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Some of the world’s largest music publishers filed a blockbuster lawsuit against Anthropic late Friday night, alleging “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.”

  • dan@upvote.au
    51·
    4 hours ago

    I don’t see how this would go any differently to the book lawsuit they settled.

    With that lawsuit, the court found that training the LLM on books is covered under fair use, as long as the books are legally acquired and they do not make illegal copies. (obviously, they can’t use data fron Anna’s Archive any more)

    The argument is that them training on the books does not impact sales of the books themselves - someone that was going to buy the book would still buy it even if an LLM was trained on it, just like they’d still buy it even if summaries/CliffNotes and reviews exist. The training is considered transformative as the LLM learns the relationship between the words rather than retaining the text of the books as-is, and transformative use is allowed under fair use.

    This is why the AI companies are destroying books - they have to destroy any books they scan in order to comply with US copyright law. Transforming the book from one form to another (eg from print to digital) is OK as long as only one copy remains.

    I’m not saying I agree or disagree, just that this is the current state of copyright caselaw in the USA.

    Having said that, the music industry is significantly more litigious than the book industry, so we’ll see what happens…

    • FishFace@piefed.socialEnglish
      3·
      2 hours ago

      A couple of things I think are slightly off:

      • They destroy the books because it allows them to scan them better. With the spine sliced off, a machine can automatically go through the pages, and there is no distortion or shadow at the middle.
      • There’s no need to do this legally - they could donate used books. The argument shows that the final product is transformative, so it doesn’t matter whether they keep the books or not.
      • LLMs can reproduce quite long passages of books, though I don’t think this changes the argument much, because it’s not reliable or useful.

      I always thought there was in obvious win where companies doing this could be forced to archive the scan publicly (after some period of time). They’d be able to use it/sell it for training, but we wouldn’t lose rare books forever.