Anthropic's developers made an extremely basic configuration error, and as a result, the source-code for Claude Code - the company's flagship coding assistant product - has leaked and is being eagerly analyzed by many parties:
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Youtube's notice-and-staydown system is Content ID, an incredibly baroque system that allows copyright holders (and people pretending to be copyright holders) to "claim" video and sound files, and block others from posting them. No one - not even the world's leading copyright experts - can figure out how to use this system to uphold copyright:
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However, there *is* a large cohort of criminals and fraudsters who have mastered Content ID and they use it to blackmail independent artists. You see, Content ID implements a "three strikes" policy: if you are accused of three acts of copyright infringement, Youtube permanently deletes your videos and bars you from the platform.
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However, there *is* a large cohort of criminals and fraudsters who have mastered Content ID and they use it to blackmail independent artists. You see, Content ID implements a "three strikes" policy: if you are accused of three acts of copyright infringement, Youtube permanently deletes your videos and bars you from the platform.
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For performers who rely on Youtube to earn their living - whether through ad-revenues or sponsorships or as a promotional vehicle to sell merchandise, recordings and tickets - the "copystrike" is an existential risk.
Enter the fraudster. A fraudster can set up multiple burner Youtube accounts and file spurious copyright complaints against a creator (usually a musician).
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For performers who rely on Youtube to earn their living - whether through ad-revenues or sponsorships or as a promotional vehicle to sell merchandise, recordings and tickets - the "copystrike" is an existential risk.
Enter the fraudster. A fraudster can set up multiple burner Youtube accounts and file spurious copyright complaints against a creator (usually a musician).
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After two of these copystrikes are accepted and the performer is just one strike away from losing their livelihood, the fraudster contacts the performer and demands blackmail money to rescind the complaints, threatening to file that final strike and put the performer out of business:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/08/copyfraud/#beethoven-just-wrote-music
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After two of these copystrikes are accepted and the performer is just one strike away from losing their livelihood, the fraudster contacts the performer and demands blackmail money to rescind the complaints, threatening to file that final strike and put the performer out of business:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/08/copyfraud/#beethoven-just-wrote-music
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The fact that copyright - nominally a system intended to protect creative workers - is weaponized against the people it is meant to serve is ironic, but it's not unusual. Copyright law has been primarily shaped by creators' *bosses* - media companies like Viacom - who brandish "starving artists" as a reason to enact policies that ultimately benefit capital at the expense of labor.
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The fact that copyright - nominally a system intended to protect creative workers - is weaponized against the people it is meant to serve is ironic, but it's not unusual. Copyright law has been primarily shaped by creators' *bosses* - media companies like Viacom - who brandish "starving artists" as a reason to enact policies that ultimately benefit capital at the expense of labor.
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That was what inspired Rebecca Giblin and I to write our 2022 book *Chokepoint Capitalism*: how is it that copyright has expanded in every way for 40 years (longer duration, wider scope, higher penalties), resulting in media companies that are more profitable than ever, with higher gross *and* net revenues, even as creative workers have grown poorer, both in total compensation and in the share of the profits they generate?
https://chokepointcapitalism.com/
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That was what inspired Rebecca Giblin and I to write our 2022 book *Chokepoint Capitalism*: how is it that copyright has expanded in every way for 40 years (longer duration, wider scope, higher penalties), resulting in media companies that are more profitable than ever, with higher gross *and* net revenues, even as creative workers have grown poorer, both in total compensation and in the share of the profits they generate?
https://chokepointcapitalism.com/
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The first half of *Chokepoint Capitalism* is a series of case studies that dissect the frauds and scams that both media and tech companies use to steal from creative workers. The second half are a series of "shovel-ready" policy proposals for new laws and rules that would actually put money in artists' pockets. Some of these policy prescriptions are copyright-related, but not all of them.
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The first half of *Chokepoint Capitalism* is a series of case studies that dissect the frauds and scams that both media and tech companies use to steal from creative workers. The second half are a series of "shovel-ready" policy proposals for new laws and rules that would actually put money in artists' pockets. Some of these policy prescriptions are copyright-related, but not all of them.
