upvote
Do you care about the law or not? I think theft is bad everywhere, not just when Anthropic does it.
reply
For me, when it specifically comes to copying, I don't think it's bad to copy a copier. (And by that I mean Anthropic has no valid complaints against Moonshot. Any valid complaints from anyone in the original corpus are valid against both of them now.)

In this way, it is different from literal theft. Stealing money/objects from a thief and keeping them is not justified.

reply
It's a little different in this case, since 1) not all the data Ant used was stolen and 2) they did contribute significantly to the value of the stolen good.

An analogy might be a baker stole 20% of the flour used to bake their special bread, which was then stolen. Both thefts are obviously wrong and bad.

reply
I think any analogy with physical theft is too different from data to apply to this comparatively subtle case. Especially when we get into the details of just using the output of the model to train on.
reply
The baker stole 100% of the flour to make the bread. He also stole the water and the salt and the yeast and the heat for his oven. What he didn't steal was the time he put into crafting a recipe for bread and the time he sat around waiting for the oven to bake it. Now, is that loaf stolen property? Hard to say. But the baker is undoubtedly a thief. He should be tried and forced to pay restitution out of his ill-gotten profits for sure. If we can't do that, the next step is pitchforks and guillotines.
reply
I don't really have an oar in this water, but...

"Judge approves a $1.5B Anthropic settlement over pirated books used to train the Claude chatbot"

https://abcnews.com/Technology/wireStory/judge-approves-15b-...

reply
If the law was applied uniformly, I would support its continued uniform application. In the last 10 years, I don't see it being applied fairly at all, I see an oligarchy, a criminal and corrupt government and rich and powerful entities getting away with anything. The most minimally competent legal system would ask the AI companies, show us the list of all the data you've used to train and lets hash out the copyright - instead we have to pray someone leaks one tiny piece of what they trained on and then sue for that. Open-weights models are the closest thing we have to justice in the world where the legal system no longer provides justice, because at least the model trained on all of our data is given back to all of us.
reply
It's a rational position to care about the law, but insist on a queue when related parties are involved.

In this case: resolve the theft claims against the US frontier labs, and only then let them make claims against third parties. It would be totally unreasonable for (say) OpenAI to extract a settlement from Moonshot and use that to pay its own claims. Ordering matters.

reply
no, I don't care about thieves getting stolen from. why would I?
reply
Not OP, but copyright law is an absolute joke. No, I don’t care one whit that someone’s TOS was violated. In fact, I find it hilarious. And it’s not “theft.”
reply
"I think we shouldn't have IP protection at all" is a totally valid position to hold, but that's not the law is. OP said it didn't violate the law, and it does.
reply
Some laws are very obviously unworthy of consideration, with broad consensus from the public. See what happened when Napster came out. Literally no one cares about some red-faced RIAA suit flicking spittle over some shared Metallica albums.

Same thing here. This whole situation is just comical.

reply
I find that I care more when copyright violations cause actual harm to the copyright owner. Let's say there's an American kid who can't speak Japanese but wants to keep up with a weekly manga. He downloads a bootleg translation and shares it among his friend group. That is a copyright violation, but meh. If he hadn't gone the illegal route, he'd more likely just not read it at all. There's very little chance he'd pay for a subscription and learn Japanese.

Now, if that kid were to print the bootleg translation and sell it to schoolmates, that's worth a slap on the wrist. The kids willing to pay would likely have paid for official copies.

When these LLM labs download our works, feed them into their models, and sell the output to people that used to pay for our work, that's worth a very hard slap. I honestly have less of a problem with the open models.

reply
> I think theft is bad everywhere, not just when Anthropic does it.

It seems like you think theft is bad everywhere except when Anthropic does it.

reply
[flagged]
reply
Do you mind having the discussion we're having?
reply
I do not block posts and I never downvote.
reply
They breached some TOS, but your first sentence is pure, over the top flim flam
reply