i dont know that its such a great thing in the end. Uber/Lyft is 50-100% more expensive now than taxis were before. Theyre entrenched in different ways.

> And thank god they did. There was no perfectly legal channel to fix the taxi cartel

And instead Uber offloaded everything onto gig workers and society. And still lost 20 billion dollars in the process (price dumping isn't cheap).

The supposed 'taxi cartel' were just (some) scummy operators ... not really a cartel. Fast forward to today => you are paying more for what is essentially very similar service (because it literally turned into a monopoly because of network effects) and the money ends up in the pocket of some corporate douche not even the people doing the actual work.

This is the business model: get more money out of customers (because no real alternative) and the drivers (because zero negotiating power). Not to mention that they actually got to that position by literally operating at a loss for over a decade (because venture money). Textbook anti-competitive practices.

However, the idea itself (that is having an app to order taxi) is spectacular. It also something a high-school kid could make in a month in his garage. The actual strength of the business model is the network effects and the anti-competitive practices, not the app or anything having to do with service quality.

What about the problem of sexual assault by drivers?

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/06/business/uber-sexual-assa...

Very few cartels actually existed to justify free range regulatory erasure.

From TFA

  The Google Books project also faced a copyright lawsuit, which was eventually decided in favor of Google.

  After contacting major publishers about possibly licensing their books, [former head of the Google Books project] bought physical books in bulk from distributors and retailers, according to court documents. He then hired outside organizations to dissemble the books, scan them and create digital copies that could be used to train the company’s AI. technologies.

  Judge Alsup ruled that this approach was fair use under the law. But he also found the company’s previous approach — downloading and storing books from shadow libraries like Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror — was illegal.

This lawsuit also makes sure that only parties that can train an AI with good enough training material are now

- Google

- Anthropic

- Any Chinese company who do not care about copyright laws

What is the cost of buying and scanning books?

Copyright law needs to be fixed and its ridiculous hundred years tenure chopped away.

Crazy to think we've been helping train AI through captchas long before the "click all squares containing" ones.

The lawsuit didn't find anything, Anthropic claimed this as part of the settlement. Companies settle without admission of wrongdoing all the time, to the extent that it can be bargained for.

I'm "team Anthropic" if we're stack ranking the major American labs pumping out SOTA models by ethics or whatever, but there is no universe in which a company like them operating in this competitive environment didn't pirate the books.

Lawyer: "Sir. These were carpoolers, just sharing a ride to their new online friends' B&B."

Judge: "But this app facilitated them."

Lawyer: "Well, you presume so-called genuine carpoolers are not facilitated? The manufacturers of their cell phones, the telecom operators, their employers or the bar where they met, or the bus company at whose bus stop they met, they all facilitated their carpooling behavior."

Judge: "But your company profits from this coordination!"

Lawyer: "Well we pay taxes, just like the manufacturer of the cell phone, the telecom operator, their employers, the bus company or the bar... But let's ignore that, what you -representing the government (which in turn supposedly represents the people)- are really after is money or power. As a judge you are not responsible for setting up the economy, or micromanaging the development of apps, so its not your fault that the government didn't create this application before our company did. In a sense you are lucky that we created the app given that the government did not create this application in a timely fashion!"

Judge: "How so?"

Lawyer: "If the population had created this app they would have started thinking about where the proceeds should go. They would have gotten concerned about the centralization of power (financial and intelligence). They would have searched for ways to decentralize and secure their app. They would have eventually gotten cryptographers involved. In that world, no substantial income would be generated, your fleet of taxi's would be threatened as well, and you wouldn't even have the juicy intel we occasionally share either!"

This conversation almost never takes place, since it only needs to take place once, after which a naive judge has learned how the cookie crumbles. Most judges have lost this naivety before even becoming a judge. They learn this indirectly when small "annoyances" threaten the scheme (one could say the official taxi fleet was an earlier such scheme).

The same could be said of grand larceny. The difference would seem to be a mix of social norms and, more notably for this conversation, very different consequences.

