Anthropic's cofounder, Ben Mann, downloaded million copies of books from Library Genesis in 2021, fully aware that the material was pirated.
Stealing is stealing. Let's stop with the double standards.
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Stealing is stealing. Let's stop with the double standards.
They make money off the model weights, which is fair use (as confirmed by recent case law).
Please keep in mind, copyright is intended as a compromise between benefit to society and to the individual.
A thought experiment, students pirating textbooks and applying that knowledge later on in their work?
Meanwhile other cases have been less friendly to it being fair use, AI companies are already paying vast sums to publishers who presumably they wouldn’t if they felt confident it was “the law”, and on and on.
I don’t like arguing from “it’s the law”. A lot of law is terrible. What’s right? It’s clear to me that if AI gets good enough, as it nearly is now, it sucks a lot of profit away from creators. That is unbalanced. The AI doesn’t exist without the creators, the creators need to exist for our society to be great (we want new creative works, more if anything). Law tends to start conservatively based on historical precedent, and when a new technology comes along it often errs on letting it do some damage to avoid setting a bad precedent. In time it catches up as society gets a better view of things.
The right thing is likely not to let our creative class be decimated so a few tech companies become fantastically wealthy - in the long run, it’s the right thing even for the techies.