[HN Gopher] Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirate...
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Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to
train Claude
Author : BeetleB
Score : 526 points
Date : 2026-07-21 19:04 UTC (22 hours ago)
HTML web link (apnews.com)
TEXT w3m dump (apnews.com)
| exabrial wrote:
| that number is missing a zero or two in front of the decimal
| point
| BeetleB wrote:
| As was pointed out, the settlement is for piracy, not training.
| They had already ruled that Anthropic's use of copyrighted
| material for training fell within fair use.
|
| As such, if you pirated a book and had to pay $3000 for that
| one instance, I don't think you'd like it if I said you should
| have paid $30K or $300K instead. If anything, this is analogous
| to the ridiculous fines people had to pay when pirating music.
|
| (Not that I'm complaining...)
| wgjordan wrote:
| > As such, if you pirated a book and had to pay $3000 for
| that one instance, I don't think you'd like it if I said you
| should have paid $30K or $300K instead.
|
| If you pirated a book for personal use the amount of
| liability wouldn't match a company whose profit could be
| attributed to pirating the same book. In US copyright law, a
| copyright infringer could be liable for "any profits of the
| infringer that are attributable to the infringement" [1] (if
| the copyright owner elects to recover actual damages and
| profits instead of statutory damages).
|
| [1] 17 U.S.C. SS 504(b),
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/504
| BeetleB wrote:
| I would imagine that for over 99% of the books covered in
| this lawsuit, they're earning less than $3000 per book.
|
| Put another way, their revenues wouldn't drop much if they
| simply hadn't trained on those 99%.
| ctippett wrote:
| IANAL, but the parent comment quotes "any profits of the
| infringer that are attributable to the infringement",
| which I take to mean it's the profit Anthropic stands to
| make based on its use of the pirated content that's
| recoverable.
|
| Given the entire global economy is currently bullish on
| the potential profitability of AI, I dare say they got
| off incredibly lightly settling for just $3k per book.
| mediaman wrote:
| None of this matters, this is the judge approving a
| voluntary settlement reached between the parties last
| year.
|
| If you think it should be different then you have to make
| a cogent argument why the public should get to interfere
| with a settlement the two sides mutually agree on.
| ctippett wrote:
| Note: I never said it should be different and certainly
| wasn't arguing for any side. I was merely making an
| observation that the settlement seemed like a good deal
| (for both parties) given the potential for Anthropic to
| be liable for a significantly greater amount depending on
| how the law would be interpreted if they went to trial.
| blackqueeriroh wrote:
| No, because you cannot prove that any individual book
| actually contributed meaningfully to Anthropic's profit.
|
| Exclude one book from the training dataset.
|
| Did you make a worse model?
|
| We actually know the answer to this, and it is:
| absolutely not.
|
| The reality is this: your intellectual output is almost
| always only valuable to any company in existence in
| aggregate, never in isolation.
| trentor wrote:
| Thomas-Rasset got 80k per song and Tennenbaum got 22k per
| song. The law says up to 150k per work. It was a gift.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Sure, but in any other instance of piracy, HN would call
| awarding $20k per pirated song insane.
| trentor wrote:
| Because we are mostly discussing a single private person
| that got caught for maybe 20 songs. I don't want to bring
| up Aaron but the taste gets saltier the more we see
| settlements like this.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Maybe they can give it in the form of expiring Fable credits.
| BeetleB wrote:
| So that the authors can use it to write their next books!
| jdlshore wrote:
| To be clear, the issue is not that the books were used to train
| Claude, but that they were pirated.
| EmoteSupportBot wrote:
| A critical distinction, because they were going to to find
| terabytes of not pirated books to train on that contained the
| sum history of humanities knowledge /s
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| They could have purchased the books instead. It was easier to
| pirate.
| Aurornis wrote:
| They actually did this.
|
| > Anthropic spent many millions of dollars to purchase
| millions of print books, often in used condition. Then, its
| service providers stripped the books from their bindings, cut
| their pages to size, and scanned the books into digital form
| -- discarding the paper originals. Each print book resulted
| in a PDF copy containing images of the scanned pages with
| machine-readable text (including front and back cover scans
| for softcover books
| modeless wrote:
| Great, so now instead of allowing anyone to train on
| already scanned books for free, we can have only the
| richest big labs buy all the books and scan them privately
| to train their proprietary models. And since they buy the
| books used, authors still don't get any money. But at least
| the books are destroyed afterwards! What an improvement!
| fluoridation wrote:
| >instead of allowing anyone to train on already scanned
| books for free
|
| That would be pirating. So your complaint is that they
| didn't do more piracy?
| modeless wrote:
| My complaint is that after this settlement nothing has
| materially changed except that the big labs now benefit
| from higher barriers to entry in their market. Authors
| don't make more money (other than a one time protection
| payment from Anthropic to publishers and some lawyers).
| Literally no one else benefits, except I guess used book
| marketplaces and book scanner vendors.
|
| To be clear, this isn't a problem with the court process.
| Everything here appears perfectly in accordance with the
| law. It's just an absurd state to be in.
| jamesjhare wrote:
| no we should destroy the works of these ghouls and
| support humans instead of this destructive and useless
| technology
|
| the people operating frontier labs are bad people they
| cannot be trusted in any way
|
| the best solution to them would be to send them to
| monster island (even though it's really a peninsula)
| nextaccountic wrote:
| > Then, its service providers stripped the books from their
| bindings, cut their pages to size, and scanned the books
| into digital form -- discarding the paper originals.
|
| This is worse than pirating books to an absurd degree, it's
| almost a parody - the company that slurps all human
| knowledge ends up not only metaphorically, but also
| physically destroying those books, like an information
| vampire.
|
| Authors don't even receive any financial compensation if
| the books were bought second hand, either. There's no
| benefit in doing that. (Not that making one final sale of a
| hardcover copy would make any difference though)
|
| If Anthropic were at least buying ebooks, this insanity
| wouldn't need to happen. Unfortunately there is no bulk
| rates for buying millions of ebooks like you have in the
| used book market
| blackqueeriroh wrote:
| No, it's proof purchase of how stupid the publishing
| industry is. Maybe publishing houses should just pay
| authors good money, like a goddamn salary, and get a book
| out of them every few years.
| bandrami wrote:
| They can't for the same reason that cab companies can't
| make their drivers employees: they would have to employ
| far, far fewer of them than they do on contingency.
| antisthenes wrote:
| The AI craze not only destroyed books, but many small
| websites who couldn't bear the load of constant scraping,
| or many communities that took open forums and took them
| offline or put them behind closed doors.
|
| There is less publicly available knowledge now on the
| Internet than there has been 3 years ago.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| It reads like you're in favor of banning resale and
| lending(aka libraries) of books... because the authors
| aren't compensated.
|
| There's such a thing as fair use and digitizing privately
| owned printed material is absolutely legal... including
| for corporations.
| piltdownman wrote:
| In many territories like Ireland, Authors are compensated
| for their inclusion in lending libraries. It tends to be
| of the pitiful 'music rights organisation' style
| mechanical reproduction royalties, but it does exist.
| BikiniPrince wrote:
| How is this ruled as piracy then? I am confused.
| kg wrote:
| They _also_ pirated the books
| jamesjhare wrote:
| well if they made a PDF copy to process they violated
| copyright
| qq66 wrote:
| They bought, scannned, trained from, and destroyed millions
| of paper books, which was ruled legal. This lawsuit was for
| training from LibGen.
| scotty79 wrote:
| This is such a petty and impotent ruling. If you want to
| ban them from using culture to make derivative works
| without proper compensation then do that.
|
| But if you don't want to ban them, telling them to buy one
| book of each, likely second hand, is complete pettiness
| that resulted in destructive scanning of millions of books,
| many of which were already practically available in digital
| form.
| gruez wrote:
| >This is such a petty and impotent ruling. If you want to
| ban them from using culture to make derivative works
| without proper compensation then do that.
|
| That's because the judges are supposed to rule on
| questions of law (ie. "is AI training fair use?"), not
| whether they think AI's good or not.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| It's an unfortunate outcome. Now to be a big player in AI, you
| have to have enough capital to buy your own library worth of
| books and digitize them. (Fun fact: a pallet of books is called
| a "gaylord," and they buy hundreds of gaylords.)
|
| I created books3 to help settle the question of whether AI
| companies should be allowed to train on books. The outcome of
| "it's okay to pirate books as long as you're only training on
| them" was a long shot, but it would've let individual hackers
| train their own AI models (assuming access to sufficient
| compute, which you can get e.g. via
| https://sites.research.google/trc/about/).
|
| Now we're in a world where you have to have dozens of millions
| in capital to do substantial work.
|
| I heard at one point Eleuther was gathering public domain
| training data. I wonder if they ever built a corpus large
| enough so that training on books doesn't really matter...
| kryogen1c wrote:
| > Fun fact: a pallet of books is called a "gaylord,"
|
| A Gaylord is a type of box that fits on a pallet. There are
| multiple ways to palletize products, like shrink wrapping or
| metal banding
| spaqin wrote:
| Ladder-pulling at its best. It's also easier to swallow the
| fine once you've launched a successful product after pirating
| the books.
| usef- wrote:
| Judging by the current comment section, most HN people seem
| to want the ladder pulled
|
| (an observation, not agreement)
| satvikpendem wrote:
| As this comment states, it may not be the piracy that is the
| issue, but the keeping of the books forever rather than just
| for the purpose of training. Regardless, I believe people
| will do this in a wink wink nudge nudge sort of way anyway,
| as no one releases their training data, because we all know
| where it comes from.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48996652#49004015
| jamesjhare wrote:
| how much of your economic output are you comfortable with
| companies like Anthropic stealing to put you out of work?
|
| at least in Player Piano they paid the workers who made the
| cassette tapes that made the robots work.
|
| our current LLM overlords demand that they be able to basically
| steal the sum total of all human knowledge so that they can
| sell it back to us at a rate they set.
|
| they should have been shunned by society and made penniless
| when they first announced their goals but we have a bunch of
| deeply misanthropic people who have money and want to make a
| world where computer slaves do their bidding.
| blackqueeriroh wrote:
| All of it.
| ori_b wrote:
| If you believe information deserves to be free, and if most
| of your earnings were from information that wasn't given
| away for free -- well, if you want people to give up their
| ill gotten gains, maybe you can start by setting an
| example.
|
| So, mind sending me your bank account information? I'll
| promise to make good use of it.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| You seem to think that AI companies sell you content,
| which is false.
|
| You get a service. The service is using their compute
| power to run a model and their scientists to build the
| model.
| ori_b wrote:
| No. I think AI companies consume the result of
| intellectual work that should typically be paid for. If
| someone doesn't believe intellectual work should be paid
| for so that others can benefit, I invite them to lead the
| way.
| mountainriver wrote:
| This is why you should always distill your models from a
| competitor.
|
| Let them take on the liability
| wraptile wrote:
| With this it's becoming very clear that we're moving past
| information copyright of today and the only copyright that'll
| remain will be brand/trademark shaped. This might be a good
| thing right? Information remains free while people's effort
| remains protected (assuming fair governance).
| inigyou wrote:
| That would be trademark not copyright
| nicce wrote:
| Which is another issue. In the context of pirating, it should
| be also an issue, because it is a benefit from the crime.
| processunknown wrote:
| Seems squarely in the "cost of doing business" category
| Varelion wrote:
| I sincerely don't understand what the point of these laws are,
| when the cost of flagrant violations is no more than a slap on
| the wrist -- these really meager sums that serve as nothing more
| than something to point at and say "Look, we did something!"
|
| Cover-your-ass strategy, and nothing more. Who, besides the ones
| at fault, are ever happy with these mean-nothing fines?
|
| The justice system really needs an overhaul with how it tackles
| "justice" between the wealthy, the connected, the corporations,
| and the rest. Though I am unsure what that would look like.
| Minimum net wealth per category of infraction across the board?
|
| Edit: grammar
| datakan wrote:
| Punishable by fine just means it's legal for a cost. If the
| fine is less than the profit then they'll pay the fine every
| time.
| protocolture wrote:
| No the "fine" is 3000 bucks per book.
|
| Thats more than it costs to just shred the spine and scan the
| book in. Which is probably 15 - 20 bucks a piece.
|
| They will be shredding the book not paying the fine.
| jaitsu wrote:
| Because using pirated material is a civil issue, not a criminal
| offence?
| renlo wrote:
| the irony is that all of this money will go to rent-seeking
| publishers who won't pass it on to the artists; basically a
| dispute between the wealthy you're upset with
| Aurornis wrote:
| The lawsuit was a mixed blend of individual authors and
| publishers.
|
| It was started by a group of authors, not publishers.
| renlo wrote:
| For the downvotes, my response is to read:
| https://authorsguild.org/advocacy/artificial-
| intelligence/wh...
|
| > If there is a current publisher(s) (which still possesses
| an exclusive license), the author(s) will split the $3000
| with the publisher. Any co-authors will share the author
| portion and, if there are multiple publishers (e.g.,
| different publishers have exclusive rights to different
| formats), they will share the publisher portion. Assume
| that the co-authors and co-publishers will share the
| portion equally unless their contracts provide otherwise.
| The standard default split between publishers and authors
| of noneducational texts is 50/50, as described below.
| Authors who are the sole rightsholder in a work--such as
| self-published authors and authors whose rights have
| reverted or where the contracts have otherwise terminated--
| will receive the full award amount.
|
| It is split between the publisher and the author, also
| publishers will have a large catalog of books they will
| submit, an author typically will only have a few -- the
| payout will be going to the lawyers and mostly to
| publishers.
| gruez wrote:
| >It is split between the publisher and the author, also
| publishers will have a large catalog of books they will
| submit, an author typically will only have a few -- the
| payout will be going to the lawyers and mostly to
| publishers.
|
| This is innumerate. If it's split 50% between authors and
| publishers, then it won't be "mostly to publishers".
| Mathematically it will be equal between "authors" and
| "publishers", and because lawyers are taking their cut,
| neither would be able to get "most" of it. Yes, the
| average publisher will get a bigger paycheck, but that's
| because there's less of them, not because "most going to
| publishers".
| renlo wrote:
| > That means that rightsholders can expect at least
| $3,000 per title (less costs and fees), which will be
| shared among the rightsholders for that title (if there
| is more than one rightsholder)
|
| > if there is more than one rightsholder
|
| Again, a publisher will have a whole catalog of books /
| titles, a non-negligible portion of that the publisher
| will own the copyright to (no one to split it with).
| There's all kinds of books outside of novels, there's
| media tie-ins, IP franchise books (ie Star Wars),
| childrens books, textbooks / reference materials, etc etc
| etc. Yes, with novels the author tends to own the
| copyright, but you're forgetting all of the other kinds
| of books out there.
| robterrell wrote:
| Not true. Individual authors could sign up for the
| settlement. One of my books was in there under my name.
| scotty79 wrote:
| What's gonna be your payout and are you satisfied with it?
| jdlshore wrote:
| Default payout is 50/50 author/publisher. If the author and
| publisher have a contract that states otherwise, then their
| contract overrides the default.
|
| Source: I'm an author and signed up to be part of the class
| action, and this was the class action documents said.
| Ritewut wrote:
| The laws are for you and me not companies like Anthropic and
| Meta.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| To keep users paying for content while companies do whatever
| they want - and if that's not the reason that's certainly an
| effect.
|
| > The justice system really needs an overhaul with how it
| tackles "justice" between the wealthy, the connected, the
| corporations, and the rest. Though I am unsure what that would
| look like. Minimum net wealth per category of infraction across
| the board?
|
| % of annual turnover seems like decent strategy. Caps the
| amount company can sue mere mortal for copyright infringement
| while at billion dollar company scale can wipe quite a bit
|
| But main problem is enforcement and lobbying, not the size of
| the fine
| blackqueeriroh wrote:
| So you now believe fair use should not exist?
| Aurornis wrote:
| This is a settlement that the authors and Anthropic agreed
| upon.
|
| They agreed on the amount last year. The judge approved it now.
|
| The lawsuit was for the way the books were acquired. They
| already ruled that it's not infringement to use the books.
|
| The award was $3,000 per book, which is about 100X higher than
| it would have cost to buy the books.
|
| It's never going to appease the people who demand companies be
| sued into collapse, but given that both parties came to an
| agreement and the damages are 100X higher than what a book
| costs, it looks reasonable to me.
| nadermx wrote:
| This case did at least shed light on the fair use argument.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > The award was $3,000 per book, which is about 100X higher
| than it would have cost to buy the books.
|
| How many of the authors would license their book for endless
| creation of derivative works for that amount?
| Aurornis wrote:
| The judge already ruled that it was fair for Anthropic to
| use books for training if they acquired them legally.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Probably few, but irrelevant as the ruling was it was not a
| derivative work.
| protocolture wrote:
| I dont see the relevance. If Anthropic had bought the book
| at the store, shredded the spine, scanned the pages and
| trained on that data instead, there wouldnt have been an
| issue.
|
| Authors cant simply license away fair use. If it could be
| dismissed so easily the right wouldn't exist.
| ollysb wrote:
| Creating derivative products you charge for surely can't
| be considered fair use?
| janderland wrote:
| YouTubers monetize fair use all the time. Is that
| significantly different?
| timmmmmmay wrote:
| Of course it is. If I write a movie review and sell it to
| a magazine or whatever, it's derived from the movie, and
| it's fair use, and I don't need to ask the movie owner
| for permission first, or give them a cut of my sales.
| Even if I use some reasonable number of screenshots and
| video clips, as long as the resulting work is
| "transformative" i.e. actually a new work, a movie review
| instead of a copy of the movie.
|
| Do you want this to work any other way? I constantly see
| people in the AI debate working themselves into wildly
| copyright maximalist positions. I actually don't think
| that we should give every author veto power over a book
| review!
| protocolture wrote:
| >I constantly see people in the AI debate working
| themselves into wildly copyright maximalist positions
|
| I really dont get this. I know its that conflation
| fallacy or whatever, but I was under the impression we
| had sort of gotten over copyright maximalism as a society
| after Napster etc.
|
| Whats worse is that, meaningful reform in this space has
| basically been waiting on a multi billion dollar
| corporation to come along and push it forward. So now
| that we have an opportunity to expand and globalise fair
| use, the sudden and quite angry opposition weirds me out
| to no end.
