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[return to "A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books"]
1. Nobody+fc[view] [source] 2025-06-24 17:29:23
>>moose4+(OP)
One aspect of this ruling [1] that I find concerning: on pages 7 and 11-12, it concedes that the LLM does substantially "memorize" copyrighted works, but rules that this doesn't violate the author's copyright because Anthropic has server-side filtering to avoid reproducing memorized text. (Alsup compares this to Google Books, which has server-side searchable full-text copies of copyrighted books, but only allows users to access snippets in a non-infringing manner.)

Does this imply that distributing open-weights models such as Llama is copyright infringement, since users can trivially run the model without output filtering to extract the memorized text?

[1]: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...

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2. martin+yJ[view] [source] 2025-06-24 20:28:41
>>Nobody+fc
Copyright was codified in an age where plagiarism was time consuming. Even replacing words with synonyms on a mass scale was technically infeasible.

The goal of copyright is to make sure people can get fair compensation for the amount of work they put in. LLMs automate plagiarism on a previously unfathomable scale.

If humans spend a trillion hours writing books, articles, blog posts and code, then somebody (a small group of people) comes and spends a million hours building a machine that ingests all the previous work and produces output based on it, who should get the reward for the work put in?

The original authors together spent a million times more effort (normalized for skill) and should therefore should get a million times bigger reward than those who build the machine.

In other words, if the small group sells access to the product of the combined effort, they only deserve a millionth of the income.

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If "AI" is as transformative as they claim, they will have no trouble making so much money they they can fairly compensate the original authors while still earning a decent profit. But if it's not, then it's just an overpriced plagiarism automator and their reluctance to acknowledge they are making money on top of everyone else's work is indicative.

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3. bonobo+LO[view] [source] 2025-06-24 21:00:10
>>martin+yJ
> get fair compensation for the amount of work

This is a bit distorted. This is a better summary: The primary purpose of copyright is to induce and reward authors to create new works and to make those works available to the public to enjoy.

The ultimate purpose is to foster the creation of new works that the public can read and written culture can thrive. The means to achieve this is by ensuring that the authors of said works can get financial incentives for writing.

The two are not in opposition but it's good to be clear about it. The main beneficiary is intended to be the public, not the writers' guild.

Therefore when some new factor enters the picture such as LLMs, we have to step back and see how the intent to benefit the reading public can be pursued in the new situation. It certainly has to take into account who and how will produce new written works, but it is not the main target, but can be an instrumental subgoal.

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