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I don’t understand why corporations can violate copyright laws at hyper scale but individuals are banned from small scale piracy through authoritarian internet

I don’t understand why corporations can violate copyright laws at hyper scale but individuals are banned from small scale piracy through authoritarian internet governance.

mlinhares 1y ago
The law only exists for those without enough money and influence to control the enforcers.
- wat10000 1y ago
  They don’t even need control. It’s a version of the old saying that if you owe the bank a million dollars then you have a problem, but if you owe a billion dollars then the bank has a problem. If your company is important enough then it’s not possible (at least not politically) to punish it significantly. See also: 2008 and “too big to fail.”
  - nradov 1y ago
    Perplexity is still a small startup. If Enron and Theranos could be published then Perplexity can be punished. So far it's unclear whether they've done anything illegal.
    - wat10000 1y ago
      It’s very difficult to punish Perplexity without also hitting OpenAI, Grok, Google, Facebook, etc. It’s plenty clear to me that they’ve broken copyright law a lot. They’ve downloaded copyrighted material without permission for their own use, which we’ve been assured is Not Good for us individual people. Some of them even redistributed it by seeding torrents, which is even more Not Good.
      - nradov 1y ago
        It only seems "plenty clear" to you because you're ignorant about the basics of copyright law in the USA and Japan. Fortunately we have actual courts to decide these issues. The applicable laws (including centuries of case law in the USA) are complex and whether particular actions are legal often depends on nuances that aren't covered in news articles.
        wat10000 1y ago
        I’m not talking about Japan. In the US, seeding a torrent containing copyrighted material without authorization from the copyright holder is unambiguously a copyright violation.
        freetime2 1y ago
        Presumably you are talking about this case, where Meta is accused of having downloaded a bunch of having torrented a bunch of copyrighted works. [1] Of relevance here is the fact that 1) Meta denies having seeded the content, and there looks to be no hard evidence that they distributed the content to other users, 2) the case is ongoing, so a decision has not yet been reached about whether they broke any laws, and 3) the fact that Meta is being sued for this shows that even corporations worth trillions of dollars are not immune to the consequences of breaking the law. [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/meta-defends-using-pirated-material-claims-its-legal-if-you-dont-seed-content https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
        wat10000 1y ago
        Of course they’re not immune to consequences. It’s just that the consequences are so relatively small that they don’t really care. Reminds me of the quote about how the law treats everyone equally: both rich and poor are forbidden to sleep under bridges, beg, and steal bread.
    - aspenmayer 1y ago
      > Perplexity is still a small startup. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/perplexity-ai https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/perplexity-ai I don’t know how to parse this. I don’t think of them as small. Though they were only founded in 2022 and may not have a huge number of employees, they have had 8 funding rounds. They’re private, so I don’t know what they have raised, but some say that the company could have a $18B valuation. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-17/ai-startup-perplexity-valued-at-18-billion-with-new-funding https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-17/ai-startu... | https://archive.is/6DZpo https://archive.is/6DZpo Is that small?
ranyume 1y ago
[flagged]
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  Things should not have escalated to the point where reasonable views need someone to escalate to the point of murdering a CEO to get heard
  - ranyume 1y ago
    People should be involved in local communities. Waiting for solutions while watching TV (or youtube) won't do anything.
    - bluefirebrand 1y ago
      Local communities don't seem to matter either
presentation 1y ago
Maxwell Tabarrok has a take on this, basically in his words: > The confusion of intellectual property and property rights is fair enough given the name, but intellectual property is not a property right at all. Property rights are required because property is rivalrous and exclusive: When one person is using a pair of shoes or an acre of land, other people’s access is restricted. This central feature is not present for IP: an idea can spread to an infinite number of people and the original author’s access to it remains untouched. > There is no inherent right to stop an idea from spreading in the same way that there is an inherent right to stop someone from stealing your wallet. But there are good reasons why we want original creators to be rewarded when others use their work: Ideas are positive externalities. > When someone comes up with a valuable idea or piece of content, the welfare maximizing thing to do is to spread