15 ms·

So, continuing to profit--forever--from someone's else work, at scale, without their prior consent, is fair use? It's funny that crimes can be settled in cash.

So, continuing to profit--forever--from someone's else work, at scale, without their prior consent, is fair use? It's funny that crimes can be settled in cash. IOW, everything has a price; and the price is always right. Settlement ought to be the euphemism for blood money. In addition to the settlement, what I'd consider fair is to have these companies pay royalties in perpetuity. Of course, that's not tractable.

owenfi 3mo ago
Yeah, I feel like penalties here should be something like 10% of revenue in perpetuity. Then companies might think twice about asking forgiveness instead of permission.
simianwords 3mo ago
Why do they need prior consent? What sort of rent seeking do you want?
- gspr 3mo ago
  Are you saying that if someone writes a book or records a song, anyone should be able to use it for anything forever without consent? How does intellectual work get funded in this insane world if yours, pray tell?
  - 0x3f 3mo ago
    You assume your premise. But plenty of "intellectual work" is already done without legal cover. It just typically attracts normal profits, rather than super-normal rent-seeking ones.
    - gspr 3mo ago
      I, too, hate rentseeking. Owning one's intellectual output, however, is not in and of itself rentseeking.
      - 0x3f 3mo ago
        Rents are just amounts beyond what's needed to cause the thing to exist. At the point of copying something, it already exists. So payments for the right to do so aren't payments required to bring anything new into existence at that point, save for the legal fiction. Now you might argue that the future copy-licencing rents are necessary to bring the _original_ creation into being. But that doesn't make them _not rents_. But I would say that's the second assumption you're baking in here. As in, we live in a world where e.g. the movie Toy Story exists. Now, certainly Toy Story does provide some good or value to the world. But I don't think you can assume such things provide more value than e.g. open science, free transformation of works, etc. I get that people enjoy our current IP culture but saying certain things wouldn't exist in an IP-free world is just an argument from consequences that doesn't even really compare consequences between the two.
  - piltdownman 3mo ago
    Intellectual property protections have a finite lifespan to begin with, and as a tenet of Western Civilization are barely 300 years old. For works published before copyright laws existed or after property protections expire, anyone should be able to use it for anything forever without consent. Intellectual work still manages to get funded in this 'insane world' - although given the classical artist/patron system has given way to state-based grants and a select capitalisation of Art post-Warhol, the concept of Universal Basic Income tends to be promoted the desired successor. Speaking of insane worlds, how does the concept of the Public Domain work in yours?
    - gspr 3mo ago
      Are you really saying that because IP protections are (and should be, I agree) time-limited, they're not doing anything in the first place? This is patently ridiculous. > Speaking of insane worlds, how does the concept of the Public Domain work in yours? Can you elaborate on what you're asking? I don't understand your question.
      - piltdownman 3mo ago
        Your contention was that it was an insane position that anyone should be able to use a piece of literature or a song for anything forever without consent. I simply highlighted the absurdity of that based on the fact that: 1. Copyright protections as a concept are an incredibly modern phenomenon, mostly limited in practice to Western Capitalist Democracies. 2. Outside of a short monetisable window (albeit one extended and irrevocably marred by Disney/Sonny Bono) your 'insane' hypothesis is in fact the status quo 3. Much intellectual work is published into the Public Domain, and all copyrighted work eventually ends up in the Public Domain. Your position appears to presuppose a world without such an entity. As to what copyright actually achieves? It's mostly a mechanism by which the media gatekeepers and owners of capital use legislative and social imbalance of power to deny artist the rights and royalties for mechanical reproduction and otherwise impose financial serfdom. This is achieved mainly by Copyright Enclosure, whereby musicians are typically pressured or contractually obligated to surrender their master recordings and intellectual property, and by contractual clauses like Controlled Composition Clauses, whereby Labels reduce the mechanical royalties they pay to artists who write their own songs, often paying below the standard statutory rate.
  - pishpash 3mo ago
