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The RIAA lawyers never had to demonstrate that copying a DVD cratered the sales of their clients. They just got high penalties for infringers almost by default.

The RIAA lawyers never had to demonstrate that copying a DVD cratered the sales of their clients. They just got high penalties for infringers almost by default. Now that big capital wants to steal from individuals, big capital wins again. (Unrelatedly, has Boies ever won a high profile lawsuit? I remember him from the Bush/Gore recount issue, where he represented the Democrats.)

kranke155 1y ago
Copyright was invented (in its modern form) by corporations. It will be uninvented if need be for corporations.
- Zambyte 1y ago
  I'm curious what you mean by "in it's modern form". You seem to suggest there was a previous form that was not invented by corporations, but I don't believe that is the case.
  - ryoshu 1y ago
    Copyright was first established by governments and the Church prior to the invention of corporations.
    - Zambyte 1y ago
      > The concept of copyright first developed in England. In reaction to the printing of "scandalous books and pamphlets", the English Parliament passed the Licensing of the Press Act 1662, which required all intended publications to be registered with the government-approved Stationers' Company, giving the Stationers the right to regulate what material could be printed. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright Okay, not a corporation, but a company.
    - dragonwriter 1y ago
      > Copyright was first established by governments and the Church prior to the invention of corporations. No, it wasn't. The first copyright law is generally held to be the Statute of Anne (1710) in Britain (the Licensing of the Press Act of 1662 which preceded it was not a "copyright law" in the sense that it did not provide for ownership of a right to publish/print particular works, but provided, as the name suggested, for licensing of printing presses, and revocation of said licenses -- it was more of a general censorship law); and even if you limit the scope to Britain (well, in either case, England before the Union with Scotland) corporations go back further (depending on whether you mean corporations as "entities which are not natural persons with legal personality"—the City of London Corporation's establishment is literally lost to history, but known to predate the Norman Conquest—or "joint stock companies"—the Company of Merchant Adventurers to New Lands in 1551 would be the first.)
  - nickpsecurity 1y ago
    There were two, major differences in prior forms of copyright: 1. It protected works to reward authors during their lifetime. This was changed to lasting a long time after the author was dead. Then, also for corporations that were only persons on paper and theoretically immortal. This shift let companies squeeze money out of monopolized ideas for over a century rather than supporting artists and their creations. Instead of supporting the small fish, copyright law can reinforce the dominance of the sharks and whales. 2. Copyright was shorter in the U.S. at 28 years with possible renewal. That would balance two goals: give author time to make money off the work; let society use the work in a timeframe where it would still matter to them. Now, we can't have most works until long after they're useful in the market. We might not even speak the language they spoke, like older vs current English. Personally, I'd love to see a limit of 5-20 years on copyrighted works. If authors want more money, they can make more stuff. Allowing remixes of culturally and technologically relevant content will create huge, thriving ecosystems. I think my concept is also proven out by the open source ecosystem. A limit would also be great for legal AI. We could train them on all human content up to 5-20 years ago. Tons of jobs would be created digitizing and optimizing that content. Then, companies would pay to create or license modern content that updated those foundation models. Under current law, it would be impossible for smaller companies to build highly-competitive A.I.'s due to licensing cost and arbitrary restrictions.
    - Zambyte 1y ago
      > It protected works to reward authors during their lifetime. This was the pitch by the (printing) companies that established copyright to gain a legal monopoly on copying. > Instead of supporting the small fish, copyright law can reinforce the dominance of the sharks and whales. This was always the case. It's just worse now. Personally I'd love to see sane copyright laws. That is, abolishing copyright. Copyright only helps people in power stay in power. Oh, does Disney argue that you used a character of theirs in your story? Does it even matter if you did? You think you can take on Disney's lawyers? It doesn't matter if copyright is 5 years or 500. You're going to lose. Art, and things erroneously treated like art under copyright like software, would be so much better if people could do it without fear of being a victim of copyright. Imagine if anyone could add their own flare to any story ever. Incredible.
- morkalork 1y ago
  The golden rule strikes again!
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
anshumankmr 1y ago
Interesting figure that guy. Here's this: >Boies also was on the Theranos board of directors,[2][74] raising questions about conflicts of interest.[75] Boies agreed to be paid for his firm's work in Theranos stock, which he expected to grow dramatically in value.[75][3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Boies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Boies That was one of the decisions of all time.
- A_D_E_P_T 1y ago
  He was also the primary villain of John Carreyrou's account of Theranos' rise and fall -- Bad Blood -- as his firm attempted to bully and hound whistleblowers, and intimidate their families with baseless legal threats. Not a very nice or ethical guy.
  - anshumankmr 1y ago
    >also the primary villain Hopefully second to Holmes,eh?
    - A_D_E_P_T 1y ago
      Holmes seemed shady, really careless, and criminally flippant re: shipping medical technologies that never worked. But Boies was an out-and-out scoundrel, a real old-fashioned criminal enforcer type. I had (and still have, to some extent,) mixed feelings about Holmes. She's like an avatar of SV's "fake it 'til you make it" aspect, taken way too far, to an uncomfortable extreme. Boies, though? He represents the absolute perversion of the legal profession and the Common Law. In him you see how it is used by the powerful to bludgeon and coerce the weak. The Law as naked and unambiguous Lawful Evil. He's the worse villain of the two. And, aptly, this Mephistopheles is the one still walking free.
  - favorited 1y ago