it as fast as possible, since ideas are essentially costless to copy and the benefits are large. > But coming up with valuable ideas often takes valuable inputs: research time, equipment, production fixed costs etc. So if every new idea is immediately spread without much reward to the creator, people won’t invest these resources upfront, and we’ll get fewer new ideas than we want. A classic positive externalities problem. > Thus, we have an interest in subsidizing the creation of new ideas and content. And so you can reframe whether or not IP rights should be assigned in this case, based on whether you believe that the welfare generated by making AI better by providing it with content is more valuable for society than the welfare generated by subsidizing copyright holders. [1] https://open.substack.com/pub/maximumprogress/p/ai-copyright-cases-will-shape-the?r=1bmwua&utm_medium=ios https://open.substack.com/pub/maximumprogress/p/ai-copyright...
- wat10000 1y ago
  You should also look at the welfare generated by showing that all are equal under the law, versus showing that companies can get away with blatant lawbreaking if they can convince people that it’s for the greater good. The proper way to decide this would be to pass a law in the legislature. But of course our system in general and tech companies in particular don’t work that way.
  - presentation 1y ago
    The USA tends to invest a great deal of legislative power in the courts, and as you mention the legislature isn’t very responsive nor effective, so this is what we get.
rr808 1y ago
Its the same reason how Uber could run a ride service without taxi medallions and Air BnB can open home stays in your neighborhood. If there is enough money involved, the VCs in Silicon Valley know who to pay to get what they want.
freetime2 1y ago
> I don’t understand why corporations can violate copyright laws at hyper scale Can they, though? Isn't that why Perplexity is being sued?
JimDabell 1y ago
Learning isn’t copying and copyright only restricts copying. Are you comparing cases where individuals distribute copies to cases where corporations are not distributing copies? The difference seems clear.
pluto_modadic 1y ago
anthropic has lawyers and buys senators, aron swartz was one dude corporations could make an example of via the courts.
charcircuit 1y ago
Transformative usages of copyrighted material is very different than people consuming content thr way it was meant to be consumed for free.
- thrance 1y ago
  Is it? Bulk downloading of every articles of a journal is OK if I train a neural network on it later, but accessing a single one without paying is not?
  - mightysashiman 1y ago
    I'm not pirating, I'm AI model training. Got it!
OhioMan2943 1y ago
Yanis Varoufakis would like to have a word with you
eviks 1y ago
Do you understand this for other laws?
hulitu 1y ago
It is because corpprattions can pay lawmakers for this, just how they did in the case of copyright law. Welcome to "democracy".
thrance 1y ago
Yes, you do understand why. In our societies, capital is king.
yorwba 1y ago
Both corporations and individuals are banned from piracy, but both corporations and individuals can violate copyright laws at hyper scale until somebody stops them. Corporations are probably more likely to get sued, but also more likely to get a lawyer instead of completely losing their head over a legal threat.
suspended_state 1y ago
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, this is just my interpretation of the situation from the comments above. I don't have an answer to your question, which seems more general and doesn't correspond to the situation described by the article anyway: here the corporations have the right to use copyrighted materials to train their model, in the same way that you are allowed to learn from the same materials. You might even learn it by heart if you want to, but copyright laws forbid you from reproducing it, and in this instance the Japanese law tries to follow the same principle for AI models. How should the corporations implement their training to prevent their models to reproduce the material verbatim is their problem, not the copyright holder's, in exactly the same fashion if you learn an article by heart, it's on you to make sure you won't recite it to the public.
- _DeadFred_ 1y ago
  For profit products are not individual human's putting in effort to learn. Stop making that comparison. Humans are human. Humans can human when there is no profit motive without it being a copyright violation. Effectively infinitely scaling, for profit products, can't 'human' without it being a copyright violation. The two are much different cases, in no way comparable. For profit products are PRODUCTS intended to make money for companies. AIs are scalable past an individual human. Rules/concepts for humans are not relevant at all for for profit products.
  - suspended_state 1y ago
    [dead]
prasadjoglekar 1y ago
Two different issues IMO. Piracy is depriving someone of payment for an item for which payment was expected. Neither you nor Perplexity may pirate a DVD that you didn't buy. Copyright usually doesn't prevent copying per se, it's the redistribution that is violative. You, as well as Perplexity are free to scrape public sites. You'll both be sued if you distribute it.

