As much as I hate AI, current copyright laws are out of control and are extended well beyond what they should be used for.
Betteridge’s law of headlines in full effect.
For those (like me) who don’t know what Betteridge’s Law of Headlines is: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”
When peasants were able to copy ‘intellectual property’ for personal benefit and enjoyment, it was a massive crime. When the oligarchs can steal - everything - for the slight chance of paying less in wages, it is an innovation.
I think it is pretty much certain the model companies escape any penalty for their mass theft of IP. There will be some settlements and token penalties that sound big on paper, but are nothing compared to the market valuations.
Not really. We had collage and training any kind of AI was fine before all this. There’s blood in the water and copyright companies can smell it.
OpenAI is happy to give them a piece of the pie if that means they are the only ones allowed to sell it to consumers.
You are right about the penalty being pennys compared to their profits. It’s not meant to punish them but help them build a moat, the one that got destroyed by China a few months ago.
This is your reminder that in 2026 absolutely ZERO court rulings matter long term except the Supreme Court, which is captured for life by conservatives.
No matter who wins the midterms or even the next election, that is with us for the rest of most of our lives.
What a time to be alive.
It very much is not. It is in effect until the end of the United States. This will be long before most of us die.
The future will be getting very bad very fast and most nation states will collapse in a few decades.
So there’s that I guess.
I think you are DRASTICALLY underestimating how durable fascist regimes are. Without external intervention they can continue for DECADES. Societies don’t just collapse when people get fed up.
If it’s any comfort, there’s a good chance the sunlight won’t be reaching the suface of the earth for much of 2027, so we won’t be alive for too much longer.
All LLM code output is now copyleft because there was GPL stuff in the training data, LOL!
spoiler
(Actually it’s probably all just copyright infringement and not usable at all because of all the conflicting licenses, but a guy can dream…)
I think this should be the reasoning politicians use to make AI companies owned by the public.
These AI models are nothing without all the data they were trained on. All this data is content produced by humans throughout history. AI is the ultimate product of thousands of years of human progress. Why should we allow corporations to be the primary beneficiaries of this?
Best case scenario but that’s not the one we will be getting.
Copyright juggernauts and data brokers, the ones that actually own all the data like Reddit and universal records, will get paid.
Open weight models won’t be allowed in business contexts or to be served online, OpenAI and company get a fat monopoly which suits them.
People are cheering for their own doom. The handful of big AI company are going to end up owning a solid chunk of the economy. It’s basically going to be an AI tax.
You will be replaced by an agent, OpenAI will only sell them to your employer in bulk at a stupid price so you can’t turn around and compete. That bulk price per agent will still be cheaper than your monthly wage.
Find me one politician that even mentioned forcing these models public. It’s a fantasy.
The current copyright system is a artifact of US-dominated systems the world is rapidly disassociating itself from.
The worst case scenario is American companies are able to lock down the United States, but the rest of the world will ignore it.
AI companies spent years treating copyright like a Terms of Service box nobody reads. Now a court has suggested that »we copied it to build a competing product« may not magically become fair use because you sprinkle AI on top. Turns out disruption is slightly less fun when the disrupted people have lawyers.
Yeah…no. This is going to the Supreme Court and there’s zero chance their right wing, Trump-choad-gargling asses don’t rule in favor of AI companies.
Unfortunately, Congress will end up doing whatever its paid to do.
Now I feel bad for basing my programming career on material I apparently “stole” from books and other copyrighted sources. Hell, sometimes I even straight-up copypasted example code. I blame society.
If you think this will turn the tide I both envy how un- jaded you are and worry that you really aren’t paying attention.
Worth reading the original opinion appealed here: great technical writing and explanation of reasoning by the judge
Thanks for the hint.
This court finds AI guilty of copyright infringement.
The penalty will be… NOTHING!
Copyright law is as copyright law does.
Immediately made me think of Betteridge’s law of headlines.
I will remain cautiously optimistic but until it makes it through Supreme Court it’s not a done deal.
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