stealing with the intent to gain a unfair marked advantage so that you can effectively kill any ethically legally correctly acting company in a way which is very likely going to hurt many authors through the products you create is far worse then just stealing for personal use
> Stealing is stealing. Let's stop with the double standards.
I get the sentiment, but that statement as is, is absurdly reductive. Details matter. Even if someone takes merchandise from a store without paying, their sentence will vary depending on the details.
These are the people shaping the future of AI? What happened to all the ethical values they love to preach about?
We've held China accountable for counterfeiting products for decades and regulated their exports. So why should Anthropic be allowed to export their products and services after engaging in the same illegal activity?
> We've held China accountable for counterfeiting products for decades and regulated their exports
We have? Are we from different multi-verses?
The one I've lived in to date has not done anything against Chinese counterfeits beyond occasionally seizing counterfeit goods during import. But that's merely occasionally enforcing local counterfeit law, a far cry from punishing the entity producing it.
As a matter of fact, the companies started outsourcing everything to China, making further IP theft and quasi-copies even easier
Why is it unethical of them to use the information in all these books? They are clearly not reselling the books in any way, shape, or form. The information itself in a book can never be copyrighted. You can also publish and sell material where you quote other books within it.
Pirate and pay the fine is probably hell of a lot cheaper than individually buying all these books. I'm not saying this is justified, but what would you have done in their situation?
Sayi "they have the money" is not an argument. It's about the amount of effort that is needed to individually buy, scan, process millions of pages. If that's done for you, why re-do it all?
Based on the fact people went to jail for downloading some music or movies, this guy will face a lifetime in prison for 7 million books that he then used for commercial profit right?
Right guys we don't have rules for thee but not for me in the land of the free?
Same did Meta and probably other big companies. People who praise AGI are very short sighted. It will ruin the world with our current morals and ethics. It's like a nuclear weapon in the hands of barbarians (shit, we have that too, actually).
The main problem I have with that argument is when have we ever been "ready" for any technology ahead of times? Its impact is always unknown not only on society but in the technology itself. What sort of 'preparatory' work can a society do to satisfy this? If we were to apply such 'precautionary' logic to automobiles it would at very best be starting out with a large public works project to create separated grades for all vehicles, before building a single vehicle (where they have no idea how tight the constraints will truly be, thinking they will go only as fast as a horse at a gallop). It is far more likely to wind up a silly waste of time or pretext for Luddism to try to delay the inevitable. Like it or not, being capable of doing something is the only true deciding standard of being ready for something.
Not to mention the whole notion of being able to judge others as 'not ready for it' is an insult to the very notion of individual self-determination. Imagine for instance if the western world in the past had took after Starfleet in the worst of ways and banned supplying medical aid to sub-Saharan Africa as they judged their society as not ready for it. They would rightfully be called callous, arrogant racist imperialists for thinking it is their right to impose suffering upon others and deny others opportunities and self-determination because of their own parochial judgement and thinking they knew better! Putting oneself in the position to be able to judge for the world is an act of hubris far greater than that they project upon the attempted inventors of AGI.
Apparently it's a common business practice. Spotify (even though I can't find any proof) seems to have build their software and business on pirated music. There is some more in this Article [0].
> Rumors that early versions of Spotify used ‘pirate’ MP3s have been floating around the Internet for years. People who had access to the service in the beginning later reported downloading tracks that contained ‘Scene’ labeling, tags, and formats, which are the tell-tale signs that content hadn’t been obtained officially.
not just Spotify pretty much any (most?) current tech giant was build by
- riding a wave of change
- not caring too much about legal constraints (or like they would say now "distrupting" the market, which very very often means doing illigal shit which beings them far more money then any penalties they will ever face from it)
- or caring about ethics too much
- and for recent years (starting with Amazone) a lot of technically illegal financing (technically undercutting competitors prices long term based on money from else where (e.g. investors) is unfair competitive advantage (theoretically) clearly not allowed by anti monopoly laws. And before you often still had other monopoly issues (e.g. see wintel)
So yes not systematic not complying with law to get unfair competitive advantage knowing that many of the laws are on the larger picture toothless when applied to huge companies is bread and butter work of US tech giants
The common meme is that megacorps are shamelessly criminalistic organizations that get away with doing anything they can to maximize profits, while true in some regard, totally pales in comparison to the illegal things small businesses and start-ups do.
It's not a common business practice. That's why it's considered newsworthy.
People on the internet have forgotten that the news doesn't report everyday, normal, common things, or it would be nothing but a listing of people mowing their lawns or applying for business loans. The reason something is in the news is because it is unusual or remarkable.
"I saw it online, so it must happen all the time" is a dopy lack of logic that infects society.
