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".
Don't they? They release the llama model weights, they do things like this:
https://www.opencompute.org/wiki/Open_Rack/SpecsAndDesigns
They also make significant contributions to Linux and are the originators of popular open source projects like zstd and React.
They make their money from selling ads, not selling licenses.
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.
The trouble with this analogy is that it proves too much.
Suppose you write a book, and so does someone else, but they have better marketing than you and then people in the market for that genre buy theirs instead of yours. Let's even stipulate that the existence of their book actually lowers your sales, because people who want that kind of book already bought theirs by the time they find out about yours and then some people don't have time to read or can't afford to buy both.
Notice that we haven't yet said a word about the contents of either book. They could be completely independent and they've never even heard of you or your book -- they "didn't even buy a copy of your book to copy it". All we know is that they're the same genre and the existence of theirs is costing you sales. By that logic all competition would thereby be "stealing", and that can't be right.
Which implies that you don't have a property right to the customers.
Facts are not copyrightable. Only your particular way of expressing those facts is copyrightable.
> Theft [...] is the act of taking another person's property or services without that person's permission or consent with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it. --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealing
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.
An LLM is essentially a lossy compression of the training data. The book absolutely is in there, it’s just mangled to the point of unrecognizability.
When large quantities of source material are replicable by prompting its a bug not a feature.
What makes you think you are entitled to tell people what they can and cant do with data they purchased (or otherwise acquired) from you. Extremely honest question. I just cant put myself in your shoes.
Like if I had written anything useful I would be overwhelmingly flattered that my content be considered so worthy for inclusion.
Your profile suggests that you are a philosopher. Did you get into philosophy hoping to exploit the publishing industry to the extent that you can squeeze every cent out of your thoughts, and deny their potential uses downstream?
Its actually crazy how bad things are, I am usually keen on capitalism and exclusivity, but the whole thing with LLMs, I see people pushing hard to tighten the grip of intellectual property. I see people making 50 cents a month on Kindle Unlimited suddenly shocked that someones LLM generated output might be ever so slightly influenced by weights ever so slightly influenced by their work, seemingly thinking they might get some big payday out of it.
Give me a tiny little wedge of understanding of your thought process. Your book is right now, doing a greater social good on your behalf than me running around and removing all the trash from my neighborhood, and the benefits of that social good are going to accrue long after you and I are gone. Your work is now going to live on, in a very tiny way, in these systems forever. I am honestly envious.
If anything, I would be trying to get bad writing removed from LLM training data. Things that I dont want to influence others. But as a potentially honest promoter of your work, you want it removed?
Whats the number? If not 1:1 exactly what you charge for the book, what do you think the proper compensation for slightly influencing training weights you should receive?
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.
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.
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.
Not even going to all GPL stuff, that in a better world should have screwed all the slop companies
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
I see the ability for trillion dollar companies to wash their hands of any wrong doing for stealing all the intellectual property of the world as incredibly dangerous for innovation in the US.
So for me I would rather see reform then an abandonment. There wouldn't be much of anything to pirate if there was no incentive or protection to create in the first place.
In my mind the biggest threat the average person faces would be billionaires who can operate with impunity. Rather then a fine for pirating a book or a movie. It would be nice if the fines were proportionate to the value of the item... I digress
Anyway, the point is - there will be no justice until the citizens of the united states demand it.
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.
> Mark Zuckerberg ‘personally authorized’ Meta’s copyright infringement, *publishers allege*
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
