be the Statute of Anne (1710) in Britain (the Licensing of the Press Act of 1662 which preceded it was not a "copyright law" in the sense that it did not provide for ownership of a right to publish/print particular works, but provided, as the name suggested, for licensing of printing presses, and revocation of said licenses -- it was more of a general censorship law); and even if you limit the scope to Britain (well, in either case, England before the Union with Scotland) corporations go back further (depending on whether you mean corporations as "entities which are not natural persons with legal personality"—the City of London Corporation's establishment is literally lost to history, but known to predate the Norman Conquest—or "joint stock companies"—the Company of Merchant Adventurers to New Lands in 1551 would be the first.)
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright
Okay, not a corporation, but a company.
But, a lot of AI products are specifically and explicitly designed to obsolesce the thing they trained off. No need to go to Encyclopedia X or the NYT, this has the same content.
I don't mean to claim that search engine image thumbnailing is like-to-like in every consideration, just that it demonstrates there's no "human spirit" required in order to qualify as "transformative" as far as fair use is concerned. Search engine image thumbnailing has been found to be transformative, for instance in Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc.: "Google's use of thumbnails is highly transformative."
And, though I'm probably being pedantic here, I think it's important to distinguish that the other fair use factor you allude to is not whether you're "competing against" the original work, but specifically the effect of your use on the market/value of that original work. For example if your documentary uses a clip from a TV show and also happens to air in the same time-slot as that TV show - the extent you compete/displace market for the TV show in general (even as you would had you not included the clip of it) is not what's under consideration, but rather only the additional extent you displace its market specifically due to inclusion of that clip.
Because of that, I'd claim that some machine-learning-based tool that partially displaces the market for a work it was trained on (for instance, Google Translate displacing the market for a translated version of a book) might still be seen reasonably favorably under the market impact factor, so long as the extent it displaces that work is largely independent of whether it has trained on that work specifically (such as if the translation tool could already provide a decent translation of the original book even before having trained on its translated version).
The output of a LLM, when based heavily on that same page, pretends to be something novel. IMadeThis_Meme.gif
Fair use is pretty complicated. Part of Fair Use is the "The Effect of the Use on the Potential Market for or Value of the Work", which already puts even human commercial endeavors in a tough spot. You can make it work, but you have to really try. Satire like Weird Al or whatever isn't competing with the music it's satirizing, the venn diagram between those markets barely overlap. But a lot of LLM use cases are explicitly meant to obsolesce and siphon value from the things they used.
Like, why go to Getty Images when you could instead go to the glorified database, which has ingested all of Getty Images, and acquire an indistinguishable stock photo for free?
The only reason we're even really entertaining this is because people continually draw parallels to humans. You see, it's not stealing from Getty. It's more like if someone saw Getty Images and then went out and took a photo in that same flat, boring style. Except nobody saw anything. And nobody went out an took a photo.
But unless your argument is that the photo outputs from the GenAI are literally equivalent to the training data, you would agree the end result is the same, right? Anyone can see that the images are not the training data stitched together, so it doesn't even really matter how it all works mechanistically, even though your description ("glorified database") is wrong.
Can GenAI produce indistinguishable images to what's on Getty Images? If you write the prompt correctly, yes. I know because there are services where you can get generated stock images.
Music has ended up in a place where short audio snippets are protected by copyright and must be licensed; but for short snippets of text the precedent has generally been that the copying needs to be more substantial. Distributed microplagarism of short phases might end up being ruled to be legal, even if wholesale reproduction is not. Which may not give copyright protection to the generated works, of course, as the question of machine authoring is entirely distinct.
That’s like saying the dictionary is micro-plagiarism of a huge number of sources because it uses all the words from those sources.
Plagiarism isn’t necessarily copyright infringement, and plagiarism isn’t illegal. Copyright infringement is.
