| ▲ | matheusmoreira 7 hours ago |
| Remember how Kim Dotcom got destroyed for criminal copyright infringement? One would think the big tech CEOs would face the same fate, that police officers would rappel down helicopters, storm their mansions and bring them out in cuffs. Instead the AI companies reached these absurd settlements with publishers that made a mockery out of all the previous copyright enforcement victims. |
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| ▲ | root-parent 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Remember Aaron Swartz who did something that just pales compared to what Dario Amodei, Zuckerberg-Mr-Torrent and Sam Altman did. |
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| ▲ | 314 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | But Aaron Swartz did it for the benefit of other people. These fine people did it to uphold american values and enrich themselves at the expense of others. The law is clearly on their side. | | |
| ▲ | gruez 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This but unironically. "did it for the benefit of other people" is redistribution, which is straightforward copyright infringement, even if you think it's a laudable act. AI training was the reverse, because courts have so far ruled is fair use. When AI companies were engaging in piracy, they were sanctioned as well. | | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > When AI companies were engaging in piracy, they were sanctioned as well. Some token settlement for an insignificant fraction of their revenue is not in any way a "sanction". | | |
| ▲ | gruez 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | That just feels like more of a general complaint about how the justice system is set up. The same logic applies to how a $300 speeding ticket "is not in any way a "sanction"" for someone making $1M/year, or even a well paid SWE reading HN. | | |
| ▲ | sbayg 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I feel you but are you possibly conflating civil and criminal justice? Tickets don’t scale with net worth of defendants, but class action penalties often do. | | |
| ▲ | gruez 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | >but class action penalties often do. Do they? Or only so far as "if you have 1000x the revenue, you probably also have 1000x the customers that you have wronged, each of which are entitled to damages as well"? | | |
| ▲ | sbayg 25 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Courts do award higher damages, specifically punitive damages, to punish and deter wealthy or large corporate defendants. In civil law, the defendant's net worth is a recognized legal factor because a small penalty on a massive corporation wouldn't incentivize them to change their illegal behavior. |
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| ▲ | stingraycharles 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think this comment is missing a /s, right? | |
| ▲ | dan_i 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | petcat 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Not sure what that is supposed to indicate? USA was a big place, even then. Most northern states had abolished slavery even before Britain, France, and especially Spain did. Maybe we should have a quick refresher on European values? | |
| ▲ | zahlman 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I thought this thread was about Alibaba's internal policies. How did we get here? | | | |
| ▲ | batch12 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The article talks about European colonies, so would these have been European values then since America did not yet exist? | | |
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| ▲ | matheusmoreira 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Indeed I do. We should all remember him. Rest in peace. |
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| ▲ | vlovich123 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Reminds me, did the AI companies redistribute that copyrighted material to others and make their money that way? Did Kim use the copyrighted material to generate something novel from it? copyright law literally says something isn’t infringement if it is a novel transformation. I get the jokes and criticism about AI companies fighting and complaining about competitors distilling, but this is a much weirder comparison. |
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| ▲ | root-parent 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Now you just have to explain this: "Anthropic settles with authors in first-of-its-kind AI copyright infringement lawsuit" - https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/nx-s1-5529404/anthropic-settl... | | |
| ▲ | hydrox24 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | > "The training use was a fair use," [the judge] wrote. "The use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative." > However, the judge ruled that Anthropic's use of millions of pirated books to build its models – books that websites such as Library Genesis (LibGen) and Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) copied without getting the authors' consent or giving them compensation – was not. It seems clear from the article that while the use of pirated works was illegal, the use of copyrighted works (a the work a book is based on is still copyrighted if you buy the book) was fine and transformative. | | |
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| ▲ | andersonpico 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | But distribution isn't the only crime here, obtaining the material illegally apparently is a crime too. And the damn robot can also spit me harry Potter verbatim so I don't know how it would also not be distribution? | | |
