4 ms·

Reminds me, did the AI companies redistribute that copyrighted material to others and make their money that way? Did Kim use the copyrighted material to generat

Reminds me, did the AI companies redistribute that copyrighted material to others and make their money that way? Did Kim use the copyrighted material to generate something novel from it? copyright law literally says something isn’t infringement if it is a novel transformation. I get the jokes and criticism about AI companies fighting and complaining about competitors distilling, but this is a much weirder comparison.

root-parent 4mo ago
Now you just have to explain this: "Anthropic settles with authors in first-of-its-kind AI copyright infringement lawsuit" - https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/nx-s1-5529404/anthropic-settlement-authors-copyright-ai https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/nx-s1-5529404/anthropic-settl...
- hydrox24 4mo ago
  > "The training use was a fair use," [the judge] wrote. "The use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative." > However, the judge ruled that Anthropic's use of millions of pirated books to build its models – books that websites such as Library Genesis (LibGen) and Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) copied without getting the authors' consent or giving them compensation – was not. It seems clear from the article that while the use of pirated works was illegal, the use of copyrighted works (a the work a book is based on is still copyrighted if you buy the book) was fine and transformative.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
cryptonym 4mo ago
This is confusing. I can torrent everything and do what I want with it, as long as I don't redistribute the exact same thing? If so, why do we still pay for games and movies?
- midasz 4mo ago
  I pay for games because it's more convenient than pirating them. For movies and tv however... They make it so difficult to be a customer.
  - klibertp 4mo ago
    Steam with Proton made gaming on Linux viable. Just for that, they deserve my money. That some of it goes to game devs is a happy coincidence ;D
- JsonDemWitOster 4mo ago
  IANAL (plus a whole suite of other caveats) but torrent-baiting works in Germany along these lines. ISPs and trigger-happy law firms don't send you a C&D for downloading a torrent, they do so for seeding a torrent. It's just that practically nobody "just seeds" a torrent so people colloquially claim they got busted for downloading a torrent. In theory this means if you torrent as a 100% leecher and turn off seeding from the get-go, you should be in the clear. But nobody sensible would dare test the extent of German Legal Spite, much less do so repeatedly to science the shit out of it. If you can download through another protocol, say HTTP, however---<Sendung unterbrochen!>
- john_strinlai 4mo ago
  >I can torrent everything and do what I want with it, as long as I don't redistribute the exact same thing? this is an incorrect interpretation (in the usa, at least). downloading a game/movie is still the creation of unauthorized copy, which is not allowed. not to mention that playing/watching does not count as a "novel transformation". (17 U.S.C. § 106 and 17 U.S.C. § 501 are the relevant pieces of reading)
- vlovich123 4mo ago
  No, that’s literally why Anthropic got sued. If they’d paid for a copy of the copyrighted works they pirated, they wouldn’t have had a problem. There were two issues in their case: does the AI infringe on copyright and did Anthropic obtain all their materials legally. The first they won on, the second they lost. So if you pirate a bunch of content you still get in trouble for that. But if you somehow make a business out of that that isn’t just redistributing those materials, then that business itself isn’t infringing.
andersonpico 4mo ago
But distribution isn't the only crime here, obtaining the material illegally apparently is a crime too. And the damn robot can also spit me harry Potter verbatim so I don't know how it would also not be distribution?
- vlian2088 4mo ago
  >And the damn robot can also spit me harry Potter verbatim so I don't know how it would also not be distribution? if you prompt it to, yes. just like your browser dutifully navigates to any copyright-infringing resource and GETs and POSTs whatever you ask of it. (also it can't, not really, only small snippets before going off rails. LLMs aren't magic, they can't losslessly compress an exabyte of training data into a few terabytes of weights.)
- mapontosevenths 4mo ago
  If I read Harry Potter I will remember some parts verbatim. Others I will tecall in only an abridged and lossy way. Does that make my brain copyright infringement? Does Disney now own all my output forever because some small part of me now has Harry Potter embedded?
  - bee_rider 4mo ago
    Does the law really not distinguish between mechanical processing of data, and humans learning from it? It seems surprising to be if every person who read a textbook is copyright infringing. It also seems surprising if something like a lossy compression algorithm is enough to protect you from copyright law. Somewhere between the two a line must be drawn… where we’d want to put that line, I guess, if up for quibbling. But it doesn’t seem obvious to me.
    - gruez 4mo ago
      >Does the law really not distinguish between mechanical processing of data, and humans learning from it? It seems surprising to be if every person who read a textbook is copyright infringing. It also seems surprising if something like a lossy compression algorithm is enough to protect you from copyright law. The google books and google thumbnails cases have so far upheld that even mechanical reproductions are allowed, depending on the context/usage.
samrus 4mo ago
They redistributed the statistical patterns of those copyrighted materials. Which perhaps should be treated similarly nos As for your "technically not copyright infringement" defense. Those laws are from a time when those patterns couldnt be derived and dostributed at scale. A human had to learn and teach them. That made it different. The scale enabled my modern tech makes it a whole dofferent situation. The same way how one person standing a street corner people watching for a bit isnt that bad, but a whole constellation of flock cameras costantly montioring everyones movements and making it available to any of their customers is really really bad. The law will have to catch up to this
- vlovich123 4mo ago
  > They redistributed the statistical patterns of those copyrighted materials. Which perhaps should be treated similarly nos Nos for the same reason that me giving you a word cloud of the frequency of words within Harry Potter isn’t infringement. It’s a novel transformation.
  - samrus 4mo ago
    Thats not as complex or scalable as what LLMs can do. The capability and scale is what changes the equation. Quantity is a quality unto itself here
    - vlovich123 4mo ago
      Exactly, and the complexity of what they’re doing is an even more significant novel creation. Particularly in the US there’s a four point test and the very first point: > To justify the use as fair, one must demonstrate how it either advances knowledge or the progress of the arts through the addition of something new. I don’t know anything that has advanced the knowledge and progress of the arts more. > The third factor assesses the amount and substantiality of the copyrighted work that has been used. In general, the less that is used in relation to the whole, the more likely the use will be considered fair. This isn’t about usage in training. This would be in the LLM itself - the copyrighted works are very rarely used in the output. > The fourth factor measures the effect that the allegedly infringing use has had on the copyright owner's ability to exploit his original work Would you sincerely claim that owners have become less able to make money because of LLMs? Those same owners using LLMs to increase their own output of copyrighted works? Anyway, copyright is not an absolute right and you have to really misunderstand copyright law to claim that LLM training infringes it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