Even still, your argument that everyone who generates 2,000 words in the style of (author) is plagiarizing is also flatly false. By that standard all English essays that mimic someone else’s style would be plagiarism.
LLMs are a drop on a hot stone compared to countless other factors why the world already is routing around the US - but I don't want to get political or economical.
You're talking as if they are some kind of nationalized or publically-owned asset, as opposed to a bunch of for-profit, privately-owned silos.
Even if ChatGPT, Huggingface, etc. died, we would still have the models and we would still be able to run them.
The firms pouring trillions of dollars into them want to own their creative output, and charge rent for access to it.
They won't be leapfrogging 'us'.
They'll be leapfrogging some privately owned, for-profit business.
Frankly, I don't give two shits about that, and I fail to see why anyone who doesn't own one of them should give one.
If they want me to have skin in the game, they should share either the profits, or the models. Until they do, it's not 'us', it's 'them'.
My fear is that the US tech won’t be able to compete with state sponsored open source out of China and will move to ban open source or suppress it somehow.
And Alibaba's Qwen team seems to be quite genuinely talented at "small" models, 32B parameters and below. Once you get Qwen3 properly configured, it punches well above its "weight class." I'm still running real benchmarks, but subjectively, it feels like the 32B model performs somewhere between 4o-mini and 4o on "objectively measureable" tasks. It's a little "stodgy" and formal by default, though. We'll see what it looks like when people start fine-tuning it.
If the US dropped off the planet, it would maybe set LLM technology back a year.
Meta did this first I believe?
Please do!!
But seriously, LLMs are useless for anything except the most basic secretarial tasks and even there they still require as much reviewing as a high school intern. The reason executives want to use AI instead of humans is because AI is a capital expense that does not hit the financial the same way that wages do. (Capital expenses are excluded from EBITDA, which is the most common metric for measuring a company's financial performance. But it's become so popular for companies to push expenses to ITDA whenever they can that financial analysts are starting to push back and include ITDA in their analyses.)
In a nutshell, there are 3 ways to look at company financials: the PR way (EBITDA), the financial reporting way (GAAP, which includes ITDA), and the tax way (starts from GAAP or IFRS but with numerous rules on what items are included or excluded).
Shouldn't they have to follow the law?
US AI companies will either make sure that a similar ruling will never be made or they will ignore it and pay the fines. They won't let anybody stop the gravy train.
But then they'd have to actually communicate with people and negotiate consent instead of just hoovering up everything they can get their hands on in their quest to replace it.
Pirating the book is copyright infringement ... reading in a library is not.
Training of a neural network on copyrighted work is the algorithmic equivalent of a "subjective mental experience".
The recording made by the camera would be a whole different issue.
Exactly.
Plus, Thomson Reuters recently won a case regarding using copyrighted material for AI training:
https://www.wired.com/story/thomson-reuters-ai-copyright-law...
> Thomson Reuters has won the first major AI copyright case in the United States. In 2020, the media and technology conglomerate filed an unprecedented AI copyright lawsuit against the legal AI startup Ross Intelligence. In the complaint, Thomson Reuters claimed the AI firm reproduced materials from its legal research firm Westlaw. Today, a judge ruled in Thomson Reuters’ favor, finding that the company’s copyright was indeed infringed by Ross Intelligence’s actions.
Though a cynical way to read this would be that the larger corporation won against the smaller, so the actual precedent here is Meta winning.
But as others have noted in these comments, even that has a silver lining: should Meta win, then everyone can pirate books to read, right? /s
That's because you would be redistributing the actual material, just in a really roundabout way. GenAI models are not that, they're not a database and don't work like one.
> Can GenAI produce indistinguishable images to what's on Getty Images?
That doesn't matter because you can't copyright a style. From the point of view of copyright law, it would look like you were copying nothing proprietary/owned at all.
Right, which I’m arguing is what LLMs do just in an even more roundabout way.
