Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI
228 comments
·May 5, 2025Workaccount2
dragonwriter
> Circumventing payment to obtain copyright material for training - Unambiguously illegal.
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.
aidenn0
> 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.
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
triceratops
> AI doesn't actually directly copy the material it trains on
Of course it does. Large models are trained on gigantic clusters. How can you train without copying the material to machines in the cluster?
thethimble
“Copy” is ambiguous here. Of course data is copied during training. That said, OP is referring to whether the resulting model is able to produce verbatim copies of the data.
xyzzy_plugh
Why does it have to be verbatim? Seriously, this I don't understand.
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.
HWR_14
"Of course data is copied during training" is copying. As far as I know, the law is consistent that temporary copies are also covered by the copyright act, and that's how some analogous cases were resolved.
dragonwriter
> That said, OP is referring to whether the resulting model is able to produce verbatim copies of the data.
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.)
OtherShrezzing
>That said, OP is referring to whether the resulting model is able to produce verbatim copies of the data.
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...
jayd16
So if they could produce verbatim segments, that would be a violation? The technology is certainly there and these companies need to work backwards to prevent that.
moomin
A good way of thinking about this is: consider the case where the data in question is illegal. Could you get into trouble for not only having access to it but also making copies of it?
There’s plenty of case law there…
crystal_revenge
> That said, OP is referring to whether the resulting model is able to produce verbatim copies of the data.
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.
kergonath
That copying is already a violation. At least it was when regular people weee on the receiving end of the lawsuits.
nashashmi
Copyright law does not restrict storing copyright information. It restricts distribution of copyright data without permission. So a computer can store and analyze data but cannot spit it out verbatim. If it spits it out under fair use clause, then it becomes debatable whether the new work is fair use.
flessner
If the former ever gets tested in court, it's the end of the road. All major AI companies have trained on copyrighted work, one way or another.
What is inspiration? What is imitation? What is plagiarism? The lines aren't clearly drawn for humans... much less for LLMs.
ekidd
> If the former ever gets tested in court, it's the end of the road. All major AI companies have trained on copyrighted work, one way or another.
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.
theturtletalks
China found the perfect way to disrupt US tech, releasing open source versions of it for free or at least cheaper. Most of US tech is built on open source anyways and with the pace YC is investing in open source alternatives, it will win out in most niches.
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.
flessner
The pattern hasn't changed in decades. Remember when ZTE copied Cisco's router code so precisely they included the same bugs and documentation typos?
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.
jamiek88
> And I can tell you down to the dollar what LLMs can save in certain business use cases.)
Please do!!
serial_dev
You point to Chinese companies disregarding any rules if there is value to be had in AI, while in the US, AI companies going to get 500 billion investment and a whistleblower is dead.
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.
dragonwriter
> If the former ever gets tested in court, it's the end of the road. All major AI companies have trained on copyrighted work, one way or another.
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.)
diggan
> If the former ever gets tested in court, it's the end of the road. All major AI companies have trained on copyrighted work, one way or another.
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.
nradov
That would hardly be the end of the road. If copyright enforcement gets stricter then that will give a market advantage to the largest, best funded major AI companies like OpenAI because they can afford to simply buy licenses from copyright holders. I predict that we'll see new middlemen arise specifically to handle this licensing, much like the agencies that handle most music licensing today.
nickpsecurity
The FairTrained models claim to train with only public domain and legal works. Companies are also licensing works. This company has a lawful, foundation model:
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.
bilbo0s
I don't know?
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.
vkou
If corporations owned human slaves and fed them copyrighted materials so that they were inspired to produce original creative output, I don't think that creative output should enjoy legal protections either. Even if slavery were not illegal.
Because the obvious question would be - how can free people compete with that?
Yizahi
The whole point of the fair use clauses is to protect humans. Clearly we can easily say that programs are altogether exempt in favor of humans, and it would be a proper thing to do, until the first real AI is built.
giancarlostoro
I have a weird controversial view on this in terms of how to legally do it, and that is, for your 1 model, you should be only required to buy a digital copy of the work, maybe publishers should make digital copies that are tailored for LLMs to churn through, but then price it at a reasonable rate, and make the format basically perfect for LLMs.
romanzubenko
This is actually clever, let the market decide the price and the worth of each book for training. Pricing per model might be tricky, instead annual licensing for training might be better pricing structure. Very quickly all big publishers and big labs might find very precisely what the fair price is to pay per book/catalogue.
Lerc
I'm not sure if Meta did anything illegal in 2. either.
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.
rixthefox
> but it would seem a reasonable protection for consumers in general.
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.
Dylan16807
So they promise to all their ISPs not to torrent again, and the ISPs keep accepting big piles of money to provide service?
