These companies are trying to have their cake and eat it too.
Quite unlikely, training on behavior purportedly approximately replicates the behavior. It gets replicated intentionally as a whole.
IANAL, but I see significant differences with intent to copy a significant part as a whole into a competing product, surely shouldn’t fit under legal concept of fair use, no matter whether scanning books for LLM training fits or not.
Whether such things (behaviors) are copyrightable - and should they be so - is another interesting question. Those aren’t algorithms or databases (stuff clearly and explicitly covered in many copyright laws), those are human expectation models, something like how we train animals or teach our own.
Again - IANAL - but in my understanding (and I spend some time reading on this), the legal concept of fair use is all about the intent how copyrighted material is used. It's all copying or distribution, but law does make distinction about what and why.
I agree with that, however that doesn't make the output copyrightable then.
I think these AI companies live in a legal fantasy where they can take any content they want, put it into the mixer without caring about copyright and then what comes out of it is somehow copyrighted.
They have to pick one or the other, either the content copyright tains the model or it doesn't but the model isn't subject to copyright.
> those are human expectation models, something like how we train animals or teach our own.
But more importantly, made by machines, and one of the requirements for copyright is the human factor.
The mixer you're talking about is what they seem to claim to be transformative use, no? Unless I'm misunderstanding something, it's not a legal fantasy.
If it's transformative use, then it's transformative use of ... what exactly? Copyrighted works? I think the law is pretty clear on what happens on transformative use of copyrighted works.
Yes. Among other stuff, but non-copyrighted stuff is not exactly an issue so it can be left out of our focus most of the time.
> I think the law is pretty clear on what happens on transformative use of copyrighted works.
Ah, if only - it's not. You could be mixing it up with concept of derived work - that's where the law is pretty clear (I think). AFAIK (IANAL), transformativeness is merely a suggestive factor for fair use consideration, and then it's all "whatever court decides" with a bunch of guidelines and precedents.
It could be - databases are copyrightable. It's long established that if you put some effort into categorizing and processing information, you get rights for that work. Basically, you can get rights a phone book or a map, even if individual bits are not copyrightable. You can also get rights on a compilation or a catalog of other copyrighted works - although original authors' rights remain. But - there's a legal trick to avoid a liability even if you infringe: fair use doctrine.
> where they can take any content they want, put it into the mixer without caring about copyright and then what comes out of it is somehow copyrighted.
Yes. It's not a legal fantasy, though - that's what they had actually pulled off, as far as I understand it (and, again, IANAL, just a layman who's interested in this stuff a little bit). They argued their work is so highly transformative to allow fair use doctrine to shield from liability on copyright infringement claims. And courts seemed to agree, making this fantasy a reality. Just because that's how legal system works.
Model is still a derived work (AFAIK there's no legal way to clear that) of all the books and articles and whatever else is copyrightable (plus a ton more of non-copyrightable stuff), but there's no liability for training on all that stuff, because courts had ruled - and that happens on a case-per-case basis - that it falls under fair use.
And there's the difference: now Anthropic argues that copying the behavior verbatim is not transformative enough to shield Alibaba from liability by invoking fair use. Now it's up to the courts (if they sue and don't just do the PR dances) to check it out.
Disclaimer: first, I'm not a legal expert, and second - I'm not arguing whether anything is right or wrong, just mapping what happened or being argued to what I know about copyright.
After they threw away all the tainted data from the pirated books, right?
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/05/anthropic...
Suppose that I have a nearly perfect memory and I could remember all the books I read. Suppose also that I have a million year life span so I could read 7 million books. Then, what happens if at the end of all of those years, or at any earlier moment I answer questions from people and I exploit commercially the knowledge I gathered reading those books? Would my reading those books be study or copyright infringement? Remember the nearly perfect memory hypotheses.
Of course it's a bit silly because the time to train a LLM and the time I need to read all those books is different by orders of magnitude and that changes the perspective. Who would complain with me today if their heirs lose some money on 7 million AD? Who would even notice that I started that million years long endeavor. Who's going to be there to ask me questions by then? Humans? Birds? Lizards? And I can say that I am studying like everybody else before me, but does an LLM study? And I am sure there are many other nuances.
Anyway, I don't think that scanning is any different than photons hitting my retina. The difference is in what happens next: the faithfulness of memory, the amount of knowledge, the speed of accumulating it. After all a huge amount of quantity can become quality.
Many of us here are software developers by choice or hobby and we know it better than regular folks that scale changes everything and can break our assumptions and business if you design something for wrong scale.
Yet why do we still want to insist that a human and machine are the same and same rules apply when it comes to AI, though we know they operate at different speed and scale?
An LLM is just a really, really big, really, really elaborate "choose your own adventure" book.
You aren't a book.
But that's what makes the usual analogies with humans fail from the start. The laws were made with the assumption that they apply to humans which are a known quantity. This breaks down when you apply them with system with vastly increased (and ever increasing) capabilities.
> Anyway, I don't think that scanning is any different than photons hitting my retina.
If I ask you 10 years from now to give me a completely accurate depiction of what your retina registered yesterday at 5:52 PM, will you be able to? And can you give me a copy?
Let’s switch up your scenario. Let’s say the subject isn’t a human with machine-like qualities but instead a computer with human-like limitations. All the books were fed to that one computer, and for technical reasons it cannot be duplicated and can only answer one question at a time. Suddenly the infringement isn’t as problematic and the ways to commercially exploit that data are minimal.
Furthermore, even with perfect memory it would take time to read all those books, you’d never keep up with everything released in a single year. Nor would you be able to reproduce everything perfectly due to required time and lack of ability (perfectly recalling a painting or photograph does not mean you have the skills to make an exact copy).
All these comparisons are silly and useless anyway (though in your particular case I think you are arguing in good faith). Computers are not human. If a person was caught killing animals of an endangered species and used as a defence “but what about the natural predators in that habitat? I’m just doing the same as them”, we’d rightfully see through the bullshit and scoff at such an obviously flawed comparison.
And the systematic nature of the excerpt service makes the excerpts different from fair use quotes. A reference quote is not a service that can reproduce the entire work, and the reference quote cites the actual source of the insight/wisdom/research/poetry/etc.
The only thought experiment is why might someone even try to excuse this activity? I can think of a few.
As long as the book was a legal copy, that is allowed legally.
Could they not just subscribe to the academic publishers like universities do? Or buy eBooks? I don't understand how the "scanning" part is relevant here other than used physical books being cheaper perhaps?
That is only relevant in the US, and even there it is still not clear-cut whether the fair use doctrine applies on all these scenarios. Outside of the US the situation is also quite different: for example take a look at the recent ruling on GEMA vs OpenAI in Germany.
The reality is that the copyright issue with generative AI is very complex and reaching anything resembling a conclusion will take much more than a few opinion paragraphs from an American district judge.
When someone steals a watch, we force them to give it back. Yet when someone steals a cake and eats it, we don't force them to puke it back up.
If you pirate a movie, the court might very well force you to delete all the copies you made of the movie you downloaded, destroy DVDs you burned, etc.
Here's a better idea, a fixed fee for any work. You can buy the license to read a book for $X (for whatever purpose) in RAND terms - of course publisher/material costs go on top, so if you're buying an actual book you're getting the material costs as well - or streaming fees or whatever
Anthropic simply considered that cost prohibitive and chose piracy instead.