Stealing is stealing. Let's stop with the double standards.
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.
They make money off the model weights, which is fair use (as confirmed by recent case law).
https://gizmodo.com/early-spotify-was-built-on-pirated-mp3-f...
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.
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?
If it outputs parts of the book verbatim then that's a different story.
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
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.
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.
Easy for the pirate to say. Artists might argue their intent was to trade compensation for one's personal enjoyment of the work.
that isn't "just" stealing, it's organized crime
"What serves me personally the best for any given situation" for 95% of people.
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.
Just as the farmer obtains his livelihood from the investment-of-energy-to-raise-crops-to-energy cycle the author has his livelihood by the investment-of-energy-to-finding-a-useful-work-to-energy cycle.
So he is in fact robbed in a very similar way.
If by "what is stored and the manner which it is stored" is intended to signal model weights, I'm not sure what the argument is? The four factors of copyright in no way mention a storage medium for data, lossless or loss-y.
(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.
In my opinion, this will likely see a supreme court ruling by the end of the decade.
I remember when piracy wasn't theft, and information wanted to be free.
I get the sentiment, but that statement as is, is absurdly reductive. Details matter. Even if someone takes merchandise from a store without paying, their sentence will vary depending on the details.
A trillion parameter SOTA model is not substantially comprised of the one copyrighted piece. (If it was a Harry Potter model trained only on Harry Potter books this would be a different story).
Embeddings are not copy paste.
The last point about market impact would be where they make their argument but it's tenuous. It's not the primary use of AI models and built in prompts try to avoid this, so it shouldn't be commonplace unless you're jail breaking the model, most folk aren't.
You'd have to steal the author's ownership of the intellectual property in order for the comparison to be valid, just as you stole ownership of his crop.
Separately, there is a reason why theft and copyright infringement are two distinct concepts in law.
Ordinary property is much worse than copyright, which is both time limited and not necessarily obtained through work, and which is much more limited in availability than the number of sequences.
When someone owns land, that's actually a place you stumble upon and can't enter, whereas you're not going to ever stumble upon the story of even 'Nasse hittar en stol' (swedish 'Nasse finds a chair') a very short book for very small children.
Meanwhile other cases have been less friendly to it being fair use, AI companies are already paying vast sums to publishers who presumably they wouldn’t if they felt confident it was “the law”, and on and on.
I don’t like arguing from “it’s the law”. A lot of law is terrible. What’s right? It’s clear to me that if AI gets good enough, as it nearly is now, it sucks a lot of profit away from creators. That is unbalanced. The AI doesn’t exist without the creators, the creators need to exist for our society to be great (we want new creative works, more if anything). Law tends to start conservatively based on historical precedent, and when a new technology comes along it often errs on letting it do some damage to avoid setting a bad precedent. In time it catches up as society gets a better view of things.
The right thing is likely not to let our creative class be decimated so a few tech companies become fantastically wealthy - in the long run, it’s the right thing even for the techies.
Big if. Practically, the movie studios aren’t poor because their product has instances of infringement.
So the median person who is harmed when something competes with his book authorship is someone making 20k p.a., not someone who is a major shareholder of a big firm.
But yea one of the smallest nitpicks I have with them is the algorithm since its a hit or miss. Sure you can remove the algorithm completely but I would really wish if I could ask something like their SOTA AI models (Gemini) to make my algorithm for me right within youtube and I can say things like No clickbait etc.
you can use alternatives but those do not have the actual content that is the reason anybody watches youtube (its in the name).
im also talking about free alternatives to premium being better for example offline videos still having DRM unlike every free yt downloader ever. the only way they have made premium better is by actively making the experience worse for everybody else is by pay walling the old default bitrate.
>Let's see how long they remain free once (if) they actually see a meaningful amount of traffic
there continues effort towards making the platform worse with every decision does not have anything to do with funding
https://www.thetoptens.com/youtube/youtube-features-were-rem...
Remember, copyright has always been a comprise between individuals and society in the first place. We can extend it but in the same breath, it may have other unforseen consequences.