That’s great. But not exclusively, right? What about your salary, assuming you’re a professional in software? Do you still want that? I would argue you deserve it, but I also believe authors and other creators should be compensated. Too many people here argue for the software professional compensation only, conveniently.

If you are privileged and talented enough to make money purely out of free software, that's great!

However in most cases that money ultimately comes from being able to sell proprietary software and software-enhanced services. Many employers wouldn't pay for free software, if it wasn't helping their closed-source tech.

If bigger companies can enforce their "right"s as the owner of intellectual property, the smaller ones and individuals should be able to do so as well.

I discussed this rather recently in HN. The timelines for copyright is too long. They need to get shorter around 20-30 years for actual creative work.

I think software needs its own category of intellectual property. It should enjoy at most 10 years. Software is quite akin to machinery and mechanical designs can only get 20 years of patent protection. Considering the fast growing and changing nature, software should get even shorter IP protection. Similar to every other sector, trade secrets can continue to exist and employers can negotiate deals with software engineers for trade secret protection.

Is tbat saying that all software should be free? And extending beyond software, that all books, art, movies, etc., should be free to copy? Likewise, would it be fine for anyone to use any other company's logo?

Thanks! That's really helpful.

> What contradictions do you see? I don't see any.

I guess us seeing very different things is also what a settlement might be for :-).

But I think I was wrong.

I think others in the thread are debating the contradictions I saw. I tried typing them out when I made my earlier comment, but couldn't get them to fix to any kind of logic that made sense to me. They just seemed contradictory, at the time.

I think the same arguments have now been made much more clearly by others - specifically around whether a corporation downloading this work is the same as a human downloading it - and the responses have been very clear also.

The settlement figure was tied implicitly to Anthropic's valuation in the Ars article [0] where I think I originally posted my comment. Those comments were moved here, so I've linked below.

Specifically linking the settlement sum to the valuation of a corporation is what caught me in a loop - that valuation assumes that Anthropic will do certain things in the future. I was thinking too much, maybe, about things like:

"Would a teenager get the same treatment? What about a teenager with a private company? What about a teenager who seemed dumber than that teenager to the person deciding their company's valuation? What about a teenager who had not opened the files themselves, but had spun up a model from them? What about a teenager who had done both?"

Etc. I think I was getting fixated on the idea that the valuation assumes future performance, and downloading the files was possibly necessary for that performance, but I was missing the obvious answers to some of my questions because of that.

I do think that some of the more anthropomorphising language - "training data" is an example - trips people up a lot in the same way. And I think that if the settlement sum reflects anything to do with the valuation of that corporation, that does create some interesting questions, but maybe not contradictions.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/09/judge-anthropics...

Hmm my huge concern was that if the settlement were to get approved, it would set a legal precedent for other "settlement approvals" like this one, setting back AI research in the US, paving way for China to win the race.

Thanks!