> Alsup ruled that Anthropic's use of copyrighted books to train its AI models was "exceedingly transformative" and qualified as fair use
> "All Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies"
It was always somewhat obvious that pirating a library would be copyright infringement. The interesting findings here are that scanning and digitizing a library for internal use is OK, and using it to train models is fair use.
> But Alsup drew a firm line when it came to piracy.
> "Anthropic had no entitlement to use pirated copies for its central library," Alsup wrote. "Creating a permanent, general-purpose library was not itself a fair use excusing Anthropic's piracy."
That is, he ruled that
- buying, physically cutting up, physically digitizing books, and using them for training is fair use
- pirating the books for their digital library is not fair use.
> pirating the books for their digital library is not fair use.
"Pirating" is a fuzzy word and has no real meaning. Specifically, I think this is the cruz:
> without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies
Essentially: downloading is fine, sharing/uploading up is not. Which makes sense. The assertion here is that Anthropic (from this line) did not distribute the files they downloaded.
It's a bit surprising that you can suddenly download copyrighted materials for personal use and and it's kosher as long as you don't share them with others.