As far as I'm concerned, the courts are wrong, and training on ill gotten copyrighted material is not fair use. Given the clear value of highly trained LLMs, the investment they have taken on, and the amount of disruption to the existing economy they stand to make, in a just world, the people who created the training data deserve some level of compensation. I think, in the US, they are very afraid of falling behind China, who doesn't give a shit about intellectual property, but that doesn't mean we aren't crossing an ethical boundary, acting like them.
> As far as I'm concerned, the courts are wrong, and training on ill gotten copyrighted material is not fair use.
It’s important to remember that a court’s job is to apply law to a situation. When a court gets something wrong it’s a misinterpretation of the law and will, by definition, be overturnable on appeal. I suspect that your objection isn’t that the court is wrong, it’s that the law is wrong.
Yes, ultimately the problem is that the law is vague or inadequate. The courts have their definitions of fair use, which are their best efforts at interpreting the law, and I have mine, which is different.
William Roper: "So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!"
Sir Thomas More: "Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?"
William Roper: "Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!"
Sir Thomas More: "Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!"
This is why the idea of being "Vogelfrei" or "lawless" was honestly a terrifying concept in the middle ages. They are neither bound by law, nor protected by law.
A lawless man can be struck down with force without persecution by law, because they are lawless.
No, because these days we are quite explicit that the law binds us all. Citizen or not, legally present or not, criminal or not, every human being within the borders of the US (or any modern country) is entitled to the full protection of the law.
When an American becomes an outlaw, it doesn't mean the same thing as it did back then. There is no legal way for the government to deny someone their rights.
I am not 100% familiar with this theory, but I'm fairly sure there is an important difference: The monopoly of violence current police forces are granted did not exist in this particular way.
If a lawless man robbed from a village, any of the villagers could do whatever they wanted to them in retribution. Maybe limited a bit by religion.
It's not a settled area of law and there is a SDNY judge that has a completely different application of the fair use analysis in the same exact context and came to a completely different conclusion (that it is not fair use).
Sorry, I'm thinking of Kadrey, where the court rejected Anthropic's "training" argument and provided an explanation as to how author litigants should demonstrate market harm in order to succeed on a fair use analysis, a factor that Alsup did not effectively weigh.
I suspect the market harm angle is not going to work out either based on the one study I know of on the topic: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34777
> We document a tripling in the number of new books coming to market between late 2022 and late 2025 that mirrors the use of AI that we detect in new books. The effects of this influx on consumer welfare depend on the quality of the additional books. The average quality of new books has fallen with the LLM-induced influx, and books with detected AI are substantially worse than human-authored books, so that much of the new work is of little value to consumers. Still, the LLM influx has delivered some books in the middle range of the usage/quality distribution, and the LLM-era entry process delivered seven percent more consumer surplus from books than the pre-LLM process in 2025.
...
Moreover, the arrival of LLMs does not appear to have displaced activity by incumbent authors. Despite the controversy surrounding
LLMs, their effect on book consumers – like other cost-reducing technological changes in the cultural industries – is positive. However, because the new books are mostly of low quality, the effects are modest
So not only are existing authors unharmed (because most of the new competition is slop) there is even a small improvement for consumers.
IMO, using copyrighted works to train models should only be "fair use", if the models are then released as (at least) open weight, so that the public can benefit from it. (Although as noted by a sibling, this would require a law change, not action by the court).
Adobe’s ereaders had a disclaimer that their books cannot be read aloud. There’s clearly precedent that this sort of transformation was disallowed by publishers at the time. Interestingly, at least the audiobook of the latest dungeon crawler Carl has a disclaimer that it can’t be used to train AI
So will you owe life long compensation for all the knowledge you got from books too? How about all the pirated books, music, movies, etc you consumed? When will you set up a life long payment plan to corporations that own these rights, because I have a bridge to sell you if you think any of this settlement will go to any of the people who created anything.
