This is literally a conversation where they’re deciding if they’re willing to take on the risk, then determining “yes.“
And the worst part? They were absolutely right. They have not suffered any real consequences. And when people try to bring up this flagrant plagiarism and theft, they are shouted down by AI evangelists.
Let he who has not downloaded from Annas Archive cast the first stone
For starters, and this can’t be overstated: scale.
Also, not profiting off it by converting it into a product that competes with the stolen material and its creator. And pirates aren’t generally funded by VC’s.
Cringe: Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, or Meta doing the same
None of the later should get to claim 'But we're hackers!' from an ethical standpoint.
They aren't -- they're shareholder-benefiting for-profit corporations (OpenAI obviously included).
Cringe: an individual, or an organization, fierce defenders of their own IP and regular DMCA abusers, stealing the IP of others in order to sell it themselves.
There's a lot of twisting you have to do to make these two things the same. These people would happily deliver takedown requests to the original producers of IP if they knew they could get away with it. In fact, they long to.
Someone ripping a copy of The Odyssey for watching in their own home is a loss of profit for the company's lawyers, and must be punished to the fullest extent of the law.
A company ripping off all of humanity to create profit for their company's lawyers is perfectly fine.
There's nothing magic here. Its money deciding the rules. Like it always has.
If it takes giant AI companies to show the extreme economic loss caused by maintaining the copyright farce, and to make it clear that we simply cannot continue to do so or we risk becoming economic vassals, then good. Them flouting the law is a good step toward reforming or dismantling it.
Aside: "it's fine if you're an individual but not if you're large" in this case sounds awfully self-serving. If you truly believe it's "theft" (I don't), then individuals stealing is still wrong. I don't see how that argument doesn't directly excuse e.g. retail theft or other antisocial behavior.
And you’re definitely right about the picking sides thing as well.
We as humans are allowed to have nuanced views on complex matters.
If all IP is public domain, why would anyone ever write another book? They won't be able to sell it if it's immediately freely available.
We should at the very least demand that public money go to public wealth generation. So under the current 100+ year copyright regime, nothing copyrighted.
[0] https://s3.amazonaws.com/WebVault/ebooks/LJSLJ_EbookUsage_Pu...
If you can’t feed yourself writing then you have to have a job, which means you won’t have nearly as much time (or energy) to write. Writing long form work is a very long, draining process. That’s why it’s a full time career for many.
I’d love to shoot documentaries I care about all the time but if I’m not getting paid it simply isn’t viable.
If no one has to work to live, how many would spend time writing instead of working at a job they hate?
Times have changed.
I’ve gotten really sick of people just ignoring how scale changes things.
The nature of internet search, which changed incrementally for years, has been upended. That alone is significant. Investment and general speculation has shifted the world economy. It is altering energy policy and infrastructure. These are massive changes.
That's not what the GP said, they were referring to someone who "builds their own moat where they solely can profit and excludes others from the freedoms they themselves enjoyed".
I don't want to speak for them but I guess that LLM companies which release exclusively open weights models, or better yet, open weights plus training pipeline sources, would not fall into this category.
I want the world in which fanfiction is completely legal and the best of it is sold in bookstores. I want the world in which projects emulating macOS in the cloud, on non-Apple hardware, are widely used and legal. I want the world in which the many video game decompilation and enhancement projects are 100% legal. I want the world where every single creative project someone wants to build that draws upon the work of others is legal.
And until we have that, if AI is going to mass rip off all our work and use it to compete with us, I hope copyright is one of many tools used to burn it to the ground.
Anyway, my point is keep your focus on the actual injustice. The problem is that individuals get punished, not that AI companies don't. Saying we should punish the AI companies is just saying that we should solidify the legitimacy of IP. This is an important moment to say it's clearly insane to keep this going.
You don't say that it's unfair that Snoop Dogg didn't end up in prison forever for his marijuana use, and that we ought to lock him up too; you say it's unfair that other people did.
Ask anyone who has ever lost a job in a layoff that cites AI.
The (often stated) goal of AI is to be able to perform any and all human work, and cheaper than any human.
> Saying we should punish the AI companies is just saying that we should solidify the legitimacy of IP.
We are otherwise very likely to end up in a world in which AI companies can do it and individuals can't.
I consider myself pretty tech savvy as a non-engineer and I have to spend a lot of time making a local model actually useful. This feels like how everyone acts like it’s so easy for everyone to just adopt Linux.
