Full order here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
The headline misses the nuance that there will be a trial on Anthropic's gathering "pirated copies to create Anthropic's central library and the resulting damages." But the court got it right IMO that "the use of the [copyrighted] books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative and was a fair use..."
Alsup has a reputation as being a very tech-savvy judge. His judgement is well reasoned. There is one part of it that I potentially take issue with:In Section 4A (p27) of the judgement doc, he analyses the effect on the market for the Author's works.
But Authors’ complaint is no different than it would be if they complained that training schoolchildren to write well would result in an explosion of competing works. This is not the kind of competitive or creative displacement that concerns the Copyright Act.
I'm not sure whether this argument should hold in general.If I train an LLM on Taylor Swift's entire discography, to produce songs in the style of Taylor Swift then surely that is competitive or creative displacement.
Possibly the underlying issue is that if I train an LLM on large corpus of work (say C21 singer / songwriter work) I am training the LLM to write singer / songwriter pop. but I could also ask the same LLM to provide me with songs in the style of Taylor Swift or Ethel Cain or whoever. One would seem infringing, the other non-infringing.
It's complicated...
This is an interesting ruling.
Note that the lawsuit has nothing to do with using models, only creating them. It is entirely possible for Anthropic to win, but still lose (somewhere else).
Other interesting things.
On pages 8 and 9, the judge points out that Anthropic made a claim about not being able to do something, then produced a document showing otherwise. They clawed the document back and are pretending it never existed. The two sides are fighting over this.
On pages 14-18, the judge discusses the issue of buying a paper book, scanning it, destroying the paper copy, and using the digital copy as if it were the paper copy. The judge rules that this is legal, which I am fairly certain is the opposite of what was decided in the lawsuit against the Internet Archive. Thus, this will almost certainly be appealed and we'll see how it goes. But if it succeeds, it could destroy the awful ebook schemes that plague libraries!