I’m guessing you have some kind of imagined idea of some small author being compensated handsomely for his book and all future earnings that could have come from it. Reality though is that between the attorneys that will run away with some high triple digit millions and the corporations that own the rights to the subject works, there will be measly “checks” for any actual person that created anything, i.e., an artist or author.
In an odd way, this whole case is really just “capitalism” cannibalizing itself, i.e., publishers greedily and also in a terrified manner trying to steal away as much capital from the technological shift to AI as possible in order to either create a buffer or fund their transformation to adapt to what AI means to the very nature of writing itself, let alone publishing.
I suspect human writing could survive, but I don’t see any room for publishers.
> So will you owe life long compensation for all the knowledge you got from books too?
You're just falling into the trap of anthropomorphizing the phrase "training" in the context of LLMs, which is not the same things as what humans do. There is no evidence they are the same thing and there is nothing to support the notion that what an LLM does when it "trains" on a book is equivalent to a human reading it.
Whatever "training" is, if you can't persuade the machine to spit substantially the same text back out verbatim, it's clearly not something that falls under copyright law either, because there's no copy.
Yes, for some texts that's possible. But for the vast majority, it is not.
The New York Times lawsuit is resting on the point that large chunks of undigested articles can be vomited out. OpenAI tried to have the lawsuit thrown out but the courts permitted it to continue.
The Times... alleged that OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot had produced near-verbatim replicas of copyrighted articles, that the chatbots generated hallucinated content falsely attributed to the Times, ...
It's possible. Would be interesting to see their evidence, and to know whether they can reproduce it for arbitrary articles, not just ones that have been endlessly republished on the net.
Don't get too hung up on the preciseness of the copy - the courts won't. I doubt that spitting out an existing article with a few adjectives changed would be considered transformative.
What's almost certainly going to happen is that the courts will decide the infringing party in that situation is the one who willfully caused the violation.
Since most users of LLMs are not using them to run around copyright and this copyright stuff is aggressively trained out of models or blocked whenever possible, the models themselves are still transformative works not intended to facilitate infringement.
The point is that for most texts, it is not possible. It's not able to recall what I wrote on Geocities in 1995, even though there's a good chance it was trained on it.
Can you cite any information on this not being possible for the vast majority?
Or is it simply that the correct prompt hasn't been written for all possible cases?
I also fail to see the difference if logic/harnessing is added around a vector database that can output the complete corpus, but simply is instructed not to.
It very clearly is still compressing the information into the vector weights, and then recovering that information, thus the information is encoded.
Why is a vector database somehow completely different from maintaining a library of the text itself?
You are asking to prove a negative. But even assuming that the model is capable of returning every bit of its training data verbatim (a mathematical impossibility) that would not be enough as mere capability is insufficient here. If capability alone were the standard any library that also has a photocopier / scanner would be in violation.
To prove distribution of copyrighted materials it would have to be practical and actually used in the wild by people to circumvent copyright and generate copies of those works. Again, I can't prove a negative, but that isn't the standard, and nobody has shown a practical exploit here.
There was a paper a while back where (from memory) they managed to coax 75% of the original text of some internet-popular books out of an LLM. Harry Potter, 1984, etc. That's why I said it was possible for some texts.
My assumption is that multiple copies in the training data "wear a deeper groove". I believe those are infringing, and should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. But the vast majority of text doesn't wear that groove.
Is that relevant? I can use a lossy compression algorithm such that the original could never be recovered from the image I've produced, but that derived image would surely be under copyright.
LLMs are obviously capable of producing "exact" phrases as well. Ask it to give you famous quotes, it can do it. Ask it to read a paper for you and cite it, it can do it.
Here's a highly compressed representation of The Lord of The Rings (all three volumes):
1
Obviously, fidelity when uncompressing it is not great, but I can assure you it was lossily compressed from the original text. Is it infringing the original's copyright? I have to assume you'd agree that the answer is "no".