The technical details of LLMs don’t actually matter. We don’t really care if they’re a database or not. The question is do they reproduce the source material? And yeah, pretty much they do, in a lot of instances. Not all, but a lot.
To produce yet another analogy, imagine I have a service X. You can pay and I will give you any movie you want. You don’t know how I do it. Is this copyright infringement or not? I would say yes. Now let’s say I reveal the secret - I open up photoshop and painstakingly recreate the movie frame by frame. I might make a mistake here or there. Is this still copyright infringement? I think it is.
Okay, but that is not what's happening here. Demonstratably so. The fact that a model is technically capable of overfitting to certain very repeated points in the training data doesn't mean the entire thing has to be shot down. The non-infringing uses far outweigh the offending ones, by a lot.
If what you say is true, and they do outright copy a lot, then it should be pretty easy for any IP holder to sue anyone who misuses the model that way for copyright infringement on those specific outputs.
If I produce a terrible shakycam recording of a film while sitting in a movie theater, it's not a verbatim copy, nor is it even necessarily representative of the original work -- muddied audio, audience sounds, cropped screen, backs of heads -- and yet it would be considered copyright infringement?
How many times does one need to compress the JPEG before it's fair use? I'm legitimately curious what the test is here.
That is why so called derivative works are allowed (and even encouraged). If copyrighted material is ingested, modified or enhanced to add value, and then regurgitated that is legal, whereas copying it without adding value is not legal.
If derivative works weren't deemed acceptable copyright would have the opposite of it's intended effect and become an impediment to progress.
Derivative works are not given a free pass from the normal constraints of copyright. You cannot legally publish books in the universe of A Song of Ice and Fire without permission from the author (and often publisher), calling them “derivative works.”
It’s why fan fiction is such a gray area for copyright and why some publishers have historically squashed it hard.
The exceptions for this are typically fair use, which requires multi-factor analysis by the judiciary and is typically decided on a case-by-case basis.
Derivative works are not "allowed (and even encouraged)" without a license from the copyright holder. Creating a derivative work is an exclusive right of the copyright holder just like making verbatim copies and requires a license for anyone else, unless an exception to copyright protection (like fair use) applies.
Derivative works are tolerated in some cases like some manga or fanfics but it is a gray area and whenever the author or publisher wants to pursue it it is their full right to do it. Many do pursue it
(You can get inspired by something, and this is where some arguments can happen if you get inspired too mmmm literally, but no one will say with a straight face that inspiration is a thing that happens to software)
That seems to go against the notion that copyright can last beyond the author's lifetime - most arts and science progress tends to reduce after death
When model training reads the text and creates weights internally, is that a substantial transformation? I think there’s a pretty strong argument that it is.
The point here is that book files have to be copied before they can be used for training. Copyright texts typically say something like "No unauthorised copying or transmission in any form (physical, electronic, etc.)"
Individuals who torrented music and video files have been bankrupted for doing exactly this.
The same laws should apply when a corporation downloads torrent files. What happens to them after they're downloaded is irrelevant to the argument.
If this is enforced (still to be seen...) it would be financially catastrophic for Meta, because there are set damages for works that have been registered for copyright protection - which most trad-pubbed books, and many self-pubbed books, are.
Seems like a big gap there.
It seems like it is very much a matter of fidelity.
As mentioned in another comment, LLMs (and most popular machine learning algorithms) can be viewed, correctly, as compression algorithms which leverage lossy encoding + interpolation to force a kind of generalization.
Your argument is that a video wouldn't count as pirated if the compression used for the pirated copy was lossy (or at least sufficiently lossy). The closest real world example would be the cases where someone records a the filming of a movie on their phone then uploads it. Such a copy is lossy enough that you can't produce anything really like the original, but my most definitions is still considered copyright.
The test is if a judge says it is fair use, nothing else.
The judge will take into account the human factor in this matter, e.g. things like who did the actual work, and who just used an algorithm (which is not the hard part anymore, code can be obtained on the internet for free). And we all know that DL is nowhere without huge amounts data.