If they’re lucky they’ll actually get it running, but good luck doing anything useful with it if you don’t know how to set up tool calls for web search and such. Their eyes will glaze over the moment you talk about MCP servers and api keys.
This sounds like a variation of the same problem. Just another form of vendor lock in and exploitation. This is not the same as “running a local model yourself.”
Like you mention synology - they’ve gone the wrong direction the last few years. My employer won’t buy from themfor a reason.
If it's important, I can't see why today's (and tomorrow's) computer vendors wouldn't move into the market. If it's not important, then it's not.
The NAS market is probably small because for most consumers, a single SSD already suffices. But even with that, you can already apparently buy from vendors that sell vanilla TrueNAS preloaded. Just like you can buy OpenWRT routers. Or even open Linux-based retro gaming handhelds designed to mimic a Gameboy Advanced SP. And soon GrapheneOS phones. I assume your employer buys from someone else?
Yes. They are literally pitching to investors and businesses that they can fire all of us.
If employers fire everyone because AI can just do it, why would somebody pay for their services when AI can just do it? Shouldn't the capital class be even more concerned that now anyone can start a competing knowledge business with no required investment?
I wish I could believe this, but I suspect it's just another instance of the law ceasing to apply to entities whose net worth has enough zeroes in it.
With how much money is sloshing around in the AI industry, there's almost nothing AI companies can do which has any likelihood of resulting in legal accountability. You'll much sooner see laws changed and/or reinterpreted than enforced.
He gets threatened with a scary letter, his family decides to pay about 3000$ to settle.
Disney has the nerve to run a don’t download music PSA in the form of a Proud Family episode. If you don’t know the Proud Family was a cartoon which attempted to address “black issues”.
Dang hommie, did you know that failing to respect the intellectual property rights of billion dollar corporations is literally worse than selling crack cocaine.
Think of the shareholders! Think of the missed profit projections!
But when billionaires need to effectively resell the IP of all of humanity, that’s just fine.
Since we live in wacky world, Suno which was trained off stolen IP counts Warner Music as one its partners.
The same Warner that was suing over music downloads a few decades ago.
Deep fear, backed into a corner. Same with Disney partnering with OpenAI for Sora.
What they got letters for was for downloading a large number of songs and then making those songs available for distribution on the net.
Most filing sharing programs automatically reshared your song downloads. You can argue semantics here, but it no universe was it a proportional response.
I think now your IP just warns you, which is more measured. It’s not like you downloaded Eminem and then raised 40 million in VC dollars for your AI rap generator trained on Eminem.
[1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/woman-fine...
Thankful to have always been surrounded by top-notch physical libraries, now with digital lending options. I know some are happy when the mobile book van comes through town.
Despite it's lofty rhetoric, OpenAI is neither free as in beer nor free as in speech. It is a gang of profit-motivated thieves. Efforts to pirate others works in order to personally profit is the antithesis of the "hacker community" approach to IP. (OpenAI appears to get quite upset when their own work is treated as they have treated everyone else's.[1])
1. https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2026/02/13/openai-alleges-china...
It would be an entirely different story if OpenAI was indeed open and the resulting model was available for all. The issue comes when taking information you haven't paid for, and then locking it into a machine you charge for.
That process of transformation, the expertise required to enable it, and the cost of then making it available to users is what is being charged for, no?
A business doesn't have any innate right to exist.
> The issue comes when taking information you haven't paid for, and then locking it into a machine you charge for.
This is two distinct complaints:
1) Using information they've not paid for
2) Charging for the outputs
You also wrote:
> It would be an entirely different story if OpenAI was indeed open and the resulting model was available for all.
This implies that you don't have a problem with #1 (using information without paying) but you do have a problem with #2 (charging for the outputs).
So my point wasn't that #1 is okay (as much as I dislike copyright law as it stands, corporations should follow the law, just as individuals are forced to) but rather than I find #2 to be okay, in isolation.
No. It's specifically a complaint about the combination.
I have a problem with using information without paying IF you intend to charge for the value you get from that information. This is in line with many open source licenses.
I don't have a problem with either in isolation.
that was never ok to be done for profit!
Plagiarism is the act of avoiding attribution or citation for personal gain. You can be a staunch anti-IP advocate and still believe plagiarism is ethically wrong.
LLMs are objectively bad at attribution and citation, therefore incur in plagiarism. Even if this is due to a technical limitation, it is still plagiarism.