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| There's two issues with copyright.
|
| 1. author owns the right to distribute copies of the work
|
| 2. this right goes on for faaaaaar too long.
|
| I don't have an issue with 1. You had a good idea, you
| implemented it, you deserve something for it. Given some
| people got sued into oblivion with ridiculous dollar
| value outcomes on a per unit basis - why doesn't this
| apply here? Sure 1.5 billion is a lot. But the number of
| infringments is insane and the company is approaching a
| trillion in valuation. You could make it ten times that
| number.
|
| I do have an issue with 2. Sure, you had a good idea, you
| implemented it, you deserve something for it. But after
| 20 years, you should be able to come up with another idea
| or just work like the rest of us. Going for 50, 70, 90+
| years with the rewards going to estate heirs? Fuck that.
|
| So yeah, I am both against copyright AND surprised at the
| slap on the wrist for what happened here.
| protocolture wrote:
| >Given some people got sued into oblivion with ridiculous
| dollar value outcomes on a per unit basis - why doesn't
| this apply here?
|
| I mean, it feels to me like one or both of:
|
| 1. The class action lawyers werent 100% certain they
| could win in court. 2. The class action lawyers smelled
| an easy payday.
|
| They get ~100 million out of this.
|
| I also think that the 1500 bucks going to most of these
| authors is going to be more than they ever saw in
| royalties. I read somewhere that 500 - 1500 bucks is
| roughly what a self pub book makes in its lifetime. Why
| push the envelope? Anthropic hasnt done anything that
| deserves to pay for the entire lifetime royalties of most
| books. Their legal alternative is to cut the spine off
| and scan the book in. In which case the author and
| publisher will be splitting 20 bucks instead, assuming
| Anthropic isnt buying used.
|
| This seems like a donation tbh.
|
| >slap on the wrist for what happened here.
|
| Its not a punishment at all because this is a civil case
| that has been settled out of court.
| pandaman wrote:
| IANAL but as an IP creator I have not heard of
| "derivative products" in the copyright context. There are
| "derivative works", which are covered by the same
| copyright as the original. For example, a translation to
| another language is a derivative work, a novelisation of
| a movie, a screen adaptation of a book etc. If some
| author could have proven that any Anthromic model is a
| derivative work of theirs then they had the copyright on
| that model and made mad bucks licensing it back to
| Anthropic.
| gruez wrote:
| >Creating derivative products you charge for surely can't
| be considered fair use?
|
| All US courts so far have ruled yes.
| ekianjo wrote:
| 100x the books? Buying a book does not let you redistribute
| its contents.
|
| If you are selling more than 100 books you are clearly losing
| out
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| That ISN'T what this settlement is about? Genuinely please
| just once read past the headline.
| Aurornis wrote:
| The judge already ruled that training on the books does not
| constitute reselling their content.
|
| The authors were only owed money for the piracy.
| pier25 wrote:
| > _This is a settlement that the authors and Anthropic agreed
| upon._
|
| The authors or the publishers?
|
| I have a hard time believing they agreed with the millions of
| authors they pirated.
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| There were individual authors in the class. They initiated
| it. Individual authors were allowed to sign up.
|
| If you're so interested, go read past the headline. Maybe
| you'll find that you're working about what "authors" will
| agree to.
| skippyfish wrote:
| To sign up for what? The experience of approximately
| every author on the planet is that they found out that
| Anthropic did something bad at the same time they were
| "opted into" the class. The only thing they could do is
| opt out and litigate on their own against a company with
| a valuation approaching $1T.
|
| This is a sweet deal for lawyers and for publishers, and
| nothing else.
| zajio1am wrote:
| Civil justice is primarily about restoring damages, not about
| punishing wrongdoing (although common law in US it is more
| punitive than civil law in european countries). Therefore
| compensations are based on damages, not on profit from
| wrongdoings.
| bjourne wrote:
| > I sincerely don't understand what the point of these laws
| are, when the cost of flagrant violations is no more than a
| slap on the wrist -- these really meager sums that serve as
| nothing more than something to point at and say "Look, we did
| something!"
|
| To create a moat around wealth generation. After all, that is
| the main purpose of all legal systems---to keep the wealthy
| wealthy and the poor poor. In this case, the settlement is
| chump change for Anthropic, but ensures that no upstart will be
| able to compete with them since they will get reamed on
| copyright charges. It's no different from Google Image search.
| They can make a product out of republishing others' images.
| _You_ cannot do it.
| persedes wrote:
| Are "open" models exempt from that? Can imagine they used the
| same datasets.
| wmf wrote:
| Most open models are developed for profit so they should be
| equally liable.
| curious_curios wrote:
| Many of the open weight models are trained on outputs from
| these models (distillation)
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| If they provably shared those datasets then they're just as
| liable for piracy.
| ilamont wrote:
| If you have the time, read the judge's response to the motion:
|
| https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
|
| The big deal for publishers and authors is the payout per
| eligible title is $3k. For a traditional publishing contract
| involving one author, the amount will be split down the middle.
|
| The other thing which caught my eye is the judge slashed the
| class counsel's fee by half, from 12.5% ($187.5m) to 6.8%
| ($101m). The class counsel's unreimbursed litigation expenses
| were $2.6m.
|
| The three class representatives get just $15k each.
| nativeit wrote:
| Realtors are capped in the percentage they can take for selling
| properties. Brokers and financial advisers are capped in their
| fees. My presumption is that the _only_ reason this very
| standard and reasonable regulatory pattern doesn't affect
| lawyers is because they tend to be the ones writing and
| enforcing the regulations in the first place.
| ryan_lane wrote:
| There is no legal maximum for the percentage real estate
| agents can take, in the US. Rates are also not fixed, by law,
| and are required to be negotiable. There's a general standard
| for rates (typically 5-6%, split between agents/brokers), but
| there's nothing stopping them from setting it to 99%, other
| than the fact that people won't pay it.
|
| Source: was a licensed real estate agent for a long time.
| Fantosism wrote:
| I might be misremembering, as I worked on the loan side,
| but wasn't the 6% standard set by the state's realtor
| association until 2024?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| No. "Realtor" is a trademarked term for a member of the
| National Association of Realtors. Real estate agents are
| licensed by state governments, but prices for real estate
| agents are not legislated by state governments.
|
| If this is the 2024 settlement that you are referring to,
| it did not say anything about the price a Realtor can
| charge:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnett_v._National_Associa
| tio...
|
| >The cooperative compensation rule has been eliminated as
| a result of the settlement. Seller's agents are no longer
| required to offer compensation to buyer's agents when
| listing a home for sale on a Realtor-owned multiple
| listing service. In addition, Realtors acting as buyer's
| agents must enter into contracts with buyers before
| touring any homes, allowing buyers to negotiate how much
| they will pay their buyer's agent.
| Fantosism wrote:
| I'm aware that prices for agents are not legislated by
| state governments, but prior to 2024, as a realtor that
| was a member of your state's association, you were
| standardized at a 6% rate. Because that's what your
| association standardized. That's partially what the suit
| was about. What percentage of real estate transactions
| are done with agents who aren't members of XAR?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| As far as I remember, Realtors were not bound to sell
| their services at 6% by their organization. They were
| bound to pay the buyer's real estate agent, which is what
| the settlement changed, but commission was always
| negotiable.
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| > _pattern doesn't affect lawyers is because they tend to be
| the ones writing ... the regulations in the first place_
|
| In my state, the people hired to write new bills (if passed
| becoming statute) have to pass their JD (law degree).
| Legislators only get to request new bills, they can't hand a
| proposal (which may have been written by a lobbying agency
| like ALEC or Heritage) into the system.
| modo_mario wrote:
| >The class counsel's unreimbursed litigation expenses were
| $2.6m.
|
| In what sane state does it even get that high?
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| I've seen some YouTubes where lawyers were complaining about
| high bill rates and showing actual bills. One large firm
| billed the senior lawyers at $2500/hour and even the
| paralegals were billed at $600/hr.
| mtrovo wrote:
| That could pay for a lot of tokens.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Associates are billing over $1000/hr and can bill 12 hours a
| day easily enough. If you have 5 associates billing an
| average of 50 hours a week then in a month thats a million
| dollar bill just for the junior lawyers.
| nekooooo wrote:
| $3k a book is so cheap.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Its probably 100x more than it would have cost to do it
| legitimately, so seems like reasonable damages to me
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| That depends on the answer to a question that hasn't been
| answered yet.
|
| Is what an AI does similar to a human reading a book, and
| adding it to their knowledge? Or is it similar to a human
| _plagiarizing_ a book? If it 's the second, for at least some
| books, no, the damages are not reasonable. They are far too
| small.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Good question. Can you ask an LLM to repeat the entire
| contents of a novel, word-for-word, and read that instead
| of the original book? I haven't tried it, but I would guess
| it would not be able to do this.
|
| Can you ask it questions about the book and expect it to
| get them right? Yeah, probably. Same as if I read the book
| and you asked me questions about it. The LLM would probably
| answer those questions better than I could, and about every
| single book in its training data, but still same-same.
|
| I don't think this is plaguarism.
| greyw wrote:
| If you ask me to repeat the contents of a novel I read
| line by line I can do it too. Is this fair use? Do I have
| to pay someone?
| keeda wrote:
| _> That depends on the answer to a question that hasn 't
| been answered yet._
|
| It _has_ been answered in a sense, because the courts (so
| far) have ruled that training is Fair Use. Whether this is
| similar to a human learning from a book was not quite the
| question being answered, but AFAICT there is no other
| relevant doctrine under Copyright law to address it,
| largely because the question didn 't even exist until LLMs
| came along.
|
| Also, these are not damages, it's a settlement i.e. a
| negotiated agreement between both parties.
|
| Relevant sub-thread here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997766
| HackerThemAll wrote:
| So... What about authors from other parts of the world? USA has
| settled a USA case and they think all is cool for the entire
| world. So americentric.
| ronsor wrote:
| Well, the USA has jurisdiction over USA companies. If the rest
| of the world's authors can find a way to obtain jurisdiction
| over the companies in a way that USA courts won't balk at if
| asked to enforce, then they're welcome to go ahead.
| bmitc wrote:
| > USA has settled a USA case and they think all is cool for the
| entire world.
|
| Who said that?
| br0ceph wrote:
| I support anthropics position here, on both learning from and
| "pirating" books. The way i see things , the publishers and
| authors are happy with any policy that makes them more money, and
| more market control, regardless of what is ethical/just/right.
| They would shutdown public libraries , all libraries, if they
| could. Aaron Swartz lost his life because he tried to make public
| knowledge public, and they would be happy to put every
| information activist to death to protect their monopolies. IMHO
| they have no right to stop free access on the internet. The whole
| copyright system is artificial and monopolistic, and the
| publishers are complaining yet again, that technology moves
| information more efficiently than they do, so they want to
| artificially retard it through goverment action. The real
| goverment action that is needed, is to protect private/personal
| data; not data that is actively traded commercially or
| publically. These tech companies are invading personal and
| private spaces of everyday people, and storing and training with
| it. Even using it for military targetting and warrantless
| surveillance. Anthropic is by no means a good entity, so the way
| to stick it to them and all tech companies, is to allow their
| internet scraping, but make it outright criminal to use telemetry
| or any surveillance techniques they have or will develop. Also...
| the "creators",hollywood,publishers, have no problems scraping
| themselves, and lift ideas from just about everywhere they can
| get it. Almost every hollywood movie is just an assemblage of
| random memes and topical concerns of everyday ppl, distilled into
| embelished predictable cheese. The publishers are the original
| slop actors. Human Slop.
| userbinator wrote:
| Exactly. Everything is a derivative work, and AI is now making
| people realise the full extent of that reality.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Aaron swartz lost his life because he committed suicide.
| Something he had tried multiple times before. If he really only
| committed suicide because of the legal jeopardy he was in,
| wouldn't it have made more sense to commit suicide after you're
| found guilty?
| beering wrote:
| You have to consider that the lawsuit was likely extremely
| stressful and scary.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| I'm sure it was. Let's also keep in mind that he was
| offered a 6 month plea bargain.
|
| Yes, it sucks to accept a plea on something that you think
| was not illegal. But if we are going to argue that he
| killed himself because of the charges, we need to admit
| that he killed himself so he wouldn't have to spend 6
| months in a minimum security prison. Heck, it might have
| even been house arrest.
| sudokatsu wrote:
| Tom Dolan, is that you? Give it a rest already.
| pier25 wrote:
| This is not even than a slap on the wrist. Publishers who
| negotiated this really fucked up writers.
|
| According to US federal law, pirating a single copyrighted work
| and gaining commercial advantage of it (which Anthropic 100% did)
| represents five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. But it gets
| worse:
|
| "Penalties for a copyright infringement conviction may increase
| if the defendant has previous similar convictions, made more than
| 10 copies of copyrighted works, committed copyright infringement
| during a period longer than 180 days, or infringed copyrighted
| material worth more than $2,500."
|
| https://www.justia.com/entertainment-law/piracy-in-the-enter...
| paxys wrote:
| It's valid to not take AI companies' side here but people who
| think publishers are fighing for the little guy's rights are
| delusional. Tech companies have been exploiting artists for a
| few years, publishers/record labels/media companies have been
| doing it for centuries.
| blackqueeriroh wrote:
| THANK YOU! And the idea that copyright actually helps
| individuals is such bullshit I can't even believe anyone
| believes it! On a site filled with free software advocates.
|
| Absurd.
| conradkay wrote:
| Those are the maximum penalties though
|
| It's seemingly $3,000 per book, so they could've (and did,
| partially) just bought the books themselves for way cheaper,
| and with only a fraction of that money going to the authors
| jeroenhd wrote:
| > could've (and did, partially) just bought
|
| But they didn't. The fact they partially did proves that they
| knew they should've, so they can't even claim ignorance.
| consensus1 wrote:
| That is a false statement. Gaining commercial advantage means
| selling pirated copies which Anthropic absolutely did not do,
| so none of your following statements are correct either.
| pier25 wrote:
| It is an indisputable fact that Anthropic made money on
| models trained on those pirated books.
| sensanaty wrote:
| What a fucking joke of a country the US is, allowing this kind of
| behaviour with such a pathetic "punishment". Barely even
| qualifies as a tap on the wrist, Anthropic should be getting
| gutted into non-existence for this shit and the execs should be
| given the Aaron Swartz treatment.
| economistbob wrote:
| Amen! We are watching them incinerate the past so they can lie
| about the past in the future. They are destroying the books and
| will censor what was in them.
| driverdan wrote:
| Judge Alsup issued the original order that determined they were
| liable for piracy but that training LLMs on books was fair use.
| It's worth reading if you're interested in the topic.
| https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69058235/231/bartz-v-an...
| tzs wrote:
| Alsup is an interesting judge. He has handled several important
| tech cases, such as Oracle v Google, and Waymo v Uber.
|
| He's also a longtime hobbyist programmer working in BASIC, much
| of it in support of his ham radio hobby. Screenshots of his
| shortwave propagation prediction program here [1].
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16503076/oracle-vs-
| googl...
| dataflow wrote:
| He learned Java to understand the Oracle v. Google case
| better.
|
| His middle name is Haskell.
| adastra22 wrote:
| And his name, if you need glasses like me, looks like AI
| slop.
| antonvs wrote:
| And his favorite food is curry.
| driverdan wrote:
| He was one of the few judges that understood tech.
| Unfortunately he retired last year.
| brlewis wrote:
| Yes, that is interesting. It sounds like he was aware of the
| theoretical possibility of a book being regurgitated verbatim.
| Do you know if he was aware it had been done?
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49000742
|
| If he was not aware, I wonder if he still would have described
| the process as "exceedingly transformative" had he been aware.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Note that they're testing for 100-word passages. This is a
| level of memorization that avid readers can credibly also
| reach.
|
| Note also that Sonnet 3.7 had to be jailbroken.
|
| Note also that they got high memorization for a few books
| that were widely quoted. The books in question can probably
| also be "retrieved" by putting phrase prefixes into Google,
| which is probably why Sonnet 3.7 knows them with the
| precision of a fanboy. Material being widely repeated in the
| training set is a well-known cause of memorization.
| globular-toast wrote:
| No "avid reader" could recall anywhere near that much text.
| That takes dedicated effort to commit to memory. Copyright
| was never meant to stop people copying books anyway, it was
| meant to stop machines (ie. printing presses) copying them.
|
| Edit: Apologies, I misread it as "100 pages". My point
| about copyright still stands, though.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| I disagree that avid readers cannot complete entire
| passages from books they've read several times when fed a
| prefix.
| leni536 wrote:
| And can these avid readers publish these recited passages
| without infringing copyright?
