We've held China accountable for counterfeiting products for decades and regulated their exports. So why should Anthropic be allowed to export their products and services after engaging in the same illegal activity?
Comment is more about the pseudo ethical high ground
You never noticed the hypocrite behavior all over society?
* O, you drunk drive, big fine, lots of trouble. * O, you drunk drive and are a senator, cop, mayor, ... Well, lets look the other way.
* You have anger management issues and slam somebody to the ground. Jail time. * You as a cop have anger management issues and slams somebody to the ground. Well, paid time off while we investigate and maybe a reprimand. Qualified immunity boy!
* You tax fraud for 10k, felony record, maybe jail time. * You as a exec of a company do tax fraud for 100 million. After 10 years lawyering around, maybe you get something, maybe, ... o, here is a fine of 5 million.
I am sorry but the idea of everybody being equal under the law has always been a illusion.
We are holding China accountable for counterfeiting products because it hurts OUR companies, and their income. But when its "us vs us", well, then it becomes a bit more messy and in general, those with the biggest backing (as in $$$, economic value, and lawyers), tends to win.
Wait, if somebody steal my book, i can sue that person in court, and get a payout (lawyers will cost me more but that is not the point). If some AI company steals my book, well, the chance you win is close to 1%, simply because lots of well paid lawyers will make your winning hard to impossible.
Our society has always been based upon power, wealth and influence. The more you have of it, the more you get away (or reduced) with things, that gets other fined or jailed.
We have? Are we from different multi-verses?
The one I've lived in to date has not done anything against Chinese counterfeits beyond occasionally seizing counterfeit goods during import. But that's merely occasionally enforcing local counterfeit law, a far cry from punishing the entity producing it.
As a matter of fact, the companies started outsourcing everything to China, making further IP theft and quasi-copies even easier
It's quite the mafia operation over at Amazon.
Rules don't apply to corporations making money for VCs.
So it goes.
Sayi "they have the money" is not an argument. It's about the amount of effort that is needed to individually buy, scan, process millions of pages. If that's done for you, why re-do it all?
105B+ is more than Anthropic is worth on paper.
Of course they’re not going to be charged to the fullest extent of the law, they’re not a teenager running Napster in the early 2000s.
I'm against Anthropic stealing teacher's work and discouraging them from ever writing again. Some teachers are already saying this (though probably not in California).
There is no equality, and seemingly there are worker bees who can be exploited, and there are privileged ones, and of course there are the queens.
Note: My definition of singularity isn't the one they use in San Francisco. It's the moment founders who stole the life's work of thousands of teachers finally go to prison, and their datacentres get seized.
Luigi was peanuts in comparison.
“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”
- Mark Twain
And it just so happens that that belief says they can burn whatever they want down because something in the future might happen that absolves them of those crimes.
Writers that have an authentic human voice and help people think about things in a new way will be fine for a while yet.
When it comes to a lot of these teachers, I'll say, copyright work hand in hand with college and school course book mandates. I've seen plenty of teachers making crazy money off students' backs due to these mandates.
A lot of the content taught in undergrad and school hasn't changed in decades or even centuries. I think we have all the books we'll ever need in certain subjects already, but copyright keeps enriching people who write new versions of these.
Pirating 7 million books, remixing their content, and using that to make money on Claude.ai is like counterfeiting 7 million branded products and selling them on your Shopify website. The original creators don't get payment, and someone's profiting off their work. Try doing that yourself and you'd get a knock on the door real quick.
Pirating 7 million books, remixing their content, and using that to make money on Claude.ai is like counterfeiting 7 million branded products and selling them on your Shopify website. The original creators don't get payment, and someone's profiting off their work.
Did you read the article? The judge literally just legally recognized it.
This is what every company using media are doing (think Spotify, Netflix, but also journal, ad agency, ...). I don't know why people in HN are giving a pass to AI company for this kind of behavior.
It's the new narrative in certain circles, especially in San Francisco: it's us vs China. We're doing all this to beat them, no matter the cost. While teachers are left scratching their heads with four kids to feed.
Individuals would have their lives ruined either from massive fines or jail time.
There are many small artists who do this not for money, but for fun and have their renowned styles. Even their styles are ripped off by these generative AI companies and turned into a slot machine to earn money for themselves. These artists didn't consent to that, and this affects their (mental) well-beings.
