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I'm reading Bartz v Anthropic, of course, from a very practical, interested perspective. ("What can libraries let me do, and how exactly can we stay out of jail?") The first thing I notice: I didn't realize Anthropic had rolled their own GBooks. Doesn't sound prohibitively $$$. 1/3

Central practical detail. It matters a lot, in this ruling, that Anthropic did not serve their model in a way that produced infringing copies. Having the potential to do it is not illegal. The gray area here for libraries will be "What if a model is mounted on Hugging Face?" But Alsup's ruling +

thx for summary! im still wondering if it implies what ur saying. the judge is giving a pass because the filters around the model prevent content leakage. couldn’t one also interpret this as open model developers may be expected to provide such filters alongside released weights?

Yeah, I agree the question of liability in that case isn’t directly addressed. I started out confident but eventually worked around to reconsidering: bsky.app/profile/tedu...

And I guess AI2 might be an exception to the last sentence there. It’s not a wholly theoretical question for you.

Oh, and if you want to consult the original, see below. Glad this did not settle out of court. That would have really screwed over academic researchers and libraries without big legal staffs. bsky.app/profile/eriq...

My overall reading: if this is the law, we can feel confident that 1) libraries that physically possess copyrighted books 2) can let researchers train models on them 3) without a lot of fuss about exactly what % of any book a model would be able to reproduce 4) and even share those models! +

All of that, by the way, before we even address the additional factor that the intended research use is not-for-profit. It's a slam-dunk — and unfortunately these things have to be a slam-dunk when you're an underfunded institution worried about lawsuits.