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.”
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.”
That’s definitely one reason, but the copyright argument is also a part of it. The court explicitly said that their digitization is legal only if does not increase the number of copies of the book.
They have to keep the digital copy of the book because they add it to the training corpus for the LLM. Selling or donating the original physical book after doing that would void the fair use argument.
One of the tests that determines if it’s fair use or not is whether it can serve as a replacement for the original book. Pirated copies can, which is why they’re illegal. A summary like CliffNotes can’t. Even if the LLM can reproduce long passages, you can’t do that reliably (like you said) and it won’t work for all books.
I definitely agree with this. I think copyright law needs to be modernized to handle cases like this. I think the AI companies should be allowed to donate the digital copy to a library (like the Internet Archive) while still being allowed to keep their copy in their training corpus.
I think copyright law already needed to be modernised… and the way I think it could be done well is consistent with AI training needs. So the whole thing doesn’t really bother me. I’m surprised this angle incenses Lemmy so much because I’d have thought we’d on the whole by very anti-copyright in its current form.