root-parent 4mo ago

Now you just have to explain this: "Anthropic settles with authors in first-of-its-kind AI copyright infringement lawsuit" - https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/nx-s1-5529404/anthropic-settlement-authors-copyright-ai https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/nx-s1-5529404/anthropic-settl...

hydrox24 4mo ago
> "The training use was a fair use," [the judge] wrote. "The use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative." > However, the judge ruled that Anthropic's use of millions of pirated books to build its models – books that websites such as Library Genesis (LibGen) and Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) copied without getting the authors' consent or giving them compensation – was not. It seems clear from the article that while the use of pirated works was illegal, the use of copyrighted works (a the work a book is based on is still copyrighted if you buy the book) was fine and transformative.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]

cryptonym 4mo ago

This is confusing. I can torrent everything and do what I want with it, as long as I don't redistribute the exact same thing? If so, why do we still pay for games and movies?

midasz 4mo ago
I pay for games because it's more convenient than pirating them. For movies and tv however... They make it so difficult to be a customer.
- klibertp 4mo ago
  Steam with Proton made gaming on Linux viable. Just for that, they deserve my money. That some of it goes to game devs is a happy coincidence ;D
JsonDemWitOster 4mo ago
IANAL (plus a whole suite of other caveats) but torrent-baiting works in Germany along these lines. ISPs and trigger-happy law firms don't send you a C&D for downloading a torrent, they do so for seeding a torrent. It's just that practically nobody "just seeds" a torrent so people colloquially claim they got busted for downloading a torrent. In theory this means if you torrent as a 100% leecher and turn off seeding from the get-go, you should be in the clear. But nobody sensible would dare test the extent of German Legal Spite, much less do so repeatedly to science the shit out of it. If you can download through another protocol, say HTTP, however---<Sendung unterbrochen!>
john_strinlai 4mo ago
>I can torrent everything and do what I want with it, as long as I don't redistribute the exact same thing? this is an incorrect interpretation (in the usa, at least). downloading a game/movie is still the creation of unauthorized copy, which is not allowed. not to mention that playing/watching does not count as a "novel transformation". (17 U.S.C. § 106 and 17 U.S.C. § 501 are the relevant pieces of reading)
vlovich123 4mo ago
No, that’s literally why Anthropic got sued. If they’d paid for a copy of the copyrighted works they pirated, they wouldn’t have had a problem. There were two issues in their case: does the AI infringe on copyright and did Anthropic obtain all their materials legally. The first they won on, the second they lost. So if you pirate a bunch of content you still get in trouble for that. But if you somehow make a business out of that that isn’t just redistributing those materials, then that business itself isn’t infringing.

