| ▲ | What Happened to Piracy? Copyright Enforcement Fades as AI Giants Rise(leefang.com) |
| 111 points by walterbell 2 days ago | 48 comments |
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| ▲ | Peteragain 2 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| Of course real scientists don't publish. Okay I'm trolling but I know that the science published by Google et al has been thoroughly screened for commercial advantage before we see it. Try doing a litt search on hypersonics and you can see where the Russians _stop_ publishing. |
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| ▲ | lambdaone a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It turned out laws were only for little people, after all. |
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| ▲ | tim333 a day ago | parent [-] | | As one of the 'little people' I've found very little problem pirating stuff. If anything it's become easier over the years. | | |
| ▲ | ASalazarMX a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Say that to Anna's Archive, who has been continuously targeted for copyright enforcement despite tech giants using its data to train their models. Somehow their argument that AI models are a derivative work exonerates them from having done piracy in the first place, but not Anna's Archive. It really is about how expensive are your lawyers. | |
| ▲ | Yeul 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It seems to me that most companies realised that trying to stop piracy costs more than it saves. You see this with videogames were they remove Denuvo DRM after a year. |
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| ▲ | npteljes a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >That is because it is now the tech giants that are accused of exploiting pirated content on an industrial scale Nah. Media just moved to services, and with that, the main media consumption turned from piracy to subscriptions / ad supported streams. Lack of public interest is also reflected in the fact that there were not really any development on the piracy front technologically in the last 15 years - or am I behind the times? Between 2000 and 2010, there were a lot more new software, new tech, different ways developed to get files, than there were between 2010 and 2025. Even with pirating content, I think illegal streaming sites take most of the traffic. There is also much more content than there ever was, making the culture diverse, fragmented, and one-time use only. So, I think, 1. Services happened to piracy. It's not about collecting files now, but about using an online service to view. 2. At the same time, collecting turned into consuming. |
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| ▲ | bediger4000 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is pretty clearly an instance of the right people (i.e. rich people) being allowed to pirate, and the poor people get in trouble for copyrighted music in the background of some video clip. The hypocrisy really grinds my gears. |
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| ▲ | tommica 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Yeah... Laws exist only if they are applied equally, else they become something else. And a monetary fine is just the cost of doing business if you are big enough. | | |
| ▲ | NoMoreNicksLeft 2 days ago | parent [-] | | >Yeah... Laws exist only if they are applied equally, else they become something else. This is bullshit and you know it. No one would ever want to go to the trouble, expense, and misery of enforcing laws where the so-called victims do not feel wronged and refuse to press complaints to the authorities. And so, copyright enforcement will only ever occur where the rightsholders wish to enforce it. The few lawsuits you see here and there aren't about genuine sentiment of being wrong, but of the rightsholders wanting their cuts. Backroom deals are already being drawn up, and everyone's cool with it. This is the status quo. If you don't like it, suggest something better, but don't be naive that the law as it stands now could be applied sanely or pragmatically. | | |
| ▲ | saghm a day ago | parent | next [-] | | So if someone goes and pirates something on their own time on a whim, it's a criminal issue, but if 100 people correctively pirate a few orders of magnitude more stuff because their boss's boss's boss's boss told everyone to, it's just a licensing issue? Here's my suggestion: either throw out all the convictions that have ever occurred for software piracy and allow them to sue for reparations, or charge the people that are making those backroom deals for extortion and obstruction of justice. Either it should be a crime for everyone or no one; being rich enough to bribe your way out of it isn't just, and it's preposterous to claim otherwise. | |
| ▲ | mihaic 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Sorry, but what you just said is bullshit, and I'm not even sure you know it. Plenty of copyright holders don't want their creations to be trained on LLMs, regardless of cut. There is no voice for them. The general statement of laws being applied differently by size is also more and more obvious in the recent climate. | | |
| ▲ | NoMoreNicksLeft a day ago | parent [-] | | The big copyright cartels are the only copyright holders out there. The people you refer to think they hold copyright on some work or another, but unless another plebe infringes on them, they'll never get a remedy for that. You think I'm wrong, but if you wrote a song (for instance) and some jackass restaurant was playing it as muzak, ASCAP takes the license money for that. They don't send you a cut. I'd say you have second class rights, but you don't even really have those. |
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| ▲ | troupo 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | YouTube routinely demonetizes and suspends people for"copyright violations" with no recourse. Including people for using their own material. SciHub is banned and blocked in several countries, there are default rulings against it in the US etc. Oh, and White House called it "one of the most flagrant notorious market sites in the world". But when you're an AI company with billions of dollars? Well, your doing it for the good of humanity or something, and of course everything you do is fair use etc. | |
| ▲ | LtWorf 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | What chances do I have of winning a lawsuit against copilot for violating my copyright? See? Laws are not applied equally. | | |
| ▲ | 1gn15 a day ago | parent [-] | | None, because they're not violating your copyright. | | |
