But then if AI output is not under GNU General Public License, how can it become so just because a Linux-developer adds it to the code-base?
But then if AI output is not under GNU General Public License, how can it become so just because a Linux-developer adds it to the code-base?
AIs are not human and therefore their output is a human authored contribution and only human authored things are covered by copyright. The work might hypothetically infringe on other people's copyright. But such an infringement does not happen until a human decides to create and distribute a work that somehow integrates that generated code or text.
The solution documented here seems very pragmatic. You as a contributor simply state that you are making the contribution and that you are not infringing on other people's work with that contribution under the GPLv2. And you document the fact that you used AI for transparency reasons.
There is a lot of legal murkiness around how training data is handled, and the output of the models. Or even the models themselves. Is something that in no way or shape resembles a copyrighted work (i.e. a model) actually distributing that work? The legal arguments here will probably take a long time to settle but it seems the fair use concept offers a way out here. You might create potentially infringing work with a model that may or may not be covered by fair use. But that would be your decision.
For small contributions to the Linux kernel it would be hard to argue that a passing resemblance of say a for loop in the contribution to some for loop in somebody else's code base would be anything else than coincidence or fair use.
Copyright Office's interpretation of US copyright laws says that AI is not human, thus not an attributable author for copyright registration, and output based on mere prompting is no one's IP, it can't be copyrighted[1].
When AI output can be copyrighted is when copyrighted elements are expressed in it, like if you put copyrighted content in a prompt and it is expressed in the output, or the output is transformed substantially with human creativity in arrangement, form, composition, etc.
[1] https://newsroom.loc.gov/news/copyright-office-releases-part...
That you can't copyright the AI's output (in the US, at least), doesn't imply it doesn't contain copyrighted material. If you generate an image of a Disney character, Disney still owns the copyright to that character.
> That you can't copyright the AI's output (in the US, at least),
It's also not really clear if you can or cannot copyright AI output. The case that everyone cites didn't even reach the point where courts had to rule on that. The human in that case decided to file the copyright for an AI, and the courts ruled that according to the existing laws copyright must be filed by a person/human/whatever.
So we don't yet have caselaw where someone used AIgen and claimed the output as written by them.
You can copyright AI output assuming there is a "reasonable" degree of human involvement. https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/this-company...
Yes. And that’s why the rules say that the human submitting the code is responsible for preventing this case.
> Is something that in no way or shape resembles a copyrighted work (i.e. a model) actually distributing that work?
Does a digitally encoded version resemble a copyrighted work in some shape or form? </snark>
Where is this hangup on models being something entirely different than an encoding coming from? Given enough prodding they can reproduce training data verbatim or close to that. Okay, given enough prodding notepad can do that too, so uncertainty is understandable.
This is one of the big reasons companies are putting effort into the so called "safety": when the legal battles are eventually fought, they would have an argument that they made their best so that the amount of prodding required to extract any information potentially putting them under liability is too great to matter.
> Does a digitally encoded version resemble a copyrighted work in some shape or form? </snark>
Well that's different because an encoded image or video clearly intends to reproduce the original perfectly and the end result after decoding is (intentionally) very close to form of the original. Which makes it a clear cut case of being a copy of the original.
The reason so many cases don't get very far is that mostly judges and lawyers don't think like engineers. Copyright law predates most modern technology. So, everything needs to be rephrased in terms of people copying stuff for commercial gain. The original target of the law was people using printing presses to create copies of books written by others. Which was hugely annoying to some publishers who thought they had exclusive deals with authors. But what about academics quoting each other? Or literary reviews. Or summaries. Or people reading from a book on the radio? This stuff gets complicated quickly. Most of those things were settled a long time ago. Fair use is a concept that gets wielded a lot for this. Yes its a copy but its entirely reasonable for the copy holder to be doing what they are doing and therefore not considered an infringement.
The rest is just centuries of legal interpretation of that and how it applies to modern technology. Whether that's DJs sampling music or artists working in visual imagery into their art works. AI is mostly just more of the same here. Yes there are some legally interesting aspects with AI but not that many new ones. Judges are unlikely to rethink centuries of legal interpretations here and are more likely to try to reconcile AI in with existing decisions. Any changes to the law would have to be driven by politicians; judges tend to be conservative with their interpretations.
