[Sayrus]

From my understanding, Meta's use of the pirated book was accepted as fair use and the plaintiffs admitted to no harm. In the case of pirated music and films, neither of those points are made. Copyright holders assume people who pirate would have bought the content, usually even assuming that one download is one lost sale. And I am not aware of a single case where watching or listening to pirated content was accepted as fair use.

It is interesting to follow how this plays out for Meta and how that will impact future cases.

[RobotToaster]

One of the underlying issues is that punitive damages seem to be the norm in US courts.

In the UK you can only claim for the actual damages incurred, which at most will be the profit you would've made on the sale of that book. Which makes most claims for private infringement uneconomical for corporations.

[tzs]

Note though that the court can award more than this in some circumstances. From the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988, section 97 [1]:

  (2) The court may in an action for infringement of copyright having regard to all the circumstances, and in particular to—

    (a)the flagrancy of the infringement, and

    (b)any benefit accruing to the defendant by reason of the infringement, award such additional damages as the justice of the case may require.

I think most copyright systems have some provision for damages beyond lost profits, because if they did not what incentive would there be to not infringe?

[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/97

[orbifold]

I don’t get that, the use of these books was instrumental and necessary for the success of the training run. The expected value of these training runs is high as the build out of 100 billion+ infrastructure demonstrates, so the book publishers should at a minimum be paid a licensing fee, a small fraction of every inference run revenue or whatever they decide. The fact that authors and publishers didn’t get any say under what conditions their intellectual property can be used is pretty outrageous.

[satvikpendem]

The conclusion was they suffered no legal harm, in that their interests such as their continued publishing of books was not affected by LLMs; no one is using AI to compete with publishers, if anything "authors" might very well use those same publishers to get their generated books on shelves.

If it's fair use, no licensing fee is needed.

[smegger001]

So pretty much the same as the Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. case ruling it as fair use as a transformative work. I mean if indexing the worlds books is transformative then a neural net run on them certainly is a transformative work and fair use.

[satvikpendem]

Yes, that's how the argument is going for these lawsuits so far.

[Hamuko]

We consumers just need BiTorrent clients that come with LLM training code incorporated, as that transforms the downloads into fair use (according to the very expensive Meta legal team).

[jazzyjackson]

The use of the pirated book is a totally separate action than acquiring the pirated book.