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:<p>> 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.”<p>> 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.”
Let me make a clarifying statement since people confuse (purposely or just out of ignorance) what violating copyright for AI training can refer to:<p>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.<p>2. Circumventing payment to obtain copyright material for training - Unambiguously illegal.<p>Meta is charged with doing the latter, but it seems the plaintiffs want to also tie in the former.
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.
"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?"<p><a href="https://archive.is/Hg4Xr" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/Hg4Xr</a>
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.
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.
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.<p>Also I read that ordinary folks have been arrested for filming in the cinema even if they did not redistribute the video (due to being arrested). Again, it is unfair why they get arrested and Zuckerberg doesn't.
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.
If it is a "fair use" to run the business using pirated books, does it mean that it is "fair use" to use pirated software as long as you don't distribute it? Why pay for copyrighted works if Zuckerberg downloads them for free?
I simply don't think that the copyright IP framework as it exists can be applied to training on this scale. Or, if it can, the relative value of any specific author/content creator's work is deminimis.<p>When the scale is a significant portion of all human text output ever, I don't think we're in the realm of any prior model. This is now something closer to how society attempts to approach natural resources like land, frequency bands, utility right-of-way, etc. I think this is the direction that laws and legislation should look to go. Or maybe not, I don't claim to have <i>the</i> answer, only that existing models are inadequate.
I get both sides of this debate.<p>However, claiming llama is not a 'substantial transformation' of the information used to build it seems untennable.<p>The complaint feels to me more like the paint factory claiming rights to the paintings you created with it's paint, rather than a classic pirate DVD copier that just resells copies.<p>Maybe a midway could be some Google Books like solution where you can still find anything but where the output is restricted to just substantial fragments and not complete verbatim chapters?<p>I do not believe people use llama to 'read published books on the cheap'.
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.<p>Will the neural network (LLM) itself become illegal? Will its outputs be deemed illegal?<p>If so, do humans who have read an illegally downloaded book become illegal? Do their creative outputs become illegal?
So to the legal peanut gallery here...<p>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?<p>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?
I'm wondering if authors are making the same mistakes that the music industry did with Napster and kazaa. Using AI has led to more book purchases for me. If I discover and enjoy a book via AI I'm more inclined to buy it. The cats out of the bag, so pet him.
This is the main reason why Chinese AI will be better than Western AI in the long term - Chinese companies can train on higher quality dataset (all the copyrighted books in the world)
> “What about the next Taylor Swift?” he asked, arguing that a “relatively unknown artist” whose work was ingested by Meta would likely have their career hampered if the model produced “a billion pop songs” in their style.<p>I have this debate with a friend of mine. He's terrified of AI making all of our jobs obsolete. He's a brilliant musician and programmer both, so he's both enthused and scared. So let's go with the Swift example they use.<p>Performance Artists have always tried to cultivate an image, an ideal, a mythos around the character(s). I've observed that as the music biz has gotten more tough, that the practice of selling merch at shows has ramped up. Social media is monetized now. There's been a big diversification in the effort to make more money from everything surrounding the music itself. So too will it be with artists.<p>You're starting to see this already. Artists which got big not necessarily because of the music, but because of the weird cult of personality they built. One who comes to minds is Poppy, who ironically enough built a cult of personality around her being a fake AI bot...<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppy_(singer)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppy_(singer)</a><p>You've definitely got counter-examples like Hatsune Miku - but the novelty of Miku was because of the artificiality (within a culture that, like, really loves robots and shit). AI pop stars will undoubtedly produce listenable records and make some money, but I don't expect that they will be able to replace the experience of fans looking for a connection with an artist. Watch the opening of a Taylor Swift concert, and you'll probably get it.
The legal system is not going to be kind to the AI hucksters. Why? Because, quite stupidly and counterproductively, they have stepped on its toes by claiming that AI can replace lawyers. On top of that, there have been incidents of lawyers getting in hot water for generating slop instead of doing their work. So, this isn't just some distant, abstract tech issue for the lawyers and judges, like whether APIs should be copyrighted. If you're in any kind of business, you generally want these people to be on your side. Oopsies!
Whether or not Meta wins this case, I'm never going to support any government that supports both LLMs and IP. Like we have to put up with IP despite having no clear value to a digital society but as soon as it becomes inconvenient it goes out the window? Nah, let's just trash the state and start over.<p>It's going to take centuries to undo the damage wracked by IP-supported private enterprise. And now we also have to put up with fucking chatbots. This is the worst timeline.