If I had compressed it by removing the letters x y and z, I'd agree with you that my "compressed" version is infringing.
So what we've got here is a spectrum with two ridiculous extremes, and a question: When has the artifact been compressed so heavily that it no longer infringes the copyright of the original?
I suggest "irretrievability" is a pretty good threshold for that question. Otherwise you're into "we know it infringes our copyright. Don't ask us to prove it, we just know it, ok?"
Given the sheer volume of text that an LLM gets trained on, and how small the output is, it seems obvious that 99% of it can no longer be recovered - the process is "lossy" to the point of irretrievability, and only a statistical smear is left behind. That's why I think only the copyright claims that can show infringement in court (Harpy Potter, et al.) have merit. And a court will still have to decide "how much is too much" but at least there's case law for that.
(Incidentally, I compressed the Mona Lisa to a single pixel. It was #3D3526).
My entire point is that compression is irrelevant. A lossily compressed image can absolutely still be in breach of the original's copyright. Showing that some kind of compressed artifact may not be doesn't change that.
"I can use a lossy compression algorithm such that the original could never be recovered from the image I've produced, but that derived image would surely be under copyright."
I've tried my best to show where I think you're wrong. I think all that's left is arguing over the exact definitions of "recoverable" and "irretrievable". As I said, the courts will have to decide that.
I have no clue what you're talking about tbh. I can use a lossy compression algorithm that is definitionally holding less information than the original while still be subject to the copyright of the original. This is just obviously true, converting a PNG to a JPEG does not invalidate the copyright on the PNG. You can also produce an imagine using a lossy compression algorithm that is not subject to the copyright of the original, I haven't said that that's not true.
Regardless, the argument that LLM output is or is not subject to copyright based on information theory is entirely defeated by what I've said.
Because that's legally the case? I don't understand the question. Using a lossy compression algorithm on an image does not remove its copyright protection.
Taking in an image then creating something new based on the ideas of that image is legally permissible, if you mean that you think AI training produces only derivative works.
What AI is doing is not analogous to compression so even if you think they are they same, it legally and technically speaking is not subject to the copyright of the original.
I wrote that comment. As I said, an LLM's weights are less than the size of theoretical compression, therefore what LLM training is doing is not compression at all.
At this point I believe you are willfully misunderstanding the argument, based on your other comments saying you don't understand, repeatedly, so I can't believe you have to say it again either.
Nah, I can't prove a negative. But Common Crawl is 12 petabytes and is not the largest part of what these models get trained on. DeepSeek v4 Pro is, what, 865GB?
That's one hell of a compression ratio, if it can do what you claim.
Ok, what about a human summarizing it or taking notes? What about a human indexing it for later searches? Does it matter if they use notecards or if they do it on a computer?
What if they retouch a photo you've taken as a political message? Does it matter if the do it with Sharpie, Photoshop, or by feeding it into an LLM?
When you publish, you give up some control over your work. Other people are allowed to do things with it and IMO it does not matter if it's in their head, on paper, or in a computer.
I think people forget that laws are perfectly capable of carving out exceptions, leaving purposeful ambiguity, expressing intent, etc. Yes, humans can have special rules, and very obviously should since laws exist to improve human lives.
I am actually not settled on either side of the matter and I have not forgotten that, but I think what we are really looking at is a rather more complex matter than people want to make it out to be. We are holding several but at the very least contradictory positions and they are incompatible.
Either it is theft or not theft. Why would you stealing from me deserve an exception, but when a group of people in an organization you may refer to as a corporation steal from me, you want them to pay me? Do as I say, not as I do or something like that?
Of course exceptions can be carved out, but they cannot be just, inherently. The problem is that we have allowed our ruling maniacs to create a fiction that organizations are people, which not only have more rights, and less responsibilities, and even less consequences/penalties; but also confers upon the individuals that make up the corporate person rather extreme super powers like being able to commit crimes up to outright murder, and there not only are effectively zero consequences for or to them but in most cases today they immensely profit from it and then shield that money from the victims seeking justice.
