AI didn't break copyright law, it just exposed how broken it was

https://www.jasonwillems.com/technology/2026/02/02/AI-Copyright/

by at1as • 6 months ago

116 136 6 months ago

sharkjacobs2• 6 months ago

Most people in my social circles are various flavours of anti-AI, and it drives me crazy how many of them, who were once stridently anti-copyright, are now using copyright as one of the great pillars of AI opposition

HPsquared• 6 months ago

It serves to demonstrate that in most cases, "principles" are only a rhetorical device.

acheron• 6 months ago

Yep. It’s just who/whom all the way down.

repelsteeltje5• 6 months ago

I suppose both copyright and AI are problematic. And the article is thought provoking.

AlienRobot3• 6 months ago

Everyone is anti-copyright until they understand what copyright means.

    In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

happytoexplain• 6 months ago

Usually when I see this opinion (yours), it leans on an uncharitable coloring of everybody who sees problems with copyright as "anti-copyright", when really those people largely are happy with the concept of protecting an individual's work. I.e. it is the age-old "those people" argument, where "those people" are a made-up conglomerate of opinions that are real, but come from slightly different contexts and from different people, throwing away those variables to create the illusion of a hypocrite.

jasonlotito2• 6 months ago

I think this is a good explanation, and even if this isn't what the OP says, I see arguments like this frequently.

In the case of copyright, think of it as anti-current-implementation of copyright rather than anti-copyright. For example, you could oppose the current copyright term, but that doesn't mean you are anti-copyright. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Altern4tiveAcc2• 6 months ago

it leans on an uncharitable coloring of everybody who sees problems with copyright as "anti-copyright"

That's the charitable coloring. Owning concepts or ideas, and trying to police others' use of ideas you """own""" is absurd.

kixiQu• 6 months ago

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy

(Not so ironclad that you're wrong not to use it, but I'm a fan of this term, so promulgating)

ares623• 6 months ago

Maybe they’re more anti-blatant-unequal-and-unfair-enforcement-of-copyright-law?

amarcheschi2• 6 months ago

I feel a stark difference if people break the law to watch movies or if a company does it for profit

masklinn3• 6 months ago

So people are pitting two foes against one another and that’s supposed to… be bad?

bitwize• 6 months ago

"Let them fight."

JoshTriplett5• 6 months ago

I'm heavily anti-copyright. I don't think it should exist. However, as long as it exists, I want it to be applied consistently across the board: AI shouldn't get to use Open Source code while ignoring its license, until Open Source developers get to use proprietary code while ignoring its license. Ditto art, movies, books, etc.

candiddevmike• 6 months ago

Were they really 100% anti-copyright though? By and large, copyright is the reason most of us have a job and get paid. There are things that shouldn't necessarily be copyright-able like APIs, and copyright probably exists for too long in certain cases, but a world without copyright doesn't really work with our current economic model.

runarberg• 6 months ago

There is a difference between distributing pirated copies of popular media by already rich artists who you know get paid anyway, and the systematic art theft of AI machines who “create” new art based on artists works who may or may not have been paid for it, and definitely didn’t get credited.

Both are copyright infringements, but only the latter is art theft.

hackyhacky• 6 months ago

Most people in my social circles are various flavours of anti-AI, and it drives me crazy how many of them, who were once stridently anti-copyright, are now using copyright as one of the great pillars of AI opposition

As the article has pointed out, it's not the principle that has changed, but the scale. Lots of things that are tolerable at small scale (e.g. lying, stealing) become disruptive to society at larger scale.

Copyright has been used in the past as a way for corporations to rent-seek and limit innovation. Now it may be the only legal means to stop them from doing that.

tjr• 6 months ago

It's not illegal for me to drive from New York to San Francisco on Interstate 80. But if I were able to endlessly duplicate myself and my car, about a million of me could hog the entire country-wide highway. Not sure if even that would be "illegal", but it would sure be annoying, and I suspect there would need to be laws updated / rewritten to account for my ability to duplicate myself without limit. I doubt society would just agree, "yep, one of you on I-80 is okay, and so a million of you on I-80 is also okay."

jasonlotito2• 6 months ago

I'm curious what the circle is, because it doesn't match up with my circle. So, I'm genuinely curious what you mean by "anti-copyright".

k__2• 6 months ago

Anti-copyright usually means, anti big corps who hold culture hostage.

avaer4• 6 months ago

Don't worry, they will flip and become staunch supporters of AI too once it starts to benefit them. Then they will immediately forget the copyright issue.

