One way is that the law applies to everybody equally. That has been the way it works for many years, not perfectly, in democratic countries.
There is another way of working were the law is not blind. Laws are applied based in who is the one affected. This is what big tech and the ultra-rich have been advocating for. The law applies differently to nobility and aristocrats than to the working class.
So, for all this big tech companies the law is clear: I can copy from you, you cannot copy from me.
(That is horrifying in case that anyone needs me to spell it out)
Nobody, not even Anthropic, is arguing that they should be able to host other people's paid content for free. The crux of their fair-use defense is that models are transformative works, just like parodies or book reviews, and hence should be treated as fair use.
You can't just take a pile of books (no pun intended) and turn that into Claude in a day with 30 lines of Python, there's a lot of work and know-how on the Anthropic side that goes into making a good LLM.
Situation A - Anthropic pays for a book - Anthropic transform the book into a new llm (transformative use) -> OK
Situation B - I pay for Anthropic API - I transform API responses into a new model (transformative use) -> Not OK
the situations, are clearly the same
my impression is that if open models did 'distill' claude they made some interesting and productive ideas, like deepseek's more efficient attention
There is a lot of knowhow going into a good divx rip too, you know.
And it enables so much novel uses such as popcorn time, with fluorishing business opportunities.
You wouldn't download a car. They did.
That’s a cynical view, but unfortunately it seems true in many cases, especially for corporate law.
Did they actually? Someone can go to prison for 5 years for that.
Fact 1: AI generated code has no copyright, so the Digital Millennium Copyright Act does not apply.
Fact 2: Misrepresenting your copyright ownership under the DMCA is felony perjury.
Fact 3: The existence of undercover.ts in the leak is grounds to void any copyright claims on whatever human written code might have existed in Claude Code. You have a DUTY TO DISCLOSE any AI generated code in your copyrighted work. undercover.ts HIDES DISCLOSURE to FRAUDULENTLY claim all the code is human written when it is not.
Given the current administration has a bone to pick with Anthropic, it was a VERY BAD IDEA for them to send false DMCA takedowns to github. Someone at Anthropic may be the very first ever to go to prison under that section of the DMCA.
Good luck!
It is an affirmative defense, you to be able to argue the merits. If you publish their source code, they are allowed to come after you whether they have previously used fair use or not. It's fact specific and determined case by case.
Anthropic won half of their fair use argument in the billion dollar settlement, but lost the other half.
You can say you're just using their code to train your own models, just like they did, and they will correctly point out that how you obtained the code also matters and you will lose just like they did.
It’s not “underrated”. Everyone is just 50 steps ahead of you.
And this whole “they’re 50 steps ahead of you” nonsense is the same kind of stuff we heard from NFT or crypto bros, that we just couldn’t comprehend the infinite wisdom of a post currency world. Sometimes bad arguments are just bad arguments.
If anything, this is a question of whether you owe royalties to the owner of IP you consumed in your life since it became part of and trained your mind, identity, and outputs too.
According to IP owners ever since things were digitized, you technically own nothing and simply paid for an authorization to use any given IP for the duration that the IP owner authorized you to use it and you continue to pay, so pay your monthly meat-AI bill to pay for all the IP your mind has been trained on.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...