I don’t understand why corporations can violate copyright laws at hyper scale but individuals are banned from small scale piracy through authoritarian internet governance.

mlinhares 1y ago

The law only exists for those without enough money and influence to control the enforcers.

wat10000 1y ago
They don’t even need control. It’s a version of the old saying that if you owe the bank a million dollars then you have a problem, but if you owe a billion dollars then the bank has a problem. If your company is important enough then it’s not possible (at least not politically) to punish it significantly. See also: 2008 and “too big to fail.”
- nradov 1y ago
  Perplexity is still a small startup. If Enron and Theranos could be published then Perplexity can be punished. So far it's unclear whether they've done anything illegal.
  - wat10000 1y ago
    It’s very difficult to punish Perplexity without also hitting OpenAI, Grok, Google, Facebook, etc. It’s plenty clear to me that they’ve broken copyright law a lot. They’ve downloaded copyrighted material without permission for their own use, which we’ve been assured is Not Good for us individual people. Some of them even redistributed it by seeding torrents, which is even more Not Good.
    - nradov 1y ago
      It only seems "plenty clear" to you because you're ignorant about the basics of copyright law in the USA and Japan. Fortunately we have actual courts to decide these issues. The applicable laws (including centuries of case law in the USA) are complex and whether particular actions are legal often depends on nuances that aren't covered in news articles.
      - wat10000 1y ago
        I’m not talking about Japan. In the US, seeding a torrent containing copyrighted material without authorization from the copyright holder is unambiguously a copyright violation.
        freetime2 1y ago
        Presumably you are talking about this case, where Meta is accused of having downloaded a bunch of having torrented a bunch of copyrighted works. [1] Of relevance here is the fact that 1) Meta denies having seeded the content, and there looks to be no hard evidence that they distributed the content to other users, 2) the case is ongoing, so a decision has not yet been reached about whether they broke any laws, and 3) the fact that Meta is being sued for this shows that even corporations worth trillions of dollars are not immune to the consequences of breaking the law. [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/meta-defends-using-pirated-material-claims-its-legal-if-you-dont-seed-content https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
        wat10000 1y ago
        Of course they’re not immune to consequences. It’s just that the consequences are so relatively small that they don’t really care. Reminds me of the quote about how the law treats everyone equally: both rich and poor are forbidden to sleep under bridges, beg, and steal bread.
  - aspenmayer 1y ago
    > Perplexity is still a small startup. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/perplexity-ai https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/perplexity-ai I don’t know how to parse this. I don’t think of them as small. Though they were only founded in 2022 and may not have a huge number of employees, they have had 8 funding rounds. They’re private, so I don’t know what they have raised, but some say that the company could have a $18B valuation. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-17/ai-startup-perplexity-valued-at-18-billion-with-new-funding https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-17/ai-startu... | https://archive.is/6DZpo https://archive.is/6DZpo Is that small?

ranyume 1y ago

[flagged]

bluefirebrand 1y ago
Things should not have escalated to the point where reasonable views need someone to escalate to the point of murdering a CEO to get heard
- ranyume 1y ago
  People should be involved in local communities. Waiting for solutions while watching TV (or youtube) won't do anything.
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    Local communities don't seem to matter either

presentation 1y ago

Maxwell Tabarrok has a take on this, basically in his words: > The confusion of intellectual property and property rights is fair enough given the name, but intellectual property is not a property right at all. Property rights are required because property is rivalrous and exclusive: When one person is using a pair of shoes or an acre of land, other people’s access is restricted. This central feature is not present for IP: an idea can spread to an infinite number of people and the original author’s access to it remains untouched. > There is no inherent right to stop an idea from spreading in the same way that there is an inherent right to stop someone from stealing your wallet. But there are good reasons why we want original creators to be rewarded when others use their work: Ideas are positive externalities. > When someone comes up with a valuable idea or piece of content, the welfare maximizing thing to do is to spread it as fast as possible, since ideas are essentially costless to copy and the benefits are large. > But coming up with valuable ideas often takes valuable inputs: research time, equipment, production fixed costs etc. So if every new idea is immediately spread without much reward to the creator, people won’t invest these resources upfront, and we’ll get fewer new ideas than we want. A classic positive externalities problem. > Thus, we have an interest in subsidizing the creation of new ideas and content. And so you can reframe whether or not IP rights should be assigned in this case, based on whether you believe that the welfare generated by making AI better by providing it with content is more valuable for society than the welfare generated by subsidizing copyright holders. [1] https://open.substack.com/pub/maximumprogress/p/ai-copyright-cases-will-shape-the?r=1bmwua&utm_medium=ios https://open.substack.com/pub/maximumprogress/p/ai-copyright...