I don't see how that's a threat to Meta.
singron
The original complaint alleges that the training process requires copying the material into the model and thus requires consent of the copyright holder. (Copyright protects copying but notably not use, so the complaint has to say they copied it in order to have standing). Then it says they didn't have consent.
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.
blibble
Blizzard managed to get a copyright infringement win against a defendant company that merely accessed their game client (IP) in memory: a cheat reading values of player position
IP that had been previously loaded by Blizzard itself
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzar....
CyberMacGyver
The source being illegal doesn’t make your use legal. Infact one could argue that it’s equally illegal or worse since a corporation knowingly engaged in illegal activity.
knowitnone
So you're saying I can legally download movies as long as I don't provide them to others? Sweet!
nashashmi
All AI is “trained” on existing works. But it also works by outputting altered copied data. This output part is a copyright violation.
startupsfail
It’s weird that you are saying it’s unambiguously illegal. AFAIK, in some cases used for training were initially created by non-profits and transformed sufficiently to strip the copyrights.
alangibson
> AI doesn't actually directly copy the material it trains on, so it's not easy to make this ruling.
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.
Dylan16807
> the fact that it pulls not only the entirety of the work
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.
granzymes
I was actually in the courtroom for this summary judgement hearing, and took extensive notes. My summary of the case:
The authors hung their hats on two theories. The first that the use of copyrighted works for training was not fair use. In particular, their main argument is that because Meta torrented at least some of the training material it cannot be fair use as a matter of law. The second theory is that Meta is depriving them of sales in the market for licensing their works for the purpose of training LLMs. In the alternative, Meta deprived them of at least one sale (the purchase Meta could have made to copy their books from if they had not illegally downloaded their works).
Meta responds that how the work was copied is irrelevant for fair use, and that definitionally all copies at issue for a fair use defense were unauthorized. Furthermore, they say that the authors cannot claim a right to a licensing market for the very same use that Meta is saying was fair: a contrary holding would mean that no use would satisfy prong 4 of the fair use test because you could always claim such a market.
The hearing was interesting because the judge seemed to agree with Meta on all of the above points and yet still seemed to think the copying was unfair (in the colloquial sense, not the copyright sense). The judge spent essentially the entire hearing discussing a totally different theory that the authors did not make, and the authors tried to convince him that that actually they did make that argument.
That theory is that the outputs of the LLMs could so thoroughly harm the markets for the originals that the 4th factor comes out decisively in favor of the authors (balancing and perhaps outweighing factor 1 favoring Meta on transformativeness). The authors strained to say they put this at issue, but the judge was quite skeptical and said he would need to hear from an AI expert on whether this is a plausible harm, and whether it is imminent.
Bottom line: I expect Meta to win a large part of this case on summary judgement, which I did not expect going in to the hearing. However, I think the judge will lay out a roadmap for what he thinks is the best way to bring a future case.
ndiddy
The title for this submission is somewhat misleading. The judge didn't make any sort of ruling, this is just reporting on a pretrial hearing. He also doesn't seem convinced as to how relevant downloading books from LibGen is to the case:
> 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.”
bgwalter
The RIAA lawyers never had to demonstrate that copying a DVD cratered the sales of their clients. They just got high penalties for infringers almost by default.
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.)
Majromax
> The RIAA lawyers never had to demonstrate that copying a DVD cratered the sales of their clients. They just got high penalties for infringers almost by default.
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.
pessimizer
> 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.
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.
999900000999
Meta needs these books.
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.
anshumankmr
Interesting figure that guy.
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.
A_D_E_P_T
He was also the primary villain of John Carreyrou's account of Theranos' rise and fall -- Bad Blood -- as his firm attempted to bully and hound whistleblowers, and intimidate their families with baseless legal threats. Not a very nice or ethical guy.
null
kranke155
Copyright was invented (in its modern form) by corporations. It will be uninvented if need be for corporations.
Zambyte
I'm curious what you mean by "in it's modern form". You seem to suggest there was a previous form that was not invented by corporations, but I don't believe that is the case.
morkalork
The golden rule strikes again!
ImPostingOnHN
If I remember correctly the legal precedent from that era, and if I'm summarizing correctly: Those who served or uploaded were considered to be infringing, since they were "making copies" by serving or uploading, whereas those who downloaded infringing copies were not themselves infringers. Meta in this case is at least described by the latter, and the question is whether LLM generation constitutes the former.
fmblwntr
ironically, he was the head lawyer on the legal team for napster (obviously a huge loss) but it accords well with your theory
cma
That's because that was statutory infringement where marketplace impact things come up more in fair use ("drummer reacts to hearing most famous drummer for the first time"). They look at whether it acts as a substitute for the original, but there are different rules depending on the type of fair use, how transformative it is, and more.
doctorpangloss
Hacker News readers want simple, first principles answers that fit in a tweet, that require no reading, let alone case law, to understand.