Needing the original material isn't enough for claiming copyright infringement as we have existing counter examples
The model isn’t storing the book.
I think that is the center of the conversation. What does it mean for a computer to "understand"? If I wrote some code that somehow transformed the text of the book and never return the verbatim text but somehow modified the output, I would likely not be spared because the ruling will likely be my transformation is "trivial".
Personally, I think we have several fixes we need to make:
1. Abolish the CFAA.
2. Limit copyright to a maximum of 5 years from date of production with no extension possible for any reason.
3. Allow explicit carveout in copyright for transformational work. Explicitly allow format shifting, time shifting, yada yada.
4. Prohibit authors and publishers from including the now obviously false statements like "No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording" bla bla bla in their works.
5. I am sure I am missing some stuff here.
In early computing, everything was closed sourced. Quoting the wikiepdia page,
To develop a legal BIOS, Phoenix used a clean room design. Engineers read the BIOS source listings in the IBM PC Technical Reference Manual. They wrote technical specifications for the BIOS APIs for a single, separate engineer—one with experience programming the Texas Instruments TMS9900, not the Intel 8088 or 8086—who had not been exposed to IBM BIOS source code.
The legal team at Phoenix deemed inappropriate to "recall source in their own words" for legal reasons.
My non-legal intuition is that these companies training their models are violating copyright. But, the stakes are too high--it's too big to fail if you will. If we don't do it, then our competitors will destroy us. How do you reconcile that?
The NYTimes in 2023 was able to demonstrate that the models can reproduce entire articles verbatim[0] with minimal coercion.
[0]https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec20...
It would be a remarkable quirk of statistics that, if given all text on the internet except for the NYTimes back catalogue, a model would produce any NYT article.
Not of physical media. You're allowed to make archival copies of digital media.
> Or reading a book via a computer would be illegal
No you purchased a license (or your library did, in the case of e-borrowing) to read the book on a computer. That makes it legal.
It becomes illegal if I try to distribute those copies
So the question is, does distributing an AI that has been trained on Harry Potter count as distributing Harry Potter?
While a tool being used to create infringing copies of some other work (whether or not it is the source material used to create the tool, and whether or not the infringing material is also verbatim copies) is relevant to whether the tool vendor is liable for contributory infringement for the infringing use of the tool, the absence of a capacity for creating such copies isn't usually enough to say that copying to make the tool isn't infringing.
(That said, generative AI tools, including LLMs specifically, have been shown to have the capacity to make such copies, to the extent that vendors of hosted models are now putting additional checks on output to try to mitigate the frequency with which verbatim copies of substantial portions of training-set works are produced, so arguing that LLMs can't do that is silly.)
Exactly. I asked my Gemma how long of a quote it could give me of a given book, if I were the author & gave express permission, and I was a bit surprised it readily admitted it could
> Without Permission (Current Limit): Single sentence.
> With Broad Permission (Full Reproduction Allowed): I could theoretically quote the entire book.
Eye-opening (for me, at least).
Transformers are fundamentally large compression algorithms where the target of compression is not just to minimize reconstruction loss + compressed file size. In fact, basically all of machine learning used today can be viewed through the lens of learning a compression algorithm with added goals other than the usual.
By this logic if I create a lossy Jpeg of a copyrighted image it's not "copying" because the lossy compression.
There’s plenty of case law there…
Using content to train an LLM is not copying the content. I'm ignoring the silly "but actually" arguments about the content being in RAM so it's "copying". It's using the content to generate a statistical model of token (word-ish) relationships and probabilities. If you write content that is so original in it's wording and I train an LLM against it, then there is certainly the possibility that the LLM could be provoked the recall the exact words you used. You'd have to set the parameters just right to make it happen and I think that proper training would drastically lower if not remove that possible scenario. But even if it doesn't, the LLM doesn't have a copy of that original content. All it has is weights representing those relationship probabilities. Yes, the minutia is more complex, but that is the essence. If my LLM were to generate enough of this essentially verbatim unique content and I tried to publish or copyright it, then I as the user should be on the hook. But then you get into a discussion about how many words in a unique sequence does it take to be infringement?
