What do you think the outcome of tightening fair use is going to be? Do you think its going to be most effectual against these big evil AI companies we are meant to fear? Or is it going to end up putting more individual creators on the end of Disneys pitchforks?
Like if you support creating a gun to kill a monster, that's great. But you need to understand that weapons rarely only target the person you want them to. And its unlikely that any bill that specifically targets a certain size or profit margin is going to make it all the way into law without being generalised to the approval of large IP holders.
Its much much (much) better to look at this as an opportunity to erode IP laws for everyone, than to make them worse and hope that your particular enemies are the only ones that are affected.
>That doesn’t mean I’m behind industrialized narcotic production on such a huge scale that it that it starts to distort the economy, and companies looking for new ways to add methamphetamine to every goddamn product.
Thats such a non sequitur. This isnt a weed legalisation argument, its "Do we make IP worse for everyone, because you dont like some people benefiting from fair use".
But I hear you. One of my biggest tells that someone can't be reasoned with is when they resort to whataboutism without any consideration for how 2 situations can actually be different even if there is some commonality. It's a powerful bad faith argument technique. When that style of argument comes up I nod my head and walk away. Some people are just doomed.
'"They then copied those stolen fruits"
How are these fruits "stolen" if they still have what was allegedley stolen?
Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207 (1985): The Supreme Court ruled that the unauthorized sale of phonorecords of copyrighted musical compositions does not constitute "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" goods under the National Stolen Property Act
And even if, arguendo, sure its stolen. The purpose of copyright is to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
And you would be hard pressed to prove that LLM's haven't advanced the arts and sciences, so at bare minimum transformative, ie fair use.'
If you write a book and I take it and embed its knowledge into my product that is so pervasive that no one needs to buy your book any more (and I don't even credit you so no one knows where that knowledge came from), to you really still have what was stolen? And I didn't even buy a copy of your book to copy it.
I wouldn't even go that far. Its an entirely new product. Its like the guy who sold you the keyboard demanding royalties for the software you built.
That the person who wrote the book couldn't predict a new use case for the book in training LLMs, is irrelevant. The book isn't in the LLM. Its not being sold with the LLM. Its one of billions of tools used to create the LLM.
People try and sell this as the AI companies extracting value from the poor little IP holders like Disney. Its maddening. That content is your cultural heritage. It already belongs to you, just some idiot has been granted a lifetime of exclusive exploitation. An LLM is trained on data you already own. Disney et al wants to exploit the new technology to extract even more money out of stuff created often decades ago.
At absolute worst its reverse engineering, which was supposed to be fair use protected in the US but apparently that's been somewhat eroded.
The items they call out around training the models (and attempting to claim that each subsequent model generation should count as an additional instance of infringement) seem far less grounded in the current court interpretations of AI training.
I am not a fan of US copyright law, but if I torrented millions of books, I would be facing a felony charge in criminal court and a (with statutory damages as high as $150,000 per title in cases of willful infringement) multi-billion dollar lawsuit in civil court.
In my opinion, this has nothing to do with whether or not AI training is transformative and this fair use, and everything to do with whether or not the laws apply to everyone equally. If Facebook isn't forced to pay billions and elect a sacrificial executive to serve prison time, then I will remain angry.
That is not what this case is about. It is more about the illegal violation and piracy of copyrighted content done by Meta for commercial use and Zuck knew they were doing it.
Why did Anthropic settle [0] with a multi-billion dollar payout to authors after commercializing their LLMs that was trained off of copyrighted content that was illegally obtained and kept without the authors permission?
There's a reason why they (Anthropic) did not want it to go to trial. (Anthropic knew they would lose and it would completely bankrupt them in the hundreds of billions.)
AI boosters will do anything to justify the mass piracy and illegal obtainment of copyrighted material for commercial use (not research) which that is not fair use in the US. There is no debate on this. [0]
[0] https://images.assettype.com/theleaflet/2025-09-27/mnuaifvw/...
The original work is not replicated identically, why would we replicate a work when it can be more easily seen in original or replaced with an alternative options online. We use AI to produce new outputs to new situations. We already have had drives and networking for plain copying.
Or anything to defend on Meta. If they go out of business, humanity profits.
Elsevier at least works within the (admittedly broken) system, Meta does not.
Not even going to all GPL stuff, that in a better world should have screwed all the slop companies
The previous infringement case with Anthropic said that while training an AI was transformative and not itself an infringement, pirating works for that purpose still was definitely infringement all by itself. The settlement was $1.5bn, so close to $3k for each of the 500k they pirated, so if Zuckerberg pirated "millions" (plural) it is quite plausible his settlement could be $6bn.
