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Anthropic's AI Training on Books Is Fair Use, Judge Rules. Authors Are More Worried Than Ever
Anthropic's AI Training on Books Is Fair Use, Judge Rules. Authors Are More Worried Than Ever

CNET

time2 hours ago

  • Business
  • CNET

Anthropic's AI Training on Books Is Fair Use, Judge Rules. Authors Are More Worried Than Ever

Claude maker Anthropic's use of copyright-protected books in its AI training process was "exceedingly transformative" and fair use, US senior district judge William Alsup ruled on Monday. It's the first time a judge has decided in favor of an AI company on the issue of fair use, in a significant win for generative AI companies and a blow for creators. Two days later, Meta won part of its fair use case. Fair use is a doctrine that's part of US copyright law. It's a four-part test that, when the criteria is met, lets people and companies use protected content without the rights holder's permission for specific purposes, like when writing a term paper. Tech companies say that fair use exceptions are essential in order for them to access the massive quantities of human-generated content they need to develop the most advanced AI systems. Writers, actors and many other kinds of creators have been equally clear in arguing that the use of their work to propel AI is not fair use. On Friday, a group of famous authors signed an open letter to publishers urging the companies to pledge never to replace human writers, editors and audiobook narrators with AI and to avoid using AI throughout the publishing process. The signees include Victoria Aveyard, Emily Henry, R.F. Kuang, Ali Hazelwood, Jasmine Guillory, Colleen Hoover and others. "[Our] stories were stolen from us and used to train machines that, if short-sighted capitalistic greed wins, could soon be generating the books that fill our bookstores," the letter reads. "Rather than paying writers a small percentage of the money our work makes for them, someone else will be paid for a technology built on our unpaid labor." The letter is just the latest in a series of battles between authors and AI companies. Publishers, artists and content catalog owners have filed lawsuits alleging that AI companies like OpenAI, Meta and Midjourney are infringing on their protected intellectual property in attempt to circumvent costly, but standard, licensing procedures. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.) The authors suing Anthropic for copyright infringement say their books were also obtained illegally -- that is, the books were pirated. That leads to the second part of Alsup's ruling, based on his concerns about Anthropic's methods of obtaining the books. In the ruling, he writes that Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann knowingly downloaded unauthorized copies of 5 million books from LibGen and an additional 2 million from Pirate Library Mirror (PirLiMi). The ruling also outlines how Anthropic deliberately obtained print copies of the books it previously pirated in order to create "its own catalog of bibliographic metadata." Anthropic vice president Tom Turvey, the ruling says, was "tasked with obtaining 'all the books in the world' while still avoiding as much 'legal/practice/business slog.'" That meant buying physical books from publishers to create a digital database. The Anthropic team destroyed and discarded millions of used books in this process in order to prep them for machine-readable scanning, by stripping them from their bindings and cutting them down to fit. Anthropic's acquisition and digitization of the print books was fair use, the ruling says. But it adds: "Creating a permanent, general-purpose library was not itself a fair use excusing Anthropic's piracy." Alsup ordered a new trial regarding the pirated library. Anthropic is one of many AI companies facing copyright claims in court, so this week's ruling is likely to have massive ripple effects across the industry. We'll have to see how the piracy claims resolve before we know how much money Anthropic may be ordered to pay in damages. But if the scales tip to grant multiple AI companies fair use exceptions, the creative industry and the people who work in it will certainly suffer damages, too. For more, check out our guide to understanding copyright in the age of AI.