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.
pessimizer
> “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.”
"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.
Dylan16807
If you do that, it won't be able to give you a summary detailed enough to infringe anything.
pessimizer
It may give me a summary good enough that I don't have to buy the book, since it read the book. If there are any parts that aren't detailed enough for me, I can ask them to be expanded.
If you're telling me that's not "infringing," you should follow what up with the argument for why it is not.
selfselfgo
To me it’s a totally insane argument from the judge, if it doesn’t stop the authors from making money on their works, then the judge is basically capping the income on all writers. The AI is totally useless without their knowledge and yet they have to prove they aren’t hurting its profits. Like these authors are entitled to derivative uses of their writing, if they’re not it’s a total farce.
codedokode
It's typical double standards policy: Google and Github remove links to pirated material (and pirated material itself) so that ordinary folks cannot download it for free, but when Zuckerberg downloads gigabytes of pirated material without paying, it's ok. The legal system doesn't want to put an ordinary folk and Zuckerberg at the same level.
dragonwriter
This is the source headline, but it is pure clickbait; the judge absolutely did not say that in any of the quotes in the article; in the hearing on both parties motions for partial sunmary judgement, he both said that would be the case if the plaintiffs proved certain facts and raised doubts that they have the evidence to prove them.
TimPC
I think the headline is a bit misleading. Mets did pirate the works but may be entitled to use them under fair use. 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. I also don’t think AI generated fiction is anywhere near high quality enough to substantially reduce the market for the original author.
stego-tech
The problem is that "harm" as defined by copyright law is strictly limited to loss of sales due to breach of that copyright; it makes no allowment (that I know of) to livelihoods lost by the theft of the work indefinitely, as AI boosters suggest their tools can do (replace people). The way this court case is going, it's an uphill battle for the plaintiffs to prove concrete harm in that very narrow context, when the real harm is the potential elimination of their future livelihoods through theft, rather than immediately tangible harms.
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.
ijk
A difficult, but not intractable problem: OLMoTrace claims to be able to trace from output to training data in seconds [1]. Notably, it can do this because OLMo itself was intentionally designed to be open and transparent [2]; it was trained on 4.6 trillion tokens of entirely open data (which you can download yourself) [3]. There's nothing stopping Meta or OpenAI from creating a similar tool, other than the obvious detail of that showing their exact training data.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.07096
stego-tech
I love it! Keeping this in my back pocket the next time someone claims that keeping accounting of training data and sourcing it isn't feasible or technically possible.
lopis
> Artists and creatives can cite their inspirational sources
Even humans have a lot of internalized unconscious inspirational sources, but I get your point.
immibis
Well, no, because all those file-sharing users used to get fined $250,000 or whatever, which is obviously much greater than the amount they would have paid for whatever they downloaded.
tedivm
Github does give free copilot access to open source developers it considers important enough (which is a pretty low bar). While not the same as actually paying, it's the only example I can think of where the company that used people's copyrighted material actually gave something back to those people.
bgwalter
They want to track and utilize the new code that those developers are writing. And they want to keep them on GitHub. And they want to claim in potential lawsuits:
"See, those developers themselves have used CoPilot, so they approve the copyright infringement."
_aavaa_
What you’re describing is the Extend phase of Microsoft’s plan.
mistrial9
the educated and erudite can wait in line near the Castle; every day due to the grace of our masters, unused bread from the master's table is available without prejudice. These people can have a fine life, and the people are fulfilled.
msabalau
AI Boosters can suggest whatever nonsense strikes their fancy, and creatives can give into fear for no reason, but the best estimates we have from the BLS is that the there are careers and ongoing demand for artists, writers, photographers.
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.
subscribed
Your friend might want to check Perplexity.
lopis
While Perplexity is able to show sources for the information it shows, the language part, and the body of text upon which it was trained, is a black box, and sources are not given, nor typically desirable as a user.
apercu
> but may be entitled to use them under fair use.
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? ;)
Filligree
> 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. ;-)
BrawnyBadger53
If the result of this becomes that substantial remixes and fanfiction can be commercialized without permission from authors then I am happy. This stuff should have been fair use to begin with. Granted it probably already is fair use but because of the way copyright is enforced online it is effectively banned regardless.
lukeschlather
I don't believe anyone was ever penalized for downloading only uploading which seems like a pretty similar principle to what the judge is saying here.
sillysaurusx
Heh. People were penalized for merely creating search engines that happened to link to songs. Supposedly the RIAA accepted the offer of a 20-something’s life savings, but only if they switched their major from CS to something else. I believe it, having witnessed those times.
fngjdflmdflg
This is why Meta didn't seed.[0]
[0] https://torrentfreak.com/meta-says-it-made-sure-not-to-seed-...
