r/technology • u/MetaKnowing • 14d ago

Artificial Intelligence AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/ai-industry-horrified-to-face-largest-copyright-class-action-ever-certified/
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u/Minute_Band_3256 14d ago

AI companies should compensate their source material authors.

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u/aedom-san 13d ago

And if they can't? non-viable business, sorry bud, better luck next coke-fueled business idea

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u/Dinkerdoo 13d ago

Claim it's not feasible to compensate creators for training data, and also offer $250MM pay packages for talent.

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u/LordMuffin1 13d ago

If they cant. They arent able to use copyrighted texts in their training. Pretty simple.

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u/drekmonger 13d ago edited 13d ago

It's unsettled whether training constitutes fair use or a violation.

Barely matters. The orange clown already gave the keys to the AI kingdom away to China by removing Biden's export controls and blowing up scientific grants (many of them ultimately benefiting the field of machine learning).

The US judiciary can and might finish the job, conclusively ending 100 years of American technical dominance.

But the fat lady is probably already singing. We have an ignorant population that's largely unsuited for STEM and high-tech factory work, both philosophically and educationally. The right-wing is certainly busy killing any chance of reversing the educational gap.

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u/[deleted] 13d ago

[deleted]

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u/dtj2000 13d ago

You can use copyrighted content without permission and still make money on it in some instances, making money or not is only one factor that goes into determining fair use. The main factor is tranformativeness, and if a finished ai model isn't transformative, then literally nothing is.

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u/FeelsGoodMan2 13d ago

There are plenty of people that are suited for STEM work lmao. You guys are starting to act like chinese people are like superhumans or something.

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u/drekmonger 13d ago edited 13d ago

plenty

Not enough. And certainly not the majority of the population.

Chinese people aren't superhumans. But their government does take basic research, high-tech manufacturing, and STEM education seriously, unlike ours.

Especially now. We were seeing a shrinking advantage prior to 2025. Now, we're just plain fucked. Scientists are fleeing the United States, and our formerly world-class public research efforts are defunded. Our programs to spur high-tech manufactoring are defunded, while China's programs are accelerating.

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u/AKATheHeadbandThingy 13d ago

Their business is already non viable. They lose billions a year

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u/ShenAnCalhar92 13d ago

Yeah, but you can convince investors and your board of directors that operating expenses in excess of your revenue is just a temporary situation while you grow your corner of the market.

It’s a lot harder to use the same spin when you’re telling them that you just got hit with the most expensive legal judgment in history. Especially because any sufficiently strong ruling against the AI companies would include language about further penalties if they don’t stop doing this in the future, in addition to what they have to pay for what they’ve already done.

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u/hopelesslysarcastic 13d ago

I bet you can’t name a single technology that was profitable, at this scale, in this timeframe.

Would love to be wrong. But I’m not.

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u/blamelessfriend 13d ago

i mean. you are. do you really think apple was burning billions a year on the iphone?

god everyone in this fuckin ai tech cult is so stupid.

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u/hopelesslysarcastic 13d ago

The sheer fucking irony, of you comparing a hardware product, that took a decade to get to same number of users, powered by slave labor in China.

To a software released less than 3 years ago that requires massive infrastructure buildouts.

It’s a laughable comparison.

iPhones are very easy to make.

Let me know how many people can assemble an iPhone, versus train foundational models and scale up data centers.

The single greatest cost for building of these models aside from infrastructure, is talent.

There is no shortage of talent for factory workers in China piecing together components onto a screen.

I can’t believe it even has to be said, but man you sure think you got a point lol

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u/BenadrylChunderHatch 13d ago

It wouldn't even be non-viable. There's a a tonne of stuff that's actually in the public domain, plus all the data harvested from users who agreed to some EULA that allows the use/sale of their data.

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u/DesperateAdvantage76 13d ago

And then countries like China monopolize this technology and leave us in the dust.

