Comment by gruez
19 hours ago
>This is great for competition! Chinese vendors offering a cheaper solution = what economics told me the free market was all about.
Yeah, like all those Chinese bootleggers selling DVDs for a few dollars rather than $20. Free market!
"Information wants to be free"
Anthropic profited from training its models on all kinds of copyrighted information, live by the sword, die by the sword...
Their model weights, training data, training methods, etc are all going to leak to China over time.
Nobody on a site named _Hacker_ news should be all that upset about this.
Los ricos también lloran (1979)
Seriously AI companies complaining about fair use is the biggest case of crocodile tears I can think of. Irony has been dead for a while, but they dug up the corpse and set it on fire anyway.
Totally agree.
Don't forget insider threat vector, too.
I deliberately didn't mention any threat vector.
I would assume China is working on liberating Anthropic weights through the battle-tested strategy of finding someone in a privileged position and getting them laid, etc.
You’re mistaking the original term hacker, a tinkerer of systems, for the black hat variety.
Hackers didn't use to spend a lot of time defending trillion-dollar corporations and their intellectual property rights.
black and white hat is relative. someone breaking into a state run database in a dictatorship and stealing documents that prove some opposition leader was murdered would be a black hat criminal if you ask their government. a hacker jailbreaking a phone to let people fix it without expensive official service is a black hat to the company. we should really switch to saying offensive and defensive or something else that doesnt come with moral implications. maybe lawful and chaotic.
I suppose his point was that the both parties are black hats.
What true hackers really did was discuss the definition of the word and how to use it
There is no real difference
5 replies →
Bootlegging is copyright theft.
Is Claude output copyrighted?
If anything, a tremendous amount of Claude’s input is copyrighted.
If there’s any bootlegging going on it’s Anthropic that’s doing the bootlegging but having mirrored the video etc sufficiently to beat copyright law.
>Bootlegging is copyright theft.
Ok, but what about those shady sites that resell Windows education keys? They're certainly a "better experience" than buying legit keys, by virtue of being significantly cheaper. You aren't even really committing copyright infringement in the process, because Microsoft gives out windows isos for free, and the seller is really selling a random 25 character string, which can hardly be copyrighted.
>If there’s any bootlegging going on it’s Anthropic that’s doing the bootlegging but having mirrored the video etc sufficiently to beat copyright law.
US courts have consistently ruled it's fair use.
>>If there’s any bootlegging going on it’s Anthropic that’s doing the bootlegging but having mirrored the video etc sufficiently to beat copyright law.
>US courts have consistently ruled it's fair use.
And they also have ruled that the that output of an AI isn't copyrightable.
As such copying claudes output isnt even fair use as that is an exemption to copyright but the same as copying public domain work which any and all are allowed to do.
> because Microsoft gives out windows isos for free,
… with a license that only allows you to use it for certain purposes, subject to certain restrictions.
> and the seller is really selling a random 25 character string, which can hardly be copyrighted.
1. Copyright is about creative works. It is possible to have a meaningful creative work no more than 25 characters long (or equivalent). Music is particularly good at this.
2. The key itself is not copyrighted (it’s not a creative work), but is reasonably interpreted as a copyright circumvention device. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number.
> US courts have consistently ruled its fair use.
Like Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations “‘Free market’ is when a company receives a favorable ruling about copyright in the United States”
> Ok, but what about those shady sites that resell Windows education keys?
Yes, they are fine? They might no longer include full first party support by Microsoft for not being "new". Same as buying a used car (also comes with the "shady sites" for a far longer time).
Though this not making any difference by Microsoft not doing any support either way to make more money is a business decision by Microsoft.
1 reply →
and Chinese courts are ruling that using Claude is fair use.
1 reply →
The current case law in the US is that the raw output of an LLM cannot be copyrighted without further meaningful arrangement or alteration by a human author.
I think renting out ID to let others in without telling the admin is generally unlawful in many places
The output of Claude is not eligible for copyright protection. I'm not sure how the analogy of bootlegging DVDs would work, given that.
I suppose you are violating the TOS by reselling a service, even if the output can't be claimed as belonging to anyone.
Sure, and Anthropic is allowed to cancel the licenses of people doing that, as they do
You can write anything in TOS, many parts of it is non-enforceable and depends a lot on the local laws.
Free market would of course allow bootleg DVD sales, state regulation that gives monopoly rights restrict it.
In the context of LLMs, monopoly rights haven't been created (yet anyway).
Fun fact: for a period the US (or american colonies) didn't have copyright but Europe did, so people could copy and sell English (and other) books for free.
BigAI are all in the bootlegging market themselves, so it's always funny to see them complaining about others copying their "product".
It's quite curious how multi billion dollar enterprises can't compete with a Chinese bootlegger with a big jacket, tbh.
Imagine having such a warchest and being so bad at business, lol.
Bad at business? One of them has to make the thing.
Maybe the making of the thing should be paid for before it's made, rather than hoping that selling copies will recoup the investment. I.e., go back to patronage while abolishing copyright.
1 reply →
This type of "resource curse" paints a perfect picture of why US based frontier providers are set up to fail. They want, and have, few restrictions and along with that unlimited warchest. The Chinese on the other hand aren't burning billions like millions. Anthropic, OAI, Google, Meta... They're all phenomenal examples of waste, corporate greed, inefficiency and are the reasons people hate tech bros at this point. Whining and crying from their super yacht, Parkinson's law is alive and well!
My biggest concern with pirating has always been malicious programs. But companies still need to show value in their products or people will pirate.
What added value can Anthropic give users not available to pirating users? That is what they should ask themselves.
ZDR but that is meaningless if the person wants to do nothing more than cheat on homework (or has enough hardware to run a local model)
1 reply →
> Yeah, like all those Chinese bootleggers selling DVDs for a few dollars rather than $20. Free market!
It's supremely ironic analogize distillation to copyright infringement when it's literally what Anthropic was found guilty of. It's not illegal to distill. It is illegal to pirate. And it's what Anthropic was found guilty of, not Alibaba.
https://apnews.com/article/anthropic-authors-copyright-judge...
I bet you've downloaded a car.
And those darned printing presses distributing works that were written prior to their existence.
This is also a good thing fwiw.
More like one bootlegger complaining that another bootlegger is copying their bootleg DVDs.
Except Anthropic didn't produce the movie.
So it's more like one bootlegger sold the DVD for $20 and their competitors are undercutting them for $1. Who's the bigger thief here now?
Capitalism as intended!