[1] See, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oink%27s_Pink_Palace#Legal_pro...
Cory Doctorow wrote a nice summary of the Zuckerstreisand book by Sarah Wynn-Williams.
"First, Facebook becomes too big to fail.
Then, Facebook becomes too big to jail.
Finally, Facebook becomes too big to care."
24 songs and was at one point $80k per song, almost 20 years ago. Let's let Zuck off with an even 100k per infringement.
His constant violation of people's privacy is also horrendous and worthy of condemnation, but that's not directly related to the copyright infringement matter. It's a separate issue.
He bought the best protection around for breaking the law.
If he did the right thing, then we should all support his choice to use it under fair use.
Freedom means that the state shouldn't punish a public benefactor.
It makes me furious to see programmers fighting against an open source hero.
If it was closed source for Meta profit, I understand.
But they gave it away free, so it infuriates me that people support damages for a public benefactor.
Churches and schools get free money from the government. We need a rule that open AI (not the company, I mean the actuality), can torrent whatever they want because it's for the public good.
Otherwise the rich companies win and can pay their sources and the small guys are screwed.
If Meta has to pay for their training data, they will need to profit from it and won't be able to offer it free.
Nobody in their right mind would ever support the publishers here.
I know there's a complaint that AI can verbatim repeat that work. But so can human savants. No one is suing human savants for reading their books.
Producing copyrighted material, of course. Training on copyrighted material... I just don't see it.
EDIT: Making a perfectly valid point, but it's unpopular, so down I go.
A machine training on all copyrighted materials in the world for commercial purposes at an industrial scale makes it disproportionate.
If a company hired hundreds of savants, then it would be illegal for them to read books?
I don't follow.
Sarah Silverman as the most prominent example.
The AI won't even know where the page of text it's seeing came from, and people will avoid your book as they can just ask the AI. So you make less money. (Talking about specialized technical books here.)
Suppose they did, and some guy was filling stadiums regularly to hear him recite an entire audio book. That would probably get the attention of someone's lawyers.
If it's illegal for AIs it should be illegal for humans, too. Is that really what you're arguing? It should be illegal for savants to read books?
Read a book, that's fine. Write a book, that's fine. Read a book and then write a book that is 99.9% the same as the book that you read and sell it for profit without a license from the original author, that's infringement.
the distinction isn't particularly clear cut with an open source model. If it is able to reproduce copyright protected work with high fidelity such that the works produced would be derivative, that's like trying to get around laws against distribution of protected works by handing them to you in a zip file.
It's a kind of copyright washing to hand you the data as a binary blob and an algorithm to extract them out of it. That wouldn't really fly with any other technology.
And that's really where a lot of the value is mind you, these models are best thought of as lossily compressed versions of their input data. Otherwise Facebook ought to be perfectly fine to train them on public domain data.
How about then to grant AI all other rights, for example, to allow voting?(sarcasm)
Just from a rational argumentation point of view. Clearly if a law is written saying as much, then sure. But there is no such copyright law like that yet.
Yes it's very different. Humans need to eat, sleep, and pay taxes. You also have to pay them competitive wages.
There's nothing in the law to support your argument either. The law however does say, very unambiguously, that copying without permission isn't allowed . There aren't exceptions for "training" just because it's superficially similar to a human activity (reading a book). A human isn't allowed to hand-copy Harry Potter. Even if they bought all the Harry Potter books.
But a multi-billion dollar corporation downloading millions of copyrighted creative works so that they can reshape the entire labor market by training a new type of artificial intelligence model on that data set? Meh, sounds like Silicon Valley disruption, give the man a medal!
I doubt Meta has deleted their local copy though ...
it is wrong to advocate for everyone to be treated equally unjustly. better to advocate for the removal of the bad laws/structures
I’m not calling for its use as a “retributive tool”. Just that it be applied evenly.
No, we should apply them equally to Mark Fucking Zuckerberg (which is decidedly not retributive, however much you want to make an emotional appeal) until such time as they are repealed as laws. It’s not really that complicated.
According to comments here that was totally deserved. You should not mess with copyright.
Royalties are owed and continuously owed as these models are deployed and doing inference. How is it any different to paying a small pittance to someone every time a song is played?
The LLaMA models were released openly. Copies exist everywhere in the world. You aren't going to be able to charge someone for running `llama.cpp`; a court order ceases to have practical relevance at that point.
"I made enough copies for everyone" isn't a valid defense for copyright infringement.
Second, royalties are not required to cite a source.
Can you imagine how disastrous it would be to everything from news reporting to scientific publishing if that was the case?
