Well maybe they shouldn’t have done of the largest violations of copyright and intellectual property ever.
Probably the largest single instance ever.
I feel like it can’t even be close. What would even compete? I know I’ve gone a little overboard with my external hard drive, but I don’t think even I’m to that level.
I love this. I hope big-tech/big-AI destroys big-copyright industry.
I am holding my breath! Will they walk free, or get a $10 million fine and then keep doing what every other thieving, embezzling, looting, polluting, swindling, corrupting, tax evading mega-corporation have been doing for a century!
Would be better if the fee were nominal, but that all their training data must never be used. Start them over from scratch and make it illegal to use anything that it knows now. Knee cap these frivolous little toys
This is how corruption works - the fine is the cost of business. Being given only a fine of $10 million is such a win that they’ll raise $10 billion in new investment on its back.
Meanwhile some Italian YouTuber was raided because some portable consoles already came with roms in their memory, they only go after individuals.
threatens to “financially ruin” the entire AI industry
No. Just the LLM industry and AI slop image and video generation industries. All of the legitimate uses of AI (drug discovery, finding solar panel improvements, self driving vehicles, etc) are all completely immune from this lawsuit, because they’re not dependent on stealing other people’s work.
But it would also mean that the Internet Archive is illegal, even tho they don’t profit, but if scraping the internet is a copyright violation, then they are as guilty as Anthropic.
IA doesn’t make any money off the content. Not that LLM companies do, but that’s what they’d want.
Profit (or even revenue) is not required for it to be considered an infringement, in the current legal framework.
Do you think that would rescue the IA from the type of people who made the IA already pull 300k books?
No. But going after LLMs wont make the situation for IA any worse, not directly anyway.
if the courts decide that scraping is illegal, IA can close up shop.
And this is exactly the reason why I think the IA will be forced to close down while AI companies that trained their models on it will not only stay but be praised for preserving information in an ironic twist. Because one side does participate in capitalism and the other doesn’t. They will claim AI is transformative enough even when it isn’t because the overly rich invested too much money into the grift.
Archival is a fair use.
Scrapping the Internet is not illegal. All AI companies did much more beyond that, they accessed private writings, private code, copyrighted images. they scanned copyrighted books (and then destroyed them), downloaded terabytes of copyrighted torrents … etc
So, the message is like piracy is OK when it’s done massively by a big company. They’re claiming “fair use” and most judges are buying it (or being bought?)
i say move it out of the us
they should have done that long ago, and if they haven’t already started a backup in both europe and china, it’s high time
Is this how Disney becomes the owner of all of the AI companies too? Lol
Good fuck those fuckers
We just need to show that ChatGPT and alike can generate Nintendo based content and let it fight out between them
They will probably just merge into another mega-golem controlled by one of the seven people who own the planet.
Mario, voiced by Chris Pratt, will become the new Siri, then the new persona for all AI.
In the future, all global affairs will be divided across the lines of Team Mario and Team Luigi. Then the final battle, then the end.
*dabs, mournfully*
Only 80% of it, the other 7 billion of us own anything from nothing to a few hundred square metres each.
As Anthropic argued, it now “faces hundreds of billions of dollars in potential damages liability at trial in four months” based on a class certification rushed at “warp speed” that involves “up to seven million potential claimants, whose works span a century of publishing history,” each possibly triggering a $150,000 fine.
So you knew what stealing the copyrighted works could result in, and your defense is that you stole too much? That’s not how that works.
Actually that usually is how it works. Unfortunately.
*Too big to fail" was probably made up by the big ones.
If scraping is illegal, so is the Internet Archive, and that would be an immense loss for the world.
This is the real concern. Copyright abuse has been rampant for a long time, and the only reason things like the Internet Archive are allowed to exist is because the copyright holders don’t want to pick a fight they could potentially lose and lessen their hold on the IPs they’re hoarding. The AI case is the perfect thing for them, because it’s a very clear violation with a good amount of public support on their side, and winning will allow them to crack down even harder on all the things like the Internet Archive that should be fair use. AI is bad, but this fight won’t benefit the public either way.
