Judge rejects Meta's claim that torrenting is “irrelevant” in AI copyright case

> This smells a bit strange to me, it's a "for-profit" company.. Fair use is a bit of pipe-dream here

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].

> This smells a bit strange to me, it's a "for-profit" company.. Fair use is a bit of pipe-dream here

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.

If you pirate a movie, watch it, and talk about it but don't distribute it then yes that's fair use. People literally do this all the time.

> This smells a bit strange to me, it's a "for-profit" company.. Fair use is a bit of pipe-dream here.

I think you're conflating "fair use" with "non-profit", or at least nudging that direction. That's too simplistic. Fair use is a four-factor test, and profitability is not among the four.

> if I download HBO's collection but don't seed or use for any commercial reasons it will be considered Fair Use ?

Fair use is just about how you use it, not how you get it. If you download HBO's collection and just watch it, that is fair use even if you are dinged about how you acquired the collection.

If you make a parody of a work in HBO's collection and publish/distribute it, the only question is whether or not the parody is a copy of their work. If it is, then you cannot distribute it; if not, then you can. You may "use" elements of their work in yours (as that is the point of a parody) but that can still be "fair".

Notice how none of that has anything to do with how you acquired the work. It is just not relevant to the question of fair use.

That has nothing to do with whether LLMs are fair use.

This seems to be a bad faith argument, although it would be amusing to see Facebook use it.

"Your honor, it's fair use because students have downloaded educational books for years."

People can process only fraction of that while using much more time to do that. And I'm using 'process' here to meet you in your nihilist argument that these algorithms are same as humans. Which is pretty strange because people barely acknowledge similarities with other mammals but suddenly software is equal.

>The judge is claiming that because the use is of the books are “so transformative,” the usage of these books to train an llm is fair use.

"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.

> The judge is claiming that because the use is of the books are “so transformative,” the usage of these books to train an llm is fair use.

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?

> but how did the plaintiffs determine their books were being used for training of the llm?

I think facebook admited this. I don't think the fact of this is under dispute.

You are allowed to quote from copyrighted works without needing permission. Trying to assert copyright because of a quote of, say, a mere 60 words in length would get you thrown out of any judge’s court.

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.

I think the better analogy is if you had someone with a superhuman, but not perfect memory read a bunch of stuff, then you were allowed to talk to the person about the things they’d read, does that violate copyright? I’d say clearly no.

Then what if their memory is so good, they repeat entire sections verbatim when asked. Does that violate it? I’d say it’s grey.

But that’s a very specific case - reproducing large chunks of owned work is something that can be quite easily detected and prevented and I’m almost certain the frontier labs are already going this.

So I think it’s just very not clear - the reality is this is a novel situation, the job of the courts is now to basically decide what’s allowed and what’s not. But the rational shouldn’t be ‘this can’t be fair use it’s just compression’. Because it’s clearly something fundamentally different and existing laws just aren’t applicable imo

This a strawman, in the sense that it is not accurate to think about AI models as a compressed form of their training data, since the lossiness is so high. One of the insights from the trial is the LLMs are particularly poor at reproducing original texts (60 tokens was the max found in this trial, IIRC). This is taken into account when considering fair use based on the fourth fair use factor: how the work impacts the market for the original work. It's hard to make an argument that LLMs are replacing long-form text works, since they have so much trouble actually producing them.

There's a whole related topic here in the realm of news (since it's shorter form), but it also has a much shorter half-life. Not sure what I think there yet.

Copyright was build to protect the artist from unauthorized copy by a human not by a machine (a machine wildly beyond their imagination at the time I mean), so the input and output limitations of humans were absolutely taken into account when writing such laws, if LLMs were treated in similar fashion authors would have had a say in wether their works can be used as inputs in such models or if they forbid it.

> That’s clearly below the proportionality threshold for copyright to matter.

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.

> The word transformative was put there in a time of manual transformative processes, like when you paint something similar to what you saw in a painting by another artist

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.

Ironically, the Llama models enable people to fine-tune on their own material. A lot of people are doing exactly this.

> The pirate sites? There is no pirate site hosting files here, BitTorrent is peer to peer.

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.

That does not seem to be the argument that was presented in the article.

Haha. I meant legally. In EU it's common to get fined for pirating movies.