6 ms·

What Happened to Piracy? Copyright Enforcement Fades as AI Giants Rise

112 points by walterbell 1y ago

bpodgursky 1y ago
The use of paywalled scientific articles to train AI is one place where I think we have to just draw the line and say, this has to be allowed or US AI is simply going to get gutted and replaced by international competitors who have no respect for copyright law. Sorry but this is just a competitive reality and the content matters A LOT. Sucks that Elsevier gambled badly on the scientific community putting up with overpriced subscriptions forever, but their concerns can't dictate national policy on this.
- kmeisthax 1y ago
  I agree, but only in the sense that I think any amount of copyright protection for scientific papers is absolutely absurd. The creativity involved in papers is minimal and a good chunk of that research is funded by the government, so paywalling it is criminally unethical. Also, if we're going to bin the entire concept of copyright, can we at least be equal about it? I'd rather not live in a world where humans labor for the remnants of their culture in the content mines while clankers[0] feast on an endless stream of training data. [0] Fake racial slur for robots or other AI systems.
  - zzo38computer 1y ago
    I agree. I think that copyright should be abolished entirely, especially for scientific articles (if they are good quality scientific research then I think they would be too important to be copyrighted, in addition to the other stuff you mention), but also for anything else too. Nevertheless I thin there is another thing against the LLM training, which is that the scraping seems to be excessive (although it could be made less excessive; there are many ways to help with making it less excessive) and I think it requires too much power (although I don't really know a lot about it). These are two separate issues, though.
    - jruohonen 1y ago
      > I think that copyright should be abolished entirely, especially for scientific articles You know, it is really the CC-BY-style most science people care about. Same goes with MIT/BSD open source licenses, while with GPL I suppose it is one the side of CC-BY-SA.
- arjie 1y ago
  Absolutely agree. Realistically, everyone was playing around with this thing because everyone was using Sci Hub, /r/Scholar, and god knows what else to get PDFs. This is one of those things where the reality is well-known and people pretend that something is actually going on in copyright enforcement. And if I'm being honest, I'm tired of the International Brotherhood of Stevedores[0] style of shredding human productivity to protect some special interest group. If Elsevier died tomorrow, we'd lose a curation function to scientific papers, true, but we wouldn't lose the science itself. And while the curation on scientific output is clearly valuable - China is suffering the lack of this while producing prodigious science - I think it's far less important than the scientific output itself. This is especially true of US science. 0: IBS, the AMA, pharmacists, teacher unions, firefighter unions, tax preparers: the distributed cost to society is huge because we decided on protecting these special interest groups. Blocking AI would be a bridge too far.
- Ferret7446 1y ago
  I think this is one reason "piracy for AI" in general is tolerated. Anyone with a clear understanding of real world dynamics realizes that if a foreign country that lacks scruples develops "AGI", for lack of a better term, then you're fucked. This is in a sense a nuclear arms race. The same applies between companies, by the way, hence the "AI bubble". The other reason "piracy for AI" is tolerated is because it's not at all clear how to legislate or regulate it. You might think it's a cut and dry case, but lots of other people think the same about the opposite conclusion.
- pjc50 1y ago
  So you end up paying an AI company (or subsist on not-endless free tokens) to circumvent another company's paywall? This doesn't sound like a sustainable solution. How reliable is it? Can you just ask an AI for a doi and get a reasonably correct copy of the original article back? Is the level of hallucination induced in science acceptable?
bediger4000 1y ago
This is pretty clearly an instance of the right people (i.e. rich people) being allowed to pirate, and the poor people get in trouble for copyrighted music in the background of some video clip. The hypocrisy really grinds my gears.
- tommica 1y ago
  Yeah... Laws exist only if they are applied equally, else they become something else. And a monetary fine is just the cost of doing business if you are big enough.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
    >Yeah... Laws exist only if they are applied equally, else they become something else. This is bullshit and you know it. No one would ever want to go to the trouble, expense, and misery of enforcing laws where the so-called victims do not feel wronged and refuse to press complaints to the authorities. And so, copyright enforcement will only ever occur where the rightsholders wish to enforce it. The few lawsuits you see here and there aren't about genuine sentiment of being wrong, but of the rightsholders wanting their cuts. Backroom deals are already being drawn up, and everyone's cool with it. This is the status quo. If you don't like it, suggest something better, but don't be naive that the law as it stands now could be applied sanely or pragmatically.
    - LtWorf 1y ago
      What chances do I have of winning a lawsuit against copilot for violating my copyright? See? Laws are not applied equally.
      - terminalshort 1y ago
        [flagged]
        brazukadev 1y ago
NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
Copyright is about extracting a perpetual tax on culture from the peasants. It's not about hobbling the march of progress itself, not when the people who get to levy the culture tax will eventually get to cash in on the wonders that will ensue. Didn't anyone ever inform you?
- DamnInteresting 1y ago
