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Comment by Frieren | Hacker News Reader

There are several ways of looking at law and order.

One way is that the law applies to everybody equally. That has been the way it works for many years, not perfectly, in democratic countries.

There is another way of working were the law is not blind. Laws are applied based in who is the one affected. This is what big tech and the ultra-rich have been advocating for. The law applies differently to nobility and aristocrats than to the working class.

So, for all this big tech companies the law is clear: I can copy from you, you cannot copy from me.

(That is horrifying in case that anyone needs me to spell it out)

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A third way of looking at it is that you can't just blindly copy arguments when the situations are clearly different.

Nobody, not even Anthropic, is arguing that they should be able to host other people's paid content for free. The crux of their fair-use defense is that models are transformative works, just like parodies or book reviews, and hence should be treated as fair use.

You can't just take a pile of books (no pun intended) and turn that into Claude in a day with 30 lines of Python, there's a lot of work and know-how on the Anthropic side that goes into making a good LLM.

It’s 200 lines of python

do you really believe that? Its not just the training run, its the whole infra around it as well

it's an exaggeration for sure but I don't think it's a stretch to believe Anthropic spends considerably more effort on data scraping & curation than anything else

anthropic argue that you should not use claude API to train your model

Situation A - Anthropic pays for a book - Anthropic transform the book into a new llm (transformative use) -> OK

Situation B - I pay for Anthropic API - I transform API responses into a new model (transformative use) -> Not OK

the situations, are clearly the same

Anthropic goes book->llm, you do llm->llm. Very different amounts of transformativeness.

this is the most honest argument for it. i respect that.

my impression is that if open models did 'distill' claude they made some interesting and productive ideas, like deepseek's more efficient attention

...idk...both transformations use transformers... thereby they both achieve adequate levels of "transformativeness" \s

If lossy-compressed transcodes of ripped movies are not "transformative works" and can get people even jailed, then lossy-compressed text of ripped books and websites is neither.

There is a lot of knowhow going into a good divx rip too, you know.

And it enables so much novel uses such as popcorn time, with fluorishing business opportunities.

You wouldn't download a car. They did.

In other words, the law is an instrument if power.

That’s a cynical view, but unfortunately it seems true in many cases, especially for corporate law.

"there is an in-group for which the law protects but does not bind, and an out-group to which the law binds but does not protect"

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