I wouldn’t even say AI is bad, i have currently Qwen 3 running on my own GPU giving me a course in RegEx and how to use it. It sometimes makes mistakes in the examples (we all know that chatbots are shit when it comes to the r’s in strawberry), but i see it as “spot the error” type of training for me, and the instructions themself have been error free for now, since i do the lesson myself i can easily spot if something goes wrong.
AI crammed into everything because venture capitalists try to see what sticks is probably the main reason public opinion of chatbots is bad, and i don’t condone that too, but the technology itself has uses and is an impressive accomplishment.
Same with image generation: i am shit at drawing, and i don’t have the money to commission art if i want something specific, but i can generate what i want for myself.
If the copyright side wins, we all might lose the option to run imagegen and llms on our own hardware, there will never be an open-source llm, and resources that are important to us all will come even more under fire than they are already. Copyright holders will be the new AI companies, and without competition the enshittification will instantly start.
What you see as “spot the error” type training, another person sees as absolute fact that they internalize and use to make decisions that impact the world. The internet gave rise to the golden age of conspiracy theories, which is having a major impact on the worsening political climate, and it’s because the average user isn’t able to differentiate information from disinformation. AI chatbots giving people the answer they’re looking for rather than the truth is only going to compound the issue.
I agree that this has to become better in the future, but the technology is pretty young, and i am pretty sure that fixing this stuff has a high priority in those companies - it’s bad PR for them. But the people are already gorging themselves on faulty info per social media - i don’t see that chatbots are making this really worse than it already is.
The purpose of copyright is to drive works into the public domain. Works are only supposed to remain exclusive to the artist for a very limited time, not a “century of publishing history”.
The copyright industry should lose this battle. Copyright exclusivity should be shorter than patent exclusivity.
Copyright companies losing the case wouldn’t make copyright any shorter.
Their winning of the case reinforces a harmful precedent.
At the very least, the claims of those members of the class that are based on >20-year copyrights should be summarily rejected.
Copyright owners winning the case maintains the status quo.
The AI companies winning the case means anything leaked on the internet or even just hosted by a company can be used by anyone, including private photos and communication.
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Copyright owners are then the new AI companies, and compared to now where open source AI is a possibility, it will never be, because only they will have enough content to train models. And without any competition, enshittification will go full speed ahead, meaning the chatbots you don’t like will still be there, and now they will try to sell you stuff and you can’t even choose a chatbot that doesn’t want to upsell you.
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An important note here, the judge has already ruled in this case that "using Plaintiffs’ works “to train specific LLMs [was] justified as a fair use” because “[t]he technology at issue was among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes.” during the summary judgement order.
The plaintiffs are not suing Anthropic for infringing on their copyright, the court has already ruled that it was so obvious that they could not succeed with that argument that it could be dismissed. Their only remaining claim is that Anthropic downloaded the books from piracy sites using bittorrent
This isn’t about LLMs anymore, it’s a standard “You downloaded something on Bittorrent and made a company mad”-type case that has been going on since Napster.
Also, the headline is incredibly misleading. It’s ascribing feelings to an entire industry based on a common legal filing that is not by itself noteworthy. Unless you really care about legal technicalities, you can stop here.
The actual news, the new factual thing that happened, is that the Consumer Technology Association and the Computer and Communications Industry Association filed an Amicus Brief, in an appeal of an issue that Anthropic the court ruled against.
This is pretty normal legal filing about legal technicalities. This isn’t really newsworthy outside of, maybe, some people in the legal profession who are bored.
The issue was class certification.
Three people sued Anthropic. Instead of just suing Anthropic on behalf of themselves, they moved to be certified as class. That is to say that they wanted to sue on behalf of a larger group of people, in this case a “Pirated Books Class” of authors whose books Anthropic downloaded from the book piracy websites.
The judge ruled they can represent the class, Anthropic appealed the ruling. During this appeal an industry group filed an Amicus brief with arguments supporting Anthropic’s argument. This is not uncommon, The Onion famously filed an Amicus brief with the Supreme Court when they were about to rule on issues of parody. Like everything The Onion writes, it’s a good piece of satire: link
The site formatting broke it. Maybe it’ll work as a link
Yup, seems to work
Thanks! That was a good read.
