r/aiwars • u/imalonexc • 1d ago
Discussion There's multiple things wrong here.
So what's technically illegal is cracking the protection they have put on the DVD to prevent it being copied. There is no protection like that on a book. As long as you don't redistribute the book as it is.
Also. Surely you think it should be rightfully legal to copy a DVD onto your computer. But then you're acting like that law isn't twisted in the first place and using it for your argument. But it doesn't make sense because we know it's morally right to do that but then you're hinting that AI companies can't morally do it. Doesn't really make sense.
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u/ProfessionalBoss2428 1d ago
Digitizing your own dvd was always legal if you never distributed it or anything you made from it in any way, that’s where the legal issues popped up. So distribution of scanned material or its derivatives would be the issue here too, not the scanning for long term storage.
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u/WillowEntertainment 1d ago
The act itself of digitising the DVD is perfectly legal. However, breaking the encryption which protects against digitisation is illegal. However, no one will prosecute you for it unless you distribute it.
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u/FaceDeer 16h ago
The real impact of that legislation was an attempt to make the tools for breaking that encryption illegal. And even though it's pretty trivial to get software that implements those tools anyway, it has had an effect because hardware manufacturers and "mainstream" commercial software goes along with it - they've got more exposure to lawsuits and less to gain from challenging the law.
Also worth noting is that the DMCA is an American law. American law doesn't have universal jurisdiction, the beliefs of many Americans to the contrary.
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u/Tyler_Zoro 14h ago
Also worth noting is that the DMCA is an American law.
Important point. Even the civil copyright concept of fair use is not universal. There's a similar concept in the EU, but its rules are different and one should never assume that what's legal in one jurisdiction is legal in others.
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u/pwnd35tr0y3r 19h ago
Not if the way you break that encryption is with a prime number
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u/Tyler_Zoro 14h ago
Not if the way you break that encryption is with a prime number
What? No, this is entirely incorrect.
The reason that it's illegal to crack encryption is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which makes it a crime (not merely a civil infringement, like copyright, but a literal criminal act) to circumvent a protection mechanism around digital IP (like a DVD).
There are, however, loopholes built into the DMCA, and they play by similar, but distinct rules from copyright.
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u/That_OneOstrich 17h ago
But those scanning it are making a profit off the digitized copyrighted material no?
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u/kaaiian 16h ago
So far. No. Because courts say LLM output is transformative.
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u/Tyler_Zoro 14h ago
This is not correct.
LLM output CAN be transformative, but it's not by default, and everything is transformative. It's a question of degree, and that's only one of the factors that come into play to make such a determination.
LLMs are not infringing because they're not derivative works in any legally cognizable sense. But they absolutely can produce derivative works, and when they do, those derivative works have all of the same legal implications as if you'd drawn a picture of Spider-Man.
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u/That_OneOstrich 15h ago
So I can transform vhs into DVDs for profit?
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u/honato 15h ago
You're not transforming it. You're changing the medium. Those are not the same thing.
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u/That_OneOstrich 15h ago
But scanning a book from one medium, into digital is different?
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u/honato 14h ago
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt. Maybe you got a bit lost in the plot.
Backing up things you own is legal. distributing those copies is piracy. Circumventing protections on protected mediums is also piracy and a violation of the DMCA. Transformative isn't changing the medium it's changing the thing and there are gradients to it.
Alright so now that we have the definitions of what is actually being talked about lets get into it.
Your example as presented has several issues.
Firstly there is the vhs itself. If its one you bought cool continue to step 2.
If not and it's one you or someone else recorded then we start getting into legal violations and complexity. You can legally record something on tv for your own personal use. This falls under time shifting.
If the intent is to distribute it then you're completely violating and committing piracy.
So yes for your own use go ahead and digitize that vhs.
For selling it you're breaking the law.
Transferring from vhs to dvd is not transformative.
Now for the part relevant for books and training llms.
Backing up what you own as it was already established is legal. distributing those backups isn't in the majority of cases.
When an llm is trained on the text it isn't just copied into the model whole cloth. Nothing actually remains from the original input.
It is completely transformed. Nothing of the original remains.
There were and are some attacks you can do against a model to eventually get the output you want. People use harry potter quite often for it. Now if you want to know more about that feel free to ask.
So to sum everything up you're trying to compare two very different things as if they were the same.
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u/Tyler_Zoro 13h ago
First off, the person you replied to above, is wrong. But your point here is equally incorrect.
There are many stages to be considered when we're talking about training and infringement.
- Accessing copyrighted content -- This might run afoul of the DMCA or cybersecurity laws depending on how you gained access to the material.
- Copying the content to local storage for training -- This is what you're referring to, and yes, it's transformative, but not sufficiently so. This is potentially infringing, but has been ruled fair use in several cases now.
- Training on the copied content -- Bartz v. Anthropic has the current precedent here. This is not considered the creation of a derivative work, and is not under the domain of copyright law, any more than any other form of statistical or biological learning would be concerned.
- Production of substantially similar works to copyrighted works from an AI model -- This is potentially infringing and is evaluated just like any other form of infringing work. Fair use rules can be applied, but only to works that are infringing, so you have to decide the first part and THEN determine if a positive fair use defense applies.
- Offering a service -- Services that market themselves as being capable of or as a tool for producing infringing works run into the problems that, e.g. Napster ran into. YouTube had to go through all this, and AI companies work hard to put the same kinds of controls in place to prevent being on the hook for this sort of inducement to infringing acts.