Mine is a daily bash cronjob that fetches a text-based database and uses grep to build an nftables-apply script with all the IPs for the blocked ASNs. I keep meaning to share it, but it's embarrassingly messy I haven't had time to clean it up...
Anyhoo, now you mention it this is the tack I am going to take in my own network, thanks!
The rate at which they were spidering and scraping was so far beyond what any other supposedly legit spider was doing, it seemed like the logical explanation.
Corporations believe in copyright so if they "break" it they should get punished for breaking rules they made up themselves.
Generally the law should be more strict for corporations than for real people.
edit: People downvoting can you argue why you disagree? I do think it's fair for the law to be more strict on the powerful rather than on the powerless.
Until we progress as a society to the point that we can put this system behind us we should at least fight to make enforcement uniform. In fact, uniform enforcement is probably a good starting point for arguing for abolition, as the pain of that enforcement is felt by proles and elites alike.
If this was you or me, we would be in prison for decades and have a fine in the millions. Time for these people to feel consequences.
As someone said, they will probably settle for around 6 billion, that is the same as say a $100 fine for us.
I'm all for strong justice, but you want to imprison an executive for decades for copyright violations?
(Copied from a comment of mine written more than three years ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33582047>)
Learning from copyrighted content is legal - for both humans and AI. If Meta is in hot water for anything, it's piracy and/or storage of copyrighted material.
No shit.
Of course, the excuse doesn't even apply: the offense of the tech bosses is not training these models (they had that declared legal the second it became clear only the big companies would be training big models), the offense of all these tech companies is running a piracy site. Taking copyrighted works, storing them, reproducing them and then publishing the results to third parties, in many cases for payment, and organizing this practice knowingly, willingly as a company. Paying others to help them do it. This is the worst copyright offense one can possibly commit. It is what one public prosecutor referred to in the Nappster case as "organizing a criminal cartel to violate criminal law on a huge scale".
Tech bosses weren't sued for downloading, in other words, they were sued for uploading. For asking payment for publishing copyrighted works, without any money going to the authors.
When Kim Dotcom did that, in the words of the US Attorney general, this is "charges of criminal copyright infringement, racketeering, and money laundering" (you see, getting paid for criminal activity is money laundering, a charge that was also made against teenagers selling warez cds)
ChatGPT tells me, unaware and unwilling to discuss the INCREDIBLE unfairness, that in the US, first-time offenders can face up to 5 years in prison, while repeat offenders can face up to 10 years PER OFFENCE. ChatGPT is unwilling to discuss it.
The courts are also unwilling to discuss this, but no worries! New technicality: only a public prosecutor gets to ask ...
Dario Amodei wilfully committed large scale copyright infringement, as did all the tech bosses from Musk to Bezos ... and "strangely" nobody in any court even mentioned how much 10 years times 500,000 is, despite systematically threatening that punsihment repeatedly in the cases against teenagers.
Note that the law is extremely clear that company management IS NOT shielded if ordering criminal actions (violating criminal law, as opposed to violating a contract). In that case, company management carries full criminal culpability, INCREASED from if they did it themselves. Of course, this is only ever applied for refusing to pay tax or court fees.
If the law were applied alike and fairly to individuals and tech bosses, Amodei would have to be VERY lucky the human race still exists by the time his corpse leaves prison.
I've wondered what the legalese justification for letting liability evaporate as it does so often with corps. So far the reasons I'm left with are 'shrugs' and 'the relevant provision (seemingly? apparently?) simply don't apply', neither of which are any good.
I was going to make a joke about how we should attach magnets to Aaron Swartz' corpse, since that'd make for a pretty potent energy source, given how fast he must be spinning. But honestly, I think he would have seen this sort of thing coming, given how his case was handled and how things really haven't gotten any better.
In the years since the basis of the case has been forgotten and replaced with an assumption about piracy, but it was a case about unlawful access.
The law doesn't see it that way, but it is not the ground truth.
This does not comfort me.
No accountability for rich people has funny patterns like this.
Personally, I would be happy if AI companies are what finally take down intellectual monopoly (intellectual property). I know being anti-intellectual-monopoly isn't a common view, but i don't see average people thinking it is so important—as you can see by the huge increases in piracy recently. Could be wrong about this, I haven't done research on public opinion about copyright.
Honestly, this whole case could be great. Either copyright loses, good for us. Or Zuckerberg loses, also good for us.
I would say that copyright loses is better for society than Zuckerberg loses because, my wish for Zuckerberg to lose is from hatred, while my wish for copyright to be abolished is from my wish to help humanity.
Even Supreme Court justices[1] have said the case for copyright is thin.
