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.
if i understand us law procedures correctly it could actually strengthen copyright law by becoming a precedent
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 :-)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
That presumes precedent still matters. cough Dobbs cough
Supreme Court: What’s precedent again?
