Good

As the reader(s) of the blog know, I think that IP protections are far too expansive, and now are little more than an exercise in corrupt rent seeking.

As the reader(s) of the blog also know, I think that LLM AI's are complete hokum, and will never be more than an overgrown Eliza program. (It may make our lives when we phone in to tech support more miserable, but that's not going to change the world.)

Also, I have profoundly mixed emotions regarding the claims by copyright holders that training Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence on copyrighted works is an infringement of their exclusive licenses.

On one hand, it seems to me that learning from a copyrighted work is allowed, on the other hand, calling what AI does, "Learning," seems to be to be a bit of a stretch.

That being said, it appears that Anthropic, which claims to be the "Ethical" AI, appears to have been training its system on pirated books.

The judge has ruled that this IS copyright infringement, as it would be for a human being, and as such, Anthropic could be liable for billions of dollars in damages because of the extremely high (IMNSHO excessively high) statutory damages.

I am amused:

Anthropic, the AI startup that’s long presented itself as the industry’s safe and ethical choice, is now facing legal penalties that could bankrupt the company. Damages resulting from its mass use of pirated books would likely exceed a billion dollars, with the statutory maximum stretching into the hundreds of billions.

Last week, William Alsup, a federal judge in San Francisco, certified a class action lawsuit against Anthropic on behalf of nearly every US book author whose works were copied to build the company’s AI models. This is the first time a US court has allowed a class action of this kind to proceed in the context of generative AI training, putting Anthropic on a path toward paying damages that could ruin the company.

The judge ruled last month, in essence, that Anthropic's use of pirated books had violated copyright law, leaving it to a jury to decide how much the company owes for these violations. That number increases dramatically if the case proceeds as a class action, putting Anthropic on the hook for a vast number of books beyond those produced by the plaintiffs.

………

Just a month ago, Anthropic and the rest of the industry were celebrating what looked like a landmark victory. Alsup had ruled that using copyrighted books to train an AI model — so long as the books were lawfully acquired — was protected as “fair use.” This was the legal shield the AI industry has been banking on, and it would have let Anthropic, OpenAI, and others off the hook for the core act of model training.

But Alsup split a very fine hair. In the same ruling, he found that Anthropic’s wholesale downloading and storage of millions of pirated books — via infamous “pirate libraries” like LibGen and PiLiMi — was not covered by fair use at all. In other words: training on lawfully acquired books is one thing, but stockpiling a central library of stolen copies is classic copyright infringement.

Statutory damages are $150,000.00 per book.  While I find this level excessive, see my comments above on , "Rent seeking," this would add up to over $750,000,000,000.00 in damages, which would likely bankrupt the company.

Well, that's going to put a kink in their $100,000,000,000.00+ valuation. 

Personally, I would prefer that the jury seize their entire training set in lieu of such a fine, but I am unclear on the law on this matter.