andersonpico 4mo ago

But distribution isn't the only crime here, obtaining the material illegally apparently is a crime too. And the damn robot can also spit me harry Potter verbatim so I don't know how it would also not be distribution?

vlian2088 4mo ago
>And the damn robot can also spit me harry Potter verbatim so I don't know how it would also not be distribution? if you prompt it to, yes. just like your browser dutifully navigates to any copyright-infringing resource and GETs and POSTs whatever you ask of it. (also it can't, not really, only small snippets before going off rails. LLMs aren't magic, they can't losslessly compress an exabyte of training data into a few terabytes of weights.)
mapontosevenths 4mo ago
If I read Harry Potter I will remember some parts verbatim. Others I will tecall in only an abridged and lossy way. Does that make my brain copyright infringement? Does Disney now own all my output forever because some small part of me now has Harry Potter embedded?
- bee_rider 4mo ago
  Does the law really not distinguish between mechanical processing of data, and humans learning from it? It seems surprising to be if every person who read a textbook is copyright infringing. It also seems surprising if something like a lossy compression algorithm is enough to protect you from copyright law. Somewhere between the two a line must be drawn… where we’d want to put that line, I guess, if up for quibbling. But it doesn’t seem obvious to me.
  - gruez 4mo ago
    >Does the law really not distinguish between mechanical processing of data, and humans learning from it? It seems surprising to be if every person who read a textbook is copyright infringing. It also seems surprising if something like a lossy compression algorithm is enough to protect you from copyright law. The google books and google thumbnails cases have so far upheld that even mechanical reproductions are allowed, depending on the context/usage.

samrus 4mo ago

They redistributed the statistical patterns of those copyrighted materials. Which perhaps should be treated similarly nos As for your "technically not copyright infringement" defense. Those laws are from a time when those patterns couldnt be derived and dostributed at scale. A human had to learn and teach them. That made it different. The scale enabled my modern tech makes it a whole dofferent situation. The same way how one person standing a street corner people watching for a bit isnt that bad, but a whole constellation of flock cameras costantly montioring everyones movements and making it available to any of their customers is really really bad. The law will have to catch up to this

vlovich123 4mo ago
> They redistributed the statistical patterns of those copyrighted materials. Which perhaps should be treated similarly nos Nos for the same reason that me giving you a word cloud of the frequency of words within Harry Potter isn’t infringement. It’s a novel transformation.
- samrus 4mo ago
  Thats not as complex or scalable as what LLMs can do. The capability and scale is what changes the equation. Quantity is a quality unto itself here
  - vlovich123 4mo ago
    Exactly, and the complexity of what they’re doing is an even more significant novel creation. Particularly in the US there’s a four point test and the very first point: > To justify the use as fair, one must demonstrate how it either advances knowledge or the progress of the arts through the addition of something new. I don’t know anything that has advanced the knowledge and progress of the arts more. > The third factor assesses the amount and substantiality of the copyrighted work that has been used. In general, the less that is used in relation to the whole, the more likely the use will be considered fair. This isn’t about usage in training. This would be in the LLM itself - the copyrighted works are very rarely used in the output. > The fourth factor measures the effect that the allegedly infringing use has had on the copyright owner's ability to exploit his original work Would you sincerely claim that owners have become less able to make money because of LLMs? Those same owners using LLMs to increase their own output of copyrighted works? Anyway, copyright is not an absolute right and you have to really misunderstand copyright law to claim that LLM training infringes it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use