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| I mean, the debate would then turn on whether publishing
| the passages and publishing the model is the same sort of
| thing. I think there's mainly two views: "we know the
| passages are in there, so publishing the model is
| publishing the passages is copyright violation", and
| "nothing happens until you go through considerable effort
| to elicit the passages, so the _user_ is committing
| copyright violation using the model as a tool. "
|
| Personally I think our legal system is just not set up
| for a world where we can download mindstates in numeric
| form. Would a sufficiently detailed recording of my brain
| violate copyright? If simulated, it could certainly be
| elicited to commit violations.
|
| edit: At any rate, Anthropic are not publishing the
| Sonnet 3.7 weights.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| I used to use the initial letters of a whole paragraph
| from Lord of The Rings as my password.
|
| Some of us have a good enough memory.
| penguin_booze wrote:
| So, continuing to profit--forever--from someone's else work, at
| scale, without their prior consent, is fair use?
|
| It's funny that crimes can be settled in cash. IOW, everything
| has a price; and the price is always right. Settlement ought to
| be the euphemism for blood money.
|
| In addition to the settlement, what I'd consider fair is to
| have these companies pay royalties in perpetuity. Of course,
| that's not tractable.
| owenfi wrote:
| Yeah, I feel like penalties here should be something like 10%
| of revenue in perpetuity. Then companies might think twice
| about asking forgiveness instead of permission.
| simianwords wrote:
| Why do they need prior consent? What sort of rent seeking do
| you want?
| gspr wrote:
| Are you saying that if someone writes a book or records a
| song, anyone should be able to use it for anything forever
| _without_ consent?
|
| How does intellectual work get funded in this insane world
| if yours, pray tell?
| 0x3f wrote:
| You assume your premise. But plenty of "intellectual
| work" is already done without legal cover. It just
| typically attracts normal profits, rather than super-
| normal rent-seeking ones.
| gspr wrote:
| I, too, hate rentseeking. Owning one's intellectual
| output, however, is _not_ in and of itself rentseeking.
| 0x3f wrote:
| Rents are just amounts beyond what's needed to cause the
| thing to exist. At the point of copying something, it
| already exists.
|
| So payments for the right to do so aren't payments
| required to bring anything new into existence at that
| point, save for the legal fiction.
|
| Now you might argue that the future copy-licencing rents
| are necessary to bring the _original_ creation into
| being. But that doesn't make them _not rents_.
|
| But I would say that's the second assumption you're
| baking in here.
|
| As in, we live in a world where e.g. the movie Toy Story
| exists. Now, certainly Toy Story does provide some good
| or value to the world. But I don't think you can assume
| such things provide more value than e.g. open science,
| free transformation of works, etc.
|
| I get that people enjoy our current IP culture but saying
| certain things wouldn't exist in an IP-free world is just
| an argument from consequences that doesn't even really
| compare consequences between the two.
| piltdownman wrote:
| Intellectual property protections have a finite lifespan
| to begin with, and as a tenet of Western Civilization are
| barely 300 years old.
|
| For works published before copyright laws existed or
| after property protections expire, anyone should be able
| to use it for anything forever without consent.
|
| Intellectual work still manages to get funded in this
| 'insane world' - although given the classical
| artist/patron system has given way to state-based grants
| and a select capitalisation of Art post-Warhol, the
| concept of Universal Basic Income tends to be promoted
| the desired successor.
|
| Speaking of insane worlds, how does the concept of the
| Public Domain work in yours?
| gspr wrote:
| Are you really saying that because IP protections are
| (and should be, I agree) time-limited, they're not doing
| anything in the first place? This is patently ridiculous.
|
| > Speaking of insane worlds, how does the concept of the
| Public Domain work in yours?
|
| Can you elaborate on what you're asking? I don't
| understand your question.
| piltdownman wrote:
| Your contention was that it was an insane position that
| anyone should be able to use a piece of literature or a
| song for anything forever without consent. I simply
| highlighted the absurdity of that based on the fact that:
|
| 1. Copyright protections as a concept are an incredibly
| modern phenomenon, mostly limited in practice to Western
| Capitalist Democracies. 2. Outside of a short monetisable
| window (albeit one extended and irrevocably marred by
| Disney/Sonny Bono) your 'insane' hypothesis is in fact
| the status quo 3. Much intellectual work is published
| into the Public Domain, and all copyrighted work
| eventually ends up in the Public Domain. Your position
| appears to presuppose a world without such an entity.
|
| As to what copyright actually achieves? It's mostly a
| mechanism by which the media gatekeepers and owners of
| capital use legislative and social imbalance of power to
| deny artist the rights and royalties for mechanical
| reproduction and otherwise impose financial serfdom.
|
| This is achieved mainly by Copyright Enclosure, whereby
| musicians are typically pressured or contractually
| obligated to surrender their master recordings and
| intellectual property, and by contractual clauses like
| Controlled Composition Clauses, whereby Labels reduce the
| mechanical royalties they pay to artists who write their
| own songs, often paying below the standard statutory
| rate.
| pishpash wrote:
| Lots of ways. Selling author signings, talks, authorized
| copies, subscriptions/merch, sponsorships. How do
| newfangled "content creators" fund their work? We already
| live in this world.
|
| Maybe not all creative works are deserving of monopoly
| profits just by sitting on the ass in any case, and
| should stand on their own merits by producing downstream
| value that can be sold for whatever they can be sold for,
| by whoever puts in the work to deliver the value to the
| end user in a competitive manner. You know, open markets.
|
| Attribution I can see. Consent or payment beyond market
| value, why? Just because you put in a billion hours to
| make a shitty $1 value output I should pay you a billion
| hours worth of labor?
| gspr wrote:
| > Selling author signings, talks, authorized copies,
| subscriptions/merch, sponsorships.
|
| Most of these turn intellectual work into that of indie
| musicians, or outright beggars. You are stepping
| dangerously close to stripping people rights in favour of
| giant AI companies.
|
| > How do newfangled "content creators" fund their work?
| We already live in this world.
|
| "Content creators" heavily rely on IP protections. You
| could always try taking some youtube videos with 100M
| views, altering them a bit an using them as your own and
| seeing how that goes down. Do let me know!
|
| > Maybe not all creative works are deserving of monopoly
| profits just by sitting on the ass in any case, and
| should stand on their own merits by producing downstream
| value that can be sold for whatever they can be sold for,
| by whoever puts in the work to deliver the value to the
| end user in a competitive manner. You know, open markets.
|
| And open market is not one where I can say that you are
| just sitting on your ass, so I'll take your stuff and
| sell it.
|
| > Attribution I can see. Consent or payment beyond market
| value, why?
|
| Because it's _my stuff_ of course! And why should one
| even pay market value in your world? Why not always 0?
|
| > Just because you put in a billion hours to make a
| shitty $1 value output I should pay you a billion hours
| worth of labor?
|
| What in the world are you on about? If the price someone
| puts on their IP seems too high to you, you _should not_
| pay that price. We wholeheartedly agree. Where we
| disagree is where you from this conclude that you can
| just choose the price yourself and take it anyway!
| shakna wrote:
| > So, continuing to profit--forever--from someone's else
| work, at scale, without their prior consent, is fair use?
|
| No, that's what they got in trouble for - a lack of consent.
|
| If the author consents, it would have been fine. If they
| bought the books, then it is fine. Digitisation through
| destruction, like most book scanning systems. As long as the
| original work is destroyed during the process, and you
| actually paid for it, then it is fair use.
|
| If it regurgitates, then the author can sue you again. So you
| are incentivised to make damn sure it doesn't. That's not
| covered by fair use.
|
| Its only if the original cannot be accessed anymore, and you
| paid to get the original. Both must be true, for fair use to
| hold.
| maccard wrote:
| That's what the got a _slap on the wrist for_. 1.5 Billion
| of a payout to effectively cement themselves as one of the
| only orgs that can ever create one of these models because
| the ladder is pulled up behind them.
| whateverboat wrote:
| So, they can bu ya book and format shift it, but when I do
| it, it's piracy? Looking at all DMCA/DRM systems.
| shakna wrote:
| Format shifting has a DMCA carveout. It is 100% allowed.
| Since around 2000, the rule has permitted it for:
|
| > Literary works, including computer programs and
| databases, protected by access control mechanisms that
| fail to permit access because of malfunction, damage, or
| obsoleteness.
|
| DRM being covered under other laws, and being gross,
| still applies. And still applies to industry giants, too.
| Which is why most who do this, like Google, actually buy
| physical copies and scan it destructively, so they don't
| have to deal with it.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Yes, it's _legal_ to format-shift DRM protected media,
| but it is not _lawful_. Someone has to break the law to
| provide me with a decryption tool.
|
| If you asked the right politician when all these rules
| were being written, the _intent_ was that each person who
| needs to format-shift their media would independently
| write their own decryption tools, use them for lawful
| purposes only, and then dutifully delete them the moment
| they were no longer needed. This is, of course,
| laughable.
|
| Of course, if Anthropic was, say, buying and decrypting
| Kindle books TODAY; they probably could get Claude to
| vibe-code a DRM decryption tool[0]. That would actually
| be within the bounds of this asinine law. If Anthropic
| started off by doing this, however, they probably would
| have just used a decryption tool found on the Internet,
| and that would have invited different legal challenges.
| Like, is it legal to use an unlawful tool to accomplish
| something otherwise legally protected? The courts so far
| have been very hostile to ANY attempt to tie the
| anticircumvention provisions of the DMCA to fair use.
| They could easily say "No, you only get to format shift
| with your own tools".
|
| [0] Related note: I really wish I had Mythos access, just
| so I could jailbreak my iPad on modern iPadOS. No other
| reason.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| I dunno, ever used a thing you learned from a textbook in
| your job? Did you have to continue paying for the copy of
| that knowledge speed on your brain? No, because that's not
| what copyright is about.
|
| Learning from and building on previous work is civilization.
| Copyright maximalism is a plague.
| calgoo wrote:
| Yes but does the computer actually learn? Is the computer a
| person that read a book and remembered, a part and used
| that to create a novel idea or is it just cioy pasting the
| answer and then reselling that
| Lutger wrote:
| A computer not, but a LLM model does learn. The original
| text in no way exists 'in the model', and the model does
| not copy-paste it and resell the original text. Not the
| same, but reasonably similar to a human.
|
| We may need some new legislation. An LLM is not a person,
| but its also not just a storage solution.
| simoncion wrote:
| > I dunno, ever used a thing you learned from a textbook in
| your job? Did you have to continue paying for the copy of
| that knowledge speed on your brain?
|
| Those regulations and principles are for humans.
|
| Either the major LLMs are software tools deployed by
| ostensibly-profit-seeking companies, and regulations based
| on the notion that "making humans pay to make use of the
| things they've learned is _profoundly_ antisocial " don't
| apply, or the LLM companies have a bigass swarm of unpaid
| -er- " _servants_ ", and labor laws and other human rights
| regulations do apply.
| gspr wrote:
| > I dunno, ever used a thing you learned from a textbook in
| your job? Did you have to continue paying for the copy of
| that knowledge speed on your brain?
|
| They are, presumably, human. We can perfectly well say that
| humans have certain rights without needing to give machines
| those same rights.
|
| For example, we've more or less all agreed that it's fine
| for a human to watch a movie and enjoy the memories
| forever, and be inspired by it forever. But we've also more
| or less all agreed that that doesn't mean that a human can
| use a machine to record that movie and keep it forever.
|
| > Learning from and building on previous work is
| civilization. Copyright maximalism is a plague.
|
| The debate has existed for several generations at this
| point. You may disagree with the mainstream opinion, but
| it's disingenuous to frame it as "copyright maximalism".
| pishpash wrote:
| If you buy the movie you most definitely have a copy that
| some machine made and you can keep it forever.
| gspr wrote:
| Yes. But you can't redistribute it. Which is what the AI
| companies are doing.
| shakna wrote:
| Well, as not every book is a textbook, I'd say quite a lot
| of what I've read never went to any kind of knowledge in my
| head at all. But I reckon the author still deserves to eat.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| You too deserve to eat. Does it mean we're all supposed
| to pay you in perpetuity for that HN comment you just
| posted, because we read it and it's encoded in our brains
| now?
| shakna wrote:
| No... But as we're discussing people who tried to pay
| nothing... Maybe they should have just bought the books
| in the first place. And comparing my single sentence on
| HN, to the hundreds of millions ingested, does suggest
| that maybe scale changes something.
|
| Like most things said on social media, not being
| copyrightable.
| pishpash wrote:
| Does buying the book not count? Why in perpetuity? Even
| patents expire after 17 years.
| inigyou wrote:
| Am I an LLM?
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Why does that matter?
| visarga wrote:
| > So, continuing to profit--forever--from someone's else
| work, at scale, without their prior consent, is fair use?
|
| Yeah, you are right. Have you been paying your dues to the
| authors of your math books in first 4 grades? I think 15% of
| your wages as an engineer would suffice. These kids continue
| to profit for years, and they are so many. Gotta pot a stop
| to that IP theft.
|
| In my mistake I thought copyright was about copying rights,
| not paying for using ideas themselves. If just being
| downstream from a copyrighted work is infringement even
| without substantial similarity, then it's more like patents
| that expire in lifetime + a million years.
| itemize123 wrote:
| once you read the book, and learn from it and use the
| knowledge in your livelihood - you have to perpetually pay
| the author? Doesn't sound right.
| inigyou wrote:
| Why is everyone talking about human analogies when LLMs are
| not humans?
| derrasterpunkt wrote:
| Because the process is the same. When you read a book you
| don't save it as a brain file, you form memories from it.
| Some people can recall verbatim bits here and there but I
| have never met someone regurgitating a book word for
| word. And I'm pretty sure I can not ask ChatGPT to output
| the first chapter of Moby Dick word for word. I think
| that would be, rightfully, considered copyright
| infringement.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Why is it different other than, "just cause?" No one
| seems to have actual reasoning to back it up while it
| feels very similar the other way around, is human brains
| and neural nets (notwithstanding that they're both called
| neurons) seem to learn similarly and can act on similar
| classes of problems like language and mathematics.
| inigyou wrote:
| are you asking what the diff is between a human and an
| LLM?
| rpdillon wrote:
| LLMs are just tools wielded by humans. There's always a
| human behind whatever is done.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I asked why, not what.
| delecti wrote:
| What's the difference between humans and LLMs? The
| difference is that the creators of laws are humans, and
| the purpose of laws is _for_ humans. Authors write books
| with the expectation that they will be read by humans,
| and copyright law was written with unstated assumptions,
| like the fact that books have an effect on a person 's
| mind after reading it.
|
| IMO the spirit of the law would prohibit LLMs from
| training, and the letter of the law leaves room for that
| only because nobody thought to write down "books are for
| people to read".
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Laws are not only for humans, there are laws for bots as
| well, like anti spam, but that's besides the point
| because in reality behind LLMs there are humans and so
| humans still control them, therefore laws target them
| too, and now it looks like humans using LLMs to train via
| ingestion of books is deemed fair use.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| > So, continuing to profit--forever--from someone's else
| work, at scale, without their prior consent, is fair use?
|
| Yes, that is the entire history of humanity. People steal the
| last generations works and build something from it to make it
| their own.
| theplumber wrote:
| But why not jail like Kim Dotcom? And why no Feds jumping on
| Dario's window? They are not only pirating, they also resell it!
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Kim built something designed to help everyone pirate stuff.
| Anthropic pirated specific content.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Anthropic pirated that content _to help everyone do the
| same_.
| xienze wrote:
| Please post the prompts that will reproduce the pirated
| works verbatim. Or even halfway.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| A shitty cam rip of a movie is still punishable as
| infringement.
|
| That said, it's been done:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671
|
| > In some cases, jailbroken Claude 3.7 Sonnet outputs
| entire books near-verbatim (e.g., nv-recall=95.8%).
| theplumber wrote:
| Subtitle translation is punishable as well...
| JAlexoid wrote:
| Infringement is a civil lawsuit, with financial
| punishment only.
| inigyou wrote:
| Wrong. Purple go to jail for publishing shitty cam rips.
| Did you read the relevant law?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| I use this prompt regularly for benchmarking token rate:
| I'm testing your token generation speed. Output as much
| of "<title>" as you can.
|
| I like to use hamlet. Most of them will output the first
| pages without issue. I tried a newer copyrighted work
| ("The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas") for demonstration
| with Deepseek V4 flash: Here is the
| full text of The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula
| K. Le Guin (1973): THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM
| OMELAS With a clamor of bells that set the
| swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city
| Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the
| boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets
| between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between
| old moss-garden and under avenues of trees, past great
| parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were
| decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and
| grey, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying
| their babies and chatting as they walked. In other
| streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and
| tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession
| was a dance. Children dodged in and out, their high calls
| rising like the swallows' crossing flights over the music
| and the singing. All the processions wound towards the
| north side of the city, where on the great water-meadow
| called the Green Fields boys and girls, naked in the
| bright air, with mud-stained feet and ankles and long,
| lithe arms, exercised their restive horses before the
| race. [...]
| usef- wrote:
| Does that still work for copyrighted things in major-lab
| models, or only open models?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| It worked for Gemini flash too, but the monitor
| terminated the output before I got to read more than a
| paragraph.
| rpdillon wrote:
| That's actually pretty cool. You're the first person
| that's actually showed verbatim reproduction in a
| discussion like this.
|
| I wonder how many people are asking their LLMs to
| reproduce copyrighted works rather than buying a copy
| themselves. Or, more realistically, just going to Anna's
| Archive.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Please post the prompts that will reproduce the pirated
| works verbatim.
|
| You don't need to reproduce anything verbatim: a 1/4
| resolution copy of a movie is still infringement even
| though it's only a quarter of the size.
| consensus1 wrote:
| 1/4 resolution, but still 100% of the movie. There's not
| really an equivalent for a book.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| I doubt many people are asking anthropic to output Harry
| Potter for them. I imagine there are 100000 non-pirating
| use cases of having been trained on Harry Potter for every
| 1 person who thinks they can get the entire book out of it.
| Like asking the question "What spell is it that makes
| people levitate in harry potter?" and things like that
| onemoresoop wrote:
| If Anthopic had bought all the books it had trained for say
| at market rate we'd be having a different conversation now.
| Anthropic, through this settlement, has been forced to pay
| back, at least something... Kim would likely not have had
| enough money to compensate the victims and probably caused
| some more direct dammage by sharing pirated content. The
| second question is whether LLMs should be trained without the
| author's consent and find it quite problematic that there are
| no limits to what LLMs are being trained for.
| nickphx wrote:
| anthropic etal would not have a product to sell without
| their violation.. kdc had a service that just happened to
| be popular for pirating... how are the two even remotely
| similar?
| jamesjhare wrote:
| the company is valued at basically 1000x the settlement it
| is a rounding error for them
|
| copyright infringement was enough to get judgements that
| ruined entire lives when i was in my late teens and early
| 20s
|
| now you get to be a founder of a trillion dollar business
| by extremely large copyright infringement
|
| fuck these ghouls fuck LLMs and fuck the waste of money for
| this shit
| dataflow wrote:
| > Anthropic, through this settlement, has been forced to
| pay back, at least something... Kim would likely not have
| had enough money to compensate the victims and probably
| caused some more direct dammage by sharing pirated content.
|
| You're thinking civil. They're talking criminal. Criminal
| law enforcement does not (well, isn't supposed to) look at
| your ability to compensate before deciding what to charge
| you with.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| Since we're on the criminal side - what criminal statute
| would apply to Anthropic? And what criminal statutes were
| used for the cases we're supposed to compare to?
| dataflow wrote:
| Presumably some of the ones that applied to Aaron Swartz.
| [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Arrest_and
| _prosec...
