AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified
AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified
arstechnica.com
AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified
31 comments
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As Anthropic argued, it now "faces hundreds of billions of dollars in potential damages liability at trial in four months"
Well sure when you potentially violate almost every active copyright for multiple kinds of media, you end up potentially being liable for some wild damages. That's the whole point.
Whether or not the work was sufficiently transformative will be an interesting question of course, but they should have known up front that this legal battle was a risk that their business could need to face.
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For all those cheering on the copyright mafia going after Anthropic, consider that some of the groups supporting anthropic against this massive overreach of "we get to decide how you use our works" include:
- Authors Alliance
- the Electronic Frontier Foundation
- American Library Association
- Association of Research Libraries
- Public Knowledge
Maybe this is not such a great thing?
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It's pretty simple: if Antropic wins, that's the end of the US copyright law, replaced by the diktat of the tech bros (worse for artists, and for anyone else but the tech oligarchs). If Antropic loses, nothing changes and we get to fight the (comparatively tiny) copyright mafia for another day.
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Indeed. I want AI companies to get regulated into smithereens, but not through expansion of copyright law. There would be too much collateral damage, and it wouldn’t even work.
31 comments
I hope you realize they aren't fighting for the rights of artists. They are fighting for their exclusive right to exploit artists.
Absolutely. There’s not a good guy on either side here.
If AI vendors win, it’s basically this:
So, use and support open-source AI models.
You're not wrong, but if they win against AI, all artists will benefit because of the precedent that it would set.
What I think will actually happen if this is looking to not go in the tech bros' favour is that they'll settle and make a potential deal with large copyright holders for ongoing usage, and that would screw individual artists.
For artists able to afford a lawsuit against a multimillion company.
No. It doesn't benefit artists.
No, these protections exist to maintain profits of large corporations. Copyright, patents, and intellectual rights were created under the false pretense that it "protects the little person", but these are lies told by the rich and powerful to keep themselves rich and powerful. Time and time again, we have seen how broken the patent system is, how it is impossible to not step on musical copyright, how Disney has extended copyrights to forever, and how the megacorporations have way more money than everybody else to defend those copyrights and patents. These people are not your friend, and their legal protections are not for you.
It wont do anything of the sort. Even if you accept the premise that somehow artists are being exploited from learning from their previous works, all that will happen is the AI companies will shift out of America to a juristiction that doesnt value extracting rents from IP above all else.
Still better than blatant theft