alt Hacker News> the largest copyright theft operation in human history
Many people think that it was fair use: training is akin to reading, not copying.
Especially the courts.
Replies
Reading isn't the right comparison. Human memory is lossy and fades while LLM encoding is durable with no degradation. The valuable content that the author provides: the content, style, selection of topics, and more is encoded, written into the LLM weights, and they obtain profit from them (now directly, via ads). No one can compete with that kind of copying and pasting from copyright-protected material. And the scale is what hurts authors most: flooding the market with millions of copies on demand, without paying for it.
Yet "distillation" which is essentially asking someone whose purpose is to answer questions is considered theft.
We have proof that Meta torrented TBs of books off Anna's Archive. They didn't even buy the books legally in the first place. Fair use doesn't magically make piracy legal. The only reason they haven't been punished is the pathetic state of our government and court system.
That's not been legally established, the litigation is ongoing. And if mere downloading and reading of copyrighted material were legal, how come torrent users have been fined for it in the thousands?
The law is the law, there can't be different law for corporations with billions in backing. I don't agree with current copyright laws btw and think they should be changed. However, they probably should have lobbied for that before illegally downloading all this material.