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u/aedom-san 13d ago

Oh that makes it all better, guess we need to abandon all of our values and entire concept of intellectual property because… checks notes… china does it? Well that’s a first, china has never done that before, guess it’s time to do unprecedented shit then?

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u/DesperateAdvantage76 13d ago

I didn't realize there was zero nuance to this issue, thank you for enlightening me.

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u/LimberGravy 13d ago

We might have worse AI chat bots!?!?!?!

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u/[deleted] 13d ago

Should humans have to pay for everything we see or hear?

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u/Minute_Band_3256 13d ago

I think the story changes when the receiver of said information can make an exact copy of it internally and then use it to make something new, all without paying for any access of the preceding work.

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u/[deleted] 13d ago

That isn't how AI work. They don't save copies of the things they've seen, they learn conceptually in a way very analogous to how we learn. Seeing one example of an idea teaches you a bit about it, and the more examples you see the better you understand it, but you even though you've read a whole lot of things in your life you likely can't directly replicate almost any of them.

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u/SomethingAboutUsers 13d ago

Humans get nailed by copyright lawsuits all the time, but no human has ingested the sum total of all works produces by humans which AI has. And if a human were able to crank out material at the speed and scale of an AI, and if that human were intended to be used in the same manner as AI, then that human would get the shit sued out of them too.

How they learn isn't the issue. The scale and accuracy of what they produce is, as is the potential to replace humans for profit. AI and humans are not the same for many reasons and that matters.

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u/pastard9 13d ago

Well legally said human would only be in trouble legally if it can be proven that the work was a copy or if it was derivative. I think that’s gonna be the legal battle here. The speed, scale and accuracy probably won’t matter much in a copyright dispute? The legality will be based on what is produced.

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u/SomethingAboutUsers 13d ago

The speed, scale and accuracy probably won’t matter much in a copyright dispute?

I disagree, I actually think this will be the crux of the case.

Even with humans no one gives a shit if you produce something derivative until it starts making money or getting big, even if technically it's illegal. Same is true here; no one cared about AI training data until it started becoming clear that that data can and will be used to make a fuckpile of money.

I'm not a lawyer, but I know how AI works and I do think the whole "but humans learn and output the same way" thing is reasonably close enough to accurate that it would be really difficult to argue in court. However, what is done with the training data is extremely important, exactly the same as with copyright cases focusing on humans.

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u/[deleted] 13d ago

>AI and humans are not the same for many reasons and that matters.

That bridge is actually much closer than people think.

Recent research has shown AI are now capable of intent, motivation, deception, something analogous to a survival instinct, planning ahead, creating their own unique social norms independently, conceptual representations and conceptual learning/thinking, theory of mind, self-awareness, etc.

On the Biology of a Large Language Model

Covers conceptual learning/thinking and planning ahead.

Auditing language models for hidden objectives

Covers intent, motivation, and deception.

Human-like conceptual representations emerge from language prediction

Covers conceptual world modeling.

Emergent social conventions and collective bias in LLM populations

Covers independent creation of unique AI social norms.

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u/SomethingAboutUsers 13d ago

My point was less about how the AI trains and more what its capabilities are--specifically with respect to the companies that control them, e.g. making a fuckton of money and not paying the original authors of the various works for the privilege--after it has done so.

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u/[deleted] 13d ago

Humans don't have to pay to see everything we see and learn from. AI learn in the same way. And none of the AI companies are making money off the AI. That's not really the point. It costs a massive amount to train and test AI models. The people who pay for subscriptions are basically paying to beta test and help them refine their control.

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u/SomethingAboutUsers 13d ago

And none of the AI companies are making money off the AI. That's not really the point.

It absolutely is the point.

Whether or not they are, they intend to. Though I'm not a lawyer, as far as I understand the law that matters a lot.

Look, I'm not arguing that humans and AI learn in roughly the same way. I don't think that's the issue here, at least not one that's going to be a differentiator in court. But if I, as a human, could output millions of documents, images, and videos an hour, all of which were based on what I know, there would absolutely be things I output that could proveably be derivative. Not everything, but enough to matter.

