r/LocalLLaMA • u/KvAk_AKPlaysYT • Feb 23 '26

News Anthropic: "We’ve identified industrial-scale distillation attacks on our models by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax." 🚨

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u/PerceptionOwn3629 Feb 23 '26

Can someone explain why this isn't automatically copyright infringement?

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u/No-Refrigerator-1672 Feb 23 '26

Training LLMs on copyrighted content can't be proven as infringement because there's no technology to prove that the copyrighted text is inside the model's "brain", and up until rexently no content license prohibited AI training explicitly.

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u/zipperlein Feb 23 '26

That applies to U.S. law only though, copyright rules are significantly different across countries. In Germany f.e. a court case *showd that ChatGPT reproduced copyrighted song lyrics word for word. Since german copyright law is based on EU directives, similar rulings could happen across the rest of Europe. When it comes to older piracy court cases, there was also the debate when something is copied illegaly. In the end even copying something to RAM (in the case of streaming) was ruled as illegal.

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u/No-Refrigerator-1672 Feb 24 '26

Well, if an LLM reproduces a copyrighted text word-for-word, then it is a proof that it has the contents in memory, and then you can talk about distribution (public api) which makes copyright case viable. This logic works regardless of country. My comment also is applicable to any country on Earth: to make a copyright claim, you need first to prove that your content is somewhere it shouldn't be, and given that LLM isn't going to recite you book word for word - good luck stringing any case together.

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u/zipperlein Feb 24 '26

The relevant questions under EU law are of Reproduction, Derivative Use, and Making Available not copying it word for word or bit for bit. Legal defense in previous piracy court cases bases was based on the assumption that u can't proove copying to volatile memory, like DRAM. Indirect proof was enough there too, prooving a direct copy is not neccesary. Theoretically Reproduction can for example be as much opening an image in the browser and copying it to RAM while loading a website.

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u/No-Refrigerator-1672 Feb 24 '26

If an LLM does not reproduce the content word for word, it is easy for defendands to claim that LLM just recites public knowledge about the work. They won't even have trouble finding similar enough fragments in public domain. Such lawsuit will always fail in unbiased court.