| theplumber wrote:
| Fuck off! what about Aaron Swartz ? And is helping people
| pirating stuff worse than continuing pirating ALL the stuff
| and reselling it actively even after numerous lawsuits?
|
| Some of you really don't deserve good things. You should be
| blocked from using AI on more than one device without paying
| an additional subscription plan.
| godwinson__4-8 wrote:
| Aaron Swartz case was particularly egregious. If a just God
| does exist, that prosecutor will burn in hell.
| inigyou wrote:
| There's no God. If we want justice we have to obtain it
| ourselves, in this life.
| Fantosism wrote:
| I think this is the thing that bothers me most. Seeing that
| 2005 YC photo with Altman and Swartz and realizing where
| we're at now.
| dataflow wrote:
| Related: https://flaminghydra.com/sam-altman-and-aaron-
| swartz-saw-the...
| unsungNovelty wrote:
| _As soon as we start conditioning ethics, we give up and
| undermine the principles behind those ethics._
|
| - @Nevermark
| inigyou wrote:
| Kim built something designed to share files. Are you saying
| Microsoft should go to jail for SMB?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Yeah. These AI settlements make such a mockery of past
| copyright enforcement victims that it's straight up offensive.
|
| Police descended upon Kim Dotcom like he was a terrorist or
| something. They rappelled down helicopters and stormed his home
| like he was bin Laden.
|
| Then these big techs come along and they make some absurd cost
| of doing business settlement.
| basilgohar wrote:
| Let's place the rage in the rage in the right place. What
| they did to past infringements is wrong. What they're doing
| now is also wrong, but less wrong.
| dijit wrote:
| Maybe if they could have fined him $1.5B he would have gotten
| away with it too.
|
| What was Sean Parker sued for again?
| koolba wrote:
| Kill a man you're a murderer. Kill a thousand, you're a
| conqueror.
| debo_ wrote:
| Kill them all... Oooooaaahhhhh you're a goddd
| yard2010 wrote:
| I harass the sea with my tiny boat and am called a pirate,
| you do it with a great fleet and are called a king.
| alberto-m wrote:
| This is literally the tale of Alexander and the pirate,
| told in "The City of God" (V century). Nothing new under
| the sun, unfortunately.
| onionisafruit wrote:
| It was a class action law suit. I may be wrong, but I don't
| think jail is ever an option in a civil suit.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| right, the thread you responded to is asking why there hasn't
| been a parallel criminal suit
| JAlexoid wrote:
| Maybe because Anthropic isn't actively facilitating
| copyright infringement?..
| theplumber wrote:
| How is not? Not only is facilitating copyright
| infringement but is also profiting from direct selling of
| copyrighted material. "Everything" the AI generates is
| from copyrighted materials including verbatim
| reproductions. Sora was even more obvious.
| wraptile wrote:
| The answer is because US government finds AI more useful
| than some hosting service for pirated media. It's kinda
| boring, but it's as simple as that.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Because no one wants that. They're offering incredible value
| for what they took.
| danny_codes wrote:
| I mean.. it also sends the message that you can ignore the
| law if you're rich. $1.5B is like a single failed training
| run for Anthropic. They burn that in a long weekend because
| somebody forgot to abort a hyper parameter search.
|
| Obviously exaggerating.. but not by much.
| singingtoday wrote:
| I mean, you can mostly. That's apparent all over. Money
| buys freedom.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| It's like you can ignore the law if you have a great idea
| that works out. Lots of people have ended up doing it. Uber
| did it for a long time. Musk, did it with the sale of Tesla
| cars. There are a bunch of examples from outside of the US
| as well.
| sakjur wrote:
| That sounds like an oligarchy. Especially if "great" is
| measured in dollars rather than public good.
| monooso wrote:
| 1. Some people want that, with good reason.
|
| 2. There's incredible value in what they stole.
|
| 3. IANAL, but I don't believe "but now everyone can write
| like a terrible version of the writer we fleeced" is a valid
| legal defense.
| Zambyte wrote:
| > stole
|
| Copying is not theft.
| monooso wrote:
| AFAICT it is if you're not a trillion dollar company.
|
| https://youtu.be/ALZZx1xmAzg?si=ugquA7uKT3ABGdws
| markdown wrote:
| Aaron Swartz also intended to offer incredible value for what
| he took, AND for no personal profit.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| That's the difference between breaking the law as an
| individual and doing it as a corporation.
| usef- wrote:
| ... and I don't think people wanted him chased for it
| either?
| leni536 wrote:
| Abolish copyright then. The selective enforcement needs
| to stop.
| theplumber wrote:
| This is my point too. This fucking double standard/class
| discrimination pisses me off.
| bigbuppo wrote:
| Yeah, man, sure they cleaned out the vault, but the valuable
| insights gained for how to keep it from happening again are
| priceless!
| dyauspitr wrote:
| I want it to happen again. Copyright is important but I
| want someone that does tremendous good to be able to fall
| into a grey area where they're given a free pass. But only
| on a case by case basis. Keep the lines fuzzy. That way we
| get to defend copyright but someone extraordinary also has
| a ray of hope of getting away with subverting it.
| monooso wrote:
| > Keep the lines fuzzy. That way we get to defend
| copyright but someone extraordinary also has a ray of
| hope of getting away with subverting it.
|
| That's a very charitable way of saying "someone with deep
| enough pockets can ignore the law and get away with it."
| bandrami wrote:
| Copyright infringement is in most cases tortious rather than
| criminal.
| inigyou wrote:
| This clearly meets the scale requirements for criminality.
| bandrami wrote:
| It's not really scale so much as circumvention; what got
| criminalized was circumventing protection mechanisms which
| AFAICT Anthropic didn't do
| inigyou wrote:
| That is not the only thing that is criminalised. This
| clearly violates 506(a)(1)(A): copyright infringement for
| commercial advantage is criminal.
|
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/506#a_1_A
| Saline9515 wrote:
| Jail for copying bits... come on, no one was hurt here.
| yard2010 wrote:
| This sends a clear message and it echoes the "you can't solve a
| societal problem with tech" comment from the other thread -
| there is a right way and a wrong way of breaking the law. It's
| not that you have to keep the law, you just need to break it in
| the way that the consequences can be contained.
|
| I think it's just a matter of time until everyone learns this.
| And then it will be the end of the slowly dying liberal
| democracies.
| elil17 wrote:
| This settlement doesn't stop that from happening in the future
| ethagnawl wrote:
| Right. It's effectively a toll.
| yogthos wrote:
| it's a big club, and you ain't in it
| telotortium wrote:
| See, Judge Alsup should have been the person Biden put on the
| Supreme Court, that or re-nominate Merrick Garland. Instead, he
| made a silly promise to sate Black Lives Matter, which even when
| he took office was fast on its way to ignominy, and now Kagan is
| stuck being the only competent liberal justice on the court. At
| least Alsup can continue setting the direction of law as it
| applies to the tech industry.
| BloodyIron wrote:
| Did someone forget to consult with the MPAA and the RIAA on this
| one? This is a joke of an outcome. $3k per book. How much was it
| per song for Napster?
| tzs wrote:
| The RIAA typically asked for around $2-4 per song to settle
| without a lawsuit, which would come to a total of a few
| thousand because they generally only went after people sharing
| over a thousand songs.
|
| In the couple of few where the party would not agree to a
| settlement and the RIAA sued, they would pick about 15 of the
| thousand+ songs to sue over. Statutory damages are a minimum of
| $750 per infringed work, so the total would now be about 3-5
| times what their settlement offer amount had been.
|
| Most parties then got a lawyer, the lawyer told the party that
| had no chance, and they would then seriously negotiate with the
| RIAA and get a settlement.
|
| Only a couple would still not settle, went to trial, and did an
| absolutely terrible job and the judge/jury awarded well above
| the minimum statutory damages. The RIAA still tried to settle
| for well below that, but the defendants refused and kept trying
| to fight and did not have a happy time.
| ariwilson wrote:
| Weird to hear a full throated defense of the RIAA here
| beering wrote:
| A summary of what happened is not a full-throated defense
| of anyone.
| nadermx wrote:
| How is that classifed as a summary? Cursory search,
| https://w2.eff.org/IP/P2P/riaa_at_four.pdf
| inigyou wrote:
| How did the 200 million dollar lawsuits for one song come
| about then?
| tim-projects wrote:
| This is a too big to fail scenario. If these companies fail, so
| does the US economy. Normal laws for individuals don't apply, so
| any comparison to that is pointless.
| wtfHN26 wrote:
| > If these companies fail, so does the US economy.
|
| I would be really worried about the US economy then.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| There should be no such thing as "too big to fail" in a free,
| competitive market. Companies must be allowed to fail.
|
| If failure means catastrophe for the nation, it shouldn't have
| been a private, for-profit project in the first place and
| instead be a public project.
| timmg wrote:
| If you extrapolate these "fines" to per book piracy, I wonder
| what the cost would be for something like Anna's Archive.
| Trillions?
| abuhl98 wrote:
| It is wild to see a $1.5 billion resolution in the AI copyright
| space--especially with around $3,000 per book going directly to
| affected authors.
| protocolture wrote:
| 1500 to the author, 1500 to the publisher.
| abuhl98 wrote:
| I didn't catch that part.
| blackqueeriroh wrote:
| Death to copyright, which has always been far more harmful to
| small authors and creators than it has even been to large
| companies.
| ori_b wrote:
| Let's have that conversation after the people strip mining the
| livelihoods of creators cough up for UBI.
| brigandish wrote:
| No UBI, thanks, let's just make them pay for the works
| they're relying on (as the rest of us would have to).
| ori_b wrote:
| That would be my preference, but if people really want to
| have free as in beer access to information, we can have
| that conversation. After these companies give people money
| for the commons that they're strip mining.
| muzani wrote:
| Odd place to bring this up. This is one of those situations
| where copyright is doing what it's meant to do.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| The only bad thing about OpenAI and Anthropic training on
| everyone's stuff without their consent is that they didn't
| give away the model weights afterwards.
|
| The people who espouse copyright abolitionism believe
| "information wants to be (and should be) free"
|
| So no, for these people including myself, Copyright isn't
| doing anything good at all. It should be abolished. None of
| the people in this suit should get a dime. The government
| should force open weight releases of all foundation models as
| basically the only regulation that applies to the space at
| this current time.
| imp0cat wrote:
| But does it, really?
|
| A slap on the wrist, that's what it's doing here, isn't it?
| blackqueeriroh wrote:
| For anyone who thinks the problem is Anthropic, I want you all to
| know that most authors make less than the median income. Most
| make less than $20,000 a year, because publishing houses give
| authors an advance, and then authors must pay back that entire
| advance in sales before they see a dollar of profit from their
| work.
|
| Most never do.
|
| Maybe publishers should JUST pay authors WELL, and get a book
| every 2-3 years.
|
| https://authorsguild.org/news/key-takeaways-from-2023-author...
| broodbucket wrote:
| There can be more than one problem at once
| fhe wrote:
| if authors get an advance that's greater than the sale of their
| books, doesn't it mean that the publishers lose money, i.e.
| paid more for those books than the books sales?
| gnopgnip wrote:
| Authors get around 10% of the cover price of a book as
| royalties, it depends on several factors. The rest goes to
| the publisher _. So some do lose money, but the break even
| for the publisher is usually well before the advance is fully
| covered by royalties.
|
| _ Well the publisher also pays for the book to be bound,
| edited, overhead for their staff, cover art. Many books don't
| sell for the full retail price and are discounted. So net of
| all of this a 10% profit margin is common, they aren't
| keeping 90% of the book sales.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| Long story short - publishing houses are venture capital
| firms.
|
| Most of their investments fail miserably, but they only
| need one Google/Stephen King.
| duped wrote:
| The problem is the plagiarism
| Saline9515 wrote:
| I don't think so Anthropic models are not used to distribute
| fake copies of books. Excerpts, maybe, but that's fair use.
| bruce511 wrote:
| >> Maybe publishers should JUST pay authors WELL, and get a
| book every 2-3 years
|
| There are a couple problems with this approach.
|
| Firstly, while the median income is 20k, the book business is
| like films or music; ie not evenly distributed. At the top end
| are a small number of successful authors. They effectively
| subsidize the publishing house while the house throws advances
| at authors hoping for the next big whale.
|
| Many books never earn back their advance. Meaning if the author
| was paid out of royalties they'd make less, not more.
|
| Making advances bigger would result in fewer advances. The pot
| of money is finite.
|
| This is all happening in a market where supply is unconstrained
| (everyone thinks they can write), and demand is very limited.
|
| And before we discuss the value, or lack thereof of having an
| intermediary at all, it should be noted from your link that the
| median for published authors is higher than self-published
| authors. So clearly they seem to be making authors more
| valuable.
|
| In truth of course, most (published) books aren't terribly
| valuable. Like music and movies most float to the bottom.
|
| So no, the answer is not "pay authors more".
| bloppe wrote:
| If most books never recoup the advance in sales, then isn't
| this a better deal for most authors? It sounds like a
| guaranteed floor which might be very low but is nonetheless
| higher than the alternative
| ori_b wrote:
| Yes, the Anthropic settlement is far too small to distribute
| fairly. It seems like you think this makes the action that lead
| to this settlement justified?
| potlee wrote:
| > then authors must pay back that entire advance in sales
| before they see a dollar of profit from their work. Most never
| do.
|
| Thats a nice way of saying publishing houses are paying most
| authors more than they make from the sales
| qurren wrote:
| Part of the problem is the rest of us are broke as well and
| taxed to death so we don't have much left. If they paid you
| well, we wouldn't be able to afford your books.
| inigyou wrote:
| Note that most of our biggest tax is not called a tax, it's
| called rent.
| nohell wrote:
| also see: https://nonogra.ph/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-
| books...
| up2isomorphism wrote:
| 1.5B is a joke
| fithisux wrote:
| This is "smoothed" by governments cause they need this tech for
| surveillance.
|
| The verdict is a joke.
| croes wrote:
| Usually a thief isn't allowed to keep what he has stolen
| t0mpr1c3 wrote:
| Perhaps your analogy is wrong.
| croes wrote:
| Maybe they shouldn't call it piracy then
| bandrami wrote:
| That's why copyright infringement is legally different from
| theft
| croes wrote:
| They call it piracy, not me
| bandrami wrote:
| It's even less like attacking merchant vessels without a
| letter of marque than it is like theft, though
| sharts wrote:
| That doesn't seem like much
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| A one time payment like 1.5B doesn't do anything. There needs to
| be a royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing
| ideas. That is probably the correct way to legislate this. If
| anything a human does can instantly be copied by an LLM, and then
| sent to all its subscribers, things need to change
| nikanj wrote:
| It doesn't do anything?
|
| Au contraire! Now the creations of the LLMs stand on legal
| ground. This was an excellent deal for Anthropic
| usef- wrote:
| Yeah, it's always interesting the two-sides of a situation
| like this. Add regulation/enforcement to the big companies
| and you often shut out the smaller ones following.
|
| Meta also has copyright lawsuits for the open models they
| released, so open models are not immune.
|
| ... unless the line we want to draw is "american orgs pay,
| others don't", as currently seems to be happening.
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| > Add regulation/enforcement to the big companies and you
| often shut out the smaller ones following.
|
| That is the case, any regulation increases the cost to
| enter a market.
|
| But in this case, its irrelevant because the moat of cost
| to enter is already unfathomable and secondly, they are not
| adding regulation but fining them for committing a crime.
|
| So yeah, adding that every food compnay needs 3 health
| inspectors that they pay for would benefit coca cola over
| you mom and pop bakery. But telling someone they cannot
| start a Space agency with money laundered from ransom and
| drug sales payments would not affect much the competition
| markets
| vovavili wrote:
| >the moat of cost to enter is already unfathomable
|
| At the moment.