null
immibis
If you used it for fair-use purposes, it could well have been legal. The only way to find out for sure would be to have them sue you, and then successfully or unsuccessfully defend yourself with a fair use argument. Please keep in mind that the law is a kind of stochastic process; "how illegal" something is dependent on how many times someone is found liable for it, which is something that takes a bunch of lawsuits to actually know, and each lawsuit is unique. It's not a computer program where if(X && Y && !Z) then punishment(); (well it sort of is, but X and Y and Z aren't definite boolean values, but things that have to be estimated based on evidence). (I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice)
gabriel666smith
I think there's a really fundamental misunderstanding of the playing field in this case. (Disclaimer that my day job is 'author', and I'm pro-piracy.)
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.
internetter
> Meta did pirate the works but may be entitled to use them under fair use
What fair use? Were the books promised to them by god or something?
TimPC
Fair use allows for certain uses of copyrighted works without a specific license for those works. One of the major criterion is how transformative the work is and an LLM model is very different from the original work so it seems likely that criterion at least is met.
SideburnsOfDoom
> an LLM model is very different from the original work
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.
matkoniecz
"fair use" is a specific legal term
internetter
I'm aware. I was unsure what doctrine of fair use meta's behaviour could be defended as.
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?
ta1243
In a specific legal jurisdiction.
The Berne convention mentions "fair practice", and puts the responsibility on the individual countries.
onlyrealcuzzo
> I also don’t think AI generated fiction is anywhere near high quality enough to substantially reduce the market for the original author.
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.
SideburnsOfDoom
Firstly, no kidding, of course it's "illegal" and "Piracy".
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.
aurizon
Yes, current AI video/text product is inferior at this time. Youtube is full of all genres of inferior products - at this time! The ramp of improvement is quite steeply pointing upwards. This is retrospective of the days of spinning jennies and knitting/weaving machines that soon made manual products un-economic - that said, excellent craft/art product endured on a smaller scale. AI is also taking a toll on the movie arts, staring at the low end and climbing the same incremental improvement rungs. All the special effects(SFX) are in a similar boat. Prop rentals are hit hard. 100 high res photos of an old Studio Tv camera - all angles/sizes/lighting can be added to an AI prop library and with a green screen insert the prop can manifest as a true object in any aspect. There can be many. It still takes people to cull the hallucinations - a declining problem. Same with actors. They can be patterned after a famous actor - with likeness fees, or created de-novo. All the classic aspects of a studio production suffer the same incremental marginalisation - in 5 years = what will remain? - what new tech will emerge? I feel that many forks will emerge, all fighting for a place in the sun = some will be weeded out, some will flower - but at a very high pace. The old producers/directors/writers - the whole panoply of what makes a major studio will be scattered like dried bread crumbs,
kazinator
Do you not understand that "fair use" is not some copyright free-for-all which lets you use works wholesale without attribution as if they were suddenly public domain?
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.
danaris
> To make fair use of a book's passage, you have to cite it.
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.
ryandrake
AI hucksters vs. the Copyright Cartel. When two evil villains fight, who do you root for? Here's hoping they somehow destroy each other.
pessimizer
Last time they fought, it was google vs. the publishers, and it resulted in the scanning and archiving of all of those books in the first place.
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.
probably_wrong
You can always root for the lawyers.
thomastjeffery
I can only root for them both to lose.
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.
TrnsltLife
Reading the books changes the weights of the neural network. If ruled illegal, wouldn't it also become illegal for a human to read an illegally downloaded book? So far, I thought just redistribution was illegal.
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?
delecti
Books are sold for the purpose of people reading them, including all the normal consequences that happen from a person reading a book. AI training being analagous to that doesn't unlock some cheat code that makes it legal, or reading books illegal. And it might indeed be found legal, but not for that reason.
labrador
"Chhabria is cutting through the moral noise and zeroing in on economics. He doesn't seem all that interested in how Meta got the data or how “messed up” it feels—he’s asking a brutally simple question: Can you prove harm?"
trinsic2
> Can you prove harm?
Where was this argument when Napster was being sued?
ebfe1
And this is how Chinese model will win in long term, perhaps... They will be trained on everything and anything without consequences and we will all use it because these models are smarter (except for area like Chinese history and geography). I don't have the right answer on what can be done here to protect copyright or rather contributing back to authors of a paper without all these millions dollar wasted in lawsuits.
jayd16
So to the legal peanut gallery here...
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?
caminanteblanco
I feel like this submission does a disservice by changing the title from the article's. It is misleading, and implied that the judge has already given a ruling, when they have not.
Let me make a clarifying statement since people confuse (purposely or just out of ignorance) what violating copyright for AI training can refer to:
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.