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.
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.
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.
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
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
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".
Presumably, there would be no requirement for the student to learn from it - making the unauthorised copy would be itself an infringement.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright
Okay, not a corporation, but a company.
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.)
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.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(19...
Of course, even this isn't enough, since corporations regularly steal (actually) from individuals, with near impunity.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
If you're telling me that's not "infringing," you should follow what up with the argument for why it is not.
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.
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?
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."
> 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.”