| ▲ | LtWorf a day ago | parent [-] | | I love how you decided before hearing my case. Thanks for proving my point exactly! |
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| ▲ | archerx a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The system is working exactly as it was designed, protect corporations and make citizens pay for it. | | |
| ▲ | K0balt a day ago | parent [-] | | Except it -wasn’t- designed that way. Citizens United made that change, prioritizing capital over people and creating the incentive alignment that precipitated a soft coup that we are witnessing the results of now, both in the USA and abroad. The ability for corporations to act as political agents is what landed us in this timeline. |
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| ▲ | asdaqopqkq a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | No cap frfr |
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| ▲ | niemandhier a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Will they rehabilitate Kim Dotcom? |
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| ▲ | terminalshort a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| AI doesn't violate any copyright laws. When AI companies have been found to violate copyright laws (in ways that have nothing at all to do with AI) they have been sued successfully. There has been no change in enforcement. |
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| ▲ | marginalia_nu a day ago | parent [-] | | I imagine it's also likely a matter of AI companies having enough of a war chest to put up a fight. It's much easier to bully teenagers and small businesses into questionable settlements. | | |
| ▲ | jack_tripper a day ago | parent [-] | | > It's much easier to bully teenagers and small businesses into questionable settlements. The world's biggest publishing, copyright and IP holders (like Disney, Thomson Reuters, Sony, etc) aren't teenagers or small businesses, and easily have a war chest as big as AI companies, and own about 90% of media IP on which LLMs are trained on, not to mention having lawmakers and artists unions on their side. If they have a case under current laws, they'll take it to court. | | |
| ▲ | marginalia_nu a day ago | parent [-] | | Up until recently, those IP rights holders just needed to show up in order for their opponents to give up and sign a settlement. The difference now is that is no longer enough. | | |
| ▲ | jack_tripper a day ago | parent [-] | | Because of the existing "transformative and fair use" laws are very murky when it comes to LLMs as they obfuscate the theft, versus the legal slam dunk that used to be teenagers ripping CDs to MP3s and sharing them on the internet. Big AI companies are in a legal blindspot of obvious theft. | | |
| ▲ | terminalshort a day ago | parent | next [-] | | It's not murky in the slightest. It's so obviously legal fair use that every judge who has seen it so far has ruled so on summary judgment. That's the legal term for "your case is so bad I'm not even going to allow you to waste more of my time on it." https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/two-california-distr... | |
| ▲ | marginalia_nu a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | The risk of taking the AI companies to court too early or without a solid enough case is that if they lose it could create a devastating legal precedent. So the AI boys are permitted to operate in the gray zone, with ambiguous legality while the rights holders bide their time. | | |
| ▲ | terminalshort a day ago | parent [-] | | Nope. Already done: https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/two-california-distr... | | |
| ▲ | marginalia_nu a day ago | parent [-] | | That judgement is far from the final nail in the coffin according to the article you just linked. Though it may well be a part of the reason why rights holders are being cautious and presumably gathering evidence for for damages rather than to press on with additional litigation. | | |
| ▲ | terminalshort a day ago | parent [-] | | You don't understand what summary judgment is. Summary judgment means that there is no dispute of the facts of the case. In other words, the AI companies admitted that they did exactly the thing the plaintiffs accused them of doing. The problem, for the plaintiffs, is that the action they accused the AI companies of is, in fact, perfectly legal. There is no amount of evidence to gather that can change this simple fact. Furthermore, damages are irrelevant here because the case was not thrown out because of a lack of damages. It was thrown out because the defendant didn't break the law at all. | | |
| ▲ | marginalia_nu a day ago | parent [-] | | > Even if LLM training is fair use, AI companies face potential liability for unauthorized copying and distribution. The extent of that liability and any damages remain unresolved. - The article you linked | | |
| ▲ | terminalshort a day ago | parent [-] | | No shit. If they violate copyright law they will be punished for it. A statement so obvious that it isn't even worth saying. What has been decided is that training LLMs does not violate copyright law. | | |
| ▲ | marginalia_nu a day ago | parent [-] | | Right, but you've moved the goal post and limited it to only a subset of the things the AI companies are doing that might get them sued. | | |
| ▲ | terminalshort a day ago | parent [-] | | That was the original goalpost. Whether AI training is fair use is a new legal question. Stealing the copyrighted data that you use for training is obviously illegal and nobody has ever claimed that it isn't so it's not even worth discussing and has absolutely nothing to do with AI. |
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| ▲ | 1gn15 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This thread is a dumpster fire. Piracy is still illegal; Anthropic had to pay for damages. Training has been ruled several times to be not copyright infringement because nothing is reproduced (no, the Harry Potter thing doesn't count). Then you have someone here using a racial slur and not being flagged. Let me be crystal clear: Large company pirates stuff: illegal (Anthropic) Little guy pirates stuff: illegal (though most get away with it) Large company trains model: legal (Anthropic) Little guy trains (fine-tunes) model: legal (Civit trainers) Why the hell are people still repeating the same old shit about "oh so the big guy can ignore laws"? What the fuck is going on? Also: if copyright enforcement is really getting weaker (no it's not, the article's premise is wrong in the first place), good. |