    Lots of ways. Selling author signings, talks, authorized copies, subscriptions/merch, sponsorships. How do newfangled "content creators" fund their work? We already live in this world. Maybe not all creative works are deserving of monopoly profits just by sitting on the ass in any case, and should stand on their own merits by producing downstream value that can be sold for whatever they can be sold for, by whoever puts in the work to deliver the value to the end user in a competitive manner. You know, open markets. Attribution I can see. Consent or payment beyond market value, why? Just because you put in a billion hours to make a shitty $1 value output I should pay you a billion hours worth of labor?
    - gspr 3mo ago
      > Selling author signings, talks, authorized copies, subscriptions/merch, sponsorships. Most of these turn intellectual work into that of indie musicians, or outright beggars. You are stepping dangerously close to stripping people rights in favour of giant AI companies. > How do newfangled "content creators" fund their work? We already live in this world. "Content creators" heavily rely on IP protections. You could always try taking some youtube videos with 100M views, altering them a bit an using them as your own and seeing how that goes down. Do let me know! > Maybe not all creative works are deserving of monopoly profits just by sitting on the ass in any case, and should stand on their own merits by producing downstream value that can be sold for whatever they can be sold for, by whoever puts in the work to deliver the value to the end user in a competitive manner. You know, open markets. And open market is not one where I can say that you are just sitting on your ass, so I'll take your stuff and sell it. > Attribution I can see. Consent or payment beyond market value, why? Because it's my stuff of course! And why should one even pay market value in your world? Why not always 0? > Just because you put in a billion hours to make a shitty $1 value output I should pay you a billion hours worth of labor? What in the world are you on about? If the price someone puts on their IP seems too high to you, you should not pay that price. We wholeheartedly agree. Where we disagree is where you from this conclude that you can just choose the price yourself and take it anyway!
shakna 3mo ago
> So, continuing to profit--forever--from someone's else work, at scale, without their prior consent, is fair use? No, that's what they got in trouble for - a lack of consent. If the author consents, it would have been fine. If they bought the books, then it is fine. Digitisation through destruction, like most book scanning systems. As long as the original work is destroyed during the process, and you actually paid for it, then it is fair use. If it regurgitates, then the author can sue you again. So you are incentivised to make damn sure it doesn't. That's not covered by fair use. Its only if the original cannot be accessed anymore, and you paid to get the original. Both must be true, for fair use to hold.
- maccard 3mo ago
  That’s what the got a _slap on the wrist for_. 1.5 Billion of a payout to effectively cement themselves as one of the only orgs that can ever create one of these models because the ladder is pulled up behind them.
- whateverboat 3mo ago
  So, they can bu ya book and format shift it, but when I do it, it's piracy? Looking at all DMCA/DRM systems.
  - shakna 3mo ago
    Format shifting has a DMCA carveout. It is 100% allowed. Since around 2000, the rule has permitted it for: > Literary works, including computer programs and databases, protected by access control mechanisms that fail to permit access because of malfunction, damage, or obsoleteness. DRM being covered under other laws, and being gross, still applies. And still applies to industry giants, too. Which is why most who do this, like Google, actually buy physical copies and scan it destructively, so they don't have to deal with it.
    - kmeisthax 3mo ago
      Yes, it's legal to format-shift DRM protected media, but it is not lawful. Someone has to break the law to provide me with a decryption tool. If you asked the right politician when all these rules were being written, the intent was that each person who needs to format-shift their media would independently write their own decryption tools, use them for lawful purposes only, and then dutifully delete them the moment they were no longer needed. This is, of course, laughable. Of course, if Anthropic was, say, buying and decrypting Kindle books TODAY; they probably could get Claude to vibe-code a DRM decryption tool[0]. That would actually be within the bounds of this asinine law. If Anthropic started off by doing this, however, they probably would have just used a decryption tool found on the Internet, and that would have invited different legal challenges. Like, is it legal to use an unlawful tool to accomplish something otherwise legally protected? The courts so far have been very hostile to ANY attempt to tie the anticircumvention provisions of the DMCA to fair use. They could easily say "No, you only get to format shift with your own tools". [0] Related note: I really wish I had Mythos access, just so I could jailbreak my iPad on modern iPadOS. No other reason.
