Has it been proved in a court of law that it is a copyright violation?
In some cases if the model regurgitates the original material then that is clearly copyright violation, but if the model "learns" from the source material just like a human brain would then that's not a copyright violation.
No, what was proved in court was that they downloaded and trained on millions of pirated books. The court said their use of books is fair use, but stealing them isn't.
I think we're going to see cases that find distillation is also fair use. You're using the competing model like a book. You pay for it, you use it (read it), it informs your model, but you aren't repeating/reselling what the model told you verbatim. Foreign labs may still run afoul of competing labs' Terms of Service, and they may also pay a settlement (or not, it's a different jurisdiction after all), but the damage is already done. Distillation will become uncontroversial when done legally.
it's a 'too big to fail' model. Because they have a big swinging dick all the copyright and other restrictions they violated would nuke them from orbit so we can't actually hold them to account for it .... for some fucking reason.
> Has it been proved in a court of law that it is a copyright violation?
God I'm so tired of this.
The billion dollar companies have the ability to hire an army of lawyers to DDOS the legal system. They at most pay a slap-on-the-wrist fine as the cost of doing business.
I'm extremely pro free markets etc, but the uncomfortable truth is anthropic stole the work of thousands of authors for profit. I think it will end one my favourite things in life: programming books.
If you have ever made a painting and sold it, then you too profited from the work of thousands of artists. How so? Because your sense of what is art came from those who preceded you. You have seen the works of Picasso, Rembrandt, Monet and so on and your brain absorbed from their work, just like an LLM.
If an LLM generalizes from thousands of authors then it is no different from what your brain does.
even if you disregard training costs, pure inference costs are a problem same reason other api have rate limit. this is an attack to bypass the rate limit.
Be careful to properly identify the bad behavior. A customer who buys a product for less money than it cost to produce has not necessarily done anything wrong. They just took advantage of a loss leader. That's on the seller.
Did you notice that when Valve was displeased about scalpers, Valve changed Valve's behavior?
It doesn't seem reasonable to complain that a customer of your AI service received that service for less money than it cost you to provide that service. I don't think that is the complaint here at all. If that was the issue, they could just raise their price.
As most everybody seems to notice, this is just a reenactment of what was once written for comedic effect: "You're trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen!"
Still calling it an "attack" feels like a stretch.
They literally had to pay for that "attack", no matter how many accounts they used.
Google was killing many websites for decades with their crawlers. Most large websites decided to create dedicated infrastructure for their traffic alone. Somehow they didn't participate in that cost and were not called the attackers.
This is the mental mental leaps I'm struggling with here. Did you not live through that era where they were explicitly and repeatedly called out as 'attacks'? They were generally tolerated/hardenee around as they provided value-in-discoverability.
Just to ensure you don't gaslight yourself - I did live through that era and I worked on and supported a niche community (a MUD) where we did a lot of work encouraging marketing and discoverability through MUD forums as well as making sure our page was accurately and minimally keyword tagged and highly available for indexers.
In the time since that era search engines have transformed into platforms themselves that do engage in more parasitic behavior but it's important not to assume that the way it is now is how it always was - that's a rather defeatist path to walk down where you ignore awareness of the fact that there can be a highly profitable non-enshittified search engine that supports, rather than destroys, the ecosystem it benefits from.
It was better and, if we're diligent, it can be better again.
Ding. Ding. Ding. "Provided value to the content author". AI scrapping negatively impacts the content author with zero compensation. There is no mutual benefit.
They should be. But as the saying goes, one website/company dying is a "tragedy," lots of them dying at the hands of one company is a statistic of corporate growth. Or something like that.
And then of course when the tables turn on a company and they're the ones getting bombarded, they cry foul. Keep in mind Anthropic did many similar things that you mentioned Google did.
I think the term "attack" here is appropriate but not in the way Anthropic is framing it. Alibaba is clearly violating terms to extract data, so that's definitely not above board. But it's not like a DDOS attack where Alibaba is trying to attack Anthropics servers. Alibaba is simply doing exactly what Anthropic did to the rest of the internet, just targeting Anthropic and paying them to do so.
Has it been proved in a court of law that it is a copyright violation?
In some cases if the model regurgitates the original material then that is clearly copyright violation, but if the model "learns" from the source material just like a human brain would then that's not a copyright violation.