  I can only speak for myself, but mostly the opposite has been true for me. I am a 'peasant' creating original works, and occasionally I must wield copyright to salt the giant thirsty leeches appropriating my work. If it were not for the protection offered by copyright, I would be a desiccated husk.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
    >and occasionally I must wield copyright to salt the giant thirsty leeches appropriating my work. I Depending on what your work is, I've probably already pirated it. And I don't stop, it's like a hobby of mine... I've made a point now of downloading every single book title I ever see mentioned (here on HN, elsewhere). Just for shits and giggles. You'll never even know, though, will you? Maybe you're a typographer. I don't pirate fonts, I pirate entire catalogs. Software, games, movies, television, music, literally everything. For years I've been on a search for house blueprints just because (no luck on those, though). You really are a peasant, and you think that copyright works for you, because theoretically it seems like it should. I guess whatever makes you happy.
    - DamnInteresting 1y ago
      Unless you are republishing my work, using it to earn yourself a livelihood while depriving me of the same, then you are not part of the problem that I describe.
Peteragain 1y ago
Of course real scientists don't publish. Okay I'm trolling but I know that the science published by Google et al has been thoroughly screened for commercial advantage before we see it. Try doing a litt search on hypersonics and you can see where the Russians _stop_ publishing.
terminalshort 1y ago
AI doesn't violate any copyright laws. When AI companies have been found to violate copyright laws (in ways that have nothing at all to do with AI) they have been sued successfully. There has been no change in enforcement.
- marginalia_nu 1y ago
  I imagine it's also likely a matter of AI companies having enough of a war chest to put up a fight. It's much easier to bully teenagers and small businesses into questionable settlements.
  - jack_tripper 1y ago
    > It's much easier to bully teenagers and small businesses into questionable settlements. The world's biggest publishing, copyright and IP holders (like Disney, Thomson Reuters, Sony, etc) aren't teenagers or small businesses, and easily have a war chest as big as AI companies, and own about 90% of media IP on which LLMs are trained on, not to mention having lawmakers and artists unions on their side. If they have a case under current laws, they'll take it to court.
    - marginalia_nu 1y ago
      Up until recently, those IP rights holders just needed to show up in order for their opponents to give up and sign a settlement. The difference now is that is no longer enough.
      - jack_tripper 1y ago
        Because of the existing "transformative and fair use" laws are very murky when it comes to LLMs as they obfuscate the theft, versus the legal slam dunk that used to be teenagers ripping CDs to MP3s and sharing them on the internet. Big AI companies are in a legal blindspot of obvious theft.
        1y ago
lambdaone 1y ago
It turned out laws were only for little people, after all.
- tim333 1y ago
  As one of the 'little people' I've found very little problem pirating stuff. If anything it's become easier over the years.
  - ASalazarMX 1y ago
    Say that to Anna's Archive, who has been continuously targeted for copyright enforcement despite tech giants using its data to train their models. Somehow their argument that AI models are a derivative work exonerates them from having done piracy in the first place, but not Anna's Archive. It really is about how expensive are your lawyers.
  - Yeul 1y ago
    It seems to me that most companies realised that trying to stop piracy costs more than it saves. You see this with videogames were they remove Denuvo DRM after a year.
niemandhier 1y ago
Will they rehabilitate Kim Dotcom?
- Yeul 1y ago
  How many statues of John Brown are there?
1gn15 1y ago
This thread is a dumpster fire. Piracy is still illegal; Anthropic had to pay for damages. Training has been ruled several times to be not copyright infringement because nothing is reproduced (no, the Harry Potter thing doesn't count). Then you have someone here using a racial slur and not being flagged. Let me be crystal clear: Large company pirates stuff: illegal (Anthropic) Little guy pirates stuff: illegal (though most get away with it) Large company trains model: legal (Anthropic) Little guy trains (fine-tunes) model: legal (Civit trainers) Why the hell are people still repeating the same old shit about "oh so the big guy can ignore laws"? What the fuck is going on? Also: if copyright enforcement is really getting weaker (no it's not, the article's premise is wrong in the first place), good.
alsetmusic 1y ago
It only mattered when multi-millionaires were upset about it and they could sue regular people. When billionaires and large conglomerates are on the receiving end of pirated content, it's no longer a problem.
npteljes 1y ago
>That is because it is now the tech giants that are accused of exploiting pirated content on an industrial scale Nah. Media just moved to services, and with that, the main media consumption turned from piracy to subscriptions / ad supported streams. Lack of public interest is also reflected in the fact that there were not really any development on the piracy front technologically in the last 15 years - or am I behind the times? Between 2000 and 2010, there were a lot more new software, new tech, different ways developed to get files, than there were between 2010 and 2025. Even with pirating content, I think illegal streaming sites take most of the traffic. There is also much more content than there ever was, making the culture diverse, fragmented, and one-time use only. So, I think, 1. Services happened to piracy. It's not about collecting files now, but about using an online service to view. 2. At the same time, collecting turned into consuming.