Avshalom• 6 months ago

People hate it when copyright law is used by corporations to crush people.

People hate it when copyright law is ignored by corporations to crush people.

This isn't particularly hard to grasp.

direwolf203• 6 months ago

Class consciousness isn't real and won't hurt you

sharkjacobs2• 6 months ago

Yes, I too hate copyright law

account424• 6 months ago

I think besides the points already brought up by other responses, it's important to distinguish attribution from copyright. AI training ignores both while people who are against copyright might not want to get rid of attribution requirements.

akst2• 6 months ago

I take it because copyright was used to hurt independent and smaller harmless creators, they’re dislike of AI is entirely consistent with that given smaller creatives are being harmed in a sense with their work mimicked and work deprived of them.

Personally I think creatives have an edge as I personally don’t think AI is great at exercising discretion in creativity or design. Which you can see in coding agents their discretion in design is often arbitrary and poor. So I think at least for now that’s still where humans tend to out perform AI

vibedev• 6 months ago

IMHO AI generated content should be treated the same way with how human generated content and I don't see the problem. However as with technology the problem is a bit different, e.g.: When subletting your apartment requires manual effort, this is not a problem. Automated, it became an industry and that's a huge headache. I think this is the key point where the derived work has unlimited possibility that they want to curb it early on. In a way it's a fair effort to keep human's competitiveness but may prove to be futile.

avaer4• 6 months ago

IMHO AI generated content should be treated the same way with how human generated content and I don't see the problem.

The problem is that AIs don't have rights. So you literally can't treat it the same.

If I "make" something in a way I'm not allowed to (e.g. copying), the law will go after me. If AI makes something I'm not allowed to, I can just say "whoopsie doodle", blame the AI, and there are no repercussions for anyone.

wtetzner• 6 months ago

If you paint a picture of Sonic the Hedgehog in your living room, you are technically creating an unauthorized derivative work

Is this even true? It might violate a trademark, but I don't think it would violate copyright law unless it was a copy of an existing picture.

k__2• 6 months ago

Yeah, in some countries private stuff isn't illegal at all.

masklinn3• 6 months ago

I don’t believe there’s any country where derivative work is intrinsically illegal. The Berne convention considers them protected same as originals.

repelsteeltje5• 6 months ago

LLMs are often framed as lossy compression, and surely converting some copyrighted Sonic the Hedgehog image from PNG to JPEG is considered copyright infringement, no?!

AlienRobot3• 6 months ago

Relevant: What Colour are your bits? https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

AlienRobot3• 6 months ago

It's not true. You don't need "authorization" to create a derivative work. You do need a license to distribute copyrighted works, including derivatives. And this only matters when you are distributing it to a sizable audience.

For example, if you rent a movie, you can watch it with your family. Nobody is going to sue you for distributing the movie with 5 people in your room. That's pure nonsense. Same with music, books, etc.

If you try to play the movie in an establishment with dozens of people, then it can become a problem, because you're essentially a theater now.

I'm not a lawyer so I don't know what the law is on selling fan art on a convention or even privately commissioned fan artwork. But things aren't as draconian as people assume it is.

iso1631• 6 months ago

UK law, and I assume other countries, specifically says that playing the movie to the public is a breach of copyright, not playing it to your family.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/19

masklinn3• 6 months ago

It is true but meaningless. Derivative works are not illegal, and you don’t need authorisation to create one.

So if you draw sonic in your living room you are indeed creating an unauthorised derivative work. And someone can call it an unauthorised derivative work. And the only reaction that should induce is raising an eyebrow and replying “ok?”

voxic11• 6 months ago

Characters are copyrightable, its a similar situation to song compositions vs song masters. There is the copyright of the original picture/song master but separately there is the copyright of the song composition/character. Making your own work derived from the same character or song composition is still a derivative work even if it doesn't directly copy the song master/original picture.

realusername4• 6 months ago

Personally I feel that the excessive duration of copyright just weakens authors arguments against AI.

If even WWII-era documents are still under copyright, building a model respecting that would be impossible.

JoshTriplett5• 6 months ago

If even WWII-era documents are still under copyright, building a model respecting that would be impossible.

"We can't do this legally, so we should be allowed to ignore the law."

If you can't build a model while respecting licenses, don't build a model.

