The issue is that the law is meant to protect billionaire corporations from you, not the other way around.

Congress has now illegally approved copyright theft of millions of works from small authors, EVEN where everything was illegal about it, down to the torrent client used to get the works in the first place. Oh and this was illegal for Congress too, you see, just about the only thing Congress isn't allowed to do is to change the law retroactively (OpenAI, Meta, Google violated the law BEFORE congress made it legal. So that doesn't matter according to the law. A lot of states even created criminal responsibility for copyright violations. Do these companies or CEOs get convicted for that? No, of course not). But to protection billionaires congress gladly ignores the law (yes, technically congress didn't do anything, the "copyright office" did, but it's a part of congress and you can bet your firstborn if 10 congresscritters disagreed with the font the decision is published in they would have changed it immediately)

Even courts do it. They make up equally absurd justifications. I mean, in order to protect the billionaire AI labs from software engineers claiming copyright they have now declared AI models persons [1]. The reasoning is that because if they are not persons they cannot create a copyright, and so cannot give it to customers, in other words: AI labs would have nothing to sell. You wouldn't be legally allowed to use AI outputs, as they would be owned by the people the model learned from. What do you think the odds are that AI models will now be treated as persons when it doesn't benefit billionaires? I believe we have found the first example of odds bigger than 100%.

Congress does NOT apply copyright used against billionaires, but it does apply when billionaires sue 9 year olds with download software, without proof even, in most cases. 9 year olds get threatened with 2 months prison plus 300,000 PER INFRACTION, billionaires get to violate the law. Oh, and by the way, the EU commission has, separately, agreed with this way of doing things over the objection of German courts (the EU AI directive, like any other directive, comes from the commission. They had the good manners to let parliament vote on it, but is there anyone who doesn't remember what happens when parliament votes against it, say, something like "Chat Control" for example?)

And this is after copyright violation was made criminal in many places. The CEOs of these companies have admitted to hundreds of millions of copyright violations, so at 3 months per violation ... even if they were the first human ever to evolve they would still not even have 1% of their prison sentence served if the punishments applied to normal people were applied to them, as the law clearly dictates.

Fundamentally, Anthropic and OpenAI (and Google and Facebook and ...) are based on massive violations of copyright. If any of these companies were held liable to the standards courts hold 9 year olds, their billions wouldn't be enough to protect them from bankruptcy (violating millions of works at hundreds of thousands per work adds up fast).

Can someone explain to me how I get to do that? If I can violate the law millions of times making up a billion dollar company is trivial, for obvious reasons. How do I get courts and congress to find technicalities to never hold me responsible. Because under the deal Sam Altman, Larry Page, Elon Musk and Dario Amodei get from courts and congress, and even from the EU, anyone can become a billionaire ... Just make the Netflix everyone wants for starters, and I have zero problems coming up with 100 more ideas.

[1] https://www.courthousenews.com/coders-lose-appeal-in-copyrig...

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jonhohle 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I reached out to both this legal team and SFC about cases where all of the LLMs will license strip open source code. In cases where BSD licensed code was copied into thousands of projects and millions of forks, it appears the training is so embedded that it will produce functions down to the formatting decisions. In the case of `strlcpy`, no human written version looks like the OpenBSD version, but most commercial LLMs will license strip the OpenBSD version when asked to implement. Depending on the context (not trying to trick them, just other programming questions), I’ve had them all produce it without license (100% score in JPlag).

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lilbigdoot 2 days ago | parent [-]

I keep wondering how this can of worms is going to play out. Right now it doesn't get them into trouble because they're taking from OSS communities, but what happens once one company finds out code they released with a restrictive license got copied verbatim into a closed product? Will they retaliate? Will they decide together to not open pandora's box? I wonder really

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kodablah 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Anthropic and OpenAI offer indemnity for this situation for their enterprise customers if such a suit were to happen. They will defend you and cover costs.

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spwa4 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It doesn't matter. The courts are entirely unfair. Take the copyright office's arguments: it states the court should explicitly address "Market Harm". Essentially, ANY fair use, such as AI training should be illegal, if it harms the market for the original authors EVEN WHERE THE LICENSE WOULD NORMALLY ALLOW THAT USE. That was reasoning applied to protect billionaire profits from the horror of library lending. The copyright office's position documents this extensively.

https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

See IV. Fair use, D. Factor Four

In other words, no matter the license, the fact that OpenAIs fair use of the works for training MIGHT take opportunities from the plaintiffs should, BY ITSELF, be an argument to make that AI training illegal. Even if the software programmers agreed to allow AI training, then still sued OpenAI, that is a valid argument accepted from billionaire companies.