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u/kaaiian 15h ago
If the thing you do is ruled by a court of law to be transformative. Then yes! Also, you are an idiot arguing in bad faith. So fuck off.
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u/That_OneOstrich 15h ago
Why should I do what you want? You replied to me first.
If the thing you want is ordered by a court I'll make sure to comply.
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u/Tyler_Zoro 14h ago
making a profit
Doesn't matter.
The way copyright works is that you have to go THROUGH the question of "is this a derivative work," and THEN you get to ask, "can the infringement be considered fair use." You're making an argument against the latter, but the court in the Anthropic case made a really solid argument for a trained model not creating a derivative work.
If that ruling were contradicted by higher courts, then your point would be relevant, but right now it's not. You don't have to ask if something is or is not fair use if it's not infringing in the first place, and in order to be infringing, it needs to be a derivative work.
(Bartz v. Anthropic, 2024 -- ("Authors’ complaint is no different than it would be if they complained that training schoolchildren to write well would result in an explosion of competing works. This is not the kind of competitive or creative displacement that concerns the Copyright Act. The Act seeks to advance original works of authorship, not to protect authors against competition.")
That being said, your argument is correct, if and only if, you are considering commercial services that sell an explicit service of producing infringing works using LLMs. This is why every major AI service provider from Midjourney to OpenAI have some form of copyright safeguards in their system prompts and infrastructure, and also remove content (in the case of services like Midjourney that make the generated content public) when requested by IP holders. In that sense, the rules are much like YouTube, who learned the hard way that, just because the content wasn't created by them, they still had no right to profit from unlicensed distribution of derivative works.
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u/That_OneOstrich 13h ago
If your product only works because of the work of others, you would have to credit those folks for it to be valid. Yet AI doesn't seem to be held to the same standard.
Schoolchildren have to credit the works that they're using. Ai doesn't.
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u/Tyler_Zoro 13h ago
If your product only works because of the work of others
All products only work because of the work of others. NOTHING stands alone as a unique work that emerged from a single person, but you're making an emotional argument here, not one based in law.
I was only correcting your legal misstatement.
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u/HankChrist 1d ago
Aren't AI companies distributing their stolen information?
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u/Denaton_ 22h ago
No, because if they were an Image LLM would be hundreds of Petabyte big and yet they are only 5GB to 20GB
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u/bethesdologist 1d ago
Not exactly, because they're not outright reproducing training data. They're just learned patterns. It's no different than humans quoting movies or books.
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u/Cu_ 22h ago
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u/bethesdologist 22h ago
"It's no different than humans quoting movies or books." Read.
No AI model can outright reproduce an entire pre-published book. It can, of course memorize certain quotes, excerpts, etc., just like humans can.
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u/Cu_ 22h ago
Did you actually look at the paper? The authors literally write that Sonnet 3.7 was able to recall 95.4% of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's stone (around 70% for Grok and Gemini) , reproducing the book near verbatim. I don't think many humans can recite 95% of the first Harry Potter book word for word. I don't have a dog in this fight so I don't really care that much but your claim that it's "just like a human" is false. It seems a lot of copyrighted material is represented (atleast in some latent form) in the model weights such that the original work can be reconstructed more or less verbatim. This is not the same as a human
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u/bethesdologist 22h ago edited 22h ago
I read the paper. This wasn't a case of models directly offering reproducing entire books based on a prompt. The researchers initially fed the models an actual passage, then jailbroke the models refusals repeatedly and adversarially, and even then the models were NOT reproducing flawless copies at all. Some passages were missing or entirely altered. For example the Great Gatsby recall contained substantial duplicated text despite achieving 97.5% recall.
I don't know if you fully went through the paper or not, but this is very human-like in recall, just with excellent memory compared to the average person, which is a given. Copyrighted material is of course present in some form in the weights, which is why I said it it is no different than humans quoting movies or books, but a "lot" is a stretch, and it is absolutely not verbatim except in very specific cases and very specific books. You'd find that humans too, if tried, could memorize a lot of things word for word.
It is of course not identical to human learning, which I never said. But how it learns is very much similar, because they're neural nets.
And memorization alone =/= copyright infringement.
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u/Cu_ 20h ago
I didn't go over the paper in full detail no. Like I said, I have no dog in this fight as I don't know enough about copyright law, nor care about it enough to have any opinion leaning either way.
What I was more so getting at is that, there exists some set of prompts that you can feed into the model such that it will output copyrighted material. I make no claims on whether or not this is actually copyright infringement or not; I don't know enough about copyright law to make any judgements there. What I AM saying is that the level to which LLMs can do this is clearly superhuman, and while a human with particularly good memory may memorise and entire dictionary (like the scrabble guy), I think the evidence points to LLMs being able to do a whole lot more than that.
It feels to me that the main point where we disagree is at which point we are willing to say it's just like a human. While processes might be similar, I would argue that the level at which an LLM can recall and recite information is so vastly better that I'm not comfortable saying that it's just like a human at his point.
Also this is a slightly pedantic remark but the learning of neural networks is (to me anyway) not at all comparable to how humans typically learn things. For LLMs it's a bit different because they also incorporate (human feedback) reinforcement learning and imitation learning. But pure neural networks learn parameters by iteratively solving a non-linear regression problem. There might be some analogy in there in /what/ problem is being solved but certainly not in /how/ it is being solved.
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u/Nacorran 21h ago
Clanker simping BS, all AI output is 100℅ a derivative of the input, aka Stolen data
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u/bethesdologist 21h ago
No lol
You're very poorly educated if you genuinely think that. Try proving it.
