Comment by senko
11 hours ago
I support your right to have an opinion, but in my opinion, thank God this is just your opinion.
Copyright, as practiced in late 20 and this century, is a tool for big corps to extract profits from actual artists, creators, and consumers of this art[0] equally. Starving artists do not actually benefit.
Look at Spotify (owned and squeezed by record labels) giving 70% of the revenue to the record labels, while artists get peanuts. Look at Disney deciding it doesn't need to pay royalties to book writers. Hell, look at Disney's hits from Snow White onwards, and then apply your "LLMs are IP theft" logic to that.
Here's what Cory Doctorow, a book author and critic of AI, has to say about it in [1]:
> So what is the alternative? A lot of artists and their allies think they have an answer: they say we should extend copyright to cover the activities associated with training a model.
> And I'm here to tell you they are wrong: wrong because this would inflict terrible collateral damage on socially beneficial activities, and it would represent a massive expansion of copyright over activities that are currently permitted – for good reason!.
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> All written text, art work, etc needs to come imbued with a GPL style license
GPL-style license has been long known not to work well for artifacts other than code. That's the whole reason for existence of Creative Commons, GNU Free Documentation License, and others.
[0] "consumers of art" sounds abhorrent, yet that's exactly what we are [1] https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/
So you don’t like big corps getting ever richer by hiding behind copyright.
How about my books?
I’ve published a few, make maybe $500 a month from them.
Is it fine for the LLMs to rip them off?
> Is it fine for the LLMs to rip them off?
Yes. It is good (and IMO should be encouraged) that derivative works can are made, even if it would make you less money.
1. Will people stop buying your books if LLMs have the information from them?
2. Will people stop buying your books if they can get them from the library? Is a library ripping you off?
3. Assuming your books are non-fiction (otherwise the answer to (1) would be a clear "no"), am I ripping you off if I read your books, create a course that teaches the same things (that you tought me through your book) and earn mega-money because I'm mega-skilled at marketing?
4. How about if I lend my copy to dozens of my friends, who are all very interested in the stuff you write but don't want to pay themselves?
5. Did OpenAI go to the bookstore, buy your book and scan it? Or did Amazon or any other ebook retailer just gave them the book PDF when they asked nicely? How did the rip off happen?
6. If an Anthropic employee buys your book in a bookstore, scans it and destroys the physical copy, and the digital equivalent is only used to train Claude, is that a ripoff?
This stuff is complex and as a society we're just starting to grapple with the consequences. Cory's making the case against copyright being used as a tool much more eloquently than I am - I encourage you to read it if you haven't already.
BTW in your particular case, I'd say you're pretty safe. Nobody stops buying books because they can get the same info from LLMs. If that's your concern, you might as well be mad at the Internet at large.
So this logic is essentially: Look at all these ways you're already getting ripped off. What's one more?! You should be grateful they're siphoning off all your work!
You've got a convert here. I don't think I'll publish my next book. I might just email it straight to Open AI.
And Cory Doctorow - I've attempted a few of his books. Felt like I was reading young adult fiction. He's pretty much the '2 prescient statements and a few average books' guy.