Authors blast 'harmful' SCOTUS ruling allowing parents to opt kids out of reading their LGBTQ+ books
Authors blast 'harmful' SCOTUS ruling allowing parents to opt kids out of reading their LGBTQ+ books

Fox News

time13 hours ago

  • Politics
  • Fox News

Authors blast 'harmful' SCOTUS ruling allowing parents to opt kids out of reading their LGBTQ+ books

Authors and illustrators of the controversial LGBTQ+ children's books at the center of Friday's Supreme Court ruling blasted the decision as "discriminatory and harmful" in a joint statement. The justices decided 6-3 in Mahmoud v. Taylor that parents can exclude their children from a Maryland public school system's lessons that contain themes about homosexuality and transgenderism if they feel the material conflicts with their religious faith. The parents who brought the suit spanned a range of religious backgrounds, from Muslims to Christians of different denominations. The Maryland parents who sued said in their petition to the high court that the Montgomery County Public Schools board introduced books to their elementary school students that promoted "gender transitions, Pride parades, and same-sex playground romance." The parents said the school board initially allowed parents to opt their children out of lessons involving those books but then prevented opt-outs. They also said the presence of the books created "indirect pressure to forgo a religious practice," which created enough of a burden to violate their religious freedom rights. Authors and illustrators of the books mentioned in the court case responded in a scathing letter. "As the authors and illustrators of the books named in Mahmoud v. Taylor, we believe the Supreme Court's ruling today threatens students' access to diverse books and undermines teachers' efforts to create safe, inclusive classrooms. To treat children's books about LGBTQ+ characters differently than similar books about non-LGBTQ+ characters is discriminatory and harmful. This decision will inevitably lead to an increasingly hostile climate for LGBTQ+ students and families, and create a less welcoming environment for all students," they said. After arguing that such books not only make children feel more represented, but also teach children "how to share their classrooms and communities with people different from themselves," the group of authors and illustrators argued they are part of a far larger shift. "We know there are families and educators across the country who are committed to creating inclusive classrooms that meet the needs of the diverse groups of students in their school districts. We are with them in spirit as they work to ensure that all students are seen and supported," the group said. "We will continue to support LGBTQ+ families and children everywhere and advocate for the right of all students to read freely. We strongly disagree with the Court's decision." Education Department Secretary Linda McMahon celebrated the ruling as a win for "parental rights" and a loss for "bureaucrats." "Parents have the right to know what their children are learning at school and to exercise their First Amendment freedom of religion to opt out of divisive and ideological lessons that go against their families' values and beliefs," McMahon said. Eric Baxter, vice president and senior counsel at Becket, the legal group that represented the parents' case, said, "This is a historic victory for parental rights in Maryland and across America. Kids shouldn't be forced into conversations about drag queens, pride parades, or gender transitions without their parents' permission. Today, the Court restored common sense and made clear that parents—not government—have the final say in how their children are raised."

Disgruntled authors lose latest copyright lawsuit against Meta
Disgruntled authors lose latest copyright lawsuit against Meta

Times

time2 days ago

  • Business
  • Times

Disgruntled authors lose latest copyright lawsuit against Meta

A group of authors who accused Meta of stealing their works to develop its artificial intelligence (AI) software have lost their case in the second such legal setback this week. The comedian Sarah Silverman and 12 others sued Meta in a US court claiming their copyright was infringed when the company fed their books into an AI model. However, the judge threw out the case, saying that they 'made the wrong arguments'. The case is one of about 40 winding their way through courts in the United States that could set the terms for how the AI industry deals with copyrighted material. In a separate case, a judge ruled on Tuesday that the AI company Anthropic did not infringe three authors' copyright when it scanned their books for developing software. AI companies need huge amounts of data such as text, images and video to develop their 'generative' software that can create content from simple prompts. The US district judge Vince Chhabria granted a partial summary judgment to Meta but also said the ruling was limited in its scope and indicated that AI companies could generally be breaking copyright law. 'This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta's use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful,' he wrote. 'It stands only for the proposition that these plaintiffs made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one.' Asking whether the practice by AI companies of feeding copyrighted works into their models without permission was illegal, he concluded: 'Although the devil is in the details, in most cases the answer will likely be yes.' He added: 'In the grand scheme of things, the consequences of this ruling are limited. This is not a class action, so the ruling only affects the rights of these 13 authors — not the countless others whose works Meta used to train its models.' Chhabria also said that the AI industry that asking it to adhere to copyright laws would slow down the technology. He said: 'These products are expected to generate billions, even trillions of dollars for the companies that are developing them. If using copyrighted works to train the models is as necessary as the companies say, they will figure out a way to compensate copyright holders for it.' In the only such case currently before the UK courts, Getty Images is suing Stability AI, a British company. On Wednesday Getty dropped its claim of direct copyright infringement — a key part of the case. However, it continues to accuse Stability of trademark and indirect copyright infringement. Lawyers for Silverman and the other authors said: 'The court ruled that AI companies that 'feed copyright-protected works into their models without getting permission from the copyright holders or paying for them' are generally violating the law. • AI firms must pay creatives for using copyrighted work, MPs say• Former Waitrose boss says Meta 'stole' his books to train AI 'Yet, despite the undisputed record of Meta's historically unprecedented pirating of copyrighted works, the court ruled in Meta's favor. We respectfully disagree with that conclusion.' Meta said: 'Open-source AI models are powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and fair use of copyright material is a vital legal framework for building this transformative technology.'

