Comment by KoolKat23
6 months ago
This isn't really profiting from piracy. They don't make money off the raw input data. It's no different to consuming for personal use.
They make money off the model weights, which is fair use (as confirmed by recent case law).
This is absurd. Remove all of the content from the training data that was pirated and what is the quality of the end product now?
With Claude, people are paying Anthropic to access answers that are generated from pirated books, without the authors permission, credit, or compensation.
There is no copyright on knowledge.
If it outputs parts of the book verbatim then that's a different story.
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That's the law.
Please keep in mind, copyright is intended as a compromise between benefit to society and to the individual.
A thought experiment, students pirating textbooks and applying that knowledge later on in their work?
Its the law (for now, very early on this in the process of deciding the law, untested, appealable, likely to be appealed and tested many times in many ways).
Meanwhile other cases have been less friendly to it being fair use, AI companies are already paying vast sums to publishers who presumably they wouldn’t if they felt confident it was “the law”, and on and on.
I don’t like arguing from “it’s the law”. A lot of law is terrible. What’s right? It’s clear to me that if AI gets good enough, as it nearly is now, it sucks a lot of profit away from creators. That is unbalanced. The AI doesn’t exist without the creators, the creators need to exist for our society to be great (we want new creative works, more if anything). Law tends to start conservatively based on historical precedent, and when a new technology comes along it often errs on letting it do some damage to avoid setting a bad precedent. In time it catches up as society gets a better view of things.
The right thing is likely not to let our creative class be decimated so a few tech companies become fantastically wealthy - in the long run, it’s the right thing even for the techies.
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When you say that's the law, as far as I'm aware a single ruling by a lower court has been issued which upholds that application. Hardly settled case law.
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