Instead the AI companies reached these absurd settlements with publishers that made a mockery out of all the previous copyright enforcement victims.
Some token settlement for an insignificant fraction of their revenue is not in any way a "sanction".
Do they? Or only so far as "if you have 1000x the revenue, you probably also have 1000x the customers that you have wronged, each of which are entitled to damages as well"?
copyright law literally says something isn’t infringement if it is a novel transformation. I get the jokes and criticism about AI companies fighting and complaining about competitors distilling, but this is a much weirder comparison.
"Anthropic settles with authors in first-of-its-kind AI copyright infringement lawsuit" - https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/nx-s1-5529404/anthropic-settl...
> However, the judge ruled that Anthropic's use of millions of pirated books to build its models – books that websites such as Library Genesis (LibGen) and Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) copied without getting the authors' consent or giving them compensation – was not.
It seems clear from the article that while the use of pirated works was illegal, the use of copyrighted works (a the work a book is based on is still copyrighted if you buy the book) was fine and transformative.
Does that make my brain copyright infringement? Does Disney now own all my output forever because some small part of me now has Harry Potter embedded?
If you just ignore anything that's inconvenient for your argument, you can make any argument you want.
None of those are relevant factors when it comes to copyright law. You don't get a pass for copyright infringement just because you're not copying the entire work. Same goes for a copy that's transient. You can't set up a bootleg movie theater in your home, even if you delete the movie file afterwards, and there's no trace of the movie aside from the viewers' vague memories.
And yet they very much are. US copyright law has the concept of "fair use" in 17 U.S. Code § 107 [0]. I'll paste here for your benefit, #3 is the one I referenced as most obvious but #1 and #4 are also very relevant:
(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.
The US justice system is too captured and corrupt at this point to take as reference because decisions there are bought by the highest bidder. But for the purpose of this discussion let's not play dumb for the benefit of trillion dollar corporations.
If you're going to invoke fair use, that opens up a whole can of worms on what counts as transformative. The google books case and the google thumbnails case shows that you can make near verbatim copies of works at scale and still be considered fair use.
>The US justice system is too captured and corrupt at this point to take as reference because decisions there are bought by the highest bidder. But for the purpose of this discussion let's not play dumb for the benefit of trillion dollar corporations.
This is begging the question. The original question is whether ai companies are getting special treatment. You can't then use that as a premise to say that the courts are tilted towards ai companies. Not to mention it's questionable how ai companies were suddenly able to corrupt all the judges, some of which were appointed decades ago, even though they only got rich a couple of years ago.
No, and neither do LLM's. They're trained on vast quantities of data and retain only a fraction of it.
You might think of it as very, very lossy compression that generates new outputs rather than the original input unless something unintentional happens.
> If you just ignore anything that's inconvenient for your argument, you can make any argument you want.
I'm not. I just understand how it actually works. You either don't understand or are deliberately ignoring that what you just said is literally and technically untrue to make some sort of political statement.
Somewhere between the two a line must be drawn… where we’d want to put that line, I guess, if up for quibbling. But it doesn’t seem obvious to me.
The google books and google thumbnails cases have so far upheld that even mechanical reproductions are allowed, depending on the context/usage.
Sometimes they go a bit wonky and overtrain on specific phrases which can result in verbatim copies of brief sections of coontent. Thats a bug, not a feature.
Humans reading or watching copyrighted material isn't considered "making a copy" for the purposes of copyright law. Machines doing so generally is.
if you prompt it to, yes. just like your browser dutifully navigates to any copyright-infringing resource and GETs and POSTs whatever you ask of it.
(also it can't, not really, only small snippets before going off rails. LLMs aren't magic, they can't losslessly compress an exabyte of training data into a few terabytes of weights.)
As for your "technically not copyright infringement" defense. Those laws are from a time when those patterns couldnt be derived and dostributed at scale. A human had to learn and teach them. That made it different. The scale enabled my modern tech makes it a whole dofferent situation. The same way how one person standing a street corner people watching for a bit isnt that bad, but a whole constellation of flock cameras costantly montioring everyones movements and making it available to any of their customers is really really bad. The law will have to catch up to this
Nos for the same reason that me giving you a word cloud of the frequency of words within Harry Potter isn’t infringement. It’s a novel transformation.
If so, why do we still pay for games and movies?
this is an incorrect interpretation (in the usa, at least).
downloading a game/movie is still the creation of unauthorized copy, which is not allowed. not to mention that playing/watching does not count as a "novel transformation".
(17 U.S.C. § 106 and 17 U.S.C. § 501 are the relevant pieces of reading)
So if you pirate a bunch of content you still get in trouble for that. But if you somehow make a business out of that that isn’t just redistributing those materials, then that business itself isn’t infringing.
ISPs and trigger-happy law firms don't send you a C&D for downloading a torrent, they do so for seeding a torrent. It's just that practically nobody "just seeds" a torrent so people colloquially claim they got busted for downloading a torrent.
In theory this means if you torrent as a 100% leecher and turn off seeding from the get-go, you should be in the clear. But nobody sensible would dare test the extent of German Legal Spite, much less do so repeatedly to science the shit out of it.
If you can download through another protocol, say HTTP, however---<Sendung unterbrochen!>
It absolutely is. That's textbook copyright infringement. Doing it for commercial purposes elevates it to criminal copyright infringement.
> Instead the AI companies reached these absurd settlements with publishers that made a mockery out of all the previous copyright enforcement victims.
Isn't that at least something? How many people pirating software ever settled with the companies they "victimized?"
