A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books without authors’ permission

Federal Judge William Alsup controller The AI ​​models were legal for anthropic to train on books published without authors’ permission. This is the first time that the courts believe in the AI ​​companies, the doctrine of fair use can make the AI ​​companies from the copyright to LLMS with copyright.

This decision comes to the authors, artists and publishers who claim dozens of court against companies such as Openai, meta. MidjourneyGoogle and more. The verdict puts the foundations of a precedent with technological companies, although other judges will obey the leadership of Judge Alsup.

These court claims often interpret the doctrine of the judge’s fair use, a notorious Carry out copyright law not updated Since 1976 – some time ago, it is a time ago, the concept of generative AI training sets alone.

Fair use, the rules of use, taking into account the use of the work (parody and education may be useless) or can not be reproduced for commercial earnings (Star Wars Fan Fantastics) and see how transformative work is in the original.

Companies like Meta They made a similar fair use controversy in the protection of copyright trainings with copyright, although the decision of this week clearly clarified how the courts would crawl.

In this case Bartz v. AnthropicalThe plaintiff’s group also draws questions in the order of the speech and work of the anthropics. According to the court, the anthropic tried to create a “central library” to “all the books in the world”. However, these copyrighted books were unequivocally loaded free of pirate sites that are unequivocally illegally.

Although the judge said the use of these materials is a fair use of these materials, the court will hold a trial on the nature of the Central Library.

“We will be tried in connection with the pirated copies used to create anthropic’s central library and resulting damage,” Judge Alsup said. “It then purchased a copy of an anthropic book on the Internet is not responsible for theft of theft, but it can affect the degree of legal damage.”