Some of the world’s largest music publishers filed a blockbuster lawsuit against Anthropic late Friday night, alleging “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.”
DRM bros vs AI bros
It’s like watching bullies fight. I want both of them to lose but in the meantime, I’m just gonna just enjoy the popcorn and cheer whenever a punch is thrown
I mean hey if the RIAA is gonna go after teenagers for hundreds of thousands in like 2004, they had friggin BETTER level their cannons at AI bros!
Publishers, not labels
You sill can’t steal music. That’s not how it works.
This may be unauthorised use, derivative works, possibly copying, but theft is the wrong word and property doesn’t apply to works of art, only to the physical medium they are etched on.
I don’t see how this would go any differently to the book lawsuit they settled.
With that lawsuit, the court found that training the LLM on books is covered under fair use, as long as the books are legally acquired and they do not make illegal copies. (obviously, they can’t use data fron Anna’s Archive any more)
The argument is that them training on the books does not impact sales of the books themselves - someone that was going to buy the book would still buy it even if an LLM was trained on it, just like they’d still buy it even if summaries/CliffNotes and reviews exist. The training is considered transformative as the LLM learns the relationship between the words rather than retaining the text of the books as-is, and transformative use is allowed under fair use.
This is why the AI companies are destroying books - they have to destroy any books they scan in order to comply with US copyright law. Transforming the book from one form to another (eg from print to digital) is OK as long as only one copy remains.
I’m not saying I agree or disagree, just that this is the current state of copyright caselaw in the USA.
Having said that, the music industry is significantly more litigious than the book industry, so we’ll see what happens…
A couple of things I think are slightly off:
- They destroy the books because it allows them to scan them better. With the spine sliced off, a machine can automatically go through the pages, and there is no distortion or shadow at the middle.
- There’s no need to do this legally - they could donate used books. The argument shows that the final product is transformative, so it doesn’t matter whether they keep the books or not.
- LLMs can reproduce quite long passages of books, though I don’t think this changes the argument much, because it’s not reliable or useful.
I always thought there was in obvious win where companies doing this could be forced to archive the scan publicly (after some period of time). They’d be able to use it/sell it for training, but we wouldn’t lose rare books forever.
They destroy the books because it allows them to scan them bette
That’s definitely one reason, but the copyright argument is also a part of it. The court explicitly said that their digitization is legal only if does not increase the number of copies of the book.
There’s no need to do this legally - they could donate used books. The argument shows that the final product is transformative, so it doesn’t matter whether they keep the books or not.
They have to keep the digital copy of the book because they add it to the training corpus for the LLM. Selling or donating the original physical book after doing that would void the fair use argument.
LLMs can reproduce quite long passages of books, though I don’t think this changes the argument much, because it’s not reliable or useful.
One of the tests that determines if it’s fair use or not is whether it can serve as a replacement for the original book. Pirated copies can, which is why they’re illegal. A summary like CliffNotes can’t. Even if the LLM can reproduce long passages, you can’t do that reliably (like you said) and it won’t work for all books.
I always thought there was in obvious win where companies doing this could be forced to archive the scan publicly (after some period of time)
I definitely agree with this. I think copyright law needs to be modernized to handle cases like this. I think the AI companies should be allowed to donate the digital copy to a library (like the Internet Archive) while still being allowed to keep their copy in their training corpus.
I think copyright law already needed to be modernised… and the way I think it could be done well is consistent with AI training needs. So the whole thing doesn’t really bother me. I’m surprised this angle incenses Lemmy so much because I’d have thought we’d on the whole by very anti-copyright in its current form.
The training is considered transformative as the LLM learns the relationship between the words rather than retaining the text of the books as-is
Which is what humans do when learning something using existing works without paying the artist. People tend to forget that the goal of neural networks was to programmatically mimic the way the human brain works.
Of course the mechanisms behind it are different, but they’d have to be because it’s silicon vs carbon based processing.
Shouldn’t this be posted in UpliftingNews?
When they win
Neh… they’re all asshats, too. It’s the artists that need to win
If you want to support artists, go to concerts and buy merch. They make almost nothing on music sales/plays.
I know… and I do.
That was an addition to your statement, I didn’t mean it directly towards you.
Very well. Carry on. Lol
