4 ms·
A key aspect folks should understand about US Copyright Law is that it much more severely penalizes infringement with distributing, or an intent to distribute,
by keeda 2mo ago
A key aspect folks should understand about US Copyright Law is that it much more severely penalizes infringement with distributing, or an intent to distribute, unauthorized copies than to just consume privately. Distributing unauthorized copies is a federal crime (which can escalate to a felony based on various factors) whereas doing whatever for private use is usually a much milder civil liability.
If you look at all the much publicized piracy trials around the Napster era, they invariably came down to the defendant distributing the works they downloaded.
This explains why the AI giants are legally fine doing what they're doing. They are explicitly not distributing copies of the work they acquired (although Meta apparently torrented some stuff, which seeds i.e. distributes data by default, and so might be in trouble to that extent) and training AI has so far been ruled to be fair use. Which, technically, makes sense; encoding patterns gleaned from billions of texts into weights is clearly different from distributing exact copies, and if you look at the cases where LLMs can be made to regurgitate content verbatim, it only really works for a handful of extremely popular books.
This also explains how whatever happened with Aaron Swartz, as tragic as it was, is qualitatively different from what is happening with LLMs. He very explicitly scraped all that content with the specific intention of distributing it. On the other hand, AI companies are literally destroying mountains of books to comply with the law.
You could call this tragic on multiple levels, but not hypocritical.
- rpdillon 2mo ago> Distributing unauthorized is a federal crime Not true. Copyright infringement is a civil infraction, but can escalate to a criminal infraction at high enough scale, but that's a judgment call. Aaron Swartz was the victim of a witch hunt, plain and simple. The prosecutor that came after him (Carmen Ortiz) has never suffered any negative consequences for coming after him in such an injust way. She should.
- keeda 2mo ago> Not true. Copyright infringement is a civil infraction, but can escalate to a criminal infraction at high enough scale, but that's a judgment call. I don't think it's a judgment call, the level to escalate seems to be pretty specific and at an extremely low scale, specifically unauthorized distribution "of at least 10 copies OR 1 or more copyrighted works with a retail value > $2,500" and the penalties are pretty severe, including imprisonment for "up to 5 years and fined up to $250,000, or both." https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual-1852-copyright-infringement-penalties-17-usc-506a-and-18-usc-2319 https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual... I'd say Aaron Swartz had crossed that bar pretty thoroughly.
- _ink_ 2mo agoA German publisher is currently sueing OpenAI, because they think it is distributing unauthorized copies of its work. [1] It's in German, but I think the example picture speaks for itself. So essentially big tech is doing exactly what the torrenters were persecuted for. I still think big tech will be treated differently. [1] - https://www.heise.de/news/Rechtsverletzende-Kopien-vom-NEINhorn-Carlsen-klagt-gegen-OpenAI-11420543.html https://www.heise.de/news/Rechtsverletzende-Kopien-vom-NEINh...
- keeda 2mo agoHmm, not familiar with what's happening in Germany or its copyright laws, but I do recall coming across this piece of news, where OpenAI was indeed found guilty of infringement, so I don't think Big Tech is being treated differently: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/11/chatgpt-violated-copyright-laws-german-court-rules https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/11/chatgpt-v...
- Gander5739 2mo agoYou can read it in English: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Rights-infringing-copies-of-NEINhorn-Carlsen-sues-OpenAI-11420677.html https://www.heise.de/en/news/Rights-infringing-copies-of-NEI...
- diabllicseagull 2mo agoarguing that the application of the law was as expected to people who point out how unjust the expected application of the law is is pointless. ideally, we would see a stronger legal reaction to the biggest IP heist in history but clearly it's not what's happening. it's only natural for people to criticize the current system until a change for the better materializes, while doing so draw attention to extreme cases such as Aaron's.
- keeda 2mo agoBut my point it is not an unjust application of the law, the law is specifically structured to treat certain behaviors as worse than others. IMO that is actually fair in theory: We do NOT want to punish people who casually pirate stuff for private use, but we probably do want to punish and deter bad actors who want to profit off of the work of others'. Aaron Swartz's case was actually neither -- you could say he wanted to "liberate" information for the "public good" -- but unfortunately the law has no provision for that and all his actions were consistent with how the law specifies the bad actor case, which is what escalated things drastically.