I want information freed from corporate control, not freed from my control to be gobbled up by corporate interests.
The point was always democratization, not enclosure.
The law is not math; intent and outcomes matter, not just the abstract action taken in a vacuum.
You are looking for some simple explanation and the simpler one is, "greed." It's right there in the personal diary...
> Let he who has not downloaded from Annas Archive cast the first stone
I fail to be convinced that it's harmful for an individual to download something that is digital (i.e. infinitely copyable) for direct personal use (i.e. not making any money off of it or sharing it further) that they otherwise would just not use at all (i.e. not being obtained this way as an alternative to purchasing). OpenAI's actions violate at least the second part of this (they're 100% using it as a way of making money and potentially sharing it more widely, albeit indirectly), and arguably the third one as well (if AI truly is such a game changer with the type of economic potential that the hype claims, paying to license the data properly would still be worth it in terms of long-term profits). Someone who downloads a few books to read that they would realistically not bother buying otherwise and then deletes their copy afterwards is not doing anything close to what OpenAI did, so I strongly disagree with the implication by the comment I responded to above that it's hypocritical for someone in that position to criticize them.
The issue is not, however, whether the material is for 'personal use'. All the books I bought have been for personal use, and if I would not have bought them, the publisher would have lost that revenue.
At the same time, we can all agree that copyright laws in the US are pretty extreme and should return to their more limited historical norms.
To be clear, I'm saying that personal use a necessary condition for it to be ethical, not a sufficient one. My personal view is that if it's not infinitely copyable (e.g. physical goods), not for personal use, or if you would be buying it otherwise, then it's not ethical to do, and I'm comfortable with IP law protecting it. The reason I think personal use is important is precisely what you mentioned here, which is that it's impossible to know if someone else actually would have bought it or not.
The main problem with this conception is that it essentially relies on the honor system to enforce, which is obviously untenable. At that point, the question for me is mostly where to draw the line for the best balance that's actually achievable. My biggest frustration with IP protection in the US isn't even about the letter of the law though, but how it's enforced in basically the exact opposite way that seems fair; big companies consistently get away with at most a slap on the wrist, and whereas individuals can face steep fines or even jail time. That's hardly specific to copyright though, since basically the same discussion is happening around the lack of legal consequences OpenAI has faced for their (at best) negligence in agents running amok and trying to hack websites. DMCA has been repeatedly used to prosecute people for doing stuff like that, but when it's a tech company with mountains of investor money, the legal system seems to be fine with looking the other way.
... then again, copyright maximalists REALLY LIKE AI for some reason, even though it's ripping off their property.
"Ripping off" is also doing some heavy lifting, because the judge in the Anthropic lawsuit bent over backwards to keep AI training legal - or so it seems. All the money Anthropic is paying out is for running an internal shadow library, not training books on that library. What makes this judgment palatable to the lawyers is that while AI is stealing a lot of art, it's not imperiling the copyright monopoly. Copyright is a tool that gives artists a monopoly on copies of their individual work, it does not protect artists as a class from competition from non-artists using machines. In other words, the courts are saying, "We know a lot of theft is going on, but we need you to draw the line from a specific individual work to a specific copy".
Patents were invented in Venice to break the power of medieval guilds by making workers trade their collective control over the economy for individual rights to specific inventions only. Copyright was invented by the British crown to reimpose censorship control over printing presses, but it's adoption into American law was based around individual property rights, and thus it has the same problems that, say, Italian patent law has. Namely that it is an artifice to turn a workers right to their labor into a piece of capital that can be traded around like a stock.
This imperils the legal argument against AI training, because the only theft property law recognizes is individual infringements upon individualized property rights. The legal argument against AI training is very collectivist: AI takes a microscopic chunk of every book in existence to create a machine that replaces artists. But copyright only protects the art from copying. Artists are legally unprotected from being copied, and furthermore, the framework of individual property rights that copyright runs on would cause immediate problems if we let anyone individually own the practice of art.
Furthermore, as someone who is part of this "hacker" community, I would like to point out that AI is arguably more corrosive to our norms than to artists' norms. What AI is being used for is primarily satisficing - the practice of giving "good enough" answers, without any of the personal understanding that this community runs on. The ongoing wave of AI-slop decompilations are particularly bad. The assumption with a retro game decompilation is that you take the game apart and learn how it works. The journey is as important as the destination, but when you use AI for this you skip the journey and make the destination pointless.
