A point of clarifications and some questions.

The portion the court said was bad was not Anthropic getting books from pirated sites to train its model. The court opined that training the model was fair use and did not distinguish between getting the books from pirated sites or hard copy scans. The part the court said was bad, which was settled, was Anthropic getting books from a pirate site to store in a general purpose library.

  "To summarize the analysis that now follows, the use of the books at issue to train Claude
  and its precursors was exceedingly transformative and was a fair use under Section 107 of the
  Copyright Act. And, the digitization of the books purchased in print form by Anthropic was. 
  also a fair use but not for the same reason as applies to the training copies. Instead, it was a
  fair use because all Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central
  library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central
  library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies.
  However, Anthropic had no entitlement to use pirated copies for its central library. Creating a
  permanent, general-purpose library was not itself a fair use excusing Anthropic’s piracy."

  "Because the legal issues differ between the *library copies* Anthropic purchased and
  pirated, this order takes them in turn."

Questions

As an author do you think it matters where the book was copied from? Presumably, a copyright gives the author the right to control when a text is reproduced and distributed. If the AI company buys a book and scans it, they are reproducing the book without a license, correct? And fair use is the argument that even though they violated the copyright, they are execused. In a pure sense, if the AI company copied (assuming they didn't torrent back the book) from a "pirate source" why is that copy worse then if they copied from a hard book?

▲ 8note 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> AI company buys a book and scans it, they are reproducing the book without a license, correct

isn't digitizing your own copies as backups and personal use fine? so long as you dont give away the original while keeping the backups. similarly, dont give away the digital copies.

	▲	esrauch 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		It is, Google Books did it over a decade ago (bought up physical books and scanned them all). There were some rulings about how much of a snippet they were allowed to show end users as fair use, but I'm fairly sure the actual scanning and indexing of the books was always allowed.

▲ cortesoft 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> If the AI company buys a book and scans it, they are reproducing the book without a license, correct?

No? I think there are a lot more details that need to be known before answering this question. It matters what they do with it after they scan it.

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greensoap 3 days ago | parent [-]

That is only relevant to whether it is fair use not to whether the copying is an infringement. Fair use is what is called an affirmative defense -- it means that yes what I did was technically a violation but is forgiven. So on technicalities the copying is an infringement but that infringement is "okay" because there is a fair use. A different scenario is if the copyright owner gives you a license to copy the work (like open source licenses). In that scenario the copying was not an infringement because a license exists.

	▲	gpm 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Fair use is what is called an affirmative defense Yes > it means that yes what I did was technically a violation but is forgiven Not at all. All "affirmative defence" means is that procedural the burden is on me to establish that I was not violating the law. The law isn't "you can't do the thing", rather it is "you can't do the thing unless its like this". There is no violation, there is no forgiveness as there is nothing to forgive, because it was done "like this" and doing it "like this" doesn't violate the law in the first place.
	▲	cortesoft 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		If I have have an app on my phone that lets me point my phone at a page to scan, OCR, and read the page out loud to me, it wouldn't even require fair use, would it?