With that context in mind, what do you think about these people who are not in this for money is ripped out of their years of achievement and their hard work exploited for money by generative AI companies?
It's not about IP (with whatever expansion you prefer) or laws, but ethics in general.
Substitute comics for any medium. Code, music, painting, illustration, literature, short movies, etc.
Yes, style copying is generally considered legal, but as another commenter posted in a related thread "scale matters".
Maybe this will be reconsidered in the near future as the scale is in a much more different level with Generative AI. While there can be no technological solution to this (since it's a social problem to begin with), maybe public opinion about this issue will evolve over time.
To be crystal clear: I'm not against the tech. I'm against abusing and exploiting people for solely monetary profit.
I do support intellectual property reform that would be considered radical by some, as I imagine you do. But my highest hopes for this situation are more modest: if AI companies are told that their data must be in the public domain to train against, we will finally have a powerful faction among capitalists with a strong incentive to push back against the copyright monopolists when it comes to the continuous renewal of copyright terms.
If the "path of least resistance" for companies like Google, Microsoft, and Meta becomes enlarging the public domain, we might finally begin to address the stagnation of the public domain, and that could be a good thing.
But I think even such a modest hope as that one is unlikely to be realized. :-\
My response to this whole thread is just “good”
Aaron Swartz is a saint and a martyr.
Right guys we don't have rules for thee but not for me in the land of the free?
The difference is, Aaron Swartz wasn't planning to build massive datacenters with expensive Nvidia servers all over the world.
This was the result of a cruel and zealous overreach by the prosecutor to try to advance her political career. It should never have gone that far.
The failure of MIT to rally in support of Aaron will never be forgiven.
Lesson is simple. If you want to break a law make sure it is very profitable because then you can find investors and get away with it. If you play robin hood you will be met with a hammer.
https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files...
Funky quote:
> Rumors that early versions of Spotify used ‘pirate’ MP3s have been floating around the Internet for years. People who had access to the service in the beginning later reported downloading tracks that contained ‘Scene’ labeling, tags, and formats, which are the tell-tale signs that content hadn’t been obtained officially.
Daniel Ek said: "my mission is to make music accessible and legal to everyone, while ensuring artists and rights holders got paid"
Also, the Swedish government has zero tolerance for piracy.
Society underestimates the chasm that exists between an idea and raising sufficient capital to act on those ideas.
Plenty of people have ideas.
We only really see those that successfully cross it.
Small things EULA breaches, consumer licenses being used commercially for example.
This is a narrative that gets passed around in certain circles to justify stealing content.
In this context, stealing is often used as a pejorative term to make piracy sound worse than it is. Except for mass distribution, piracy is often regarded as a civil wrong, and not a crime.
Pirating 7 million books, remixing their content, and using that to make money on Claude.ai is like counterfeiting 7 million branded products and selling them on your Shopify website. The original creators don't get payment, and someone's profiting off their work.
Try doing that yourself and you'd get a knock on the door real quick.
Also mostly this would be a civil lawsuit for "damages".
The trial is scheduled for December 2025. That’s when a jury will decide how much Anthropic owes for copying and storing over seven million pirated books
Don’t have legal access to training data? Simply steal it, but move fast enough to keep ahead of the law. By the time lawsuits hit the company is worth billions and the product is embedded in everyday life.
That's a statement carefully crafted to be impossible to disprove. Of course they shipped pirated music (I've seen the files). Of course anyone paying attention knew. Nothing in the music industry was "clean" in those days. But, sure, no credible evidence because any evidence anyone shows you you'll decide is not credible. It's not in anyone's interests to say anything and none of it matters.
If you're an individual pirating software or media, then from the rights owners' perspective, the most rational thing to do is to make an example of you. It doesn't happen everyday, but it does happen and it can destroy lives.
If you're a corporation doing the same, the calculation is different. If you're small but growing, future revenues are worth more than the money that can be extracted out of you right now, so you might get a legal nastygram with an offer of a reasonable payment to bring you into compliance. And if you're already big enough to be scary, litigation might be just too expensive to the other side even if you answer the letter with "lol, get lost".
Even in the worst case - if Anthropic loses and the company is fined or even shuttered (unlikely) - the people who participated in it are not going to be personally liable and they've in all likelihood already profited immensely.
but systematic wide spread big things and often many of them, giving US giant a unfair combative advantage
and don't think if you are a EU company you can do the same in the US, nop nop
but naturally the US insist that US companies can do that in the EU and complain every time a US company is fined for not complying for EU law
The AI sector, famously known for its inability to raise funding. Anthropic has in the last four years raised 17 billion dollars
https://www.forbes.com/2009/08/04/online-anime-video-technol...
https://venturebeat.com/business/crunchyroll-for-pirated-ani...
