I got to be honest, that sounds extremely weak to me. The benefit to the pirate site of joining the torrent swam seems like it would be extremely slight.
If it’s fine for a large corp. like Meta to pirate books then it’s fine for everyone else. If it’s a crime for ordinary consumers then it’s a crime for Meta too.
Especially as Meta aren’t doing this for charity. They train LLMs for their own gain.
Or "shadow library" or whatever you want to call it. The argument according to the article is that the entity that created the torrent, which also as far as i understand also operates a traditional website, benefits from meta's actions.
I think that is really far fetched.
I feel like this has really blown a hole in copyright.
"Your honor, it's fair use because students have downloaded educational books for years."
I’m not familiar with the facts of the case and IANAL, and its late, but how did the plaintiffs determine their books were being used for training of the llm? Was the model spitting out language that was similar or verbatim to their works?
"you're doing something so critical to our (country's) success, that we're ok to waive copyright. I get that, if the US doesn't do it, then China will(is).
Interesting judgement, and it's implications, if you are correct haha.
Maybe I'm mistaken but shouldn't the source come from a legal source ? This is not public domain material.
Again if I download the entire works of HBO tv shows, then make a "transformative" version on my iphone, how can that be considered fair use?
There is no such thing as a legal or illegal source, only legal or illegal uses.
If the use was legal, then it doesn't matter where you got the material from. Similary if you got the material via more conventional means it would still be copyright infringement if you used it in an illegal way.
> Again if I download the entire works of HBO tv shows, then make a "transformative" version on my iphone, how can that be considered fair use?
That wouldn't be considered transformative. In this context "transformative" means you transformed it into something with a different purpose than the original.
However if you for example made a video essay for youtube talking about the themes (or whatever) of the tv show including clips from it, that would be transformative and probably fine.
Then I get a free pass when downloading the entire disney collection but making a youtube essay video for each downloaded item? So long as I don't seed of course.
I'm not trying to be argumentative, but surely you can see how that will never pass muster.
I think facebook admited this. I don't think the fact of this is under dispute.
It was shown, in this case, that the llms wouldn’t generate accurate quotes more than 60 words in length.
This is not comparable to encoding a full video file.
Describing training as “encoding them in the model” doesn’t seem like an accurate description of what is happening. We know for certain that a typical copyrighted work that is trained on is not contained within the model. It’s simply not possible to represent the entirety of the training set within a model of that size in any meaningful way. There are also papers showing that memorisation plateaus at a reasonably low rate according to the size of the model. Training on more works doesn’t result in more memorisation, it results in more generalisation. So arguments based on the idea that those works are being copied into the model don’t seem to be founded in fact.
> I can't sell you a Harry potter book, but I can sell you some service that let's you generate it yourself?
That’s the reason why cases like this are doomed to fail: No model can output any of the Harry Potter books. Memorisation doesn’t happen at that scale. At best, they can output snippets. That’s clearly below the proportionality threshold for copyright to matter.
- It is not accurate to describe training as “encoding works into the model”.
– A model cannot recreate a Harry Potter book.
Neither of these have anything to do with “the spirit of the law”.
This is the part I have a problem with, that threshold was put there for humans based on their capabilities, it's an extremely dishonest assessment that the same threshold must apply for a LLM and it's outputs, those works were created to be read by humans not a for-profit statistical inference machine, the derivative nature were also expected to be caused by the former no the later, so the judge should have admitted that the context of the law is insufficient and that copyright must include the power of forbidding the usage of one's work into such model for copyright to continue fulfilling it's intended purpose (or move the case to the supreme court I guess)
It wasn’t. It’s there because a small proportion being reproduced doesn’t harm the copyright holder in the same way a full reproduction does.
Nobody is going to stop buying Harry Potter books because they can get an LLM to spit out ~50 words from the book. This is entirely in line with the spirit of the law. This is exactly why proportionality is a factor in fair use.
I kind of assumed I could ask it for verses from the bible one by one till i have the full book?
When i ask chatgpt for a specific page or so from HP I get the impression that the model would be perfectly capable of doing so but is hindred by extra work openAI put in to prevent the answer specifically because of copyright. In which case the question: What if someone manages to do some prompt trickery again to get past it? Are they then responsible?
Copyright law was spurred by the spread of the printing press, a machine which has ability to output full replicas. It does not assume human-like input/output limitations.
> A fair ruling would have declared that authors must be able to forbid the usage of their work as training data for any given model because the "transformative" processes that are being executed are wildly beyond what the writers of the law knew were even possible
Copyright's basis in the US is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Declaring a transformative use illegal because it's so novel would seem to run directly counter to that.
To my understanding it's generally the opposite (a pre-existing use with an established market that the rightsholder had expected to exploit) that would weigh against a finding of fair use.
This type of reasoning keeps coming up with seemingly zero consideration for why copyright actually exists. The goal of copyright, under US law, is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts".
