As Meta defends its AI training practices in court, major publishers and copyright law experts are weighing in against the company. An amicus brief from publishers highlights Meta’s alleged reliance on pirated book archives including Anna’s Archive and Z-Library. Separately, a brief from law professors argues that Meta’s unauthorized copying to train Llama is an “undeniably commercial” use that provides no new transformative meaning and shouldn’t qualify as fair use.
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unauthorized copying to train Llama is an “undeniably commercial” use that provides no new transformative meaning and shouldn’t qualify as fair use.
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Obviously they shouldn’t have used pirated content in this case… but how is the argument that it provides “no new transformative meaning”? Isn’t it pretty self evident that it does? It’s even in the literal name: “generative AI” 🙄
If it was as easy as giving it a nice name, you could just rename seed boxes to fair use machines.
It’s a finicky legal topic, because transformative can be anything and nothing. If you take an album and shuffle the tracks or create a mixtape from multiple albums, that is technically transformative, but most likely not enough to justify fair use.
that is technically transformative, but most likely not enough to justify fair use.
Right, but it’s pretty obvious that the transformation for AI is very transformative, and it’s lossy at that. After the training, you can’t just duplicate the image it was trained from, even if it was asked a thousand times.
No, not least because almost nothing in this area is self-evident due to the state of caselaw at the moment.
Putting aside for the moment the question of whether “generative” implies “transformative” in the specific sense under discussion in copyright law, the definition of “transformative” in this context is highly contentious, and courts have avoided defining it in an unambiguous way. Even here, the courts will probably avoid answering these questions if at all practical.
This is a big part of why fair use is in such a bad state right now: no predictability in how courts will rule on it as a defense, plus no way to keep you out of courts in the first place.
This is a big part of why fair use is in such a bad state right now: no predictability in how courts will rule on it as a defense, plus no way to keep you out of courts in the first place.
That’s not completely true. Fair Use has four declarations that you must pass, so there’s at least some definition to how it would play out in the courts. But, it’s not a definitive rule of law, so yeah it’s not going to keep you out of the courts.
