“The use of training was fair use”, the judge of the Senior District William Alsup he wrote In an order of summary judgment issued on Monday evening late. In the copyright law, one of the main ways in which the courts determine whether the use of copyright protected works without authorization is a fair use is to examine whether the use was “transformative”, which means that it is not a substitute for the original work but rather something new. “The technology in question was among the most transformative that many of us will see in our life,” wrote Alsup.
“This is the first great sentence in a generative Ai copyright case to face the fair use in detail,” says Chris Mammen, administrator member of Womble Bond Dickinson who focuses on the law on intellectual property. “Judge Alsup discovered that the formation of an LLM is a transformative use, even when there is a significant memorization. He specifically rejected the topic that what humans do when we read and store is different in nature from what computers do during the formation of a LLM.”
The case, a cause of class action intended by authors of books that said that Anthropic had violated their copyright using their works without permission, was presented for the first time in August 2024 at the United States District Court for the northern district of California.
Anthropic is the first artificial intelligence company to win this type of battle, but the victory arrives with a large asterisk attached. While Alsup discovered that anthropic training was fair use, he established that the authors could take the anthropic to process on the piratification of their works.
While in the anthropic end he moved to training on purchased copies of the books, he had however collected and maintained for the first time a huge bookstore of pirated materials. “Anthropic has downloaded over seven million pirated copies of books, did not pay anything and maintained these pirated copies in his library even after deciding that they would not have used them to train their own Ai (at all or never again). The authors claim that Anthropic should have paid for these copies of the Pirated Library. This order agrees”, writes Alsup.
“We will have a process on the pirated copies used to create the central library of anthropes and the resulting damage”, concludes the order.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Lawyers for complaints have refused to comment.
The cause, Bartz v. Anthropic He was archived for the first time less than a year ago; Anthropic asked for a summary judgment on the Fair Use issue in February. It is remarkable that Alsup has much more experience with fair use questions than the average federal judge, since he chaired the initial process in Google v. OracleA case of reference on technology and copyright that eventually went before the Supreme Court.