Technology

Well maybe they shouldn't have done of the largest violations of copyright and intellectual property ever.

Probably the largest single instance ever.

threatens to "financially ruin" the entire AI industry

No. Just the LLM industry and AI slop image and video generation industries. All of the legitimate uses of AI (drug discovery, finding solar panel improvements, self driving vehicles, etc) are all completely immune from this lawsuit, because they're not dependent on stealing other people's work.

Meanwhile some Italian YouTuber was raided because some portable consoles already came with roms in their memory, they only go after individuals.

I am holding my breath! Will they walk free, or get a $10 million fine and then keep doing what every other thieving, embezzling, looting, polluting, swindling, corrupting, tax evading mega-corporation have been doing for a century!

As Anthropic argued, it now "faces hundreds of billions of dollars in potential damages liability at trial in four months" based on a class certification rushed at "warp speed" that involves "up to seven million potential claimants, whose works span a century of publishing history," each possibly triggering a $150,000 fine.

So you knew what stealing the copyrighted works could result in, and your defense is that you stole too much? That's not how that works.

We just need to show that ChatGPT and alike can generate Nintendo based content and let it fight out between them

Is this how Disney becomes the owner of all of the AI companies too? Lol

An important note here, the judge has already ruled in this case that "using Plaintiffs' works "to train specific LLMs [was] justified as a fair use" because "[t]he technology at issue was among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes." during the summary judgement order.

The plaintiffs are not suing Anthropic for infringing on their copyright, the court has already ruled that it was so obvious that they could not succeed with that argument that it could be dismissed. Their only remaining claim is that Anthropic downloaded the books from piracy sites using bittorrent

This isn't about LLMs anymore, it's a standard "You downloaded something on Bittorrent and made a company mad"-type case that has been going on since Napster.

Also, the headline is incredibly misleading. It's ascribing feelings to an entire industry based on a common legal filing that is not by itself noteworthy. Unless you really care about legal technicalities, you can stop here.

The actual news, the new factual thing that happened, is that the Consumer Technology Association and the Computer and Communications Industry Association filed an Amicus Brief, in an appeal of an issue that Anthropic the court ruled against.

This is pretty normal legal filing about legal technicalities. This isn't really newsworthy outside of, maybe, some people in the legal profession who are bored.

The issue was class certification.

Three people sued Anthropic. Instead of just suing Anthropic on behalf of themselves, they moved to be certified as class. That is to say that they wanted to sue on behalf of a larger group of people, in this case a "Pirated Books Class" of authors whose books Anthropic downloaded from the book piracy websites.

The judge ruled they can represent the class, Anthropic appealed the ruling. During this appeal an industry group filed an Amicus brief with arguments supporting Anthropic's argument. This is not uncommon, The Onion famously filed an Amicus brief with the Supreme Court when they were about to rule on issues of parody. Like everything The Onion writes, it's a good piece of satire: link

I love this. I hope big-tech/big-AI destroys big-copyright industry.

Good fuck those fuckers

Oh no! Building a product with stolen data was a rotten idea after all. Well, at least the AI companies can use their fabulously genius PhD level LLMs to weasel their way out of all these lawsuits. Right?

Let's go baby! The law is the law, and it applies to everybody

If the "genie doesn't go back in the bottle", make him pay for what he's stealing.

Fucking good!! Let the AI industry BURN!

I was reading the article and thinking "suck a dick, AI companies" but then it mentions the EFF and ALA filed against the class action. I have found those organizations to be generally reputable and on the right side of history, so now I'm wondering what the problem is.

Unfortunately, this will probably lead to nothing: in our world, only the poor seem to be punished for stealing. Well, corporations always get away with everything, so we sit on the couch and shout "YES!!!" for the fact that they are trying to console us with this.

Good. Burn it down. Bankrupt them.

If it's so "critical to national security" then nationalize it.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

And yet, despite 20 years of experience, the only side Ashley presents is the technologists' side.

I thought it was hilarious how there was a quote in the article that said

immense harm not only to a single AI company, but to the entire fledgling AI industry and to America’s global technological competitiveness

It will only do this because all these idiotic American companies fired all their employees to replace them with AI. Hire then back and the edge won't dull. But we all know that they won't do this and just cry and point fingers wondering how they ever lost a technology race.

Edited because it's my first time using quotes and I don't know how to use them properly haha

Well, theft has never been the best foundation for a business, has it?

While I completely agree that copyright terms are completely overblown, they are valid law that other people suffer under, so it is 100% fair to make them suffer the same. Or worse, as they all broke the law for commercial gain.

Probably would have been cheaper to license everything you stole, eh, Anthropic?

Now they're in the "finding out" phase of the "fucking around and finding out".

I hope LLMs and generative AI crash and burn.

People cheering for this have no idea of the consequence of their copyright-maximalist position.

If using images, text, etc to train a model is copyright infringement then there will NO open models because open source model creators could not possibly obtain all of the licensing for every piece of written or visual media in the Common Crawl dataset, which is what most of these things are trained on.

As it stands now, corporations don't have a monopoly on AI specifically because copyright doesn't apply to AI training. Everyone has access to Common Crawl and the other large, public, datasets made from crawling the public Internet and so anyone can train a model on their own without worrying about obtaining billions of different licenses from every single individual who has ever written a word or drawn a picture.

If there is a ruling that training violates copyright then the only entities that could possibly afford to train LLMs or diffusion models are companies that own a large amount of copyrighted materials. Sure, one company will lose a lot of money and/or be destroyed, but the legal president would be set so that it is impossible for anyone that doesn't have billions of dollars to train AI.

People are shortsightedly seeing this as a victory for artists or some other nonsense. It's not. This is a fight where large copyright holders (Disney and other large publishing companies) want to completely own the ability to train AI because they own most of the large stores of copyrighted material.

If the copyright holders win this then the open source training material, like Common Crawl, would be completely unusable to train models in the US/the West because any person who has ever posted anything to the Internet in the last 25 years could simply sue for copyright infringement.

So, the US now has a choice: rescue AI and fix their fucked up copyright system, or rescue the fucked up copyright system and fuck up AI companies. I'm interested in the decision.

I'd personally say that the copyright system needs to be fixed anyway, because it's currently just a club for the RIAA&MPAA to wield against everyone (remember the lawsuits against single persons with alleged damages in the millions for downloading a few songs? or the current tries to fuck over the internet archive?). Should the copyright side win, then we can say goodbye to things like the internet archive or open source-AI; copyright holders will then be the AI-companies, since they have the content.

No it won't. Just their companies. Which are the ones making slop. If your AI does something actually useful it will survive.