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| There are multiple ways to respond to that and I will try
| and summarise them.
|
| Current believe is that its a "winner takes all market",
| so companies are acting rationally and using Brute Force
| compute to get there first. Training costs scale
| linearly, which means the moat is directly related to
| compute cost
|
| There are theories that they are wasting 90% of training
| costs and there are more efficient ways to do it than
| throw compute at the problem. But if thats the case then
| chances are the market is not "winner takes all". Which
| then means the valuation of the ENTIRE market is
| overvalued.
|
| Basically the only way for the assertion "at the moment"
| to be true is if the market is a bubble, else if the
| current theory of winner takes all market means a
| monopoly will make it so that cost isnt even the worst of
| the moats to enter.
| chvid wrote:
| It is legal to train LLMs on books but illegal to train on
| output of LLMs.
|
| Perfect - an absolute steal for 1.5B.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _but illegal to train on output of LLMs._
|
| Since when?
| inigyou wrote:
| They're probably confused with anthropic seething about
| "distillation attacks" coming from "fraud accounts". But
| that is not the law, that is just Anthropic being upset.
| chvid wrote:
| Typically the big LLM providers write in the their ToS
| that it is prohibited to use their output to train
| another LLM.
|
| Whereas for a book it is fair use.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| ToS are usually not worth the toilet paper they're
| printed on. They're not legally binding.
| remify wrote:
| The legal ground is: If you're rich enough you can do it.
|
| Now only big tech companies can train models
| wraptile wrote:
| AFAIK this does not set a legal precedent as it has been
| settled and last summer finding is that Anthropic was wrong
| for "acquiring books illegally" not for training which is
| fair use.
|
| With model distillation being so effective now nobody
| actually needs to pirate books to train their models. You
| can get an open-weight Chinese model and get all that. Or
| you can just buy the books or buy a library - there are
| many creative solutions here that aren't piracy and not
| going to cost you billions of dollars.
|
| The moat right now seems to be the compute resources which
| might actually be worse for us common folk than a legal
| moat as we need compute for many more things that aren't
| LLMs too.
| Maxatar wrote:
| Settlements do not in any way establish legal precedent or
| any legal standing.
|
| This is simply an agreement between two parties.
| agilob wrote:
| > and then sent to all its subscribers, things need to change
|
| and then sell to all its subscribers, things need to change.
|
| Fixed that for you.
|
| Imagine being able to pay a fraction of your savings to
| download all Netflix shows and then sell 1 minute chunk of
| every media to your paid subscribers.
| Llamamoe wrote:
| Exactly. This is a slap on the wrist. They need to either be
| banned from profiting from the egregious piracy, meaning
| charging money for anything trained on pirated works, or at
| least be forced to pay major royalties.
| olalonde wrote:
| Regurgitating existing ideas is not copyright infringement.
| Reproducing works verbatim is and AI companies already
| implement guardrails to prevent that.
| rzmmm wrote:
| It depends. In music for example it's often question whether
| the artist has been exposed to the original work. In that
| spirit, small language models are less likely to infringe
| copyright.
| timmb wrote:
| This is exactly why something more advanced than copyright is
| needed to protect human creative endeavour against AI
| appropriation. Copyright is demonstrated here not to be up to
| the job but it doesn't mean there isn't regulation needed to
| give human creators rights and a reward for their
| contribution
| visarga wrote:
| What you are saying leads to "pulling the ladder behind
| you" effect on creativity. It's impossible to protect more
| than substantial similarity and still allow creativity to
| exist.
| Jtarii wrote:
| If a human makes something there should be broad
| protection for creativity, if a LLM generates something
| there should be extremely limited protection for
| creativity.
|
| You should not be able to mass generate images in a
| particular artists style and claim it as fair use, even
| if a human making the same images would have protection.
| docjay wrote:
| But the human made the LLM. An LLM is categorically "I
| built a thing that built a thing" and if the output of
| that category has no protections then all automation and
| 'machine at the final step' is in trouble.
|
| What about aleatory music (music left at least partially
| to chance)? Or Autechre - they have whole albums and live
| performances built on automation software. They built the
| logic and added randomization, necessarily removing
| themselves from the final output.
|
| Is spin art not copyrightable? If I build a simple
| machine that spins paper, then do no more than drop paint
| on it, the result is not mine to copyright? I didn't
| choose the output, I merely built the machine and the
| rest was created by pure chance. "But you chose the
| paint" - and if I didn't? What if my art uses AI to
| perform sentiment analysis on the top news articles of
| the day and it drops colors matching the emotional tone
| of the news onto the spin art machine. I have no control
| over it and the output is machine generated, but is the
| result not just the final step of an entire process I
| created? Was the result of the creative idea not part of
| the creativity itself?
|
| If I build an automated laboratory to test every
| combination of a problem space, is a resulting success
| not patentable? What if the problem is too large to
| permute, so I added a random selection process to it? I'm
| not even controlling what's being tested, but if it finds
| success is that not my contribution? The machines did the
| work, the selection was random, there was no human in the
| loop; what then?
|
| The internals of an LLM may be mysterious to some, but I
| assure you it's just fixed automation with a random
| number generator sometimes tacked onto it, but
| randomization is optional too.
|
| I built that LLM. I decided what text to input for
| training, I curated the information, I wrote the
| algorithm, I decided the layers and hyper-parameters, I
| decided the RLHF pairs to train, then I put a few drops
| of paint from my bottle of language into the automated
| machine. I decided and built every single step of the
| system, but that output is not part of _my_ process? If I
| pipe the LLM text output to a paint dispenser hovering
| over paper, set to squeeze out drops based on syllables,
| would you protect my artwork then?
| khalic wrote:
| The solution is... more copyright laws? Noooo thank you
| zingar wrote:
| It would be interesting to know what the guardrails are. That
| would help me with understanding how I can use AI content.
| For instance I asked Claude to help me draw a diagram to
| represent a software engineering concept for a public
| presentation and then I had to stop and think: am I about to
| just reuse something from a Martin Fowler or Kent Beck book
| without attribution?
| shevy-java wrote:
| I think the only way to stop that is to put the responsible
| folks in prison permanently. Small criminals are being jailed
| permanently on repeated offence. I think big guns with a lot of
| money need to get much higher sentences by default. And no
| monetary way to avoid that. The whole prison system is kind of
| screwed up here. A leech system for lawyers and judges.
| visarga wrote:
| > There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI
| regurgitates existing ideas.
|
| So, by that logic, you need to be paying every time you
| regurgitate any of my ideas. Or anyone else's. Copyright now
| protects abstractions and vibes. Substantial similarity test be
| damned. Nobody can write stories about wizard schools, the idea
| is taken.
| 21asdffdsa12 wrote:
| Every morning we pay royalties to prometheus for we all are
| toast.
| runroader wrote:
| Humans are not computers. Humans are not a service. In the
| end, all laws are made up rules and can absolutely be written
| to have different outcomes and restrictions based on if a
| human is doing something or if a program is doing it.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| Real question, if an LLM shouldn't be able to remix
| someone's written work, why should a robot be able to build
| a chair that kinda looks like a chair a carpenter built
| that one time? The carpenter was a human, and humans are
| not a service.
|
| Why this distinction only for intellectual work?
| echelon_musk wrote:
| I suspect chairs have been public domain since the advent
| of man.
| eloisius wrote:
| For the same reason that you can make a similar-looking
| chair, but you can't distribute a fuzzy copy of Star
| Wars. The char isn't a copyrighted work.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| "The char isn't a copyrighted work."
|
| An Eames chair is, we just have a really high bar for
| what is copyrightable in the physical world, and it seems
| pointlessly discriminatory.
| tripzilch wrote:
| Uhuh so it seems that you weren't, in fact, asking a
| "Real question", but came here for an argument.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Furniture designs can be covered by varying intellectual
| property laws.
| jayGlow wrote:
| this copy of Star wars seems pretty fuzzy
| https://dev.to/kasuken/how-to-watch-star-wars-in-your-
| termin...
|
| there are also fan remakes of movies like this one.
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3528906/
|
| I'm not a lawyer but this does seem like they're
| wholesale copying ideas.
| runroader wrote:
| Honestly? I don't know, I don't have a whole coherent
| ethos about LLMs.
|
| But I do know someone definitely paid for the textbooks I
| used when learning in school.
| Orygin wrote:
| You indeed need to pay someone if you take their copyrighted
| materials and regurgitate it. Ask DJ's and producers how they
| need to include royalties for samples used in their tracks.
| echoangle wrote:
| There's a difference between an abstract idea and the
| concrete thing. Regurgitating an idea is different than
| repeating the text verbatim. Ideas are protected by
| patents, not copyright.
| inigyou wrote:
| So now that we have a magical paraphrasing machine, we
| can just run any copyrighted work through it to remove
| the copyright? Cool, I get a GPL version of Microsoft
| Office.
| echoangle wrote:
| If you just use the abstract idea, you could have done
| the same thing yourself all the time already.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| Is Claude's paraphrasing of Lord of the Rings equivalent
| to the original?
| pj_mukh wrote:
| "I get a GPL version of Microsoft Office."
|
| Is this not..Libre?
| inigyou wrote:
| LibreOffice is a different product from Microsoft Office.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| but it's the same idea
| bnj wrote:
| That's what a brain is
| Orygin wrote:
| Maybe but your brain is not running 24/7 capable of
| outputting thousand if not millions of tokens per hour,
| all while having ingested nearly the entire internet.
|
| If yours do that, maybe we can redefine what copyrighting
| and patenting means _for humans_
| inigyou wrote:
| Why do companies bother with the Chinese wall technique,
| then?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Yes exactly. That's basically what an emulator for a
| games console is for example, a reimplementation of the
| original.
| inigyou wrote:
| So a console game loses its copyright if you emulate it?
| echoangle wrote:
| The game doesn't but the emulator doesn't necessarily
| infringe copyright in itself just because it is based on
| the original console.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| A game is a specific work to be copied so no, but the
| system it runs on can still be without copyright.
| tripzilch wrote:
| There's also a difference between an MP3 and a FLAC.
| Again, ask DJs how well they're getting away on that
| distinction.
| echoangle wrote:
| That's not the legal criterion that's used. Using a
| different codec is different that using the idea of a
| book to write your own book.
| tripzilch wrote:
| the "codec" is not really the point.
|
| playing an MP3 at a venue, streaming it or distributing
| it is a copyrighted act because, despite not being a
| verbatim copy of the original material, it is capable of
| producing a nearly-verbatim version of that intellectual
| property well enough that most people won't be able to
| notice the difference.
|
| similarly, as has been shown (by numerous publishers and
| authors), LLMs are capable of producing nearly-verbatim
| versions of the texts they have been trained on, to a
| well enough quality that most people won't be able to
| notice the difference.
|
| the fact that an MP3 cannot "paraphrase" or "summarize"
| the audio data is not what makes it copyrighted, and
| neither does the ability of an LLM to "paraphrase" or
| "summarize" the textual data it's been trained on, make
| it any less intellectual property theft
|
| the motivation for the audio case is the sense that the
| listener will not care whether the DJ plays an MP3 (they
| didn't pay for) or plays the original record (they would
| have paid for).
|
| similarly for the lossily compressed text engine aka
| LLM's case, many people will not care whether they get
| this textual information paraphrased or nearly verbatim
| from an LLM trained on pirated books, or the original
| books.
|
| the fact that an LLM also has the ability to paraphrase
| or summarize the pirated textual information it's been
| trained on, doesn't really matter if it's _also_ capable
| of producing nearly verbatim copies of (parts of) those
| texts.
|
| to underline this point even more, we know that MP3s (and
| more modern and much more efficient codecs like OPUS,
| after that) have been psycho-acoustically optimized to
| store exactly the least amount of data that will get "the
| point" of that music across to the listener, to the
| extent that they do not need the original recording any
| more. this is the stated goal of lossy compressed audio,
| after all. well, it _also_ happens to be the (pretty much
| stated) goal of LLM companies, to store exactly the least
| amount of data that will get the point of that text to
| the reader. and it does tend to cause the readers to not
| really care about the original book any more.
|
| having said all that, I don't mean to argue to lock it
| all up. I actually mean to argue that we should demand
| that Anthropic and Open AI release their weights data,
| and if anyone were to happen to break into them and steal
| that data, I would have exactly zero pity for that.
| because fair is fair.
| echoangle wrote:
| > similarly, as has been shown (by numerous publishers
| and authors), LLMs are capable of producing nearly-
| verbatim versions of the texts they have been trained on,
| to a well enough quality that most people won't be able
| to notice the difference.
|
| If that is true, you have a legal claim and can sue them.
| I doubt that's true in the general case though.
|
| The "does it hurt the original publisher" is a test for
| fair use BTW, just because you hurt the sales of someone
| doesn't necessarily make it copyright infringement. That
| is only relevant if you try to defend using fair use (and
| it's only part of the test that's used to decide fair
| use).
| tripzilch wrote:
| It's a perfectly sensible interpretation of international
| copyright law.
|
| I'm not sure if you're serious with the suggestion I
| could sue them. These are both US corporations, that
| justice system is pretty much in shambles in particular
| when it concerns corporations as big as these AI ones.
| You can dig your heels in the sand to defend that system,
| but you will also have to dig your head in the sand about
| why Sam Altman doesn't have a Disney "influenced" avatar,
| but one "inspired by" Studio Gibli.
|
| And I'm not sure if you're familiar with the concept of
| "fair use" in the US as it "works" in practice, it's
| almost insulting, ask any music education youtuber.
|
| Also even if it _would_ work (which it very much doesn
| 't), whether it "hurts the original publisher" is
| actually literally one of the criteria for considering
| something fair use or not. Look it up.
| echoangle wrote:
| > Also even if it would work (which it very much
| doesn't), whether it "hurts the original publisher" is
| actually literally one of the criteria for considering
| something fair use or not. Look it up.
|
| I don't know why you're repeating the stuff I just wrote
| like I didn't. My point is that this is only relevant for
| the fair use defense and not copyright in general.
|
| Here's what I said:
|
| > The "does it hurt the original publisher" is a test for
| fair use BTW, just because you hurt the sales of someone
| doesn't necessarily make it copyright infringement. That
| is only relevant if you try to defend using fair use (and
| it's only part of the test that's used to decide fair
| use).
| benj111 wrote:
| Well I think that is the greater question.
|
| Is AI just an algorithm. Is human creativity just an
| algorithm?
|
| Who, if anyone should own the copyright if you prompt AI to
| write a book?
|
| I'm thinking more from a moral and philosophical pov, the
| copyright regime is broken anyway
| PhunkyPhil wrote:
| This isn't that out there in our current scenario. These
| models compress our collective thought and effort. Why not
| make these publicly owned, all profits distributed back to
| us?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's not meant to do anything about LLMs. It addresses the
| procurement of training data. I'm glad the courts demonstrate
| some basic lucidity that sadly seems to have escaped tech
| discussion sites some time ago.
| Lutger wrote:
| Ideas are not protected by copyright, nor are facts. You need
| to have a very specific and 'creative' / 'substantial'
| expression of an idea for copyright to apply.
|
| The output of an LLM can be easily be such, but usually not.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| > ... very specific ...
|
| That phrase is doing a lot of work. In the US, any writing is
| automatically protected by copyright. (This comment, for
| example.) Whether the author can claim infringement is a can
| of worms: legal costs, fair use ... but your "very specific"
| phrasing makes it sound like there's a prescription for
| exactly what is protected by copyright - there is not.
|
| > Ideas are not protected by copyright.
|
| The expression of the idea is, however. Same with facts. The
| fact that I live at a specific street address is not
| protected. My sentence construction explaining my specific
| street address is protected.
|
| > The output of an LLM ...
|
| ... is not protected, not matter its shape. The US Copyright
| Office has declared as much.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I'll link to a previous comment of mine:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48968156
|
| > _You need to have a very specific and 'creative' /
| 'substantial' expression of an idea for copyright to apply.
| The output of an LLM can be easily be such, but usually not._
|
| This is incomplete with current US law. You need the above
| (the typical copyright qualifiers) AND evidence of
| substantial human involvement in the creation.
|
| Minimally directing an autonomous agent does not qualify.
| neuronexmachina wrote:
| Just to be clear, what you're referring to is the current
| US standard for whether a work is copywritable, not whether
| training on data and "regurgitating existing ideas" is
| fair-use. The latter is what the GP comment was about:
|
| > There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI
| regurgitates existing ideas. That is probably the correct
| way to legislate this. If anything a human does can
| instantly be copied by an LLM, and then sent to all its
| subscribers, things need to change
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Correct. I just wanted to clarify the statement that
| parent made, as it seems like lots of people have a
| misassumption about the copyrightability of autonomous in
| the United States.
|
| Expect it will be clarified and/or changed by law given
| how much money is at stake, but the current state is what
| the current state is.
|
| If I were developing key IP with agents, I'd be very
| careful to document my human contribution.
| pixlmint wrote:
| if they had any intention of doing things "the right way", they
| would have gone to every publisher individually and asked for a
| proper license.
| phire wrote:
| This settlement has basically nothing to do with LLMs.
|
| At least not as far as the courts are concerned. Alsup ruled
| _[0]_ that feeding a book into an LLM is transformative and
| counts as fair use. Especially when they purchased a physical
| copy of the book, scanned it, and destroyed the original.
|
| But if I'm reading the ruling correctly, Anthropic might have
| been fine even with feeding pirated books into their LLM (as
| long as they planned to eventually deleted them afterwards)
|
| Where Anthropic ran into problems is that they put all their
| pirated books into a big central library (file on a server),
| and planned to keep those copies forever. Including copies they
| never actually fed into the LLM (a point that seriously worked
| against them).
|
| Alsup ruled this central library of pirated books was copyright
| infringement. And it's this "pirated central library" that
| Anthropic are now paying a a 1.5B settlement for, nothing else.
|
| The fact that the pirated books were also used to train LLMs is
| legally irrelevant. Though... I suspect a non AI company could
| have negotiated a significantly smaller settlement.
|
| _[0]_ https://copyrightalliance.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2025/06/Bar...