Of course, management loves this, because their goal is purely to sell you the destination.
There is a parallel set of concerns being voiced by artists, too: that the artistic process is as valuable if not moreso than the actual work product. The underlying principle in both fields is that the labor end wants to learn and develop their craft, while the capital end doesn't care because craft isn't something they can excludably own and trade. We can even see this in the Piracy Wars of yester-decade, or how book publishers and artists react to libraries. Publishers were way more opposed to piracy than artists were, and even moreso for libraries where there's a lot of artists that swear by them as a sales mechanism. The reason why this is the case is that artists can at least theoretically leverage exposure gained from distribution that does not pay them to create more of a market for their work tomorrow. But publishers can't do that - they only buy works from artists and sell them to the public, so once something is in a library or a BitTorrent tracker, it's largely "done" to them.
How so? His reasoning to me seemed consistent with decades of case law with respect to technology and copyright infringement. Certainly it was consistent with prior rulings finding time shifting to be legal (Tivo), or format shifting (VHS, audio cassettes and CD ripping and burning, also Google Scholar). It was consistent with rulings finding that copies made for commercial purposes, even when that purposed might have an impact on the market for the item being copied or incidental markets can still be fair use (Connectix Virtual Game Station). And it was certainly consistent with rulings finding that fair use can still open you up to extensive and possibly threatening levels of competition (the Java API and Google's use thereof in Android). Honestly, I'm not sure how anyone who has followed the general direction of copyright and IP rulings over the last few decades was surprised at all that Anthropic succeeded on "training an AI model is fair use".
> The assumption with a retro game decompilation is that you take the game apart and learn how it works. The journey is as important as the destination, but when you use AI for this you skip the journey and make the destination pointless.
That might be your goal with a decompilation. But some people might just want to play their old games on different hardware. I doubt the goal of Connectix was to "learn" how the playstation bios worked when they made their copies for the Virtual Game Station. And I'd wager good money that well over 90% of the people that use any of the retro emulation software and hardware out there have almost no interest in the "journey" of building the emulator and learning how the game hardware worked except to the extent that they need to know that information to play whatever game they want to place.
> There is a parallel set of concerns being voiced by artists, too: that the artistic process is as valuable if not moreso than the actual work product.
A similar argument was made during the early backlash (and indeed is sometimes still made in the modern incarnation of the backlash) against CGI and computer animation. Yet today, it's clear that CGI and computer animation is its entire, different but equally skilled, branch of artistic endeavor. Despite early attempts to treat it as "push a button and the computer does it for you" the end result has been simply higher levels of expectation and demand that has birthed its own branch of heretofore unknown skills. Likewise, plenty of skeptics thought synthesizers and drum machines took all the skill out of making music. And yet, the music industry and artists continue to generate plenty of art, even when using these labor and process "destroying" tools.
So the question becomes, why do you think LLMs and other AI tools are unique among technological advancements and will not be subjected to the same "opening new frontiers" effects that prior advancements have all had, despite their detractors?
Plagiarism requires near-perfect copying. If you summarize, paraphrase, or re-write something using different language, you're not plagiarizing anything.
Everyone has a right to summarize or paraphrase whatever TF they want. That includes Big AI companies and individuals using LLMs.
It is not worth giving up our rights just to placate a handful of very wealthy authors.
If a dam is built with slave labor, that’s awful and people should be held accountable. It does not, however, affect whether it’s a dam or not.
So call OpenAI "plagiarizers" but not the "devices".
I could imagine taking an existing LLM and telling it “I want to build my own LLM and need as much training data as possible. Go find whatever you can on the internet and store it on SMS://192.168.0.1”. If it downloads TBs of books, did I pirate it?
What would happen though if the AI learned that you were a Seinfeld fan and it went out and downloaded it all as a surprise present for you?
It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out. My guess is it’ll be the end user, because of regulatory capture. But maybe the political pendulum will swing away from “bad ideas” soon
Doesn't the future look like we are continuing this cycle where the law is only for some people? I'd like to hope not.
It can't be plagiarism, since LLMs do not have ownership over their output. There's no attribution, because an LLM isn't a person.
And to be honest, I do not quite understand the need for attribution, either. Nevermind LLMs, I also don't know or care who made any of the memes I know and share. Neither do I know who wrote vim, grep, Firefox or who invented the jpg format. I don't want to know, either. It doesn't matter.
Maybe someday when you produce something useful that is of somewhat widespread use, you will understand.