US judge sides with Meta in AI training copyright case
US judge sides with Meta in AI training copyright case

Free Malaysia Today

time2 days ago

  • Business
  • Free Malaysia Today

US judge sides with Meta in AI training copyright case

A group of authors sued Meta for downloading pirated copies of their works and using them to train the open-source Llama generative AI. (Meta pic) SAN FRANCISCO : A US judge handed Meta a victory over authors who accused the tech giant of violating copyright law by training Llama artificial intelligence (AI) on their creations without permission. District court judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco ruled that Meta's use of the works to train its AI model was 'transformative' enough to constitute 'fair use' under copyright law, in the second such courtroom triumph for AI firms this week. However, it came with a caveat that the authors could have pitched a winning argument that by training powerful generative AI with copyrighted works, tech firms are creating a tool that could let a sea of users compete with them in the literary marketplace. 'No matter how transformative (generative AI) training may be, it's hard to imagine that it can be fair use to use copyrighted books to develop a tool to make billions or trillions of dollars while enabling the creation of a potentially endless stream of competing works that could significantly harm the market for those books,' Chhabria said in his ruling. Tremendous amounts of data are needed to train large language models powering generative AI. Musicians, book authors, visual artists and news publications have sued various AI companies that used their data without permission or payment. AI companies generally defend their practices by claiming fair use, arguing that training AI on large datasets fundamentally transforms the original content and is necessary for innovation. 'We appreciate today's decision from the court,' a Meta spokesman said in response to an AFP inquiry. 'Open-source AI models are powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and fair use of copyright material is a vital legal framework for building this transformative technology,' the spokesman said. In the case before Chhabria, a group of authors sued Meta for downloading pirated copies of their works and using them to train the open-source Llama generative AI, according to court documents. Books involved in the suit include Sarah Silverman's comic memoir 'The Bedwetter' and Junot Diaz's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel 'The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,' the documents showed. 'This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta's use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful,' the judge stated. 'It stands only for the proposition that these plaintiffs made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one.' Market harming? A different federal judge in San Franciso on Monday sided with AI firm Anthropic regarding training its models on copyrighted books without authors' permission. District court judge William Alsup ruled that the company's training of its Claude AI models with books bought or pirated was allowed under the 'fair use' doctrine in the US Copyright Act. 'Use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative and was a fair use,' Alsup wrote in his decision. 'The technology at issue was among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes,' Alsup added in his decision, comparing AI training to how humans learn by reading books. The ruling stems from a class-action lawsuit filed by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who accused Anthropic of illegally copying their books to train chatbot Claude, the company's ChatGPT rival. Alsup rejected Anthropic's bid for blanket protection, ruling that the company's practice of downloading millions of pirated books to build a permanent digital library was not justified by fair use protections.

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