Once upon a time, copyright infringement for personal use was barely a crime, while copyright infringement by a for-profit commercial enterprise was a serious matter.
The idea being (before the rise of online peer-to-peer piracy) to prosecute the people making bootleg VHSes rather than the people buying them.
With the rise of these AI behemoths, it seems that rule is now inverted: You can download all the pirated ebooks you want, as long as it's for large-scale for-profit commercial use.
It wasn't a crime at all. It was a civil matter. Over the last forty years it has been criminalized around much of the world under pressure from the USA.
> You can download all the pirated ebooks you want, as long as it's for large-scale for-profit commercial use.
It's literally the opposite. Anthropic paid a $1.5 billion settlement. Litigation against OpenAi is still ongoing. Meanwhile, no one has ever been punished just for consuming pirated media.
Oh boy 1.5 billion, that is almost as much as the cost of the cardboard boxes that their GPUs ship in!! Surely this will make a substantial difference and prevent any future occurrence of this crime.
It would be shocking and outrageous if this was a case of this being 'the cost of doing business' for the big guy and a life-ending judgement for the little guy. Luckily our justice system is clearly allowing individual citizens the pleasure and honor of eating cake.
1.5 billion is an order of magnitude less than what Anthropic just had bought the books in question. And like I said it's infinitely more than what any private has ever paid for doing the same thing.
Even if AI companies were literally doing the exact same thing as Aaron Swartz but not getting punished for it, that still doesn't make Swartz's punishment retroactively their fault. If you have a problem with powerful people being powerful, then I suggest you direct your complaints to the heavens.
The idea being (before the rise of online peer-to-peer piracy) to prosecute the people making bootleg VHSes rather than the people buying them.
With the rise of these AI behemoths, it seems that rule is now inverted: You can download all the pirated ebooks you want, as long as it's for large-scale for-profit commercial use.