More alarming was the upshot of that lawsuit: a judge ruled that because Anthropic was turning the physical texts into digital ones and destroying the original copies, it was “transformative” and therefore didn’t violate copyright law.
So by that token if someone digitizes a physical medium and makes it available to the public copyright is no longer valid. Otherwise, having it ingested by an AI has no purpose it it’s not meant to be referenced in response to requests by the end user.
No it only applies to books because books have an entirely different legal system than everything else.
SCOTUS case: White-Smith Music Publishing Co. v. Apollo Co. (1908) created a new issue for the Government about copying people’s printed works.
Copyright Act of 1909 is passed. New framework is established, books get an entirely different legal system from everything else. Publishers lobbied to prevent it’s passage and fought it especially hard in the Great Depression because libraries were becoming very popular during that time.
But printed books have a whole different thing that applies to them that doesn’t apply to anything else. So you can’t use “physical medium” because books are a special case and have their own special US law.
For books, transformative, has to deal with the intent.
Book - I want to read them.
Anthropic - I want to convert it to weights for use in massive matrix multiplication operations.
Since the intent is different, the book first sale doctrine applies here to grant transformative. Which is but just one pillar in their defense.
Same goes for what Google did like a decade ago.
Book - I want to read them.
Google - I want to convert it to a searchable database of terms that can refer you to the correct ISBN.
And transformative applies too to things like DVDs, it’s just under a different framework known as the DMCA.
DVD - I want to watch the movie.
MP4 - I want to watch the movie.
That’s not transformative.
DVD - I want to watch the movie.
MP4 - I want to take clips to make memes.
That is transformative. And again, transformative is but one thing out of the whole “fair use” thing.
This is the thing. Those news articles are oversimplifying a massive amount of legal technicalities. I’m not saying what Anthropic is doing is correct or not. What I am saying is that the conclusion that people are getting from these stories is like the last 10% of a massively technical legal battle. And running with that small amount can lead to conclusions that aren’t true.
And I know someone is going to bring it up. No you aren’t LEGALLY allows to rip a copy of a DVD for your personal use. Violates the DMCA. BUT in order to sue you, a publisher has to know ahead of time before discovery, that you broke their encryption scheme, which if you only keep it personally, is impossible for them to ever enforce. So we have a law that is written in a way, that if you never put it online, it’s impossible to enforce the law. As a summary of how all that works.
Copyright law is not some philosophically derived right it’s literally just a government granted Monopoly that was invented in the 1700s because printers wanted dibs on books. It literally serves Now function other than giving advantages to our corporate overlords
token if someone digitizes a physical medium and makes it available to the public copyright is no longer valid
only if you destroy the original i guess
(the real answer is that copyright is and always has been a tool for corporations to control the ownership of culture. what ai companies are doing isn’t fine in the eye of the state because it’s “transformative”, it’s fine in the eyes of the state because they’re corporations selling their products)
So by that token if someone digitizes a physical medium and makes it available to the public copyright is no longer valid. Otherwise, having it ingested by an AI has no purpose it it’s not meant to be referenced in response to requests by the end user.
Oh! Can I play? Let me transcode a video into a new format and put it on a blu-ray and then delete the old file! Transformative, lol.
No it only applies to books because books have an entirely different legal system than everything else.
SCOTUS case: White-Smith Music Publishing Co. v. Apollo Co. (1908) created a new issue for the Government about copying people’s printed works.
Copyright Act of 1909 is passed. New framework is established, books get an entirely different legal system from everything else. Publishers lobbied to prevent it’s passage and fought it especially hard in the Great Depression because libraries were becoming very popular during that time.
But printed books have a whole different thing that applies to them that doesn’t apply to anything else. So you can’t use “physical medium” because books are a special case and have their own special US law.
For books, transformative, has to deal with the intent.
Since the intent is different, the book first sale doctrine applies here to grant transformative. Which is but just one pillar in their defense.
Same goes for what Google did like a decade ago.
And transformative applies too to things like DVDs, it’s just under a different framework known as the DMCA.
That’s not transformative.
That is transformative. And again, transformative is but one thing out of the whole “fair use” thing.
This is the thing. Those news articles are oversimplifying a massive amount of legal technicalities. I’m not saying what Anthropic is doing is correct or not. What I am saying is that the conclusion that people are getting from these stories is like the last 10% of a massively technical legal battle. And running with that small amount can lead to conclusions that aren’t true.
And I know someone is going to bring it up. No you aren’t LEGALLY allows to rip a copy of a DVD for your personal use. Violates the DMCA. BUT in order to sue you, a publisher has to know ahead of time before discovery, that you broke their encryption scheme, which if you only keep it personally, is impossible for them to ever enforce. So we have a law that is written in a way, that if you never put it online, it’s impossible to enforce the law. As a summary of how all that works.
The articles are oversimplifying because the law is impossibly complex, but the moral hazard is obvious.
It’s like they’re murdering orphans and someone tries to argue it’s actually state sanctioned manslaughter.
It’s not impossibly complex. You’ve just had it explained to you pretty well and succinctly.
Copyright law is not some philosophically derived right it’s literally just a government granted Monopoly that was invented in the 1700s because printers wanted dibs on books. It literally serves Now function other than giving advantages to our corporate overlords
only if you destroy the original i guess
(the real answer is that copyright is and always has been a tool for corporations to control the ownership of culture. what ai companies are doing isn’t fine in the eye of the state because it’s “transformative”, it’s fine in the eyes of the state because they’re corporations selling their products)