    He was a secondary villain in Ronan Farrow's Catch and Kill book, as Harvey Weinstein's attorney. He employed similar tactics to protect Weinstein as he did for Theranos. He was fired by the New York Times after all this came out, because he hired private investigators to go after the NYT reporters investigating Weinstein (Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey at the NYT broke the story just before Farrow's reporting was published), while also representing the Times.
nadermx 1y ago
Copyright infringement is not stealing[0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(1985) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(19...
- immibis 1y ago
  No, but the law treats it as bad as stealing when an individual copyright-infringes from a corporation, so why shouldn't it be as bad as stealing when a corporation copyright-infringes from an individual? Of course, even this isn't enough, since corporations regularly steal (actually) from individuals, with near impunity.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
fmblwntr 1y ago
ironically, he was the head lawyer on the legal team for napster (obviously a huge loss) but it accords well with your theory
ImPostingOnHN 1y ago
If I remember correctly the legal precedent from that era, and if I'm summarizing correctly: Those who served or uploaded were considered to be infringing, since they were "making copies" by serving or uploading, whereas those who downloaded infringing copies were not themselves infringers. Meta in this case is at least described by the latter, and the question is whether LLM generation constitutes the former.
999900000999 1y ago
Meta needs these books. They seek to convert them into more products. The needs of the copyright holders , who are relatively small businesses and individuals are outweighed by the needs of Meta. Sarah wanting to watch a movie or listen to music... Too bad she doesn't have an elite team of lawyers to justify whatever she wants. In practice Meta has the money to stretch this out forever and at most pay inconsequential settlements. YouTube largely did the same thing, knowingly violate copyright law, stack the deck with lawyers and fix it later.
- anton-c 1y ago
  Content id is actually a pretty good solution tho. Copyright holders do get paid ad revenue, and when u post a vid of your daughter's wedding with Kenny loggins' copyrighted music playing, it doesn't get removed. Sony or Universal or whomever is just gonna get the monetization. Seems like a good deal for both sides. Edit: I didn't make it clear... I don't think meta is going to be paying or offering a revenue stream like YouTube ended up creating. I also have no idea if YT actually brings in money for those groups and if the copyright holders essentially took what they could get or were happy with the deal so who knows. It's only when other parts of the system get abused there's problems but that's a sep issue...
Majromax 1y ago
> The RIAA lawyers never had to demonstrate that copying a DVD cratered the sales of their clients. They just got high penalties for infringers almost by default. The argument for 'fair use' in DVD copying/sharing is much weaker since the thing being shared in that case is a verbatim, digital copy of the work. 'Format shifting' is a tenuous argument, and it's pretty easily limited to making (and not distributing) personal copies of media. For AI training, a central argument is that training is transformative. An LLM isn't intended to produce verbatim copies of trained-upon works, and the problem of hallucination means an LLM would be unreliable at doing so even if instructed to. That transformation could support the idea of fair use, even though copies of the data are made (internally) during the training process and the model's weights are in some sense a work 'derived' from the training data. If you analogize to human leaning, then there's clearly no copyright infringement in a human learning from someone's work and creating their own output, even if it "copies" an artist's style or draws inspiration from someone's plot-line. However, it feels unseemly for a computer program to do this kind of thing at scale, and the commercial impact can be significantly greater.
- pessimizer 1y ago
  > there's clearly no copyright infringement in a human learning from someone's work and creating their own output, even if it "copies" an artist's style or draws inspiration from someone's plot-line. What do you mean here by "clearly?" This is not at all clear, and court cases have been decided in the opposite direction. This case: https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/marvin-gaye-family-prevails-in-blurred-lines-plagiarism-case-idUSKBN1GX273/ https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/marvin-gaye-family... is as far from what you say is "clearly" true as could possibly be. You're handwaving away the parts of the question that are difficult.
  - lsaferite 1y ago
    But that case involves publishing of content. If you want to compare them, it seems like you'd argue that the content of Pharrell Williams' head is somehow copyright infringement. I've yet to see anyone credible say that an AI model outputting exact content and then someone publishing that should be allowed. If you manage to make an AI model output copyrighted content, you can't then claim it's not copyrighted. If you sit on one side of a table and read a book out loud and I write it down (with minor transcription errors), that content is almost certainly still copyrighted content and I could not distribute it legally.
cma 1y ago
That's because that was statutory infringement where marketplace impact things come up more in fair use ("drummer reacts to hearing most famous drummer for the first time"). They look at whether it acts as a substitute for the original, but there are different rules depending on the type of fair use, how transformative it is, and more.
favorited 1y ago
> Unrelatedly, has Boies ever won a high profile lawsuit? I remember him from the Bush/Gore recount issue, where he represented the Democrats. He teamed up with opposing counsel from Bush v. Gore, Ted Olson, and the pair of them represented plaintiffs in Hollingsworth v. Perry, the SCOTUS case which overturned Prop 8, California's gay marriage ban.
dragonwriter 1y ago
> The RIAA lawyers never had to demonstrate that copying a DVD cratered the sales of their clients. Did any of the defendants raise a fair use defense based on a transformative use that they were making of the downloaded copies? If not, you are in the domain of "unlike legal situations lead to unlike decisions" which is not exactly surprising.
- ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
  IIRC format shifting was argued to be part of fair use. I would think that taking an audio CD and ripping it into MP3 would be transformative, but I don't think the law would agree.
fazeirony 1y ago
when kids during the napster era were downloading music, the mega-corporations yelled that their bottom-lines to shareholders were being destroyed. now, when the mega-corporations do it, it is 'just the cost of doing business'. in both cases, the mega-corporations win because...they have the most money. law, and certainly justice, is not for the poor. at least not in america.

