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

Federal judge William Alsup judge That it was legal for Anthropic to train his AI models on books published without the authorization of the authors. This marks the first time that the courts have given credits to the complaint of AI companies that the doctrine of fair use can absorb fault AI companies when they use copyright protected equipment to train LLM.

This decision is a blow for the authors, the artists and the publishers who have brought dozens of prosecution against companies like Openai, Meta, MediaGoogle, and more. Although the decision is not a guarantee that other judges will follow the example of judge Alsup, it laid the foundations of a precedent which was put on the side of technological companies rather than creatives.

These proceedings often depend on the way in which a judge interprets the doctrine of fair use, a Notoriously capricious Leaving copyright law which has not been updated Since 1976 – an era before the Internet, not to mention the concept of AI generative training sets.

The fair use decisions take into account what the work is used (parody and education can be viable), whether reproduced or not for a commercial gain (you can write the fan wars fan fiction, but you cannot sell it), and how much a derivative work is an original transformator.

Companies love Meta made arguments for the defense of training on works protected by copyright, but before this week’s decision, it was less clear how the courts would influence.

In this particular case of Bartz c. AnthropicThe applicant’s group of authors also questioned the way Anthropic has reached and stored their works. According to the trial, Anthropic sought to create a “central library” of “all the books in the world” to keep “forever”. But millions of these books protected by copyright have been downloaded for free from pirate sites, which is unambiguously illegal.

Although the judge granted that the anthropic training of these documents was fair use, the court will hold a lawsuit on the nature of the “central library”.

“We will have a lawsuit on the hacked copies used to create the central library of Anthropic and the resulting damage,” wrote Alsup in the decision. “This anthropic later bought a copy of a book which he stole on the internet will not stop it will not have responsibility for the flight, but this can affect the extent of statutory damages.”