The underlying issue, why I am not settled on this matter, is that it is inherently contradictory because the facts and underlying assumptions are all so distorted and perverted that there is no good answer to be had and it's really just a matter of rule of power, feigning rule of law.
> Either it is theft or not theft. Why would you stealing from me deserve an exception, but when a group of people in an organization you may refer to as a corporation steal from me, you want them to pay me? Do as I say, not as I do or something like that?
Which system of justice works like this? The law, uniformly applied, is a steamroller. That's why we have courts, to allow people to explain their actions (justify them).
> Either it is theft or not theft. Why would you stealing from me deserve an exception, but when a group of people in an organization you may refer to as a corporation steal from me, you want them to pay me? Do as I say, not as I do or something like that?
Because the goal of laws is to improve human flourishing, not to be consistent. Laws are not strictly based on some sort of virtue ethics, they are often practical ways to accomplish the task of improving human lives. If having "applies to X but not Y and maybe Z depending on some criteria" accomplishes that then... that's the whole point.
> but they cannot be just, inherently
That's sort of an absurdly strong assertion. Why would exceptions not be "just"? "Killing someone is wrong, except in the case where it is strictly necessary to save lives in self defense" etc are generally consider just exceptions. This seems trivial. Very few people hold to an actual system of ethics that does not take context into account...
This reliably inevitable rationalization comes up in every thread it seems, and its ultimate goal is to humanize AI. This is what the big guys want us peons to believe and it works so well, I have even been lectured by an AI for being rude, the implication was that I was logged in and it would be a shame if anything happened to my account.
Quit trying to make AIs human, people who are trying to make AI human keep forgetting that humanized AI's have only the morals relevant to their mission, there is no profit in humanizing AI's because if we continue on this track of humanizing AI's, we being stupid humans will grant them civil rights expecting these new AI's with rights will somehow respect our rights and thats a fundamental misunderstanding of how AI'S actually work.
Copyright is what stops someone from copy+pasting a book that took years to write, then selling it $1 cheaper than the original author on Amazon or whatever and making a margin 1 million percent higher than the original author.
Imagine a society without copyright… only physically intensive jobs could make money because everything else would be pirated, ripped-off or free. Thus, only those who are financially independent could afford to publish. Because the world really needs more rich class propaganda…
How many times were hugely popular books rejected before a publisher decided they were worthy?
Copyright far more protects the wealthy than the good. They don't need to sell your book, they just need to own the book that people are buying right now. Giving your book a chance to sell would dectract from those sales.
If there were no copyright anyone trying to sell the book $1 cheaper would be undercut by someone selling $1 cheaper them them, and so on. The financial incentive to do that goes away. People then choose to distribute based on different incentives, like the fact that they have seen something worthy that others should see. We have almost completely lost that today because the financial incentive doesn't care what it is as long as you buy it. That might lead to a world dominated by an optimisation for whatever it takes to get you engaged, or worse, addicted. That world might really suck.
There needs to be a way to support the creation of art. Copyright lets a few corporations decide the subset of available art is seen enough and available to pay for (in the hope that maybe some of the patment gets to the creator). It is not a system that works in the modern world.
If money is the only incentive, then it's not a product of artistic work.
Also current copyright laws only exists to fulfill the constitutional mandate to promote the progress of science and useful arts. There are a lot of alternative ways to fulfill that mandate that don't include a lot of the baggage we have presently in copyright law which is now slowing down progress.
>If money is the only incentive, then it's not a product of artistic work.
This is just bullshit and no one said it's the only incentive.
> There are a lot of alternative ways to fulfill that mandate that don't include a lot of the baggage we have presently in copyright law which is now slowing down progress.
I hope you're not implying that post-hoc commercial exploitation via copyright is the only incentive for authors to write. Because we have a whole history worth of evidence to the contrary.
