> then surely a model distilling another model is transformative and fair use.

Yes it is, in the legal/copyright sense of fair use. That's why they ban it in their TOS. Which customers agree to when signing up for the service.

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trollbridge a day ago | parent | next [-]

My website’s TOS says not to use it to train AI without permission, yet my website is in the training set of all the big models.

So… my TOS doesn’t matter, but theirs does?

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a4isms 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> my TOS doesn’t matter, but theirs does?

Wilhoit Conservatism: In-groups protected by contract law but not bound by it, alongside out-groups bound by contract law, but not protected by it.

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dotancohen 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The term "matters" is proportional to influence. Do you have a team of well financed attorneys?

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SR2Z 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Your TOS matters insofar as you can prove a person actually read and agreed to it. These are illegal in different ways:

1. Copyright violations (can put you in jail) 2. TOS violations (will be a fine at worst)

Companies do get away with drive-by legal shittiness way too often and frankly the practice needs to be reined in, but at the end of the day the only damages are the financial ones you can prove in court.

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archagon 16 hours ago | parent [-]

And what if the LLM ingested and “understood” it as part of its training?

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SR2Z 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Well, I guess that's a personal question but the law is pretty clear that only a human being can "understand" anything.

	▲	archagon 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		How convenient. Incidentally, this suggests that once an LLM is capable of accessing and distilling a competitor's LLM without human intervention, then any legal argument about TOS violation is moot. But somehow I doubt that will fly in court.

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wlonkly a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

L1 contracts class: offer, acceptance, and consideration.

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trollbridge 21 hours ago | parent [-]

The content of the site is subject to licence for making copies. So you’re saying licences don’t matter?

The GPL established this rather clearly. Copyright law doesn’t require consideration.

(The licence itself is a basic BSD licence, so it just requires attribution including in marketing materials, which obviously hasn’t happened.)

	▲	JumpCrisscross 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> you’re saying licences don’t matter? Within this context, I don’t think so. I can’t make a website that buries some shrink wrap that requires everyone who reads it become vegan.

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foxglacier a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes - yours is just some optional text nobody reads or understands and is probably not legally required to adhere to. Theirs is a contract signed by their customer who they know did understand it.

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blks 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Accessing the site may already mean that you agree to TOS. Also if you don’t see an explicit copyright terms on some text on the internet it doesn’t mean that it’s public domain. Same as checking a checkbox. Text being small and somewhere is not an excuse for a corporation to steal and sell other people’s work.

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trollbridge 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Interesting. So what makes theirs not “optional text nobody reads or understands”?

	▲	JumpCrisscross 14 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> what makes theirs not “optional text nobody reads or understands”? You accept it. You pay consideration for it. If your website has a TOS dickover, that requires someone attest with their legal name and pay you $1, yes, it may be enforceable under some circumstances.
	▲	18 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

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cornholio 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So what you are saying is that, if I can somehow get my hands on a copy of Fable, it's fair use to use it to train any models and serve those, since I'm no longer bound by the TOS of the service provider?

Asking for all Anthropic employees who dream big.

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david-gpu a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How long until books come with TOS, then?

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ozlikethewizard a day ago | parent | next [-]

Damn now im looking forward to the day when books end up like physical game disks, where somehow you're not buying the book just a license to it, what a boring dystopia this is lol

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JustAnUserNameF a day ago | parent | next [-]

As usual, Stallman already predicted this: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

	▲	phoghed a day ago \| parent [-]
		Darryl W. Perry predicted this: https://www.c-span.org/clip/road-to-the-white-house-2016/use...

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3eb7988a1663 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Common for college textbooks to have some digital-only component accessed with a one-time key inside the cover. Sometimes time-limited to a single semester.

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jtbayly a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Have you ever heard of Amazon? Kindle?

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steve1977 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Many of them do already and have for decades

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david-gpu 21 hours ago | parent [-]

Can you please provide a specific example?

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delecti 21 hours ago | parent [-]

Pick up nearly any published book. Turn to the ~3rd page. There will be either a whole page, or sometimes the second half of a page, dedicated to a copyright notice. Very nearly every published book I've ever seen has that identical page. This isn't a recent thing. I grabbed my copy of Diaspora by Greg Egan and opposite the table of contents is a page that starts like this:

First Night Shade Books edition 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, blah blah (it felt very ironic to transcribe that bit in particular to make this point)

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david-gpu 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Standard copyright boilerplate. Not terms of service distinct from copyright, which is the subject of this thread.

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delecti 19 hours ago | parent [-]

If you read the whole copyright page of a book and come away with the conclusion that it's anything but terms of use for the book, then we'll just have to agree to disagree.

	▲	david-gpu 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The thread is about terms of use separate from copyright law. It is the whole premise.

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steve1977 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is what I meant.

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paradox460 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They kind of do. There's usually a big scary notice on the imprint page scolding you for even thinking about piracy

	▲	david-gpu 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We are talking of TOS independent of copyright law.

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ACCount37 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

So far, we have one ruling that says "model distillation by vendor A from vendor B with the intent to use the results to compete with vendor B in vendor B's domain is not fair use". Which makes a degree of sense.

It's possible that distillation for other reasons, with no intent to harm the vendor you distill from, would have been ruled to be fair use. But in law, intent matters.

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ipython a day ago | parent [-]

What was the intent of the original ai companies (anthropic, OpenAI, etc) when they mass-distilled the entire internet to create their training data set?

	▲	dotancohen 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		One could make arguments for OpenAI and Anthropic. But Google Search displays AI results above the SERP - clearly in competition with them. No premise or excuse there.