00:02Generally, very difficult to talk about such complex issues in a high-level way, but one
00:09view of things is it's something which is better than nothing for the authors whose
00:13works have been misused, used without their permission.
00:17And another view is that this is less fulfilling and satisfying perhaps for the whole sort
00:24of class and authors overall because we don't have a precedent at the end, we don't have
00:31a clear-cut decision that says that indeed copyright and moral rights have been infringed
00:37on a mass scale and that authors really ought to be in control of their works and compensated
00:44in a much more fulfilling a way, I guess.
00:47Okay, let's unpick that a bit then.
00:49So there were 14,000 titles, Bloomsbury titles, including some very well-known authors to
00:56the Harry Potter books, J.K. Rowling.
00:59How was their work used by AI?
01:02What happened?
01:03Well, so in the process of powering the systems and tools that, you know, Claude for Anthropics
01:13version, ChatPT and so on for others, are based on, their works had been scraped, ingested
01:19completely without their permission.
01:22The particular class that are involved in this settlement were from a pirated or two pirated
01:29sources sites.
01:31So they're sort of the double whammy of copyright infringing material and, you know, the authors
01:41have had absolutely no say in that.
01:43So that's one level of the use.
01:46There will likely be lots of outputs that users are prompting that also amount to copyright
01:53infringement, technically, and arguably the tech companies who are participating in all
02:00of this are probably in some way doing what we call in Australia authorising the infringement
02:06on a wide scale as well, potentially.
02:08The AI companies, Louise, say that it's fair use.
02:11I mean, what's the legal grounding of that, that it's fair use that they use these published
02:15materials?
02:16Well, they're relying on a US concept when they're talking about that.
02:20In Australia, we don't have fair use.
02:22We've got a much more restrictive fair dealing exceptions regime.
02:27So that's the first thing to say about that.
02:29But the part of the earlier sort of settlement arrangements that involved one determination
02:37around fair use were about the transformative nature of what the systems and tools are doing
02:45with the works in terms of deploying the billions of pieces of data in their large language models
02:56to then power the systems like Claude and ChatGPT that people use.
03:02What is it the authors would like?
03:04Do they just want to be asked permission or do they want to be paid for their writings, their material?
03:12I think they want both and rightly so. They tend to pour, you know, blood, sweat and tears
03:17and whole lifetimes of, you know, living kind of hand to mouth existence often for the majority
03:24of authors. It's not everybody who's a huge superstar author in producing the wonderful
03:29works that they do and that we all benefit from. So, yes, I think they feel connected to
03:34their works. They want to retain control. They want to be paid fairly and in ways that they
03:41approve of. And the law ought to support them in that. And if we're adhering to principles
03:45of copyright, but also in Australia and other jurisdictions, moral rights, which are the author's
03:51rights to be attributed and not have their works subjected to derogatory treatment, then,
03:57yeah, they want both control and compensation.
04:00Each author is only going to get about $3,000, which doesn't seem very much, that's not the
04:08point. But there are lots of other, and this doesn't set a precedent, as you said, because
04:12it's not strong enough, this ruling. So what of the dozens and dozens of other cases that
04:17are going through the courts in America against AI companies?
04:20Yeah. So I think we're up to something like 189 at the moment for different creative expressions,
04:28to put it that way. And, you know, they may be similarly negotiating and navigating sort of
04:35potential settlements. And I think for some of us who would like the law to sort of do its job
04:43and
04:43make some clear-cut rulings around what conduct is permissible and what is not, and perhaps oblige
04:51big tech to pay a much larger portion of its profits back to the people who are powering
04:57the profits for them, let's put it frankly, you know, then maybe we'll get some outcomes
05:05that are more in the way of decisions that say one way or another, what is allowable, what's permissible,
05:11and what's not.
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