Great, that way is called copyright. The author has the right to control who has the rights to distribute their work, and can require compensation in exchange for that right; what economists refer to as "selling".
>The entire thesis of my commrnt is copyright is not that.
Your entire thesis is false on its face. One does not need a big publisher to get published or make there work available. You've also offered no other alternative wherein the other works not sought by large publishers will somehow be afforded equivalent treatment so your proposition is just ridiculous if not outright ignorant.
For strict definitiond of necessary (see also sufficient) this is correct.
A is not necessary for B if a single instance of B exists without A.
In colloquial terms it is frequently used to suggest a recommendation with an imperitive need.
Different things for the same word. Only the former can be used to determine if something is necessary, the latter is a subjective assertion and can have no proof either way.
Copyright doesn't actually stop me from pirating a book or an mp3 right now. Heck, I'll just download a book right now. Bam. Done. Some things are so difficult to keep from being pirated, such a photographs, that saying the copyright system protects photographers strikes me as a bit silly. It does protect some commercial photographers if a magazine wants to sell their photo sometimes, but that's a very very small slice of all the photos in copyright that are being shared online right now.
Also there are other systems that might protect an author's financials. Off the top of my head I imagine you could do a netflix model where every citizen pays some taxes to consume intellectual property like a utility. Then the goverment finds a way to measure what is being consumed and gives each author a share based on the rate of consumption. In fact the "intellegence is a ultility" ramblings of Sam Altmen sort-of point in this direction. But that's just one idea thought up early in the morning when its too hot to sleep properly. I'm sure there are many others.
> Also there are other systems that might protect an author's financials. Off the top of my head I imagine you could do a netflix model where every citizen pays some taxes to consume intellectual property like a utility. Then the goverment finds a way to measure what is being consumed and gives each author a share based on the rate of consumption.
We already have these - CD taxes, government grants funded by general taxes, GEMA in Germany, even TV licenses.
They all universally suck and are extremely unfair in who gets paid by them.
> It does protect some commercial photographers if a magazine wants to sell their photo sometimes, but that's a very very small slice of all the photos in copyright that are being shared online right now.
That is a very small slice thanks to copyrights. Without copyrights then corporations stealing from the small guy like this would be the majority of it.
It's funny because copyright only benefits the rich now. Record labels hold all the copyright to songs, same with publishers for books, Disney made sure it lasts over a hundred years. The days of copyright being held by individuals in any real sense is long gone.
You're speaking to the generation of pirates. What? Suddenly everyone is hanging up their high seas hat to capture the virtue signals of current sentiment?
am I? Most guys on this forum would be younger than me and I definitely find streaming services easier and more convenient than pirating and wondering if I’m gonna catch computer AIDS.
Right, it's about incentivising intellectual work. While I have big issues with the copyright system, like all the extensions lobbied for by Disney and friends, it did enable a lot of good work to happen.
How do we know that when we don't have a copy of the world without this regime? How much more and greater works could have been produced without such a repressive system?
A really successful work becomes part of the culture, and remixing, derivatives and other modes of integrating cultural artifacts are prohibited. Why should we allow corporations to own our culture?
Yeah, I can't AB test against a world without copyright at all, but I think there's sufficient evidence to believe that a lot of stuff would never have gotten done without copyright to ensure it could be done gainfully.
The importance of striking a balance between incentivising creation and enriching culture was why the original copyright term was dramatically shorter. The modern term of owners life + 80 years or whatever it is, is clearly ridiculous. 20 years before entering public domain seems pretty reasonable.
There's unfortunately also some pressure against people using legitimate public domain works. E.g. youtubers getting copyright strikes for playing public domain music because it's too similar to a specific copyrighted recording.
> Yeah, I can't AB test against a world without copyright at all, but I think there's sufficient evidence to believe that a lot of stuff would never have gotten done without copyright to ensure it could be done gainfully.
The problem is that there is also a lot of stuff that never got done because of copyright. And the extend to which works that were funded by exploiting copyright would not have been funded in any other way is also questionable.
