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Radio stations get to use anyone’s music but they still need to pay to play that music. Requiring payment to use your product isn’t rent seeking anymore than re

by Retric 1y ago

Radio stations get to use anyone’s music but they still need to pay to play that music. Requiring payment to use your product isn’t rent seeking anymore than requiring a hobo to leave your house is. AI companies trying to leverage their power and lobby governments to stiff paying people and thus increase profits is rent seeking behavior. They aren’t creating wealth by non payment, just trying to enrich themselves.

ndriscoll 1y ago
Hmm? Creating new models is clearly adding wealth to the world, and it wouldn't terribly surprise me if a lot of source material (e.g. scanned books or recorded music) is older than the people working on models. The history of copyright is basically a perfect example of rent-seeking.
- Retric 1y ago
  Creating new models doesn’t require taking content without any compensation. That’s the basic flaw in any argument around necessity.
  - ndriscoll 1y ago
    No, but society has no reason to grant monopolies on 50 year old publications (e.g. textbooks or news articles written or songs recorded prior to 1975), and the changes that were made to copyright law to extend it into multiple generations were actual rent-seeking. i.e. manipulating public policy to transfer wealth from others to you rather than creating wealth. Going with the original 28 year compromise from a time when publishing was much more expensive, anything prior to 1997 would be free for anyone to use for any purpose with no expectation of compensation. We'd all be far richer culturally if we had this base to freely build upon instead of having the last 100 years stolen. Likewise much of the most important information to want to train on (research literature) was just straight up stolen from the public that paid for its creation already. By contrast, the models being created from these works are obviously useful to people today. They are clearly a form of new wealth generation. The open-weights models are even an equitable way of doing so, and are competitive with the top proprietary models. Saying the model creators need to pay the people monopolizing generations-old work is the rent-seeking behavior.
    - Retric 1y ago
      It’s far more recent works that AI companies care about. They can’t copy 50 year old python, JavaScript, etc code because it simply doesn’t exist. There’s some 50 year old C code, but it’s no longer idiomatic and so it goes. Utility of older works drop off as science marches on and culture changes. The real secret of long copyright terms is they just don’t matter much. Steamboat Willy entered the public domain and for all practical purposes nothing changed. Chip 20 years off of current copyright terms and it starts to matter more, but still isn’t particularly important. Sure drop it down to say 5 years and that’s meaningful but now it’s much harder to be an author which means fewer books worth reading.
      - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
        I still don't really get how compensation is supposed to work just based on the math. Models are trained on billions of works and have a lifetime of around a year; AI companies (e.g. Anthropic) have revenue in the low billions of dollars a year. Even if you took all of that -- leave nothing for salaries, hardware, utilities, to say nothing of profit -- and applied it to the works in the training data, it would be approximately $1 each. What is that good for? It would have a massive administrative cost and the authors would still get effectively nothing.
        Retric 1y ago
        I think you’re overestimating the number of authors, and forgetting there’s several AI companies. A revenue sharing agreement with 10% going to creators isn’t unrealistic. Google’s revenue was 300 billion with 100 billion in profits last year, the AI industry may never reach that size but 1$/person on the planet is only 8 billion dollars, drop that to 70% of people are online so your down to 5.6 billion. That’s assuming you’re counting books and individual Facebook posts in any language equally. More realistically there’s only 12k professional journalists in the US but they create a disproportionate amount of value for AI companies.
        AnthonyMouse 1y ago
  - otterley 1y ago
    That’s fine, but if you don’t want content taken without compensation, don’t make it available for free on the Internet. You can’t have it both ways, where it’s free to individuals to read but not for machines to do it. That’s just practically impossible.
otterley 1y ago
The music analogy doesn’t hold. Unlike websites that provide content for free to the public, commercial recording artists don’t make their content available for free on demand to the public. Spotify and radio/TV broadcasters, as well as individuals, don’t get a copy unless they buy one or make arrangements with the publisher or its licensees. This is why we’re seeing paywalls go up: authors and publishers of textual content are seeing that they need to protect the value of their assets.
- Retric 1y ago
  LLMs are being trained on published books a direct equivalent of records. People were able to get one to reproduce over 40% of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s stone word for word. https://arstechnica.com/features/2025/06/study-metas-llama-3-1-can-recall-42-percent-of-the-first-harry-potter-book/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2025/06/study-metas-llama-3... There’s zero chance that happened without the book being in their training corpus. Worse, there’s significant effort put into obscuring this.
  - otterley 1y ago
    Yes, they are trained on books, but the courts so far are largely in agreement that AI models are neither copies nor derivative works of the source materials. If you’re searching for legal protections against your works being used for model training, copyright law as written today does not appear to give you cover.
    - Retric 1y ago
      Stuff can take a long time to wind their way through the court system. The worst cases already failed but many are going strong, here’s a 1.5 billion dollar win for authors. https://www.kron4.com/news/technology-ai/anthropic-copyright-lawsuit-authors/ https://www.kron4.com/news/technology-ai/anthropic-copyright...
      - otterley 1y ago
        Anthropic and the authors settled over a portion of the case involving the unauthorized copying of works that were used to train the model. Obtaining the works is a step that happens before the training has begun. “the authors alleged nearly half a million books had been illegally pirated to train AI chatbots...” Finally, a settlement isn’t a “win” from a legal perspective. It’s money exchanged for dropping the case. In almost every settlement, there’s no admission of guilt or liability.

by Retric 1y ago

ndriscoll 1y ago

Hmm? Creating new models is clearly adding wealth to the world, and it wouldn't terribly surprise me if a lot of source material (e.g. scanned books or recorded music) is older than the people working on models. The history of copyright is basically a perfect example of rent-seeking.