Obviously, I am not a lawyer.
My summation in all of this is that new laws need to be put into place to handle this stuff because the existing ones are sufficiently non-definitive and/or ill-suited such that every party is forming strong opinions about how old laws apply to new situations and causing massive friction.
If we're going that way, let me torrent every movie and TV show ever to "train" myself.
Copyright doesn't protect against all forms of duplication. For instance, you own the copyright to your post and grant HN a license to offer copies of it. I have no direct license from you to copy the content of your post; but I can copy it to memory, copy a cache to disk, and make a copy appear on my display.
It’s not a good example, because if you grant a license you give them the right to make copies. The problem is not when Meta got licenses, it’s when they did not.
Where your analogy goes wrong is you're saying you want to "[Circumvent] payment to obtain copyright material for training" to use Workaccount2's words.
Because I'm certainly not allowed to photocopy a library book in its entirety. And I guarantee you a Netflix subscription doesn't allow me to keep a copy of a movie on my hard drive and use it for training man or machine.
Exactly this. Legal copying requires a license.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_In....
I'm not a legal expert. My layman's understanding of the case above is Aereo was in violation because they made copies of content - content that the receiver was already allowed to access - available over the Internet to the intended receiver. That is to say, the copying was the problem.
But any such arrangement needs to be hammered out by the legislature. As laws are, I think it's pretty clear that infringement is happening.
"Aereo's retransmission of television broadcasts was a "public performance" of the networks' copyrighted work. The Copyright Act of 1976 forbids such performances without the permission of the holder of the copyright. Second Circuit Court of Appeals reversed. Court membership"
IANAL but that probably falls under fair use? You'll get in trouble if you photocopy the work and sell access to it.
I've not found case law for that. I've had this same argument on HN multiple times over the past few months.
So… it’s complicated. This is one of the weird areas where music copyright and other copyright seem to differ in the US.
In the US the situation is complex and there are a lot of weird special interests [0], but generally a composer/author of a song has the right to decide who first records and releases the song, but after the first recording covers require a mechanical license, which is compulsory (ie: the author cannot object).
In music there are _a lot_ of special cases and different rights are decided with different kinds of licenses, some of which are compulsory. I think it’s an area that doesn’t make for good analogies with copyright in other media.
Which is compulsory for the performer too.
A derivative work like cover is sort of acceptable when it's performed by a person live for some audience (grey area but twitch sort of allows it. with a bunch of rules). As soon as you want to publish it you MUST have a license. And chatbot is a derivative work totally not performed live by a person for some audience
I saw great tracks that got taken down from all legal channels because they featured a sample from another song. Sometimes they remained up but mostly they were taken down. It is fully original publisher's discretion...
If the work is "derivative" in the legal sense it is copyrighted, and you may not create derivative works without the copyright holders permission.
What I should have said is that simply being inspired by a work or copying unprotectable elements (like facts or ideas) does not create a derivative work.
For example, if ChatGPT were to generate Star Wars, except with Dookies instead of Wookies, that might be illegal. If it were to learn what a spaceship is from Star Wars and then create something substantially new it would not. The key is is that it must not be substantially similar to the original. You must add enough value that it becomes something new, not just rehash the original.
Only if they seeded the data and some other entity downloaded it, i.e. they hosted the data. In a previous article I believe it was called out that Meta was being a leecher (not seeding back what they downloaded).
It's the hosting that gets you, not the act of downloading it.
However, people have been prosecuted for not even hosting a torrent, but merely providing a link to where people can find it.
e.g. https://torrentfreak.com/operator-of-popcorn-time-info-site-...