IANAL; this is what my limited understanding of the matter is. With that caveat: it is easy to forget that copyright is on output- verbatim or exact reproductions and derivatives of a covered work are already covered under copyright.
So if the AI outputs Starry Night or Starry Night in different color theme, that's likely infringement without permission from van Gogh, who would have recourse against someone, either the user or the AI provider.
But a starry-night style picture of an aquarium might not be infringing at all.
>For small contributions to the Linux kernel it would be hard to argue that a passing resemblance of say a for loop in the contribution to some for loop in somebody else's code base would be anything else than coincidence or fair use.
I would argue that if it was a verbatim reproduction of a copyrighted piece of software, that would likely be infringing. But if it was similar only in style, with different function names and structure, probably not infringing.
Folks will argue that some things might be too small to do any different, for example a tiny snippet like python print("hello") or 1+1=2 or a for loop in your example. In that case it's too lacking in original expression to qualify for copyright protection anyway.
Starry Night is public domain everywhere (van Gogh died 136 years ago and AFAIK there is no place on Earth that would have copyright that long).
But your point still stands.
>AIs are not human and therefore their output is a human authored contribution and only human authored things are covered by copyright.
That is a non sequitur. Also, I'm not sure if copyright applies to humans, or persons (not that I have encountered particularly creative corporations, but Taranaki Maunga has been known for large scale decorative works)
Copyright applies to legal persons, that's why corporations can have copyright at all.
A "large scale decorative work" is the strangest euphemism for a dormant volcano I've ever heard.
Well obviously it's not doing any decorating right at the moment.
Didn't a court in the US declare that AI generated content cannot be copyrighted? I think that could be a problem for AI generated code. Fine for projects with an MIT/BSD license I suppose, but GPL relies on copyright.
However, if the code has been slightly changed by a human, it can be copyrighted again. I think.
Thaler v. Perlmutter said that an AI system cannot be listed as the sole author of a work - copyright requires a human author.
US Copyright Office guidance in 2023 said work created with the help of AI can be registered as long as there is "sufficient human creative input". I don't believe that has ever been qualified with respect to code, but my instinct is that the way most people use coding agents (especially for something like kernel development) would qualify.
Interesting. That seems to suggest that one would need to retain the prompts in order to pursue copyright claims if a defendant can cast enough doubt on human authorship.
Though I guess such a suit is unlikely if the defendant could just AI wash the work in the first place.
No, a court did not declare that. The case involved a person trying to register a work with only the AI system listed as author. The Supreme Court decided that you can't do that, you need to list a human being as author to register a work with the Copyright Office. This stems from existing precedent where someone tried to register a photograph with the monkey photographer listed as author.
I don't believe the idea that humans can or can't claim copyright over AI-authored works has been tested. The Copyright Office says your prompt doesn't count and you need some human-authored element in the final work. We'll have to see.
It's almost a certainty that you can't copyright code that was generated entirely by an AI.
Copyright requires some amount of human originality. You could copyright the prompt, and if you modify the generated code you can claim copyright on your modifications.
The closest applicable case would be the monkey selfie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
It's almost certain that you're wrong. It's like saying I can't copyright a song if my modular synthesizer generated it. Why would you think this?
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I’m curious to see if subscription vs free ends up mattering here. If it is a work for hire, generally it doesn’t matter how the work was produced, the end result is mine, because I contracted and instructed (prompted?) someone to do it for me. So will the copyright office decide it cares if I paid for the AI tool explicitly?
That would depend on whether those who sold you the software-output, had copyright to it.
> Didn't a court in the US declare that AI generated content cannot be copyrighted?
No, my understanding is that AI generated content can't be copyrighted by the AI. A human can still copyright it, however.
It's obvious that a computer program cannot have copyright because computer programs are not persons in any currently existing jurisdiction.
Whether a person can claim copyright of the output of a computer program is generally understood as depending on whether there was sufficient creative effort from said person, and it doesn't really matter whether the program is Photoshop or ChatGPT.
Just thinking out loud... why can't an algorithm be an artificial person in the legal sense that a corporation is? Why not legally incorporate the AI as a corporation so it can operate in the real world: have accounts, create and hold copyrights...
Because the law doesn't say it can. It's that simple.