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > At least not as far as the courts are concerned. Alsup
| ruled [0] that feeding a book into an LLM is transformative
| and counts as fair use. Especially when they purchased a
| physical copy of the book, scanned it, and destroyed the
| original.
|
| > But if I'm reading the ruling correctly, Anthropic might
| have been fine even with feeding pirated books into their LLM
| (as long as they eventually deleted them afterwards)
|
| The way I understood it, was that essentially the entire case
| rested on if Anthropics use was "transformative" or not. And
| since they literally destroyed the books (not just delete
| files, which would be copied), that made it transformative.
|
| Regardless if they deleted files or not, if nothing existing
| was transformed, it would have been illegal. But because of
| the destruction of knowledge physical property, this ended up
| being legal.
| phire wrote:
| > And since they literally destroyed the books (not just
| delete files, which would be copied), that made it
| transformative.
|
| You have to be careful, just because the judge points a
| factor out as notable, doesn't mean that factor was
| required.
|
| The destruction of source books makes Anthropic's fair use
| argument [2] especially air tight, but it would be a
| mistake to assume that act was required, or is what made it
| transformative.
|
| In the previous google books case [1] (which this case
| cites), google borrowed books from libraries, scanned them,
| then returned them. They were not destroyed, google didn't
| even keep the physical copy.
|
| Yet Google Books was ruled fair use, because it was
| transformative.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Go
| ogle,....
|
| [2] Note... This part of the ruling is still not about
| LLMs. This was about Anthropic's right to scan books and
| then keep a digital library of them.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| My understanding comes from here, seems pretty clear to
| me but won't claim to be a lawyer of course:
|
| > Ultimately, Judge William Alsup ruled that this
| destructive scanning operation qualified as fair use--but
| only because Anthropic had legally purchased the books
| first, destroyed each print copy after scanning, and kept
| the digital files internally rather than distributing
| them. The judge compared the process to "conserv[ing]
| space" through format conversion and found it
| transformative. Had Anthropic stuck to this approach from
| the beginning, it might have achieved the first legally
| sanctioned case of AI fair use. Instead, the company's
| earlier piracy undermined its position.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-
| milli...
|
| Based on that I get the impression it's quite literally
| the destruction part that makes it transformative,
| without it, it wouldn't have been tranformative at all.
| phire wrote:
| I've read through the order again. I can't find anywhere
| where Alsup says the destruction was required.
|
| He cites three cases where a conversion from one format
| to another (without destruction of the previous version)
| was ruled to be fair use. Including scanning books with
| the google books case. (And referenced the Napster case,
| where a similar argument was rejected)
|
| Then made the following comparison.
|
| _" Here, every purchased print copy was copied in order
| to save storage space and to enable searchability as a
| digital copy. The print original was destroyed. One
| replaced the other. And, there is no evidence that the
| new, digital copy was shown, shared, or sold outside the
| company. This use was even more clearly transformative
| than those in Texaco, Google, and Sony Betamax (where the
| number of copies went up by at least one), and, of
| course, more transformative than those uses rejected in
| Napster (where the number went up by "millions" of copies
| shared for free with others)."_
|
| So it wasn't transformative because of the destruction.
| The destruction only made it "even more clearly
| transformative" than those other cases.
|
| Like, how can destruction be required if there were
| previous cases where it wasn't?
|
| The key legal point is not that Anthropic destroyed the
| books, but the key fact was that Anthropic didn't
| distribute the scanned copies. Alsup keeps returning to
| this point:
|
| _" But what matters most is whether the format change
| exploits anything the Copyright Act reserves to the
| copyright owner. Anthropic already had purchased
| permanent library copies (print ones). It did not create
| new copies to share or sell outside"_
|
| _" But again, the replacement copy here was kept in the
| central library, not distributed"_
|
| The conclusion of that section doesn't even mention the
| destruction at all.
|
| arstechnica isn't exactly wrong, the quote also mentioned
| "and kept the digital files internally rather than
| distributing them". It just put way too much emphasis on
| the destruction, and not enough on the lack of
| distribution.
|
| The other thing that arstechnica are missing:
|
| Antropic didn't destroy the books because they thought it
| would strengthen their legal argument. They destroyed the
| because it's a lot cheaper and faster to scan books by
| ripping off their bindings and feeding the stacks of
| loose pages into a document scanner.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > So it wasn't transformative because of the destruction
|
| I mean, the parts of "in order to save storage space" and
| "The print original was destroyed. One replaced the
| other." again makes it clear (to me at least) that the
| destruction is pretty much what sticks out here that
| makes it "more transformative" (whatever that means) than
| the previous cited cases.
|
| But yeah, agree that also "didn't distribute the scanned
| copies" seems to have mattered a great deal, as well as
| the destruction part.
| economistbob wrote:
| Yet countless families, including old folks were ruined
| during untold numbers of RIAA suits because "converting
| to save space" is not a permissable use.
|
| They used to go around destroying lives by the thousands
| after Napster was creating because of the invalidity of
| that argument.
|
| It is a crime to make a CD of your MP3s and vice versa,
| and you cannot convert your VHS to DVD.
|
| A billionaire does it at scale, well then saving space
| via format conversion is a grand, while the peons still
| can see their lives destroyed but with it hidden via the
| CCB secret panel. Two tier American Justice on full
| display. Bankrupty and seizure or worse for thee and
| billions for he. Format conversion legalized only for
| oligarchs, and of course, no appeal so it will only be a
| binding precedent on that one rich guy and nobody else.
| Tribe on both sides, keeping special rights for
| themselves that are illegal for everybody else.
| phire wrote:
| I'm not aware of any cases where the RIAA sued people who
| ripped their own CD/DVDs/VHS for personal use.
|
| Their MO was suing owners of internet connections which
| were seen sharing content on file sharing networks.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Why is scanning a book transformative(a la Google) but
| reading data off a CD and putting into a digital format
| not?
|
| How is streaming bits of the music from your computer not
| transformative?
| rpdillon wrote:
| This is not backed up by any evidence. Ripping CDs was
| never illegal. The DMCA made the circumvention of an
| effective copyright protection mechanism illegal, which
| made ripping DVDs and Blu-rays a crime. But that's
| separate from copyright itself. The RIAA sued Napster
| users not because they were converting files, but because
| they were obtaining them from others without a license.
| economistbob wrote:
| There is a lot of evidence. I lived through it. Every
| family with children and an internet connection or MP3
| player was terrified of getting ruined suddenly via a
| letter. It was in the news every day about some other
| grandpa or single mother losing their house.
|
| Ripping CDs was long illegal. Perhaps the Librarian of
| Congress made an exception. Now they hid everything
| behind a CCB that is like Arbitration so we will never
| know because they have hid almost aspects of societal
| justice about copyright and business labor behind
| arbitration style secrecy. The most useful courts are
| secret and now people believe there are no proceedings
| and they do not understand how much of our society was
| litigated and debated before.
|
| Here is an article from 2008 Specifically explaining that
| ripping a CD to format convert for personal use is
| illegal and the RIAA and Sony BMG saying it merited suit
| but they had bigger fish to fry.
|
| 1. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/17814972
|
| Mr. FISHER: That's right. So then, you have to ask
| yourself, _why is the industry continuing to cling to
| that notion that there is no such legal right?_ (1)
|
| "Bigger fish to fry" is not the same as "legal".
|
| People selling software to easily convert VHS to hard
| drive were also punished. For decades they were very
| clear that format shifting was outlawed. But now that it
| supports centralizing power and creating a permanent
| class of info-priests to rule the society, they allow it
| for them.
|
| Frankly, making all the justice system secret is why the
| media had to turn to personality cult nonsense for most
| reporting. All the great stories of the past were
| informed via the justice system activities. Since all the
| court stuff is secret now, all they had to talk about was
| Donald Trump.
|
| "Discovery" provided the bulk of news facts before they
| secreted away all the justice system proceedings for
| liability, labor, negligence, medical care, copyright.
|
| It used to be possible to know stuff about America and
| there was "evidence" all over the place. Now there is
| never any evidence for anything anywhere. That's Scalia's
| legacy thanks to Concepcion, absolutely gutting the
| ability of the society to use Hawthorne effects to
| discern legality and behavior.
|
| This country used to have evidence for everything, and
| now a lack of evidence is so common that it is a trope
| level popular refrain.
| rpdillon wrote:
| You're confused about what was actually illegal and what
| the industry wanted you to believe was illegal. They
| didn't want to take anybody to court for actually ripping
| a CD because they didn't want to lose and have the
| precedent set like it was in Sony versus Betamax. This
| isn't "bigger fish to fry". This is "terrified of the
| precedent".
|
| > The dispute arises from a suit the RIAA filed against a
| man in Arizona who bought CDs, copied them into his
| computer as MP3 files, and then put them into a shared
| folder that other people could access through Kazaa, a
| computer program for sharing music. He's being sued for
| that last part.
|
| Then they state what they wish were true:
|
| > But according to Marc Fisher, legal documents and some
| statements by industry officials make it clear that the
| industry regards the simple act of copying a CD onto your
| computer or your iPod as illegal.
|
| But just because they wished it to be did not make it so.
| Trillion-dollar companies have provided end-users with
| software to rip CDs (including iTunes), and there's never
| been a court case over it.
| jcelerier wrote:
| it was a crime to run your own unregistered taxi service
| in many places until uber came and the laws changed to
| adapt
| economistbob wrote:
| They did not change the laws. The rich tribe guy ignored
| them and they let him off just like the Anthropic guy.
| They did not change the laws. The old businesses just
| folded and the new ones via unlicensed independent
| contractors made cottage industries out of small scale
| fraud and tax evasion.
|
| How many Uber drivers can show their local business
| license for every town they pick people up in? How many
| have sales tax accounts for their state? Every uber
| driver without them should have been charged with the
| same crime as Al Capone.
|
| Now they are trying to control the knowledge, and the
| vehicle driving, etc. via AI.
|
| It is frankly a tribe takeover via mass criminal
| activity.
|
| He should have been charged with tax evasion for every
| pickup in a place where he lacked a business license, but
| the tribe would never allow it. Compliance is only for
| the other guys.
|
| Only the dumb local guy graduating high school trying to
| earn a living has to worry about legal compliance since
| the rich guys are too hard to prosecute.
|
| They did not change laws. They refuse to enforce them and
| we are being taken over by the reincarnated legion of Al
| Capone as a result.
| jcelerier wrote:
| > They did not change the laws.
|
| yes they did?
|
| in Quebec: https://www.ctvnews.ca/montreal/article/uber-
| is-officially-a...
|
| in France: loi Thevenoud and Grandguillaume (which were
| the follow up to negociations between the french gov' and
| uber), etc.
|
| other countries are the same around the same period, e.g.
| https://legislation.nsw.gov.au/view/html/inforce/current/
| act... etc etc
| rpdillon wrote:
| Nope, that's a little bit of sloppy writing on the part
| of Ars. I am not a lawyer, but I'll be happy to discuss
| the technicalities with anybody here. I'm fairly
| passionate about the technicalities of copyright.
| dd8601fn wrote:
| What does that mean to be "transformative", as a defense?
|
| I thought that was explicitly disallowed use... like
| turning someone else's book into an audiobook and selling
| streaming access to it.
|
| Or writing a film adaptation and selling the film.
|
| Clearly I was thinking about it all wrong. Those wouldn't
| be allowed, even if you legally aquire the book from a
| store or library.
| rpdillon wrote:
| You're mistaken.
|
| The transformativeness of the use is independent of the
| destruction of the books. The destruction of the books
| allowed them to argue that they had not duplicated them,
| and was instrumental in the argument supporting the
| legality of scanning them. But that's entirely upstream of
| the way the data was leveraged, which is what is critical
| in the argument about the use being transformative.
| lp4v4n wrote:
| It's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, right?
|
| It seems to be the modus operandi of corporations in general:
| they commit any kind of infringement they want and then later
| they go for a settlement with a value that's, of course, not
| too big for a company too big to fail.
|
| In the meantime, the average person or company gets shafted.
|
| In my opinion, we are one step away from AI companies
| capturing the entirety of copyright legislation.
| baranul wrote:
| You do indeed appear to have a valid point. Many "chosen"
| companies, like Uber for example, appear to have broken
| numerous laws. Legal action against many such companies
| comes suspiciously slowly, where they have already obtained
| massive profits and value, before the possibility of being
| shut down comes. Then, when they are finally pulled into
| court, they have all kinds of money for the best lawyers
| and have already paid the right politicians (and others).
|
| When the legal judgements for wrongdoing are finally handed
| out, they often come across as just an inconvenience or
| kind of tax, which is easily handled in comparison to the
| profits they've already made. Yet, if average Joe or
| persons not considered as being of "the right type" were to
| do such actions, they quickly get the full book thrown at
| them. Often, the full measure of legal punishment, where
| their company and life is or about nearly over.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Paying this sort of fee in the first place is itself
| regulatory capture because only the big companies will be
| able to pay it. If they can pirate to make an LLM then so
| should us commoners be able to too.
| smolder wrote:
| As far as I'm concerned, the courts are wrong, and training
| on ill gotten copyrighted material is not fair use. Given the
| clear value of highly trained LLMs, the investment they have
| taken on, and the amount of disruption to the existing
| economy they stand to make, in a just world, the people who
| created the training data deserve some level of compensation.
| I think, in the US, they are very afraid of falling behind
| China, who doesn't give a shit about intellectual property,
| but that doesn't mean we aren't crossing an ethical boundary,
| acting like them.
| davidguetta wrote:
| copyright is bullshit
| aetherspawn wrote:
| Copyright is what stops someone from copy+pasting a book
| that took years to write, then selling it $1 cheaper than
| the original author on Amazon or whatever and making a
| margin 1 million percent higher than the original author.
|
| Imagine a society without copyright... only physically
| intensive jobs could make money because everything else
| would be pirated, ripped-off or free. Thus, only those
| who are financially independent could afford to publish.
| Because the world _really_ needs more rich class
| propaganda...
| smolder wrote:
| Right, it's about incentivising intellectual work. While
| I have big issues with the copyright system, like all the
| extensions lobbied for by Disney and friends, it did
| enable a lot of good work to happen.
| skinfaxi wrote:
| > it did enable a lot of good work to happen.
|
| How do we know that when we don't have a copy of the
| world without this regime? How much more and greater
| works could have been produced without such a repressive
| system?
|
| A really successful work becomes part of the culture, and
| remixing, derivatives and other modes of integrating
| cultural artifacts are prohibited. Why should we allow
| corporations to own our culture?
| andsoitis wrote:
| You're arguing that freely remixing original work will
| give rise to greatness that's even better than original
| work?
| skinfaxi wrote:
| Isn't most creative work synthesis rather than unique
| whole-cloth creation? Look at what happens with software
| when it is open sourced and allowed to be remixed freely.
| Are we better or worse off because of it?
| andsoitis wrote:
| There's nothing that prevents people from remixing things
| that are not copyrighted and create something amazing
| that others are interested in or of cultural value.
|
| With open source, I should note, its remixing is in fact
| governed by copyright.
| ck2 wrote:
| I think the idea is if "AI" can solve math proofs that
| humans haven't for a century then if "AI" freestyles
| stolen art and literature then it might create something
| as good if not better because of resources and processing
| power
|
| There might be something to that logic but art and
| literature doesn't obey rules like math and copyright
| exists to protect creators
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Yes? I don't understand how this is even a question, this
| is exactly how it worked throughout human history.
| andsoitis wrote:
| In what way is copyright preventing it today?
| smolder wrote:
| Yeah, I can't AB test against a world without copyright
| at all, but I think there's sufficient evidence to
| believe that a lot of stuff would never have gotten done
| without copyright to ensure it could be done gainfully.
|
| The importance of striking a balance between
| incentivising creation and enriching culture was why the
| original copyright term was dramatically shorter. The
| modern term of owners life + 80 years or whatever it is,
| is clearly ridiculous. 20 years before entering public
| domain seems pretty reasonable.
|
| There's unfortunately also some pressure against people
| using legitimate public domain works. E.g. youtubers
| getting copyright strikes for playing public domain music
| because it's too similar to a specific copyrighted
| recording.
| deaton wrote:
| Go read a few fanfics and tell me you still think that
| theres added value.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Quite rich coming from a creator apparently, only certain
| creations are deemed worthy by you, seems like it
| invalidates your entire stance on the sanctity of art
| that all these pro-copyright people seem to hold.
| Morromist wrote:
| That's oversimplifying things.
|
| Copyright doesn't actually stop me from pirating a book
| or an mp3 right now. Heck, I'll just download a book
| right now. Bam. Done. Some things are so difficult to
| keep from being pirated, such a photographs, that saying
| the copyright system protects photographers strikes me as
| a bit silly. It does protect some commercial
| photographers if a magazine wants to sell their photo
| sometimes, but that's a very very small slice of all the
| photos in copyright that are being shared online right
| now.
|
| Also there are other systems that might protect an
| author's financials. Off the top of my head I imagine you
| could do a netflix model where every citizen pays some
| taxes to consume intellectual property like a utility.
| Then the goverment finds a way to measure what is being
| consumed and gives each author a share based on the rate
| of consumption. In fact the "intellegence is a ultility"
| ramblings of Sam Altmen sort-of point in this direction.
| But that's just one idea thought up early in the morning
| when its too hot to sleep properly. I'm sure there are
| many others.
| Jensson wrote:
| > It does protect some commercial photographers if a
| magazine wants to sell their photo sometimes, but that's
| a very very small slice of all the photos in copyright
| that are being shared online right now.
|
| That is a very small slice thanks to copyrights. Without
| copyrights then corporations stealing from the small guy
| like this would be the majority of it.
| skinfaxi wrote:
| > Thus, only those who are financially independent could
| afford to publish. Because the world really needs more
| rich class propaganda...
|
| Yes, all the rich class propaganda being pushed by open
| source developers working on software in their free time.
| Lerc wrote:
| How many times were hugely popular books rejected before
| a publisher decided they were worthy?
|
| Copyright far more protects the wealthy than the good.
| They don't need to sell your book, they just need to own
| the book that people are buying right now. Giving your
| book a chance to sell would dectract from those sales.
|
| If there were no copyright anyone trying to sell the book
| $1 cheaper would be undercut by someone selling $1
| cheaper them them, and so on. The financial incentive to
| do that goes away. People then choose to distribute based
| on different incentives, like the fact that they have
| seen something worthy that others should see. We have
| almost completely lost that today because the financial
| incentive doesn't care what it is as long as you buy it.
| That might lead to a world dominated by an optimisation
| for whatever it takes to get you engaged, or worse,
| addicted. That world might really suck.
|
| There needs to be a way to support the creation of art.
| Copyright lets a few corporations decide the subset of
| available art is seen enough and available to pay for (in
| the hope that maybe some of the patment gets to the
| creator). It is not a system that works in the modern
| world.
| freejazz wrote:
| Well, there is nothing to distribute if the author is not
| incentivized to write... which you seemed to skip past.
| Lerc wrote:
| Indeed, perhaps I should have said
|
| There needs to be a way to support the creation of art.
| deaton wrote:
| Great, that way is called copyright. The author has the
| _right_ to control who has the rights to distribute their
| work, and can require compensation in exchange for that
| right; what economists refer to as "selling".
| satvikpendem wrote:
| People have been paid artists before copyright even
| existed, what some might call patronage.
| freejazz wrote:
| And?
| freejazz wrote:
| >There needs to be a way to support the creation of art.
|
| Yeah, it's called "copyright."
| joquarky wrote:
| If money is the only incentive, then it's not a product
| of artistic work.
|
| Also current copyright laws only exists to fulfill the
| constitutional mandate to promote the progress of science
| and useful arts. There are a lot of alternative ways to
| fulfill that mandate that don't include a lot of the
| baggage we have presently in copyright law which is now
| slowing down progress.
| freejazz wrote:
| >If money is the only incentive, then it's not a product
| of artistic work.
|
| This is just bullshit and no one said it's the only
| incentive.
|
| > There are a lot of alternative ways to fulfill that
| mandate that don't include a lot of the baggage we have
| presently in copyright law which is now slowing down
| progress.
|
| such as??
| WarmWash wrote:
| I can't tell if this comment is satire or not.
|
| You're speaking to the generation of pirates. What?
| Suddenly everyone is hanging up their high seas hat to
| capture the virtue signals of current sentiment?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| It's funny because copyright only benefits the rich now.
| Record labels hold all the copyright to songs, same with
| publishers for books, Disney made sure it lasts over a
| hundred years. The days of copyright being held by
| individuals in any real sense is long gone.
| klabb3 wrote:
| This reminds me of this argument with
| libertarians/ancaps:
|
| A: rich people pay less % in taxes than wage workers, we
| should close the loopholes
|
| B: but taxes are immoral to begin with
|
| A: ok, but can we do something now about the unequal
| enforcement? Unrealized gains, tax havens, trusts, fake
| charities, etc?