kranke155 1y ago

Zambyte 1y ago
I'm curious what you mean by "in it's modern form". You seem to suggest there was a previous form that was not invented by corporations, but I don't believe that is the case.
- ryoshu 1y ago
  Copyright was first established by governments and the Church prior to the invention of corporations.
  - Zambyte 1y ago
    > The concept of copyright first developed in England. In reaction to the printing of "scandalous books and pamphlets", the English Parliament passed the Licensing of the Press Act 1662, which required all intended publications to be registered with the government-approved Stationers' Company, giving the Stationers the right to regulate what material could be printed. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright Okay, not a corporation, but a company.
  - dragonwriter 1y ago
    > Copyright was first established by governments and the Church prior to the invention of corporations. No, it wasn't. The first copyright law is generally held to be the Statute of Anne (1710) in Britain (the Licensing of the Press Act of 1662 which preceded it was not a "copyright law" in the sense that it did not provide for ownership of a right to publish/print particular works, but provided, as the name suggested, for licensing of printing presses, and revocation of said licenses -- it was more of a general censorship law); and even if you limit the scope to Britain (well, in either case, England before the Union with Scotland) corporations go back further (depending on whether you mean corporations as "entities which are not natural persons with legal personality"—the City of London Corporation's establishment is literally lost to history, but known to predate the Norman Conquest—or "joint stock companies"—the Company of Merchant Adventurers to New Lands in 1551 would be the first.)
- nickpsecurity 1y ago
  There were two, major differences in prior forms of copyright: 1. It protected works to reward authors during their lifetime. This was changed to lasting a long time after the author was dead. Then, also for corporations that were only persons on paper and theoretically immortal. This shift let companies squeeze money out of monopolized ideas for over a century rather than supporting artists and their creations. Instead of supporting the small fish, copyright law can reinforce the dominance of the sharks and whales. 2. Copyright was shorter in the U.S. at 28 years with possible renewal. That would balance two goals: give author time to make money off the work; let society use the work in a timeframe where it would still matter to them. Now, we can't have most works until long after they're useful in the market. We might not even speak the language they spoke, like older vs current English. Personally, I'd love to see a limit of 5-20 years on copyrighted works. If authors want more money, they can make more stuff. Allowing remixes of culturally and technologically relevant content will create huge, thriving ecosystems. I think my concept is also proven out by the open source ecosystem. A limit would also be great for legal AI. We could train them on all human content up to 5-20 years ago. Tons of jobs would be created digitizing and optimizing that content. Then, companies would pay to create or license modern content that updated those foundation models. Under current law, it would be impossible for smaller companies to build highly-competitive A.I.'s due to licensing cost and arbitrary restrictions.
  - Zambyte 1y ago
    > It protected works to reward authors during their lifetime. This was the pitch by the (printing) companies that established copyright to gain a legal monopoly on copying. > Instead of supporting the small fish, copyright law can reinforce the dominance of the sharks and whales. This was always the case. It's just worse now. Personally I'd love to see sane copyright laws. That is, abolishing copyright. Copyright only helps people in power stay in power. Oh, does Disney argue that you used a character of theirs in your story? Does it even matter if you did? You think you can take on Disney's lawyers? It doesn't matter if copyright is 5 years or 500. You're going to lose. Art, and things erroneously treated like art under copyright like software, would be so much better if people could do it without fear of being a victim of copyright. Imagine if anyone could add their own flare to any story ever. Incredible.
morkalork 1y ago
The golden rule strikes again!
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

