- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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Well maybe they shouldn’t have done of the largest violations of copyright and intellectual property ever.
Probably the largest single instance ever.
I feel like it can’t even be close. What would even compete? I know I’ve gone a little overboard with my external hard drive, but I don’t think even I’m to that level.
threatens to “financially ruin” the entire AI industry
No. Just the LLM industry and AI slop image and video generation industries. All of the legitimate uses of AI (drug discovery, finding solar panel improvements, self driving vehicles, etc) are all completely immune from this lawsuit, because they’re not dependent on stealing other people’s work.
But it would also mean that the Internet Archive is illegal, even tho they don’t profit, but if scraping the internet is a copyright violation, then they are as guilty as Anthropic.
IA doesn’t make any money off the content. Not that LLM companies do, but that’s what they’d want.
Profit (or even revenue) is not required for it to be considered an infringement, in the current legal framework.
Do you think that would rescue the IA from the type of people who made the IA already pull 300k books?
No. But going after LLMs wont make the situation for IA any worse, not directly anyway.
if the courts decide that scraping is illegal, IA can close up shop.
They could move to a voluntary model in the worst case, they don’t profit from it. Institute a “robots.txt” style protocol for signalling opt-in intent to volunteer for scraping by the archive.
yeah that might work, but what will happen to all the data they store currently?
Scrapping the Internet is not illegal. All AI companies did much more beyond that, they accessed private writings, private code, copyrighted images. they scanned copyrighted books (and then destroyed them), downloaded terabytes of copyrighted torrents … etc
So, the message is like piracy is OK when it’s done massively by a big company. They’re claiming “fair use” and most judges are buying it (or being bought?)
deleted by creator
Meanwhile some Italian YouTuber was raided because some portable consoles already came with roms in their memory, they only go after individuals.
I am holding my breath! Will they walk free, or get a $10 million fine and then keep doing what every other thieving, embezzling, looting, polluting, swindling, corrupting, tax evading mega-corporation have been doing for a century!
Would be better if the fee were nominal, but that all their training data must never be used. Start them over from scratch and make it illegal to use anything that it knows now. Knee cap these frivolous little toys
This is how corruption works - the fine is the cost of business. Being given only a fine of $10 million is such a win that they’ll raise $10 billion in new investment on its back.
As Anthropic argued, it now “faces hundreds of billions of dollars in potential damages liability at trial in four months” based on a class certification rushed at “warp speed” that involves “up to seven million potential claimants, whose works span a century of publishing history,” each possibly triggering a $150,000 fine.
So you knew what stealing the copyrighted works could result in, and your defense is that you stole too much? That’s not how that works.
Actually that usually is how it works. Unfortunately.
*Too big to fail" was probably made up by the big ones.
The purpose of copyright is to drive works into the public domain. Works are only supposed to remain exclusive to the artist for a very limited time, not a “century of publishing history”.
The copyright industry should lose this battle. Copyright exclusivity should be shorter than patent exclusivity.
Copyright companies losing the case wouldn’t make copyright any shorter.
Their winning of the case reinforces a harmful precedent.
At the very least, the claims of those members of the class that are based on >20-year copyrights should be summarily rejected.
Copyright owners winning the case maintains the status quo.
The AI companies winning the case means anything leaked on the internet or even just hosted by a company can be used by anyone, including private photos and communication.
If scraping is illegal, so is the Internet Archive, and that would be an immense loss for the world.
This is the real concern. Copyright abuse has been rampant for a long time, and the only reason things like the Internet Archive are allowed to exist is because the copyright holders don’t want to pick a fight they could potentially lose and lessen their hold on the IPs they’re hoarding. The AI case is the perfect thing for them, because it’s a very clear violation with a good amount of public support on their side, and winning will allow them to crack down even harder on all the things like the Internet Archive that should be fair use. AI is bad, but this fight won’t benefit the public either way.
I love this. I hope big-tech/big-AI destroys big-copyright industry.
Nah, the only thing that could realistically happen is that copyright doesn’t apply to AI hosted by large corporations. In no way will this destroy copyright claims against individuals or small companies.
