But why not jail like Kim Dotcom? And why no Feds jumping on Dario’s window? They are not only pirating, they also resell it!
But why not jail like Kim Dotcom? And why no Feds jumping on Dario’s window? They are not only pirating, they also resell it!
Yeah. These AI settlements make such a mockery of past copyright enforcement victims that it's straight up offensive.
Police descended upon Kim Dotcom like he was a terrorist or something. They rappelled down helicopters and stormed his home like he was bin Laden.
Then these big techs come along and they make some absurd cost of doing business settlement.
Let's place the rage in the rage in the right place. What they did to past infringements is wrong. What they're doing now is also wrong, but less wrong.
It was a class action law suit. I may be wrong, but I don’t think jail is ever an option in a civil suit.
right, the thread you responded to is asking why there hasn't been a parallel criminal suit
The answer is because US government finds AI more useful than some hosting service for pirated media. It's kinda boring, but it's as simple as that.
Maybe because Anthropic isn't actively facilitating copyright infringement?..
How is not? Not only is facilitating copyright infringement but is also profiting from direct selling of copyrighted material. “Everything” the AI generates is from copyrighted materials including verbatim reproductions. Sora was even more obvious.
Kill a man you’re a murderer. Kill a thousand, you’re a conqueror.
I harass the sea with my tiny boat and am called a pirate, you do it with a great fleet and are called a king.
This is literally the tale of Alexander and the pirate, told in “The City of God” (V century). Nothing new under the sun, unfortunately.
Kill them all... Oooooaaahhhhh you're a goddd
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.
This settlement doesn't stop that from happening in the future
Right. It's effectively a toll.
Copyright infringement is in most cases tortious rather than criminal.
This clearly meets the scale requirements for criminality.
It's not really scale so much as circumvention; what got criminalized was circumventing protection mechanisms which AFAICT Anthropic didn't do
That is not the only thing that is criminalised. This clearly violates 506(a)(1)(A): copyright infringement for commercial advantage is criminal.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/506#a_1_A
Maybe if they could have fined him $1.5B he would have gotten away with it too.
What was Sean Parker sued for again?
Jail for copying bits... come on, no one was hurt here.
it's a big club, and you ain't in it
Because no one wants that. They’re offering incredible value for what they took.
1. Some people want that, with good reason.
2. There's incredible value in what they stole.
3. IANAL, but I don't believe "but now everyone can write like a terrible version of the writer we fleeced" is a valid legal defense.
> stole
Copying is not theft.
AFAICT it is if you're not a trillion dollar company.
https://youtu.be/ALZZx1xmAzg?si=ugquA7uKT3ABGdws
I mean.. it also sends the message that you can ignore the law if you're rich. $1.5B is like a single failed training run for Anthropic. They burn that in a long weekend because somebody forgot to abort a hyper parameter search.
Obviously exaggerating.. but not by much.
I mean, you can mostly. That's apparent all over. Money buys freedom.
It’s like you can ignore the law if you have a great idea that works out. Lots of people have ended up doing it. Uber did it for a long time. Musk, did it with the sale of Tesla cars. There are a bunch of examples from outside of the US as well.
That sounds like an oligarchy. Especially if "great" is measured in dollars rather than public good.
Aaron Swartz also intended to offer incredible value for what he took, AND for no personal profit.
... and I don't think people wanted him chased for it either?
Abolish copyright then. The selective enforcement needs to stop.
This is my point too. This fucking double standard/class discrimination pisses me off.
That’s the difference between breaking the law as an individual and doing it as a corporation.
Yeah, man, sure they cleaned out the vault, but the valuable insights gained for how to keep it from happening again are priceless!
I want it to happen again. Copyright is important but I want someone that does tremendous good to be able to fall into a grey area where they’re given a free pass. But only on a case by case basis. Keep the lines fuzzy. That way we get to defend copyright but someone extraordinary also has a ray of hope of getting away with subverting it.
> Keep the lines fuzzy. That way we get to defend copyright but someone extraordinary also has a ray of hope of getting away with subverting it.
That's a very charitable way of saying "someone with deep enough pockets can ignore the law and get away with it."