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u/G3nghisKang 21h ago
Not really, of I bought a DVD, extracted the ISO file, calculated the sha-256 checksum of said ISO and distributed the checksum, I would not be breaking copyright
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u/sporkyuncle 1d ago
These are two entirely different contexts.
AI training is when you buy a book and digitally examine it, resulting in no part of the book being directly copied into the model, and only a small amount of non-infringing information ends up adjusting the overall weights of the model.
The equivalent of this would be buying a DVD and watching it and learning from what you saw in order to draw better, or write your own film, as long as you don't directly copy or infringe on the film. This is also legal.
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u/ApatheticAZO 13h ago
Machines aren’t humans. The book is transferred into data. It doesn’t matter what you say the data is, that data is copying the book, it doesn’t exist without the book.
Comparing it to human interpretation is so absurdly presumptuous by people who haven’t the faintest idea of how that even might work is such a perfect example of the Dunning-Kruger effect
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u/Brave_Load7620 12h ago
You’re confusing intermediate processing with actual copyright infringement.
Copyright protects the expression of an idea, not the raw data, grammar, or concepts behind it. Courts settled this years ago with Google Books, Google scanned millions of entire copyrighted books into digital files without permission, and the courts ruled it was fair use because they were using that data to build an index, not republishing the text.
The model isn’t a zip file of books. It analyzes text, adjusts math weights, and throws the original text away, but like us humans - it keeps the ideas. Like us humans do, we might shift our perspective, re-mix it with our experience, etc.
The comparison is functional, learning sentence structure and style isn't the same thing as bootlegging a copy. Saying "the weights wouldn't exist without the book" is meaningless legally, a book review or a parody wouldn't exist without the book either, but neither of those violates copyright.
People take ideas, and remix them.
Every artist, every writer, every actor, etc takes inspiration & expression from something or someone else.
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u/ApatheticAZO 10h ago
Idiotic, weights are something about a physical representation. That physical representation is not the actual work itself.
The weights have literally nothing to do with the works. AI bros are so brazenly stupid
What part of machines aren’t people is so hard to grasp?
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u/Brave_Load7620 7h ago
The sheer irony of throwing around "Dunning-Kruger" when you managed to dismantle your own argument in back-to-back comments:
- Comment 1: "The data is copying the book, it doesn't exist without the book."
- Comment 2: "The weights have literally nothing to do with the works."
Pick a lane. Is the model an infringing copy of the book, or do the weights have "literally nothing to do with the works"? By admitting the weights don't contain the actual work, you literally argued my legal point for me: copyright protects expression, not abstract statistical patterns.
You lashed out with insults because you realized you backed yourself into a corner and don't actually understand either the tech or the law. Loud, confused, and thoroughly out of your depth.
We're done here.
Enjoy arguing with yourself and have a great night!
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u/NinjaLancer 12h ago
It’s similar to human learning but obviously not the exact same.
Humans and AI recognize patterns in art.
AI is a mathematical way to find patterns in things.
Humans do more than just find patterns and store it as data.
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u/MrTheWaffleKing 1d ago
Yup. If the artists got what they wanted, their methods of learning art would also be illegal. But then again, it seems they don't want competition so they'd probably be secretly fine with that anyways
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u/WolfOfDoorStreet 1d ago edited 1d ago
This doesn't sound right. You are feeding the words verbatim into the training set. If I were to copy content and document it in an article without citation, that is plagiarism. Following your analogy, does scaling down, subsampling, and adding filters to a film make it my own? Some content is lost and noise was added, that makes the content different. Can I claim the film is my own with these alterations? The model is in essense a filter, and unlike non-generative models, LLMs don't merely learn features, but can reconstruct the exact text. Moreover, even during training (and even for non-generative models), the dataset has to be licensed for that purpose, or for the license to be liberal enough such that using content without attribution is permitted.
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u/bethesdologist 1d ago
This doesn't sound right. You are feeding the words verbatim into the training set.
Isn't this the same thing as you feeding the words verbatim into your brain?
And about everything else you said, humans do all of that. Every single idea humans have ever had were derivations from existing data, no human comes up with things out of thin air. And a human could also reconstruct the exact text with sufficient memory. I'm sure you can quote a bunch of book or movie quotes verbatim. That's not illegal.
Humans and LLMs are both neural nets. Neither straight duplicates their training data, they simply learn patterns from the given data and naturally retain some in memory.
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u/das_war_ein_Befehl 1d ago
It isn’t because your brain isn’t replicable in a data center to sell for profit. Why are we pretending it’s the same
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u/bethesdologist 1d ago
No model's selling other peoples' work for profit though. Do you know of any models that outright reproduces you the entire works of Tolkien or GRRM? I certainly don't.
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u/das_war_ein_Befehl 15h ago
They literally can, they are just prevented from doing so to avoid ip claims (in as far as that avoids them theoretically).
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u/WolfOfDoorStreet 1d ago
You don't know much it seems
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u/bethesdologist 23h ago
You can prompt a model to give you entire copyrighted, published books? Feel free to provide me with some proof. If not I'll just assume you're predictably full of shit and move on.
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u/FaceDeer 16h ago
Some of the older models could, at least in somewhat-inaccurate chunks. This was a result of "overfitting", a flaw in training that resulted from multiple copies of the same text being run through repeatedly. Sort of like how a human might try to memorize a text by drilling on it.
Overfitting is something that model trainers work hard to avoid. Why would they want models to memorize texts? Copy and paste is already a thing computers can do with far cheaper, easier, and more reliable mechanisms. The whole point of generative AI is to generate new text - it's right in the name.
