I agree with the conclusion, but that rationale is wrong. First, you can digitize a DVD. Second, it’s not a double standard. You can grab copies of random stuff and jam it in an AI model too.
Our laws are written such that it’s making a copy outside of reasonable use that’s illegal, and AI training only makes a copy incidentally to what they’re doing and then it’s deleted. It’s the same standard that makes viewing a photo on an artists website legal.
It’s not bullshit because they’re breaking the law, but because we need to refine the law to make it clear training an AI model isn’t a reasonable usage anymore than a public broadcast of a DVD is a reasonable use.
Trying to shoehorn it into the existing laws will just create a nightmare of loopholes and complications.
You got four replies all about just the DVD part, but I want to ask is how you would word things to apply to AI specifically? LLM models? Idk what language would be in legaleese for this and exclusive enpugh to apply.
The traditional method would be to define the scope and intent of the law, and then defer the specifics of enforcement to an executive agency for nuanced application. That way the law conveys “no usage of information passed to a machine learning model for the purposes of generative content production, nor the output of any such system, should be considered fair use under copyright law unless the usage is non commercial and qualifies as fair use for academic or research purposes”. Then someone like the FCC would determine what qualifies as a machine learning model, and can flex to account for changes in technology.
You basically just say what you mean very specifically. I don’t think it’s a problem for Google to download webpages and track how they connect and their words, because that’s how search engines work. So I’m okay with that. I’m okay with individuals downloading chunks of the public web to do normal things. I’m okay with people needing huge swaths of the text for research, as well as the images, even for specific research into generative AI of the type we’re talking about. No one is being harmed by someone at MIT incidentally creating farside comics.
Harm or no harm, the disagreeable part to me is the commercial use of the model trained on inputs from people who didn’t want you to do that, sometimes without even having the most superficial justification to have the content in the first place.
Nitpick: Why would anyone do that, DVDs are already digital mediums with a filesystem. So they first have to convert to analog media first… And that introduces losses…
You just put a DVD in your drive and now you can copy files from it to you HD… If copying files is now called ‘digitizing’ we live in a strange world…
If you have a large number of DVDs, digitising them makes them easier to browse and decouples you from the physical medium (so you don’t have to bring them with you everywhere in order to watch them).
As for the conversion, maybe you’re confusing this with ripping vinyl or tape. Ripping a CD or a DVD is easy and reproducible and gives you a 1:1 digital copy of it.
Maybe because I’m not a native english speaker, but to me ‘digitising’ means converting an analog medium to a digital one. Like with vinyl, VHS, etc. And ‘ripping’ is about an extraction process. Like overcoming a protection or more difficult to access mediums like Audio CDs, which don’t have a real filesystem, and into a easily accessible single file on a harddrive.
DVDs are already digital, and if they don’t have a copy protection, which you have to rip through, you can just copy the files to a hardrive and then, if you want reencode them into one more portable file…
You’re missing his point, he’s unhappy with the word choice. Ripping a DVD is not digitizing it. Digitizing means specifically turning an analog signal digital.
Ah, my bad - now that I read it again, you’re right. In the same line of thought though “digitising” is sometimes wrongly used in the place of ripping.
AI training only makes a copy incidentally to what they’re doing and then it’s deleted. It’s the same standard that makes viewing a photo on an artists website legal.
That’s not what the U.S. Copyright office says about training. They hold that it does implicate the copyright of reproduction. Meaning: If you train on a protected work without a license you are violating copyright, and if that’s not a fair use then you are breaking the law.
Training ~ viewing might be an analogy used by “AI” brands, but it is not legal reality.
I could’ve sworn a court case decided otherwise. Literally EVERY AI model in existence right now is commiting copyright theft on a massive scale if that’s the interpretation the courts took. Which is why I have a hard time buying it. I fear it’s reached the idea of normalcy in people’s minds and we’ll never see it illegal.
There’s been a couple court cases (that I know of / at least), and one judge was accepting on the argument that model training was a “fair use” while the other was not. I think both of those rulings came down prior to the publication of the U.S. Copyright Office guidelines.
Also, I’m not 100% sure that the U.S. Copyright Office is an authority here. The DOJ and/or Federal judiciary would have the authority to interpret the copyright laws: The DOJ to decide to prosecute, and the judiciary to make binding rulings and/or advise juries. I’m sure both the DOJ and the judiciary will give a lot of weight to the guidelines, but the guidelines aren’t actually the law.
In any case, you can read the guidelines and make your own decisions: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ Part 3 is about training, and I think the damning bits are III, B and D. Part 2 is about outputs, and I think the damning bits are II, B and D.2. (My summaries: 1. Training infringes 2. Outputs that are substantially similar infringe 3. models get no copyright 4. prompts are NOT ‘human creative effort’ and thus are insufficient to establish copyright 5. human creative effort still gets copyright protections, even when generative AI is used as a tool in the creative process.)