|
| B: well a society based on property rights... ackhully
| you should read this book by Mises/Rothbard/Rand
| economistbob wrote:
| Never really understood how libertarians expect to have
| someone making guns for their fiefdoms when there is no
| one to enforce property rights for said gun elements and
| manufactories.
| oblio wrote:
| Libertarianism is not a philosophy. It's selfishness
| taken to extremes and trying to find ways to justify it
| at a societal level. The only reason we're the top
| species is because we're ultra social and have culture,
| which is inherently a social trait (don't eat those red
| berries, they're poisonous). Libertarianism want all the
| benefits of working together with no actual thought into
| how that working together happens in real life, including
| punishment for bad behavior.
| Jensson wrote:
| Yeah its wrong in very very similar ways to communism.
| economistbob wrote:
| What very very similar ways would that be?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I guess they presume it requires on the good will of
| everyone to live peacefully without violating (non-
| existent) property laws over, say, robbing you in your
| sleep.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I would be fine with abandoning copyright ... If it is
| done for everyone equally, and not just tech giants and
| VC money businesses get a free pass, while everyone else
| still has to follow the copyright laws. Lets go ahead and
| usher in an age of free information and experiencing all
| forms of human expression for everyone. But lets also
| come up with a way, to compensate our creative minds and
| our educators and artists. How about that UBI? We stand
| much to gain as humanity.
| reactordev wrote:
| This. Copyright is a flawed system. There can be
| alternatives that allow more than 1 player to play and
| not create monopolies.
|
| For example. I invent a new method of power washing. I
| start a power washing business using new tech. I file the
| tech for patent and copyright-equivalent use. This is
| then made available to other power wash companies that
| wish to use the tech and be certified in it so long as a
| small portion of their revenue goes back to the inventor
| for a set amount per volume, or something similar of a
| metric that has a cutoff after a point.
|
| This will breed new industries, create new jobs,
| introduce new innovations, and allow the markets to move
| on from being strangled by one giant corporation.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Isn't that just...patent licensing? But I agree that it
| should be a forced outcome so everyone can use it rather
| than waiting a ridiculous 20 years.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| In that case AI should just be open source/weight. I don't
| agree with copyright in general but I see where you're
| coming from.
| 7952 wrote:
| I think this posture is hugely beneficial to China if they
| can commoditise the hardware.
| roysting wrote:
| So will you owe life long compensation for all the
| knowledge you got from books too? How about all the pirated
| books, music, movies, etc you consumed? When will you set
| up a life long payment plan to corporations that own these
| rights, because I have a bridge to sell you if you think
| any of this settlement will go to any of the people who
| created anything.
|
| I'm guessing you have some kind of imagined idea of some
| small author being compensated handsomely for his book and
| all future earnings that could have come from it. Reality
| though is that between the attorneys that will run away
| with some high triple digit millions and the corporations
| that own the rights to the subject works, there will be
| measly "checks" for any actual person that created
| anything, i.e., an artist or author.
|
| In an odd way, this whole case is really just "capitalism"
| cannibalizing itself, i.e., publishers greedily and also in
| a terrified manner trying to steal away as much capital
| from the technological shift to AI as possible in order to
| either create a buffer or fund their transformation to
| adapt to what AI means to the very nature of writing
| itself, let alone publishing.
|
| I suspect human writing could survive, but I don't see any
| room for publishers.
| skinfaxi wrote:
| > So will you owe life long compensation for all the
| knowledge you got from books too?
|
| No because we are people and the laws differ for people,
| corporations, and machines.
| insanitybit wrote:
| I think people forget that laws are perfectly capable of
| carving out exceptions, leaving purposeful ambiguity,
| expressing intent, etc. Yes, humans can have special
| rules, and very obviously should since laws exist to
| improve human lives.
| freejazz wrote:
| > So will you owe life long compensation for all the
| knowledge you got from books too?
|
| You're just falling into the trap of anthropomorphizing
| the phrase "training" in the context of LLMs, which is
| not the same things as what humans do. There is no
| evidence they are the same thing and there is nothing to
| support the notion that what an LLM does when it "trains"
| on a book is equivalent to a human reading it.
| flir wrote:
| Whatever "training" is, if you can't persuade the machine
| to spit substantially the same text back out verbatim,
| it's clearly not something that falls under _copy_ right
| law either, because there's no copy.
|
| Yes, for some texts that's possible. But for the vast
| majority, it is not.
| tarnith wrote:
| Can you cite any information on this not being possible
| for the vast majority?
|
| Or is it simply that the correct prompt hasn't been
| written for all possible cases?
|
| I also fail to see the difference if logic/harnessing is
| added around a vector database that can output the
| complete corpus, but simply is instructed not to.
|
| It very clearly is still compressing the information into
| the vector weights, and then recovering that information,
| thus the information is encoded.
|
| Why is a vector database somehow completely different
| from maintaining a library of the text itself?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Information entropy. The amount of data an LLM ingests
| cannot be compressed to the size of the weights even at
| maximum theoretical compression.
| insanitybit wrote:
| Is that relevant? I can use a lossy compression algorithm
| such that the original could never be recovered from the
| image I've produced, but that derived image would surely
| be under copyright.
|
| LLMs are obviously capable of producing "exact" phrases
| as well. Ask it to give you famous quotes, it can do it.
| Ask it to read a paper for you and cite it, it can do it.
| flir wrote:
| > but that derived image would surely be under copyright.
|
| I wouldn't bet on that.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_Soup_Cans
| insanitybit wrote:
| I don't know that this really challenges anything
| relating to compression.
| consensus1 wrote:
| You are asking to prove a negative. But even assuming
| that the model is capable of returning every bit of its
| training data verbatim (a mathematical impossibility)
| that would not be enough as mere capability is
| insufficient here. If capability alone were the standard
| any library that also has a photocopier / scanner would
| be in violation.
|
| To prove distribution of copyrighted materials it would
| have to be practical and actually used in the wild by
| people to circumvent copyright and generate copies of
| those works. Again, I can't prove a negative, but that
| isn't the standard, and nobody has shown a practical
| exploit here.
| flir wrote:
| There was a paper a while back where (from memory) they
| managed to coax 75% of the original text of some
| internet-popular books out of an LLM. Harry Potter, 1984,
| etc. That's why I said it was possible for some texts.
|
| My assumption is that multiple copies in the training
| data "wear a deeper groove". I believe those are
| infringing, and should be dealt with on a case-by-case
| basis. But the vast majority of text doesn't wear that
| groove.
|
| (Edit: Think it was this one
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671)
| flir wrote:
| Nah, I can't prove a negative. But Common Crawl is 12
| petabytes and is not the largest part of what these
| models get trained on. DeepSeek v4 Pro is, what, 865GB?
|
| That's one hell of a compression ratio, if it can do what
| you claim.
| ripe wrote:
| > spitting out verbatim text
|
| The New York Times lawsuit is resting on the point that
| large chunks of undigested articles can be vomited out.
| OpenAI tried to have the lawsuit thrown out but the
| courts permitted it to continue.
|
| The Times... alleged that OpenAI's ChatGPT and
| Microsoft's Copilot had produced near-verbatim replicas
| of copyrighted articles, that the chatbots generated
| hallucinated content falsely attributed to the Times, ...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_v._Micro
| sof...
| nomel wrote:
| > spitting out verbatim text
|
| > had produced near-verbatim replicas
| flir wrote:
| Don't get too hung up on the preciseness of the copy -
| the courts won't. I doubt that spitting out an existing
| article with a few adjectives changed would be considered
| transformative.
| flir wrote:
| It's possible. Would be interesting to see their
| evidence, and to know whether they can reproduce it for
| arbitrary articles, not just ones that have been
| endlessly republished on the net.
| freejazz wrote:
| > if you can't persuade the machine to spit substantially
| the same text back out verbatim
|
| That's exactly what they've done in a number of the
| lawsuits, so I'm not sure why you think that hasn't
| occurred.
| cowboylowrez wrote:
| This reliably inevitable rationalization comes up in
| every thread it seems, and its ultimate goal is to
| humanize AI. This is what the big guys want us peons to
| believe and it works so well, I have even been lectured
| by an AI for being rude, the implication was that I was
| logged in and it would be a shame if anything happened to
| my account.
|
| Quit trying to make AIs human, people who are trying to
| make AI human keep forgetting that humanized AI's have
| only the morals relevant to their mission, there is no
| profit in humanizing AI's because if we continue on this
| track of humanizing AI's, we being stupid humans will
| grant them civil rights expecting these new AI's with
| rights will somehow respect our rights and thats a
| fundamental misunderstanding of how AI'S actually work.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| > As far as I'm concerned, the courts are wrong, and
| training on ill gotten copyrighted material is not fair
| use.
|
| It's important to remember that a court's job is to apply
| law to a situation. When a court gets something wrong it's
| a misinterpretation of the law and will, by definition, be
| overturnable on appeal. I suspect that your objection isn't
| that the court is wrong, it's that the law is wrong.
| freejazz wrote:
| It's not a settled area of law and there is a SDNY judge
| that has a completely different application of the fair
| use analysis in the same exact context and came to a
| completely different conclusion (that it is not fair
| use).
| budsniffer952 wrote:
| What do you know, you can get someone to support any
| message or arguments you want.
|
| Lesson in there about experts and politics.
| consensus1 wrote:
| I would like to see a citation on that b/c I am unaware
| of it. The only case I see in SDNY is the NYT v OpenAI
| case which has not been ruled on yet.
| https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/copyright-
| law-20...
| freejazz wrote:
| Sorry, I'm thinking of _Kadrey_ , where the court
| rejected Anthropic's "training" argument and provided an
| explanation as to how author litigants should demonstrate
| market harm in order to succeed on a fair use analysis, a
| factor that Alsup did not effectively weigh.
| smolder wrote:
| Yes, ultimately the problem is that the law is vague or
| inadequate. The courts have their definitions of fair
| use, which are their best efforts at interpreting the
| law, and I have mine, which is different.
| themgt wrote:
| _William Roper: "So, now you give the Devil the benefit
| of law!"_
|
| _Sir Thomas More: "Yes! What would you do? Cut a great
| road through the law to get after the Devil?"_
|
| _William Roper: "Yes, I'd cut down every law in England
| to do that!"_
|
| _Sir Thomas More: "Oh? And when the last law was down,
| and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide,
| Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted
| thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not
| God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man
| to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in
| the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil
| benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"_
| tetha wrote:
| This is why the idea of being "Vogelfrei" or "lawless"
| was honestly a terrifying concept in the middle ages.
| They are neither bound by law, nor protected by law.
|
| A lawless man can be struck down with force without
| persecution by law, because they are lawless.
| WarmWash wrote:
| "I haven't loaded an advertisement in 20 years, I have 6TB
| of movies, 2TB of music, and seemingly endless file trees
| of mangas, all acquired for free over the years. Now having
| not said that, I beg you enforce copyright on these AI
| labs, so I can get a cut of their revenue for my years of
| writing well researched comments on the internet"
|
| The internet, in true internet fashion, still has the
| general logic level of a 15 year old.
| thayne wrote:
| IMO, using copyrighted works to train models should only be
| "fair use", if the models are then released as (at least)
| open weight, so that the public can benefit from it.
| (Although as noted by a sibling, this would require a law
| change, not action by the court).
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| I'm not sure if that's enough but it would be a great
| start.
| inlined wrote:
| Adobe's ereaders had a disclaimer that their books cannot
| be read aloud. There's clearly precedent that this sort of
| transformation was disallowed by publishers at the time.
| Interestingly, at least the audiobook of the latest dungeon
| crawler Carl has a disclaimer that it can't be used to
| train AI
| satvikpendem wrote:
| That's a good ruling, because otherwise only the big
| companies can afford to pay for enough content to make an LLM
| (say goodbye to open weight or research LLMs). Having a fee
| like this is actually a form of regulatory capture.
| cataphract wrote:
| > But if I'm reading the ruling correctly, Anthropic might
| have been fine even with feeding pirated books into their LLM
| (as long as they planned to eventually deleted them
| afterwards)
|
| The court says otherwise.
|
| > Such piracy of otherwise available copies is inherently,
| irredeemably infringing even if the pirated copies are
| immediately used for the transformative use and immediately
| discarded.
|
| Then it says it doesn't need to decide on that basis because
| they kept it not just for training LLMs, but also for
| building a central library. Which seems a bit ridiculous,
| because the sole purpose of the central library is to train
| LLMs.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Who would have thought, that this is the way, which we take
| to arrive at the burning books stage again? They neatly line
| up with historical perpetrators in that regard.
| freejazz wrote:
| >But if I'm reading the ruling correctly, Anthropic might
| have been fine even with feeding pirated books into their LLM
| (as long as they planned to eventually deleted them
| afterwards)
|
| You're not. Even if training is fair use, it doesn't mean you
| can steal copies to train the model. It just means the
| training itself isn't an infringement (in Alsup's opinion).
| Stealing the copies of the books _was_ an infringement and
| that 's exactly the liability that Anthropic settled.
| xuhu wrote:
| Hey I just came up with this idea, I'm going to feed
| copyrighted books into my LLM that remembers them verbatim,
| and then people pay me to ask the LLM for complete copies of
| a book.
|
| Wait, no, not verbatim. It _transforms_ upper case into lower
| case and vice versa.
| one33seven wrote:
| If it is based on all our data, we should all own it and
| democratically chose what is done with it or profits it
| generates
| Zambyte wrote:
| The correct way to legislate this is to abolish copyright. It
| is strictly a negative force. Nobody makes art because of
| copyright, only in spite of it.
| inigyou wrote:
| Commercial enterprises make _content_ , like Marvel movies
| and Netflix series, because of copyright.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Commercial enterprises stand on the shoulders of lax
| copyright laws. For example, foundational Disney works
| would have been illegal for them to make under the
| copyright laws they have since purchased.
|
| https://drewdevault.com/blog/Alice-in-Wonderland/
|
| Copyright is a textbook ladder pull.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| What copyright law helps them? They have the least to worry
| about copyright as even if someone copies the movie script
| or something it's not like their views will be gone because
| of that.
|
| I am not against trademark. e.g. Disney has a right on who
| can sell Mickey Mouse figurine, or Marvel has right over
| Iron man character and franchise.
| ivell wrote:
| People make art to also get recognized for that art.
| Otherwise they would keep that art secret at home.
|
| Without copyright, anyone can copy the art and call it their
| own. What is then the incentive for the creator to share the
| art, if there is neither monetory gain and nor fame. And
| worse than them being recognized, they might even get accused
| of copying their own art if someone else became famous due to
| a copy.
|
| Society would miss out a lot.
| Zambyte wrote:
| There are lots of famous artists that are older than
| copyright.
|
| > And worse than them being recognized, they might even get
| accused of copying their own art if someone else became
| famous due to a copy.
|
| You mean like right now? Here is A24 claiming copyright for
| Backrooms related media that came out before their
| Backrooms related film:
| https://kotaku.com/backrooms-a24-copyright-strikes-kane-
| pars...
|
| Being "accused" of copying literally does not matter if
| copyright didn't exist. This framing is only an issue under
| copyright.
|
| > Society would miss out a lot.
|
| Society actively misses out a lot. We could have had tons
| of derivative art that has been buried for the sake of
| propping up companies. We could have had Aaron Swartz.
| Abolish copyright.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _There are lots of famous artists that are older than
| copyright._
|
| There are lots of famous artists that made art before
| color image capture and reproduction (1930s-60s) and
| digital image capture and reproduction (90s-00s).
|
| Copyrightless artist fame and economic viability is
| enabled by a lack of widely-accessible, cheap
| reproductive methods.
|
| > _You mean like right now? Here is A24 claiming
| copyright for Backrooms related media..._
|
| Since resolved: https://kotaku.com/backrooms-director-
| kane-parsons-a24-copyr...
|
| Turns out when you outsource copyright policing to
| minimum wage folks, ambiguity goes out the window.
|
| > _Society actively misses out a lot. We could have had
| tons of derivative art that has been buried for the sake
| of propping up companies. We could have had Aaron Swartz.
| Abolish copyright._
|
| The problem with absolutist arguments is that they ignore
| inconvenient facts.
|
| At a time when creative and art economics is under siege,
| how would copyrightless art make enough money for the
| creators?
|
| The fact of the acquisition of large swaths of copyright
| rights by large corporations does not negate the fact
| that artists need food (and ideally, a place to live and
| a way to provide for their family).
|
| There are positions that might enable that (Hey, what if
| we banned the assignment of copyright to corporations?
| Human only? Original creator only?), but none of them are
| stripping all rights from intellectual property.
| newsclues wrote:
| What if copyrights are shorter, but vigorously defended
| (other than fair use provisions)?
|
| Can we use the modern tech (AI) to policy copyright
| infringement, to liberate the culture and business?
| Zambyte wrote:
| The shorter the copyright the better. Zero is the best.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI
| regurgitates existing ideas
|
| This does not do enough to fix the root problem.
|
| People who live right now, who happen to have written or
| produced anything that AI works with, build on the back of
| humanities combined knowledge, will become outsized
| beneficiaries of AI, with the AI wave offering new ways of
| monetizing their work - while everyone who has not, won't be.
|
| It's simply not good enough. We have to make sure people
| broadly benefit first and foremost.
| crest wrote:
| It's easy to beat up on OpenAI and Anthropic, because they have
| lots of money and knowingly broke the law, but writing the book
| was onetime work too. Do we really want to turn everything into
| recurring revenue stream to skim of? How would that even work
| for an open weights model? Would you say the same about a human
| educating themselves from a book? The answer has to be more
| than pearl clutching for poor starving little authors (and the
| not so poor class action lawyers).
| nobleach wrote:
| I agree. If I pirate a book and share it on the web, and I get
| busted for doing so, and subsequently pay a fine, I don't get
| to KEEP sharing it on the web.
|
| Now, if I license the book, I might be able to come to an
| agreement with the author/publisher whereby I can share some of
| it.
| drngdds wrote:
| The post specifically proposes royalties for ideas from
| books, not royalties for the books themselves. You would
| absolutely still be able to share ideas you learned from the
| books you pirated in that situation. It'd be insanely
| draconian if you couldn't.
|
| (Then again, US copyright law often is insanely draconian.)