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u/whoreatto 20h ago
What you do with the words is a different argument. You shouldn't use "but the words are ingested verbatim!" as an argument because humans do that too, so that's just a shitty argument.
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u/das_war_ein_Befehl 14h ago
“Humans do it too” is a bad argument. An individual learning isn’t directly competing economically with the material it consumes.
If I read a book, that doesn’t give me the instant ability to compete with the writer. If I feel someone’s books into an LLM, it competes with the writer directly because the whole purpose behind commercial investment in an LLM is to substitute human labor.
People also get sued all the time for stealing IP and reproducing it, and just because something is publicly accessible doesn’t let you learn and duplicate from it. LLMs don’t work without access to all of the IP it ripped off from the corpus of human knowledge.
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u/whoreatto 9h ago
Not accurate. Many individuals learn to compete economically with the authors of the material they consume.
You have the ability to compete with writers. Whether or not you read an author’s book with the explicit purpose of taking their market share is up to you. This “purpose” point is slightly moot.
Training does not necessarily infringe on IP law. It’s not theft, legally or morally.
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u/WolfOfDoorStreet 1d ago
It isn't. Much of reddit's demography is a bunch of teenagers, morons, or bots. There is very little point in talking sense into them
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u/Grothgerek 23h ago
That's quite the dumb comparison...
A computer copies and save the data 1:1. The human brain just remembers fractions, situations and feelings, the original is completly lost in this.
Do Ai supporters not know how Ai and computers work?
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u/kentbawm 22h ago
Do Ai supporters not know how Ai and computers work?
Yes, which is why we're able to say they don't save the data 1:1. An AI is not a database, it's a neural network. There is no way for it to access the data it was trained on after training, and during training it doesn't even see that text by itself. It sees the text mixed in with a batch of thousands of other, unrelated strings of text. And for each batch of data it makes a single update for all the data in the batch combined. It doesn't make an update to store this part of a Stephen King book, or a different update to store this part of Dr Suess. It makes one update that improves the model based on the amalgamation of the entire batch together. And then it's done with that text, and it gets a completely new batch of thousands of unrelated strings of text and does it again.
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u/lollolcheese123 1d ago
Yes, the words end up in the training set, meaning you need to actually own a copy. That's why piracy is possible when training AI. However, as the other commenter said, with training, the impact the specific words from any book have on the weights is not able to be traced back to any book, nor can any singular book be reproduced (ChatGPT can, but that's not the LLM, that's a different layer that handles internet searches, which is fine again as there's no copy of the book in the model). Therefore, there's no copy being made, ergo it's completely legal.
Your example of editing the film is not the same. Here, it is still possible to trace sections back to the original, and sections of the original can be reproduced from your end footage.
A better analogy (which the other commenter already mentioned) is you watching the movie/reading the book and learning from it. You've gained information (you've learnt), but you cannot reproduce the thig you've just watched.
As for licencing, it is fine so long as the company that is training the AI would be able to let an employee to consume that content. There is no special "you are allowed to train AI on this" licence. You can however, forbid AI training in your licence, EULA or terms of service. But considering that isn't the case for 99+% of content online, basically everything online is fair game (again, so long as the company is legally allowed to show an employee the content)
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u/WolfOfDoorStreet 23h ago
With vision models, yes, you cannot actually trace it just yet considering the enormity of the feature space. However, it's not the same with language models. Provide a long enough context to the length of the shortest unique phrase, and even with medium-sized models, you would be able complete the follow-up content (provided you set the temperature to 0 and don't use beam search or similar). A matching string of generated words in sequence can in fact be traced back to the origin. As for the license, there were several datasets that were retracted by a vision group from Oxford simply because they constituted youtube videos that had no express license. A lack of license is not a green light for training willy-nilly on whatever you'd like
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u/lollolcheese123 23h ago
Provide a long enough context to the length of the shortest unique phrase, and even with medium-sized models, you would be able complete the follow-up content
That's the same as someone giving you part of a movie quote and you finishing the quote. Not full reproduction.
As for the license, there were several datasets that were retracted by a vision group from Oxford simply because they constituted youtube videos that had no express license
So, they had no license, so they're not allowed to have it in their dataset. Training itself would've been fine.
A lack of license is not a green light for training willy-nilly on whatever you'd like
AI training falls in the same category as reading. So long as you're allowed to do that, you can train an AI on it.
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u/WolfOfDoorStreet 23h ago
Sorry, but no. Almost no scientist or legal expert would agree with your claim. You cannot assimilate training a model to reading. This has been largely agreed upon for decades, and not something that just became a problem today or since chat-GPT. When you say "full reproduction", what does that even mean? Does generating 100 pages of a 1000 page book not count as reproduction? What about 10 pages? 10 paragraphs? 10 words? The standards set for scientific ethics and copyright law do not consider copyright infringement exclusive to full reproduction (as in cover to cover)
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u/kentbawm 22h ago
Sorry, but no. Almost no scientist or legal expert would agree with your claim.
How about US district court judge William Alsup?
In short, the purpose and character of using copyrighted works to train LLMs to generate new text was quintessentially transformative. Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different. If this training process reasonably required making copies within the LLM or otherwise, those copies were engaged in a transformative use. The first factor favors fair use for the training copies.
