AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified

I hope you realize they aren't fighting for the rights of artists. They are fighting for their exclusive right to exploit artists.

Absolutely. There’s not a good guy on either side here.
If AI vendors win, it’s basically this:
- So, use and support open-source AI models.
You're not wrong, but if they win against AI, all artists will benefit because of the precedent that it would set.
What I think will actually happen if this is looking to not go in the tech bros' favour is that they'll settle and make a potential deal with large copyright holders for ongoing usage, and that would screw individual artists.
- For artists able to afford a lawsuit against a multimillion company.
  No. It doesn't benefit artists.
- It wont do anything of the sort. Even if you accept the premise that somehow artists are being exploited from learning from their previous works, all that will happen is the AI companies will shift out of America to a juristiction that doesnt value extracting rents from IP above all else.
- all artists will benefit because of the precedent that it would set.
  No, these protections exist to maintain profits of large corporations. Copyright, patents, and intellectual rights were created under the false pretense that it "protects the little person", but these are lies told by the rich and powerful to keep themselves rich and powerful. Time and time again, we have seen how broken the patent system is, how it is impossible to not step on musical copyright, how Disney has extended copyrights to forever, and how the megacorporations have way more money than everybody else to defend those copyrights and patents. These people are not your friend, and their legal protections are not for you.
Still better than blatant theft
- Abolish the abomination known as intellectual property
  I hope both sides straight up die as a result of this
  The end of the intellectual "property" regime
  making infinite things artificially scarce
  cannot possibly come soon enough
  What was "intellectual property" should instead be paid up front by the people who want it
  the result should be entirely unburdened of any sort of property, royalty, strings and DRM
  ready to be infinitely broadcast and available to all
  We're still going to want stuff and we're going to pay for it
  We're not going to be vampirized by monstrous mice of the past
  for 80 years after the author's death
  now I'm off to piss, in Walt Disney's cryotank

As Anthropic argued, it now "faces hundreds of billions of dollars in potential damages liability at trial in four months"

Well sure when you potentially violate almost every active copyright for multiple kinds of media, you end up potentially being liable for some wild damages. That's the whole point.

Whether or not the work was sufficiently transformative will be an interesting question of course, but they should have known up front that this legal battle was a risk that their business could need to face.

For all those cheering on the copyright mafia going after Anthropic, consider that some of the groups supporting anthropic against this massive overreach of "we get to decide how you use our works" include:

Authors Alliance
the Electronic Frontier Foundation
American Library Association
Association of Research Libraries
Public Knowledge

Maybe this is not such a great thing?

It's pretty simple: if Antropic wins, that's the end of the US copyright law, replaced by the diktat of the tech bros (worse for artists, and for anyone else but the tech oligarchs). If Antropic loses, nothing changes and we get to fight the (comparatively tiny) copyright mafia for another day.
- if i understand us law procedures correctly it could actually strengthen copyright law by becoming a precedent
Indeed. I want AI companies to get regulated into smithereens, but not through expansion of copyright law. There would be too much collateral damage, and it wouldn’t even work.
- Yet so far it seems the only real solution at hand. Under the Cheeto, AI companies basically have free reign to race for who gets to make the first Skynet, nobody cares anymore as long as it's more more more, and the goal justifies the means. Sacrifice the environment, humanity, everything, as long as shareholders get a lot of money.
  The copyright lobby, on the other hand, has been doing this shit since forever, I doubt things can get much worse on their side

Never going to happen with the current administration. Just a big Dog and Pony show.

It has to set some precedent though. Either there are valid reasons to violate copyright are there aren’t.
- Does it?
- That presumes precedent still matters. cough Dobbs cough