Archive.org was distributing the books themselves to users. Anthropic argued (and the authors suing them weren’t able to show otherwise) that their software prevents users from actually retrieving books out of the LLM, and that it only will produce snippets of text from copyrighted works. And producing snippets in the context of something else is fair use, like commentary or criticism.

just spitting the information back out, without paying the copyright source

The court made its ruling under the factual assumption that it isn’t possible for a user to retrieve copyrighted text from that LLM, and explained that if a copyright holder does develop evidence that it is possible to get entire significant chunks of their copyrighted text out of that LLM, then they’d be able to sue then under those facts and that evidence.

It relies heavily on the analogy to Google Books, which scans in entire copyrighted books to build the database, but where users of the service simply cannot retrieve more than a few snippets from any given book. That way, Google cannot be said to be redistributing entire books to its users without the publisher’s permission.

What does an LLM application (or training processes associated with an LLM application) have to do with the concept of learning?

No, you’re framing the issue incorrectly.

The law concerns itself with copying. When humans learn, they inevitably copy things. They may memorize portions of copyrighted material, and then retrieve those memories in doing something new with them, or just by recreating it.

If the argument is that the mere act of copying for training an LLM is illegal copying, then what would we say about the use of copyrighted text for teaching children? They will memorize portions of what they read. They will later write some of them down. And if there is a person who memorizes an entire poem (or song) and then writes it down for someone else, that’s actually a copyright violation. But if they memorize that poem or song and reuse it in creating something new and different, but with links and connections to that previous copyrighted work, then that kind of copying and processing is generally allowed.

The judge here is analyzing what exact types of copying are permitted under the law, and for that, the copyright holders’ argument would sweep too broadly and prohibit all sorts of methods that humans use to learn.

specifically about the training itself.

It’s two issues being ruled on.

Yes, as you mention, the act of training an LLM was ruled to be fair use, assuming that the digital training data was legally obtained.

The other part of the ruling, which I think is really, really important for everyone, not just AI/LLM companies or developers, is that it is legal to buy printed books and digitize them into a central library with indexed metadata. Anthropic has to go to trial on the pirated books they just downloaded from the internet, but has fully won the portion of the case about the physical books they bought and digitized.

No. The court made its ruling with the explicit understanding that the software was configured not to recite more than a few snippets from any copyrighted work, and would never produce an entire copyrighted work (or even a significant portion of a copyrighted work) in its output.

And the judge specifically reserved that question, saying if the authors could develop evidence that it was possible for a user to retrieve significant copyrighted material out of the LLM, they’d have a different case and would be able to sue under those facts.

The law says this is ok now, right?

No.

The judge accepted the fact that Anthropic prevents users from obtaining the underlying copyrighted text through interaction with its LLM, and that there are safeguards in the software that prevent a user from being able to get an entire copyrighted work out of that LLM. It discusses the Google Books arrangement, where the books are scanned in the entirety, but where a user searching in Google Books can’t actually retrieve more than a few snippets from any given book.

Anthropic get to keep the copy of the entire book. It doesn’t get to transmit the contents of that book to someone else, even through the LLM service.

The judge also explicitly stated that if the authors can put together evidence that it is possible for a user to retrieve their entire copyrighted work out of the LLM, they’d have a different case and could sue over it at that time.

Does buying the book give you license to digitise it?

Does owning a digital copy of the book give you license to convert it into another format and copy it into a database?

Yes. That’s what the court ruled here. If you legally obtain a printed copy of a book you are free to digitize it or archive it for yourself. And you’re allowed to keep that digital copy, analyze and index it and search it, in your personal library.

Anthropic’s practice of buying physical books, removing the bindings, scanning the pages, and digitizing the content while destroying the physical book was found to be legal, so long as Anthropic didn’t distribute that library outside of its own company.

The court’s ruling explicitly depended on the fact that Anthropic does not allow users to retrieve significant chunks of copyrighted text. It used the entire copyrighted work to train the weights of the LLMs, but is configured not to actually copy those works out to the public user. The ruling says that if the copyright holders later develop evidence that it is possible to retrieve entire copyrighted works, or significant portions of a work, then they will have the right sue over those facts.

But the facts before the court were that Anthropic’s LLMs have safeguards against distributing copies of identifiable copyrighted works to its users.

It took me a few days to get the time to read the actual court ruling but here’s the basics of what it ruled (and what it didn’t rule on):

• It’s legal to scan physical books you already own and keep a digital library of those scanned books, even if the copyright holder didn’t give permission. And even if you bought the books used, for very cheap, in bulk.
• It’s legal to keep all the book data in an internal database for use within the company, as a central library of works accessible only within the company.
• It’s legal to prepare those digital copies for potential use as training material for LLMs, including recognizing the text, performing cleanup on scanning/recognition errors, categorizing and cataloguing them to make editorial decisions on which works to include in which training sets, tokenizing them for the actual LLM technology, etc. This remains legal even for the copies that are excluded from training for whatever reason, as the entire bulk process may involve text that ends up not being used, but the process itself is fair use.
• It’s legal to use that book text to create large language models that power services that are commercially sold to the public, as long as there are safeguards that prevent the LLMs from publishing large portions of a single copyrighted work without the copyright holder’s permission.
• It’s illegal to download unauthorized copies of copyrighted books from the internet, without the copyright holder’s permission.

Here’s what it didn’t rule on:

• Is it legal to distribute large chunks of copyrighted text through one of these LLMs, such as when a user asks a chatbot to recite an entire copyrighted work that is in its training set? (The opinion suggests that it probably isn’t legal, and relies heavily on the dividing line of how Google Books does it, by scanning and analyzing an entire copyrighted work but blocking users from retrieving more than a few snippets from those works).
• Is it legal to give anyone outside the company access to the digitized central library assembled by the company from printed copies?
• Is it legal to crawl publicly available digital data to build a library from text already digitized by someone else? (The answer may matter depending on whether there is an authorized method for obtaining that data, or whether the copyright holder refuses to license that copying).

So it’s a pretty important ruling, in my opinion. It’s a clear green light to the idea of digitizing and archiving copyrighted works without the copyright holder’s permission, as long as you first own a legal copy in the first place. And it’s a green light to using copyrighted works for training AI models, as long as you compiled that database of copyrighted works in a legal way.

The ruling explicitly says that scanning books and keeping/using those digital copies is legal.

The piracy found to be illegal was downloading unauthorized copies of books from the internet for free.

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