Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

The ruling is essentially that "the use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative and was a fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act." That doesn't excuse Anthropic from having used pirated copies of books. But the judgement is pretty clear that using books as input to large language models (LLM) is not a violation of copyright. In this I am in agreement with the court. You can't make learning from what you read illegal, even if it's a computer that is doing the learning. Pretty much everyone in this Bluesky thread disagrees with me though.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Aug 28, 2025 9:15 p.m.

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