GenAI tools ‘could not exist’ if firms are made to pay copyright | Computer Weekly
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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”.

        • @[email protected]
          3•10 months ago

          There is literally no way in hell someone can convince me what Meta and others are doing is not pirating

          Then your argument is non-falsifiable, and therefore, invalid.

          Major corporations and pirates are finally on the same side for once. “Fair Use” finally has financial backing. Meta is certainly not a friend, but our interests currently align.

          The worst possible outcome here is that copyright trolls manage to convince the courts that they are owed licensing fees. Next worse is a settlement that grants rightsholders a share of profits generated by AI, like they got from manufacturers of blank tapes and CDs.

          Best case is that the MPAA, RIAA, and other copyright trolls get reminded that “Fair Use” is not an exception to copyright law, but the fundamental reason it exists: Fair Use is the promotion of science and the useful arts. Fair Use is the rule; Restriction is the exception.

          • @[email protected]English
            6•10 months ago

            Then your argument is non-falsifiable, and therefore, invalid.

            Wow this is some powerful internet word salad, just shot gunning scientific sounding words at the wall to try to pretty up a basic internet debate. Falsifiability is about scientific hypotheses, not statements of belief. “Nothing you can say can convince me that murder isn’t wrong” may mean there’s no further use in debate, but it isn’t “non-falsifiable” in any meaningful way nor does it somehow make the argument for the immorality of murder “invalid”.

    • VoterFrog
      4•10 months ago

      You don’t see the difference between distributing someone else’s content against their will and using their content for statistical analysis? There’s a pretty clear difference between the two, especially as fair use is concerned.