> then used that material to generate billions of dollars which they kept for themselves?
Hasn't it also lead to distilled, free and open models that everyone can benefit from?
A courtesy. There was never any need to justify it.
> Isn't that at least something?
Yes, it's a joke. Why do they get to infringe copyrights with impunity while normal people get destroyed? Either go after them like the copyright industry always does and punish them properly, or abolish copyright straight up. This "rules for thee but not for me" nonsense is straight up disgusting.
> How many people pirating software ever settled with the companies they "victimized?"
Too many to list. Also, nobody is victimizing billion dollar corporations.
I mean, what is this? Their balls suddenly drop off? They only have the audacity to prosecute random people? Smaller companies? When they're up against trillion dollar AI companies they suddenly become cowards? That's so incredibly disgusting, and it made me completely lose even the small amount of respect for copyright that I had managed to rationalize over the years.
So either enforce the law the same way against everyone correctly and proportionally, or your law and its enforcement are illegitimate and shouldn't exist. If some activity is harmless enough for some billionaires to do at massive scales and settle in court like it was some footnote in history, then nobody should be punished for it at all.
No that's not something. That's just having infinitely more money to fight legal battles.
The AI companies knew that and bet, correctly, that it would be worth the cost.
1. The copyright infringement of big corpos fully justifying my copyright infringement in the face of law
2. The copyright infringement of big corpos being prosecuted in the same exact way as my copyright infringement would.
There is really no middle ground.
But Eisenhower was right:
> In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
This isn't even about a single person or personality. Very few people in such position could stand fast by their moral code. In any case, an environment that favors profit above everything will naturally select for individuals who are unencumbered by such hindrances.
There might've been 100s of Altmans and Amodeis who had a strong moral code but we don't know about them because they dropped out of the "race" because of said moral hurdles.
I think appropriate attribution is a moral code, but I am not able to attribute every idea I have to all those who helped me develop the general intelligence that I use to develop such ideas.
Exactly. Dairy farms optimise for milk production so favour cows that produce the most milk.
The market economy optimises for profit so favours those most willing/able to generate it. Zuckerberg, Musk, Thiel, Andreesen and co are products of the system.
terrifying
If you look at it with your eyes crossed, Anthropic and the chinese are doing the same thing.
If you look at it with nuance 1 the chinese are doing way worse stuff, and 2 stealing from a thief would still be stealing
1. The chinese are making multiple accounts (at least 49,000)[1][2], using proxies/VPNs, possibly using residential computers and infected computers (unless you think the chinese are doing due diligence to ensure their purchased IPs are kosher). All accounts need to be created with a real name, and especially so if the paid models need to be accessed and paid with a credit card. So this is beyond IP theft and getting closer to fraud. These are all techniques that are well studied because they are used by criminals and cybercriminals, textbook stuff. Consider if that was not sufficient, that China is banned from using the product, so they need to use identities and locations not just to avoid relating the accounts between themselves, but merely to allow account creation. What identities are they using to create accounts.
Compare this to Anthropic which reads notes made a deal in an IP theft case paying billions because they bought books and scanned them but buying the books wasn't sufficient retribution for the authors. Or that they gasp scanned the internet, like Google.
Not having nuance to see the difference between the two companies is something I expect of the twitter echo chamber copying hot takes for upvotes, not hacker news.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/anthropic-claims... [2] https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...
Anthropic seems to want to both own and eat its stolen cake.
> stealing from a thief would still be stealing
Stealing from a thief hurts thief industry which is a win for society.
> The chinese are making multiple accounts
Not a crime. AI companies also ignore robots.txt and applicable laws when illegally copying copyrighted material from websites to their servers without author permission.
You are welcome to study the law of any country. A crime against a criminal is still a crime.
>applicable laws when illegally copying copyrighted material from websites to their servers without author permission.
If the material is distributed in http without authentication, isn't that sufficient authorization from the distributor? I would think the search + web crawler era would have set plenty of precedent for this.
>Not a crime. AI companies also ignore robots.txt
Breach of contract is not a crime, agreed.
How about identity fraud (accounts by identity proxy, document KYC), computer crime (C&C residential proxies), conspiracy.
And after the June US directive to suspend Chinese access, smuggling, false statements to regulated entity.
These are all criminal charges that are presumably not levied because of the adversarial relationship between those countries. But if this happened in the US you would probably be seeing at least a civil claim and potentially criminal charges. Hell if this were in any other western country you would see the same. Consider CloudFlare vs Spain, much lighter criminal accusations, and there's already a criminal investigation brought where the CF CEO is indicted.
Non-trivial lack of nuance when you can distinguish between a domestic civil case and a criminal international case between 2 world powers with great judicial tension.
On the book case, a class action case was brought to court and it was settled. There's no use in bringing it up further, it has been settled, and it bears no relation to the Anthropic v China case.
You like programming? Think of encapsulation, imagine if you had to think about f(x) but someone brings up y, now you have to think about f(x,y) and what other parameters might bear relationship? The law simplifies by compartimentalizing. And it doesn't even bear a tradeoff, judgment(case1,case2) isn't better than judgment(case1)+judgment(case2).
If the damnified have considered the matter settled, why would it matter what third parties have to say about it? Third parties would have pushed for more compensation, or ownership of the derivate product. If you feel damnified yourself you can open a case and explain why the actions of Anthropic have hurt you personally.
Otherwise it is a matter that doesn't concern the general public, we have no say in it and there is no right to be offended on behalf of parties that have already settled the argument.