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Comment by gbacon | Hacker News Reader

The HN crowd dislikes brick-and-mortar landlords but often sides with charging rent for certain bits. Which side will prevail?

Interesting excerpt:

> “We will have a trial on the pirated copies used to create Anthropic’s central library and the resulting damages,” Judge Alsup wrote in the decision. “That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages.”

Language of “pirated” and “theft” are from the article. If they did realize a mistake and purchased copies after the fact, why should that be insufficient?

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> The HN crowd dislikes brick-and-mortar landlords but often sides with charging rent for certain bits. Which side will prevail?

I don't think that's exactly the case. A lot of the HN crowd is very much against the current iterations of copyright law, but is much more against rules that they see as being unfairly applied. For most of us, we want copyright reform, but short of that, we want it to at least pretend to be used for what it is usually claimed to be for: protecting small artists from large, predatory companies.

> Which side will prevail?

They aren't sides of the same coin, so neither? They have as much in common as a balloon full of helium and the an opossum.

Folks try to create a false equivalency between landlords and creatives, but they aren't remotely the same. I generally consider this to be a bad faith argument by people who just want free things. (The argument against landlords isn't free housing, even though the argument against copyright is piracy)

Landlords have something with a limited supply and rent it to other people for their use. Access to the particular something is necessary on the residential side and generally important on the commercial side.

Copyrighted works haven't had a limited supply since around 1440 and are a couple rungs higher on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Copyright laws are, by their nature, intended to simulate the market effects of a limited supply as to incentivize people to create those works.

Have laws and vultures created perverse incentives in both markets? Absolutely. Are there both good and bad landlords and copyright holders? Absolutely.

But we could address the flaws in one without even thinking to talk about the other.

Anthropic won't submit a spreadsheet of all the books and whether they were purchases or not. So trivially, not every book stolen is shown to be later purchased.

As just a matter of society, I don't think you want people say stealing a car and then coming back a month later with the money.

While no one wants anyone to steal a car, almost no one would mind freely cloning a car. The trouble truly is that 3d-printing hasn't gotten that good yet.

If 3d printing was that good, stealing a car would be moot because production costs would come way down and only need to cover cost/procurement of materials and paying back the black box.

Regardless, I don't think the car is an apt metaphor here. Cars are an important utility and gatekeeping cars arguably holds society back., art is creative expression, and no one is going hungry because they didn't have $10 for the newest book.

We also have libraries already for this reason, so why not expand on that instead of relinquishing sharing of knowledge to a private corporation?

I dislike framing art as something unimportant. Art is a vital part of being a human and part of a culture. We've grown accustomed to our culture being commoditized and rented back to us, but that doesn't mean the culture is unimportant, or such a state of affairs is acceptable.

The car would be unlikely to exist if its maker had to expect free clones without compensation. So yes, people would mind.

Completely untrue. If some clever engineer or consortium of engineers designed a 3D-printable car for 3D printing-and-manufacturing companies to make then it surely would exist. If you buy one from a Ford dealership you'd be getting the Ford-branded version which may have their own tweaks to the design.

It makes perfect sense to me that the big carmakers could get together some day and develop a handful of car platforms that all their cars will be built upon. That way they can buy the parts from any number of manufacturers (on-demand!) and save themselves a ton of money.

They kind of already do that, actually =)

Stealing a car deprives the previous owner of the car of possession and use. It is a criminal charge and you will be punished for it regardless of the monetary value of the car. The owner of the car could also sue the thief for financial damages caused by not having the car for a month, which won't be more than the cost of an equivalent rental for a month, so it's not even worth bothering.

Copyright infringement does not deprive the copyright owner of its property and is not criminal. So in this case only the lawsuit part applies. The owner is only entitled to the monetary damages, which is the lost sale. But in this case the sale price was paid to the owner 1 month later, so the only real damages will be the interest the publisher could have earned if they had got their money one month earlier.

Your take on how copyright infringement works only counts for unregistered copyrights. If the copyrighted works are registered with the copyright office statutory damages apply:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/504

>If they did realize a mistake and purchased copies after the fact, why should that be insufficient?

1. You're assuming this was some good faith "they didn't know they were stealing" factor. They use someone else's product's for commercial use. I'm not so charitable in my interpretation.

2. I'm not absolved of theft just because I go back and put money on the register. I still sttole, intentionally or not

Google trained their AI on stuff they scraped without knowing whether it was pirated content. Why should it be different for Anthropic?

Google literally scrapes pirated content all day every day. When they do that they have no idea if the content was legally placed on that website. Yet, they scan and index it anyway because there's actually no way to know (at all!). There's no great big database of all copyrighted works they can reference.

I'm not saying Meta and Anthropic didn't know they were pirating content. I'm saying that it should be moot since they never distributed it. You can't claim a violation of copyright for content that was never actually "copied" (aka distributed). The site/seeders that uploaded the content to Meta/Anthropic are the violators since copyright is all about distribution rights.

I think the reason it's okay to charge rent for certain bits is that the space of bitstrings is so large.

Choosing someone's bitstrings is like choosing to harvest someone's fields in a world where there's infinite space of fertile fields. You picked his, instead of finding a space in the infinite expanse to farm on your own.

If you start writing something you'll never generate a copyrighted work at random. When the work isn't available nothing is taken away from you even if you were strictly forbidden from reproducing the work.

Choosing someone's particular bitstring is only done because there's someone who has expended effort in preparing it.

why would it erase the mistake? you pirated first.

Who is the victim, and how was that person not made whole?

The copyright holder. That person was not made whole because of the time value of money. I stole $1000 from you in January and returned it to you in June: why should you happily give me a zero interest loan?

No royalty contract is getting an author a thousand bucks per sale. If you have to wildly exaggerate to make your point, then the point isn’t compelling.

Books have a resale market. Every “lost sale” isn’t necessarily of a new purchase from a bookstore or Amazon.

Copyright has a place. Rent-seeking authors attacking LLM owners is not a sympathetic case. Said authors are demanding to have their ideas relegated to unknown backwaters. It makes the authors worse off. It makes the community poorer. Cui bono?

We are not talking about a single sale. We are talking about millions of books.

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