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Comment by usef- | Hacker News Reader

They do seem to be paying for it (as per the 1.5Bil lawsuit yesterday and them now purchasing books and licensing from media companies).

Whether we think they're paying enough is another question, but "I'm paying for content so can protect it" doesn't seem inconsistent.

We may decide that giving models away for free means they don't have to license content (judging by HN comments), but currently that doesn't seem to be the case as Meta is facing lawsuits for its open models.

(Obligatory stratechery piece: https://stratechery.com/2026/whos-afraid-of-chinese-models/ )

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The judge found their use is fair use. They are paying not for their use of the content, they are paying for using illegal copies of the content.

The same principle can be applied to distillation - it is a fair use. You just shouldn't use illegal ways to access the models being distilled.

To the commenter below: if it is illegal - has the police/FBI report been made? Otherwise it is just a civil court matter.

Fair, but isn't "illegal" access what they're talking about in OP?

It does seem to be becoming the norm for AI companies to licence premium content in America, judging by the deals they're making. It doesn't seem to be done by the international distillers. It's a cost that American open models will seem to have to pay but not international.

>It does seem to be becoming the norm for AI companies to licence premium content in America, judging by the deals they're making. It doesn't seem to be done by the international distillers.

International distillers doesn't use that premium content, so they don't pay for it. They do pay for their access to the models they are distilling. Thus providing the revenue stream to those models. Thus those models make profit off the content they used for training. The content they mostly have't paid for.

>It's a cost that American open models will seem to have to pay but not international.

It goes both ways - American companies and their business are protected by American laws and have access to the market protected by those laws, etc.

> International distillers doesn't use that premium content, so they don't pay for it.

This doesn't seem to be true. They are training on their own scraped data overwhelmingly (we can extract copyright data from, eg, deepseek). They couldn't get nearly enough tokens through the American APIs to train a model on alone.

> American companies and their business are protected by American laws and have access to the market protected by those laws

Absolutely. Currently international providers are selling inference on the American market though, I don't know how that will sit legally the way things are currently going.

> It does seem to be becoming the norm for AI companies to licence premium content in America, judging by the deals they're making.

This is a very surprising claim to me (and I imagine many small website owners who keep getting scraped by Anthropic and OpenAI).

Do you have a source?

There's been many news stories of it over the past year(s) as they signed each one. Here's the first result I could see with a rundown of many of them (am on mobile).

https://digiday.com/media/a-timeline-of-the-major-deals-betw...

Those are licenses for API access to data too new to be in the training data (for use by agents), not for the training itself.

I don't really understand why you think they're relevant, given that this conversation is about the training itself.

It isn't just that, it includes publishing houses, Wiley etc, and non-live media.

Even the news orgs say explicitly in the press releases that it's about training on their archive

eg. http://ap.org/media-center/press-releases/2023/ap-open-ai-ag...

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edit, examples:

Wiley https://newsroom.wiley.com/press-releases/press-release-deta...

Shutterstock https://investor.shutterstock.com/news-releases/news-release...

Axel Springer https://openai.com/index/axel-springer-partnership

Stack Overflow: https://stackoverflow.co/partnerships

Disney (for characters in video. Video is especially where licensing is a big difference internationally right now) https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement

etc.

The news corp one had a leaked price ($250mill), so they don't seem to be insignificant. These would have to be included in API prices I presume.

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