112 points by walterbell 1y ago

The use of paywalled scientific articles to train AI is one place where I think we have to just draw the line and say, this has to be allowed or US AI is simply going to get gutted and replaced by international competitors who have no respect for copyright law. Sorry but this is just a competitive reality and the content matters A LOT. Sucks that Elsevier gambled badly on the scientific community putting up with overpriced subscriptions forever, but their concerns can't dictate national policy on this.

kmeisthax 1y ago
I agree, but only in the sense that I think any amount of copyright protection for scientific papers is absolutely absurd. The creativity involved in papers is minimal and a good chunk of that research is funded by the government, so paywalling it is criminally unethical. Also, if we're going to bin the entire concept of copyright, can we at least be equal about it? I'd rather not live in a world where humans labor for the remnants of their culture in the content mines while clankers[0] feast on an endless stream of training data. [0] Fake racial slur for robots or other AI systems.
- zzo38computer 1y ago
  I agree. I think that copyright should be abolished entirely, especially for scientific articles (if they are good quality scientific research then I think they would be too important to be copyrighted, in addition to the other stuff you mention), but also for anything else too. Nevertheless I thin there is another thing against the LLM training, which is that the scraping seems to be excessive (although it could be made less excessive; there are many ways to help with making it less excessive) and I think it requires too much power (although I don't really know a lot about it). These are two separate issues, though.
  - jruohonen 1y ago
    > I think that copyright should be abolished entirely, especially for scientific articles You know, it is really the CC-BY-style most science people care about. Same goes with MIT/BSD open source licenses, while with GPL I suppose it is one the side of CC-BY-SA.
arjie 1y ago
Absolutely agree. Realistically, everyone was playing around with this thing because everyone was using Sci Hub, /r/Scholar, and god knows what else to get PDFs. This is one of those things where the reality is well-known and people pretend that something is actually going on in copyright enforcement. And if I'm being honest, I'm tired of the International Brotherhood of Stevedores[0] style of shredding human productivity to protect some special interest group. If Elsevier died tomorrow, we'd lose a curation function to scientific papers, true, but we wouldn't lose the science itself. And while the curation on scientific output is clearly valuable - China is suffering the lack of this while producing prodigious science - I think it's far less important than the scientific output itself. This is especially true of US science. 0: IBS, the AMA, pharmacists, teacher unions, firefighter unions, tax preparers: the distributed cost to society is huge because we decided on protecting these special interest groups. Blocking AI would be a bridge too far.
Ferret7446 1y ago
I think this is one reason "piracy for AI" in general is tolerated. Anyone with a clear understanding of real world dynamics realizes that if a foreign country that lacks scruples develops "AGI", for lack of a better term, then you're fucked. This is in a sense a nuclear arms race. The same applies between companies, by the way, hence the "AI bubble". The other reason "piracy for AI" is tolerated is because it's not at all clear how to legislate or regulate it. You might think it's a cut and dry case, but lots of other people think the same about the opposite conclusion.
pjc50 1y ago
So you end up paying an AI company (or subsist on not-endless free tokens) to circumvent another company's paywall? This doesn't sound like a sustainable solution. How reliable is it? Can you just ask an AI for a doi and get a reasonably correct copy of the original article back? Is the level of hallucination induced in science acceptable?