In case you're wondering how the court argued that in this decision? It didn't. Not covered at all. Obviously brought up by the plaintiffs, not adressed. The weirdest pro-billionaire arguments are just accepted by the court (the big one is accepting AI models as making new works despite the copyright act clearly stating, 50+ times, only "natural persons" can make new works), and the most reasonable, long established principles, such as market harm (if the use of a copyrighted work harms its authors in the smallest way, even lost sales, even lost job opportunities, lost licensing opportunities, ...) is enough to forbid it's use EVEN WHERE THE LICENSE STATES DIFFERENTLY.

This was required because they wanted to forbid digital lending out of Disney's movies, where the lending software would guarantee that only one copy is actually in circulation (ie. use of DRM to let a library just show a movie without the patron coming to the library to get it). In other words: when billionaires want to make money of works, and the first sale doctrine as well as long standing fair use principles for libraries were in the way, the courts declared that market harm superseded fair use. And, of course, suddenly, when it protects programmers from billionaires, it doesn't apply anymore.

The courts deciding this way has done incredible damage to the availability of older works, to the point of destroying them entirely, since libraries cannot legally keep collections of older works and make those available over the internet, and it is impossible to keep the physical media in working condition and available over a large area, like the united states, for example.

Repeating theme here: absurd arguments to protect billionaire profits, silently rejecting and ignoring reasonable arguments to protect normal people.

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jonhohle a day ago | parent [-]

I looked into this a few years ago for lending older games or unique prototypes or press copies to researchers without having to send them a copy. VGHF argued for this use case with the copyright office and was denied an exemption to the DMCA, as the use case was not considered fair use (which affects DRM free media as well which is not affected by DMCA).

	▲	spwa4 a day ago \| parent [-]
		Given what happens if you ask Claude to reproduce some well-known game, especially FPS games ... you can be pretty damn sure it's seen the game, maybe they even trained on all the leaked source code they could find. But I find it very hard to believe that style, that code, the best game styles came from open source code. I mean if it trained on open source, you'd expect it to always come up with Quake essentially. That's not true at all. It's always very close to Call Of Duty in how they play. Very hard to believe in coincidences. 90% sure Anthropic did just that.

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vulcan01 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> just about the only thing Congress isn't allowed to do is to change the law retroactively

[IANAL] The Constitution prohibits ex post facto laws which retroactively criminalize (or increase criminal penalties of) past legal conduct. This does not apply to civil penalties, and does not apply to reductions in criminal penalties or decriminalization.

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chrismorgan 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> they have now declared AI models persons [1]

Your citation says no such thing. Maybe there’s more in the case itself (in which case, cite it), but I think you’re inferring that based on what I think is an incorrect understanding of what’s going on, also revealed in the rest of the paragraph.

(I’m not commenting on other parts of the comment directly, though I feel not identifying the “‘fair use’ exemption” claim or reacting to that in such a long tirade is a bit off.)

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spwa4 2 days ago | parent [-]

True, you have to look at copyright law as well. The only thing that can create a new work with copyright according to both US law AND the international convention is a "natural person".

It cannot even be a company according to the law (because copyright is split up in my textbook into what's called natural rights, such as authorship, and economic rights, such as the right to set a license. It must always have a natural person origin because that natural person retains the right to state they were the author forever, no matter what agreements he or she entered into. Meaning it's never the employer that gets that right)

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jonhohle 2 days ago | parent [-]

That means what the AI created is new (not always) but also not copyrightable. What will vibe coding companies do when they realize none of their software is protected by copyright? A EULA can’t prevent the use of public domain works. (In reality everything will increasingly move server side and no one will be able to access anything resembling code anyway).

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2 days ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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spwa4 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That's another way courts could go. But once again that would make life very hard for billionaires. So not a chance.

	▲	chrismorgan a day ago \| parent [-]
		No, that’s already where it’s gone <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence_and_co...>, continuing the tradition established before AI <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...>. The machine output is not directly copyrightable.

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skeaker 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Really surprised to see you get downvoted. This has been known for years and for a long time was more or less a pillar of thought in hacker spaces, at least since Aaron Swartz was killed by it. Copyright has basically only been used to keep society down.

If someone writes a really great Harry Potter (or whatever other character) book that you wind up really liking and you give them a buck for it, but then some faceless corporation yanks it out of your hands and throws them into prison because they weren't the original Harry Potter author, what has society really gained by doing that? Seems like we just put a guy in prison and burned that book that you liked for basically no reason.

We have the sum of all human knowledge at our fingertips thanks to the digitization of academia. Great! Huge positive for society, we should be in a golden age where anyone can learn anything they want to, but we're not because some guy in a suit says you owe him a million dollars to get access to the journal some paper was published in (a paper which was made by someone unrelated to the suit on your tax payer dime). Unbelievable, debatably apocalyptic net negative for society.

Nintendo doing this is just more of the same again. It won't ever stop until the law is fixed to fight for you and me instead of being used to kill people like Aaron.