It is likely that commercial generative AI is in violation of a lot of copyrights, yes. Research projects are fair use, but only as long as they stay research projects.
I’m not sure that’s been extensively tested in courts. The document you referenced below appears to be as-yet not officially published, so I don’t believe it actually qualifies as an official position yet, but the bigger issue is that it’s untested in court.
This thread is a response to an AI court case where the ruling was that training on copy written works is fair use.
Alsup ruled in June that Anthropic made fair use of the authors’ work to train Claude, but found that the company violated their rights by saving more than 7 million pirated books to a “central library” that would not necessarily be used for that purpose
Regardless, you do make good points and I think we agree that the end state is “they shouldn’t be able to do that”. I have concerns that using existing standards that take copying too literally results in some unintended ambiguity, and situations where AI training is incidentally blocked, but so is stuff like “opening a news article on a computer”, which does the same things the copyright office report highlights as infringement.
I think we’d be in a much more agreeable place if we just legally state that a commercial AI tools training isn’t fair use. That lets you have nuance like “search engine? It’s a statistical model, but not generative: allowed. AI agent? Statistical model that’s generating content as opposed to classification or ranking: not allowed”.
Its a slopper who wants to project these spreadsheets as ‘conscious’ when what’s happening is they’re essentially being transcoded into statistical models.
Yup. Give a Markov chain multi-billion parameters and you can get some surprisingly cogent results.
I will freely admit that current LLM architectures include several innovations that make them not actually Markov chains, but it’s still statistics and linear algebra. I don’t know what thought is, but I’m quite unconvinced that LLMs (or any current generative AI architecture) is doing it.
I don’t know what thought is, but I’m quite unconvinced that LLMs (or any current generative AI architecture) is doing it.
Okay, why not? I also don’t know what thought is, so I don’t think it’s possible to say if an LLM is or is not doing it. And giving wrong or incoherent answers doesn’t invalidate it as thought or your local stoner buddy would be considered brain dead.
I’ve not seen evidence of it in any of my interactions with generative AI, which have pretty universally been bad. I feel like it has something to do with autonomous spontaneity. I recognize it in animals I can’t communicate well with, but I found it lacking in the LLM that I tried to play a TTRPG with. It would be easier for me to be convinced, if I really had a better understanding of what thought is. It’s hard for me to be convinced because while I understand LLMs and diffusion networks better than most people*, I don’t think I understand thought so I recognize the gap.
Also I’m not sure I agree with your final assertion, the stoner buddy is plenty wrong, but there is a coherency there. When coherency disappears entirely from human thought that’s usually a seizure or stroke. Even as confusing as they are dreams and acid trips often have a coherency while you are in them, if not one that’s easily described when recalling the experience.
*: My formal AI training ended before big data met ML, so it’s woefully out of date. I am quite the computer geek tho, it’s just my passion tends toward languages, type systems, and proof assistants. So, better than most, but not an expert by any means.
Nah. Shut the fuck up slopper. If you’re going to insult us and then ask chatgpt to win the argument, which you always do and it always misses the point, I’m not going to answer your question.
The fact is these systems can do what a lot of humans do. That’s not because the matrix multiplication is identical to thinking, but because most of these humans have never thought in their lives, do not have interiority, and are not people in any way that matters. Prove you’re conscious if you want me to address you as such, fucking slopper.
The larger part of the infringement is probably its use commercially. I doubt that there would have been such a fuss if it was a fully-open, low-profit operation.
But as-is, the commercial products are being used to make money for the AI company in an unauthorised way.
Similar to how it’s generally frowned upon for fan media to make money, because it starts being infringement. You can have a “support the fan media maker” button, but you generally can’t do things like put your fan media behind a pay wall. The IP owners will come down hard on you for that.
‘‘(a)(3) As used in this subsection—
‘‘(A) to ‘circumvent a technological measure’ means to
descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work,
or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair
a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright
owner;
and
‘‘(a) VIOLATIONS REGARDING CIRCUMVENTION OF TECHNOLOGICAL MEASURES.—(1)(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
They hyphenated techno-logical both times in the second paragraph? Was it a line break both times, or was the moron who wrote it really that out of touch with the topic he was writing laws for?
Different senses of the word digital. The dvd is digital as in “made discrete and not analog”.
I meant in the sense of “to move off of fixed use physical media and translate to a format more agnostic to storage medium or conducive to transfer and immediate processing”.
More succinctly: to copy something to a storage medium that’s harder to loose under the couch.
Okay so how DO you digitize it since you can also hold the SSD in your computer in your hand? In fact I can’t think of a data storage medium in use that you can’t touch physically at all.