Corporations are required to have human directors with full operational authority over the corporation's actions. This allows a court to summon them and compel them to do or not do things in the physical world. There's no reason a corporation can't choose to have an AI operate their accounts, but this won't affect the copyright status, and if the directors try to claim they can't override the AI's control of the accounts they'll find themselves in jail for contempt the first time the corporation faces a lawsuit.
So if creative effort was put into writing the prompt, then whoever wrote the prompt should have the copyright to the output produced by ChatGPT?
Sure, but the prompt wasn't the only input… there was considerable effort put into the training data as well :)
Public domain code is GPL compatible
Same as if a regular person did the same. They are responsible for it. If you're using AI, check the code doesn't violate licenses
In certain law cases plagiarization can be influenced by the fact if person is exposed to the copyrighted work. AI models are exposed to very large corpus of works..
Copyright infringement and plagiarism are not the same or even very closely related. They're different concepts and not interchangeable. Relative to copyright infringement, cases of plagiarism are rarely a matter for courts to decide or care about at all. Plagiarism is primarily an ethical (and not civil or criminal) matter. Rather than be dealt with by the legal system, it is the subject of codes of ethics within e.g. academia, journalism, etc. which have their own extra-judicial standards and methods of enforcement.
I suspect they were instead referring to patents; for example, when I worked at Google, they told the engineers not to read patents because then the engineer might invent something infringing, I think it's called willful infringement. No other employer I've worked for has every raised this as an issue, while many lawyers at google would warn against this.
You're right, legally speaking.
But you shouldn't be right. I mean, morally.
The law is a compromise between what the people in power want and what they can get away with without people revolting. It has nothing to do with morality, fairness or justice. And we should change that. The promise of democracy was (among other things) that everyone would be equal, everybody would get to vote and laws would be decided by the moral system of the majority. And yet, today, most people will tell you they are unhappy about the rising cost of living and rising inequality...
The law should be based on complete and consistent moral system. And then plagiarism (taking advantage of another person's intellectual work without credit or compensation) would absolutely be a legal matter.
As opposed to an irregular person?
LLMs are not persons, not even legal ones (which itself is a massive hack causing massive issues such as using corporate finances for political gain).
A human has moral value a text model does not. A human has limitations in both time and memory available, a model of text does not. I don't see why comparisons to humans have any relevance. Just because a human can do something does not mean machines run by corporations should be able to do it en-masse.
The rules of copyright allow humans to do certain things because:
- Learning enriches the human.
- Once a human consumes information, he can't willingly forget it.
- It is impossible to prove how much a human-created intellectual work is based on others.
With LLMs:
- Training (let's not anthropomorphize: lossily-compressing input data by detecting and extracting patterns) enriches only the corporation which owns it.
- It's perfectly possible to create a model based only on content with specific licenses or only public domain.
- It's possible to trace every single output byte to quantifiable influences from every single input byte. It's just not an interesting line of inquiry for the corporations benefiting from the legal gray area.
Dude come on, I clearly wasn't saying LLMs are people. My point was it's a tool and it's the responsibility of the person wielding it to check outputs.
If it's too hard to check outputs, don't use the tool.
Your arguments about copyright being different for LLMs: at the moment that's still being defined legally. So for now it's an ethical concern rather than a legal one.
For what it's worth I agree that LLMs being trained on copyright material is an abuse of current human oriented copyright laws. There's no way this will just continue to happen. Megacorps aren't going to lie down if there's a piece of the pie on the table, and then there's precedent for everyone else (class action perhaps)
Alright, I did make that assumption because I've seen and heard people talk about LLM as people. It worries me that otherwise functional and reasonable people, some of them my friends, have been so easily been convinced by a machine which demonstrated its flaws to me daily.
As for checking outputs - I don't believe that's sufficient. Maybe the letter of the law is flawed but according to the spirit the model itself is derivative work.
A model takes several orders of magnitude more work as training data than it takes to code the training algorithm itself, to any reasonable and sane person, that makes it a derivative work of the training data by nearly 100% - we can only argue how many nines it should be.
> precedent
Yeah but the US system makes me very uneasy about it. The right way to do this is to sit down, talk about the options and their downstream implications, talking about fairness and justice and then deciding what the law should be. If we did that, copyright law would look very different in the first place and this whole thing would have an obvious solution.
How could you do that though? You can’t guarantee that there aren’t chunks of copied code that infringes.