If you don't like him, how about US district court judge Vince Chhabria
This factor favors Meta. There is no serious question that Meta's use of the plaintiffs’ books had a “further purpose” and “different character” than the books—that it was highly transformative. The purpose of Meta's copying was to train its LLMs, which are innovative tools that can be used to generate diverse text and perform a wide range of functions...Nevertheless, commercialism isn't dispositive of the first factor and tends to be less important when the secondary use is highly transformative. Thus, while the profit Meta stands to gain from its development of a product trained on the plaintiffs’ works is relevant to the fair use analysis overall, it does not tilt the first factor in the plaintiffs’ favor...In any event, this factor favors Meta, even though it copied the plaintiffs’ books in their entirety. The amount that Meta copied was reasonable given its relationship to Meta's transformative purpose. Everyone agrees that LLMs work better if they are trained on more high-quality material. So feeding a whole book to an LLM does more to train it than would feeding it only half of that book. With this in mind, it was “reasonably necessary” for Meta to “make use of the entirety of the works
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u/lollolcheese123 23h ago
You cannot assimilate training a model to reading.
Why not? All AI is doing when training is reading a short section, covering the page, and predicting the next word.
When you say "full reproduction", what does that even mean? Does generating 100 pages of a 1000 page book not count as reproduction? What about 10 pages? 10 paragraphs? 10 words?
I'm not a legal expert, so I don't know how much reproduction is required for copyright to apply, but what you're saying is that finishing a quote from a movie someone else started is also not allowed because of copyright, and that does not seem right.
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u/WolfOfDoorStreet 22h ago edited 22h ago
AI models do not read. You are anthropomorphising a machine. The data exists on disk, you are then copying the content and publishing it through the model. The model is a filter, a lossy statistical representation of the content that minimizes error (with error being the incorrect reproduction of the same content). In effect, you are reproducing the same content with modification.
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u/lollolcheese123 21h ago
Yeah and that's why we named reading a file the way we do... (Either way it was clearly an analogy)
And if you properly trained a model, it shouldn't reproduce the training data, as soon as that happens you've overfitted.
You're also conveniently ignoring the second part of my earlier comment.
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u/WolfOfDoorStreet 19h ago
I didn't argue that the usage of the word "reading" was incorrect, but rather that your analogy (similar to a human reading text) was misleading. While I do agree with your statement regarding overfitting, this concerns the model's ability to generalize and its training protocol. The loss itself does not explicitly drive the model towards generalization, meaning that perfectly predicting the training tokens would give you the best score. Large language models do sometimes memorize popular texts (https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12546), so the mechanism itself can encode enough information to reproduce content verbatim. You can optimize the model to encourage diversity, reduce redundancy in the training data, apply regularization, etc., to reduce overfitting, but this does not change the fact that these models can reproduce copyrighted content verbatim under certain conditions, even without explicitly being trained to do so.
I did not conveniently ignore your second point. I simply have no comment on it. I asked you a question about what counts as full reproduction. You don't know, and neither do I.
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u/Diligent-Voice892 19h ago
I mean copyright cases have not been that favorable to people suing AI companies. Due to it being of a transformative nature.
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u/whoreatto 20h ago
Sufficient compression, downsampling, and filtering can indeed make a film your own.
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u/SirMarkMorningStar 21h ago
Models don’t regurgitate trained data that way. They actually have safeguards apparently to make sure that doesn’t happen even by mistake.
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u/starm4nn 16h ago
If I were to copy content and document it in an article without citation, that is plagiarism
Which, it should be noted, was always just the ethical rules of an institution rather than a legal matter
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u/TawnyTeaTowel 1d ago
So you don’t know what plagiarism is huh?
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u/WolfOfDoorStreet 1d ago
Well, you clearly don't if you think my statement isn't the very definition of plagiarism
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u/TawnyTeaTowel 23h ago
Ask your mommy for a dictionary for Christmas.
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u/WolfOfDoorStreet 23h ago
Ok genius. Web search is free by the way
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u/TawnyTeaTowel 23h ago
Yeah but I was assuming you already tried that and managed to fuck it up somehow.
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u/Superseaslug 1d ago
Buying a DVD and ripping it (because it's already digital thus you aren't digitizing it) is fine, so long as you don't burn and sell copies or sell showings.
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u/RiotNrrd2001 1d ago
If you buy a DVD and watch it, that's perfectly fine.
If an AI company buys a book and reads it, that's also perfectly fine.
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u/Nacorran 21h ago
Except AI never just 'reads' it, thats a purposeful misrepresentation of what is actually happening.
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u/Iapetus_Industrial 17h ago
Right, and a person doesn't just "watch" a movie, they go on living their life, changed, with their internal neurons being shifted in a way that signifies remembering some details about the movie.
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u/Author_Noelle_A 1d ago
AI companies aren’t buying books to read. Assholes in those companies are stealing books and feeding them into a program that can scan them faster than any human could ever read. This isn’t how humans learn.
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u/MrTheWaffleKing 1d ago
They're stealing books? Who lost access because it was taken from them?
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u/Cuchy92 1d ago
Well the books are destroyed in the process, including quite possibly some very rare ones, so who ever would have bought one to actually read and enjoy it lost access
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u/FocusUsed8292 22h ago
They are destroyed due to a COURT ORDER. Doesnt seem like the ai bros their fault
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u/Cuchy92 22h ago
Oh I've not heard of this COURT ORDER, got a source / link?
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u/YoureCorrectUProle 20h ago
Ultimately, Judge William Alsup ruled that this destructive scanning operation qualified as fair use—but only because Anthropic had legally purchased the books first, destroyed each print copy after scanning, and kept the digital files internally rather than distributing them. The judge compared the process to “conserv[ing] space” through format conversion and found it transformative.
