[skilled]

> In response, NVIDIA defended its actions as fair use, noting that books are nothing more than statistical correlations to its AI models.

Does this even make sense? Are the copyright laws so bad that a statement like this would actually be in NVIDIA’s favor?

[ThrowawayR2]

Yes, it's been discussed many times before. All the corporations training LLMs have to have done a legal analysis and concluded that it's defensible. Even one of the white papers commissioned by the FSF ( "Copyright Implications of the Use of Code Repositories to Train a Machine Learning Model" at https://www.fsf.org/licensing/copilot/copyright-implications... ), concluded that using copyrighted data to train AI was plausibly legally defensible and outlined the potential argument. You will notice that the FSF has not rushed out to file copyright infringement suits even though they probably have more reason to oppose LLMs trained on FOSS code than anyone else in the world.

[jkaplowitz]

> Even one of the white papers commissioned by the FSF

Quoting the text which the FSF put at the top of that page:

"This paper is published as part of our call for community whitepapers on Copilot. The papers contain opinions with which the FSF may or may not agree, and any views expressed by the authors do not necessarily represent the Free Software Foundation. They were selected because we thought they advanced the discussion of important questions, and did so clearly."

So, they asked the community to share thoughts on this topic, and they're publishing interesting viewpoints that clearly advance the discussion, whether or not they end up agreeing with them. I do acknowledge that they paid $500 for each paper they published, which gives some validity to your use of the verb "commissioned", but that's a separate question from whether the FSF agrees with the conclusions. They certainly didn't choose a specific author or set of authors to write a paper on a specific topic before the paper was written, which a commission usually involves, and even then the commissioning organization doesn't always agree with the paper's conclusion unless the commission isn't considered done until the paper is updated to match the desired conclusion.

> You will notice that the FSF has not rushed out to file copyright infringement suits even though they probably have more reason to oppose LLMs trained on FOSS code than anyone else in the world.

This would be consistent with them agreeing with this paper's conclusion, sure. But that's not the only possibility it's consistent with.

It could alternatively be because they discovered or reasonably should have discovered the copyright infringement less than three years ago, therefore still have time remaining in their statute of limitations, and are taking their time to make sure they file the best possible legal complaint in the most favorable available venue.

Or it could simply be because they don't think they can afford the legal and PR fight that would likely result.

[grayhatter]

> Even one of the white papers commissioned by the FSF [...] concluded that using copyrighted data to train AI was plausibly legally defensible [...] notice that the FSF has not rushed out to file copyright infringement suits even though they probably have more reason to oppose LLMs trained on FOSS code than anyone else in the world.

I agree with jkaplowitz, but for a different reason I still believe that your description feels a bit misleading to me. The FSF commissioned paper makes the argument that Microsoft's use of code FROM GITHUB, FOR COPILOT is likely non-infringing, because of the additional github ToS. This feels like critical context to provide given in the very next statement, you widened it to LLMs generally, and the FSF which likely cares about code, not on github as well.

All of that said, I'm not sure it matters, because while I don't find the argument from the that whitepaper very compelling, because it's based critically on additional grants in the ToS. IIRC (going only from memory) the ToS requires that you grant github a license as it's needed to provide the service. Github can provide the services the user reasonably understood github to provide, without violating the additional clauses specified in the existing FOSS license covering the code. That being from a while ago, and I'd say it's very murky now, because everyone knows Microsoft provides copilot, so "obviously" they need it.

Unfortunately, and importantly, when dealing with copyrights, the paper also covers the transformative fair use arguments in depth. And I do find those following arguments very compelling. The paper, (and likely others) are making the argument that the code output from an LLM is likely transformative. And thus can't be infringing compelling, (or is unlikely to be). I think in many cases, the output is clearly transformative in nature.

I've also seen code generated by claude (likely others as well?) to copy large sections from existing works. Where it's clearly "copy/paste" which clearly can't be fair use, nor transformative. The output clearly copies the soul of the work. Thus given I have no idea what dataset they're copying this code from, it's scary enough to make me unwilling to take the chance on any of it.

[reorder9695]

So it's legal to train an "intelligence" on everything for free based on fair use, but it's not legal to train another intelligence (my brain) on it?

[general1465]

Did you pirated this movie? No I did not, it is fair use because this movie is nothing more than a statistical correlation to my dopamine production.

[earthnail]

The movie played on my screen but I may or may not have seen the results of the pixels flashing. As such, we can only state with certainty that the movie triggered the TV's LEDs relative to its statistical light properties.

[gruez]

>Did you pirated this movie? No I did not, [...]

You're probably being sarcastic but that's actually how the law works. You'll note that when people get sued for "pirating" movies, it's almost always because they were caught seeding a torrent, not for the act of watching an illegal copy. Movie studios don't go after visitors of illegal streaming sites, for instance.