I agree with the conclusion, but that rationale is wrong. First, you can digitize a DVD. Second, it’s not a double standard. You can grab copies of random stuff and jam it in an AI model too.
Our laws are written such that it’s making a copy outside of reasonable use that’s illegal, and AI training only makes a copy incidentally to what they’re doing and then it’s deleted. It’s the same standard that makes viewing a photo on an artists website legal.
It’s not bullshit because they’re breaking the law, but because we need to refine the law to make it clear training an AI model isn’t a reasonable usage anymore than a public broadcast of a DVD is a reasonable use.
Trying to shoehorn it into the existing laws will just create a nightmare of loopholes and complications.
You got four replies all about just the DVD part, but I want to ask is how you would word things to apply to AI specifically? LLM models? Idk what language would be in legaleese for this and exclusive enpugh to apply.
The traditional method would be to define the scope and intent of the law, and then defer the specifics of enforcement to an executive agency for nuanced application. That way the law conveys “no usage of information passed to a machine learning model for the purposes of generative content production, nor the output of any such system, should be considered fair use under copyright law unless the usage is non commercial and qualifies as fair use for academic or research purposes”. Then someone like the FCC would determine what qualifies as a machine learning model, and can flex to account for changes in technology.
You basically just say what you mean very specifically. I don’t think it’s a problem for Google to download webpages and track how they connect and their words, because that’s how search engines work. So I’m okay with that. I’m okay with individuals downloading chunks of the public web to do normal things. I’m okay with people needing huge swaths of the text for research, as well as the images, even for specific research into generative AI of the type we’re talking about. No one is being harmed by someone at MIT incidentally creating farside comics.
Harm or no harm, the disagreeable part to me is the commercial use of the model trained on inputs from people who didn’t want you to do that, sometimes without even having the most superficial justification to have the content in the first place.
Thank you for the clarification. The topic is growing ever more nebulous.
Nitpick: Why would anyone do that, DVDs are already digital mediums with a filesystem. So they first have to convert to analog media first… And that introduces losses…
You just put a DVD in your drive and now you can copy files from it to you HD… If copying files is now called ‘digitizing’ we live in a strange world…
If you have a large number of DVDs, digitising them makes them easier to browse and decouples you from the physical medium (so you don’t have to bring them with you everywhere in order to watch them).
As for the conversion, maybe you’re confusing this with ripping vinyl or tape. Ripping a CD or a DVD is easy and reproducible and gives you a 1:1 digital copy of it.
Maybe because I’m not a native english speaker, but to me ‘digitising’ means converting an analog medium to a digital one. Like with vinyl, VHS, etc. And ‘ripping’ is about an extraction process. Like overcoming a protection or more difficult to access mediums like Audio CDs, which don’t have a real filesystem, and into a easily accessible single file on a harddrive.
DVDs are already digital, and if they don’t have a copy protection, which you have to rip through, you can just copy the files to a hardrive and then, if you want reencode them into one more portable file…
You’re missing his point, he’s unhappy with the word choice. Ripping a DVD is not digitizing it. Digitizing means specifically turning an analog signal digital.
Right, that’s it. Though… you probably shouldn’t assume someones gender ;)
Ah, my bad - now that I read it again, you’re right. In the same line of thought though “digitising” is sometimes wrongly used in the place of ripping.
That’s not what the U.S. Copyright office says about training. They hold that it does implicate the copyright of reproduction. Meaning: If you train on a protected work without a license you are violating copyright, and if that’s not a fair use then you are breaking the law.
Training ~ viewing might be an analogy used by “AI” brands, but it is not legal reality.
I could’ve sworn a court case decided otherwise. Literally EVERY AI model in existence right now is commiting copyright theft on a massive scale if that’s the interpretation the courts took. Which is why I have a hard time buying it. I fear it’s reached the idea of normalcy in people’s minds and we’ll never see it illegal.
There’s been a couple court cases (that I know of / at least), and one judge was accepting on the argument that model training was a “fair use” while the other was not. I think both of those rulings came down prior to the publication of the U.S. Copyright Office guidelines.
Also, I’m not 100% sure that the U.S. Copyright Office is an authority here. The DOJ and/or Federal judiciary would have the authority to interpret the copyright laws: The DOJ to decide to prosecute, and the judiciary to make binding rulings and/or advise juries. I’m sure both the DOJ and the judiciary will give a lot of weight to the guidelines, but the guidelines aren’t actually the law.
In any case, you can read the guidelines and make your own decisions: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ Part 3 is about training, and I think the damning bits are III, B and D. Part 2 is about outputs, and I think the damning bits are II, B and D.2. (My summaries: 1. Training infringes 2. Outputs that are substantially similar infringe 3. models get no copyright 4. prompts are NOT ‘human creative effort’ and thus are insufficient to establish copyright 5. human creative effort still gets copyright protections, even when generative AI is used as a tool in the creative process.)