The lender owns the book, and it is within his rights to loan it to whoever he wants. That is legal. Making this illegal would end libraries.
The borrower is well within his rights to accept the book, and as the current owner he is even allowed to make a copy of the book (see the famous TIVO case). Making this illegal would end backups and format/time shifting.
When the borrower returns the book, he keeps the copy. Oh no! Surely he must now become a criminal? Nope. Possessing an unauthorized copy is also not illegal, despite what many copyright holders would like you to believe. Making this illegal would also criminalize a lot of legitimate format/time shifting, again see the famous TIVO case.
If the borrower were to loan his homemade copy to someone else THEN it would finally become illegal.
Nothing about AI changes any of this.
I download a torrent with movie that I didn't pay for. If I don't allow to seed it, then I don't get in trouble. If I let it seed either during the download process or after, I'd get a DMCA notice if that torrent/magnet link was getting tracked.
I don't need a hypothetical book, that is just how it works if I were to download illegally obtained documents/media.
As technical as people are in this thread, easy to tell when folks didn't have their parents wondering why they were getting scary letters from the ISP.
But if you make books contents available online via some service that regurgitates its contents you would be totally sus because you can be considered in a business of selling derivative works.
Nobody is going to try to extract pages by pages a book from ChapGPT, let's be realistic. (and you can't anyways)
I don't think the current state of LLM would be able to write 200 pages in a coherent manner anyways.
I’m sure all these ‘clever’ questions would be useful if this trial was about humans but it’s not.
The training material is used to play this guessing game to dial in it's weights. The training data is picked up, used as reference material for the game, and then discarded. It's hard to place this far from what humans do when reading, because both are using the information to mold their respective "brains" and both are doing an acquire, analyze, discard process.
At no point is training data actually copied into the model itself, it's just run past the "eyes" of the model to play the training game.
This scenario seems quite contrived but is there an actual court precedent allowing it? I'm 100% confident no one will ever prosecute you for doing it but that's not the same thing as "allowed".
In another thread I already posted about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_In....
This case was about pointing <recording equipment> at <content someone is allowed to access> and making a copy to transmit it to <only that person>. The Supreme Court held it to be illegal. There was a lot of money on the line, which is why it went so far.
Your example involves transmission and mine doesn't, and that's a whole different can of worms.
Also the result of that case was self-contradicting so it's not a great basis to build too much logic upon.
You would never use a human to backup your financial reports, but the human might be able to give a good overview. You would never use an LLM to backup your financial reports, but they might be able to give a good overview.
AI training data is disposable. There is nothing that could be called a compression algorithm that disposes all of the data you put into it. AI uses training data as examples of what the next token in a token sequence is. The examples are disposable reference points, not the model itself. That's how you get image models that are 20GB in size despite training on 20PB of data. It's 20PB of examples used to form the shape of a 20GB model. You could show it 5GB of training data or 500EB of training data and it would still be 20GB - because it is not a compression algo, it's a 20GB shape formed by external data.
You can compress 20PB of text to 20Gb or even less, if input is super repetitive. So the same with images, if 50% of the images are cats then you learn how to represent the cat pixels with a few vectors and then you could represent all the cats int he world doing all possible cat actions.
But please have the courage to respond to this, when the AI is caught regurgitating the exact text from a popular book, the exact verses from a poem, the exact code function from some code , then how can you defend that is not memorizing things? If a human uses my poem(after they read it) and signs his name under it would you defend them?
And yes LLMs can recall exact material, but it is excerpts and fragments. There is statistical significance to it's ordering. Humans readily do this too (excerpts and fragments), most artists can draw a batman symbol (but not an episode of batman). That doesn't in anyway mean that artists should not be allowed to ever see a batman symbol. It means that artists shouldn't be allowed to get paid to draw one. And they are not. And LLMs are not exempt either.