Now they’re in the “finding out” phase of the “fucking around and finding out”.
Fucking good!! Let the AI industry BURN!
What um, what court system do you think is going to make that happen? Cause the current one is owned by an extremely pro-AI administration. If anything gets appealed to SCOTUS they will rule for AI.
The people who literally own this planet have investigated the people who literally own this planet and found that they literally own this planet and what the FUCK are you going to do about it, bacteria of the planet?
^
What in the absolute fuck are you talking about?! Your comment is asinine, “bacteria of the planet” the fuck?! Do you have the same “worm in the brain” that RFK claims to have because you sound just as stupid as him?
You claim people “own” this planet… um… what in the absolute fuck? Yes, people with money have always push an agenda but “owning” it, is beyond the dumbest statement.
Good. Burn it down. Bankrupt them.
If it’s so “critical to national security” then nationalize it.
the “burn it down” variant would only lead to the scenario where the copyright holders become the AI companies, since they have the content to train it. AI will not go away, it might change ownership to someone worse tho.
nationalizing sounds better; even better were to put in under UNESCO-stewardship.
Hard to imagine worse than the insane techno-feudalists who currently own it.
believe me, Disney is fucking ruthless in comparison to Anthropic.
Let’s go baby! The law is the law, and it applies to everybody
If the “genie doesn’t go back in the bottle”, make him pay for what he’s stealing.
The law absolutely does not apply to everybody, and you are well aware of that.
The law applies to everybody, but the law-makers change the laws to benefit certain people. And then trump pardons the rest lol.
Shouldn’t it?
I just remembered the movie where the genie was released from the bottle of a real genie, he turned the world into chaos by freeing his own kind, and if it weren’t for the power of the plot, I’m afraid people there would have become slaves or died out.
Although here it is already necessary to file a lawsuit for theft of the soul in the literal sense of the word.
I remember that X-Files episode!
Damn, what did you watch those masterpieces on? What kind of smoke were you sitting on then? Although I don’t know what secret materials you’re talking about. Maybe I watched something wrong… And what an episode?
This would mean the copyright holders like Disney are now the AI companies, because they have the content to train them. That’s even worse, man.
It’s not because they would only train on things they own which is an absolute tiny fraction of everything that everyone owns. It’s like complaining that a rich person gets to enjoy their lavish estate when the alternative is they get to use everybody’s home in the world.
do you know how much content disney has? go scrolling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_the_Walt_Disney_Company e: that’s the tip of the iceberg, because if they band together with others from the MPAA & RIAA, they can suffocate the entire Movie, Book and Music world with it.
good, then I can just ignore Disney instead of EVERYTHING else.
Until they charge people to use their AI.
It’ll be just like today except that it will be illegal for any new companies to try and challenge the biggest players.
why would I use their AI? on top of that, wouldn’t it be in their best interests to allow people to use their AI with as few restrictions as possible in order to maximize market saturation?
They have 0.2T in assets the world has around 660T in assets which as I said before is a tiny fraction. Obviously both hold a lot of assets that aren’t worthwhile to AI training such as theme parks but when you consider a single movie that might be worth millions or billions has the same benefit for AI training as another movie worth thousands. the amount of assets Disney owned is not nearly as relevant as you are making it out to be
The law is not the law. I am the law.
insert awesome guitar riff here
Reference: https://youtu.be/Kl_sRb0uQ7A
Oh no! Building a product with stolen data was a rotten idea after all. Well, at least the AI companies can use their fabulously genius PhD level LLMs to weasel their way out of all these lawsuits. Right?
I propose that anyone defending themselves in court over AI stealing data must be represented exclusively by AI.
Hilarious.
“ooh, so sorry, but your LLM was trained on proprietary documents stolen from several major law firms, and they are all suing you now”
That would be glorious. If the future of your company depends on the LLM keeping track of hundreds of details and drawing the right conclusions, it’s game over during the first day.
PhD level LLM = paying MAs $21/hr to write summaries of paragraphs for them to improve off of. Google Gemini outsourced their work like this, so I assume everyone else did too.