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| ▲ | NoMoreNicksLeft 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Copyright is about extracting a perpetual tax on culture from the peasants. It's not about hobbling the march of progress itself, not when the people who get to levy the culture tax will eventually get to cash in on the wonders that will ensue. Didn't anyone ever inform you? |
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| ▲ | DamnInteresting a day ago | parent [-] | | I can only speak for myself, but mostly the opposite has been true for me. I am a 'peasant' creating original works, and occasionally I must wield copyright to salt the giant thirsty leeches appropriating my work. If it were not for the protection offered by copyright, I would be a desiccated husk. | | |
| ▲ | NoMoreNicksLeft 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | >and occasionally I must wield copyright to salt the giant thirsty leeches appropriating my work. I Depending on what your work is, I've probably already pirated it. And I don't stop, it's like a hobby of mine... I've made a point now of downloading every single book title I ever see mentioned (here on HN, elsewhere). Just for shits and giggles. You'll never even know, though, will you? Maybe you're a typographer. I don't pirate fonts, I pirate entire catalogs. Software, games, movies, television, music, literally everything. For years I've been on a search for house blueprints just because (no luck on those, though). You really are a peasant, and you think that copyright works for you, because theoretically it seems like it should. I guess whatever makes you happy. | | |
| ▲ | DamnInteresting 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Unless you are republishing my work, using it to earn yourself a livelihood while depriving me of the same, then you are not part of the problem that I describe. |
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| ▲ | bpodgursky 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The use of paywalled scientific articles to train AI is one place where I think we have to just draw the line and say, this has to be allowed or US AI is simply going to get gutted and replaced by international competitors who have no respect for copyright law. Sorry but this is just a competitive reality and the content matters A LOT. Sucks that Elsevier gambled badly on the scientific community putting up with overpriced subscriptions forever, but their concerns can't dictate national policy on this. |
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| ▲ | arjie 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Absolutely agree. Realistically, everyone was playing around with this thing because everyone was using Sci Hub, /r/Scholar, and god knows what else to get PDFs. This is one of those things where the reality is well-known and people pretend that something is actually going on in copyright enforcement. And if I'm being honest, I'm tired of the International Brotherhood of Stevedores[0] style of shredding human productivity to protect some special interest group. If Elsevier died tomorrow, we'd lose a curation function to scientific papers, true, but we wouldn't lose the science itself. And while the curation on scientific output is clearly valuable - China is suffering the lack of this while producing prodigious science - I think it's far less important than the scientific output itself. This is especially true of US science. 0: IBS, the AMA, pharmacists, teacher unions, firefighter unions, tax preparers: the distributed cost to society is huge because we decided on protecting these special interest groups. Blocking AI would be a bridge too far. | |
| ▲ | pjc50 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | So you end up paying an AI company (or subsist on not-endless free tokens) to circumvent another company's paywall? This doesn't sound like a sustainable solution. How reliable is it? Can you just ask an AI for a doi and get a reasonably correct copy of the original article back? Is the level of hallucination induced in science acceptable? | |
| ▲ | Ferret7446 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think this is one reason "piracy for AI" in general is tolerated. Anyone with a clear understanding of real world dynamics realizes that if a foreign country that lacks scruples develops "AGI", for lack of a better term, then you're fucked. This is in a sense a nuclear arms race. The same applies between companies, by the way, hence the "AI bubble". The other reason "piracy for AI" is tolerated is because it's not at all clear how to legislate or regulate it. You might think it's a cut and dry case, but lots of other people think the same about the opposite conclusion. | |
| ▲ | kmeisthax 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I agree, but only in the sense that I think any amount of copyright protection for scientific papers is absolutely absurd. The creativity involved in papers is minimal and a good chunk of that research is funded by the government, so paywalling it is criminally unethical. Also, if we're going to bin the entire concept of copyright, can we at least be equal about it? I'd rather not live in a world where humans labor for the remnants of their culture in the content mines while clankers[0] feast on an endless stream of training data. [0] Fake racial slur for robots or other AI systems. | | |
| ▲ | zzo38computer 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I agree. I think that copyright should be abolished entirely, especially for scientific articles (if they are good quality scientific research then I think they would be too important to be copyrighted, in addition to the other stuff you mention), but also for anything else too. Nevertheless I thin there is another thing against the LLM training, which is that the scraping seems to be excessive (although it could be made less excessive; there are many ways to help with making it less excessive) and I think it requires too much power (although I don't really know a lot about it). These are two separate issues, though. | | |
| ▲ | jruohonen 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > I think that copyright should be abolished entirely, especially for scientific articles You know, it is really the CC-BY-style most science people care about. Same goes with MIT/BSD open source licenses, while with GPL I suppose it is one the side of CC-BY-SA. |
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| ▲ | alsetmusic a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| It only mattered when multi-millionaires were upset about it and they could sue regular people. When billionaires and large conglomerates are on the receiving end of pirated content, it's no longer a problem. |
