Comment on AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified
halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 2 days ago
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.
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.
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.
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.
If scraping is illegal, so is the Internet Archive, and that would be an immense loss for the world.
This is the real concern. Copyright abuse has been rampant for a long time, and the only reason things like the Internet Archive are allowed to exist is because the copyright holders don't want to pick a fight they could potentially lose and lessen their hold on the IPs they're hoarding. The AI case is the perfect thing for them, because it's a very clear violation with a good amount of public support on their side, and winning will allow them to crack down even harder on all the things like the Internet Archive that should be fair use. AI is bad, but this fight won't benefit the public either way.
I wouldn’t even say AI is bad, i have currently Qwen 3 running on my own GPU giving me a course in RegEx and how to use it. It sometimes makes mistakes in the examples (we all know that chatbots are shit when it comes to the r’s in strawberry), but i see it as “spot the error” type of training for me, and the instructions themself have been error free for now, since i do the lesson myself i can easily spot if something goes wrong.
AI crammed into everything because venture capitalists try to see what sticks is probably the main reason public opinion of chatbots is bad, and i don’t condone that too, but the technology itself has uses and is an impressive accomplishment.
Same with image generation: i am shit at drawing, and i don’t have the money to commission art if i want something specific, but i can generate what i want for myself.
If the copyright side wins, we all might lose the option to run imagegen and llms on our own hardware, there will never be an open-source llm, and resources that are important to us all will come even more under fire than they are already.
What you see as "spot the error" type training, another person sees as absolute fact that they internalize and use to make decisions that impact the world. The internet gave rise to the golden age of conspiracy theories, which is having a major impact on the worsening political climate, and it's because the average user isn't able to differentiate information from disinformation. AI chatbots giving people the answer they're looking for rather than the truth is only going to compound the issue.
zlatko@programming.dev 2 days ago
Actually that usually is how it works. Unfortunately.
*Too big to fail" was probably made up by the big ones.