For me, when it specifically comes to copying, I don't think it's bad to copy a copier. (And by that I mean Anthropic has no valid complaints against Moonshot. Any valid complaints from anyone in the original corpus are valid against both of them now.)

In this way, it is different from literal theft. Stealing money/objects from a thief and keeping them is not justified.

I don't really have an oar in this water, but...

"Judge approves a $1.5B Anthropic settlement over pirated books used to train the Claude chatbot"

https://abcnews.com/Technology/wireStory/judge-approves-15b-...

> I think theft is bad everywhere, not just when Anthropic does it.

It seems like you think theft is bad everywhere except when Anthropic does it.

Not OP, but copyright law is an absolute joke. No, I don’t care one whit that someone’s TOS was violated. In fact, I find it hilarious. And it’s not “theft.”

It's a rational position to care about the law, but insist on a queue when related parties are involved.

In this case: resolve the theft claims against the US frontier labs, and only then let them make claims against third parties. It would be totally unreasonable for (say) OpenAI to extract a settlement from Moonshot and use that to pay its own claims. Ordering matters.

no, I don't care about thieves getting stolen from. why would I?

If the law was applied uniformly, I would support its continued uniform application. In the last 10 years, I don't see it being applied fairly at all, I see an oligarchy, a criminal and corrupt government and rich and powerful entities getting away with anything. The most minimally competent legal system would ask the AI companies, show us the list of all the data you've used to train and lets hash out the copyright - instead we have to pray someone leaks one tiny piece of what they trained on and then sue for that. Open-weights models are the closest thing we have to justice in the world where the legal system no longer provides justice, because at least the model trained on all of our data is given back to all of us.

I find that I care more when copyright violations cause actual harm to the copyright owner. Let's say there's an American kid who can't speak Japanese but wants to keep up with a weekly manga. He downloads a bootleg translation and shares it among his friend group. That is a copyright violation, but meh. If he hadn't gone the illegal route, he'd more likely just not read it at all. There's very little chance he'd pay for a subscription and learn Japanese.

Now, if that kid were to print the bootleg translation and sell it to schoolmates, that's worth a slap on the wrist. The kids willing to pay would likely have paid for official copies.

When these LLM labs download our works, feed them into their models, and sell the output to people that used to pay for our work, that's worth a very hard slap. I honestly have less of a problem with the open models.