anshumankmr 1y ago

Interesting figure that guy. Here's this: >Boies also was on the Theranos board of directors,[2][74] raising questions about conflicts of interest.[75] Boies agreed to be paid for his firm's work in Theranos stock, which he expected to grow dramatically in value.[75][3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Boies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Boies That was one of the decisions of all time.

A_D_E_P_T 1y ago
He was also the primary villain of John Carreyrou's account of Theranos' rise and fall -- Bad Blood -- as his firm attempted to bully and hound whistleblowers, and intimidate their families with baseless legal threats. Not a very nice or ethical guy.
- anshumankmr 1y ago
  >also the primary villain Hopefully second to Holmes,eh?
  - A_D_E_P_T 1y ago
    Holmes seemed shady, really careless, and criminally flippant re: shipping medical technologies that never worked. But Boies was an out-and-out scoundrel, a real old-fashioned criminal enforcer type. I had (and still have, to some extent,) mixed feelings about Holmes. She's like an avatar of SV's "fake it 'til you make it" aspect, taken way too far, to an uncomfortable extreme. Boies, though? He represents the absolute perversion of the legal profession and the Common Law. In him you see how it is used by the powerful to bludgeon and coerce the weak. The Law as naked and unambiguous Lawful Evil. He's the worse villain of the two. And, aptly, this Mephistopheles is the one still walking free.
- favorited 1y ago
  He was a secondary villain in Ronan Farrow's Catch and Kill book, as Harvey Weinstein's attorney. He employed similar tactics to protect Weinstein as he did for Theranos. He was fired by the New York Times after all this came out, because he hired private investigators to go after the NYT reporters investigating Weinstein (Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey at the NYT broke the story just before Farrow's reporting was published), while also representing the Times.

nadermx 1y ago

Copyright infringement is not stealing[0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(1985) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(19...

immibis 1y ago
No, but the law treats it as bad as stealing when an individual copyright-infringes from a corporation, so why shouldn't it be as bad as stealing when a corporation copyright-infringes from an individual? Of course, even this isn't enough, since corporations regularly steal (actually) from individuals, with near impunity.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

fmblwntr 1y ago

ironically, he was the head lawyer on the legal team for napster (obviously a huge loss) but it accords well with your theory

ImPostingOnHN 1y ago

If I remember correctly the legal precedent from that era, and if I'm summarizing correctly: Those who served or uploaded were considered to be infringing, since they were "making copies" by serving or uploading, whereas those who downloaded infringing copies were not themselves infringers. Meta in this case is at least described by the latter, and the question is whether LLM generation constitutes the former.