Option 1: $183B valuation, $1.5B settlement.

Option 2: near-$0 valuation, $15M purchasing cost.

To an investor, that just looks like a pretty good deal, I reckon. It's just the cost of doing business - which in my opionion is exactly what is wrong with practices like these.

It's not about money. It's about time.

That doesn't really feel like the same thing to me.

With Uber you had a company that wanted to enter an existing market but couldn't due to legally-granted monopolies on taxi service. And given that existing market, you can be sure that the incumbents would lobby to keep Uber locked out.

With Waymo you have a new technology that has a computer driving the car autonomously. There isn't really any directly-incumbent party with a vested (conflict of) interest to argue against it. Waymo is a kind of taxi, though, so presumably existing taxi operators -- and the likes of Uber and Lyft -- could argue against it in order to protect their advantages. But ironically Uber and Lyft "softened" those regulatory bars already, so it might not have been worth it to try.

At any rate, the regulatory and safety concerns are also very different between the two.

I think I am also just a little more sympathetic to early Uber, given how terrible and cartel-like taxi service was in the past. But I would not at all be sympathetic toward Waymo putting driverless cars on the streets without regulatory approval and oversight, especially if people got injured or killed.

I think the difference between Waymo and Uber is risk level. Maybe Waymo would like to skirt regulations but they won't be allowed to by citizens and officials alike.

Exactly. Well said.

I didn't realize Vernor Vinge had passed away... Sad TIL

One of my favorites

  >  but AI doesn't change the motivations and goals behind copyright

I don't know the word but it's similar to arguing morality or public policy from the current status of the law.

They do not have perfect recall unless you provide them a passage in the current context and then ask them to quote it.

The 'lossy encyclopedia' analogy is quite apt

Has anyone actually made the argument that having an AI regurgitate a word for word copy of an otherwise copyrighted work is fair use? Or have they made the argument that training the AI is transformative and fair use, and using that AI to generate works that are similar but not duplications of the copyrighted work is fair use?

A xerox machine can reproduce an exact copy of a book if you ask it to, but that doesn't make a xerox machine inherently a copyright violation, nor does it make every use of a xerox machine a violation of copyright, even when the inputs are materials under copyright. So far the judge in this case has ruled that training an AI is sufficiently transformative, and that using legally acquired works for that purpose is not a violation of copyright. That outcome seems entirely unsurprising given the years of case law around copyright and technology that can duplicate copyrighted works. See the aforementioned xerox machines, but also CD ripping, DVRs, VHS recording of TV shows, audio cassette recording, emulators, the Java API lawsuit and also the Google Books lawsuit.

But there is a difference between “illegal to regurgitate it” and “illegal to remember it”. IIRC in this case that settled the judge had ruled on “remember” (fair use) but not on the other.

The ruling also doesn’t establish precedent, because it is a trial court ruling, which is never binding precedent, and under normal circumstances can’t even be cited as persuasive precedent, and the settlement ensures there will be no appellate ruling.

I suspect that ruling legally gets wiped off the books by the settlement since the case gets dismissed, no?

Even if the ruling legally remains in place after the settlement, district court rulings are at most persuasive precedent and not binding precedent in future cases, even ones handled by the same court. In the US federal court system, only appellate rulings at either the circuit court of appeals level or the Supreme Court level are binding precedent within their respective jurisdictions.

Which is very important for e.g. the NYT lawsuit against OpenAI. Basically there’s now precedent that training AI models on text and them producing output is not copyright infringement.

By US law, cccording to Author's Guild vs Google[1] on the Google book scanning project, scanning books for indexes is fair use.

Additionally:

> Every human has the right to read those books.

Since when?

I strongly disagree - knowledge should be free.

I don't think the author's arrangement of the words should be free to reproduce (ie, I think some degree of copyright protection is ethical) but if I want to use a tool to help me understand the knowledge in a book then I should be able to.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....

> this is obvious

I think it is obvious instead that readers employed by humans fit the principle.