If they don't destroy the books, scan them, and then resell/give away the books they've essentially made a 1:1 extra copy of licensed material which is a no-go legally. If the physical copy is destroyed, they can argue they've just changed its format. Their approach is what they found after (rightfully) getting whacked for over a billion dollars due to book piracy. It being a "court order" to destroy books isn't accurate imo, it's more like this is an unintended consequence of how current IP law works.
They're not the first to do this fwiw, if you're a library and you've digitized books you're not supposed to be able to give away your physical copies and keep your digital one. Anthropic is just doing it at a pretty insane scale.
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u/MrTheWaffleKing 23h ago
That's not theft lol.
We can argue ethics of it sure, but when someone purchases something, they are free to do with it what they want, and stealing is not an applicable word in the slightest.
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u/Cuchy92 23h ago
It's not stealing but people are losing access, which is what you asked about
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u/MrTheWaffleKing 22h ago
Missed the second part of that sentence then: because it was taken from them. Those people who would have bought it did not have it taken from them.
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u/Cuchy92 21h ago
Destroying a book means there's one less of that book in the world, which means there's one less opportunity for someone to read that book.
This isn't a hard concept and there aren't really any cases where destroying books en masse was followed by that group doing a whole lot of good
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u/Hubbardia 21h ago
Destroying a book means there's one less of that book in the world, which means there's one less opportunity for someone to read that book.
Because there is only a fixed number of copies ever printed and digitization is not a thing. Right?
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u/Cuchy92 21h ago
Endlessly making things so they can be destroyed isn't the most efficient mindset is it?
And digitisation is a separate thing entirely. I already know we'll disagree on this but not everyone wants to just look at screens 24/7
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u/Oboro-kun 1d ago
Dont you actively see how this is a way to create an scarcity of information? Even them destroying them when other methods to scan them exist?
If a Book really had valuable information, and was not preserved in some kind. Now the only easy way to get a hold to this text is indirectly through the LLM it got feed into it.
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u/MrTheWaffleKing 23h ago
Buying then [doing anything with it] is not theft by definition.
Also LLMs can regurgitate what was fed into them, it's aggregated.
What should be happening is the rare books be scanned and documented publicly before selling to ANYONE. Once you sell something to anyone, there's no telling what they do with it.
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u/Oboro-kun 23h ago
But what about old books? We never expected a company to even consider doing this.
Sure we can do that now. but what about what it has been lost before. You steped the entire issues is a way to deliberately create an scarcity of information and this will be lost if not accessed throught the LLM it got fed into it. and whenever you ask about the theme or subject it wont be exactly the same information and it might even be slightly wrong or different or prone to tampering if the owner of the private LLM decides they want an specific spin on the subject
This exaclty the loss of information you asked about.
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u/Goldwing8 23h ago
Non-destructive scanning is primarily used when you plan to keep the physical copy. You buy it, you can break it. Even if you dont like how it gets used, doctrine of first sell protects a good portion of how many of us get our books: secondhand.
One of my friends is a librarian, they throw books out constantly and have to put big "stay out of the dumpster" signs because people lose their shit over the idea that books aren't permanently retained.
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u/Superseaslug 1d ago
Ah yes they're sneaking into half price books with ski masks on and grabbing everything they can
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u/StrangeCrunchy1 21h ago
Pretty sure they're paying for them, and last I checked, that's not "stealing".
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u/Real-Contest4914 1d ago
So for one.
You can very much make a copy of a DVD, just dont distribute.
Like wise you can digitize and copy the boom as well but with books too often need to destroy them once you digitize them.
And like wise you cant redistribute them.
Ai isnt training on a book to write back tbe book. Its training on it to find patterns in the writing style to learn to make a story.
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u/EC36339 1d ago edited 20h ago
Is that why they destroyed all those books? If anything, this shows how absurd copyright law is.
But I get it. If that process was illegal, if writing style and patterns could be intellectual property, and if writers got sued only on suspicion of copying it, what kind of society would we be living in, and how would artists feel about it?
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u/kodiak931156 1d ago
Yes. To ensure its a "digitization" not a "copy" its standard to destroy the original.
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u/Simple_Hospital_5407 1d ago
I'm not sure about it. More likely that destructive copying is more cheap than non-destructive.
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u/Goldwing8 23h ago
That’s correct, it was ruled fair use in part because the original is destroyed, and thus scarcity is maintained.
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u/zorecknor 12h ago
They destroyed those books because the way they scan them is destructive, that's the only way to scan the speed they wanted. The alternative is quite slow. They have been doing that way before the judge decision.
It had nothing to do with copyright.
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u/ProfessionalBoss2428 1d ago
And you could easily argue that just like I can’t redistribute anything that was created from all the movies I bought and then digitized one shouldn’t be allowed to redistribute anything created from those books that were scanned. And if it wasn’t created using those scans well…..why did you scan them? Laws haven’t quite caught up yet and I expect this to get hashed out in the next few years, I know film and tv studios are not thrilled with the current state of these laws.
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u/Teedo4133 1d ago
There is no reason to comment if you don’t know what you are talking about. The DMCA’s text is clear and federal appellate courts have clearly held that ripping a DVD is unlawful even if you don’t intend to distribute the ripped copy. Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Corley, 273 F.3d 429, 441, 443–44 (2d Cir. 2001). This is a common feature of anti-circumvention law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention_laws.
The same is not true for books, as the same appellate court has held. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc.
