I see no problem with distillation, on the other hand the complete dismissal of copyright by AI labs is pretty bad, I don’t think we should put them at the same level
Courts keep ruling over and over that an LLM trained on copyrighted works qualifies as a transformative work and is therefore fair use. They don't have to dismiss copyright law, this has always been allowed.
The only thing they get in trouble for is pirating the works to get their hands on them.
*USA only.
the UK has fair dealing, which is more restrictive
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/exceptions-to-copyright#fair-dea...
https://www.britishcopyright.org/wp-content/uploads/BCC-Fair...
This will have to wait for the Supreme Court. OpenAI and Microsoft 100% deserve to lose, even without OpenAI allegedly hiding evidence.
It takes two parties to agree to a settlement. That the other party agreed to a settlement instead of taking it to court implies this was not the slam dunk you may think it was.
Settling just says that they expected the internal costs or risks to be more than 1.5 billion cashflow.
In the $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation they said their run-rate revenue crossed $47B annualised.
Also if it ends up that other competitors also need to pay $1.5 billion, then maybe that does or doesn't have a competitive advantage.
Anthropic's business and legal strategies are not public. I would expect there to be multiple legs/reasons for settlement even for a decision below 1%. Trying to create a single narrative is what us spectators do.
Regardless, it was always inevitable—will continue to happen.
Technically, providing better value from your competitor's private holdings could be theft (of trade secrets), but might it also be fair use? "Schrodinger's IP" be damned.
I don't think the 1.5B settlement has resolved this. The 2 cases need to be merged!
I generally agree, in the same sense that it's "fair" for the US and China to spy on each other. It's not a moral outrage, but it is something that the targets can and should try to prevent.
Meta, for examples, doesn’t want employees to use Claude Code due to distillation risk.
It's also about the larger companies explaining why they can't be as efficient, of course they can't, they're not just ripping the outputs of another model that someone else invested billions to train.
True, they're simply ripping the inputs that humanity invested thousands of years and trillions of dollars to produce.
If they payed for inference, doesn't they own the output? So if I pay for a model to generate code, isn't that code mine to do with it whatever I want? Just curious.
It would be one thing if Moonshot was breaking into OpenAI servers and stealing trade secrets, but the only thing they are doing is looking at the output of the program, which is exactly the service that OpenAI offers. So, at best, this is a ToS violation. Sucks for the frontier labs I suppose, but live by the sword - die by the sword.
The issue seems to be the US only likes competition when it is winning. Markets in Asia are meant for cheap labor and resources, they're not meant to actually compete. /s
This. Free markets for everyone when they're the dominant economic force. Protectionism, tariffs and import/export controls when they're not.
It's so disgusting.
Anthropic just settled a $1.5B suit over it!
Like the US did when it "stole" the textiles IP from the UK in order to kickstart its own industry?
> The industry cannot sustain itself if that’s the model
Then let it fall apart.
It's like they've read the history of the US and how it got to where it is in the first place.
It is what built and sustains the movie and music industries. See: work for hire and 100+year copyright length
The tech industry: see: copyright and patent assignment from discoverer to corporation.
I know that corporations forcing me to assign patents and copyright to them was an incentive to take published works from "software practice and experience" and other technical journals, use them as the core of my work, and disclose that source to the company I worked for. Didn't stop them from applying for patents, however.
I think the discussion of copyright needs more refinement. We need to separate the discoverer's need for acknowledgment of development effort from the rent-seeking core of copyright.
You're right to call out the nasty environment surrounding intellectual property in the US and the exploitation of ideation in general, you just needed a correction on that. Someone else in this chain said virtually the same thing, which is a weird coincidence of historical ignorance. Not too weird, people tend to forget the 18th and 19th centuries happened, and much of the causally important wheels of the world are in the unsexy grease pits nobody wants to think about.
Then there is Alexander Hamilton's advocacy for importing foreign technicians that bring back IP and reproduce it here in the states. Best of all was the patent act of 1793 which like with the literature copyright ignoring, let us citizens patent inventions from the other side of the pond.
The founding fathers definitely had the right idea on IP.