Isn't most creative work synthesis rather than unique whole-cloth creation? Look at what happens with software when it is open sourced and allowed to be remixed freely. Are we better or worse off because of it?
There's nothing that prevents people from remixing things that are not copyrighted and create something amazing that others are interested in or of cultural value.
With open source, I should note, its remixing is in fact governed by copyright.
What things are not copyrighted? Anything someone makes is immediately copyrighted. If you mean take a couple hundred years old content to remix, well, I don't find that very useful and certainly not how human history has worked all this time.
You are right that in most countries (including the US) copyright protects a work automatically the moment it’s fixed in a tangible form.
I think we’ve veered a little off the original thesis where we started which is an argument that copyright is limiting the rate or breadth or level of cultural artifacts. I have to say that I find it hard to imagine a meaningfully higher volume or level than we already see today. I mean are you worried that we’re stifling creativity? I think it is abundant and the evidence is all around us.
I think the idea is if "AI" can solve math proofs that humans haven't for a century then if "AI" freestyles stolen art and literature then it might create something as good if not better because of resources and processing power
There might be something to that logic but art and literature doesn't obey rules like math and copyright exists to protect creators
That’s not accurate. All the Disney interpretations of pre-existing fairy tales also have takes by others, whether books, theatrical adaptations, or even movies! Take Snow White as an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_White
So I’d be curious to hear about a counter example.
I guess I haven't looked into it much, but the chilling effect of having Disney lawyers scrutinize your project would be enough to deter most people. The slew of content coming out after these properties enter public domain from Disney is telling. But it's also just the irony that Disney used other people's stories to build their empire but then fought extremely hard so that nobody could use theirs for as long as society would possibly hold out (which in my opinion was way beyond the point of reason).
Quite rich coming from a creator apparently, only certain creations are deemed worthy by you, seems like it invalidates your entire stance on the sanctity of art that all these pro-copyright people seem to hold.
I would be fine with abandoning copyright ... If it is done for everyone equally, and not just tech giants and VC money businesses get a free pass, while everyone else still has to follow the copyright laws. Lets go ahead and usher in an age of free information and experiencing all forms of human expression for everyone. But lets also come up with a way, to compensate our creative minds and our educators and artists. How about that UBI? We stand much to gain as humanity.
This. Copyright is a flawed system. There can be alternatives that allow more than 1 player to play and not create monopolies.
For example. I invent a new method of power washing. I start a power washing business using new tech. I file the tech for patent and copyright-equivalent use. This is then made available to other power wash companies that wish to use the tech and be certified in it so long as a small portion of their revenue goes back to the inventor for a set amount per volume, or something similar of a metric that has a cutoff after a point.
This will breed new industries, create new jobs, introduce new innovations, and allow the markets to move on from being strangled by one giant corporation.
Never really understood how libertarians expect to have someone making guns for their fiefdoms when there is no one to enforce property rights for said gun elements and manufactories.
Libertarianism is not a philosophy. It's selfishness taken to extremes and trying to find ways to justify it at a societal level. The only reason we're the top species is because we're ultra social and have culture, which is inherently a social trait (don't eat those red berries, they're poisonous). Libertarianism want all the benefits of working together with no actual thought into how that working together happens in real life, including punishment for bad behavior.
I guess they presume it requires on the good will of everyone to live peacefully without violating (non-existent) property laws over, say, robbing you in your sleep.
Your comment says basically nothing, no explanation of your point whatsoever, and either way I was talking about what I think they believe, not what I personally believe.
"I haven't loaded an advertisement in 20 years, I have 6TB of movies, 2TB of music, and seemingly endless file trees of mangas, all acquired for free over the years. Now having not said that, I beg you enforce copyright on these AI labs, so I can get a cut of their revenue for my years of writing well researched comments on the internet"
The internet, in true internet fashion, still has the general logic level of a 15 year old.