| ▲ | mapontosevenths 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If I read Harry Potter I will remember some parts verbatim. Others I will tecall in only an abridged and lossy way. Does that make my brain copyright infringement? Does Disney now own all my output forever because some small part of me now has Harry Potter embedded? | | |
| ▲ | buran77 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Can you remember every part? Can you do this for every book in a library? Can you remember all that forever? If you just ignore anything that's inconvenient for your argument, you can make any argument you want. | | |
| ▲ | gruez 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | >Can you remember every part? Can you do this for every book in a library? Can you remember all that forever? None of those are relevant factors when it comes to copyright law. You don't get a pass for copyright infringement just because you're not copying the entire work. Same goes for a copy that's transient. You can't set up a bootleg movie theater in your home, even if you delete the movie file afterwards, and there's no trace of the movie aside from the viewers' vague memories. | | |
| ▲ | buran77 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > None of those are relevant factors when it comes to copyright law. And yet they very much are. US copyright law has the concept of "fair use" in 17 U.S. Code § 107 [0]. I'll paste here for your benefit, #3 is the one I referenced as most obvious but #1 and #4 are also very relevant: (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Naturally remembering some parts of a legally purchased book verbatim is fair use. "Memorizing" the entire library obtained via torrents and incorporating that in a commercial product that can output all that content doesn't sound like fair use to me.The US justice system is too captured and corrupt at this point to take as reference because decisions there are bought by the highest bidder. But for the purpose of this discussion let's not play dumb for the benefit of trillion dollar corporations. [0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107 | | |
| ▲ | gruez 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | >And yet they very much are. US copyright law has the concept of "fair use" in 17 U.S. Code § 107 [0]. I'll paste here for your benefit, #3 is the one I referenced as most obvious but #1 and #4 are also very relevant: If you're going to invoke fair use, that opens up a whole can of worms on what counts as transformative. The google books case and the google thumbnails case shows that you can make near verbatim copies of works at scale and still be considered fair use. >The US justice system is too captured and corrupt at this point to take as reference because decisions there are bought by the highest bidder. But for the purpose of this discussion let's not play dumb for the benefit of trillion dollar corporations. This is begging the question. The original question is whether ai companies are getting special treatment. You can't then use that as a premise to say that the courts are tilted towards ai companies. Not to mention it's questionable how ai companies were suddenly able to corrupt all the judges, some of which were appointed decades ago, even though they only got rich a couple of years ago. |
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| ▲ | mapontosevenths 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Can you remember every part? No, and neither do LLM's. They're trained on vast quantities of data and retain only a fraction of it. You might think of it as very, very lossy compression that generates new outputs rather than the original input unless something unintentional happens. > If you just ignore anything that's inconvenient for your argument, you can make any argument you want. I'm not. I just understand how it actually works. You either don't understand or are deliberately ignoring that what you just said is literally and technically untrue to make some sort of political statement. |
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| ▲ | triceratops 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If you write out the parts or recite them for other people to hear, yes it's copyright infringement. Humans reading or watching copyrighted material isn't considered "making a copy" for the purposes of copyright law. Machines doing so generally is. | |
| ▲ | bee_rider 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Does the law really not distinguish between mechanical processing of data, and humans learning from it? It seems surprising to be if every person who read a textbook is copyright infringing. It also seems surprising if something like a lossy compression algorithm is enough to protect you from copyright law. Somewhere between the two a line must be drawn… where we’d want to put that line, I guess, if up for quibbling. But it doesn’t seem obvious to me. | | |
| ▲ | gruez 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | >Does the law really not distinguish between mechanical processing of data, and humans learning from it? It seems surprising to be if every person who read a textbook is copyright infringing. It also seems surprising if something like a lossy compression algorithm is enough to protect you from copyright law. The google books and google thumbnails cases have so far upheld that even mechanical reproductions are allowed, depending on the context/usage. | |
| ▲ | mapontosevenths 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | To me the distinction hinges on the output being transformative enough to be considered a new work. I think that most of the time LLM output is. Sometimes they go a bit wonky and overtrain on specific phrases which can result in verbatim copies of brief sections of coontent. Thats a bug, not a feature. |