My theory is that once they saw how much traffic they were getting, they realized how big of a market (subbed/dubbed) anime was.
- riding a wave of change
- not caring too much about legal constraints (or like they would say now "distrupting" the market, which very very often means doing illigal shit which beings them far more money then any penalties they will ever face from it)
- or caring about ethics too much
- and for recent years (starting with Amazone) a lot of technically illegal financing (technically undercutting competitors prices long term based on money from else where (e.g. investors) is unfair competitive advantage (theoretically) clearly not allowed by anti monopoly laws. And before you often still had other monopoly issues (e.g. see wintel)
So yes not systematic not complying with law to get unfair competitive advantage knowing that many of the laws are on the larger picture toothless when applied to huge companies is bread and butter work of US tech giants
It's not a common business practice. That's why it's considered newsworthy.
People on the internet have forgotten that the news doesn't report everyday, normal, common things, or it would be nothing but a listing of people mowing their lawns or applying for business loans. The reason something is in the news is because it is unusual or remarkable.
"I saw it online, so it must happen all the time" is a dopy lack of logic that infects society.
What you really should be asking is whether they infringed on the copyrights of the rippers. /s
"Anthropic cut up millions of used books to train Claude — and downloaded over 7 million pirated ones too, a judge said."
A not-so-subtle difference.
That said, in a sane world, they shouldn't have needed to cut up all those used books yet again when there's obviously already an existing file that does all the work.
https://investors.autodesk.com/news-releases/news-release-de...
“Piracy” is mostly a rhetorical term in the context of copyright. Legally, it’s still called infringement or unauthorized copying. But industries and lobbying groups (e.g., RIAA, MPAA) have favored “piracy” for its emotional weight.
Copyright infringement is unauthorized reproduction - you have made a copy of something, but you have not deprived the original owner of it. At most, you denied them revenue although generally less than the offended party claims, since not all instances of copying would have otherwise resulted in a sale.
This is reaching at best.
This is very different to what Anthropic did. Nobody was buying copies of books from Anthropic instead of the copyright holder.
Come up with a better comparison.
as long as you buy the book it still should be legal, that is if you actually buy the book and not a "read only" eBook
but the 7_000_000 pirated books are a huge issue, and one from which we have a lot of reason to believe isn't just specific to Anthropic
EDIT: Ah, the old, Hacker News pretend good faith question. Why bother answering you people? You're not interested in anything other than your existing point of view. The least Hacker thing about this place.
Fake altruistic mindset. Super sociopathic.
You are often allowed to nake a digital copy of a physical work you bought. There are tons of used, physical works thay would be good for training LLM's. They'd also be good for training OCR which could do many things, including improve book scanning for training.
This could be reduced to a single act of book destruction per copyrighted work or made unnecessary if copyright law allowed us to share others' works digitally with their licensed customers. Ex: people who own a physical copy or a license to one. Obviously, the implementation could get complex but we wouldn't have to destroy books very often.
This of course cannot be allowed to happen, so the the legal system is just a limbo, a bar which regular individuals must strain to pass under but that corporations regularly overstep.
Someone correct me if I am wrong but aren't these works being digitized and transformed in a way to make a profit off of the information that is included in these works?
It would be one thing for an individual to make person use of one or more books, but you got to have some special blindness not to see that a for-profit company's use of this information to improve a for-profit model is clearly going against what copyright stands for.
Simply, if the models can think then it is no different than a person reading many books and building something new from their learnings. Digitization is just memory. If the models cannot think then it is meaningless digital regurgitation and plagiarism, not to mention breach of copyright.
The quotes "consistent with copyright's purpose in enabling creativity and fostering scientific progress." and "Like any reader aspiring to be a writer" say, from what I can tell, that the judge has legally ruled the model can think as a human does, and therefore has the legal protections afforded to "creatives."
No, that's fallacious. Using anthropomorphic words to describe a machine does not give it the same kinds of rights and affordances we give real people.
Although, there’s an exception for fictional characters:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_fic...
Can anyone make a compelling argument that any of these AI companies have the public's best interest in mind (alignment/superalignment)?