[thaumasiotes]

Note that what copyright law prohibits is the action of producing a copy for someone else, not the action of obtaining a copy for yourself.

[ErroneousBosh]

Did you pirate this movie?

No, I acquired a block of high-entropy random numbers as a standard reference sample.

[JKCalhoun]

I saw the movie, but I don't remember it now.

[Ferret7446]

Indeed, the "copy" of the movie in your brain is not illegal. It would be rather troublesome and dystopian if it were.

[NitpickLawyer]

> Does this even make sense? Are the copyright laws so bad that a statement like this would actually be in NVIDIA’s favor?

It makes some sense, yeah. There's also precedent, in google scanning massive amounts of books, but not reproducing them. Most of our current copyright laws deal with reproductions. That's a no-no. It gets murky on the rest. Nvda's argument here is that they're not reproducing the works, they're not providing the works for other people, they're "scanning the books and computing some statistics over the entire set". Kinda similar to Google. Kinda not.

I don't see how they get around "procuring them" from 3rd party dubious sources, but oh well. The only certain thing is that our current laws didn't cover this, and probably now it's too late.

[musicale]

> There's also precedent, in google scanning massive amounts of books,

Except that Google acquired the books legally, and first sale doctrine applies to physical books.

> but not reproducing them

See also: "Extracting books from production language models"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46569799

[olejorgenb]

> I don't see how they get around "procuring them" from 3rd party dubious sources

Yeah, isn't this what Anthropic was found guilty off?

[bulbar]

Is they don't reproduce the data of any kind, how could the LLM be of any use?

The whole/main intention of an LLM is to reproduce knowledge.

[masfuerte]

Scanning books is literally reproducing them. Copying books from Anna's Archive is also literally reproducing them. The idea that it is only copyright infringement if you engage in further reproduction is just wrong.

As a consumer you are unlikely to be targeted for such "end-user" infringement, but that doesn't mean it's not infringement.

[threethirtytwo]

It does make sense. It’s controversial. Your memory memorizes things in the same way. So what nvidia does here is no different, the AI doesn’t actually copy any of the books. To call training illegal is similar to calling reading a book and remembering it illegal.

Our copyright laws are nowhere near detailed enough to specify anything in detail here so there is indeed a logical and technical inconsistency here.

I can definitely see these laws evolving into things that are human centric. It’s permissible for a human to do something but not for an AI.

What is consistent is that obtaining the books was probably illegal, but say if nvidia bought one kindle copy of each book from Amazon and scraped everything for training then that falls into the grey zone.

[ckastner]

> To call training illegal is similar to calling reading a book and remembering it illegal.

Perhaps, but reproducing the book from this memory could very well be illegal.

And these models are all about production.

[lelanthran]

> To call training illegal is similar to calling reading a book and remembering it illegal.

A type of wishful thinking fallacy.

In law scale matters. It's legal for you to possess a single joint. It's not legal to possess 400 tons of weed in a warehouse.

[kalap_ur]

You can only read the book, if you purchased it. Even if you dont have the intent to reproduce it, you must purchase it. So, I guess NVDA should just purchase all those books, no?

[_trampeltier]

But to train the models they have to download it first (make a copy)

[Nursie]

But it’s not just about recall and reproduction. If they used Anna’s Archive the books were obtained and copied without a license, before they were fed in as training data.

[godelski]

You need to pay for the books before you memorize them

[Bombthecat]

Who cares? Only Disney had the money to fight them.

Everything else will be slurped up for and with AI and be reused.

[nancyminusone]

When you're responsible for 4% of the global GDP, they let you do it.

[qingcharles]

They let you just grab any book you want.

[HillRat]

It's not settled law as it pertains to LLMs, but, yes, creating a "statistical summary" of a book (consider, e.g., a concordance of Joyce's "Ulysses") is generally protected as fair use. However, illegally accessing pirated books to create that concordance is still illegal.

[HWR_14]

Copyright laws are so undefined and NVIDIAs lawyers so plentiful that the statement works in their favor. You're allowed to copy part of a work in many cases, the easiest example is you can quote a line from a book in a review. The line is fuzzy.

[tobwen]

Books are databases, chars their elements. We have copyright for databases in EU :)

[bulbar]

Of course it does not make sense, it's just the framing of a multi billion dollar industry and people tend to buy those.

[lencastre]

I would love to see these nvidia designs as mere statistical correlations of graphic card design.

[RGamma]

The chicken is trying to become the egg.

[postexitus]

A quite good explanation of what copyright laws cover and should (and should not) cover is here by Cory Doctorow: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/...

[Elfener]

It seems so, stealing copyrighted content is only illegal if you do it to read it or allow others to read it. Stealing it to create slop is legal.

(The difference, is that the first use allows ordinary poeple to get smarter, while the second use allows rich people to get (seemingly) richer, a much more important thing)