Is this how Disney becomes the owner of all of the AI companies too? Lol
Oh no! Building a product with stolen data was a rotten idea after all. Well, at least the AI companies can use their fabulously genius PhD level LLMs to weasel their way out of all these lawsuits. Right?
PhD level LLM = paying MAs $21/hr to write summaries of paragraphs for them to improve off of. Google Gemini outsourced their work like this, so I assume everyone else did too.
I propose that anyone defending themselves in court over AI stealing data must be represented exclusively by AI.
Hilarious.
“ooh, so sorry, but your LLM was trained on proprietary documents stolen from several major law firms, and they are all suing you now”
We just need to show that ChatGPT and alike can generate Nintendo based content and let it fight out between them
An important note here, the judge has already ruled in this case that "using Plaintiffs’ works “to train specific LLMs [was] justified as a fair use” because “[t]he technology at issue was among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes.” during the summary judgement order.
The plaintiffs are not suing Anthropic for infringing on their copyright, the court has already ruled that it was so obvious that they could not succeed with that argument that it could be dismissed. Their only remaining claim is that Anthropic downloaded the books from piracy sites using bittorrent
This isn’t about LLMs anymore, it’s a standard “You downloaded something on Bittorrent and made a company mad”-type case that has been going on since Napster.
Also, the headline is incredibly misleading. It’s ascribing feelings to an entire industry based on a common legal filing that is not by itself noteworthy. Unless you really care about legal technicalities, you can stop here.
The actual news, the new factual thing that happened, is that the Consumer Technology Association and the Computer and Communications Industry Association filed an Amicus Brief, in an appeal of an issue that Anthropic the court ruled against.
This is pretty normal legal filing about legal technicalities. This isn’t really newsworthy outside of, maybe, some people in the legal profession who are bored.
The issue was class certification.
Three people sued Anthropic. Instead of just suing Anthropic on behalf of themselves, they moved to be certified as class. That is to say that they wanted to sue on behalf of a larger group of people, in this case a “Pirated Books Class” of authors whose books Anthropic downloaded from the book piracy websites.
The judge ruled they can represent the class, Anthropic appealed the ruling. During this appeal an industry group filed an Amicus brief with arguments supporting Anthropic’s argument. This is not uncommon, The Onion famously filed an Amicus brief with the Supreme Court when they were about to rule on issues of parody. Like everything The Onion writes, it’s a good piece of satire: link
Let’s go baby! The law is the law, and it applies to everybody
If the “genie doesn’t go back in the bottle”, make him pay for what he’s stealing.
The law absolutely does not apply to everybody, and you are well aware of that.
Shouldn’t it?
I was reading the article and thinking “suck a dick, AI companies” but then it mentions the EFF and ALA filed against the class action. I have found those organizations to be generally reputable and on the right side of history, so now I’m wondering what the problem is.
I disagree with the EFF and ALA on this one.
These were entire sets of writing consumed and reworked into poor data without respecting the license to them.
Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if copyright wasn’t the only thing to be the problem here, but intellectual property as well. In that case, EFF probably has an interest in that instead. Regardless, I really think it need to be brought through court.
LLMs are harmful, full stop. Most other Machine Learning mechanisms use licensed data to train. In the case of software as a medical device, such as image analysis AI, that data is protected by HIPPA and special attention is already placed in order to utilize it.
My guess is that the EFF is mostly concerned with the fact this is a class action and also worried about expanding copyright in general.
Fucking good!! Let the AI industry BURN!
What um, what court system do you think is going to make that happen? Cause the current one is owned by an extremely pro-AI administration. If anything gets appealed to SCOTUS they will rule for AI.
The people who literally own this planet have investigated the people who literally own this planet and found that they literally own this planet and what the FUCK are you going to do about it, bacteria of the planet?
^
What in the absolute fuck are you talking about?! Your comment is asinine, “bacteria of the planet” the fuck?! Do you have the same “worm in the brain” that RFK claims to have because you sound just as stupid as him?
You claim people “own” this planet… um… what in the absolute fuck? Yes, people with money have always push an agenda but “owning” it, is beyond the dumbest statement.