You are missing the point. Spotify had permission from the copyright holders and/or their national proxies to use those songs in a limited beta in Sweden. They didn't have access to clean audio data directly from the record companies, so in many cases they used pirated rips instead.
What you really should be asking is whether they infringed on the copyrights of the rippers. /s
This isn't as meaningful as it sounds. Nintendo was apparently using scene roms for one of the official emulators on Wii (I think?). Spotify might have received legally-obtained mp3s from the record companies that were originally pulled from Napster or whatever, because the people who work for record companies are lazy hypocrites.
Google Music originally let people upload their own digital music files. The argument at the time was that whether or not the files were legally obtained was not Google’s problem. I believe Amazon had a similar service.
YouTube's initial success came from being able to serve, on a global scale, user-uploaded, largely uncredited copyright violations of both video and audio.
Facebook's "pivot to video" similarly relied on user-uploaded unlicensed video content, now not just pulling from television and film, but from content creators on platforms like YouTube.
Today, every "social" platform is now littered with "no copyright infringement intended" and "all credit to the original" copy-and-paste junk. Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of remix culture – but I believe appropriating and monetizing the work of others without sharing the reward is a destructive cycle. And while there are avenues for addressing this, they're designed for the likes of Universal, Sony, Disney, etc. (I've had original recordings of original music flagged by megacorps because the applause triggered ContentID.)
AI slop further poisons the well. It's rough going out there.
"Anthropic cut up millions of used books to train Claude — and downloaded over 7 million pirated ones too, a judge said."
A not-so-subtle difference.
That said, in a sane world, they shouldn't have needed to cut up all those used books yet again when there's obviously already an existing file that does all the work.
Yeah, I'm not sure if people realize that the whole reason they had to cut up the books was because they wanted to comply with copyright law. Artificial scarcity.
So using the standard industry metrics for calculating the financial impact of piracy, this would equate to something like trillions of damages to the book publishing industry?
I've begun to wonder if this is why some large torrent sites haven't been taken down. They are essentially able to crowdsource all the work. There are some users who spend ungodly amounts of time and money on these sites that I suspect are rich industry benefactors.
as far as I understand while training on books is clearly not fair use (as the result will likely hurt the lively hood of authors, especially not "best of the best" authors).
as long as you buy the book it still should be legal, that is if you actually buy the book and not a "read only" eBook
but the 7_000_000 pirated books are a huge issue, and one from which we have a lot of reason to believe isn't just specific to Anthropic
Buying, scanning, and discarding was in my proposal to train under copyright restrictions.
You are often allowed to nake a digital copy of a physical work you bought. There are tons of used, physical works thay would be good for training LLM's. They'd also be good for training OCR which could do many things, including improve book scanning for training.
This could be reduced to a single act of book destruction per copyrighted work or made unnecessary if copyright law allowed us to share others' works digitally with their licensed customers. Ex: people who own a physical copy or a license to one. Obviously, the implementation could get complex but we wouldn't have to destroy books very often.
The farce of treating a corporation as an individual precludes common sense legal procedure to investigate people who are responsible for criminal action taken by the company. Its obviously premeditated and in all ways an illicit act knowingly perpetrated by persons. The only discourse should be about upending this penthouse legalism.
The “farce” of treating a corporation as a legal individual is the reason you can have this case in the first place. Otherwise the authors would have had to discover and individually sue each specific individual in the company for each specific claim. They would have to find the specific individual that downloaded their specific book and sue that person. Then they would need to find the specific individual that digitized their specific book and sue that person. Then they would need to find the specific person that loaded that digital copy into an AI model and sue that person. And on and on for each alleged act of infringement.
Or we could recognize that’s silly when we’re talking about a group of people acting in concert and treat them as a single entity for the purpose of alleged crimes. Which is what we do when we treat a corporation as an individual for legal purposes.
I'm not seeing how this is fair use in either case.
Someone correct me if I am wrong but aren't these works being digitized and transformed in a way to make a profit off of the information that is included in these works?
It would be one thing for an individual to make person use of one or more books, but you got to have some special blindness not to see that a for-profit company's use of this information to improve a for-profit model is clearly going against what copyright stands for.
91 comments
[ 1758 ms ] story [ 3753 ms ] threadStealing is stealing. Let's stop with the double standards.
that isn't "just" stealing, it's organized crime
I get the sentiment, but that statement as is, is absurdly reductive. Details matter. Even if someone takes merchandise from a store without paying, their sentence will vary depending on the details.
We've held China accountable for counterfeiting products for decades and regulated their exports. So why should Anthropic be allowed to export their products and services after engaging in the same illegal activity?
We have? Are we from different multi-verses?
The one I've lived in to date has not done anything against Chinese counterfeits beyond occasionally seizing counterfeit goods during import. But that's merely occasionally enforcing local counterfeit law, a far cry from punishing the entity producing it.