Retric 1y ago
Creating new models doesn’t require taking content without any compensation. That’s the basic flaw in any argument around necessity.
- ndriscoll 1y ago
  No, but society has no reason to grant monopolies on 50 year old publications (e.g. textbooks or news articles written or songs recorded prior to 1975), and the changes that were made to copyright law to extend it into multiple generations were actual rent-seeking. i.e. manipulating public policy to transfer wealth from others to you rather than creating wealth. Going with the original 28 year compromise from a time when publishing was much more expensive, anything prior to 1997 would be free for anyone to use for any purpose with no expectation of compensation. We'd all be far richer culturally if we had this base to freely build upon instead of having the last 100 years stolen. Likewise much of the most important information to want to train on (research literature) was just straight up stolen from the public that paid for its creation already. By contrast, the models being created from these works are obviously useful to people today. They are clearly a form of new wealth generation. The open-weights models are even an equitable way of doing so, and are competitive with the top proprietary models. Saying the model creators need to pay the people monopolizing generations-old work is the rent-seeking behavior.
  - Retric 1y ago
    It’s far more recent works that AI companies care about. They can’t copy 50 year old python, JavaScript, etc code because it simply doesn’t exist. There’s some 50 year old C code, but it’s no longer idiomatic and so it goes. Utility of older works drop off as science marches on and culture changes. The real secret of long copyright terms is they just don’t matter much. Steamboat Willy entered the public domain and for all practical purposes nothing changed. Chip 20 years off of current copyright terms and it starts to matter more, but still isn’t particularly important. Sure drop it down to say 5 years and that’s meaningful but now it’s much harder to be an author which means fewer books worth reading.
    - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      I still don't really get how compensation is supposed to work just based on the math. Models are trained on billions of works and have a lifetime of around a year; AI companies (e.g. Anthropic) have revenue in the low billions of dollars a year. Even if you took all of that -- leave nothing for salaries, hardware, utilities, to say nothing of profit -- and applied it to the works in the training data, it would be approximately $1 each. What is that good for? It would have a massive administrative cost and the authors would still get effectively nothing.
      - Retric 1y ago
        I think you’re overestimating the number of authors, and forgetting there’s several AI companies. A revenue sharing agreement with 10% going to creators isn’t unrealistic. Google’s revenue was 300 billion with 100 billion in profits last year, the AI industry may never reach that size but 1$/person on the planet is only 8 billion dollars, drop that to 70% of people are online so your down to 5.6 billion. That’s assuming you’re counting books and individual Facebook posts in any language equally. More realistically there’s only 12k professional journalists in the US but they create a disproportionate amount of value for AI companies.
        AnthonyMouse 1y ago
- otterley 1y ago
  That’s fine, but if you don’t want content taken without compensation, don’t make it available for free on the Internet. You can’t have it both ways, where it’s free to individuals to read but not for machines to do it. That’s just practically impossible.

otterley 1y ago

The music analogy doesn’t hold. Unlike websites that provide content for free to the public, commercial recording artists don’t make their content available for free on demand to the public. Spotify and radio/TV broadcasters, as well as individuals, don’t get a copy unless they buy one or make arrangements with the publisher or its licensees. This is why we’re seeing paywalls go up: authors and publishers of textual content are seeing that they need to protect the value of their assets.

Retric 1y ago
LLMs are being trained on published books a direct equivalent of records. People were able to get one to reproduce over 40% of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s stone word for word. https://arstechnica.com/features/2025/06/study-metas-llama-3-1-can-recall-42-percent-of-the-first-harry-potter-book/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2025/06/study-metas-llama-3... There’s zero chance that happened without the book being in their training corpus. Worse, there’s significant effort put into obscuring this.
- otterley 1y ago
  Yes, they are trained on books, but the courts so far are largely in agreement that AI models are neither copies nor derivative works of the source materials. If you’re searching for legal protections against your works being used for model training, copyright law as written today does not appear to give you cover.
  - Retric 1y ago
    Stuff can take a long time to wind their way through the court system. The worst cases already failed but many are going strong, here’s a 1.5 billion dollar win for authors. https://www.kron4.com/news/technology-ai/anthropic-copyright-lawsuit-authors/ https://www.kron4.com/news/technology-ai/anthropic-copyright...
    - otterley 1y ago
      Anthropic and the authors settled over a portion of the case involving the unauthorized copying of works that were used to train the model. Obtaining the works is a step that happens before the training has begun. “the authors alleged nearly half a million books had been illegally pirated to train AI chatbots...” Finally, a settlement isn’t a “win” from a legal perspective. It’s money exchanged for dropping the case. In almost every settlement, there’s no admission of guilt or liability.