Death to copyright, which has always been far more harmful to small authors and creators than it has even been to large companies.
Death to copyright, which has always been far more harmful to small authors and creators than it has even been to large companies.
Odd place to bring this up. This is one of those situations where copyright is doing what it's meant to do.
The only bad thing about OpenAI and Anthropic training on everyone's stuff without their consent is that they didn't give away the model weights afterwards.
The people who espouse copyright abolitionism believe "information wants to be (and should be) free"
So no, for these people including myself, Copyright isn't doing anything good at all. It should be abolished. None of the people in this suit should get a dime. The government should force open weight releases of all foundation models as basically the only regulation that applies to the space at this current time.
But does it, really?
A slap on the wrist, that's what it's doing here, isn't it?
Yes, what would you like to happen?
I believe Anthropic shouldn't go bankrupt. I don't think the violated should be filthy rich either.
The richer publishers are still fighting. The ones taking the settlement may not have strong enough grounds and are happy with what they got.
It should be a speed bump. Just enough that it discourages blatantly breaking the law, and doesn't make it a strong incentive for others to resort to piracy as well.
If copyright law didn't exist, writers would still write but everyone would just take the books. A company like Amazon which doesn't give a damn about ethics would pirate all the books; the slap is painful enough to keep them straight.
If it were too tight, we'd have regulatory arbitrage; AI companies would set up in Japan, Singapore, India, China, and so on where they would get just a slap on the wrist.
Or if international laws were stricter, people would be pirating data on Elon Island or SpaceXAI Station. Forbidding something that valuable would be like Prohibition, lucrative for the criminals.
It's not really fair to anyone, and yet that doesn't mean it shouldn't exist.
Let's have that conversation after the people strip mining the livelihoods of creators cough up for UBI.
No UBI, thanks, let's just make them pay for the works they're relying on (as the rest of us would have to).
That would be my preference, but if people really want to have free as in beer access to information, we can have that conversation. After these companies give people money for the commons that they're strip mining.