Copyright Law or Lose the AI Race

Sci-hub, Libgen, and Anna's Archive are services you can use to pirate books and scientific papers. The creators of these services are committed to opening up copyrighted works, despite legal risk. They're now advising the West to fix copyright law or lose the AI race. Me and my team are ideologues. We believe that preserving and hosting these files is morally right. Librarians around the world are seeing funding cuts, and we can’t trust humanity’s heritage to corporations either. Then came AI. Virtually all major companies building LLMs contacted us to train on our data. Most (but not all!) US-based companies considered once they realized the illegal nature of our work. By contrast, Chinese firms have enthusiastically embraced our collection, apparently untroubled by its legality. This is notable given China's role as a signatory to nearly all major international copyright treaties. We have given high-speed access to about 30 companies. Most of them are LLM companies, and some are data brokers, who will resell our collection. Most are Chinese, though we’ve also worked with companies from the US, Europe, Russia, South Korea, and Japan. DeepSeek admitted that an earlier version was trained on part of our collection, though they’re tight-lipped about their latest model (probably also trained on our data though). If the West wants to stay ahead in the race of LLMs, and ultimately, AGI, it needs to reconsider its position on copyright, and soon. Whether you agree with us or not on our moral case, this is now becoming a case of economics, and even of national security. AI power blocs are building artificial super-scientists, super-hackers, and super-militaries. Freedom of information is becoming a matter of survival for these countries — even a matter of national security. Our team is from all over the world, and we don’t have a particular alignment. But we’d encourage countries with strong copyright laws to use this existential threat to reform them. So what to do? Our first recommendation is straightforward: shorten the copyright term. In the US, copyright is granted for 70 years after the author's death. This is absurd. We can bring this in line with patents, which are granted for 20 years after filing. This should be more than enough time for authors of books, papers, music, art and other creative works, to get fully compensated for their efforts (including longer-term projects such as movie adaptations).

The meme contrasts a short commentary about Sci-Hub, LibGen, and Anna’s Archive with a fake-looking manifesto from a pirate-library collective. The joke is that these services, while motivated by access to knowledge, are portrayed as having become strategically important to AI companies and geopolitical competition, using the threat of losing the AI race to argue for shorter copyright terms. EN: The meme contrasts a short commentary about Sci-Hub, LibGen, and Anna’s Archive with a fake-looking manifesto from a pirate-library collective. The joke is that these services, while motivated by access to knowledge, are portrayed as having become strategically important to AI companies and geopolitical competition, using the threat of losing the AI race to argue for shorter copyright terms.

• @gentoomemes / 16159 2025-02-22