sdenton4 3mo ago
I dunno, ever used a thing you learned from a textbook in your job? Did you have to continue paying for the copy of that knowledge speed on your brain? No, because that's not what copyright is about. Learning from and building on previous work is civilization. Copyright maximalism is a plague.
- calgoo 3mo ago
  Yes but does the computer actually learn? Is the computer a person that read a book and remembered, a part and used that to create a novel idea or is it just cioy pasting the answer and then reselling that
  - Lutger 3mo ago
    A computer not, but a LLM model does learn. The original text in no way exists 'in the model', and the model does not copy-paste it and resell the original text. Not the same, but reasonably similar to a human. We may need some new legislation. An LLM is not a person, but its also not just a storage solution.
- simoncion 3mo ago
  > I dunno, ever used a thing you learned from a textbook in your job? Did you have to continue paying for the copy of that knowledge speed on your brain? Those regulations and principles are for humans. Either the major LLMs are software tools deployed by ostensibly-profit-seeking companies, and regulations based on the notion that "making humans pay to make use of the things they've learned is profoundly antisocial" don't apply, or the LLM companies have a bigass swarm of unpaid -er- "servants", and labor laws and other human rights regulations do apply.
- gspr 3mo ago
  > I dunno, ever used a thing you learned from a textbook in your job? Did you have to continue paying for the copy of that knowledge speed on your brain? They are, presumably, human. We can perfectly well say that humans have certain rights without needing to give machines those same rights. For example, we've more or less all agreed that it's fine for a human to watch a movie and enjoy the memories forever, and be inspired by it forever. But we've also more or less all agreed that that doesn't mean that a human can use a machine to record that movie and keep it forever. > Learning from and building on previous work is civilization. Copyright maximalism is a plague. The debate has existed for several generations at this point. You may disagree with the mainstream opinion, but it's disingenuous to frame it as "copyright maximalism".
visarga 3mo ago
> So, continuing to profit--forever--from someone's else work, at scale, without their prior consent, is fair use? Yeah, you are right. Have you been paying your dues to the authors of your math books in first 4 grades? I think 15% of your wages as an engineer would suffice. These kids continue to profit for years, and they are so many. Gotta pot a stop to that IP theft. In my mistake I thought copyright was about copying rights, not paying for using ideas themselves. If just being downstream from a copyrighted work is infringement even without substantial similarity, then it's more like patents that expire in lifetime + a million years.
itemize123 3mo ago
once you read the book, and learn from it and use the knowledge in your livelihood - you have to perpetually pay the author? Doesn't sound right.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  Why is everyone talking about human analogies when LLMs are not humans?
  - derrasterpunkt 3mo ago
    Because the process is the same. When you read a book you don‘t save it as a brain file, you form memories from it. Some people can recall verbatim bits here and there but I have never met someone regurgitating a book word for word. And I‘m pretty sure I can not ask ChatGPT to output the first chapter of Moby Dick word for word. I think that would be, rightfully, considered copyright infringement.
    - umpalumpaaa 3mo ago
      https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02671 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02671
  - satvikpendem 3mo ago
    Why is it different other than, "just cause?" No one seems to have actual reasoning to back it up while it feels very similar the other way around, is human brains and neural nets (notwithstanding that they're both called neurons) seem to learn similarly and can act on similar classes of problems like language and mathematics.
    - inigyou 3mo ago
      are you asking what the diff is between a human and an LLM?
      - satvikpendem 3mo ago
HDThoreaun 3mo ago
> So, continuing to profit--forever--from someone's else work, at scale, without their prior consent, is fair use? Yes, that is the entire history of humanity. People steal the last generations works and build something from it to make it their own.

