Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI

papergirl

Newly released court filings quote an OpenAI researcher saying: “I was just worried about optics - i.e. 'openai uses copyrighted data from sketchy russian website’ showing up on HN would be unfortunate." That's just one of several interesting quotes that have surfaced in documents from the Authors Guild's lawsuit against OpenAI.

Skyy93

This is a lobby organisation using only the pieces and bits they like to push their own agenda. "sketchy russian website", how about using some more clear description like: A library for sharing books and articles that should be partly public domain because they were paid for by the public. Only some of the material is copyrighted by authors. However, some of their work is so old that it is not reprinted anyway. But of course such an explanation would not click. I also don't see a problem with statements about making people jobless. Imagine if every robotic or automation company advertised like this: Yeah, you'll buy tons of expensive robots and still rely on expensive labor from real people without any efficiency gains.

shaunpud

https://web.archive.org/web/20260927062011/https://authorsgu...

alansaber

Not even openai want to get flamed on show hn

monster_truck

I could not care less

hnfong

Can we fix the title? This is clickbait for HN, the actual article's title is "Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI: Top Execs Knew Their Mass Book Piracy Was Illegal And Would Put Authors Out of Work"

hn1rig3rak

Pulled datasets off libgen for a corpus once and it's overwhelmingly in-copyright textbooks, the public domain framing doesn't really hold up.

whatever1

Is our opinion that important ? Nice !

handoflixue

It's wild how much weight "they're destroying jobs" has. I dare say that car manufacturers are aware of their impact on the horse and buggy industry. Calculator manufacturers wrecked the livelihood of mathematicians and accountants. Technology is in the business of putting people out of work, by inventing better ways of doing things. Or rather, any time you invent a better way of doing things, that's fundamentally going to disrupt all the businesses built around older technologies.

AraneaDev

Lol, the fear mongering is just part of the hype train at this point.

usernametaken29

If this doesn’t put anyone in prison then we might as well declare copyright dead. They knew they broke the law and then they deliberately covered it up. How much more evidence is required here?

vilius

It’s 2030, I open HN and top result is from 7 hours ago, 2100 points, 700 comments: > AI agent accidentally publishes OpenAI’s unreleased model weights The optics are bad. The submission marks a turning page in human history.

pera

Can some explain why would a billionaire like Altman care about the opinions expressed on HN? Given the political power they have, particularly now with the Trump administration, whatever "optics" exist on this forum seems completely insignificant

senectus1

the AI isnt going to destroy jobs in numbers large enough to blip the unemployment stats more thna a qtr a percent. the economics of those companies will cause a catastrophic wipe out of jobs across the board.

sidcool

HN is their AB testing playground.

Betelbuddy

The Title should be: "Top Execs Knew Their Mass Book Piracy Was Illegal And Would Put Authors Out of Work"

fragmede

Posted by an account created to post this.

fwlr

Cute that they were concerned, but they need not have worried - as you can clearly see from any HN comments section on these kinds of articles, everyone long ago wrote down their conclusion (“OpenAI/Anthropic/LLMs are good/bad”) at the bottom of the page, and now all we are doing is shuffling facts, quotes, and arguments around the page above it. We are very clever to make it look like the conclusion below follows from the arguments above; but we are also careful to never smudge our bottom line, so it will never change.

spacecadet

To all the top comments making analogies about destroying jobs; horses, buggies, calculators... what?! You are awful people. We're not talking about shit jobs, these are peoples creative passions, livelihoods, and life long careers. It looks like OpenAI had nothing to fear. Fuck you.

shevy-java

Doesn't this fulfil the criterium of an illegal organisation, aka a mafia? They knew the damage they would cause - and went on regardless. The USA need to fix their court system. Right now it is just OligarchBros running the show. The small thief stealing a wallet gets put in jail for years. If you are rich enough, you pay some peanuts and that's the end of it.