Probably would have been cheaper to license everything you stole, eh, Anthropic?

I propose that anyone defending themselves in court over AI stealing data must be represented exclusively by AI.

threatens to "financially ruin" the entire AI industry

No. Just the LLM industry and AI slop image and video generation industries. All of the legitimate uses of AI (drug discovery, finding solar panel improvements, self driving vehicles, etc) are all completely immune from this lawsuit, because they're not dependent on stealing other people's work.

As Anthropic argued, it now "faces hundreds of billions of dollars in potential damages liability at trial in four months" based on a class certification rushed at "warp speed" that involves "up to seven million potential claimants, whose works span a century of publishing history," each possibly triggering a $150,000 fine.

So you knew what stealing the copyrighted works could result in, and your defense is that you stole too much? That's not how that works.

I thought it was hilarious how there was a quote in the article that said

immense harm not only to a single AI company, but to the entire fledgling AI industry and to America’s global technological competitiveness

It will only do this because all these idiotic American companies fired all their employees to replace them with AI. Hire then back and the edge won't dull. But we all know that they won't do this and just cry and point fingers wondering how they ever lost a technology race.

Edited because it's my first time using quotes and I don't know how to use them properly haha

Hilarious.

With the amount of money pouring in you'd think they'd just pay for it

I was reading the article and thinking "suck a dick, AI companies" but then it mentions the EFF and ALA filed against the class action. I have found those organizations to be generally reputable and on the right side of history, so now I'm wondering what the problem is.

Let them fight!

AI coding tools are using the exact same backends as AI fiction writing tools, so it would hurt the fledgling vibe coder profession (which according to proper software developers should not be allowed to exist at all).

They don’t want copyright power to expand further. And I agree with them, despite hating AI vendors with a passion.

For an understanding of the collateral damage, check out How To Think About Scraping by Cory Doctorow.

The purpose of copyright is to drive works into the public domain. Works are only supposed to remain exclusive to the artist for a very limited time, not a "century of publishing history".

The copyright industry should lose this battle. Copyright exclusivity should be shorter than patent exclusivity.

Let’s give them this one last win. For spite.

Well, theft has never been the best foundation for a business, has it?

While I completely agree that copyright terms are completely overblown, they are valid law that other people suffer under, so it is 100% fair to make them suffer the same. Or worse, as they all broke the law for commercial gain.

PhD level LLM = paying MAs $21/hr to write summaries of paragraphs for them to improve off of. Google Gemini outsourced their work like this, so I assume everyone else did too.

Actually that usually is how it works. Unfortunately.

*Too big to fail" was probably made up by the big ones.

Copyright companies losing the case wouldn't make copyright any shorter.

Their winning of the case reinforces a harmful precedent.

At the very least, the claims of those members of the class that are based on >20-year copyrights should be summarily rejected.

Take scraping. Companies like Clearview will tell you that scraping is legal under copyright law. They’ll tell you that training a model with scraped data is also not a copyright infringement. They’re right.

I love Cory's writing, but while he does a masterful job of defending scraping, and makes a good argument that in most cases, it's laws other than Copyright that should be the battleground, he does, kinda, trip over the main point.

That is that training models on creative works and then selling access to the derivative "creative" works that those models output very much falls within the domain of copyright - on either side of a grey line we usually call "fair use" that hasn't been really tested in courts.

Lets take two absurd extremes to make the point. Say I train an LLM directly on Marvel movies, and then sell movies (or maybe movie scripts) that are almost identical to existing Marvel movies (maybe with a few key names and features altered). I don't think anyone would argue that is not a derivative work, or that falls under "fair use." However, if I used literature to train my LLM to be able to read, and used that to read street signs for my self-driving car, well, yeah, that might be something you could argue is "fair use" to sell. It's not producing copy-cat literature.

I agree with Cory that scraping, per se, is absolutely fine, and even re-distributing the results in some ways that are in the public interest or fall under "fair use", but it's hard to justify the slop machines as not a copyright problem.

In the end, yeah, fuck both sides anyway. Copyright was extended too far and used for far too much, and the AI companies are absolute thieves. I have no illusions this type of court case will do anything more than shift wealth from one robber-barron to another, and won't help artists and authors.

Copyright owners winning the case maintains the status quo.

The AI companies winning the case means anything leaked on the internet or even just hosted by a company can be used by anyone, including private photos and communication.