bediger4000 1y ago

This is pretty clearly an instance of the right people (i.e. rich people) being allowed to pirate, and the poor people get in trouble for copyrighted music in the background of some video clip. The hypocrisy really grinds my gears.

tommica 1y ago
Yeah... Laws exist only if they are applied equally, else they become something else. And a monetary fine is just the cost of doing business if you are big enough.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  >Yeah... Laws exist only if they are applied equally, else they become something else. This is bullshit and you know it. No one would ever want to go to the trouble, expense, and misery of enforcing laws where the so-called victims do not feel wronged and refuse to press complaints to the authorities. And so, copyright enforcement will only ever occur where the rightsholders wish to enforce it. The few lawsuits you see here and there aren't about genuine sentiment of being wrong, but of the rightsholders wanting their cuts. Backroom deals are already being drawn up, and everyone's cool with it. This is the status quo. If you don't like it, suggest something better, but don't be naive that the law as it stands now could be applied sanely or pragmatically.
  - LtWorf 1y ago
    What chances do I have of winning a lawsuit against copilot for violating my copyright? See? Laws are not applied equally.
    - terminalshort 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - brazukadev 1y ago

NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago

Copyright is about extracting a perpetual tax on culture from the peasants. It's not about hobbling the march of progress itself, not when the people who get to levy the culture tax will eventually get to cash in on the wonders that will ensue. Didn't anyone ever inform you?

DamnInteresting 1y ago
I can only speak for myself, but mostly the opposite has been true for me. I am a 'peasant' creating original works, and occasionally I must wield copyright to salt the giant thirsty leeches appropriating my work. If it were not for the protection offered by copyright, I would be a desiccated husk.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  >and occasionally I must wield copyright to salt the giant thirsty leeches appropriating my work. I Depending on what your work is, I've probably already pirated it. And I don't stop, it's like a hobby of mine... I've made a point now of downloading every single book title I ever see mentioned (here on HN, elsewhere). Just for shits and giggles. You'll never even know, though, will you? Maybe you're a typographer. I don't pirate fonts, I pirate entire catalogs. Software, games, movies, television, music, literally everything. For years I've been on a search for house blueprints just because (no luck on those, though). You really are a peasant, and you think that copyright works for you, because theoretically it seems like it should. I guess whatever makes you happy.
  - DamnInteresting 1y ago
    Unless you are republishing my work, using it to earn yourself a livelihood while depriving me of the same, then you are not part of the problem that I describe.