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| ▲ | lelandfe 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Further, why has my brain's searing remake of Snow White as a gritty murder mystery gone unscathed by Disney lawyers? Surely their negligence has diluted the Snow White trademark! | |
| ▲ | JsonDemWitOster 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This analogy is disingenuous because by comparing the human brain to the machine, it ignores _scale_. Scale is absolutely important in copyright law. As a matter of fact, copyright law is among the various profound impacts of the---wait for it---printing press, a _machine_ for the mass production of books. | | | |
| ▲ | hartbook 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | yes it is if you write it down from memory and sell it. Exactly what LLM companies do |
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| ▲ | vlian2088 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | >And the damn robot can also spit me harry Potter verbatim so I don't know how it would also not be distribution? if you prompt it to, yes. just like your browser dutifully navigates to any copyright-infringing resource and GETs and POSTs whatever you ask of it. (also it can't, not really, only small snippets before going off rails. LLMs aren't magic, they can't losslessly compress an exabyte of training data into a few terabytes of weights.) |
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| ▲ | samrus 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They redistributed the statistical patterns of those copyrighted materials. Which perhaps should be treated similarly nos As for your "technically not copyright infringement" defense. Those laws are from a time when those patterns couldnt be derived and dostributed at scale. A human had to learn and teach them. That made it different. The scale enabled my modern tech makes it a whole dofferent situation. The same way how one person standing a street corner people watching for a bit isnt that bad, but a whole constellation of flock cameras costantly montioring everyones movements and making it available to any of their customers is really really bad. The law will have to catch up to this | | |
| ▲ | vlovich123 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > They redistributed the statistical patterns of those copyrighted materials. Which perhaps should be treated similarly nos Nos for the same reason that me giving you a word cloud of the frequency of words within Harry Potter isn’t infringement. It’s a novel transformation. | | |
| ▲ | samrus an hour ago | parent [-] | | Thats not as complex or scalable as what LLMs can do. The capability and scale is what changes the equation. Quantity is a quality unto itself here |
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| ▲ | cryptonym 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is confusing. I can torrent everything and do what I want with it, as long as I don't redistribute the exact same thing? If so, why do we still pay for games and movies? | | |
| ▲ | midasz 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I pay for games because it's more convenient than pirating them. For movies and tv however... They make it so difficult to be a customer. | | |
| ▲ | klibertp 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Steam with Proton made gaming on Linux viable. Just for that, they deserve my money. That some of it goes to game devs is a happy coincidence ;D |
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| ▲ | john_strinlai 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >I can torrent everything and do what I want with it, as long as I don't redistribute the exact same thing? this is an incorrect interpretation (in the usa, at least). downloading a game/movie is still the creation of unauthorized copy, which is not allowed. not to mention that playing/watching does not count as a "novel transformation". (17 U.S.C. § 106 and 17 U.S.C. § 501 are the relevant pieces of reading) | |
| ▲ | vlovich123 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | No, that’s literally why Anthropic got sued. If they’d paid for a copy of the copyrighted works they pirated, they wouldn’t have had a problem. There were two issues in their case: does the AI infringe on copyright and did Anthropic obtain all their materials legally. The first they won on, the second they lost. So if you pirate a bunch of content you still get in trouble for that. But if you somehow make a business out of that that isn’t just redistributing those materials, then that business itself isn’t infringing. | |
| ▲ | JsonDemWitOster 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | IANAL (plus a whole suite of other caveats) but torrent-baiting works in Germany along these lines. ISPs and trigger-happy law firms don't send you a C&D for downloading a torrent, they do so for seeding a torrent. It's just that practically nobody "just seeds" a torrent so people colloquially claim they got busted for downloading a torrent. In theory this means if you torrent as a 100% leecher and turn off seeding from the get-go, you should be in the clear. But nobody sensible would dare test the extent of German Legal Spite, much less do so repeatedly to science the shit out of it. If you can download through another protocol, say HTTP, however---<Sendung unterbrochen!> |
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| ▲ | codedokode 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Exactly. If a rich corporation downloads and uses pirated content without paying, why should ordinary person pay for movies and music instead of downloading them for free? |
