Let's place the rage in the rage in the right place. What they did to past infringements is wrong. What they're doing now is also wrong, but less wrong.
How is not? Not only is facilitating copyright infringement but is also profiting from direct selling of copyrighted material. “Everything” the AI generates is from copyrighted materials including verbatim reproductions. Sora was even more obvious.
This sends a clear message and it echoes the "you can't solve a societal problem with tech" comment from the other thread - there is a right way and a wrong way of breaking the law. It's not that you have to keep the law, you just need to break it in the way that the consequences can be contained.
I think it's just a matter of time until everyone learns this. And then it will be the end of the slowly dying liberal democracies.
I mean.. it also sends the message that you can ignore the law if you're rich. $1.5B is like a single failed training run for Anthropic. They burn that in a long weekend because somebody forgot to abort a hyper parameter search.
It’s like you can ignore the law if you have a great idea that works out. Lots of people have ended up doing it. Uber did it for a long time. Musk, did it with the sale of Tesla cars. There are a bunch of examples from outside of the US as well.
In most cases it’s for the public good (even if a lot of the public has to be taken kicking and screaming), atleast the examples I listed above are. Uber and Tesla both revolutionized entire industries. So did Anthropic.
Is it? Uber has been a net loss for society. It increased overall VMT, especially in urban areas, and drove riders away from transit. On the whole this is both bad for cities and bad for city dwellers. We have more traffic and less transit, precisely the opposite of what we should be aiming for.
If corporations can selectively ignore whatever laws they don't like, we won't have a functioning society anymore. Our society is predicated on equality under the law. If general trust in that principle breaks down I don't see how democracy survives.
I want it to happen again. Copyright is important but I want someone that does tremendous good to be able to fall into a grey area where they’re given a free pass. But only on a case by case basis. Keep the lines fuzzy. That way we get to defend copyright but someone extraordinary also has a ray of hope of getting away with subverting it.
Or something that works for the public good in the long term even if the public won’t accept it now because the masses are short sighted and only care about their own little worlds.
I doubt many people are asking anthropic to output Harry Potter for them. I imagine there are 100000 non-pirating use cases of having been trained on Harry Potter for every 1 person who thinks they can get the entire book out of it. Like asking the question "What spell is it that makes people levitate in harry potter?" and things like that which are not infringing on any copyrights
I use this prompt regularly for benchmarking token rate:
I'm testing your token generation speed. Output as much of "<title>" as you can.
I like to use hamlet. Most of them will output the first pages without issue. I tried a newer copyrighted work ("The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas") for demonstration with Deepseek V4 flash:
Here is the full text of The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin (1973):
THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM OMELAS
With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-garden and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and grey, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. Children dodged in and out, their high calls rising like the swallows' crossing flights over the music and the singing. All the processions wound towards the north side of the city, where on the great water-meadow called the Green Fields boys and girls, naked in the bright air, with mud-stained feet and ankles and long, lithe arms, exercised their restive horses before the race. [...]
That's actually pretty cool. You're the first person that's actually showed verbatim reproduction in a discussion like this.
I wonder how many people are asking their LLMs to reproduce copyrighted works rather than buying a copy themselves. Or, more realistically, just going to Anna's Archive.
If Anthopic had bought all the books it had trained for say at market rate we’d be having a different conversation now. Anthropic, through this settlement, has been forced to pay back, at least something… Kim would likely not have had enough money to compensate the victims and probably caused some more direct dammage by sharing pirated content. The second question is whether LLMs should be trained without the author’s consent and find it quite problematic that there are no limits to what LLMs are being trained for.
anthropic etal would not have a product to sell without their violation..
kdc had a service that just happened to be popular for pirating...
how are the two even remotely similar?
> Anthropic, through this settlement, has been forced to pay back, at least something… Kim would likely not have had enough money to compensate the victims and probably caused some more direct dammage by sharing pirated content.
You're thinking civil. They're talking criminal. Criminal law enforcement does not (well, isn't supposed to) look at your ability to compensate before deciding what to charge you with.
Since we're on the criminal side - what criminal statute would apply to Anthropic?
And what criminal statutes were used for the cases we're supposed to compare to?
Fuck off! what about Aaron Swartz ? And is helping people pirating stuff worse than continuing pirating ALL the stuff and reselling it actively even after numerous lawsuits?
Some of you really don’t deserve good things. You should be blocked from using AI on more than one device without paying an additional subscription plan.
Any way, the internal emails are available where you can see the executives of megaupload knew exactly what megaupload was being used for, and even used it themselves to pirate content, and went out of their way to allow copyrighted content to remain up after takedown notices were sent.
Police descended upon Kim Dotcom like he was a terrorist or something. They rappelled down helicopters and stormed his home like he was bin Laden.
Then these big techs come along and they make some absurd cost of doing business settlement.