But the fix is output filtering, just like everything else that can violate copyright. Which is already being done (albeit poorly, but way better than 2 years ago), the same as artists will not draw the batman symbol for you despite being able to.
I'm sorry, but this a fundamentally incorrect view of machine learning (including, but not limited to transformers).
From an information theoretic perspective the two are essentially identical with the exception that standard compression algorithms do not have a proper "loss" function other than just trying to minimize reconstruction loss with the resulting compression size.
Here's a link to the section on the Wikipedia for more information if you'd like [0]. MacKay's Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms is the standard full text treatment of this topic [1]. Ted Chiang's article "ChatGPT is a Blurry JPEG of the web" is pretty good "pop sci" exploration of this topic if you don't want to get too into the mathematics [2].
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_compression#Machine_learn...
1. https://www.inference.org.uk/itprnn/book.pdf
2. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-...
Humans are totally capable of data compression. This will just devolved into a semantics game of what a data compressor is.
LLMs were not developed to be, do not function as, and are not use as data compression utilities. Please, come knocking when a service provider exists that will use LLM's to compactly store your company data.
How is this done? Are bits not written into RAM or disk? Are they not sent between machines in a training cluster? That's copying.
> it is seemingly not far removed from how humans consume content
Except that humans don't make full copies to RAM, or disk or paper.
AI doesn't need lasting copies to train, however I don't know what the actual implementation is. But if it's ruled that they can only use copyrighted data if it's not stored for more than the time it would take a human to consume, It wouldn't really cripple the models, but perhaps make training more logistically challenging.
It's important to understand that models are not data archives. They are statistical constructs made from getting quizzed, that uses human made content to generate the quiz questions.
Images on your retina form exact copies.
They are scanned and translated into impulses that are then sent to a first set of "neural columns" - that's an exact copy.
This is then connected to the visual cortex by the two most high bandwidth links in the human body ("the optical nerve", there's 2 of them of course, always wondered why everybody insists on using the singular). Why would you have that high bandwidth link unless to create verbatim copies.
The way those columns are structured also very strongly suggests they make carbon copies, which they then make available on the "brain bridge" (which is probably at least vaguely similar to the "attention matrix" of a transformer). If it does work like that, that's also a verbatim copy.
The only way "humans don't make full copies to RAM" is that humans don't have separate RAM. The processing power is colocated with the processing, even on a microscopic level. You know, what everybody knows is the best way of doing things even in silicon, it's just incredibly impractical if you can't rebuild your circuit every time there's a slight change to the instructions your "computer" carries out (the brain is not a "Von Neumann architecture", except it kind of is when it regrows connections. But in the short term it isn't)
> Using software almost always involves creating copies, even though many of these copies only exist for a very short time. For example, executing a program means copying it from the hard disk into RAM so that the CPU can interpret the instructions. Because of this, the right to run a program is considered to fall under the copyright of the author.
For comparison, when a human looks at the letters, there is no copying.
Also, models can reproduce text verbatim which proves that they store it.
So it is unfair when ordinary folks got sued for this and Zuckerberg wants to get away with a million times larger violation. He must go directly to jail.
The computer model is working differently of course but functionally it's the same idea.
In Googles case they were digitizing the books (that they did not own), and publishing snippets for search users to help them find books and other material that weren't indexed on the web. The court found they had that right, but did place some pretty strict limits on them.
Still, Google was allowed to keep their database of scanned material despite not owning the originals.
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....
Someone photocopying a book to read on the toilet (and leave the original on their nightstand) isn't engaging in transformative use. They're also harming the market for the work because if they hadn't made this photocopy, they would've had to buy a second copy of the book to get the same benefit.
The situation you describe is more akin to "format shifting" or maybe "space shifting", which is converting copyrighted material to other formats or places as a backup, for preservation purposes, or just for convenience. It is legally protected in the US, and most of the rest of the world. I believe that was settled due to early litigation with VCR's, but there are mountains of relevant cases at this point.