Peteragain 1y ago

Of course real scientists don't publish. Okay I'm trolling but I know that the science published by Google et al has been thoroughly screened for commercial advantage before we see it. Try doing a litt search on hypersonics and you can see where the Russians _stop_ publishing.

terminalshort 1y ago

AI doesn't violate any copyright laws. When AI companies have been found to violate copyright laws (in ways that have nothing at all to do with AI) they have been sued successfully. There has been no change in enforcement.

marginalia_nu 1y ago
I imagine it's also likely a matter of AI companies having enough of a war chest to put up a fight. It's much easier to bully teenagers and small businesses into questionable settlements.
- jack_tripper 1y ago
  > It's much easier to bully teenagers and small businesses into questionable settlements. The world's biggest publishing, copyright and IP holders (like Disney, Thomson Reuters, Sony, etc) aren't teenagers or small businesses, and easily have a war chest as big as AI companies, and own about 90% of media IP on which LLMs are trained on, not to mention having lawmakers and artists unions on their side. If they have a case under current laws, they'll take it to court.
  - marginalia_nu 1y ago
    Up until recently, those IP rights holders just needed to show up in order for their opponents to give up and sign a settlement. The difference now is that is no longer enough.
    - jack_tripper 1y ago
      Because of the existing "transformative and fair use" laws are very murky when it comes to LLMs as they obfuscate the theft, versus the legal slam dunk that used to be teenagers ripping CDs to MP3s and sharing them on the internet. Big AI companies are in a legal blindspot of obvious theft.
      - 1y ago

lambdaone 1y ago

It turned out laws were only for little people, after all.

tim333 1y ago
As one of the 'little people' I've found very little problem pirating stuff. If anything it's become easier over the years.
- ASalazarMX 1y ago
  Say that to Anna's Archive, who has been continuously targeted for copyright enforcement despite tech giants using its data to train their models. Somehow their argument that AI models are a derivative work exonerates them from having done piracy in the first place, but not Anna's Archive. It really is about how expensive are your lawyers.
- Yeul 1y ago
  It seems to me that most companies realised that trying to stop piracy costs more than it saves. You see this with videogames were they remove Denuvo DRM after a year.

niemandhier 1y ago

Will they rehabilitate Kim Dotcom?

Yeul 1y ago
How many statues of John Brown are there?

1gn15 1y ago

This thread is a dumpster fire. Piracy is still illegal; Anthropic had to pay for damages. Training has been ruled several times to be not copyright infringement because nothing is reproduced (no, the Harry Potter thing doesn't count). Then you have someone here using a racial slur and not being flagged. Let me be crystal clear: Large company pirates stuff: illegal (Anthropic) Little guy pirates stuff: illegal (though most get away with it) Large company trains model: legal (Anthropic) Little guy trains (fine-tunes) model: legal (Civit trainers) Why the hell are people still repeating the same old shit about "oh so the big guy can ignore laws"? What the fuck is going on? Also: if copyright enforcement is really getting weaker (no it's not, the article's premise is wrong in the first place), good.

alsetmusic 1y ago

It only mattered when multi-millionaires were upset about it and they could sue regular people. When billionaires and large conglomerates are on the receiving end of pirated content, it's no longer a problem.

npteljes 1y ago

>That is because it is now the tech giants that are accused of exploiting pirated content on an industrial scale Nah. Media just moved to services, and with that, the main media consumption turned from piracy to subscriptions / ad supported streams. Lack of public interest is also reflected in the fact that there were not really any development on the piracy front technologically in the last 15 years - or am I behind the times? Between 2000 and 2010, there were a lot more new software, new tech, different ways developed to get files, than there were between 2010 and 2025. Even with pirating content, I think illegal streaming sites take most of the traffic. There is also much more content than there ever was, making the culture diverse, fragmented, and one-time use only. So, I think, 1. Services happened to piracy. It's not about collecting files now, but about using an online service to view. 2. At the same time, collecting turned into consuming.