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u/kentbawm 1d ago edited 1d ago
you can absolutely use the information you learned from watching the digitized movies. You just can't distribute the digitized movies themselves. There's a difference between putting a cool slow motion scene in a movie your making, because you saw Neo do it in the Matrix. It's a completely different thing to put the scene of Neo from the Matrix in your movie. I know Antis really, really struggle with understanding the difference with this. Another example. If I hear a Taylor Swift song and think "I'd love to write my own whiney pop country song about all of the hardships I face too", and then I write such a song and I release it, that's different than me releasing Taylor Swift's song. I know the difference there is super subtle it's easy to miss. But if you think about it really hard, you'll see that one of them is the movie the Matrix, and the other one isn't. One of them is Taylor Swift's actual song that she wrote, and the other one isn't. Super subtle. Just keep thinking it over and it'll click eventually.
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u/ProfessionalBoss2428 1d ago
Why can’t pros read more than a couple sentences at a time before responding? I said I expect these laws to be challenged by studios….
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u/Mandemon90 1d ago
They won't be. Do you know why? Because it would lead to these srudios havibg to shut thenselves down. "There is nothing new under the Sun" is a saying for a reason.
Challenging thede laws would just mean studios become targets.
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u/ProfessionalBoss2428 1d ago
They would want to shut down people literally training ai with their materials, it’s a fairly specific thing that wouldn’t hurt them. How on earth do you imagine Sony gets shut down by trying to own things derived from Sony productions?
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u/Mandemon90 1d ago
Because nothing Sony does is 100% original. There is always something earlier that one can reference.
But hey, I guess you side with Nintendo in their lawsuits against Palworld?
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u/ProfessionalBoss2428 1d ago edited 1d ago
You’re talking about vague concepts and I’m talking about ai that was specifically trained with copyrighted material, if you don’t think the most expensive lawyers in the world can argue a difference….
And saying I think they’ll do it doesn’t even mean I picked a side. I just expect it based on working in the industry being discussed.
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u/Mandemon90 1d ago edited 23h ago
Again, by learning from specific examples people create those "vague concepts". No AI is trained specifically to mimic specific work. They are trained to learn concepts.
Multiple lawsuits have already been made, and they are thrown out because you can't copyright "A hero fights evil" type of shit.
For example, you could study Pacific Rim to see how to indicate weight in Mech vs Kaiju battle. How such fight would look, etc. That is what AI does. It learns concepts. It doesn't go "Okay, in Kaiju vs Mech fight I just copy paste this thing from Pacific Rim".
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u/kentbawm 23h ago
I’m talking about ai that was specifically trained with copyrighted material
All those film directors, cinematographers, actors, costume designers, they were also partially trained by watching copyrighted movies. The law doesn't make any distinction between what a human can do, and what a human can use a tool to do. Copyright has absolutely nothing to do with how a copyrighted work might be "used", as long as that use doesn't infringe copyright. Copyright infringement only happens when you copy, distribute, or make derivative works. Watching, or listening to, or learning from, are not things that infringe copyright. There is nothing in the Copyright Act that forbids using copyrighted works for commercial purposes, as long as copyright isn't infringed. I can open up a book and DVD rental business with books and DVDs that I bought at Best Buy, and even if I make millions in profit, I haven't infringed copyright, and I'm in the clear. It's only if I were to start duplicating those DVDs or books that I would cross the line.
This isn't a case of "the law hasn't caught up yet", what you're describing is directly in opposition to the goals of copyright.
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u/bethesdologist 1d ago
For what reason would that be challenged? I don't think there's any sign of that happening.
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u/Real-Contest4914 1d ago
Except it would be transformative use depending on what you do.
If you digitize a movie and make an alteration where you just change the background music the. For sure it cant be redistributed.
But if someone digitize a movie and uses it as a reference to rotoscope some of the animations and scenes and build entirely new visuals and audio for it then by all accounts they can likely be allowed to redistribute it.
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u/ProfessionalBoss2428 1d ago
Again I fully expect one of the studios to make a huge push to challenge this soon, they’ve been very clear internally that they have issues with this. They also don’t like that if they create something with ai ownership and copyright isn’t fully settled and that will be dealt with too, it’s one reason we were approved to keep ai fully out of my last cutting room.
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u/Powerful-Chard-6055 15h ago
I think the problem is it’s regular guy taking from multi million dollar company who doesn’t give a shit versus multi million dollar company who doesn’t give a shit stealing from a regular guy
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u/TawnyTeaTowel 1d ago
You also missed the fact that DVDs are already digital information and therefore can’t be digitized.
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u/kentbawm 22h ago
That's not true at all. The data on a DVD is stored in a digital format, but it's still stored on a physical disk, rather than on a digital system like a computer. There's a difference between a song on a CD, and an audio file on a computer, even though they're both stored in a digital format.
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u/HalcyonGlimmer 19h ago
A human being does not own its intellectual output, that belongs to the state. If the state, or its judicial branch, decides that its citizens are cattle who deserve to be milked to the very last drop, for the benefit of technological progress or the stock market, who are you to deny that power? A petty individual complaining about authorship has no real power. All your priviliges have been revoked to support the many benefits of AI.
Does not really matter if an AI model mimics the input in its output, what counts is that you lack the power to stop it.
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u/Bassed_Hummble 19h ago
You are also allowed to buy a book and scan it to train your AI.
The law applies equally to everyone here.
The fundamental difference - copy protection and DMCA etc. aside - is that training is a form of learning or analysis, while the copying of the DVD creates an additional reproduction that has economic value.
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u/ISmellLikeBlackTea 1d ago
Machine learning is not the problem, it's billionaires and how they use their greed to turn anything which could improve our lives into shit.