I don't want copyright to exist, at any duration, and I certainly think it should be much shorter than it is. However, as long as it exists, AI should not get any exception to it; such an exception inherently privileges massive entities over small entities or individuals.

realusername4• 6 months ago

If you can't do something which looks reasonable within the laws, it means that the laws have to change.

I don't see how building such a model of historical documents would impact authors (which most of them are dead anyways).

mindcandy• 6 months ago

I would very much like to see us return to something resembling the original copyright terms. Like: Manually file for 22 years of enforcement. Then manually file 20 years later for 22 more.

You could create some great masterpiece at 18 and live off of it until you are 62 and starting to take social security payments.

at1as6• 6 months ago

Personally I feel that the excessive duration of copyright just weakens authors arguments against AI.

That excess exists precisely because of the industry’s clout. For decades, rightsholders successfully lobbied Congress to extend copyright term again and again. That process appears to have finally plateaued, which is why early Mickey Mouse has now entered the public domain.

And notably, since the rise of AI, the government has not been especially quick or eager to step in and defend rightsholders.

klustregrif• 6 months ago

Copyright infringement use to be the absolute worst crime imaginable if you asked the tech industry, that is until they started doing it themselves at scale and now they are claiming it’s the law that’s broken, it’s crazy.

amarcheschi2• 6 months ago

I think you can replace copyright with whatever the law <insert big company here> wants to break

Last but not least, generating csam and deep fakes porn on social medias and having to see it called free speech

Spivak2• 6 months ago

All of that last one really says is that broadly speaking the average person has no idea what free speech actually is and the kinds of things that it covers. I put it in the same bucket as like the young kids uploading to YouTube with the comment no copyright infringement intended thinking it's like plagiarism.

xgkickt• 6 months ago

In space, no-one can ... serve you warrants.

Spivak2• 6 months ago

Hollywood sure, publishers sure, but tech? Where? The pro piracy pro game cracking open source p2p distribution people?

account424• 6 months ago

The people adding DRM to operating systems, display connector standards and even the web.

Permit• 6 months ago

Copyright infringement use to be the absolute worst crime imaginable if you asked the tech industry

Every day hundreds of links to archive.is are posted[1] to this website to get around paywalls. Technologists built file sharing tools to subvert copyright. It has never been one of the worst crimes imaginable in tech circles.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=tru... (85 instances in the last week)

avaer4• 6 months ago

You might be looking at a small time horizon.

What about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists ?

aleph_minus_one3• 6 months ago

Copyright infringement use to be the absolute worst crime imaginable if you asked the tech industry

This is rather the opinion of the copyright-industrial complex, as Spivak implied in his comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46874194) by referring to Hollywood.

The attitude of the tech industry has always been much more vague (example: Google Books), and people from the hacker culture, who often work as programmers, are traditionally rather sceptical of at least the concrete manifestation of the copyright system ("information wants to be free", circumvention of paywalls, Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, ...).

int_19h2• 6 months ago

This is from 1986 even:

"We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals."

scotty794• 6 months ago

To be honest I don't care. Whatever helps the copyright industry burn is my ally.

ineedasername2• 6 months ago

The tech industry? I don’t remember that being the case, at least not in general. Content owners yes— and there’s tech overlap there with Sony and some others. Beside that it’s never been a major hill for tech to die on, except in having to implement systems to deal with DMCA takedowns, and that only as half baked as they could get away with. Which unfortunately has meant “not in favor of users” when it comes to to failure modes and where and how to default actions.

at1as6• 6 months ago

I think this is part of a recurring pattern in tech of pushing boundaries around copyright.

In the last few years, we had Google scanning books, Google threatening to shut down News in Canada rather than pay publishers, LLMs summarizing articles on social platforms, crawlers bypassing paywalls, and so on.

Each time, the industry frames it as their interpretation of the current law, which were usually not written with these specific future use cases in mind.

In my view the current discussion regarding Gen AI is similar.

8note• 6 months ago

i still dont see why google should pay news publishers for each reader google sends to the publisher. like the publisher is getting that view already and can monetize it how they see fit

socalgal2• 6 months ago

Nina Paley was against copyright, and she's still against copyright.

Her position is all artists copy

https://ninapaley.com/category/creativity/

mock-possum2• 6 months ago

Copying is not theft!