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| ▲ | UqWBcuFx6NV4r 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Intellectually dishonest comment. Kim Dotcom got done for illegal distribution. It’s not about “illegally downloading”. You can pretend all you want that it’s the same thing as these AI companies, but it’s not. It certainly very well may be immoral, but to act like copyright law as it currently stands in spirit or in reality covers this scenario we’ve found ourselves in, is a complete and utter lie. | | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > It’s not about “illegally downloading”. It absolutely is. That's textbook copyright infringement. Doing it for commercial purposes elevates it to criminal copyright infringement. |
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| ▲ | Simulacra 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| He just lost another court case… I wonder if we're getting close to the government spending as much to prosecute the man than what Hollywood possibly lost.. |
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| ▲ | xienze 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Remember how people used to justify their own personal software piracy with arguments like "information wants to be free", "no one stole anything, you still have the data", "I was never going to buy it anyway", and "copyright should be abolished?" > Instead the AI companies reached these absurd settlements with publishers that made a mockery out of all the previous copyright enforcement victims. Isn't that at least something? How many people pirating software ever settled with the companies they "victimized?" |
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| ▲ | monooso 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | How many people pirating software stole every piece of copyrighted material in existence and then used that material to generate billions of dollars which they kept for themselves? | | |
| ▲ | xienze 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | You keep using that word "stole", you can't steal digital information, remember? > then used that material to generate billions of dollars which they kept for themselves? Hasn't it also lead to distilled, free and open models that everyone can benefit from? | | |
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| ▲ | matheusmoreira 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Remember how people used to justify their own personal software piracy A courtesy. There was never any need to justify it. > Isn't that at least something? Yes, it's a joke. Why do they get to infringe copyrights with impunity while normal people get destroyed? Either go after them like the copyright industry always does and punish them properly, or abolish copyright straight up. This "rules for thee but not for me" nonsense is straight up disgusting. > How many people pirating software ever settled with the companies they "victimized?" Too many to list. Also, nobody is victimizing billion dollar corporations. | | |
| ▲ | phoghed 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | So you don’t actually care, you just want them punished out of spite because some other guy was for doing something similar but not the same? | | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Correct. I'm one of the copyright abolitionists the other person alluded to. It's the selective enforcement that's disgusting. I mean, what is this? Their balls suddenly drop off? They only have the audacity to prosecute random people? Smaller companies? When they're up against trillion dollar AI companies they suddenly become cowards? That's so incredibly disgusting, and it made me completely lose even the small amount of respect for copyright that I had managed to rationalize over the years. | | |
| ▲ | phoghed 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | So you believe a dude was wrongly punished, and to you justice would be for everyone else to also be wrongly punished? Kind of dumb tbh | | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | My mind is not capable of the cognitive dissonance necessary to accept that billionaires get a slap on the wrist while mere mortals get police helicopters descending upon them. In order to maintain my mental health, I must have consistency. So either enforce the law the same way against everyone correctly and proportionally, or your law and its enforcement are illegitimate and shouldn't exist. If some activity is harmless enough for some billionaires to do at massive scales and settle in court like it was some footnote in history, then nobody should be punished for it at all. | | |
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| ▲ | cinntaile 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Settlements after the fact, not agreements beforehand. No that's not something. That's just having infinitely more money to fight legal battles. | | |
| ▲ | mapontosevenths 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | When a crime is only punishable by fines it isn't a crime, it's just an activity with a tax. The AI companies knew that and bet, correctly, that it would be worth the cost. |
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| ▲ | curtisblaine 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | No. I want either: 1. The copyright infringement of big corpos fully justifying my copyright infringement in the face of law 2. The copyright infringement of big corpos being prosecuted in the same exact way as my copyright infringement would. There is really no middle ground. |
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| ▲ | datsci_est_2015 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| The trick here, imo, was the integration with the military industrial complex. It wasn’t very difficult of course, as automation has been a topic in warfare for decades, if not centuries. But Eisenhower was right: > In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. |