owenfi 3mo ago

Yeah, I feel like penalties here should be something like 10% of revenue in perpetuity. Then companies might think twice about asking forgiveness instead of permission.

simianwords 3mo ago

Why do they need prior consent? What sort of rent seeking do you want?

gspr 3mo ago
Are you saying that if someone writes a book or records a song, anyone should be able to use it for anything forever without consent? How does intellectual work get funded in this insane world if yours, pray tell?
- 0x3f 3mo ago
  You assume your premise. But plenty of "intellectual work" is already done without legal cover. It just typically attracts normal profits, rather than super-normal rent-seeking ones.
  - gspr 3mo ago
    I, too, hate rentseeking. Owning one's intellectual output, however, is not in and of itself rentseeking.
    - 0x3f 3mo ago
      Rents are just amounts beyond what's needed to cause the thing to exist. At the point of copying something, it already exists. So payments for the right to do so aren't payments required to bring anything new into existence at that point, save for the legal fiction. Now you might argue that the future copy-licencing rents are necessary to bring the _original_ creation into being. But that doesn't make them _not rents_. But I would say that's the second assumption you're baking in here. As in, we live in a world where e.g. the movie Toy Story exists. Now, certainly Toy Story does provide some good or value to the world. But I don't think you can assume such things provide more value than e.g. open science, free transformation of works, etc. I get that people enjoy our current IP culture but saying certain things wouldn't exist in an IP-free world is just an argument from consequences that doesn't even really compare consequences between the two.
- piltdownman 3mo ago
  Intellectual property protections have a finite lifespan to begin with, and as a tenet of Western Civilization are barely 300 years old. For works published before copyright laws existed or after property protections expire, anyone should be able to use it for anything forever without consent. Intellectual work still manages to get funded in this 'insane world' - although given the classical artist/patron system has given way to state-based grants and a select capitalisation of Art post-Warhol, the concept of Universal Basic Income tends to be promoted the desired successor. Speaking of insane worlds, how does the concept of the Public Domain work in yours?
  - gspr 3mo ago
    Are you really saying that because IP protections are (and should be, I agree) time-limited, they're not doing anything in the first place? This is patently ridiculous. > Speaking of insane worlds, how does the concept of the Public Domain work in yours? Can you elaborate on what you're asking? I don't understand your question.
    - piltdownman 3mo ago
      Your contention was that it was an insane position that anyone should be able to use a piece of literature or a song for anything forever without consent. I simply highlighted the absurdity of that based on the fact that: 1. Copyright protections as a concept are an incredibly modern phenomenon, mostly limited in practice to Western Capitalist Democracies. 2. Outside of a short monetisable window (albeit one extended and irrevocably marred by Disney/Sonny Bono) your 'insane' hypothesis is in fact the status quo 3. Much intellectual work is published into the Public Domain, and all copyrighted work eventually ends up in the Public Domain. Your position appears to presuppose a world without such an entity. As to what copyright actually achieves? It's mostly a mechanism by which the media gatekeepers and owners of capital use legislative and social imbalance of power to deny artist the rights and royalties for mechanical reproduction and otherwise impose financial serfdom. This is achieved mainly by Copyright Enclosure, whereby musicians are typically pressured or contractually obligated to surrender their master recordings and intellectual property, and by contractual clauses like Controlled Composition Clauses, whereby Labels reduce the mechanical royalties they pay to artists who write their own songs, often paying below the standard statutory rate.
- pishpash 3mo ago
  Lots of ways. Selling author signings, talks, authorized copies, subscriptions/merch, sponsorships. How do newfangled "content creators" fund their work? We already live in this world. Maybe not all creative works are deserving of monopoly profits just by sitting on the ass in any case, and should stand on their own merits by producing downstream value that can be sold for whatever they can be sold for, by whoever puts in the work to deliver the value to the end user in a competitive manner. You know, open markets. Attribution I can see. Consent or payment beyond market value, why? Just because you put in a billion hours to make a shitty $1 value output I should pay you a billion hours worth of labor?
  - gspr 3mo ago
    > Selling author signings, talks, authorized copies, subscriptions/merch, sponsorships. Most of these turn intellectual work into that of indie musicians, or outright beggars. You are stepping dangerously close to stripping people rights in favour of giant AI companies. > How do newfangled "content creators" fund their work? We already live in this world. "Content creators" heavily rely on IP protections. You could always try taking some youtube videos with 100M views, altering them a bit an using them as your own and seeing how that goes down. Do let me know! > Maybe not all creative works are deserving of monopoly profits just by sitting on the ass in any case, and should stand on their own merits by producing downstream value that can be sold for whatever they can be sold for, by whoever puts in the work to deliver the value to the end user in a competitive manner. You know, open markets. And open market is not one where I can say that you are just sitting on your ass, so I'll take your stuff and sell it. > Attribution I can see. Consent or payment beyond market value, why? Because it's my stuff of course! And why should one even pay market value in your world? Why not always 0? > Just because you put in a billion hours to make a shitty $1 value output I should pay you a billion hours worth of labor? What in the world are you on about? If the price someone puts on their IP seems too high to you, you should not pay that price. We wholeheartedly agree. Where we disagree is where you from this conclude that you can just choose the price yourself and take it anyway!

shakna 3mo ago

> So, continuing to profit--forever--from someone's else work, at scale, without their prior consent, is fair use? No, that's what they got in trouble for - a lack of consent. If the author consents, it would have been fine. If they bought the books, then it is fine. Digitisation through destruction, like most book scanning systems. As long as the original work is destroyed during the process, and you actually paid for it, then it is fair use. If it regurgitates, then the author can sue you again. So you are incentivised to make damn sure it doesn't. That's not covered by fair use. Its only if the original cannot be accessed anymore, and you paid to get the original. Both must be true, for fair use to hold.