The goal of companies creating these LLMs is to supersede the use of source material they draw from, like books. You use an LLM because it has all the answers without having to spend the money compensating the original authors, or put in the work digesting it yourself, that's their entire value proposition.
Their end game is to create a product so good that nobody has a reason to ever buy a book again. A few hours after you publish your book, the LLM will gobble it up and distribute the insights contain within to all of their users for free, "it's fair use", they say. There won't be any economic incentive to write books at that point, and so "the progress of science and useful arts" will crawl to a halt. Copyright defeated.
If LLM companies are allowed to produce market substitutes of original works then the goal of copyright is being defeated on a technicality and this ought to be a discussion about whether copyright should be abolished completely, not a discussion about whether big tech should be allowed to get away with it.
Nobody is going to stop buying Harry Potter books because they can get an LLM to spit out ~50 words from one of the books. The proportionality factor is very clearly relevant here.
> If LLM companies are allowed to produce market substitutes of original works
Did Meta publish a book written by an LLM?
> The goal of copyright, under US law, is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts".
I would consider training LLMs to be very much in line with those goals.
Do you have any citation that that is how the word "transformation" was understood historically? Because what your suggesting seems to be the opposite of what i've read.
My understanding is even back in the 1800s (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folsom_v._Marsh ) your example would not be considered transformative, if your intention was to make a similar painting to serve a similar purpose.
Or am I misunderstanding something about LLMs?
The ruling is fine. The judge is not Alsop but he’s not technically incompetent either, which is good.
The torrent comments in general are nothing to get het up about; in summary
1) Meta wanted to download but not upload libgen and Anna’s after they couldn’t find anyone with rights to license that would talk to them.
2) they didn't want to distribute; just download. An engineer put in evidence that they restricted seeding successfully.
3) late in the case Silverman et al claimed while they hadnt been seeding they had been leeching and that counts as distribution (?!)
Judge commented as follows
1. just downloading is probably fine because it could be for purposes of fair use, and fair use concerns generally trump even good faith and fair dealing
2. Nobody could get llama to spit out more than a 60 token quote from a plaintiff book; thus llama is not made for infringement
3. We will need more briefing on this leeching thing which it is alleged is a form of distribution.
The judge lays out what he thinks a workable claim to get to the supreme court would be, which is that these llms defeat the purpose of our copyright laws by reducing the amount of human creativity and expression available to those who want to create economic value through creativity. Eg where will the jobs for biographers go?
I will say that debate is an active topic worldwide right now and a good question, with answers ranging from: “this maximizes human creativity bro” to “laser printers disrupted lead type foundries, that was great” to “nobody will ever write again and we are murdering our creative class and burning down their craftsman mid century modern homes.”
It seems to me this will get taken up next session with SCOTUS but also that it’s a little early; we just don’t know where this is going exactly. Either way, I expect our current judge will learn that leeching is precisely NOT seeding once the defense legal team has time to brief him.
This smells a bit strange to me, it's a "for-profit" company.. Fair use is a bit of pipe-dream here. Also there is no conditions on the source of the content ? If the source was obtained from illegal sources IE illegal distribution of copyrighted materials does that not play a part ?
Also will this set a precedent that if I download HBO's collection but don't seed or use for any commercial reasons it will be considered Fair Use ?
This whole thing just reeks of "rules for thee but not for me".
Why do you think that? For-profit companies use fair use all the time. Its not unusual.
Yes, a usage being non-commercial can be a factor in favour of fair use, but its just one factor. Its definitely not a neccesary condition nor is it a sufficient condition.
> If the source was obtained from illegal sources IE illegal distribution of copyrighted materials does that not play a part ?
Why would it? That isn't really how copyright works. Its about the right to "copy" (or not to), not about distribution methods.
> Also will this set a precedent that if I download HBO's collection but don't seed or use for any commercial reasons it will be considered Fair Use ?
No. That's not the reason this is potentially fair use.
[Although as an aside it uses to be in Canada that only uploading was illegal].
Okay, but if there was no permission to "copy" the content by the owners. I wish I knew more about it all, but seems to me that quoting a snippet from a book while offering comment on it would be classic fair use. Consuming the entire collection for free to charge for transformative services really doesn't feel 'fair'.
And again I can't shake the feeling that if I did this, was brought to court. I would be laughed at for claiming fair use.
I still don't fully grok how Meta can legally download a pirated book as fair use when an individual doing the same would be deemed a criminal act.
It would seem that Meta still don't have the right to make copies of books that they haven't paid for.
Fair use can be for profit.
> if I download HBO's collection but don't seed or use for any commercial reasons it will be considered Fair Use
No, seeding is automatically not fair use. Leeching does not automatically mean its not fair use, just that it might be.
We are back to feudal society, except that monarchs or their advisers at least had taste as opposed to the Nouveau riche.
ngold•4h ago