The tinternet is getting like the Wild West again, circa early 200s and Napster and all that... This will pass, dunno when or how but it will pass, or perhaps we will start getting everything paywalled so LLMs can't just scrape data without some sort of payment. I don't actually know many people that like AI nowadays
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2025
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That's probably your social bubble. My company is currently deepthroating everything that has AI in its name. I jokingly mentioned they should rename the company to Jira&AI, the joke was not well received.
Anyway, most people I know (including me) are somewhere in the middle - not quite fans in the traditional sense, but definitely not disliking AI.
I’d feel better about this if meta actually produced anything of value and I was able to also violate their copyright, but they’re just fucking leeches bro
All I'm hearing is that pirating is A-OK as long as you claim it's for model training
The ruling explicitly does not allow pirating. It only lets you run ML training on legally acquired media.
They still haven't ruled on copyright infringement from pirating the media used to train, and they haven't ruled on copyright status of outputs (what it takes to be considered transformative).
This is judge Alsup, same guy who ruled in Oracle vs Google
Sorry, but no. That's just the paper-thin excuse.
Pirating, like pretty much anything else that's sometimes a crime in the current US, is A-OK if you can buy enough judges and politicians.
I just put a thin blue line sticker on my case and full send that bitch.
American law has become a literal fucking joke (IAAL). I could’ve guessed the could get the outcome of this case without any facts: the huge corporation wins over authors. American law is no longer capable of holding major corporations to account, so we need a new legal system—one that’s actually functional.
Do you want a new constitution in the United States?
Could start with a guillotine for corporations and see how that goes.
But the actual process of an AI system distilling from thousands of written works to be able to produce its own passages of text qualified as “fair use” under U.S. copyright law because it was “quintessentially transformative,” Alsup wrote.
Thats the actual argument and the judge is right here. LLMs are transformative in every sense of the word. The technology is even called "transformers".
Fallacious argument.
Something that can't generate wine glass full to the brim without a band-aid fix is far from "transformative." Even if it were:
More like obfuscated plagiarism.
Nope I'm literally a data programmer working in this field. Any sufficiently transformed data even coming from hard copyright is transformative work and currently LLMs meet this criteria and will continue to do so. Wanna bet?
I think there's a blurry line here where you can easily train an LLM to just regurgitate the source material by overfitting, and at what point is it "transformative enough"? I think there's little doubt that current flagship models usually are transformative enough, but that doesn't apply to everything using the same technology - even though this case will be used as precedence for all of that.
There's also another issue in that while safeguards are generally in place, without them llms would be very capable of quoting entire pages at least of popular books. And jailbreaking llms isn't exactly unheard of. They also at least used to really like just verbatim repeating news articles on obscure topics.
What I'm mainly getting at is that LLMs can be transformative, but they also can plagiarize. Much like any human could. The question is then, if training LLMs on copyrighted data is allowed, will the company be held accountable when their LLM does plagiarize, the same way a person would be? Or would the better decision be to prohibit training on copyrighted data because actually transforming it meaningfully can not be guaranteed, and copyright holders actually finding these violations is very hard?
Though idk the case details, if the argument was purely focused on using the material to produce the model, rather than including the ultimate step of outputting text to anyone who asks, it was probably doomed to fail from the start and the decision makes perfect sense. And that doesn't seem too unlikely to have happened because realizing this would require the lawyer making the case to actually understand what training an LLM does.
This case didn't cover the copyright status of outputs. The ruling so far is just about the process of training itself.
IMHO the generative ML companies should be required to build a process tracking the influence of distinct samples on the outputs, and inform users of potential licensing status
Division of liability / licensing responsibility should depend on who contributes what to the prompt / generation. The less it takes for the user to trigger the model to generate an output clearly derived from a protected work, the more liability lies on the model operator. If the user couldn't have known, they shouldn't be liable. If the user deliberately used jailbreaks, etc, the user is clearly liable.
But you get a weird edge case when users unknowingly copy prompts containing jailbreaks, though
Yeah, well, I could call my dick the Magnum Opus but that wouldn't make it two feet long.
I'm torrenting movies in order to develop my own AI, your honor. I rest my case. 😎
The judge explicitly did not allow piracy here. Only legally acquired media can be used for training.