Comment by reinitctxoffset
20 hours ago
Eh, I think you've done a pretty good job summarizing a collection of settlements with a few narrow bench rulings for seasoning. I'm not sure I follow you to it being a coherent legal theory. Buying a book in a bookstore is sure legal, and excerpting from it for e.g. literary criticism is pretty settled. Downloading every torrent of all e-books ever is pretty clearly illegal (or at least it fuckin would be if I did it). Pretty sure like, multiple labs have been popped for that though.
Situation right now seems more like a fragile detente: if you got a Hill staffer drunk and hounded him long enough he'd probably be like "God damnit the market will fucking tank if we don't get these two IPOs out north of a trillion. And don't even get me started on how I'm going to sell Chinese AI to a Senate that still calls people Nipponesians when no one is looking. We're doing the best we can alright, get off my back man."
We have a situation, but it's not exactly A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster.
> Downloading every torrent of all e-books ever is pretty clearly illegal (or at least it fuckin would be if I did it). Pretty sure like, multiple labs have been popped for that though.
Oh it is, and at least anthropic has paid $1.5 billion and deleted there torrented copies and not released any models derived from them as a consequence.
The thing is it turns out to be not that expensive to just buy a copy of every book legally and scan them. And there's even precedent that this is legal predating LLMs (Google books)
> and deleted there torrented copies and not released any models derived from them as a consequence.
I have a bridge to sell you
Great, let's go down to the courthouse and get some sworn testimony as to the ownership, value, condition, and so on and so forth of the bridge. And some document review and discovery run through professional legal firms under the same conditions. And perfectly reasonable and verifiable explanations as to why you own the bridge and are selling it (namely that you bought a copy of literally every book in existence in the meantime).
Facts are in fact knowable, and the US legal system is in fact not terrible at getting to them.
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