wat10000 1y ago
You should also look at the welfare generated by showing that all are equal under the law, versus showing that companies can get away with blatant lawbreaking if they can convince people that it’s for the greater good. The proper way to decide this would be to pass a law in the legislature. But of course our system in general and tech companies in particular don’t work that way.
- presentation 1y ago
  The USA tends to invest a great deal of legislative power in the courts, and as you mention the legislature isn’t very responsive nor effective, so this is what we get.

rr808 1y ago

Its the same reason how Uber could run a ride service without taxi medallions and Air BnB can open home stays in your neighborhood. If there is enough money involved, the VCs in Silicon Valley know who to pay to get what they want.

freetime2 1y ago

> I don’t understand why corporations can violate copyright laws at hyper scale Can they, though? Isn't that why Perplexity is being sued?

JimDabell 1y ago

Learning isn’t copying and copyright only restricts copying. Are you comparing cases where individuals distribute copies to cases where corporations are not distributing copies? The difference seems clear.

pluto_modadic 1y ago

anthropic has lawyers and buys senators, aron swartz was one dude corporations could make an example of via the courts.

charcircuit 1y ago

Transformative usages of copyrighted material is very different than people consuming content thr way it was meant to be consumed for free.

thrance 1y ago
Is it? Bulk downloading of every articles of a journal is OK if I train a neural network on it later, but accessing a single one without paying is not?
- mightysashiman 1y ago
  I'm not pirating, I'm AI model training. Got it!

OhioMan2943 1y ago

Yanis Varoufakis would like to have a word with you

eviks 1y ago

Do you understand this for other laws?

hulitu 1y ago

It is because corpprattions can pay lawmakers for this, just how they did in the case of copyright law. Welcome to "democracy".

thrance 1y ago

Yes, you do understand why. In our societies, capital is king.

yorwba 1y ago

Both corporations and individuals are banned from piracy, but both corporations and individuals can violate copyright laws at hyper scale until somebody stops them. Corporations are probably more likely to get sued, but also more likely to get a lawyer instead of completely losing their head over a legal threat.

suspended_state 1y ago

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, this is just my interpretation of the situation from the comments above. I don't have an answer to your question, which seems more general and doesn't correspond to the situation described by the article anyway: here the corporations have the right to use copyrighted materials to train their model, in the same way that you are allowed to learn from the same materials. You might even learn it by heart if you want to, but copyright laws forbid you from reproducing it, and in this instance the Japanese law tries to follow the same principle for AI models. How should the corporations implement their training to prevent their models to reproduce the material verbatim is their problem, not the copyright holder's, in exactly the same fashion if you learn an article by heart, it's on you to make sure you won't recite it to the public.

_DeadFred_ 1y ago
For profit products are not individual human's putting in effort to learn. Stop making that comparison. Humans are human. Humans can human when there is no profit motive without it being a copyright violation. Effectively infinitely scaling, for profit products, can't 'human' without it being a copyright violation. The two are much different cases, in no way comparable. For profit products are PRODUCTS intended to make money for companies. AIs are scalable past an individual human. Rules/concepts for humans are not relevant at all for for profit products.
- suspended_state 1y ago
  [dead]

prasadjoglekar 1y ago

Two different issues IMO. Piracy is depriving someone of payment for an item for which payment was expected. Neither you nor Perplexity may pirate a DVD that you didn't buy. Copyright usually doesn't prevent copying per se, it's the redistribution that is violative. You, as well as Perplexity are free to scrape public sites. You'll both be sued if you distribute it.