No, what was proved in court was that they downloaded and trained on millions of pirated books. The court said their use of books is fair use, but stealing them isn't.
I think we're going to see cases that find distillation is also fair use. You're using the competing model like a book. You pay for it, you use it (read it), it informs your model, but you aren't repeating/reselling what the model told you verbatim. Foreign labs may still run afoul of competing labs' Terms of Service, and they may also pay a settlement (or not, it's a different jurisdiction after all), but the damage is already done. Distillation will become uncontroversial when done legally.
Are LLMs even copyrightable? If not, no need to speculate fair use.
Then distillation isn't a violation either by extension.
I would agree, if they are inspecting static output of American AI models without using their compute resources.
Scraping the internet for training is also using compute resources.
Aren't they buying the use of these resources just like any other customer?
it's a 'too big to fail' model. Because they have a big swinging dick all the copyright and other restrictions they violated would nuke them from orbit so we can't actually hold them to account for it .... for some fucking reason.
> Has it been proved in a court of law that it is a copyright violation?
God I'm so tired of this.
The billion dollar companies have the ability to hire an army of lawyers to DDOS the legal system. They at most pay a slap-on-the-wrist fine as the cost of doing business.
Ddos is a great framing of this :)
I'm extremely pro free markets etc, but the uncomfortable truth is anthropic stole the work of thousands of authors for profit. I think it will end one my favourite things in life: programming books.
If you have ever made a painting and sold it, then you too profited from the work of thousands of artists. How so? Because your sense of what is art came from those who preceded you. You have seen the works of Picasso, Rembrandt, Monet and so on and your brain absorbed from their work, just like an LLM.
If an LLM generalizes from thousands of authors then it is no different from what your brain does.
even if you disregard training costs, pure inference costs are a problem same reason other api have rate limit. this is an attack to bypass the rate limit.
Be careful to properly identify the bad behavior. A customer who buys a product for less money than it cost to produce has not necessarily done anything wrong. They just took advantage of a loss leader. That's on the seller.
Did you notice that when Valve was displeased about scalpers, Valve changed Valve's behavior?
It doesn't seem reasonable to complain that a customer of your AI service received that service for less money than it cost you to provide that service. I don't think that is the complaint here at all. If that was the issue, they could just raise their price.
As most everybody seems to notice, this is just a reenactment of what was once written for comedic effect: "You're trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen!"
Perhaps an arrangement can be reached.
https://clip.cafe/the-princess-bride-1987/youre-trying-kidna...
Still calling it an "attack" feels like a stretch.
They literally had to pay for that "attack", no matter how many accounts they used.
Google was killing many websites for decades with their crawlers. Most large websites decided to create dedicated infrastructure for their traffic alone. Somehow they didn't participate in that cost and were not called the attackers.
> and were not called the attackers.
This is the mental mental leaps I'm struggling with here. Did you not live through that era where they were explicitly and repeatedly called out as 'attacks'? They were generally tolerated/hardenee around as they provided value-in-discoverability.
Just to ensure you don't gaslight yourself - I did live through that era and I worked on and supported a niche community (a MUD) where we did a lot of work encouraging marketing and discoverability through MUD forums as well as making sure our page was accurately and minimally keyword tagged and highly available for indexers.
In the time since that era search engines have transformed into platforms themselves that do engage in more parasitic behavior but it's important not to assume that the way it is now is how it always was - that's a rather defeatist path to walk down where you ignore awareness of the fact that there can be a highly profitable non-enshittified search engine that supports, rather than destroys, the ecosystem it benefits from.
It was better and, if we're diligent, it can be better again.
Ding. Ding. Ding. "Provided value to the content author". AI scrapping negatively impacts the content author with zero compensation. There is no mutual benefit.
> [Google] were not called the attackers.
They should be. But as the saying goes, one website/company dying is a "tragedy," lots of them dying at the hands of one company is a statistic of corporate growth. Or something like that.
And then of course when the tables turn on a company and they're the ones getting bombarded, they cry foul. Keep in mind Anthropic did many similar things that you mentioned Google did.
I think the term "attack" here is appropriate but not in the way Anthropic is framing it. Alibaba is clearly violating terms to extract data, so that's definitely not above board. But it's not like a DDOS attack where Alibaba is trying to attack Anthropics servers. Alibaba is simply doing exactly what Anthropic did to the rest of the internet, just targeting Anthropic and paying them to do so.