Interesting excerpt:
> “We will have a trial on the pirated copies used to create Anthropic’s central library and the resulting damages,” Judge Alsup wrote in the decision. “That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages.”
Language of “pirated” and “theft” are from the article. If they did realize a mistake and purchased copies after the fact, why should that be insufficient?
As just a matter of society, I don't think you want people say stealing a car and then coming back a month later with the money.
1. You're assuming this was some good faith "they didn't know they were stealing" factor. They use someone else's product's for commercial use. I'm not so charitable in my interpretation.
2. I'm not absolved of theft just because I go back and put money on the register. I still sttole, intentionally or not
Regardless, I don't think the car is an apt metaphor here. Cars are an important utility and gatekeeping cars arguably holds society back., art is creative expression, and no one is going hungry because they didn't have $10 for the newest book.
We also have libraries already for this reason, so why not expand on that instead of relinquishing sharing of knowledge to a private corporation?
I don't think that's exactly the case. A lot of the HN crowd is very much against the current iterations of copyright law, but is much more against rules that they see as being unfairly applied. For most of us, we want copyright reform, but short of that, we want it to at least pretend to be used for what it is usually claimed to be for: protecting small artists from large, predatory companies.
Choosing someone's bitstrings is like choosing to harvest someone's fields in a world where there's infinite space of fertile fields. You picked his, instead of finding a space in the infinite expanse to farm on your own.
If you start writing something you'll never generate a copyrighted work at random. When the work isn't available nothing is taken away from you even if you were strictly forbidden from reproducing the work.
Choosing someone's particular bitstring is only done because there's someone who has expended effort in preparing it.
Copyright infringement does not deprive the copyright owner of its property and is not criminal. So in this case only the lawsuit part applies. The owner is only entitled to the monetary damages, which is the lost sale. But in this case the sale price was paid to the owner 1 month later, so the only real damages will be the interest the publisher could have earned if they had got their money one month earlier.
Books have a resale market. Every “lost sale” isn’t necessarily of a new purchase from a bookstore or Amazon.
Copyright has a place. Rent-seeking authors attacking LLM owners is not a sympathetic case. Said authors are demanding to have their ideas relegated to unknown backwaters. It makes the authors worse off. It makes the community poorer. Cui bono?
They aren't sides of the same coin, so neither? They have as much in common as a balloon full of helium and the an opossum.
Folks try to create a false equivalency between landlords and creatives, but they aren't remotely the same. I generally consider this to be a bad faith argument by people who just want free things. (The argument against landlords isn't free housing, even though the argument against copyright is piracy)
Landlords have something with a limited supply and rent it to other people for their use. Access to the particular something is necessary on the residential side and generally important on the commercial side.
Copyrighted works haven't had a limited supply since around 1440 and are a couple rungs higher on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Copyright laws are, by their nature, intended to simulate the market effects of a limited supply as to incentivize people to create those works.
Have laws and vultures created perverse incentives in both markets? Absolutely. Are there both good and bad landlords and copyright holders? Absolutely.
But we could address the flaws in one without even thinking to talk about the other.
It makes perfect sense to me that the big carmakers could get together some day and develop a handful of car platforms that all their cars will be built upon. That way they can buy the parts from any number of manufacturers (on-demand!) and save themselves a ton of money.
They kind of already do that, actually =)
Google literally scrapes pirated content all day every day. When they do that they have no idea if the content was legally placed on that website. Yet, they scan and index it anyway because there's actually no way to know (at all!). There's no great big database of all copyrighted works they can reference.
I'm not saying Meta and Anthropic didn't know they were pirating content. I'm saying that it should be moot since they never distributed it. You can't claim a violation of copyright for content that was never actually "copied" (aka distributed). The site/seeders that uploaded the content to Meta/Anthropic are the violators since copyright is all about distribution rights.