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  • Hacker News
  • It only mattered when multi-millionaires were upset about it and they could sue regular people. When billionaires and large conglomerates are on the receiving end of pirated content, it's no longer a problem.
    by alsetmusic
  • The use of paywalled scientific articles to train AI is one place where I think we have to just draw the line and say, this has to be allowed or US AI is simply going to get gutted and replaced by international competitors who have no respect for copyright law.

    Sorry but this is just a competitive reality and the content matters A LOT. Sucks that Elsevier gambled badly on the scientific community putting up with overpriced subscriptions forever, but their concerns can't dictate national policy on this.

    by bpodgursky
  • I agree, but only in the sense that I think any amount of copyright protection for scientific papers is absolutely absurd. The creativity involved in papers is minimal and a good chunk of that research is funded by the government, so paywalling it is criminally unethical.

    Also, if we're going to bin the entire concept of copyright, can we at least be equal about it? I'd rather not live in a world where humans labor for the remnants of their culture in the content mines while clankers[0] feast on an endless stream of training data.

    [0] Fake racial slur for robots or other AI systems.

    by kmeisthax
  • I think this is one reason "piracy for AI" in general is tolerated. Anyone with a clear understanding of real world dynamics realizes that if a foreign country that lacks scruples develops "AGI", for lack of a better term, then you're fucked. This is in a sense a nuclear arms race.

    The same applies between companies, by the way, hence the "AI bubble".

    The other reason "piracy for AI" is tolerated is because it's not at all clear how to legislate or regulate it. You might think it's a cut and dry case, but lots of other people think the same about the opposite conclusion.

    by Ferret7446
  • So you end up paying an AI company (or subsist on not-endless free tokens) to circumvent another company's paywall? This doesn't sound like a sustainable solution.

    How reliable is it? Can you just ask an AI for a doi and get a reasonably correct copy of the original article back? Is the level of hallucination induced in science acceptable?

    by pjc50
  • Absolutely agree. Realistically, everyone was playing around with this thing because everyone was using Sci Hub, /r/Scholar, and god knows what else to get PDFs. This is one of those things where the reality is well-known and people pretend that something is actually going on in copyright enforcement.

    And if I'm being honest, I'm tired of the International Brotherhood of Stevedores[0] style of shredding human productivity to protect some special interest group. If Elsevier died tomorrow, we'd lose a curation function to scientific papers, true, but we wouldn't lose the science itself. And while the curation on scientific output is clearly valuable - China is suffering the lack of this while producing prodigious science - I think it's far less important than the scientific output itself. This is especially true of US science.

    0: IBS, the AMA, pharmacists, teacher unions, firefighter unions, tax preparers: the distributed cost to society is huge because we decided on protecting these special interest groups. Blocking AI would be a bridge too far.

    by arjie
  • Copyright is about extracting a perpetual tax on culture from the peasants. It's not about hobbling the march of progress itself, not when the people who get to levy the culture tax will eventually get to cash in on the wonders that will ensue. Didn't anyone ever inform you?
    by NoMoreNicksLeft
  • I can only speak for myself, but mostly the opposite has been true for me. I am a 'peasant' creating original works, and occasionally I must wield copyright to salt the giant thirsty leeches appropriating my work. If it were not for the protection offered by copyright, I would be a desiccated husk.
    by DamnInteresting
  • This thread is a dumpster fire. Piracy is still illegal; Anthropic had to pay for damages. Training has been ruled several times to be not copyright infringement because nothing is reproduced (no, the Harry Potter thing doesn't count). Then you have someone here using a racial slur and not being flagged.

    Let me be crystal clear:

    Large company pirates stuff: illegal (Anthropic)

    Little guy pirates stuff: illegal (though most get away with it)

    Large company trains model: legal (Anthropic)

    Little guy trains (fine-tunes) model: legal (Civit trainers)

    Why the hell are people still repeating the same old shit about "oh so the big guy can ignore laws"? What the fuck is going on?

    Also: if copyright enforcement is really getting weaker (no it's not, the article's premise is wrong in the first place), good.

    by 1gn15
  • AI doesn't violate any copyright laws. When AI companies have been found to violate copyright laws (in ways that have nothing at all to do with AI) they have been sued successfully. There has been no change in enforcement.
    by terminalshort
  • I imagine it's also likely a matter of AI companies having enough of a war chest to put up a fight. It's much easier to bully teenagers and small businesses into questionable settlements.
    by marginalia_nu
  • Will they rehabilitate Kim Dotcom?
    by niemandhier
  • How many statues of John Brown are there?
    by Yeul
  • >That is because it is now the tech giants that are accused of exploiting pirated content on an industrial scale

    Nah. Media just moved to services, and with that, the main media consumption turned from piracy to subscriptions / ad supported streams.

    Lack of public interest is also reflected in the fact that there were not really any development on the piracy front technologically in the last 15 years - or am I behind the times? Between 2000 and 2010, there were a lot more new software, new tech, different ways developed to get files, than there were between 2010 and 2025.

    Even with pirating content, I think illegal streaming sites take most of the traffic. There is also much more content than there ever was, making the culture diverse, fragmented, and one-time use only.

    So, I think,

    1. Services happened to piracy. It's not about collecting files now, but about using an online service to view.

    2. At the same time, collecting turned into consuming.

    by npteljes
  • It turned out laws were only for little people, after all.
    by lambdaone
  • As one of the 'little people' I've found very little problem pirating stuff. If anything it's become easier over the years.
    by tim333
  • This is pretty clearly an instance of the right people (i.e. rich people) being allowed to pirate, and the poor people get in trouble for copyrighted music in the background of some video clip.

    The hypocrisy really grinds my gears.

    by bediger4000
  • No cap frfr
    by asdaqopqkq
  • The system is working exactly as it was designed, protect corporations and make citizens pay for it.
    by archerx
  • Yeah... Laws exist only if they are applied equally, else they become something else.

    And a monetary fine is just the cost of doing business if you are big enough.

    by tommica
  • Of course real scientists don't publish. Okay I'm trolling but I know that the science published by Google et al has been thoroughly screened for commercial advantage before we see it. Try doing a litt search on hypersonics and you can see where the Russians _stop_ publishing.
    by Peteragain