Comment by rectang
9 hours ago
At some point, there will be a successful copyright infringement suit against an LLM user who redistributes infringing output generated by an LLM. It could be the NYTimes suit, or it could be another, but it's coming — after which the industry will face a Napster-style reckoning.
What comes next? Perhaps it won't be that hard to assemble a proprietary licensed corpus and get decent performance out of it. Look at all the people already willing to license their voices.
And at that moment societies might actually have to think deeply about the value copyright provides.
Because having access to the condensed knowledge of humanity might be more valuable for society then having access to Lars Ulrich's shitty drumming.
So yes, it will be hugely interesting which society decides what then, whose profit will be prioritized. And societies won't easily find good answers.
> Because having access to the condensed knowledge of humanity might be more valuable for society then having access to Lars Ulrich's shitty drumming.
Under the current copyright regime, nothing's stopping you from condensing that knowledge yourself and publishing in the public domain. But that would be a lot of work for you, wouldn't it? And I suppose you'd rather do work you'd get paid for.
When society decides AI slop will be the only item on the menu, then copyright will die.
Yes, I agree.
I deliberatly formulated that channeling myself as the kid who actually found his drumming valuable but didn't have the money to buy (all) of it. Who was annoyed at society deciding I should not have it.
So I still don't have the answers but the stakes have certainly gotten bigger.
OpenAI's valuation is more than basically all traditional media companies combined. Nvidia could buy the NYTimes with a month's worth of profits. The top 8 companies in the S&P 500 all benefit more from LLMs being successful than strict copyright enforcement. Congress has very broad power over copyright law. If a suit is successful there is a lot of money and power to be deployed to change copyright law.
Exactly. So just buy it. They have the money or does Sam need a moonbase to complete his villain arc. Any of these AI companies could come out and start paying creators a licensing fee. Instead of being forced to pay damages which is their current approach
If we have to devolve into a tech dystopia, the least they could do is make it interesting. The billionares should get into a lunar robot war, corporate space wars would make a great drama. Maybe if they're busy playing Star Wars they'll forget about the rest of us for a while and we can repurpose all that wealth.
They would almost certainly be paying publishers, not creators.
You are comparing the fight between a p2p program and the entire music industry with the fight between the entire LLM industry and a newspaper. Notice how the order seems inconsistent.
And what happened after Napster? Filesharing totally stopped, right?
With the chinese in the mix it wont stop ai. It probably will change Copyright.
Spotify and Netflix happened.
file sharing became far less popular and ubiquitous as a result of their popularity.
they tweaked the model — originally users download a temporary copy from central servers instead of p2p, then later to users rent licensed copies of media instead of pirated copies.
i’m tired of seeing this as an argument on HN — that because something didn’t hit 100% that implies it was a failure and not worth doing or something.
the fact that a limited subset of people still do filesharing is not evidence that the napster case had no effect.
(spotify didn’t exactly start out squeaky clean with how they built out their repertoire iirc).
(apologies for early edits. i just woke up.)
How did the Napster suit change copyright?
Can you name an active filesharing app that's in use today? The action against Napster might not have killed filesharing, but it was p2p's Antietam.
The Bittorrent ecosystem is still very much around. I’m a cinephile who has a collection of nearly a thousand films in Blu-Ray image format, and 95% of that is off a tracker that is open even, not private.
And Soulseek is still known as the P2P source where you can find all kinds of obscure music.
4 replies →
Bittorrent?
I have it running basically all the time...
There are many people sharing many files on usenet. There are few open source projects to automate the downloads.
[dead]
We will see such attempts first against weaker target. Users who are not having the enterprise indemnifications.
The law exists to protect the elite and punish the underclass. We’re not in a Hollywood movie. Nothing will happen.