YouTube was mostly a library of pirated content when Google bought it for $1.6B.
Spotify began by uploading an employee's pirated MP3s, and is now valued at $92B.
There are plenty of other examples. One of the ways to success is to ignore silly legal matters, build a product people want, and worry about the legality later. It's not just AI companies, the pattern is well established.
Eric Schmidt said so, and it caused a giant uproar.
To me, it's just "more of the same", but apparently he said the quiet part out loud, which was somehow verboten.
(Edit to add: I'm not saying "I think this is okay", but rather "this is Standard Operating Procedure for startups" -- even Reddit was seeded with fake accounts and content, to give the appearance of an active online community. This sort of hustle is a core part of SV culture, and I don't think this is going to change in a hurry.)
Excerpt:
...in the example that I gave of the TikTok competitor, and by the way, I was not arguing that you should illegally steal everybody's music.
What you would do if you're a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, which hopefully all of you will be, is if it took off, then you'd hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up, right?
But if nobody uses your product, it doesn't matter that you stole all the content.
You're very obviously missing a key point here. It's rather simple: pirating is integral to "AI", as it is of the utmost importance with regards to its optimization and even to building its basic functionalities. It will never cease to happen nor is it part of some "preliminary" process in which executives "ignore silly legal matters" in order to kick-start their projects only to discard those practices once they eventually take off. Comparisons to YouTube, Spotify, etc., are invalid for this very reason.
I should have been very clear that "silly legal matters" was meant tongue in cheek. I do not think that this is cool at all.
You raise a good point. However, both Spotify and YouTube benefited from network effects and being the biggest guerrilla in the room. Can you remove the initial illegality from their later success, since the latter dependend on the prior?
What seems inevitable is that some deal is made with major rights holders, the little guy gets screwed, as has happened before.
Spotify began by uploading an employee's pirated MP3s, and is now valued at $92B.
There are plenty of other examples. One of the ways to success is to ignore silly legal matters, build a product people want, and worry about the legality later. It's not just AI companies, the pattern is well established.