Comment by bgwalter

*technically

No but he coincidentally passed away after he was accused of it.

It’s very unlikely that Claude will verbatim reproduce an entire book from its training corpus. If that’s the bar, they are pretty safe in my opinion.

It is extremely likely this will be declared fair use in the end.

There's already one decision on a competitor.

It makes sense, if you think of how the model works.

> If their AI spits out the original copy of the book

Not even the authors suing Anthropic have claimed it can do this, have they?

Yeah, people have gone to jail for a few copies of content. Taking that large of a corpus and getting off without penalty would be a farce of the justice system.

They might say that, but it doesn’t mean it has the force of law behind it. Copyright does not cover and has never covered facts. So as much as the NFL might wish you can’t tell people what the final score of the game is, or describe the events of the last minute clutch play, they can’t actually prevent you from doing that because that’s not protected by copyright.

I can say "you cannot read this comment for any purpose" but that doesn't supersede the law.

existing copyright law seems to say you cannot help yourself to significant parts of a work - such as to write your own sequel. I have no idea how the courts establish the degree of copying "owned" by the original author. There would clearly be stories in some way related to Moby Dick that would be legal, but others that were too close.

its legal because a judge said so.

your piracy apologetics are obviously irrelevant.

That a service incorporating the authors' works exists is not at issue. The plaintiffs' claims are, as summarized by Alsup:

  First, Authors argue that using works to train Claude’s underlying LLMs 
  was like using works to train any person to read and write, so Authors 
  should be able to exclude Anthropic from this use (Opp. 16). 

  Second, to that last point, Authors further argue that the training was 
  intended to memorize their works’ creative elements — not just their 
  works’ non-protectable ones (Opp. 17).

  Third, Authors next argue that computers nonetheless should not be 
  allowed to do what people do. 

https://media.npr.org/assets/artslife/arts/2025/order.pdf

Yup, piracy sounds better than copyright violation.

“Piracy” is mostly a rhetorical term in the context of copyright. Legally, it’s still called infringement or unauthorized copying. But industries and lobbying groups (e.g., RIAA, MPAA) have favored “piracy” for its emotional weight.

Piracy is theft - you have taken something and deprived the original owner of it.

Copyright infringement is unauthorized reproduction - you have made a copy of something, but you have not deprived the original owner of it. At most, you denied them revenue although generally less than the offended party claims, since not all instances of copying would have otherwise resulted in a sale.

Asked unironically: "What's worse, hijacking ships at sea and holding their crews hostage for ransom on threat of death, or downloading a song off the internet?" ...

The simplest way to put I can think of is a silly set of two hypotheticals.

Imagine mer-people or aliens existed and started armed raiding marine shipping. That would be would be a hostile act of war. Declaring war on the mer-people would be a shame but justifiable in self-defense.

Imagine instead they were decrypting communications and using it to decipher and view our content. The other would basically be acceptable as part of a first contact protocol and exploration as it involves trying to figure out the basics of communication protocols of an 'alien' species. Declaring war on them in response would be a vastly disproportionate act of aggression for violating laws that they had no way of knowing they were subject to and literally could not possibly know.

Maybe the most memorable version of the response is this the "Copying is not Theft" song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4

Saying that piracy isn't copyright violation is an RMS talking point. It's not worth trying to ask why because the answer will be RMS said so and will not be backed by the common usage of the word.