As a matter of fact, the companies started outsourcing everything to China, making further IP theft and quasi-copies even easier
Against companies like Elsevier locking up the worlds knowledge.
Authors are no different to scientists, many had government funding at one point, and it's the publishing companies that got most of the sales.
You can disagree and think Aaron Swartz was evil, but you can't have both.
You can take what Anthropic have show you is possible and do this yourself now.
isohunt: freedom of information
Sayi "they have the money" is not an argument. It's about the amount of effort that is needed to individually buy, scan, process millions of pages. If that's done for you, why re-do it all?
Individuals would have their lives ruined either from massive fines or jail time.
$500,000 per infringement...
Right guys we don't have rules for thee but not for me in the land of the free?
Not to mention the whole notion of being able to judge others as 'not ready for it' is an insult to the very notion of individual self-determination. Imagine for instance if the western world in the past had took after Starfleet in the worst of ways and banned supplying medical aid to sub-Saharan Africa as they judged their society as not ready for it. They would rightfully be called callous, arrogant racist imperialists for thinking it is their right to impose suffering upon others and deny others opportunities and self-determination because of their own parochial judgement and thinking they knew better! Putting oneself in the position to be able to judge for the world is an act of hubris far greater than that they project upon the attempted inventors of AGI.
https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files...
Funky quote:
> Rumors that early versions of Spotify used ‘pirate’ MP3s have been floating around the Internet for years. People who had access to the service in the beginning later reported downloading tracks that contained ‘Scene’ labeling, tags, and formats, which are the tell-tale signs that content hadn’t been obtained officially.
- riding a wave of change
- not caring too much about legal constraints (or like they would say now "distrupting" the market, which very very often means doing illigal shit which beings them far more money then any penalties they will ever face from it)
- or caring about ethics too much
- and for recent years (starting with Amazone) a lot of technically illegal financing (technically undercutting competitors prices long term based on money from else where (e.g. investors) is unfair competitive advantage (theoretically) clearly not allowed by anti monopoly laws. And before you often still had other monopoly issues (e.g. see wintel)
So yes not systematic not complying with law to get unfair competitive advantage knowing that many of the laws are on the larger picture toothless when applied to huge companies is bread and butter work of US tech giants
It's not a common business practice. That's why it's considered newsworthy.
People on the internet have forgotten that the news doesn't report everyday, normal, common things, or it would be nothing but a listing of people mowing their lawns or applying for business loans. The reason something is in the news is because it is unusual or remarkable.
"I saw it online, so it must happen all the time" is a dopy lack of logic that infects society.
What you really should be asking is whether they infringed on the copyrights of the rippers. /s
https://www.computerworld.com/article/1447323/google-reporte...
Facebook's "pivot to video" similarly relied on user-uploaded unlicensed video content, now not just pulling from television and film, but from content creators on platforms like YouTube.
Today, every "social" platform is now littered with "no copyright infringement intended" and "all credit to the original" copy-and-paste junk. Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of remix culture – but I believe appropriating and monetizing the work of others without sharing the reward is a destructive cycle. And while there are avenues for addressing this, they're designed for the likes of Universal, Sony, Disney, etc. (I've had original recordings of original music flagged by megacorps because the applause triggered ContentID.)
AI slop further poisons the well. It's rough going out there.
"Anthropic cut up millions of used books to train Claude — and downloaded over 7 million pirated ones too, a judge said."
A not-so-subtle difference.
That said, in a sane world, they shouldn't have needed to cut up all those used books yet again when there's obviously already an existing file that does all the work.
https://investors.autodesk.com/news-releases/news-release-de...
as long as you buy the book it still should be legal, that is if you actually buy the book and not a "read only" eBook
but the 7_000_000 pirated books are a huge issue, and one from which we have a lot of reason to believe isn't just specific to Anthropic
You are often allowed to nake a digital copy of a physical work you bought. There are tons of used, physical works thay would be good for training LLM's. They'd also be good for training OCR which could do many things, including improve book scanning for training.
This could be reduced to a single act of book destruction per copyrighted work or made unnecessary if copyright law allowed us to share others' works digitally with their licensed customers. Ex: people who own a physical copy or a license to one. Obviously, the implementation could get complex but we wouldn't have to destroy books very often.
Or we could recognize that’s silly when we’re talking about a group of people acting in concert and treat them as a single entity for the purpose of alleged crimes. Which is what we do when we treat a corporation as an individual for legal purposes.
Someone correct me if I am wrong but aren't these works being digitized and transformed in a way to make a profit off of the information that is included in these works?
It would be one thing for an individual to make person use of one or more books, but you got to have some special blindness not to see that a for-profit company's use of this information to improve a for-profit model is clearly going against what copyright stands for.