7 ms·

Using them was allowed as fair use – it was the downloading of the pirated copies that was infringement. That's why Anthropic switched to scanning paper books.

realusername 3mo ago
If using the books is fair use, then distilling the model, which is just a derived product of those books is also fair use. These companies are trying to have their cake and eat it too.
- ascorbic 3mo ago
  Probably, yes. It's likely just a breach in their terms of service. You'll note that they're not suing them – they're trying to get the government to do their work for them.
- drdaeman 3mo ago
  Hmm, training on a book’s text smears the content all over the weights, merging it with all other texts. The original text isn’t intentionally supposed to be reproducible in any larger part (although IIRC models were able to emit fairly large chunks verbatim). Quite unlikely, training on behavior purportedly approximately replicates the behavior. It gets replicated intentionally as a whole. IANAL, but I see significant differences with intent to copy a significant part as a whole into a competing product, surely shouldn’t fit under legal concept of fair use, no matter whether scanning books for LLM training fits or not. Whether such things (behaviors) are copyrightable - and should they be so - is another interesting question. Those aren’t algorithms or databases (stuff clearly and explicitly covered in many copyright laws), those are human expectation models, something like how we train animals or teach our own.
  - didroe 3mo ago
    It's the exact same training process for both of your examples. I don't really see how you can claim books are not replicated, but that output from other LLMs is.
    - drdaeman 3mo ago
      Process is the same, but intent is not. One intent is to extract information from the book for better general eloquence and overall awareness - not for replicating the book itself (ability to recall verbatim fragments is a side effect, not the goal). Another intent is to replicate the behavior, carry it over using training. Again - IANAL - but in my understanding (and I spend some time reading on this), the legal concept of fair use is all about the intent how copyrighted material is used. It's all copying or distribution, but law does make distinction about what and why.
  - realusername 3mo ago
    > Hmm, training on a book’s text smears the content all over the weights, merging it with all other texts. The original text isn’t intentionally supposed to be reproducible in any larger part (although IIRC models were able to emit fairly large chunks verbatim). I agree with that, however that doesn't make the output copyrightable then. I think these AI companies live in a legal fantasy where they can take any content they want, put it into the mixer without caring about copyright and then what comes out of it is somehow copyrighted. They have to pick one or the other, either the content copyright tains the model or it doesn't but the model isn't subject to copyright. > those are human expectation models, something like how we train animals or teach our own. But more importantly, made by machines, and one of the requirements for copyright is the human factor.
    - dataflow 3mo ago
      > I think these AI companies live in a legal fantasy where they can take any content they want, put it into the mixer without caring about copyright and then what comes out of it is somehow copyrighted. The mixer you're talking about is what they seem to claim to be transformative use, no? Unless I'm misunderstanding something, it's not a legal fantasy.
      - realusername 3mo ago
        > The mixer you're talking about is what they seem to claim to be transformative use, no? Unless I'm misunderstanding something, it's not a legal fantasy. If it's transformative use, then it's transformative use of ... what exactly? Copyrighted works? I think the law is pretty clear on what happens on transformative use of copyrighted works.
        drdaeman 3mo ago
        > it's transformative use of ... what exactly? Copyrighted works? Yes. Among other stuff, but non-copyrighted stuff is not exactly an issue so it can be left out of our focus most of the time. > I think the law is pretty clear on what happens on transformative use of copyrighted works. Ah, if only - it's not. You could be mixing it up with concept of derived work - that's where the law is pretty clear (I think). AFAIK (IANAL), transformativeness is merely a suggestive factor for fair use consideration, and then it's all "whatever court decides" with a bunch of guidelines and precedents.
maccard 3mo ago
> That's why Anthropic switched to scanning paper books. After they threw away all the tainted data from the pirated books, right?
- tidojo 3mo ago
  Yes, as part of the settlement
  - maccard 3mo ago
    Have you a source for that? Because everyhthing I've read tells me that they paid out a settlement but no mention of deleting the training data or the models that were tainted, e.g. [0] [0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/05/anthropic-settlement-ai-book-lawsuit https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/05/anthropic...
- ascorbic 3mo ago
  No, because the judge ruled that the training was fair use and the model itself wasn't infringing.
  - kklisura 3mo ago
    That sounds pretty applicable to this case, right? _Access_ to the Claude is illicit, but distilling is not. Distilling is fair use.
    - ascorbic 3mo ago
      Probably yes. Maybe that's one of the reasons they're not suing them.
nicce 3mo ago
In a different world it is not fair use. The benefits of the crime should be always taken off. If you isolate the training and pirating, you may say that it was fair, but that completely misses the point. The sole purpose of pirating (aka crime) was to train the models.
- ascorbic 3mo ago
  Copyright infringement isn't usually a crime.
  - nicce 3mo ago
    Yet you can get jailed?
kykeonaut 3mo ago
Isn't scanning also a form of copyright infringement? You are making a digital copy of a book, which is the same thing as downloading a book from the internet...
- yonatan8070 3mo ago
  I'm pretty sure every book I've seen has a page that says you're not allowed to copy/scan/photograph it.
  - gpderetta 3mo ago
    that per-se doesn't mean you are bound by it.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- pmontra 3mo ago
  I think that we can run a perhaps silly thought experiment. Suppose that I have a nearly perfect memory and I could remember all the books I read. Suppose also that I have a million year life span so I could read 7 million books. Then, what happens if at the end of all of those years, or at any earlier moment I answer questions from people and I exploit commercially the knowledge I gathered reading those books? Would my reading those books be study or copyright infringement? Remember the nearly perfect memory hypotheses. Of course it's a bit silly because the time to train a LLM and the time I need to read all those books is different by orders of magnitude and that changes the perspective. Who would complain with me today if their heirs lose some money on 7 million AD? Who would even notice that I started that million years long endeavor. Who's going to be there to ask me questions by then? Humans? Birds? Lizards? And I can say that I am studying like everybody else before me, but does an LLM study? And I am sure there are many other nuances. Anyway, I don't think that scanning is any different than photons hitting my retina. The difference is in what happens next: the faithfulness of memory, the amount of knowledge, the speed of accumulating it. After all a huge amount of quantity can become quality.
  - 3mo ago
olalonde 3mo ago
> That's why Anthropic switched to scanning paper books. Could they not just subscribe to the academic publishers like universities do? Or buy eBooks? I don't understand how the "scanning" part is relevant here other than used physical books being cheaper perhaps?
- ascorbic 3mo ago
  Bulk second-hand books are a lot cheaper than ebooks. Also not all books are available as ebooks, and ebooks have terms of service that presumably prevent them being used for training.
pera 3mo ago
> Using them was allowed as fair use That is only relevant in the US, and even there it is still not clear-cut whether the fair use doctrine applies on all these scenarios. Outside of the US the situation is also quite different: for example take a look at the recent ruling on GEMA vs OpenAI in Germany. The reality is that the copyright issue with generative AI is very complex and reaching anything resembling a conclusion will take much more than a few opinion paragraphs from an American district judge.

