Comment on Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models
jarfil@beehaw.org 3 days agoIs it protecting “small artists”, though?
Suing for copyright infringement, requires money, both for lawyers and proceedings.
Small artists don’t have that money. Large artists do, small ones don’t, so more often than not they end up watching as their copyright is being abused without being able to do anything about it.
To get any money, small artists generally sign off their rights, either directly to clients (work for hire), or to publishers… who do have the money to enforce the copyright, but pay peanuts to the artist… when they even pay anything. A typical publishing contract has an advance payment, a marketing provision… then any copyright payments go first to pay off the “investment” by the publisher, and only then they give a certain (rather small) percentage to the artist. Small artists rarely reach the payment threshold.
Best case scenario, small artists get defended by default by some “artists, editors, and publishers” association… which is like putting wolves in charge of sheep. The associations routinely charge for copyrighted material usage… then don’t know whom to pay out, because not every small artist is a member, so they just pocket it, often using it to subsidize publishers.
Vodulas@beehaw.org 3 days ago
It can, and has helped people when their art is stolen by smaller entities. But for sure when it is the big companies doing the stealing it does not do a lot. I never said copyright is good, and abolishing it is better, but how far are we from doing that? This is US centric, but it would require our government to not be so heavily influenced by corporate money.
jarfil@beehaw.org 2 days ago
Entities care about art… as much as they can benefit from it. Large entities make sure to get the rights for peanuts, small ones are fine with dropping it and replacing with someone else’s, still without paying. Pretty much the only way for small artists to get a fair compensation, is from people who want to support them… a case in which —ironically— copyright is irrelevant.
It isn’t US centric either. Corporations have used the US to pressure everyone into accepting a similar set of rules, with similar effects all over the world.
I’m not even strictly against copyright itself, I’m against how the laws have been pushed over and over towards a twisted parody of the initial goals, while the real world has been going in a completely different direction.