> rights

Societally, it is more of a duty. Knowledge is made available because we must harness it.

> Archive is off the hook then

Probably so, because with "library" I did not mean the "building". It is the decision of the society to make knowledge available.

> we don't call computers "someone"

We do instead, for this purpose. Why should we not. Anything that can read fits the set.

--

Edit: Come up with the arguments, sniper.

I think he implies that because one can borrow hypothetically any book for free from a library, one could use them for legal training purposes, so the requirement of having your own copy should be moot

I had no idea libgen was that old, thanks!

Yeah but did he die before anybody actually knew about it?

He got into trouble for breaking into an unsecured network closet at MIT and using MIT credentials to download a bunch of copyrighted content.

The whole incident is written up in detail, https://swartz-report.mit.edu/ by Hal Abelson (who wrote SICP among other things). It is a well-researched document.

Anthropic legally purchased the books it used to train its model according to the judge. And the judge said that was fine. Anthropic also downloaded books from a pirate site and the judge said that was bad -- even though the judge also said they didn't use those books for training....

Books.Google.Com was deemed fair use because it only shows previews, not full downloads. Internet Archive is still under litigation iirc besides having owned a physical copy of every book they ever scanned (and keeping a copy in their warehouses) they let people read the whole thing.

I’m surprised Google hasn’t hit its competitors harder with the fact that they actually got permission to scan books from its partner libraries and Facebook and OpenAI just torrented books2/books3, but I guess they have aligned incentive to benefit from a legal framework that doesn’t look to closely at how you went about collecting source material

Switzerland has five main collecting societies: ProLitteris for literature and visual arts, the SSA (Société Suisse des Auteurs) for dramatic works, the SUISA for music, Suissimage for audiovisual works, and SWISSPERFORM for related rights like those of performers and broadcasters. These non-profit societies manage copyright and related rights on behalf of their members, collecting and distributing royalties from users of their works.

Note that the law specifically regulates software differently, so what you cannot do is just willy nilly pirate games and software.

What distribution means in this case is defined in the swiss law. However swiss law as a whole is in some ways vague, to leave a lot up to interpretation by the judiciary.

> compensate the authors this one time.

I would assume it would compensate the publisher. Authors often hand ownership to the publisher; there would be obvious exceptions for authors who do well.

> courts are generally far more common sense than that in applying the law.

'The Board’s decision was later upheld by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which rejected the applicant’s contention that the AI system itself should be acknowledged as the author, with any copyrights vesting in the AI’s owner. The court further held that the CO did not act arbitrarily or capriciously in denying the application, reiterating the requirement that copyright law requires human authorship and that copyright protection does not extend to works “generated by new forms of technology operating absent any guiding human hand, as plaintiff urges here.”' From: https://www.whitefordlaw.com/news-events/client-alert-can-wo...

The court is using common sense when it comes to the law. It is very explicit and always has been... That word "human" has some long standing sticky legal meaning (as opposed to things that were "property").

The example is a real legal case afaik, or perhaps paraphrased from one (don’t think it was a monkey - an ape? An elephant?).

I’d guess the legal scenario for `rails generate` is that you have a license to the template code (by way of how the tool is licensed) and the template code was written by a human so licensable by them and then minimally modified by the tool.

I don’t think the code you get from rails generate is yours. Certainly not by way of copyright, which protects original works of authorship and so if it’s not original, it’s not copyrightable, and yes it’s been decided in US courts that non-human-authorship doesn’t count as creative.

Like most things in law, the answers are going to come down to intent and outcome. If you distribute the PDF to other people with the intent that they can read the copyrighted works of an author, then you have distributed that author's content in violation of copyright. If on the other hand, you encrypted the entire contents of that PDF, threw away the encryption key and the published prints of the PDF as artwork of binary code, that's probably going to fall on the side of "fair use" even though the entire copyrighted work is input to and contained in your final output. Though you might get into some legal hot water if you promoted your work using the author's name, but that's more of a trademark issue than a copyright issue.