I do tend to vibe wjth Paley’s views on originality and creativity, though I haven’t kept up with her recently, good reminder!

hulitu2• 6 months ago

"The laws are valid as long as they serve us". Regards, The Ruling Party.

falloutx• 6 months ago

Basically a rage bait. If the law was bad, does it make it okay to violate it? In fact Anthropic is literally paying $1.5B on the copyright settlement, that indicates its completely a settled issue that AI companies have been violating this law. Some have been caught and fined, others are been lucky or that influence over the government.

Copyright Law Was Built for Human Scale

No where in the law it has this kinda scoped limits. It has a time limit and scale doesnt not matter. Scale matter in a way that its gets harder to enforces buts that not the fault of copyright law. If you steal at a big scale, its still stealing.

at1as6• 6 months ago

Basically a rage bait. If the law was bad, does it make it okay to violate it? In fact Anthropic is literally paying $1.5B on the copyright settlement, that indicates its completely a settled issue that AI companies have been violating this law. Some have been caught and fined, others are been lucky or that influence over the government.

Yes, but they were found not liable for copying the books they purchased. They were found liable for the books they torrented.

The former is something publishers still want to address

saulpw• 6 months ago

If the law was bad, does it make it okay to violate it?

Yes.

repelsteeltje5• 6 months ago

(I know these days it feels silly to bring this up, but...)

That is not how the separation of power is supposed to work. If a law is bad, politics (preferably a democratic process representing the people) replaces the law with a better one. Until the new law comes into effect, everyone is supposed to abide by the old law, even if it's bad.

scotty794• 6 months ago

More than yes. It's commendable.

repelsteeltje5• 6 months ago

I think build for, here means was intended to work at or with human scale in mind. Not be limited to.

Laws usually don't describe the bigger societal context in which they were conceived.

arcfour• 6 months ago

If the law was bad, does it make it okay to violate it?

St. Augustine: "an unjust law is no law at all."

John Marshall, in Marbury v. Madison: "a law repugnant to the constitution is void."

This is actually a fairly well established principle in common law. So, yes.

infermore• 6 months ago

laws that were already broken can still be broken. AI exposed how broken copyright law was. AI companies also broke (and continue to break) that law

at1as6• 6 months ago

I think the problem is that “transformation” has never been clearly defined in copyright law, and that ambiguity is exactly what AI companies lean on in their defense.

At a human scale, those boundaries get clarified through litigation on a case by case basis once an infringement becomes large or obvious enough. But there has always been a gray area around when a derivative work crosses the line into infringement.

And AI didn’t create that ambiguity, it just pushed it to a more extreme scale

ppqqrr• 6 months ago

copyright is not “broken,” it was always a two-faced scam designed to protect “owners” at the expense of creators. don’t expect this blatant hypocrisy to kill copyright, either - death of copyright is a slippery slope leading straight to communist utopia, and the death of the global acqui-parasite class

excalibur• 6 months ago

Copyright law has always been excessively restrictive, and is long overdue for reform. The informal practices that people have been following (i.e. free creation and distribution but no monetization and no confusion with official releases) are pretty close to what a reasonable law would state.

at1as6• 6 months ago

Agreed on all of these points. I think that this will happen (...eventually)

Altern4tiveAcc2• 6 months ago

Always have been broken.

Hopefully, future legislation will cater less to publishers and copyright trolls. I'm not optimistic though. While certain kinds of publishers are indeed becoming less powerful, sports-related media conglomerates are successfully lobbying for more surveillance.

The general population will likely get the worst of both worlds, with copyright trolls getting to enforce unjust laws against regular people, while big tech gets to pay their way out.

lp4v4n• 6 months ago

In the past, many developers were against copyright law because they saw it as a way for big corps to stifle competition and curb creativity in order to increase their profits. A lot of people right now invoke the violation of the same copyright law because the tide has changed and now companies, by ignoring copyright law, are hurting artists/smaller companies and/or not contributing back or unlawfully closing the code in the case of GPL.

I don't see any kind of hypocritical stance here honestly. All this time the criticism of the enforcement of copyright law or now the lack of it just reflects the fact that some people are genuinely concerned that bad actors(big corps) are using the law to damage society in order to pursue their own interests.

observationist• 6 months ago

Well, no, not really - there's no "they" in general. Copyright law is constructed by design for large institutions, lobbying, case law, and attendant legislation allow it to be abused by data hoarders. It was never built to protect individual creators or authors or artists, despite the PR campaigns and marketing for it.

