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People keep throwing this idea around haphazardly, but U.S. courts have pretty consistently decided that training on copyrighted works falls under fair use. You
by next_xibalba 3mo ago
People keep throwing this idea around haphazardly, but U.S. courts have pretty consistently decided that training on copyrighted works falls under fair use. You may not like it, but that doesn't make it "illegal".
- rowanG077 3mo agoRight, so it seems that distilling an AI model is legal too then. At least it is somewhat similar.
- pixl97 3mo agoLegal vs "They aren't going to let you do it with their service" are two different things.
- next_xibalba 3mo agoIt is a violation of their terms of service. There are plenty of good reasons to not use Anthropic's services. If you don't like their terms of service, do stop using them! I personally think Anthropic's increasingly successful attempts at regulatory capture are even more distasteful.
- danlitt 3mo agoYou have to admit that "downloading every book ever written for free from a repository of books that is itself illegal to compile and to run, in order to write a text generation tool" being legal is at least unintuitive, to put it mildly.
- stale2002 3mo agoNo it's not unintuitive. Just like I can learn from a book and nobody can make that illegal, so can other people transformative do the same with computers. Fair use is fair use.
- eloisius 3mo agoJust like these distillers can learn from Claude’s output. Fair use is fair use.
- ToValueFunfetti 3mo agoI don't think Anthropic argues that distillation violates copyright. AFAIK, their position is that it violates their terms and conditions for interacting with their servers.
- eloisius 3mo agoI think Anthropic will argue whatever argument is likely to protect their interests. I don’t expect anything consistent or moral from them. My quibble is with all the Anthropic fanboys who repeat this crap.
- ToValueFunfetti 3mo agoI'd think the problem with fanboys is that they don't care about the truth of the underlying arguments. They just want to score points for their team. Do you have a different issue with them? If not, why not engage with the arguments yourself?
- malfist 3mo agoHas it? Because as far as I can tell those cases keep getting settled out of court before a legal precedent can be set. For record breaking amounts too.
- bsder 3mo ago> U.S. courts have pretty consistently decided that training on copyrighted works falls under fair use. I don't believe that this has been resolved at all, and there are quite a few pending lawsuits about it at this very moment.
- ethbr1 3mo ago> that training on [lawfully obtained] copyrighted works falls under fair use Fixed that for you.
- xydone 3mo agoWere the copyright owners contacted prior to this lawful obtaining that you speak of? Or after?
- brookst 3mo agoI miss the days when tech people were copyright skeptics. Remember when everyone was upset with Disney for our perpetual copyright regime and the destruction of public domain? Now many tech people are copyright maximalists and 100% converted to the church of Disney. It’s depressing.
- tripzilch 3mo agoI don't think that's right. The problem is that Anthropic is hoarding it and that's hypocritical. If copyright doesn't count for Anthropic, they should publish Claude. If they wanna hide Claude behind copyrights and/or TOS, they don't get to screw with other people's copyrights and TOS and then profit from it. To call that opinion "copyright maximalist 100% converted to the church of Disney" is, at the very least, hyperbole.
- brookst 3mo ago“Anthropic is hypocritical and hoarding data” is 100% compatible with “copyright has gotten out of control and we need less of it” But pearl clutching over the poor corporations who have their works trained on is much less compatible with a copyright-skeptical view. And I stand by copyright-maximalism as a rising trend in tech circles. It’s mostly anti-ai, but strange bedfellows and all that.
- ethbr1 3mo ago
- tedivm 3mo agoThe courts have never said piracy, which is how the training sets were originally built, is legal. There are several court cases still ongoing over this.
- tripzilch 3mo agoMaybe "U.S. courts have pretty consistently decided" used to mean something, but I don't think the opinion of US courts should be the standard for anything, anymore.