261–270 of 761 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He died (2013) after libgen was created (2008).
Yeah but did he die before anybody actually knew about it?
To be very clear on this point - this is not related to model training. It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use, but the pirating of the books is the issue at hand here, and is what Anthropic “whoopsied” into in acquiring the training data. Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine. Rainbows End was prescient in many ways.
> Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine. But nobody was ever going to that, not when there are billions in VC dollars at stake for whoever moves fastest. Everybody will simply risk the fine, which tends to not be anywhere close to enough to have a deterrent effect in the future. That is like saying Uber would have not had any problems if they just entered into a licensing contract wit…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And what about all the other stuff that LLM's spit out? Who owns that. Well at present, no one. If you train a monkey or an elephant to paint, you cant copyright that work because they aren't human, and neither is an LLM. This seems too cute by half, courts are generally far more common sense than that in applying the law. This is like saying using `rails generate model:example` results in a bunch of code that isn'…
The example is a real legal case afaik, or perhaps paraphrased from one (don’t think it was a monkey - an ape? An elephant?). I’d guess the legal scenario for `rails generate` is that you have a license to the template code (by way of how the tool is licensed) and the template code was written by a human so licensable by them and then minimally modified by the tool.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
To be very clear on this point - this is not related to model training. It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use, but the pirating of the books is the issue at hand here, and is what Anthropic “whoopsied” into in acquiring the training data. Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine. Rainbows End was prescient in many ways.
> Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine. But nobody was ever going to that, not when there are billions in VC dollars at stake for whoever moves fastest. Everybody will simply risk the fine, which tends to not be anywhere close to enough to have a deterrent effect in the future. That is like saying Uber would have not had any problems if they just entered into a licensing contract wit…
Uber could have made the same decision and worked with regulators to be allowed into markets one at a time. It was an intentional choice to lean on the fact that Uber drivers blended into traffic and could hide in plain sight until Uber had enough market share and customer base to give them leverage.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Didn't he get in trouble for contributing to sci-hub before he died?
He got into trouble for breaking into an unsecured network closet at MIT and using MIT credentials to download a bunch of copyrighted content. The whole incident is written up in detail, https://swartz-report.mit.edu/ by Hal Abelson (who wrote SICP among other things). It is a well-researched document.
The report speculates to his motivations on page 31, but it seems to be unknown with any certainty.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine. But nobody was ever going to that, not when there are billions in VC dollars at stake for whoever moves fastest. Everybody will simply risk the fine, which tends to not be anywhere close to enough to have a deterrent effect in the future. That is like saying Uber would have not had any problems if they just entered into a licensing contract wit…
Sure, but that’s mostly because the sheer convenience of the illegal way is so much higher, and carries zero startup cost.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Paying $3,000 for pirating a ~$30 book seems disproportionate.
Fines should be disproportionate at this scale. So it discourages other businesses from doing the same thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine. But nobody was ever going to that, not when there are billions in VC dollars at stake for whoever moves fastest. Everybody will simply risk the fine, which tends to not be anywhere close to enough to have a deterrent effect in the future. That is like saying Uber would have not had any problems if they just entered into a licensing contract wit…
> But nobody was ever going to that If this is a choice between risking to pay 1.5 billion or just paying 15 mil safely, they might.
Option 2: near-$0 valuation, $15M purchasing cost.
To an investor, that just looks like a pretty good deal, I reckon. It's just the cost of doing business - which in my opionion is exactly what is wrong with practices like these.