There are just companies big enough to ignore those institutions for which copyright law was created, like Google, etc, and the fair use exceptions Google carved out empowered AI companies to make similar moves. To an extent.

What's hurting artists and smaller companies and various licensing schemes intended to push back is the fundamental structure of the laws.

All copyrights need to be nuked and replaced. If we want to support individuals and maximize protections of individuals, and we want to disincentivize data hoarders that do nothing but recycle old content and IP in perpetual rent-seeking schemes, we should implement a 5 year copyright system.

The first 5 years, you get total copyright, any commercial use has to be licensed explicitly, fair use remains largely as it is now. From year 6-10, fair use gets extended - you have to credit the creator, pay a 15% royalty direct to the creator, but otherwise you can use it for anything. Year 10-20, you must credit the creator, but otherwise the media is in the public domain.

We should be pushing for and incentivizing creative use of data, empowering as many people as possible to use it and riff on it and make the culture vibrant and active and free from centralizing, manipulative actors.

99% of commercial profits come from the first 5 years after any piece of media gets published - book, music, film, artwork, etc. Copyright should protect that, but after that 5 years, things open up so the price you pay in order to participate in the marketplace which the US fosters is that your content thereafter becomes available for use by anyone, and they have to pay a fair markup for the use. You don't get to deny anyone the use of the media. You'll get credited, paid, and then after 10 years, it's public domain + mandatory credits, kinda like an MIT license style. After 20 years, it's fully public domain.

Throw in things like "if you're not paid the royalty, you can sue for up to half of the total revenues generated by the offending work" or something appropriately scaled to prohibit casual abuses, but not totally explode someone's life over honest mistakes, and scale between the two extremes accordingly.

Things like Sony and Disney and Hollywood studios are evil. They're effectively data cartels and hoarders, rarely producing anything, gatekeeping access and socializing, imposing obscene contracts on naive artists and creators, exploiting everything and everyone they touch without returning concurrent value to society. They don't deserve consideration or protection under a sane copyright system, especially in a world with gigabit internet everywhere. Screw the MAFIAA and all the people responsible for things ending up like they have.

Until then, pirate everything. If you feel an ethical obligation to pay, then do the research and send some crypto or a $20 bill in the mail to the author or creator. All sorts of people have crypto wallets, these days.

tzs• 6 months ago

99% of commercial profits come from the first 5 years after any piece of media gets published - book, music, film, artwork, etc.

Many songs make far more profits when they are featured in popular movies or TV shows decades or more after their first publication than they do in their first 5 years.

It is also not uncommon for songs released before a future big star becomes a big star to make much money (or even lose money), but when they become big people their early work sells.

patrick4512• 6 months ago

If I create something, I should get to dictate how it is used not just until I die but for eternity.

strken• 6 months ago

It is also true that in the present, many developers are against copyright law, and in the past, many condemned the violation of the same copyright law because it protected artists and smaller companies. Not the same developers, necessarily, but many were and are on either side.

You'd really need to put some numbers on "many" for there to be a substantial observation here, because it could mean any figure in a huge range.

raincole• 6 months ago

All this time it has been just simply anti-(mega)corporation. When mega corporations take one side, people's moral standard shift to the other side.

N_Lens2• 6 months ago

The law (and the system/society) generally serves capital, instead of humans.

That's why big corporations can both use copyright against smaller companies and individual creators, while also ignoring the same copyright laws when it suits them.

I think this is unjust. As we see capital concentrate, we see more injustice as the power balance becomes more lopsided. This isn't good for anyone, not even the super wealthy because it undermines the stability of the whole system upon which their wealth depends.

Borg3• 6 months ago

And why you think all the big boys push for ML, LLM, AI? To cut off the middle class. Once stuff will work automagicaly, they can squish even more profits while not caring about middle class at all. They will just ask automatas to do things for them... Great bright future...

program_whiz• 6 months ago

Correct, and for some reason America has gotten to an "over legalization" state where every concept has to filter through a legal system in order to be good / bad. I think that's where the matter comes from. Pedantic legalists insist that everyone couch their ideas in a rigid set of legal statutes.

"But you just said that an individual should be able to use copyrighted works. Therefore you should have no qualms with a legal individual (corp) utilizing every copyrighted work in the world to destroy society, as nothing they are doing is illegal under your rubric."

