Michael Hiltzik , Los Angeles Times; An AI firm won a lawsuit for copyright infringement — but may face a huge bill for piracy
[Kip Currier: Excellent informative overview of some of the principal issues, players, stakes, and recent decisions in the ongoing AI copyright legal battles. Definitely worth 5-10 minutes of your time to read and reflect on.
A key take-away, derived from Judge Vince Chhabria's decision in last week's Meta win, is that:
Artists and authors can win their copyright infringement cases if they produce evidence showing the bots are affecting their market. Chhabria all but pleaded for the plaintiffs to bring some such evidence before him:
“It’s hard to imagine that it can be fair use to use copyrighted books...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.”
But “the plaintiffs never so much as mentioned it,” he lamented.
[Excerpt]
"Anthropic had to acknowledge a troubling qualification in Alsup’s order, however. Although he found for the company on the copyright issue, he also noted that it had downloaded copies of more than 7 million books from online “shadow libraries,” which included countless copyrighted works, without permission.
That action was “inherently, irredeemably infringing,” Alsup concluded. “We will have a trial on the pirated copies...and the resulting damages,” he advised Anthropic ominously: Piracy on that scale could expose the company to judgments worth untold millions of dollars...
“Neither case is going to be the last word” in the battle between copyright holders and AI developers, says Aaron Moss, a Los Angeles attorney specializing in copyright law. With more than 40 lawsuits on court dockets around the country, he told me, “it’s too early to declare that either side is going to win the ultimate battle.”...
With billions of dollars, even trillions, at stake for AI developers and the artistic community at stake, no one expects the law to be resolved until the issue reaches the Supreme Court, presumably years from now...
But Anthropic also downloaded copies of more than 7 million books from online “shadow libraries,” which include untold copyrighted works without permission.
Alsup wrote that Anthropic “could have purchased books, but it preferred to steal them to avoid ‘legal/practice/business slog,’” Alsup wrote. (He was quoting Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei.)...
Artists and authors can win their copyright infringement cases if they produce evidence showing the bots are affecting their market."...
The truth is that the AI camp is just trying to get out of paying for something instead of getting it for free. Never mind the trillions of dollars in revenue they say they expect over the next decade — they claim that licensing will be so expensive it will stop the march of this supposedly historic technology dead in its tracks.
Chhabria aptly called this argument “nonsense.” If using books for training is as valuable as the AI firms say they are, he noted, then surely a market for book licensing will emerge. That is, it will — if the courts don’t give the firms the right to use stolen works without compensation."
