During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) spoke about Meta and Anthropic using potentially pirated material to train their artificial intelligence models.
00:00Thanks, Mr. Chairman. The way AI interacts with intellectual property rights, particularly copyrights, is a critical topic we can't overlook.
00:08America's creative industries, including software, music, movies, literature, collectively contribute over a trillion dollars to our economy each year, employing millions of people.
00:19While AI can be an incredible tool that unlocks further creativity, writers, artists, musicians, and others are rightfully concerned about what technology means to them personally.
00:31Should AI companies be able to use their materials freely as, quote, fair use, unquote, or should they receive compensation when their works are used to train AI models?
00:41I want to tell you, Chapter 1, how I discovered intellectual property.
00:46I was an attorney in Springfield, Illinois, and in a rash moment, decided to buy a restaurant.
00:52So I joined a few friends and bought a restaurant, and we had live music.
00:56And I got a phone call one day from a fellow who said, I just was out at your restaurant.
01:00I said, great, did you have a good time? Couldn't have been better.
01:02Saturday night, the music was terrific.
01:05And I said, well, I'm glad you had a good time.
01:06And he said, you played 10 BMI tunes and 6 ASCAP tunes.
01:12I said, no, I didn't. I didn't play any tunes.
01:14He said, well, the way the law is written, you're responsible for the fact that copyright material was used by you to make a profit at your restaurant.
01:23I said, tell it to the judge.
01:24He said, no, before you say that, call your friend over in Jacksonville, Illinois, a few miles away, and ask him about a similar experience.
01:32And his reaction was the same as yours.
01:34I called my friend who said, ask him how much money he needs each month for ASCAP and BMI.
01:40And we started paying it.
01:42That was my first course in intellectual property.
01:45I hold on to it to this day.
01:48So how can creators compete with AI products that generate content at the push of the button,
01:52especially when the content might mimic or even produce their own work?
01:56These are just a few of the questions that we're going to consider in this hearing.
01:59As we try to find the right balance between promoting technological innovation, protecting the work of our nation's creators,
02:07and continuing to incentivize creativity in years to come.
02:10We must recognize that AI innovation and protection of intellectual properties are not mutually exclusive.
02:16That's why it's troubling, as I listen carefully to the chairman, to hear stories about steps big tech companies are taking
02:24to train their AI models on copyright materials without compensation to the creators of these works.
02:30For example, rather than license authors' works, companies like Meta and Anthropic have obtained copyright materials
02:38from sites that host pirated copies of the authors' books and writings.
02:42Anthropic pirated over 7 million books from shadow libraries.
02:49As Anthropic's CEO put it, Anthropic had many places from which it could have purchased,
02:53but it preferred to steal them to avoid, quote, legal practice business slog, whatever that means.
02:59While Anthropic later became not so gung-ho about training their LLM on pirated books for legal reasons,
03:07it kept the pirated copies that it had already downloaded anyway.
03:10I don't get that.
03:11As a judge in the Meta case recently put it, quote,
03:14companies have been unable to resist the temptation to feed copyright protected materials into their models
03:20without getting permission from the copyright holders or paying them for the right to use their works for this purpose.
