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Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

(www.businessinsider.com)
402 points pyman | 1 comments | 07 Jul 25 09:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.519s | source
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marapuru ◴[07 Jul 25 11:17 UTC] No.44489031[source]▶
Apparently it's a common business practice. Spotify (even though I can't find any proof) seems to have build their software and business on pirated music. There is some more in this Article [0].

https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files...

Funky quote:

> Rumors that early versions of Spotify used ‘pirate’ MP3s have been floating around the Internet for years. People who had access to the service in the beginning later reported downloading tracks that contained ‘Scene’ labeling, tags, and formats, which are the tell-tale signs that content hadn’t been obtained officially.

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dathinab ◴[07 Jul 25 14:48 UTC] No.44490949[source]▶
not just Spotify pretty much any (most?) current tech giant was build by

- riding a wave of change

- not caring too much about legal constraints (or like they would say now "distrupting" the market, which very very often means doing illigal shit which beings them far more money then any penalties they will ever face from it)

- or caring about ethics too much

- and for recent years (starting with Amazone) a lot of technically illegal financing (technically undercutting competitors prices long term based on money from else where (e.g. investors) is unfair competitive advantage (theoretically) clearly not allowed by anti monopoly laws. And before you often still had other monopoly issues (e.g. see wintel)

So yes not systematic not complying with law to get unfair competitive advantage knowing that many of the laws are on the larger picture toothless when applied to huge companies is bread and butter work of US tech giants

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benced ◴[07 Jul 25 16:20 UTC] No.44491900[source]▶
As you point out, they mostly did this before they were large companies (where the public choice questions are less problematic). Seems like the breaking of these laws was good for everybody.
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FirmwareBurner ◴[07 Jul 25 18:23 UTC] No.44493240[source]▶
>Seems like the breaking of these laws was good for everybody.

Are all music creators better off now than before Spotify?

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megaman821 ◴[07 Jul 25 19:23 UTC] No.44493772[source]▶
The music pie is bigger now but it is split between more people. Spotify brings in the most revenue for musicians as a whole.
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1. dathinab ◴[07 Jul 25 22:38 UTC] No.44495307[source]▶
Yeah, but like another post said it killed a lot of other income streams.

And Spotify is a bad example as it ran into another psudo monopoly with very unreasonable/unhealthy power (the few large music labels holding rights to the majority of main stream music).

They pretty much forced very bad terms onto Spotify which is to some degree why Spotify is pushing podcasts, as they can't be long term profitable with Music (raising prices doesn't help if the issue is a percent cut which rises too :/ )