[dghlsakjg]

> As far as I'm concerned, the courts are wrong, and training on ill gotten copyrighted material is not fair use.

It’s important to remember that a court’s job is to apply law to a situation. When a court gets something wrong it’s a misinterpretation of the law and will, by definition, be overturnable on appeal. I suspect that your objection isn’t that the court is wrong, it’s that the law is wrong.

[smolder]

Yes, ultimately the problem is that the law is vague or inadequate. The courts have their definitions of fair use, which are their best efforts at interpreting the law, and I have mine, which is different.

[themgt]

William Roper: "So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!"

Sir Thomas More: "Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?"

William Roper: "Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!"

Sir Thomas More: "Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!"

[tetha]

This is why the idea of being "Vogelfrei" or "lawless" was honestly a terrifying concept in the middle ages. They are neither bound by law, nor protected by law.

A lawless man can be struck down with force without persecution by law, because they are lawless.

[mycall]

> A lawless man can be struck down with force without persecution by law, because they are lawless.

Doesn't this define modern day police force theory?

[SR2Z]

No, because these days we are quite explicit that the law binds us all. Citizen or not, legally present or not, criminal or not, every human being within the borders of the US (or any modern country) is entitled to the full protection of the law.

When an American becomes an outlaw, it doesn't mean the same thing as it did back then. There is no legal way for the government to deny someone their rights.

[tetha]

I am not 100% familiar with this theory, but I'm fairly sure there is an important difference: The monopoly of violence current police forces are granted did not exist in this particular way.

If a lawless man robbed from a village, any of the villagers could do whatever they wanted to them in retribution. Maybe limited a bit by religion.

[smolder]

That's a cool quote but utterly useless. You have a strong opinion and no argument.

[mycall]

So this is first-mover's advantage in play here?

[freejazz]

It's not a settled area of law and there is a SDNY judge that has a completely different application of the fair use analysis in the same exact context and came to a completely different conclusion (that it is not fair use).

[consensus1]

I would like to see a citation on that b/c I am unaware of it. The only case I see in SDNY is the NYT v OpenAI case which has not been ruled on yet. https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/copyright-law-20...

[freejazz]

Sorry, I'm thinking of Kadrey, where the court rejected Anthropic's "training" argument and provided an explanation as to how author litigants should demonstrate market harm in order to succeed on a fair use analysis, a factor that Alsup did not effectively weigh.

[keeda]

I suspect the market harm angle is not going to work out either based on the one study I know of on the topic: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34777

> We document a tripling in the number of new books coming to market between late 2022 and late 2025 that mirrors the use of AI that we detect in new books. The effects of this influx on consumer welfare depend on the quality of the additional books. The average quality of new books has fallen with the LLM-induced influx, and books with detected AI are substantially worse than human-authored books, so that much of the new work is of little value to consumers. Still, the LLM influx has delivered some books in the middle range of the usage/quality distribution, and the LLM-era entry process delivered seven percent more consumer surplus from books than the pre-LLM process in 2025.

...

Moreover, the arrival of LLMs does not appear to have displaced activity by incumbent authors. Despite the controversy surrounding LLMs, their effect on book consumers – like other cost-reducing technological changes in the cultural industries – is positive. However, because the new books are mostly of low quality, the effects are modest

So not only are existing authors unharmed (because most of the new competition is slop) there is even a small improvement for consumers.

[budsniffer952]

What do you know, you can get someone to support any message or arguments you want.

Lesson in there about experts and politics.