Comment by sReinwald

You're attacking a strawman. Nobody's claiming LLMs are a new piracy vector or that people will use ChatGPT, Llama or Claude instead of buying Harry Potter.

The issue here is that tech companies systematically copied millions of copyrighted works to build commercial products worth billions, without reembursing the people who made their products possible in the first place. The research shows Llama literally memorized 42% of Harry Potter - not simply "learned from it," but can reproduce it verbatim. That's 1) not transformative and 2) clear evidence of copyright infringement.

By your logic, the existence of torrents would make it perfectly acceptable for someone to download pirated movies and charge people to stream them. "Piracy already exists" isn't a defense, and it especially shouldn't be for companies worth billions. But you bet your ass that if I built a commercial Netflix competitor built on top of systematic copyright violations, I'd be sued into the dirt faster than I can say "billion dollar valuation".

Aaron Swartz faced 35 years in prison and ultimately took his own life over downloading academic papers that were largely publicly funded. He wasn't selling them, he wasn't building a commercial product worth billions of dollars - he was trying to make knowledge accessible.

Meanwhile, these AI companies like Meta systematically ingested copyrighted works at an industrial scale to build products worth billions. Why does an individual face life-destroying prosecution for far less, while trillion dollar companies get to negotiate in civil court after building empires on others' works? And why are you defending them?

Edit:

And for what it's worth, I'm far from a copyright maximalist. I've long believed that copyright terms - especially decades after creators' deaths - have become excessive. But whatever your stance on copyright ultimately is, the rules should apply equally to individuals like Aaron and multi-billion dollar corporations.

You cannot seriously use the fact that individuals may pirate a book (which is illegal) as an ethical or legal defense for corporations doing the same thing at an industrial scale for profit.