Latest news with #JudgeWilliamAlsup
The Guardian
an hour ago
- Business
- The Guardian
Anthropic did not breach copyright when training AI on books without permission, court rules
A US judge has ruled that a tech company's use of books to train its artificial intelligence system – without permission of the authors – did not breach copyright law. A federal judge in San Francisco said Anthropic made 'fair use' of books by writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson to train its Claude large language model. Judge William Alsup compared the Anthropic model's use of books to a 'reader aspiring to be a writer' who uses works 'not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them' but to 'turn a hard corner and create something different'. Alsup added, however, that Anthropic's copying and storage of more than 7m pirated books in a central library infringed the authors' copyrights and was not fair use – although the company later bought 'millions' of print books as well. The judge has ordered a trial in December to determine how much Anthropic owes for the infringement. 'That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages,' Alsup wrote. US copyright law says that wilful copyright infringement can result in damages of up to $150,000 (£110,000) per work. The copyright issue has pitted AI firms against publishers and the creative industries because generative AI models – the term for technology that underpins powerful tools such as the ChatGPT chatbot – have to be trained on a vast amount of publicly available data in order to generate their responses. Much of that data has included copyright-protected works. An Anthropic spokesperson said the company was pleased that the court recognised its AI training was transformative and 'consistent with copyright's purpose in enabling creativity and fostering scientific progress'. Keith Kupferschmid, chief executive of the US nonprofit Copyright Alliance, described the decision as a 'mixed bag.' 'In some instances AI companies should be happy with the decision and in other instances copyright owners should be happy,' he said. The writers filed the proposed class action against Anthropic last year, arguing that the company, which is backed by Amazon and Alphabet, used pirated versions of their books without permission or compensation to teach Claude to respond to human prompts. The proposed class action is one of several lawsuits brought by authors, news outlets and other copyright owners against companies including OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta Platforms over their AI training. The doctrine of fair use allows the use of copyrighted works without the copyright owner's permission in some circumstances. Fair use is a key legal defence for the tech companies, and Alsup's decision is the first to address it in the context of generative AI. AI companies argue their systems make fair use of copyrighted material to create new, transformative content, and that being forced to pay copyright holders for their work could hamstring the nascent industry. Anthropic told the court that it made fair use of the books and that US copyright law 'not only allows, but encourages' its AI training because it promotes human creativity. The company said its system copied the books to 'study Plaintiffs' writing, extract uncopyrightable information from it, and use what it learned to create revolutionary technology'. Giles Parsons, a partner at UK law firm Browne Jacobson, said the ruling would have no impact in the UK, where the fair use argument holds less sway. Under current UK copyright law, which the government is seeking to change, copyright-protected work can be used without permission for scientific or academic research. He said: 'The UK has a much narrower fair use defence which is very unlikely to apply in these circumstances.' Copyright owners in the US and UK say that AI companies are unlawfully copying their work to generate competing content that threatens their livelihoods. A UK government proposals to change copyright law in the UK by allowing use of copyright-protected work without permission – unless the work's owner signals they want to opt out of the process – has met with vociferous opposition from the creative industries. Alsup said, Anthropic violated the authors' rights by saving pirated copies of their books as part of a 'central library of all the books in the world' that would not necessarily be used for AI training. Anthropic and other prominent AI companies including OpenAI and Facebook owner Meta have been accused of downloading pirated digital copies of millions of books to train their systems.
Washington Post
10 hours ago
- Business
- Washington Post
Federal court says copyrighted books are fair use for AI training
A federal judge this week ruled that artificial intelligence company Anthropic did not break the law when it used copyrighted books to train its chatbot, Claude, without the consent of the texts' authors or publishers — but he ordered the company to go to trial for allegedly using pirated versions of the books. The decision, made Monday by Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, represents a win for AI companies, which have battled copyright lawsuits from writers and news organizations for using their work to train AI systems. Alsup said Anthropic's use of the books to train its large language models, was like an aspiring writer who reads copyrighted texts 'not to race ahead and replicate or supplant' those works, 'but to turn a hard corner and create something different.' His ruling was on a lawsuit filed against Anthropic last year by three authors — Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson — who alleged that the company used their work without their consent to train AI systems in what amounted to 'largescale theft.' But Alsup ordered Anthropic to face trial for the accusation that it knowingly obtained copies of more than 7 million books from piracy websites, although the company later paid to purchase copies of some books. Alsup said he doubted 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.' 'That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages,' he added. In a statement, Anthropic said it was pleased that the court recognized that using published works to train LLMs was consistent with copyright laws 'in enabling creativity and fostering scientific progress.' But the company said it disagrees with the decision to hold a trial for its 'acquisition of a subset of books and how they were used,' in apparent reference to the piracy allegations. 'We remain confident in our overall case, and are evaluating all options,' it said. In their lawsuit, the authors said the actions of Anthropic have made 'a mockery of its lofty goals.' The company was founded in 2021 by a group that included OpenAI's former vice president of research Dario Amodei with goals that included 'research into increasing the safety of AI systems.' Bartz and Johnson did not reply to requests for comment. Graeber declined to comment. After concerns arose within the company about using pirated books, Anthropic hired former Google Books executive Tom Turvey to obtain 'all the books in the world' while also avoiding as many legal issues as possible, according to court documents. Turvey and his team could have sought to reach commercial agreements with publishers to license the books to train its AI systems, Alsup noted, but they instead purchased millions of print books from retailers, many of them in used condition, then scanned them into digital form. The company could have also hired staff writers and engineers to create good original writing to train AI models. But that would have 'required spending more,' Alsup noted.