Let me introduce you to the concept of submarine patents...
But the responsible party is still the human who added the code. Not the tool that helped do so.
The practical concern of Linux developers regarding responsibility is not being able to ban the author, it's that the author should take ongoing care for his contribution.
That's not going to shield the Linux organization.
A DCO bearing a claim of original authorship (or assertion of other permitted use) isn't going to shield them entirely, but it can mitigate liability and damages.
Can it though? As far as I know this hasn’t been tested.
In a court case the responsibility party very well could be the Linux foundation because this is a foreseeable consequence of allowing AI contributions. There’s no reasonable way for a human to make such a guarantee while using AI generated code.
It’s not about the mechanism: responsibility is a social construct, it works the way people say that it works. If we all agree that a human can agree to bear the responsibility for AI outputs, and face any consequences resulting from those outputs, then that’s the whole shebang.
Sure we could change the law. It would be a stupid change to allow individuals, organizations, and companies to completely shield themselves from the consequences of risky behaviors (more than we already do) simply by assigning all liability to a fall guy.
What law exactly are you suggesting needs to be changed? How is this any different from what already happens right now, today?
Right now it's very easy not to infringe on copyrighted code if you write the code yourself. In the vast majority of cases if you infringed it's because you did something wrong that you could have prevented (in the case where you didn't do anything wrong, inducement creation is an affirmative defense against copyright infringement).
That is not the case when using AI generated code. There is no way to use it without the chance of introducing infringing code.
Because of that if you tell a user they can use AI generated code, and they introduce infringing code, that was a foreseeable outcome of your action. In the case where you are the owner of a company, or the head of an organization that benefits from contributors using AI code, your company or organization could be liable.
So it's a bit as if Linux Organization told its contributors you can bring in infringing code but you must agree you are liable for any infringement?
But if a lawsuit was later brought who would be sued? The individual author or the organization? In other words can an organization reduce its liability if it tells its employees "You can break the law as long as you agree you are solely responsible for such illegal actions?
It would seem to me that the employer would be liable if they "encourage" this way of working?
It’s a foreseeable outcome that humans might introduce copyrighted code into the kernel.
I think you’re looking for problems that don’t really exist here, you seem committed to an anti AI stance where none is justified.
A human has to willingly violate the law for that to happen though. There is no way for a human to use AI generated that doesn't have a chance of producing copyrighted code though. That's just expected.
If you don't think this is a problem take a look at the terms of the enterprise agreements from OpenAI and Anthropic. Companies recognize this is an issue and so they were forced to add an indemnification clause, explicitly saying they'll pay for any damages resulting in infringement lawsuits.
> Right now it's very easy not to infringe on copyrighted code if you write the code yourself.
Humans routinely produce code similar to or identical to existing copyrighted code without direct copying.
They don’t produce enough similar code to infringe frequently. And if they did independent creation is an affirmative defense to copyright infringement that likely doesn’t apply to LLMs since they have the demonstrated capability to produce code directly from their training set.
You have shifted from "very easy not to infringe" to "don't infringe frequently", which concedes the original point that humans can and do produce infringing code without intent.
On independent creation: you are conflating the tool with the user. The defense applies to whether the developer had access to the copyrighted work, not whether their tools did. A developer using an LLM did not access the training set directly, they used a synthesis tool. By your logic, any developer who has read GPL code on GitHub should lose independent creation defense because they have "demonstrated capability to produce code directly from" their memory.
LLM memorization/regurgitation is a documented failure mode, not normal operation (nor typical case). Training set contamination happens, but it is rare and considered a bug. Humans also occasionally reproduce code from memory: we do not deny them independent creation defense wholesale because of that capability!
In any case, the legal question is not settled, but the argument that LLM-assisted code categorically cannot qualify for independent creation defense creates a double standard that human-written code does not face.
> You have shifted from "very easy not to infringe" to "don't infringe frequently", which concedes the original point that humans can and do produce infringing code without intent.
Practically speaking humans do not produce code that would be found in court to be infringing without intent.
It is theoretically possible, but it is not something that a reasonable person would foresee as a potential consequence.
That’s the difference.
> LLM memorization/regurgitation is a documented failure mode, not normal operation (nor typical case).
Exactly. It is a documented failure mode that you as a user have no capacity to mitigate or to even be aware is happening.
