how much of your economic output are you comfortable with companies like Anthropic stealing to put you out of work?
at least in Player Piano they paid the workers who made the cassette tapes that made the robots work.
our current LLM overlords demand that they be able to basically steal the sum total of all human knowledge so that they can sell it back to us at a rate they set.
they should have been shunned by society and made penniless when they first announced their goals but we have a bunch of deeply misanthropic people who have money and want to make a world where computer slaves do their bidding.
I sincerely don't understand what the point of these laws are, when the cost of flagrant violations is no more than a slap on the wrist -- these really meager sums that serve as nothing more than something to point at and say "Look, we did something!"
Cover-your-ass strategy, and nothing more. Who, besides the ones at fault, are ever happy with these mean-nothing fines?
The justice system really needs an overhaul with how it tackles "justice" between the wealthy, the connected, the corporations, and the rest. Though I am unsure what that would look like. Minimum net wealth per category of infraction across the board?
The big deal for publishers and authors is the payout per eligible title is $3k. For a traditional publishing contract involving one author, the amount will be split down the middle.
The other thing which caught my eye is the judge slashed the class counsel's fee by half, from 12.5% ($187.5m) to 6.8% ($101m). The class counsel's unreimbursed litigation expenses were $2.6m.
The three class representatives get just $15k each.
Realtors are capped in the percentage they can take for selling properties. Brokers and financial advisers are capped in their fees. My presumption is that the only reason this very standard and reasonable regulatory pattern doesn’t affect lawyers is because they tend to be the ones writing and enforcing the regulations in the first place.
I support anthropics position here, on both learning from and "pirating" books.
The way i see things , the publishers and authors are happy with any policy that makes them more money, and more market control, regardless of what is ethical/just/right.
They would shutdown public libraries , all libraries, if they could.
Aaron Swartz lost his life because he tried to make public knowledge public, and they would be happy to put every information activist to death to protect their monopolies.
IMHO they have no right to stop free access on the internet. The whole copyright system is artificial and monopolistic, and the publishers are complaining yet again, that technology moves information more efficiently than they do, so they want to artificially retard it through goverment action.
The real goverment action that is needed, is to protect private/personal data; not data that is actively traded commercially or publically.
These tech companies are invading personal and private spaces of everyday people, and storing and training with it. Even using it for military targetting and warrantless surveillance.
Anthropic is by no means a good entity, so the way to stick it to them and all tech companies, is to allow their internet scraping, but make it outright criminal to use telemetry or any surveillance techniques they have or will develop.
Also... the ”creators",hollywood,publishers, have no problems scraping themselves, and lift ideas from just about everywhere they can get it.
Almost every hollywood movie is just an assemblage of random memes and topical concerns of everyday ppl, distilled into embelished predictable cheese.
The publishers are the original slop actors. Human Slop.
This is not even than a slap on the wrist. Publishers who negotiated this really fucked up writers.
According to US federal law, pirating a single copyrighted work and gaining commercial advantage of it (which Anthropic 100% did) represents five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. But it gets worse:
"Penalties for a copyright infringement conviction may increase if the defendant has previous similar convictions, made more than 10 copies of copyrighted works, committed copyright infringement during a period longer than 180 days, or infringed copyrighted material worth more than $2,500."
That is a false statement. Gaining commercial advantage means selling pirated copies which Anthropic absolutely did not do, so none of your following statements are correct either.
What a fucking joke of a country the US is, allowing this kind of behaviour with such a pathetic "punishment". Barely even qualifies as a tap on the wrist, Anthropic should be getting gutted into non-existence for this shit and the execs should be given the Aaron Swartz treatment.
Amen! We are watching them incinerate the past so they can lie about the past in the future. They are destroying the books and will censor what was in them.
Alsup is an interesting judge. He has handled several important tech cases, such as Oracle v Google, and Waymo v Uber.
He's also a longtime hobbyist programmer working in BASIC, much of it in support of his ham radio hobby. Screenshots of his shortwave propagation prediction program here [1].