maccard 3mo ago
That’s what the got a _slap on the wrist for_. 1.5 Billion of a payout to effectively cement themselves as one of the only orgs that can ever create one of these models because the ladder is pulled up behind them.
whateverboat 3mo ago
So, they can bu ya book and format shift it, but when I do it, it's piracy? Looking at all DMCA/DRM systems.
- shakna 3mo ago
  Format shifting has a DMCA carveout. It is 100% allowed. Since around 2000, the rule has permitted it for: > Literary works, including computer programs and databases, protected by access control mechanisms that fail to permit access because of malfunction, damage, or obsoleteness. DRM being covered under other laws, and being gross, still applies. And still applies to industry giants, too. Which is why most who do this, like Google, actually buy physical copies and scan it destructively, so they don't have to deal with it.
  - kmeisthax 3mo ago
    Yes, it's legal to format-shift DRM protected media, but it is not lawful. Someone has to break the law to provide me with a decryption tool. If you asked the right politician when all these rules were being written, the intent was that each person who needs to format-shift their media would independently write their own decryption tools, use them for lawful purposes only, and then dutifully delete them the moment they were no longer needed. This is, of course, laughable. Of course, if Anthropic was, say, buying and decrypting Kindle books TODAY; they probably could get Claude to vibe-code a DRM decryption tool[0]. That would actually be within the bounds of this asinine law. If Anthropic started off by doing this, however, they probably would have just used a decryption tool found on the Internet, and that would have invited different legal challenges. Like, is it legal to use an unlawful tool to accomplish something otherwise legally protected? The courts so far have been very hostile to ANY attempt to tie the anticircumvention provisions of the DMCA to fair use. They could easily say "No, you only get to format shift with your own tools". [0] Related note: I really wish I had Mythos access, just so I could jailbreak my iPad on modern iPadOS. No other reason.

sdenton4 3mo ago

I dunno, ever used a thing you learned from a textbook in your job? Did you have to continue paying for the copy of that knowledge speed on your brain? No, because that's not what copyright is about. Learning from and building on previous work is civilization. Copyright maximalism is a plague.

calgoo 3mo ago
Yes but does the computer actually learn? Is the computer a person that read a book and remembered, a part and used that to create a novel idea or is it just cioy pasting the answer and then reselling that
- Lutger 3mo ago
  A computer not, but a LLM model does learn. The original text in no way exists 'in the model', and the model does not copy-paste it and resell the original text. Not the same, but reasonably similar to a human. We may need some new legislation. An LLM is not a person, but its also not just a storage solution.
simoncion 3mo ago
> I dunno, ever used a thing you learned from a textbook in your job? Did you have to continue paying for the copy of that knowledge speed on your brain? Those regulations and principles are for humans. Either the major LLMs are software tools deployed by ostensibly-profit-seeking companies, and regulations based on the notion that "making humans pay to make use of the things they've learned is profoundly antisocial" don't apply, or the LLM companies have a bigass swarm of unpaid -er- "servants", and labor laws and other human rights regulations do apply.
gspr 3mo ago
> I dunno, ever used a thing you learned from a textbook in your job? Did you have to continue paying for the copy of that knowledge speed on your brain? They are, presumably, human. We can perfectly well say that humans have certain rights without needing to give machines those same rights. For example, we've more or less all agreed that it's fine for a human to watch a movie and enjoy the memories forever, and be inspired by it forever. But we've also more or less all agreed that that doesn't mean that a human can use a machine to record that movie and keep it forever. > Learning from and building on previous work is civilization. Copyright maximalism is a plague. The debate has existed for several generations at this point. You may disagree with the mainstream opinion, but it's disingenuous to frame it as "copyright maximalism".

visarga 3mo ago

> So, continuing to profit--forever--from someone's else work, at scale, without their prior consent, is fair use? Yeah, you are right. Have you been paying your dues to the authors of your math books in first 4 grades? I think 15% of your wages as an engineer would suffice. These kids continue to profit for years, and they are so many. Gotta pot a stop to that IP theft. In my mistake I thought copyright was about copying rights, not paying for using ideas themselves. If just being downstream from a copyrighted work is infringement even without substantial similarity, then it's more like patents that expire in lifetime + a million years.

itemize123 3mo ago

once you read the book, and learn from it and use the knowledge in your livelihood - you have to perpetually pay the author? Doesn't sound right.

inigyou 3mo ago
Why is everyone talking about human analogies when LLMs are not humans?
- derrasterpunkt 3mo ago
  Because the process is the same. When you read a book you don‘t save it as a brain file, you form memories from it. Some people can recall verbatim bits here and there but I have never met someone regurgitating a book word for word. And I‘m pretty sure I can not ask ChatGPT to output the first chapter of Moby Dick word for word. I think that would be, rightfully, considered copyright infringement.
  - umpalumpaaa 3mo ago
    https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02671 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02671
- satvikpendem 3mo ago
  Why is it different other than, "just cause?" No one seems to have actual reasoning to back it up while it feels very similar the other way around, is human brains and neural nets (notwithstanding that they're both called neurons) seem to learn similarly and can act on similar classes of problems like language and mathematics.
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    are you asking what the diff is between a human and an LLM?
    - satvikpendem 3mo ago

HDThoreaun 3mo ago

> So, continuing to profit--forever--from someone's else work, at scale, without their prior consent, is fair use? Yes, that is the entire history of humanity. People steal the last generations works and build something from it to make it their own.