realusername 3mo ago

If using the books is fair use, then distilling the model, which is just a derived product of those books is also fair use. These companies are trying to have their cake and eat it too.

ascorbic 3mo ago
Probably, yes. It's likely just a breach in their terms of service. You'll note that they're not suing them – they're trying to get the government to do their work for them.
drdaeman 3mo ago
Hmm, training on a book’s text smears the content all over the weights, merging it with all other texts. The original text isn’t intentionally supposed to be reproducible in any larger part (although IIRC models were able to emit fairly large chunks verbatim). Quite unlikely, training on behavior purportedly approximately replicates the behavior. It gets replicated intentionally as a whole. IANAL, but I see significant differences with intent to copy a significant part as a whole into a competing product, surely shouldn’t fit under legal concept of fair use, no matter whether scanning books for LLM training fits or not. Whether such things (behaviors) are copyrightable - and should they be so - is another interesting question. Those aren’t algorithms or databases (stuff clearly and explicitly covered in many copyright laws), those are human expectation models, something like how we train animals or teach our own.
- didroe 3mo ago
  It's the exact same training process for both of your examples. I don't really see how you can claim books are not replicated, but that output from other LLMs is.
  - drdaeman 3mo ago
    Process is the same, but intent is not. One intent is to extract information from the book for better general eloquence and overall awareness - not for replicating the book itself (ability to recall verbatim fragments is a side effect, not the goal). Another intent is to replicate the behavior, carry it over using training. Again - IANAL - but in my understanding (and I spend some time reading on this), the legal concept of fair use is all about the intent how copyrighted material is used. It's all copying or distribution, but law does make distinction about what and why.
- realusername 3mo ago
  > Hmm, training on a book’s text smears the content all over the weights, merging it with all other texts. The original text isn’t intentionally supposed to be reproducible in any larger part (although IIRC models were able to emit fairly large chunks verbatim). I agree with that, however that doesn't make the output copyrightable then. I think these AI companies live in a legal fantasy where they can take any content they want, put it into the mixer without caring about copyright and then what comes out of it is somehow copyrighted. They have to pick one or the other, either the content copyright tains the model or it doesn't but the model isn't subject to copyright. > those are human expectation models, something like how we train animals or teach our own. But more importantly, made by machines, and one of the requirements for copyright is the human factor.
  - dataflow 3mo ago
    > I think these AI companies live in a legal fantasy where they can take any content they want, put it into the mixer without caring about copyright and then what comes out of it is somehow copyrighted. The mixer you're talking about is what they seem to claim to be transformative use, no? Unless I'm misunderstanding something, it's not a legal fantasy.
    - realusername 3mo ago
      > The mixer you're talking about is what they seem to claim to be transformative use, no? Unless I'm misunderstanding something, it's not a legal fantasy. If it's transformative use, then it's transformative use of ... what exactly? Copyrighted works? I think the law is pretty clear on what happens on transformative use of copyrighted works.
      - drdaeman 3mo ago
        > it's transformative use of ... what exactly? Copyrighted works? Yes. Among other stuff, but non-copyrighted stuff is not exactly an issue so it can be left out of our focus most of the time. > I think the law is pretty clear on what happens on transformative use of copyrighted works. Ah, if only - it's not. You could be mixing it up with concept of derived work - that's where the law is pretty clear (I think). AFAIK (IANAL), transformativeness is merely a suggestive factor for fair use consideration, and then it's all "whatever court decides" with a bunch of guidelines and precedents.

