The big news this week is that there has been a ruling in one of the major AI copyright cases, and the tech industry at this stage seems to have the most to cheer. But while there are implications for other claims, this is not a once-and-done case by any means.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
This is a case brought by three authors against Anthropic, in relation to the training of Claude, their AI platform that recently showed such a strong desire not to be switched off that it was found to blackmail people even talking about doing so.
Reading through the details of the case, it feels as though this was a slightly strange lawsuit to bring. Which, of course, makes the ruling less wide-ranging than it might have been.
A Mixed Ruling
The central claim seems to be that training a platform such as Claude on copyrighted books would lead to the creation of works that would greatly impact authors’ ability to make a living because they would be in direct competition.
The ruling covers several things. In two key areas, the judge found with Anthropic—on which more in a moment. But in a third area, the judge was very damning indeed. Anthropic had used shadow libraries, including LibGen, to form the basis for its central book library that would be the foundation of its training program. Doing that was, the judge stated, piracy. Plain and simple. And there will be a ruling on damages at the end of the year that could run into several billions.
What Counts as Fair Use?
But the thing that will please the tech industry is the ruling that training a platform on copyrighted works constitutes fair use. In words that will be quoted for at least minutes to come, such use was described as “transformative—spectacularly so.” That is, what gets spat out is far enough from what is put in that there is no breach of copyright.
And finally, while building a library for training purposes on pirated works is a big, billion-dollar no, building such a library is not in itself doing anything wrong. Where Anthropic paid for paper books, digitized them, and destroyed the paper copy, that was OK. Which feels like a line the Internet Archive might be interested in.
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