It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use, but the pirating of the books is the issue at hand here, and is what Anthropic “whoopsied” into in acquiring the training data.
Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine.
Rainbows End was prescient in many ways.
But nobody was ever going to that, not when there are billions in VC dollars at stake for whoever moves fastest. Everybody will simply risk the fine, which tends to not be anywhere close to enough to have a deterrent effect in the future.
That is like saying Uber would have not had any problems if they just entered into a licensing contract with taxi medallion holders. It was faster to just put unlicensed taxis on the streets and use investor money to pay fines and lobby for favorable legislation. In the same way, it was faster for Anthropic to load up their models with un-DRM'd PDFs and ePUBs from wherever instead of licensing them publisher by publisher.
And thank god they did. There was no perfectly legal channel to fix the taxi cartel. Now you don't even have to use Uber in many of these places because taxis had to compete - they otherwise never would have stopped pulling the "credit card reader is broken" scam, taking long routes on purpose, and started using tech that made them more accountable to these things as well as harder for them to racially profile passengers. (They would infamously pretend not to see you if they didn't want to give you service back when you had to hail them with an IRL gesture instead of an app..)
And instead Uber offloaded everything onto gig workers and society. And still lost 20 billion dollars in the process (price dumping isn't cheap).
Yup. The drivers should have to pay everything because despite working for Uber they are "free contractors"
> And the drivers have the free will to choose to drive for Uber
Ah yes, I forgot that's exactly how price dumping works: there are multiple companies to chose from and all of them offer competitive wages.
I mean, it's not ancient history. For half of Uber's existence the ongoing story was: drivers have to drive almost 24 hours a day to make living wage with Uber randomly stealing their wages.
This only somewhat changed once governments stepped in and forced Uber to change some of its practices.
Trust me, Snell is far from a fire breathing libertarian conservative.
It’s not the responsibility of a corporation to decide what a “living wage” is. Should Uber pay more to a single mother with three kids than a single father with no kids? Again it’s society’s responsibility to provide for a safety net and to tax corporations to fund it.
On the federal level, that’s what the earned income tax credit was suppose to do and until 2016, it had wide bi-partisan support and was championed by both Republican and Democratic Presidents.
You have to decide whether you want the society to provide safety nets through healthcare, strong labor protections etc. or not.
> Again it’s society’s responsibility to provide for a safety net and to tax corporations to fund it.
Indeed. That's why governments and regulators eventually stepped in.
You can't in good conscience or good faith argue that Uber didn't offload anything onto society and people working for it just because "it's not the job of a company" etc. Uber literally engaged in multiple illegal and borderline illegal practices across the globe, including the US.
And yes, it's the literal job of a taxi company to make sure its drivers work a healthy amount of hours. In Uber's case it meant that it had to pay drivers enough money to cover the costs Uber offloaded onto them, and enough money left over so that they didn't have to drive 18-20 hours a day to make ends meet.
And yeah, not everyone can become Jason Snell
My argument is simply that the only “labor protections” the government should enforce on private enterprise is that a company can’t actively harm employees - OSHA protections, discrimination etc.
> And yes, it's the literal job of a taxi company to make sure its drivers work a healthy amount of hours. In Uber's case it meant that it had to pay drivers enough money to cover the costs Uber offloaded onto them, and enough money left over so that they didn't have to drive 18-20 hours a day to make ends meet.
It’s up to individuals to decide whether the tradeoffs are worth it. It’s not the responsibility of private industry to calculate what a “living wage” is for an individual. Uber never put a gun to anyone’s head to force them to drive for Uber. If anything the government should enforce how long someone can drive because it puts others in danger. But does the government stop people from working two jobs that might add up to 20 hours? What should happen when the driver drives for Uber, Lyft and DoorDash?
The illegal practices at least in New York were around taxi medallion monopoly where taxi drivers were getting in hundreds of thousands in debt to own them for the right to drive.
As far as not everyone being Jason Snell, there were other freelance writers and contractors like truck drivers who had to leave California to save their business
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/i-had-leave-california-save-...
It even affected 1099 (as opposed to W2) tech workers who were contractors.
Oh no. Uber only spent 20 billion dollars on price dumping, driving competing companies out of business, and was the poster child for gig economy.
> If anything the government should enforce how long someone can drive because it puts others in danger.
Once again, the wages Uber was paying were below substinence if you were to drive just within the safe margin of hours. Oh, I forgot, it's ridiculously easy to become a writer and sustain living from a podcast. Those ~400 000 people could've easily found a different job.
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However, the actual insane thing is this worldview that companies are not responsible for anything, and can do whatever they want; that people have to be punished for working because it's easy to not just switch jobs but to go and start supporting yourself with books and podcasts; and that there should be some magical government that provides some safety net, but still actively punishes people if they end up at a wrong job.
So the only choices anyone has in the US is to become a writer or an Uber driver? Does Uber have some type of monopoly on employment?
> However, the actual insane thing is this worldview that companies are not responsible for anything, and can do whatever they want;
I said that companies shouldn’t be able to do things that harm their employees - I never said that OSHA and safety standards shouldn’t exist. They also shouldn’t be able to do anything that hurts others. I even said that they should pay taxes to fund a safety net and to provide universal health care like every other civilized company.
> but to go and start supporting yourself with books and podcasts
No I said that the government shouldn’t get involved with creating an environment where adults can’t get into voluntarily contracts where they get to decide how much their labor is worth.
Even a cursory reading of whey I wrote would tell you I used Snell as an example of all of the contractors that wanted to do freelance who were harmed by a law meant to protect them but only created a nanny state that took away agency from adults who freely made a choice.
> and that there should be some magical government that provides some safety net
You mean the same type of safety net that every other industrialized company provides?