[1] (before he became a justice) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uneasy_Case_for_Copyright
Anyway, the point is - there will be no justice until the citizens of the united states demand it.
> Authors have sued AI companies for copyright infringement before - and lost.
So, basically nothing will come out of this
So not are these publishers rightfully pissed, Meta didn’t even give them the $6.99 for each epub to begin with. They’ve stolen the whole thing as part of this “fair use” campaign to destroy human authorship free of even the most basic remuneration.
I'd much rather prosecution focus on Zuck's more serious crimes against privacy and civilization as a whole. But maybe this is a small start?
- Mark Zuckerberg
The title is clickbait at it's worst. The situation around copyright and AI is stock standard "CEO makes a decision in an area that is clear as mud".
How are these fruits "stolen" if they still have what was allegedley stolen?
Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207 (1985): The Supreme Court ruled that the unauthorized sale of phonorecords of copyrighted musical compositions does not constitute "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" goods under the National Stolen Property Act
And even if, arguendo, sure its stolen. The purpose of copyright is to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
And you would be hard pressed to prove that LLM's haven't advanced the arts and sciences, so at bare minimum transformative, ie fair use.
All the Aaron Schwartzes of the future could freely share scientific papers with the world.
RICO specifically cites "criminal infringement of a copyright" as laid out in 18 U.S. Code § 2319. If the CEO tells his employees to download hundreds of thousands of works illegally in order to carry out his money-making scheme, how is that not organized crime even if (dubiously) LLM training on the material is fair use?
-----
RICO: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-I/chapter-96
Definitions: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1961
> As used in this chapter — (1) “racketeering activity” means (A)[...]; (B) any act which is indictable under any of the following provisions of title 18, United States Code: [...], section 2319 (relating to criminal infringement of a copyright),[...]
18 U.S. Code § 2319 - Criminal infringement of a copyright: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2319
-----
edit:
> 18 U.S. Code § 1962 - Prohibited activities
> (c) It shall be unlawful for any person employed by or associated with any enterprise engaged in, or the activities of which affect, interstate or foreign commerce, to conduct or participate, directly or indirectly, in the conduct of such enterprise’s affairs through a pattern of racketeering activity[...].
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1962
From the lawsuit:
“Meta — at Zuckerberg’s direction — copied millions of books, journal articles, and other written works without authorization, including those owned or controlled by Plaintiffs and the Class, and then made additional copies of those works to train Llama,” the suit says. “Zuckerberg himself personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement. Meta also stripped [copyright management information] from the copyrighted works it stole. It did this to conceal its training sources and facilitate their unauthorized use.”
WTF
When you think about the objectives and constraints on the table, and how disproportionately light penalties imposed on large corporations can be, if you can muster any kind of crappy argument, doing absolutely zero licensing is the no-brainer clear win. You get all of the material. You avoid a massive cost. Then the tech friendly Federal courts of the Trump administration will interpret all of the laws as far as possible in your favor and impose the lightest penalties they reasonably can.
It's a no brainer. License none of it, it's more data, it's cheaper, it's easier, the win is blinding. But if you license, you pay so much, if you use anything you didn't license you've tipped your hand on cognizance of guilt, blahblah. The contrast is stark.
The difference is how easy they are to sue. Good luck suing Chinese companies over this, but suing American companies is much easier.
Consider the case of someone who gets banned but Facebook keeps collecting money on their business account. Or consider the case of Facebook's video metrics scandal, or... whatever. It's a little fuzzy translating how much value equates to how much stock price equates to how much real-world is-this-useful-to-me but it does matter when FB is accused of marketing (Aaron Greenspan, thinkcomp, has brought this up, in his 2019 testimony to UK parliament) advertising to more people in a region or country than actually physically exist
So fraud builds on itself, you have more fraud money to pay lawyers to try to defend you in fraud cases
The question to answer is, did it happen and if so is this copyright infringement (not covered by fair use), not which company official authorized it.
Who gave permission to Anthropic/ClosedAI to scan hundreds of thousands of books to feed to their systems which they commercially sell. Why is this the new normal. Even GitHub a month ago was like if you don't opt out we will read even your private repos for AI training.
Tech is turning into next level BS, I don't know if it always was like this but this has pierced even the very bottom.
Like the fine means nothing to meta, and they'll still be the beneficiaries of their infringement.
In this current state, you really just need to have enough money to bypass this lawsuit and be on your way.
Tired of the double standard that CEOs get away when bad things happen (because they can’t be everywhere all the time) but all the benefits when the company makes a great profit (because they’re personally driving results!).
> "81.7TB"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz
> "approximately 70 gigabytes"
