Artificial intelligence firm Anthropic hits out at copyright lawsuit filed by music publishing corporations, claiming the content ingested into its models falls under ‘fair use’ and that any licensing regime created to manage its use of copyrighted material in training data would be too complex and costly to work in practice
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) company Anthropic has claimed to a US court that using copyrighted content in large language model (LLM) training data counts as “fair use”, however.
Under US law, “fair use” permits the limited use of copyrighted material without permission, for purposes such as criticism, news reporting, teaching, and research.
In October 2023, a host of music publishers including Concord, Universal Music Group and ABKCO initiated legal action against the Amazon- and Google-backed generative AI firm Anthropic, demanding potentially millions in damages for the allegedly “systematic and widespread infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics”.
Until one of these AIs just starts selling other people’s work as its own, and no I don’t mean derivative work I mean the copyrighted material, nobody is breaking the rules here.
Except of course that’s not how copyright law works in general.
Of course the questions are 1) is training a model fair use and 2) are the resulting outputs derivative works. That’s for the courts to decide.
But in general, just because I publish content on my website, does not give anyone else license or permission to republish that content or create derivative works, whether for free or for profit, unless I explicitly license that content accordingly.
Right, but I think it’s going to be a tough legal argument that using a text to adjust database weighting links between word associations is copying or distributing any part of that work. Assuming courts understand the math/algorithms.
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Except of course that’s not how copyright law works in general.
Of course the questions are 1) is training a model fair use and 2) are the resulting outputs derivative works. That’s for the courts to decide.
But in general, just because I publish content on my website, does not give anyone else license or permission to republish that content or create derivative works, whether for free or for profit, unless I explicitly license that content accordingly.
That’s why things like Creative Commons exists.
But surely you already knew that.
Right, but I think it’s going to be a tough legal argument that using a text to adjust database weighting links between word associations is copying or distributing any part of that work. Assuming courts understand the math/algorithms.