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For example, we have a chapter on how the Hollywood "guild" system (which allows unionized workers to bargain with *all* the studios at once) has been a powerful antidote to corporate power. This is called "sectoral bargaining" and it's been illegal since 1947's Taft-Hartley Act, but the Hollywood guilds were grandfathered in.
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For example, we have a chapter on how the Hollywood "guild" system (which allows unionized workers to bargain with *all* the studios at once) has been a powerful antidote to corporate power. This is called "sectoral bargaining" and it's been illegal since 1947's Taft-Hartley Act, but the Hollywood guilds were grandfathered in.
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When we wrote about the power of sectoral bargaining, it was in reference to the Writers Guild's incredible triumph over the four giant talent agencies, who'd invented a scam that inverted the traditional revenue split between writer and agent, so the agencies were taking in *90%* and the writers were getting just *10%*:
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When we wrote about the power of sectoral bargaining, it was in reference to the Writers Guild's incredible triumph over the four giant talent agencies, who'd invented a scam that inverted the traditional revenue split between writer and agent, so the agencies were taking in *90%* and the writers were getting just *10%*:
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Two years later, the Hollywood Writers struck again, this time over AI in the writers' room, securing a *stunning* victory over the major studios:
Notably, the writers strike was a *labor* action, not a copyright action. The writers weren't demanding a new copyright that would allow them to control whether their work could be used to train an AI.
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Two years later, the Hollywood Writers struck again, this time over AI in the writers' room, securing a *stunning* victory over the major studios:
Notably, the writers strike was a *labor* action, not a copyright action. The writers weren't demanding a new copyright that would allow them to control whether their work could be used to train an AI.
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They struck for the right not to have their wages eroded by AI - to have the right to use (or not use) AI, as they saw fit, without risking their livelihoods.
Right now, many media companies are demanding a new copyright that would allow them to control AI training, and many creative workers have joined in this call. The media companies aren't arguing against infringing *uses* of AI models - they're arguing that the mere *creation* of such a model infringes copyright.
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They struck for the right not to have their wages eroded by AI - to have the right to use (or not use) AI, as they saw fit, without risking their livelihoods.
Right now, many media companies are demanding a new copyright that would allow them to control AI training, and many creative workers have joined in this call. The media companies aren't arguing against infringing *uses* of AI models - they're arguing that the mere *creation* of such a model infringes copyright.
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They claim that making a transient copy of a work, analyzing that work, and publishing that analysis is a copyright infringement:
Here's a good rule of thumb: any time your boss demands a new rule, you should be very skeptical about whether that rule will benefit *you*.
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They claim that making a transient copy of a work, analyzing that work, and publishing that analysis is a copyright infringement:
Here's a good rule of thumb: any time your boss demands a new rule, you should be very skeptical about whether that rule will benefit *you*.
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It's clear that the media companies that have sued the AI giants aren't "anti-AI." They don't want to prevent AI from replacing creative workers - they just want to control how that happens.
When Disney and Universal sue Midjourney, it's not to prevent AI models from being trained on their catalogs and used to pauperize the workers whose work is in those catalogs.
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It's clear that the media companies that have sued the AI giants aren't "anti-AI." They don't want to prevent AI from replacing creative workers - they just want to control how that happens.
When Disney and Universal sue Midjourney, it's not to prevent AI models from being trained on their catalogs and used to pauperize the workers whose work is in those catalogs.
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What these companies want is to be paid a license fee for access to their catalogs, and then they want the resulting models to be exclusive to them, and not available to competitors:
These companies are violently allergic to paying creative workers.
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What these companies want is to be paid a license fee for access to their catalogs, and then they want the resulting models to be exclusive to them, and not available to competitors:
These companies are violently allergic to paying creative workers.
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Disney takes the position that when it buys a company like Lucasfilm, it secures the right to publish the works Lucasfilm commissioned, but not the obligation to pay the royalties that Lucasfilm owes when those works are sold:
As Theresa Nielsen Hayden quipped during the Napster Wars: "Just because you're on their side, it doesn't mean they're on your side."