maccard 3mo ago

> That's why Anthropic switched to scanning paper books. After they threw away all the tainted data from the pirated books, right?

tidojo 3mo ago
Yes, as part of the settlement
- maccard 3mo ago
  Have you a source for that? Because everyhthing I've read tells me that they paid out a settlement but no mention of deleting the training data or the models that were tainted, e.g. [0] [0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/05/anthropic-settlement-ai-book-lawsuit https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/05/anthropic...
ascorbic 3mo ago
No, because the judge ruled that the training was fair use and the model itself wasn't infringing.
- kklisura 3mo ago
  That sounds pretty applicable to this case, right? _Access_ to the Claude is illicit, but distilling is not. Distilling is fair use.
  - ascorbic 3mo ago
    Probably yes. Maybe that's one of the reasons they're not suing them.

nicce 3mo ago

In a different world it is not fair use. The benefits of the crime should be always taken off. If you isolate the training and pirating, you may say that it was fair, but that completely misses the point. The sole purpose of pirating (aka crime) was to train the models.

ascorbic 3mo ago
Copyright infringement isn't usually a crime.
- nicce 3mo ago
  Yet you can get jailed?

kykeonaut 3mo ago

Isn't scanning also a form of copyright infringement? You are making a digital copy of a book, which is the same thing as downloading a book from the internet...

yonatan8070 3mo ago
I'm pretty sure every book I've seen has a page that says you're not allowed to copy/scan/photograph it.
- gpderetta 3mo ago
  that per-se doesn't mean you are bound by it.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
pmontra 3mo ago
I think that we can run a perhaps silly thought experiment. Suppose that I have a nearly perfect memory and I could remember all the books I read. Suppose also that I have a million year life span so I could read 7 million books. Then, what happens if at the end of all of those years, or at any earlier moment I answer questions from people and I exploit commercially the knowledge I gathered reading those books? Would my reading those books be study or copyright infringement? Remember the nearly perfect memory hypotheses. Of course it's a bit silly because the time to train a LLM and the time I need to read all those books is different by orders of magnitude and that changes the perspective. Who would complain with me today if their heirs lose some money on 7 million AD? Who would even notice that I started that million years long endeavor. Who's going to be there to ask me questions by then? Humans? Birds? Lizards? And I can say that I am studying like everybody else before me, but does an LLM study? And I am sure there are many other nuances. Anyway, I don't think that scanning is any different than photons hitting my retina. The difference is in what happens next: the faithfulness of memory, the amount of knowledge, the speed of accumulating it. After all a huge amount of quantity can become quality.
- 3mo ago

olalonde 3mo ago

> That's why Anthropic switched to scanning paper books. Could they not just subscribe to the academic publishers like universities do? Or buy eBooks? I don't understand how the "scanning" part is relevant here other than used physical books being cheaper perhaps?

ascorbic 3mo ago
Bulk second-hand books are a lot cheaper than ebooks. Also not all books are available as ebooks, and ebooks have terms of service that presumably prevent them being used for training.

pera 3mo ago

> Using them was allowed as fair use That is only relevant in the US, and even there it is still not clear-cut whether the fair use doctrine applies on all these scenarios. Outside of the US the situation is also quite different: for example take a look at the recent ruling on GEMA vs OpenAI in Germany. The reality is that the copyright issue with generative AI is very complex and reaching anything resembling a conclusion will take much more than a few opinion paragraphs from an American district judge.