999900000999 1y ago

Meta needs these books. They seek to convert them into more products. The needs of the copyright holders , who are relatively small businesses and individuals are outweighed by the needs of Meta. Sarah wanting to watch a movie or listen to music... Too bad she doesn't have an elite team of lawyers to justify whatever she wants. In practice Meta has the money to stretch this out forever and at most pay inconsequential settlements. YouTube largely did the same thing, knowingly violate copyright law, stack the deck with lawyers and fix it later.

anton-c 1y ago
Content id is actually a pretty good solution tho. Copyright holders do get paid ad revenue, and when u post a vid of your daughter's wedding with Kenny loggins' copyrighted music playing, it doesn't get removed. Sony or Universal or whomever is just gonna get the monetization. Seems like a good deal for both sides. Edit: I didn't make it clear... I don't think meta is going to be paying or offering a revenue stream like YouTube ended up creating. I also have no idea if YT actually brings in money for those groups and if the copyright holders essentially took what they could get or were happy with the deal so who knows. It's only when other parts of the system get abused there's problems but that's a sep issue...

Majromax 1y ago

> The RIAA lawyers never had to demonstrate that copying a DVD cratered the sales of their clients. They just got high penalties for infringers almost by default. The argument for 'fair use' in DVD copying/sharing is much weaker since the thing being shared in that case is a verbatim, digital copy of the work. 'Format shifting' is a tenuous argument, and it's pretty easily limited to making (and not distributing) personal copies of media. For AI training, a central argument is that training is transformative. An LLM isn't intended to produce verbatim copies of trained-upon works, and the problem of hallucination means an LLM would be unreliable at doing so even if instructed to. That transformation could support the idea of fair use, even though copies of the data are made (internally) during the training process and the model's weights are in some sense a work 'derived' from the training data. If you analogize to human leaning, then there's clearly no copyright infringement in a human learning from someone's work and creating their own output, even if it "copies" an artist's style or draws inspiration from someone's plot-line. However, it feels unseemly for a computer program to do this kind of thing at scale, and the commercial impact can be significantly greater.

pessimizer 1y ago
> there's clearly no copyright infringement in a human learning from someone's work and creating their own output, even if it "copies" an artist's style or draws inspiration from someone's plot-line. What do you mean here by "clearly?" This is not at all clear, and court cases have been decided in the opposite direction. This case: https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/marvin-gaye-family-prevails-in-blurred-lines-plagiarism-case-idUSKBN1GX273/ https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/marvin-gaye-family... is as far from what you say is "clearly" true as could possibly be. You're handwaving away the parts of the question that are difficult.
- lsaferite 1y ago
  But that case involves publishing of content. If you want to compare them, it seems like you'd argue that the content of Pharrell Williams' head is somehow copyright infringement. I've yet to see anyone credible say that an AI model outputting exact content and then someone publishing that should be allowed. If you manage to make an AI model output copyrighted content, you can't then claim it's not copyrighted. If you sit on one side of a table and read a book out loud and I write it down (with minor transcription errors), that content is almost certainly still copyrighted content and I could not distribute it legally.

cma 1y ago

That's because that was statutory infringement where marketplace impact things come up more in fair use ("drummer reacts to hearing most famous drummer for the first time"). They look at whether it acts as a substitute for the original, but there are different rules depending on the type of fair use, how transformative it is, and more.

favorited 1y ago

> Unrelatedly, has Boies ever won a high profile lawsuit? I remember him from the Bush/Gore recount issue, where he represented the Democrats. He teamed up with opposing counsel from Bush v. Gore, Ted Olson, and the pair of them represented plaintiffs in Hollingsworth v. Perry, the SCOTUS case which overturned Prop 8, California's gay marriage ban.

dragonwriter 1y ago

> The RIAA lawyers never had to demonstrate that copying a DVD cratered the sales of their clients. Did any of the defendants raise a fair use defense based on a transformative use that they were making of the downloaded copies? If not, you are in the domain of "unlike legal situations lead to unlike decisions" which is not exactly surprising.

ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
IIRC format shifting was argued to be part of fair use. I would think that taking an audio CD and ripping it into MP3 would be transformative, but I don't think the law would agree.

fazeirony 1y ago

when kids during the napster era were downloading music, the mega-corporations yelled that their bottom-lines to shareholders were being destroyed. now, when the mega-corporations do it, it is 'just the cost of doing business'. in both cases, the mega-corporations win because...they have the most money. law, and certainly justice, is not for the poor. at least not in america.