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Disney takes the position that when it buys a company like Lucasfilm, it secures the right to publish the works Lucasfilm commissioned, but not the obligation to pay the royalties that Lucasfilm owes when those works are sold:
As Theresa Nielsen Hayden quipped during the Napster Wars: "Just because you're on their side, it doesn't mean they're on your side."
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If these companies manage to get copyright law expanded to restrict scraping, analysis, and publication of factual information, they won't use those new powers to increase creators' pay - they'll use them the same way they've used *every* new copyright created in the past 40 years, to make themselves richer at the expense of artists:
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If these companies manage to get copyright law expanded to restrict scraping, analysis, and publication of factual information, they won't use those new powers to increase creators' pay - they'll use them the same way they've used *every* new copyright created in the past 40 years, to make themselves richer at the expense of artists:
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The Claude Code leak is full of fascinating information about a tool that - like Diebold's voting machines - is at the very center of the most important policy debates of our time. Here's just one example: Claude is almost certainly implicated in the US missile that murdered a building full of little girls in Iran last month:
AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying
LLMs-gone-rogue dominated coverage, but had nothing to do with the targeting. Instead, it was choices made by human beings, over many years, that gave us this atrocity
the Guardian (www.theguardian.com)
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The Claude Code leak is full of fascinating information about a tool that - like Diebold's voting machines - is at the very center of the most important policy debates of our time. Here's just one example: Claude is almost certainly implicated in the US missile that murdered a building full of little girls in Iran last month:
AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying
LLMs-gone-rogue dominated coverage, but had nothing to do with the targeting. Instead, it was choices made by human beings, over many years, that gave us this atrocity
the Guardian (www.theguardian.com)
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Of course I see the irony. Anthropic has taken an extremely aggressive posture on copyright's "limitations and exceptions," arguing that it can train its models on *any* information it can find, and that it can knowingly download massive troves of infringing works for that purpose.
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Of course I see the irony. Anthropic has taken an extremely aggressive posture on copyright's "limitations and exceptions," arguing that it can train its models on *any* information it can find, and that it can knowingly download massive troves of infringing works for that purpose.
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It's darkly hilarious to see the company firehosing copyright complaints by the thousands in order to prevent the dissemination, dissection and discussion of the source-code that leaked due to the company's gross incompetence:
Anthropic Issues Copyright Takedown Requests To Remove 8,000+ Copies of Claude Code Source Code - Slashdot
Anthropic is using copyright takedown notices to try to contain an accidental leak of the underlying instructions for its Claude Code AI agent. According to the Wall Street Journal, "Anthropic representatives had used a copyright takedown request to force the removal of more than 8,000 copies and ad...
(developers.slashdot.org)
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It's darkly hilarious to see the company firehosing copyright complaints by the thousands in order to prevent the dissemination, dissection and discussion of the source-code that leaked due to the company's gross incompetence:
Anthropic Issues Copyright Takedown Requests To Remove 8,000+ Copies of Claude Code Source Code - Slashdot
Anthropic is using copyright takedown notices to try to contain an accidental leak of the underlying instructions for its Claude Code AI agent. According to the Wall Street Journal, "Anthropic representatives had used a copyright takedown request to force the removal of more than 8,000 copies and ad...
(developers.slashdot.org)
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But what's objectionable about Anthropic - and the AI sector - isn't *copyright*. The thing that makes these companies disgusting is their gleeful, fraudulent trumpeting about how their products will destroy the livelihoods of every kind of worker:
And it's their economic fraud, the inflation of a bubble that will destroy the economy when it bursts:
The Subprime AI Crisis Is Here
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Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At (www.wheresyoured.at)
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But what's objectionable about Anthropic - and the AI sector - isn't *copyright*. The thing that makes these companies disgusting is their gleeful, fraudulent trumpeting about how their products will destroy the livelihoods of every kind of worker:
And it's their economic fraud, the inflation of a bubble that will destroy the economy when it bursts:
The Subprime AI Crisis Is Here
Hi! If you like this piece and want to support my independent reporting and analysis, why not subscribe to my premium newsletter? It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 to 18,000 words,
Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At (www.wheresyoured.at)
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It's their enthusiastic deployment of AI tools for mass surveillance and mass killing. (Anthropic is no exception, despite what you may have heard:)
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