Yes, that is interesting. It sounds like he was aware of the theoretical possibility of a book being regurgitated verbatim. Do you know if he was aware it had been done? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49000742
If he was not aware, I wonder if he still would have described the process as "exceedingly transformative" had he been aware.
So, continuing to profit--forever--from someone's else work, at scale, without their prior consent, is fair use?
It's funny that crimes can be settled in cash. IOW, everything has a price; and the price is always right. Settlement ought to be the euphemism for blood money.
In addition to the settlement, what I'd consider fair is to have these companies pay royalties in perpetuity. Of course, that's not tractable.
This sends a clear message and it echoes the "you can't solve a societal problem with tech" comment from the other thread - there is a right way and a wrong way of breaking the law. It's not that you have to keep the law, you just need to break it in the way that the consequences can be contained.
I think it's just a matter of time until everyone learns this. And then it will be the end of the slowly dying liberal democracies.
See, Judge Alsup should have been the person Biden put on the Supreme Court, that or re-nominate Merrick Garland. Instead, he made a silly promise to sate Black Lives Matter, which even when he took office was fast on its way to ignominy, and now Kagan is stuck being the only competent liberal justice on the court. At least Alsup can continue setting the direction of law as it applies to the tech industry.
Did someone forget to consult with the MPAA and the RIAA on this one? This is a joke of an outcome. $3k per book. How much was it per song for Napster?
This is a too big to fail scenario. If these companies fail, so does the US economy. Normal laws for individuals don't apply, so any comparison to that is pointless.
For anyone who thinks the problem is Anthropic, I want you all to know that most authors make less than the median income. Most make less than $20,000 a year, because publishing houses give authors an advance, and then authors must pay back that entire advance in sales before they see a dollar of profit from their work.
Most never do.
Maybe publishers should JUST pay authors WELL, and get a book every 2-3 years.
84 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 5.9 ms ] threadat least in Player Piano they paid the workers who made the cassette tapes that made the robots work.
our current LLM overlords demand that they be able to basically steal the sum total of all human knowledge so that they can sell it back to us at a rate they set.
they should have been shunned by society and made penniless when they first announced their goals but we have a bunch of deeply misanthropic people who have money and want to make a world where computer slaves do their bidding.
Let them take on the liability
Cover-your-ass strategy, and nothing more. Who, besides the ones at fault, are ever happy with these mean-nothing fines?
The justice system really needs an overhaul with how it tackles "justice" between the wealthy, the connected, the corporations, and the rest. Though I am unsure what that would look like. Minimum net wealth per category of infraction across the board?
Edit: grammar
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
The big deal for publishers and authors is the payout per eligible title is $3k. For a traditional publishing contract involving one author, the amount will be split down the middle.
The other thing which caught my eye is the judge slashed the class counsel's fee by half, from 12.5% ($187.5m) to 6.8% ($101m). The class counsel's unreimbursed litigation expenses were $2.6m.
The three class representatives get just $15k each.
In what sane state does it even get that high?
According to US federal law, pirating a single copyrighted work and gaining commercial advantage of it (which Anthropic 100% did) represents five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. But it gets worse:
"Penalties for a copyright infringement conviction may increase if the defendant has previous similar convictions, made more than 10 copies of copyrighted works, committed copyright infringement during a period longer than 180 days, or infringed copyrighted material worth more than $2,500."
https://www.justia.com/entertainment-law/piracy-in-the-enter...
He's also a longtime hobbyist programmer working in BASIC, much of it in support of his ham radio hobby. Screenshots of his shortwave propagation prediction program here [1].
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16503076/oracle-vs-googl...
If he was not aware, I wonder if he still would have described the process as "exceedingly transformative" had he been aware.
It's funny that crimes can be settled in cash. IOW, everything has a price; and the price is always right. Settlement ought to be the euphemism for blood money.
In addition to the settlement, what I'd consider fair is to have these companies pay royalties in perpetuity. Of course, that's not tractable.
I think it's just a matter of time until everyone learns this. And then it will be the end of the slowly dying liberal democracies.
Most never do.
Maybe publishers should JUST pay authors WELL, and get a book every 2-3 years.
https://authorsguild.org/news/key-takeaways-from-2023-author...
The verdict is a joke.