It's bad but I think it's important to recognize how much worse it can get. Otherwise why would you work to save anything? I'm "positive" because I come from the US and I now live in an actual banana republic and I see firsthand how much worse things will get in America if the trajectory doesn't change.

Imagine a future where election results are casually and publicly nullified if the people with the guns don't like the result, and no one can do anything about it. Or where you can start a business but if it succeeds and you don't have the right family name it'll be taken from you and you'll be stripped of all you own and possibly put in prison for a while. That's reality in some countries, the US is not there yet, but those are the stakes we're playing for here, and why change needs to happen.

Creative corruption?

If we were to use an entirely neutral term for it, in the case of something like Uber, really it's the privatization of control. The regulation around taxi cabs was a matter of public policy, Uber brought in its own version of this, broke the laws where it saw fit, spent money to get new laws written, basically the decisionmaking was no longer in the hands of a public institution.

Now there is a fair criticism to be made that the public institutions governing taxi cabs were sclerotic and shitty, but if you trust Uber for one nanosecond to do what's in your best interest when it doesn't align with theirs, you're a fool, and giving a private company such a huge global footprint in what was formerly a public affair is probably going to lead to tears. They absolutely will seek rents, find them and charge them to you sooner or later, that is what's in their DNA as a private company, barring effective regulation this only ends in one way.

Where we are now is we are so deep down the rabbit hole of profit chasing that there is zero interest in maintaining or strengthening our public institutions. Why would you do that? How does it get you paid? It doesn't and everyone thinks society and culture are just big jokes that don't get you paid. So no one really cares to uphold them anymore, everyone's feasting on the corpse of the civil society while it rots.

Honest question: what's with the penchant some people have to turn every conversation into a referendum on how horrible America is?

You realize there are countries that are even worse to their citizens right? Like I'm really asking, why do so many people online seek to eliminate all conversation that isn't a simple and un-nuanced condemnation of America?

I am able to have criticisms of America while also thinking there are good things about it and that there are also worse places, but some people seem incapable of holding those three ideas in their heads simultaneously. Especially the idea that there actually are countries worse than the US, they just can't fathom that it seems, or don't consider it a fact that should receive any attention.

We hem and haw about metaphorical "book burning" so much we forget that books themselves are not actually precious.

The books that are destroyed in scanning are a small minority compared to the millions discarded by libraries every year for simply being too old or unpopular.

I remember them having a 3D page unwarping tech they built as well so they could photograph rare and antique books without hacking them apart.

No, that's not how Google Books did it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books#Scanning_of_books

I don't think Google Books scanner chopped off the spine. https://linearbookscanner.org/ is the open design they released.

Oh I didn't know that. That's wild

> handsomely profiting

Well actively generating revenue at least.

Profits are still hard to come by.

what a fascinating software project someone had the oppertunity to work on.

If in most cases damages cannot be recovered or the criminal will never be caught in the first place, then what is the lesson being taught? Doesn't that just create a moral hazard where you "randomly" choose who to penalize?

Even if the goal is to deter crime, we still have a principle of proportionate punishment. We don't cut people's hands of for petty theft, and we don't execute people for exceeding the speed limit even though both should be pretty effective deterrents.

And a low end of $750/item.

So they’re creating monopolies? The existing players were allowed to do it, but anyone that tries to do it now will be hit with a 1.5B fine?

That's not how class actions work. Ever.

In this specific case the settlement caps the lawyer fees at 25%, and even that is subject to the courts approval. In addition they will ask for $250k total ($50k / plaintiff) for the lead plaintiffs, also subject to the courts approval.

The golden rule:

He who has the gold makes the rules

So how did they profit off the pirated books?

That is something which is extremely difficult to prove from either side.

It is 500,000 books in total so did they really scan all those books instead of using the pirated versions? Even when they did not have much money in the early phases of the model race?

> Buying used copies of books, scanning them, training an employee with the scans: fair use.

Does this still hold true if multiple employees are "trained" from scanned copies at the same time?

Computers aren't people. And analogies aren't laws.