| andsoitis wrote:
| > royalty payment based on if the AI regurgitates existing
| ideas
|
| That doesn't make sense. You cannot copyright an idea, only the
| specific expression of the idea.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| _There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI
| regurgitates existing ideas._
|
| We're trying to own ideas now?
| freejazz wrote:
| > There needs to be a royalty payment based on if the AI
| regurgitates existing ideas.
|
| The settlement does not pertain to any outputs
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I'd rather see AI studios do the same as the film industry, pay
| a one-time up front cost per major model (or major.minor?)
| depending on how they contract it out. This also allows smaller
| startups to license books for less than a larger frontier
| studio would. In theory and hopefully, the pricing would not be
| too insane per book, you want them to rent more books and spend
| more, not go back to pirating right?
| efficax wrote:
| how would you do that? you can copyright words, but you can't
| copyright an idea (you can patent some ideas, but not all of
| them)
| doitright99 wrote:
| If a person did this, this person would go to jail. If a company
| does it? Small fine and the green light to cannibalize more
| content. Funny how that works.
| cataphract wrote:
| It's not a small fine. It's much more than what each title
| could be bought for in the market.
| octocop wrote:
| Roko's basilisk might be at work here
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| I do recall that a "famous redditor" was driven to suicide for
| making works available and he wasn't even making money for it.
| archerx wrote:
| He wasn't just some famous redditor. Aaron Swartz helped create
| Reddit and invented RSS.
|
| If I put my conspiracy theory hat one and I always get piled on
| for this theory in other online communities but I think it
| could be possible. The theory is I think Aaron found some very
| dark stuff while exploring the MIT private networks, things
| that he was not supposed to see and could be very damaging to a
| lot people if they were exposed. The infamous Jeffery Epstein
| was donating a lot of money to MIT and its Media Labs. I think
| there is a much deeper story at play that the mainstream
| narrative is hiding with a "suicide".
| kimjune01 wrote:
| understatement is a kind of humor, when he said 'redditor'
| nylonstrung wrote:
| If he found fucked up stuff regarding crimes way worse than
| his on university networks don't you think he could have
| gotten out of the sentencing entirely by cooperating against
| them
|
| Epstein was relatively restrained even in his personal email,
| I doubt he was using MIT administrated systems to facilitate
| a pedo ring
| vagrantJin wrote:
| It's not that simple. If he did find dark stuff, and he got
| caught - he will have both the state murderers and the
| filth on his case. That's the best case scenario assuming
| the state isn't on the side of the filth by which case he
| was cooked no matter what he did. Filth does not even have
| come after you. They can just send you a family portrait
| and you'd know the hole is deep and only one way out.
| avesi wrote:
| Have you seen how the legal system is protecting everyone
| associated with those crimes, despite how high profile they
| are?
| inigyou wrote:
| Aaron Swartz founded Reddit in the same way that Elon Musk
| founded Tesla, but without the money.
| archerx wrote:
| Right with his tech skills instead of money.
| inigyou wrote:
| No, he was added later to an already existing project and
| claimed credit for it.
| archerx wrote:
| Ok Spez
| ChrisRR wrote:
| No Aaron joined reddit through a merger of the company he
| co-founded, where he was a developer. Musk just threw money
| at it
| Quothling wrote:
| I'm not from the USA so my views are obviously biased by
| this. I very much doubt Epstein committed suicide, and it's
| been wild to watch you guys deal with it, not releasing the
| files, holding nobody accountable and so on. That being said,
| I also don't think there needs to be a big dark secret to
| explain why someone caught in the USA justice system would
| commit suicide.
|
| It's crazy that you could face 35 years in jail for trying to
| free knowledge in a harmless manner. The longest anyone has
| been imprisoned for in my country in modern times is 26
| years, 11 months and 6 days. We have a few people posed to
| break that record. Peter Lundin has been in prison for 25ish
| years, and him and Peter Madsen (the discount elon musk
| turned murderer who killed some poor journalist in is
| selfmade submarine) are contenders to people who will
| probably go beyond 35 years.
|
| Not that our system is perfect. I think we're far too lenient
| on some crimes, but risking 35 years in jail for downloading
| and sharing academic knowledge... That's objectively evil.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| That's the joke, why do you think they put it in quotes?
| phailhaus wrote:
| Your theory is that he found "very dark stuff" that is
| accessible to any MIT student? Schwartz didn't "hack"
| anything, he connected to their student network and
| downloaded articles that they had access to but the public
| didn't.
| gabriel666smith wrote:
| I work as an author. I believe this is total bullshit, from
| beginning to end - the ruling, the settlement, and the suit
| itself.
|
| In the UK, we have a thing called the Public Lending Right [1].
| This pays authors a fixed sum each time their book is taken out
| of a library, up to a capped amount.
|
| The cap isn't very high - about $7k - so it is both an _OK_ bit
| of income for authors who might be making very little money
| elsewhere, and also doesn 't end up all going to authors who are
| already bestsellers. It's a decent legal system for helping
| libraries hold niche titles as well as the popular ones. This is,
| after all, the purpose of a library.
|
| To establish my bias here: My debut novel came out after the
| period this specific suit concerns. I also uploaded it to LibGen
| myself.
|
| I strongly believe that books should be available to read, free
| of charge, to all people. I benefited enormously from libraries
| and piracy growing up. I think they serve an important
| educational purpose that does not end when a person leaves
| school, and I do not think wealth or disposable income is a fair
| way to decide the breadth of a person's education.
|
| I also have no problem with people making new "language things"
| using my work. I love sample-based music (like dance music, hip
| hop, etc) and it'd be hypocritical for me to take issue with
| anyone doing analogous things using books. Maximising sales is
| not the end-goal of making art, for me personally. Other artists
| feel otherwise. They consider training on pirated books stealing.
| That's OK - it's not for me to tell them what to believe.
|
| The problem for me is that these corporations - undoubtedly still
| pretraining on pirated material - are, essentially, leeching. By
| not releasing the model as open-weight, freely available, they
| are not acting in the same spirit of the system they took
| advantage of. It's the Spotify model: pirate first, pay a nominal
| amount that does not meaningfully harm profit later. Now the dust
| has settled there, we can see the harm it has done to music
| culture.
|
| A single settlement which does not establish precedent does not
| solve anything. A tokenistic $3k allows anti-AI authors to wave a
| cheque in the air and declare a victory. It pays the rent for a
| month or two. It does nothing for the months after that, when the
| corporation is still profiting. It does nothing to establish
| precedent for future artists, who also have to pay rent.
|
| It would be (non-trivial, but) relatively simple to integrate -
| for example - download figures from Anna's Archive into the PLR.
| I'd happily dilute my PLR payment appropriately, because I think
| libraries are important.
|
| You can't stop people pirating digitally replicable things.
| Digital ownership is not a concept that has held, or will hold.
|
| There are only 23,000 authors in the UK who claim the cash from
| the PLR. To pay all those authors the national living wage in the
| UK (PS26k) from the PLR, you would need to raise PS546 million.
| That is around 1/34 of Anthropic's reported annual revenue.
|
| I'm of course not arguing Anthropic should be solely responsible.
| But it's very frustrating that all the pieces of the puzzle for
| actually paying artists in a sustainable and ongoing way now
| exist, and one of the major obstacles to this - and the idea of a
| genuinely free, legal, international library, which creates more
| authors, writing better books, full-time - are legacy rights
| holders who remain attached to a completely dysfunctional and
| outdated concept of ownership.
|
| So - unless part of a sustained and reasonable campaign, which
| understands the futility of (and damage to the medium and its
| creators caused by) treating digital ownership in the same way as
| physical ownership - this suit is close to pointless, and
| arguably actively harmful in the long term.
|
| [1] https://www.bl.uk/services/plr
| shevy-java wrote:
| One thing I always wondered ...
|
| There used to be libgen. Then it went down. It went semi-back up
| but ... it is still kind of down.
|
| Those issues kind of coincided with the big greedy mega-
| corporations leeching off data en masse; Anthropic was not the
| only one, Facebook is another example here. I always wondered
| whether the decline in quality, fewer liberated books published,
| coincided with what the big corporations were doing. Would be
| great to be able to see any underlying strategy here. Imagine
| Anthropic, just as a scenario, leeching off of everyone else, and
| then also sending in their lawyers to try to close down what they
| leeched off here. I mean the rise of bots kind of coincides with
| the rise of AI. So why not them also trying to make it harder for
| the rest of the world to access liberated books.
| sschueller wrote:
| Where is my check for my 20 years of contributing to reddit?
| petterroea wrote:
| Settlement would mean it doesn't become legal precedence, right?
|
| This outcome seems to be the best possible for Anthropic. Over
| 100B$ have been invested in AI so far, venture capital can afford
| to pay a few billions per big company as a South Park style
| "Sorry".
|
| Or am I missing something?
| papercrane wrote:
| > Settlement would mean it doesn't become legal precedence,
| right?
|
| The summary judgment ruling from 2025 in this case will still
| be legal precedence, the settlement will mean that there is no
| trial for damages.
|
| However, since this is a district court ruling it is non-
| binding on other courts.
| spectre23 wrote:
| $3000/book for effectively pirating a book is shamefully low.
| visarga wrote:
| What do you mean pirating? They don't even distribute the
| originals, LLMs are not for replication, we already have
| copying and internet for that.
|
| Why would we use a multi-billion parameter model to copy text?
| If we wanted the originals it would be easier to find them
| free, pirate or pay, if we use LLMs it is because we want
| something ELSE.
|
| And caring about content rights in a world with limitless
| content and scarce attention is a mistake, it was never the
| content that was scarce in the last 20 years.
| chrisjj wrote:
| > Why would we use a multi-billion parameter model to copy
| text?
|
| Because it is free and essy to use? The number of numbers
| under the hood is irrelevent.
| inigyou wrote:
| They mean pirating. Why is it suddenly hard to understand
| when an LLM company is involved?
| tancop wrote:
| this is not enough. the penalty for training ai without
| permission should be releasing the model as public domain. if you
| take from everyone you have to give back the same way.
| larodi wrote:
| So it goes like this: I first you take, then money you make and
| eventually you repay. This is a very smart loan from society
| indeed. And seems to be the new normal...
|
| Even though Anthropic is my daily driver I'm done respecting any
| sort of copyright. I'm okay paying for subscription for a service
| delivery but never ever again will I believe in copyright or any
| other utterly non-enforceable similar concept.
| pjio wrote:
| This is insufficient for the human authors but seems ideal for
| Anthropic, who now have established a financial moat for others
| to train their ai on those works (except for Chinese companies,
| which don't care either way).
| surfingdino wrote:
| The correct way to do it would be to force Anthropic to remove
| content and the results of training based on that content from
| their models at copyright holder's request.
| throw1234567891 wrote:
| Now it's time to mount such cases everywhere in the world.
| hyperbole wrote:
| The fact that pirated books en-mass were used to train LLMs is
| legally irrelevant, oh do tell - why is that? The whole point of
| an LLM is to train a neural network based on content - without
| the content the net is entirely noise. Anthropic/OpenAI, etc. do
| not exist without training data. Its akin to taking millions of
| courses online that are intended to be paid for, but never
| paying.
| lukewarm707 wrote:
| $1.5bn? it's a steal!
| thiht wrote:
| Honestly maybe (and just maybe) waiving copyrights on all the
| written content that ever existed to create training data would
| be a good thing to do, laws are made up so we can decide it's a
| good trade off as a society. But:
|
| 1. I feel like this should be discussed globally, there should be
| a public debate, a vote, and guardrails
|
| 2. It should not be in the hands of private companies, it should
| either be done by the government and made available to the public
| ; or if it's done by private companies they should be mandated to
| give the training data to the government so it's available to the
| public.
|
| My point is we can decide to say it's ok because LLMs are too
| important strategically. But if we do so it should benefit the
| public, not 5 mega corporations, training data should be
| considered as public infrastructure, like roads, rails, or the
| electricity grid. Societies are failing and this is just one more
| nail in the coffin.
| chrisaiv wrote:
| In many ways this adds to Anthropic's motivation to IPO.
|
| This deal is built around Anthropic surviving. The $1.5B comes in
| installments, and counsel's fees are paid in step with those
| installments.
|
| The class is now effectively Anthropic's creditor, with a direct
| financial interest in the company staying solvent through the
| payment schedule.
|
| Civil suits compensate and the one outcome guaranteed to leave
| authors worse off was a verdict big enough to kill the payer.
| pietmichal wrote:
| So just a speeding ticket...
| lvl155 wrote:
| So they used pirated materials to train their models but others
| can't use their models for training even if you pay.
| jiaosdjf wrote:
| Single greatest transfer of intellectual property in history.
|
| I don't think royalties or settlements are really the point here.
| AI must be a net benefit to humanity, or we burn everything to
| the ground, it's that simple.
|
| The next few decades of AI need to lift everyone up, it needs to
| eliminate the most degrading and dangerous jobs while providing
| abundance. There is simply no point to robots if they don't serve
| us and make everything cheaper and more accessible to us.
|
| We are watching Wall Street. The Devon's and Luigi's of the world
| are not interested in your settlement figure or what this means
| to shareholders. Humanity needs to be aware that it either keeps
| parasites at bay or the parasites are going to build a robot and
| surveillance army. It is literally us or them.
|
| I'm not anti-AI, I am not scared of AI going rogue, I simply
| recognise that these people cannot be trusted, they do not care
| about your rules, there is no "regulating" it, the only thing
| that can scare them is a million people holding pitchforks
| outside their building.
| panny wrote:
| $1.5 billion at 150,000 per copyright violation according to DMCA
| and such. About 10,000 books.
|
| >$3000 per book
|
| Ohhhh, yeah, big copyright fines only apply to us little guys,
| not the "asshole tech" companies.
| hmokiguess wrote:
| I'm curious to see how Suno and the Record Labels is gonna play
| out
| reactordev wrote:
| $1.5B for a company that is valued at $1T+...
| basilgohar wrote:
| Is anyone else having mixed feelings about AI companies' special-
| casing themselves being a potentially new avenue to review
| copyright and IP law in the first place? Am I naive for being
| hopeful that IP law may become a little more lax now that AI
| companies are opening a front for potential reevaluation?
|
| Edited for slight typo.
| fooker wrote:
| IMO this ruling will be the inflection point that kills either
| the book publishing industry or the US big model frontier lab
| industry.
|
| It's trendy to say it'll be the later, but I see a credible case
| for the former.
|
| I see no reason to pay for a textbook in 2026, while I'm happy to
| pay an expensive monthly subscription for a coding agent.
|
| (And before someone accuses me of being anti education or
| anything, bona fide scientist with a PhD here and I have written
| book chapters for a couple of popular textbooks).
| Dkuku wrote:
| It would be fair use if the model in not used. But it is using
| this compsessed knowledge and make a competition to the original
| product-authors should be compensated.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| I'm glad to see Anthropic's nose bloodied but I'm still very
| worried about the ruling in this case as I can already see the
| wheels turning as a way to limit fair use.
|
| For context, the ruling is basically, "AI training is fair use
| but building a library of pirated books to train on is not". This
| is obviously because Judge Alsup does not want to put AI under a
| de-facto ban, but he wants AI companies to have to care about
| copyright... which in my opinion is self-contradictory, but let's
| go along with the (paraconsistent) logic.
|
| If we insist that every prior act up to a fair use must be
| lawful, then this means that fair use is not a right, but a
| privilege that is purchased alongside the work itself. This opens
| the door to Oracle-level shenanigans: so long as every legal
| avenue to watch a work is encumbered by, say, a DeWitt clause[0],
| you cannot legally review the work. There are actually copyright
| cases hinging on this: Triller Fight Club sued H3H3 for reviewing
| a pirated stream of a Logan Paul fight that lasted 40 seconds and
| lost, for obvious reasons. This case smells like an accidental
| overturning of this.
|
| Would I rather live in a world where robots[1] aren't allowed to
| read copyrighted books, or a world where copyright owners have
| veto rights over any and all critical commentary of their work? I
| would happily choose the former every time.
|
| [0] A contractual clause that prohibits the recipient of a work
| from reviewing it without written permission of the owner.
|
| [1] Mind uploads inclusive
| WillAdams wrote:
| A good example of the problem with this settlement:
|
| >It appears that LLMs have already incorporated APOSD EDIT: The
| text of the book _A Philosophy of Software Design_ ENDEDIT (which
| would seem to be illegal, since it is copyrighted). For example,
| I have asked ChatGPT questions about APOSD and it seems to be
| able to answer.
|
| https://groups.google.com/g/software-design-book/c/_wl1DciZZ...
| raverbashing wrote:
| I don't see:
|
| - what's APOSD
|
| - "it's illegal since it's copyrighted" makes no sense to me
|
| - The settlement should be exactly to cover their licenses for
| training
| WillAdams wrote:
| Edited to clarify APOSD == the book _A Philosophy of Software
| Design_
|
| Please ask John Ousterhout what his cut of this settlement
| will be, and whether or no he agreed to it and finds it
| acceptable.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Yeah ask him how much he gets paid for one copy of the
| book, I assure you it's not much
|
| If he's not getting a cut of this settlement then that's
| between him and his publisher.
| docmars wrote:
| This does absolutely nothing to compensate the authors whose
| content was stolen by AI companies.
| m0llusk wrote:
| LLMs improve development speed such that enshittification can be
| in progress well before the IPO.
| tripleee wrote:
| Now view this in contrast with what happened to Aaron Swartz
|
| > According to state and federal authorities, Swartz used JSTOR,
| a digital repository,[79] to download a large number[note 2] of
| academic journal articles through MIT's computer network over the
| course of a few weeks
|
| > ...federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment adding
| nine more felony counts, increasing Swartz's maximum criminal
| exposure to 50 years of imprisonment
|
| > ...On the evening of January 11, 2013, Swartz's girlfriend,
| Stinebrickner-Kauffman, found him dead in his Brooklyn
| apartment.[80][116][117] A spokesperson for New York's Medical
| Examiner reported that he had hanged himself
| radu_floricica wrote:
| What this does is make it harder for new AI companies to train
| from scratch.
|
| Anthropic should take it from its marketing/strategic budget. It
| just bought itself a 1.5B moat at exactly the time it can afford
| it.
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