The issue is that the law is meant to protect billionaire corporations from you, not the other way around.
Congress has now illegally approved copyright theft of millions of works from small authors, EVEN where everything was illegal about it, down to the torrent client used to get the works in the first place. Oh and this was illegal for Congress too, you see, just about the only thing Congress isn't allowed to do is to change the law retroactively (OpenAI, Meta, Google violated the law BEFORE congress made it legal. So that doesn't matter according to the law. A lot of states even created criminal responsibility for copyright violations. Do these companies or CEOs get convicted for that? No, of course not). But to protection billionaires congress gladly ignores the law (yes, technically congress didn't do anything, the "copyright office" did, but it's a part of congress and you can bet your firstborn if 10 congresscritters disagreed with the font the decision is published in they would have changed it immediately)
Even courts do it. They make up equally absurd justifications. I mean, in order to protect the billionaire AI labs from software engineers claiming copyright they have now declared AI models persons [1]. The reasoning is that because if they are not persons they cannot create a copyright, and so cannot give it to customers, in other words: AI labs would have nothing to sell. You wouldn't be legally allowed to use AI outputs, as they would be owned by the people the model learned from. What do you think the odds are that AI models will now be treated as persons when it doesn't benefit billionaires? I believe we have found the first example of odds bigger than 100%.
Congress does NOT apply copyright used against billionaires, but it does apply when billionaires sue 9 year olds with download software, without proof even, in most cases. 9 year olds get threatened with 2 months prison plus 300,000 PER INFRACTION, billionaires get to violate the law. Oh, and by the way, the EU commission has, separately, agreed with this way of doing things over the objection of German courts (the EU AI directive, like any other directive, comes from the commission. They had the good manners to let parliament vote on it, but is there anyone who doesn't remember what happens when parliament votes against it, say, something like "Chat Control" for example?)
And this is after copyright violation was made criminal in many places. The CEOs of these companies have admitted to hundreds of millions of copyright violations, so at 3 months per violation ... even if they were the first human ever to evolve they would still not even have 1% of their prison sentence served if the punishments applied to normal people were applied to them, as the law clearly dictates.
Fundamentally, Anthropic and OpenAI (and Google and Facebook and ...) are based on massive violations of copyright. If any of these companies were held liable to the standards courts hold 9 year olds, their billions wouldn't be enough to protect them from bankruptcy (violating millions of works at hundreds of thousands per work adds up fast).
Can someone explain to me how I get to do that? If I can violate the law millions of times making up a billion dollar company is trivial, for obvious reasons. How do I get courts and congress to find technicalities to never hold me responsible. Because under the deal Sam Altman, Larry Page, Elon Musk and Dario Amodei get from courts and congress, and even from the EU, anyone can become a billionaire ... Just make the Netflix everyone wants for starters, and I have zero problems coming up with 100 more ideas.
[1] https://www.courthousenews.com/coders-lose-appeal-in-copyrig...
> just about the only thing Congress isn't allowed to do is to change the law retroactively
[IANAL] The Constitution prohibits ex post facto laws which retroactively criminalize (or increase criminal penalties of) past legal conduct. This does not apply to civil penalties, and does not apply to reductions in criminal penalties or decriminalization.
> they have now declared AI models persons [1]
Your citation says no such thing. Maybe there’s more in the case itself (in which case, cite it), but I think you’re inferring that based on what I think is an incorrect understanding of what’s going on, also revealed in the rest of the paragraph.
(I’m not commenting on other parts of the comment directly, though I feel not identifying the “‘fair use’ exemption” claim or reacting to that in such a long tirade is a bit off.)
I reached out to both this legal team and SFC about cases where all of the LLMs will license strip open source code. In cases where BSD licensed code was copied into thousands of projects and millions of forks, it appears the training is so embedded that it will produce functions down to the formatting decisions. In the case of `strlcpy`, no human written version looks like the OpenBSD version, but most commercial LLMs will license strip the OpenBSD version when asked to implement. Depending on the context (not trying to trick them, just other programming questions), I’ve had them all produce it without license (100% score in JPlag).