“Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different,” the judge said in a statement published by Reuters.
An Anthropic spokesperson praised Alsop for recognizing that the company’s use of books for training was “consistent with copyright’s purpose in enabling creativity and fostering scientific progress,” as per a statement published by Reuters. The company said in court that US copyright law encouraged AI training as a way to promote human creativity and that its system took the material to “study plaintiffs’ writing, extract uncopyrightable information from it, and use what it learned to create revolutionary technology.”
While Alsup handed Anthropic the win in terms of fair use, he determined that Anthropic infringed on the authors’ rights by sourcing pirated copies of their works for its central library, which contains over seven million illegally sourced books that might not be used in training. Anthropic had argued that the source of the material was not relevant to the issue of fair use.
“This order doubts that any accused infringer could ever meet its burden of explaining why downloading source copies from pirate sites that it could have purchased or otherwise accessed lawfully was itself reasonably necessary to any subsequent fair use,” Alsup said in a statement published by Reuters.
He ordered a December trial to determine Anthropic’s penalty for this violation; as per US copyright law, wilful copyright infringment can result in statutory damages of up to US$150,000 per work.
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source link