I do recall reading that the UK recently changed their laws in that regard, and like most copyright law it can depend on the specifics of the situation and even (*yuck*) intent. So it's always worth checking if you're unsure.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.10668
Transformers are also used in the top algorithm right now on the Large Text Compression Benchmark. https://bellard.org/nncp/nncp.pdf
Again, from a information theoretic view point, this is exactly what they are doing, how they where developed and how they function.
I don't know any serious researcher in ML that would find this claim even remotely controversial. It's really not just "a semantics game", its a part of a foundational understanding of the topic. If you want to understand LLMs from this perspective, a good place to start is with an auto-encoder which does try to learn a standard compression algorithm, the move on to more sophisticated embedding models (found in a lot of recommender systems) which try to learn an additional objective on top of minimizing reconstruction error. You'll then see that Transformers and all other major NN architectures fall out of these basic principles.
> Please, come knocking when a service provider exists that will use LLM's to compactly store your company data.
This is literally what every vectordb company does right now, as well as all "chat with your docs" type startups.
Can you get transformers to regurgitate information verbatim? Yes.
Would anyone in their right mind rely on a transformer to do so? No.
Would anyone in their right mind rely on a vectorDB to do so? No.
Would anyone in their right mind use a vectorDB/RAG/SQL/transformer combo to do so? Yes.
Is youtube going to drop VP9 for GeminiEncode to save google billions in bandwidth? No.
I'm not aware of this principle. Where is it spelled out?
> Also the result of that case was self-contradicting
I agree the verdict was a travesty. An innovative business went to ridiculous lengths to stay on the right side of the copyright mafia (data centers with tiny individual TV antennas for each subscriber FFS!) while providing a better product and experience. They still had the hammer brought down on them.
Well, do CDs give you a license agreement that allows you to copy the data? I've never seen one. And it's nearly impossible to play a CD without that copying.
Exactly. It's how you are supposed to use the CD. That's not true for your example of a book on a webcam. You're supposed to read the book, not an image of the book.
That's not the same thing as copying for "processing".
Wired explicitly sent that article to their computer for the purposes of reading it so it's not a copyright violation.
Citation needed.
maybe even simpler, I create a zip format where I randomly replace words with their synonym, or group of words with something equivalent. Would you defend this as original ? why my random transformations are not original while mathematical transformations you will defend ?
And how can you suggest putting output filters to protect only the giants for copyright and everyone else gets screwed.
We should be building robust copyright filters and everyone should be able to contribute their work to it.
but that is a different issue than whether or not an LLM is legally allowed to view a work that is publicly available.
Again, pretty much every artist is capable of off-hand copyright violation on the spot. This has been true forever. We don't bar them from seeing art to prevent this.
We are not talking about the scenario where LLM does a web search and "transforms" your blog as a response to a user prompt.
We are talking about people writing code to torrent content, including copyrighted content as books and newspaper articles then this same people create soem software/script/blackbox and they put this copyrighted stuff inside and this same people also put a filter in the output to attempt and block SOME of the copyrighted material to be spitted out(they did it for Dune, Harry Poter , probably other popular stuff but for sure they did not done it for Romanian copyrighted material or some small writer).
If I publish a poem I do not give implicit permission to anyone to use it as they see fit, and have scripts/software/backboxes train on it and spit parts of my poem out.
Would it be a violation to play back a record like a CD and have a digital buffer? That would be pretty silly.
Selling you the CD explicitly grants you the right to play it using a CD player.
> Would it be a violation to play back a record like a CD and have a digital buffer?
I genuinely have no idea lol.
Not for the purposes of copyright law.
> is that humans don't have separate RAM [or disk]
And that turns out to be incredibly important. Humans can't create a lasting, shareable copy of a copyrighted work by consuming it.
And that's a copyright violation.