Double standards are perfectly fine. LLMs are not conscious beings that deserve protection under the law.
>not settled.
What appears to likely be settled is that human authorship is required, so there’s no way that an LLM could qualify for independent creation.
And that's not an infringement. Actual copying is the infringement, not having the same code. The most likely way to have the same code is by copying, but it's not the only way.
In this case, the "fall guy" is the person who actually introduced the code in question into the codebase.
They wouldn't be some patsy that is around just to take blame, but the actual responsible party for the issue.
Imagine your a factory owner and you need a chemical delivered from across the country, but the chemical is dangerous and if the tanker truck drives faster than 50 miles per hour it has a 0.001% chance per mile of exploding.
You hire an independent contractor and tell him that he can drive 60 miles per hour if he wants to but if it explodes he accepts responsibility.
He does and it explodes killing 10 people. If the family of those 10 people has evidence you created the conditions to cause the explosion in order to benefit your company, you're probably going to lose in civil court.
Linus benefits from the increase velocity of people using AI. He doesn't get to put all the liability on the people contributing.
Cool analogy! Which has nothing to do with the topic in hand.
That is a nonsensical analogy on multiple levels, and doesn't even support your own argument.
Nice rebuttal.
Why would I put much effort into responding to a post like yours, which makes no sense and just shows that you don't understand what you're talking about?
Why would you put any effort into it at all?
Responsibility is an objective fact, not just some arbitrary social convention. What we can agree or disagree about is where it rests, but that's a matter of inference, an inference can be more or less correct. We might assign certain people certain responsibilities before the fact, but that's to charge them with the care of some good, not to blame them for things before they were charged with their care.
Because contributions to Linux are meticulously attributed to, and remain property of, their authors, those authors bear ultimate responsibility. If Fred Foobar sends patches to the kernel that, as it turns out, contain copyrighted code, then provided upstream maintainers did reasonable due diligence the court will go after Fred Foobar for damages, and quite likely demand that the kernel organization no longer distribute copies of the kernel with Fred's code in it.
Anyone distributing infringing material can be liable, and it’s unlikely that this technicality will actually would shield anyone.
Anyone who thinks they have a strong infringement case isn’t going to stop at the guy who authored the code, they’re going to go after anyone with deep pockets with a good chance of winning.
> Anyone distributing infringing material can be liable
There is still the "mens rea" principle. If you distribute infringing material unknowingly, it would very likely not result in any penalties.
Copyright is strict liability. There’s no mens rea required.
Tab complete does not produce copyrightable material either. Yet we don't require software to be written in nano.
This is a nice point that I haven't seen before. It's interesting to regress AI to the simplest form and see how we treat it as a test for the more complex cases.
There is already lots and lots of non-GPL code in the kernel, under dozens of licenses, see https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Open-Source-Compliance/pac...
As long as everything is GPLv2-compatible it‘s okay.
If the output is public domain it's fine as I understand it.
Makes sense to me. But so anybody can take Public Domain code and place it under GNU Public License (by dropping it into a Linux source-code file) ?
Surely the person doing so would be responsible for doing so, but are they doing anything wrong?
> Surely the person doing so would be responsible for doing so, but are they doing anything wrong?
You're perfectly at liberty to relicense public domain code if you wish.
The only thing you can't do is enforce the new license against people who obtain the code independently - either from the same source you did, or from a different source that doesn't carry your license.
This is correct, and it's not limited to code. I can take the story of Cinderella, create something new out of it, copyright my new work, but Cinderella remains public domain for someone else to do something with.
If I use public domain code in a project under a license, the whole work remains under the license, but not the public domain code.
I'm not sure what the hullabaloo is about.
If someone else uses your exact same prompt to generate the exact same code, can you claim copyright infringement against them? If the output is possible to copyright, then you could claim their prompt is infringement (just like if it reproduced Harry Potter). If it isn’t copyrightable, then the kernel would not have legal standing to enforce the GPL on those lines of code against any future AI reproduction of them. The developers might need to show that the code is licensed under GPL and only GPL, otherwise there is the possibility the same original contributor (eg the AI) did permit the copy. The GPL is an imposed restriction on what the kernel can legally do with any code contributions. That seems legally complicated for some projects—probably not the kernel with the large amount of pre-AI code, but maybe it spells trouble for smaller newer projects if they want to sue over infringement. IANAL.