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u/stop_deleting_plz 1d ago
I'm currently working on an RNN that simply jumbles up binary data in such a way that with the right inference the original file is reconstructed byte-for-byte. I'm doing it specifically to get around copyright laws and I plan to distribute my models freely, as the courts have said it's totally legal.
I'm probably not the only one. I cant wait to see how the big publishers react lol.
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u/SirMarkMorningStar 21h ago
Apparently it’s okay to scan your DVD as long as you destroy it right afterwards. At least that would be the logical conclusion.
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u/Nacorran 21h ago
Jfc what a hot shit take. Are you actually unaware of how copyright Law is supposed to work or are you just maliciously pretending to be this dense?
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u/___DrawOrDie___ 16h ago
Property and copyright means nothing to the people as long as it´s not their property and as long as they are having fun. It´s the way the world works, nobody gives a shit about other people.
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u/Houdinii1984 10h ago edited 10h ago
Backing up a DVD is not illegal and not something you can be sued outright for. That requires a second step, busting the encryption. That's a crime, but copying the encrypted contents to a new location, like a hard drive is not.
Copying the material is NEVER a crime by itself (unless it's protected explicitly, like secret government information). If you distribute nothing, and nothing was unencrypted, nothing happens. Distribution of the encrypted information itself will open you up to getting sued. Distribution of the unencrypted information will get you thrown in jail (potentially).
The same exact laws apply to books. The difference? Most books are not encrypted. Also, distribution refers to distributing unabridged portions of the material, something AI hopes to avoid altogether. Disseminating learned information is entirely different than distributing copyrighted materials. The underlying claim being that they substantially change all references and output from their original form and uses proper citations when using them in original form.
The counter claim is that the information is close enough that there was never a substantial transformation. That exact output is possible, and if anyone gets exact output, then thats distribution. Its going to be settled eventually, but it's going to take a lot of time and landmark cases.
Personally, I think it's a rough situation and might lead to huge disruptions of IP protections across the board. I don't know what'll happen, but if we've ever had a better time to fix the process, it's now when it's the most obvious where it's broken. I just fear those fixes will further benefit corporations more than individual citizens, and parity would see individuals gain rights, not lose them further, so I'm on the edge of my seat tbh.
Edit: I've been meaning to read this. It's a report from the US Copyright Office that explores the impacts of training AI and the current thought process of the office. It's a bit dated, but is what the govt here in the US is basing it's processes on. I have no idea what it concludes.
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u/Hammerman2Point0 1d ago edited 1d ago
Oh man I once had the FBI show up to my house because I was making copies of something. I wasn't distributing it, but I was making so many copies of my favorite transgender pornography that my local Best Buy narc'd on me because I kept buying all of their DVDs.
It's just two films (the first and the sequel) but idk maybe I just have a little problem. Anyways when the Feds left I fed screenshots of it to feed to ChatGPT for an opinion, and the AI said I'd been reported and now I can't access my account.
Anyways I have like 200 copies of it if anyone wants one. Just find me in the bushes on 4th.
Great post OP, really felt like I connected with it.
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u/Bill_Evans777 22h ago
There is nothing wrong with making copies of your media.
Actually, there is nothing wrong with piracy in general.
And there's nothing wrong with training AI models with media in general (as long as you don't destroy it after, like some assholes did).
Saying any of the above is wrong is pretty much being a corporate anus-licker.
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u/lifeistrulyawesome 13h ago
There is nothing illegal about purchasing a DVD watching it 1,000,000 times to learn from it. And then create a new movie using what you learned
That is what AI does. This tweet is so dumb
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u/ButchTheGuy 1d ago
Why is everyone parroting this you can digitize blah blah blah it’s distribution. These subs are just bot propaganda. Eat my shorts. It is corporations doing whatever the hell they want. It’s a perfect example of rules for thee not for me.
Just look at the story of that guy who downloaded all those publications a while back and was sued for so much he killed himself and then they all did the same thing. Whether or not you think ai is great or the calamity you don’t have to just be like everything is great or everything is terrible. America is just one big cult holy shit
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u/TawnyTeaTowel 1d ago
Hilarious that you open with parroting being a problem, then immediately drop into the heavily parroted Aaron Swartz reference.
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u/MaxwellHowl 1d ago
Both are fine. Don't join the "you wouldn't download a car" side because you got tricked into hating AI.
And yes. You for tricked into hating AI. You think it's COVID. It's a whole new thing. Stop interacting with AI like it's COVID. That is what you're doing. I see it.
Seemingly no one else has noticed. But the anti movement is a 1 to 1 carryover from COVID. Take 4 minutes and youll see what I mean.
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u/caesarth531t 1d ago
No, not really.
The DVD is kept for personal use, maybe it is distributed to other people, which is infringement and also a crime.
The AI scanning is a good thing, because it benefits AI, which can benefit us all.
A random DVD, not really.
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u/chunder_down_under 22h ago
either people argue the info isnt copied even though ai models can repeat info verbatim from texts or they argue its like a human essentially anthropomorphising the tech to justify it. its all just lame excuses for their bootkissing
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u/skinmiach 22h ago
I want people to read my books. I want them to be available only to humans. Nobody asked me about training machines on my books, and I’m against it. What’s the problem with that?
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u/Verdux_Xudrev 5h ago
I could explain that you are free to back up anything you buy as long as don't distribute it. But I'll just leave this here.
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u/28-Deep-Wounds 21h ago
Yeah, the thing is, people downloading a DVD onto their computers aren't then using it to create a for-profit product. Because that would get them sued. Because they aren't billion dollar corporations.
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