Kim built something designed to help everyone pirate stuff. Anthropic pirated specific content.
Anthropic pirated that content to help everyone do the same.
I doubt many people are asking anthropic to output Harry Potter for them. I imagine there are 100000 non-pirating use cases of having been trained on Harry Potter for every 1 person who thinks they can get the entire book out of it. Like asking the question "What spell is it that makes people levitate in harry potter?" and things like that which are not infringing on any copyrights
Please post the prompts that will reproduce the pirated works verbatim. Or even halfway.
I use this prompt regularly for benchmarking token rate:
I like to use hamlet. Most of them will output the first pages without issue. I tried a newer copyrighted work ("The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas") for demonstration with Deepseek V4 flash:That's actually pretty cool. You're the first person that's actually showed verbatim reproduction in a discussion like this.
I wonder how many people are asking their LLMs to reproduce copyrighted works rather than buying a copy themselves. Or, more realistically, just going to Anna's Archive.
Does that still work for copyrighted things in major-lab models, or only open models?
It worked for Gemini flash too, but the monitor terminated the output before I got to read more than a paragraph.
A shitty cam rip of a movie is still punishable as infringement.
That said, it's been done: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671
> In some cases, jailbroken Claude 3.7 Sonnet outputs entire books near-verbatim (e.g., nv-recall=95.8%).
Subtitle translation is punishable as well…
Infringement is a civil lawsuit, with financial punishment only.
Wrong. Purple go to jail for publishing shitty cam rips. Did you read the relevant law?
> Please post the prompts that will reproduce the pirated works verbatim.
You don't need to reproduce anything verbatim: a 1/4 resolution copy of a movie is still infringement even though it's only a quarter of the size.
1/4 resolution, but still 100% of the movie. There's not really an equivalent for a book.
If Anthopic had bought all the books it had trained for say at market rate we’d be having a different conversation now. Anthropic, through this settlement, has been forced to pay back, at least something… Kim would likely not have had enough money to compensate the victims and probably caused some more direct dammage by sharing pirated content. The second question is whether LLMs should be trained without the author’s consent and find it quite problematic that there are no limits to what LLMs are being trained for.
> Anthropic, through this settlement, has been forced to pay back, at least something… Kim would likely not have had enough money to compensate the victims and probably caused some more direct dammage by sharing pirated content.
You're thinking civil. They're talking criminal. Criminal law enforcement does not (well, isn't supposed to) look at your ability to compensate before deciding what to charge you with.
Since we're on the criminal side - what criminal statute would apply to Anthropic? And what criminal statutes were used for the cases we're supposed to compare to?
Presumably some of the ones that applied to Aaron Swartz. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Arrest_and_prosec...
anthropic etal would not have a product to sell without their violation.. kdc had a service that just happened to be popular for pirating... how are the two even remotely similar?
the company is valued at basically 1000x the settlement it is a rounding error for them
copyright infringement was enough to get judgements that ruined entire lives when i was in my late teens and early 20s
now you get to be a founder of a trillion dollar business by extremely large copyright infringement
fuck these ghouls fuck LLMs and fuck the waste of money for this shit
Fuck off! what about Aaron Swartz ? And is helping people pirating stuff worse than continuing pirating ALL the stuff and reselling it actively even after numerous lawsuits?
Some of you really don’t deserve good things. You should be blocked from using AI on more than one device without paying an additional subscription plan.
I think this is the thing that bothers me most. Seeing that 2005 YC photo with Altman and Swartz and realizing where we're at now.
Related: https://flaminghydra.com/sam-altman-and-aaron-swartz-saw-the...
Aaron Swartz case was particularly egregious. If a just God does exist, that prosecutor will burn in hell.
There's no God. If we want justice we have to obtain it ourselves, in this life.
Kim built something designed to share files. Are you saying Microsoft should go to jail for SMB?
You're confusing a technology for a service.
Any way, the internal emails are available where you can see the executives of megaupload knew exactly what megaupload was being used for, and even used it themselves to pirate content, and went out of their way to allow copyrighted content to remain up after takedown notices were sent.
As soon as we start conditioning ethics, we give up and undermine the principles behind those ethics.
- @Nevermark