> If someone else uses your exact same prompt to generate the exact same code, can you claim copyright infringement against them?
No, because they've independently obtained it from the same source that you did, so their copy is "upstream" of your imposing of a new license.
Realistically, adding a license to public domain work is only really meaningful when you've used it as a starting point for something else, and want to apply your license to the derivative work.
Copyright infringement is triggered by the act of copying, not by having the same bytes.
Be careful here - you cannot copyright a story, only the specific tangible form of the story.
Which is why I used precise language: "copyright my new *work*."
The core thing about licenses, in general, is that they only grant new usage. If you can already use the code because it's public domain, they don't further restrict it. The license, in that case, is irrelevant.
Remember that licenses are powered by copyright - granting a license to non-copyrighted code doesn't do anything, because there's no enforcement mechanism.
This is also why copyright reform for software engineering is so important, because code entering the public domain cuts the gordian knot of licensing issues.
Linux code doesn't have to strictly be GPL-only, it just has to be GPL-compatible.
If your license allows others to take the code and redistribute it with extra conditions, your code can be imported into the kernel. AFAIK there are parts of the kernel that are BSD-licensed.
Sqlite’s source code is public domain. Surely if you dropped the sqlite source code into Linux, it wouldn’t suddenly become GPL code? I’m not sure how it works
The Linux kernel would become a GPLv2-licensed derivative work of SQLite, but that doesn’t matter, because public domain works, by definition, are not subject to copyright restrictions.
Claiming copyright on an unmodified public domain work is a lie, so in some circumstances could be an element of fraud, but still wouldn’t be a copyright violation.
This ruling is IMO/IANAL based on lawyers and judges not understanding how LLMs work internally, falling for the marketing campaign calling them "AI" and not understanding the full implications.
LLM-creation ("training") involves detecting/compressing patterns of the input. Inference generates statistically probable based on similarities of patterns to those found in the "training" input. Computers don't learn or have ideas, they always operate on representations, it's nothing more than any other mechanical transformation. It should not erase copyright any more than synonym substitution.
>LLM-creation ("training") involves detecting/compressing patterns of the input.
There's a pretty compelling argument that this is essentially what we do, and that what we think of as creativity is just copying, transforming, and combining ideas.
LLMs are interesting because that compression forces distilling the world down into its constituent parts and learning about the relationships between ideas. While it's absolutely possible (or even likely for certain prompts) that models can regurgitate text very similar to their inputs, that is not usually what seems to be happening.
They actually appear to be little remix engines that can fit the pieces together to solve the thing you're asking for, and we do have some evidence that the models are able to accomplish things that are not represented in their training sets.
Kirby Ferguson's video on this is pretty great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9RYuvPCQUA
So? Why should it be legal?
If people find this cool and wanna play with it, they can, just make sure to only mix compatible licenses in the training data and license the output appropriately. Well, the attribution issue is still there, so maybe they can restrict themselves to public domain stuff. If LLMs are so capable, it shouldn't limit the quality of their output too much.
Now for the real issue: what do you think the world will look like in 5 or 10 years if LLMs surpass human abilities in all areas revolving around text input and output?
Do you think the people who made it possible, who spent years of their life building and maintaining open source code, will be rewarded? Or will the rich reap most of the benefit while also simultaneously turning us into beggars?
Even if you assume 100% of the people doing intellectual work now will convert to manual work (i.e. there's enough work for everyone) and robots don't advance at all, that'll drive the value of manual labor down a lot. Do you have it games out in your head and believe somehow life will be better for you, let alone for most people? Or have yo not thought about it at all yet?
> Do you think the people who made it possible, who spent years of their life building and maintaining open source code, will be rewarded?
I think they should be rewarded more than they are currently. But isn't the GNU Public License bassically saying you can use such source-code without giving any rewards what so ever?
But I see your The reward for Open Source developers is the public recognition for their works. LLMs can take that recognition away.
The best answer to those issues is still Basic Income.
UBI only means you won't starve or die of exposure. It doesn't mean that people who are already rich today won't become so obscenely rich tomorrow they are above the law or can change the law (and decide who gets medical treatment or even take your UBI away).
fortunately, you aren't only operating on representations, right? lemme check my Schopenhauer right quick...