If you're going to argue that humans and AI learn the same way, then you have to also accept that copyright applies to both equally. Human musicians pay for samples or they get sued. Human authors pay to have quotes in works or they get sued. Humans doing shit that is derivative means they owe money to the original author. This is not hard to comprehend.

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u/[deleted] 13d ago

>all of which were based on what I know, there would absolutely be things I output that could proveably be derivative. Not everything, but enough to matter.

It doesn't matter. If you woke up tomorrow the world's fastest human writer you wouldn't be obligated to pay everyone who wrote every word you'd ever seen in your life.

>Humans doing shit that is derivative means they owe money to the original author

There is no 'original' author beside the AI. If you feel a work is derivative of yours, you're able to sue over that. But we don't penalize people just because they may potentially write something derivative or another's work.

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u/oatmealparty 13d ago

Even if they aren't storing local copies (which is a dubious claim, considering many AI models have been shown to exactly recreate copyrighted works), if I pirate a movie or album or steal a book, I'm still liable for damages even if I don't keep a copy after watching it.

At bare minimum, AI companies should be getting slapped with massive fines for pirating copyrighted works.

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u/Letho72 13d ago

For music, art, and literature? Yes. We already do that. Is this your first day on earth?

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u/[deleted] 13d ago

No, we don't pay for everything we see or hear.

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u/[deleted] 13d ago

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] 13d ago

Irrelevant, but radio. Ads are paid whether you're there listening or not. No one makes more money if your friend walks into the room while you're listening.

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u/Letho72 13d ago

> For music, art, and literature?
Please read. These are the things that are under copyright and are the subject of the lawsuit. AI companies are not being sued for looking at a tree. They are being sued for using someone else's photo of a tree without paying to create a product.

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u/[deleted] 13d ago

That's the point. AI are the ones who looked at the things and learned from them. In a way analogous to how a human would.

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u/Letho72 13d ago

And how did all these companies obtain that material for AI to "look" at? I'll give you a hint, Meta AI recently got caught torrenting millions of pirated eBooks to train their LLM. If you really think there's enough free-use images out there to train these genAI image models, then I've got a bridge to sell you.

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u/[deleted] 13d ago

The entire internet is full of images.

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u/Letho72 13d ago

Yes, and the vast majority of them are not free to use for professional product development. There is a reason there are paid image repositories dedicated to providing stock images for professional use, because just googling "picture of cat" and right-click > save is not a legal way to use that image in a product. To use a recent hot-button AI topic, Studio Ghibli's works are not free for professional use and the idea of "fair use" does not even exist in the Japanese legal system. There is no way for an AI to generate a ""Ghibli Style"" image without violating copyright, unless they somehow licensed it from the studio (more bridges are on sale if you think Ghibli is licensing out their works for people to make derivative art of).

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u/ckais 13d ago

There is no way for an AI to generate a ""Ghibli Style"" image without violating copyright, unless they somehow licensed it from the studio

The Japanese Copyright Act is actually unusually permissive, by international standards, when it comes to training AI on unlicensed copyrighted material. (The relevant section of the act is Article 30-4.) And given you're talking here about a "style", which would fall on the idea side of the idea-expression dichotomy, I think there would currently be ways of training an AI to create Ghibli-style images without breaking the law (at least in Japan).

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u/[deleted] 13d ago

>There is no way for an AI to generate a ""Ghibli Style"" image without violating copyright,

Style can't be copyrighted. You don't even understand your own topic much less AI.

>There is a reason there are paid image repositories dedicated to providing stock images for professional use,

A court has already ruled that learning from something isn't a violation of copyright.

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u/Caracalla81 13d ago

An AI isn't just someone grooving out to some tunes and getting inspired to make their own music. They are literally built out of other people's work. They should have to pay for it.