I hope you realize they aren’t fighting for the rights of artists. They are fighting for their exclusive right to exploit artists.
Absolutely. There’s not a good guy on either side here.
If AI vendors win, it’s basically this:
So, use and support open-source AI models.
Licensing is the least of my objections to the gen AI plague.
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.
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.
For artists able to afford a lawsuit against a multimillion company.
No. It doesn’t benefit artists.
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.
Still, artists will see nothing.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Never going to happen with the current administration. Just a big Dog and Pony show.
It has to set some precedent though. Either there are valid reasons to violate copyright are there aren’t.
That presumes precedent still matters. cough Dobbs cough
Supreme Court: What’s precedent again?
Does it?
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.
