[matheusmoreira]

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.

[root-parent]

Remember Aaron Swartz who did something that just pales compared to what Dario Amodei, Zuckerberg-Mr-Torrent and Sam Altman did.

[314]

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]

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]

> 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]

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]

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.

[stingraycharles]

I think this comment is missing a /s, right?

[dan_i]

Quick refresher on American values: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_colonial_histor...

[petcat]

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]

I thought this thread was about Alibaba's internal policies. How did we get here?

[batch12]

The article talks about European colonies, so would these have been European values then since America did not yet exist?

[abenga]

That's just the label that changed. Same people, same values.

[dan_i]

> The article talks about European colonies, so would these have been European values then since America did not yet exist?

Slavery is an expression of capitalist values.

Frederick Douglass is Karl Marx's ideological predecessor.

You aren't wrong that the European powers were slavers. That being said, the culture of the 13 American colonies is the first appearance of the unique Euro-American culture that dominates the United States.

It's wrongheaded to deny the central importance of slavery to American culture and values.

In the United States, the land of the small business owner, slaves mixed socially and sexually with their captors and with the culture of their captors.

For this reason, the culture of the United States is deeply affected by the institution of slavery in ways that are alien to the European powers.

[matheusmoreira]

Indeed I do. We should all remember him. Rest in peace.

[vlovich123]

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.

[root-parent]

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]

> "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.

[andersonpico]

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?

[vlian2088]

>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.)

[mapontosevenths]

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]

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]

>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]

> 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

[mapontosevenths]

> 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.

[bee_rider]

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]

>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]

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.

[triceratops]

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.

[lelandfe]

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]

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.

[mapontosevenths]

So if I watch a LOT of Disney movies THEN they own my own unique output forever?

[hartbook]

yes it is if you write it down from memory and sell it. Exactly what LLM companies do

[samrus]

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]

> 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]

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

[vlovich123]

Exactly, and the complexity of what they’re doing is an even more significant novel creation.

Particularly in the US there’s a four point test and the very first point:

> To justify the use as fair, one must demonstrate how it either advances knowledge or the progress of the arts through the addition of something new.

I don’t know anything that has advanced the knowledge and progress of the arts more.

> The third factor assesses the amount and substantiality of the copyrighted work that has been used. In general, the less that is used in relation to the whole, the more likely the use will be considered fair.

This isn’t about usage in training. This would be in the LLM itself - the copyrighted works are very rarely used in the output.

> The fourth factor measures the effect that the allegedly infringing use has had on the copyright owner's ability to exploit his original work

Would you sincerely claim that owners have become less able to make money because of LLMs? Those same owners using LLMs to increase their own output of copyrighted works?

Anyway, copyright is not an absolute right and you have to really misunderstand copyright law to claim that LLM training infringes it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

[cryptonym]

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]

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]

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

[john_strinlai]

>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)

[JsonDemWitOster]

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!>

[vlovich123]

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.

[codedokode]

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?

[UqWBcuFx6NV4r]

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]

> 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.

[Simulacra]

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..

[Obscurity4340]

KimDoctCom?

[datsci_est_2015]

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.

[xienze]

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?"

[monooso]

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]

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?

[curtisblaine]

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.

[matheusmoreira]

> 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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[cinntaile]

Settlements after the fact, not agreements beforehand.

No that's not something. That's just having infinitely more money to fight legal battles.

[mapontosevenths]

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.