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[–] 57 points 1 year ago (18 children)

I hope you realize they aren't fighting for the rights of artists. They are fighting for their exclusive right to exploit artists.

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  • [–] 27 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Absolutely. There’s not a good guy on either side here.

    If AI vendors win, it’s basically this:

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  • [–] -2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    So, use and support open-source AI models.

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    You're not wrong, but if they win against AI, all artists will benefit because of the precedent that it would set.

    What I think will actually happen if this is looking to not go in the tech bros' favour is that they'll settle and make a potential deal with large copyright holders for ongoing usage, and that would screw individual artists.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    For artists able to afford a lawsuit against a multimillion company.

    No. It doesn't benefit artists.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    But the large corporations are handling that side of things already. If the lawsuit goes in the favour of copyright holders, AI companies would in theory have to do something to avoid using copyrighted material, or pay for the usage. Of course, there's every chance that they may end up avoiding using copyrighted material from anyone big enough to fight back, and just profit off of the works of artists without the resources to stop them doing so.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Still, artists will see nothing.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    If artists see generative AI companies going bust, that will be something.

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  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    No thanks. I care about real benefits and systemic changes. Not fucking petty vengeance.

    It's literally worse than nothing because now all the time and effort used fighting for this was wasted.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    If it ends the stupid AI bubble then I don't think it qualifies as petty vengeance; that is some real change. There won't be meaningful legislation to aid the day-to-day person against this garbage, no, but it'd still seriously reduce the degree to which this shit has invaded our lives.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    all artists will benefit because of the precedent that it would set.

    No, these protections exist to maintain profits of large corporations. Copyright, patents, and intellectual rights were created under the false pretense that it "protects the little person", but these are lies told by the rich and powerful to keep themselves rich and powerful. Time and time again, we have seen how broken the patent system is, how it is impossible to not step on musical copyright, how Disney has extended copyrights to forever, and how the megacorporations have way more money than everybody else to defend those copyrights and patents. These people are not your friend, and their legal protections are not for you.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago*

    It wont do anything of the sort. Even if you accept the premise that somehow artists are being exploited from learning from their previous works, all that will happen is the AI companies will shift out of America to a juristiction that doesnt value extracting rents from IP above all else.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Still better than blatant theft

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    Abolish the abomination known as intellectual property
    I hope both sides straight up die as a result of this
    The end of the intellectual "property" regime
    making infinite things artificially scarce
    cannot possibly come soon enough
    What was "intellectual property" should instead be paid up front by the people who want it
    the result should be entirely unburdened of any sort of property, royalty, strings and DRM
    ready to be infinitely broadcast and available to all
    We're still going to want stuff and we're going to pay for it
    We're not going to be vampirized by monstrous mice of the past
    for 80 years after the author's death
    now I'm off to piss, in Walt Disney's cryotank

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  • [–] 43 points 1 year ago

    As Anthropic argued, it now "faces hundreds of billions of dollars in potential damages liability at trial in four months"

    Well sure when you potentially violate almost every active copyright for multiple kinds of media, you end up potentially being liable for some wild damages. That's the whole point.

    Whether or not the work was sufficiently transformative will be an interesting question of course, but they should have known up front that this legal battle was a risk that their business could need to face.

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    For all those cheering on the copyright mafia going after Anthropic, consider that some of the groups supporting anthropic against this massive overreach of "we get to decide how you use our works" include:

    • Authors Alliance
    • the Electronic Frontier Foundation
    • American Library Association
    • Association of Research Libraries
    • Public Knowledge

    Maybe this is not such a great thing?

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    It's pretty simple: if Antropic wins, that's the end of the US copyright law, replaced by the diktat of the tech bros (worse for artists, and for anyone else but the tech oligarchs). If Antropic loses, nothing changes and we get to fight the (comparatively tiny) copyright mafia for another day.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    if i understand us law procedures correctly it could actually strengthen copyright law by becoming a precedent

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    In which way do you expect this to strengthen copyright laws? Also, from the article, it reads like Anthropic implicitly admits to copyright infringement, and that their defence essentially boils down to "if you prosecute us, we will go bankrupt". I don't see how that flies, but then again, IANAL :-)

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    i don't know, but there have been cases in other areas where failure to convict have basically become grounds for not prosecuting those cases. again, i don't know much about common law, it's not used here.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Indeed. I want AI companies to get regulated into smithereens, but not through expansion of copyright law. There would be too much collateral damage, and it wouldn’t even work.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Yet so far it seems the only real solution at hand. Under the Cheeto, AI companies basically have free reign to race for who gets to make the first Skynet, nobody cares anymore as long as it's more more more, and the goal justifies the means. Sacrifice the environment, humanity, everything, as long as shareholders get a lot of money.

    The copyright lobby, on the other hand, has been doing this shit since forever, I doubt things can get much worse on their side

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  • [+] 18 points 1 year ago (5 children)
  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    It has to set some precedent though. Either there are valid reasons to violate copyright are there aren’t.

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  • [+] 12 points 1 year ago (1 child)
  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago

    Ok reading a little more the class has been certified but it hasn’t gone to trial, so there’s still a possibility of a closed-door settlement of some sort, though given the number of parties involved that seems unlikely. Maybe I’m just being optimistic. But if it goes to trial and makes it to judgement there will either have to be cases where using copyrighted materials to train AI (which seriously how is that not for generating derivative works) is found to be ok, or copyright will be held sacrosanct and the whole gen AI industry will have to pay… something. Punitive damages would make the industry cease to exist overnight, and I’d bet most publishers would prefer a check instead.

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