Ensure the models are open source, so everyone can use them, as everyones data is in there?
Close those companies and force them to delete the models, as they used copyright material?
I can read 100 books and write a book based on the inspiration I got from the 100 books without any issue. However, if I pirate the 100 books I've still committed copyright infringement despite my new book being fully legal/fair use.
> Alsup ruled that Anthropic's use of copyrighted books to train its AI models was "exceedingly transformative" and qualified as fair use
> "All Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies"
It was always somewhat obvious that pirating a library would be copyright infringement. The interesting findings here are that scanning and digitizing a library for internal use is OK, and using it to train models is fair use.
pyman•7h ago
Stealing is stealing. Let's stop with the double standards.
damnesian•6h ago
originalvichy•6h ago
pyman•6h ago
That's not what's happening here. People weren't downloading music illegally and reselling it on Claude.ai. And while P2P networks led to some great tech, there's no solid proof they actually improved the music industry.
drcursor•5h ago
https://gizmodo.com/early-spotify-was-built-on-pirated-mp3-f...
pyman•4h ago
Imustaskforhelp•4h ago
I use an adblocker and tbh I think so many people on HN are okay with ad blocking and not piracy when basically both just block the end user from earning money.
I kind of believe that if you really like a software, you really like something. Just ask them what their favourite charity is and donate their or join their patreon/a direct way to support them.
Workaccount2•1h ago
"What serves me personally the best for any given situation" for 95% of people.
mnky9800n•5h ago
KoolKat23•5h ago
They make money off the model weights, which is fair use (as confirmed by recent case law).
j_w•4h ago
pyman•4h ago
KoolKat23•4h ago
If it outputs parts of the book verbatim then that's a different story.
pyman•4h ago
Pirating 7 million books, remixing their content, and using that to power Claude.ai is like counterfeiting 7 million branded products and selling them on your personal website. The original creators don't get credit or payment, and someone’s profiting off their work.
All this happens while authors, many of them teachers, are left scratching their heads with four kids to feed
KoolKat23•3h ago
KoolKat23•4h ago
Please keep in mind, copyright is intended as a compromise between benefit to society and to the individual.
A thought experiment, students pirating textbooks and applying that knowledge later on in their work?
j_w•4h ago
KoolKat23•3h ago
In my opinion, it will be upheld.
Looking at what is stored and the manner which it is stored. It makes sense that it's fair use.
mrcwinn•1h ago
Easy for the pirate to say. Artists might argue their intent was to trade compensation for one's personal enjoyment of the work.
Workaccount2•1h ago
jobs_throwaway•1h ago
SketchySeaBeast•39m ago
x3n0ph3n3•5h ago
1oooqooq•5h ago
pyman•5h ago
zb3•5h ago
pyman•4h ago
azangru•43m ago
Also, there are various incentives for teachers to publish books. Money is just one of them (I wonder how much revenue books bring to the teachers). Prestige and academic recognition is another. There are probably others still. How realistic is the depiction of a deprived teacher whose livelihood depended on the books he published once every several years?
BlackFly•4h ago
TiredOfLife•4h ago
seydor•2h ago
eviks•20m ago
impossiblefork•2h ago
There's so many texts, and they're so sparse that if I could copyright a work and never publish it, the restriction would be irrelevant. The probability that you would accidentally come upon something close enough that copyright was relevant is almost infinitesimal.
Because of this copyright is an incredibly weak restriction, and that it is as weak as it is shows clearly that any use of a copyrighted work is due to the convenience that it is available.
That is, it's about making use of the work somebody else has done, not about that restricting you somehow.
Therefore copyright is much more legitimate than ordinary property. Ordinary property, especially ownership of land, can actually limit other people. But since copyright is so sparse infringing on it is like going to world with near-infinite space and picking the precise place where somebody has planted a field and deciding to harvest from that particular field.
Consequently I think copyright infringement might actually be worse than stealing.
jpalawaga•5m ago
you're saying copying a book is worse than robbing a farmer of his food and/or livelihood, which cannot be replaced to duplicated. Meanwhile, someone who copies a book does not deprive the author of selling the book again (or a tasty proceedings from harvest).
I can't say I agree, for obvious reasons.
Der_Einzige•1h ago
troyvit•11m ago
dathinab•1h ago
that isn't "just" stealing, it's organized crime
1970-01-01•35m ago