Meta Beats Copyright Suit From Authors Over AI Training on Books (bloomberglaw.com)
- Reference: 0178185144
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/06/25/2127222/meta-beats-copyright-suit-from-authors-over-ai-training-on-books
- Source link: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/legal-ops-and-tech/meta-beats-copyright-suit-from-authors-over-ai-training-on-books
> Meta escaped a first-of-its-kind copyright lawsuit from a group of authors who alleged the tech giant hoovered up millions of copyrighted books without permission to train its generative AI model called Llama.
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> San Francisco federal Judge Vince Chhabria ruled Wednesday that Meta's decision to use the books for training is [1]protected under copyright law's fair use defense , but he cautioned that his opinion is more a reflection on the authors' failure to litigate the case effectively. "This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta's use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful," Chhabria said.
[1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/legal-ops-and-tech/meta-beats-copyright-suit-from-authors-over-ai-training-on-books
failed to litigate (Score:2)
When the judge said the plaintiffs failed to litigate effectively, what he meant was this:
The defendant said that the LLM is not capable of reproducing the training materials. Instead, the information derived from them is able to summarize relationships, identify contained information, maybe even mimic the style of the book with new writings. In other words, it can do the things a normal human being can do after reading a book.
To prevail, the plaintiffs would have had to offer evidence that it was likely th
Re: (Score:1)
I am not a lawyer, but I read the lawsuit, it sounded like the plaintiffs weren't arguing copyright infringement but wanted case law to invalidate fair use as a concept.
I haven't read the opinion (Score:2)
But if you're summary is correct the judge is just plain wrong. If you store the details of a book into your model congratulations you have made a copy of the book as per our copyright law. We could change that. We made significant changes to copyright law in the wake of the internet for example such as section 230 of the CDA. But is the law is written right now ai is absolutely violating copyright
Not that any of that matters given how much money is on the table for AI
Re: (Score:3)
Section 230 is part of Title 47 (Telecommunications) of the U.S. Code. It has nothing to do with copyright, which is covered by Title 17.
If you want to consider copyright cases in the context of the Internet we could look at Metallica v. Napster Inc, which ... led to no changes to the law after it became clear that Napster would have to settle or lose.
Or we could consider Viacom International Inc. v. YouTube, Inc., which ... led to no changes in the law after YouTube lost an appeal and settled the case rat
Fix copyright law! (Score:2)
Most of the problem comes from the copyright period being so insanely long. Make copyrights expire after ~30 years or so, and much of this problem evaporates (as well as many other problems).
The end of copyright (Score:1)
I used to advocate for piracy in my 20s, when I could barely afford anything, but then changed my mind. For more than a decade I advocated for respecting copyrights, because even if the copyright system is truly skewed towards American financial interests, there are ways to profit from it even for poorer countries. I convinced a lot of people that copyright is a good thing, even with its flaws, even when hiding academic content and knowledge behind paywalls and high markups.
Now, it's impossible for me to ar
Pirating (Score:2)
Wasn't the story that Facebook also pirated these books? Seems like they could also be sued for copyright infringement.
The Privacy Rapists have now become... (Score:2)
the Content Rapists.
Re: (Score:3)
Since we are coming up with arbitrary measures of when of when to screw over as you so eloquently put it "rent seekers", I will come up with another arbitrary measure. If a work of art is good enough or important enough to include in a LLM, pony up the cash. Otherwise, piss off.
Re: (Score:1)
> The knowledge of these books is so thoroughly distilled into training these LLMs it is ridiculous to call them derivative works.
Excellent! Now that's an awesome defense next time I'll pirate anything: the knowledge of the things I pirated is so thoroughly distilled in me that it's ridiculous to consider my act illegal.