Blake Montgomery , The Guardian; AI companies start winning the copyright fight
"The lawsuits over AI-generated text were filed first, and, as their rulings emerge, the next question in the copyright fight is whether decisions about one type of media will apply to the next.
“The specific media involved in the lawsuit – written works versus images versus videos versus audio – will certainly change the fair-use analysis in each case,” said John Strand, a trademark and copyright attorney with the law firm Wolf Greenfield. “The impact on the market for the copyrighted works is becoming a key factor in the fair-use analysis, and the market for books is different than that for movies.”
To Strand, the cases over images seem more favorable to copyright holders, as the AI models are allegedly producing images identical to the copyrighted ones in the training data.
A bizarre and damning fact was revealed in the Anthropic ruling, too: the company had pirated and stored some 7m books to create a training database for its AI. To remediate its wrongdoing, the company bought physical copies and scanned them, digitizing the text. Now the owner of 7m physical books that no longer held any utility for it, Anthropic destroyed them. The company bought the books, diced them up, scanned the text and threw them away, Ars Technica reports. There are less destructive ways to digitize books, but they are slower. The AI industry is here to move fast and break things.
Anthropic laying waste to millions of books presents a crude literalization of the ravenous consumption of content necessary for AI companies to create their products."