It is likely that commercial generative AI is in violation of a lot of copyrights, yes. Research projects are fair use, but only as long as they stay research projects.
I’m not sure that’s been extensively tested in courts. The document you referenced below appears to be as-yet not officially published, so I don’t believe it actually qualifies as an official position yet, but the bigger issue is that it’s untested in court.
This thread is a response to an AI court case where the ruling was that training on copy written works is fair use.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/us-judge-approves-15-billion-anthropic-copyright-settlement-with-authors-2025-09-25/
Regardless, you do make good points and I think we agree that the end state is “they shouldn’t be able to do that”. I have concerns that using existing standards that take copying too literally results in some unintended ambiguity, and situations where AI training is incidentally blocked, but so is stuff like “opening a news article on a computer”, which does the same things the copyright office report highlights as infringement.
I think we’d be in a much more agreeable place if we just legally state that a commercial AI tools training isn’t fair use. That lets you have nuance like “search engine? It’s a statistical model, but not generative: allowed. AI agent? Statistical model that’s generating content as opposed to classification or ranking: not allowed”.
Its a slopper who wants to project these spreadsheets as ‘conscious’ when what’s happening is they’re essentially being transcoded into statistical models.
Yup. Give a Markov chain multi-billion parameters and you can get some surprisingly cogent results.
I will freely admit that current LLM architectures include several innovations that make them not actually Markov chains, but it’s still statistics and linear algebra. I don’t know what thought is, but I’m quite unconvinced that LLMs (or any current generative AI architecture) is doing it.
Okay, why not? I also don’t know what thought is, so I don’t think it’s possible to say if an LLM is or is not doing it. And giving wrong or incoherent answers doesn’t invalidate it as thought or your local stoner buddy would be considered brain dead.
I’ve not seen evidence of it in any of my interactions with generative AI, which have pretty universally been bad. I feel like it has something to do with autonomous spontaneity. I recognize it in animals I can’t communicate well with, but I found it lacking in the LLM that I tried to play a TTRPG with. It would be easier for me to be convinced, if I really had a better understanding of what thought is. It’s hard for me to be convinced because while I understand LLMs and diffusion networks better than most people*, I don’t think I understand thought so I recognize the gap.
Also I’m not sure I agree with your final assertion, the stoner buddy is plenty wrong, but there is a coherency there. When coherency disappears entirely from human thought that’s usually a seizure or stroke. Even as confusing as they are dreams and acid trips often have a coherency while you are in them, if not one that’s easily described when recalling the experience.
*: My formal AI training ended before big data met ML, so it’s woefully out of date. I am quite the computer geek tho, it’s just my passion tends toward languages, type systems, and proof assistants. So, better than most, but not an expert by any means.
Nah. Shut the fuck up slopper. If you’re going to insult us and then ask chatgpt to win the argument, which you always do and it always misses the point, I’m not going to answer your question.
The fact is these systems can do what a lot of humans do. That’s not because the matrix multiplication is identical to thinking, but because most of these humans have never thought in their lives, do not have interiority, and are not people in any way that matters. Prove you’re conscious if you want me to address you as such, fucking slopper.
The larger part of the infringement is probably its use commercially. I doubt that there would have been such a fuss if it was a fully-open, low-profit operation.
But as-is, the commercial products are being used to make money for the AI company in an unauthorised way.
Similar to how it’s generally frowned upon for fan media to make money, because it starts being infringement. You can have a “support the fan media maker” button, but you generally can’t do things like put your fan media behind a pay wall. The IP owners will come down hard on you for that.
Commercializing a work virtually guarantees it’s creation isn’t “fair use”.
But also, “fair use” is actually quite a bit more narrow than just non-commercial.
There may be a limitation if the DVD is copy-protected, as is usually the case. There’s too much to read for a single comment in DMCA: https://www.congress.gov/105/plaws/publ304/PLAW-105publ304.pdf
But it does fall under this definition (§1201):
and
They hyphenated techno-logical both times in the second paragraph? Was it a line break both times, or was the moron who wrote it really that out of touch with the topic he was writing laws for?
Line break, I’ll fix it.
How do you digitize a DVD when it’s already digital?
Har har.
Different senses of the word digital. The dvd is digital as in “made discrete and not analog”.
I meant in the sense of “to move off of fixed use physical media and translate to a format more agnostic to storage medium or conducive to transfer and immediate processing”.
More succinctly: to copy something to a storage medium that’s harder to loose under the couch.
You can’t hold something in your hand if it’s digital.
Oh?
Okay so how DO you digitize it since you can also hold the SSD in your computer in your hand? In fact I can’t think of a data storage medium in use that you can’t touch physically at all.
On the cloud, duh