The reality is most humans operate from a more natural and intuitive sense. A single artist who made a song shouldn't be destroyed by the big corp that is stealing it for their own profit (e.g. Elastic vs. Amazon). But its hard to interpret this in the strict legalist sense, because in the US, law is setup to make corps/people, money/speech, art/product, all hard to distinguish, and generally doesn't give much affordance to "what the law reasonably meant" when challenged by corporations (but it does seem to be applied quite conservatively for individuals).

For example, data protection laws tend to be applied quite loosely to corps with slaps on the wrist and stern words. For individuals, accessing data you shouldn't can mean the rest of your life in prison. People feel this is unfair, but the legalists will use a bunch of reasoning to excuse the clear immorality.

Its definitely "using the intellect and words to override correct human moral intuitions."

znnajdla• 6 months ago

This is exactly why some legal systems are intentionally not codified in language, i.e. the Qadi system. There are no laws, there are only mutually agreed upon judges who adjudicate between parties who bring a complaint. Every case is different and there are no set of rules that can cover every edge case. Programmers of all people should know this.

strogonoff• 6 months ago

Developers in the past were strongly for copyleft. The promise of copyleft is how we got all the great software that underlies the Internet today, starting with Linux itself.

The fact to keep in mind is that, despite what the name might suggest, copyleft is not at odds with copyright! The core feature of copyright is having a degree of control over what you have authored, and copyleft is ingeniously using copyright to prevent corporations from just taking open code, volunteer contributions, and modifying and using it for profit without giving anything back to the community.

Death of copyright would be the death of copyleft.

cyanydeez• 6 months ago

Sorry...what?

Money, money broke copyright.

Remember the DMCA?

scrubs• 6 months ago

This is a particularly well written article. Plaudits to poster and original writer. It took me from no clue to a context or sieve I could organize the noise through. And darn it, it made it look easy. Like the John Daily line it's so good I'm mad. Sheesh, thanks a lot!

at1as6• 6 months ago

Thanks, I'm glad it helped! I still think it's too long, but kudos to those that made it through

fuzzfactor• 6 months ago

I can only imagine you already cut out a lot of material :)

The way I see it, the original problem, which stands the test of time, is when copies are made and/or sold by somebody who is taking credit for the original work without giving credit to the actual creator.

Anything less needs to be much more realistically reflected as very minor by comparison.

N_Lens2• 6 months ago

The law (and the system/society) generally serves capital, instead of humans. That's why big corporations can both use copyright against smaller companies and individual creators, while also ignoring the same copyright laws when it suits them.

moi2388• 6 months ago

I’m happy with what’s happening.

It never made sense to me that just because you drew a shitty picture of a mouse, somehow I’m no longer allowed to do that.

hulitu2• 6 months ago

AI didn't break copyright law, it just exposed how broken it was

"I twist the truth, i rule the world"...

Tell this to kids raided by BSA for downloading pirated Microsoft and Adobe programms.

teleforce• 6 months ago

"AI did break copyright law and by doing that exposed how broken it was."

Fixed that for you.

tsoukase• 6 months ago

Not copywrite but the whole democracy is broken. A big company with an army of lawyers and an OS project will claim exactly the same case. Who has more probability to win? It happens in every occasion, it's just that copywrite ones are more common. Only when two giants collide justice is rendered, eg Oracle vs Google over Java on Android.

timoth3y• 6 months ago

The article fundamentally misrepresents what AI is doing.

It claims that people using AI to create works that violate copyright is equivalent to individual artists painting pictures or people writing fan fiction. But that is not at all what is happening.

OpenAI and others are taking money from customers to generate copyrighted works. That's back-letter copyright infringement.

The states that it is unreasonable to go after all the individual customers. That's true, but that's not how copyright law has ever been enforced. If you have a company selling copyrighted works without permission, you go after that company not after their customers.

akst2• 6 months ago

The argument here is founded on motivated reasoning.

Copyright was founded on similar principles to property rights, it encourages desirable economic by ensuring investment in RnD doesn’t have a free-rider disincentive. Whether it’s the right tool for the job and how enforcement carries out its a another matter. While these laws for property and IP aren’t without issues they do address actual problems.

Personally I would be more open to the idea of open AI flouting copy rights if they weren’t planning on taking a portion of the claim of other peoples creations used via the product while failing to properly compensate the sources of its training data.

AI didn't break copyright law, it just exposed how broken it was

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