>How are these fruits "stolen" if they still have what was allegedley stolen?
If you write a book and I take it and embed its knowledge into my product that is so pervasive that no one needs to buy your book any more (and I don't even credit you so no one knows where that knowledge came from), to you really still have what was stolen? And I didn't even buy a copy of your book to copy it.
> If you write a book and I take it and embed its knowledge into my product that is so pervasive that no one needs to buy your book any more (and I don't even credit you so no one knows where that knowledge came from), to you really still have what was stolen?
The trouble with this analogy is that it proves too much.
Suppose you write a book, and so does someone else, but they have better marketing than you and then people in the market for that genre buy theirs instead of yours. Let's even stipulate that the existence of their book actually lowers your sales, because people who want that kind of book already bought theirs by the time they find out about yours and then some people don't have time to read or can't afford to buy both.
Notice that we haven't yet said a word about the contents of either book. They could be completely independent and they've never even heard of you or your book -- they "didn't even buy a copy of your book to copy it". All we know is that they're the same genre and the existence of theirs is costing you sales. By that logic all competition would thereby be "stealing", and that can't be right.
Which implies that you don't have a property right to the customers.
I like your argument, not because it is a good analogy for AI but because it is a good contrast. Copyright isn't a guarantee or magic force field blocking fair competition. It is a permeable buffer against lazy knockoffs and time-boxed so that buffer doesn't choke all future creativity.
People on this thread need to focus on what "derivative" and "fair use" mean and understand both are measured on a somewhat fuzzy spectrum, subject to interpretation.
In a perfectly fair world AIs/MLs could vacuum up all human knowledge, fair and square. (In an ideal world, they would do that adhering to polite opt-in/opt-out agreements with copyright holders. We can dream). Input isn't theft.
On output, two magic genies would stand at the gate, the Derivative Genie and Fair Use Genie and review anything spat out by the AI/ML. If it crossed agreed upon thresholds the Genies would bar the gates and issue a stern warning to prompt again (or maybe the AL/ML would auto-adjust the prompt and try again).
So, if your prompt asked for a 300-word poem about thrash metal mosh pit dancing and it spat out a poem where 85% of it match one of the handful of available mosh pit poems in its database, the Derivative Demon would block the output and raise an alarm.
On the other hand, if you asked for a line by line analysis of a famous mosh pit dancing poem (by name) or maybe asked for a satirical spoof of said poem, the Fair Use Demon would overrule the Derivative Demon and give the output a pass.
That's as fair as this could get, especially if you add one more thing: An Appeals Court (maybe corporate, maybe 3rd party, maybe state run) with a Settlement Pool. If a copyright holder could prove the Genies let pass something they shouldn't, the AL/ML would fix that. If real damage is done, the creator would get a settlement from the pool.
The point is that the Input Genie is out of the bottle. Creators just look foolish trying to squeeze it back in. Better, they should focus on making the output Genies and the Appeals process as effective and fair as possible for everyone.
A better analogy would be that you do original research or work and produce a valuable book. Somebody else looks at your work, decides it has value, and reproduces it in a new book under their name. The new book is cheaper, or easier to find, or for whatever reason displaces your original book created through your own research and investment. Now somebody else is profiting off your creativity or work, without payment or even acknowledgement.
I'm not sure how this plays out legally, but it certainly seems unethical
So for example, when Disney sees value in public domain stories like Cinderella, Rapunzel/Tangled or Snow White, and they make movies out of them, profiting from the creativity and work of the Brothers Grimm without paying anything to their estate, or high school plays do Shakespeare, that seems unethical to you?
Would it be fair for Greece to do retroactive term extensions all the way back to Plato and then sue anyone who copies the idea of having a university or uses the Platonic solids or distributes religious texts that incorporate the dualistic theory of the soul?
Your examples, as you say, are all public domain. Are all the works we train LLMs on public domain too? Was the original book in my analogy in the public domain? What do you think about training on material that isn't yet in the public domain?
You're framing this as an ethical question, but copyright term lengths are essentially arbitrary. They're set by the government, as are the boundaries of fair use. At which point you're making a circular argument. That it's bad if it's illegal and that it should be illegal because it's bad. So what happens if someone argues the opposite? That it's not unethical if it's fair use and then it should be fair use because it's not unethical.
Why are you talking about this case that case nothing to do with the topic at hand? The comment you’re replying to gives a very clear and narrow analogy, and you’re talking about something else.
How is it something else? It's the same analogy. The problem with it is that the harm from the alleged theft doesn't require any use of the original material in order to happen, since that "harm" is competition rather than expropriation.
The attempt to distinguish them is through copying, but that's the part that isn't depriving anyone of anything.
The main point here is _using_ copyrighted materials to create a commercial product, that you then sell, that may be used as alternative or substitute for the original materials. You’re missing that point and talking about two independent projects competing.
Because the competition is the only source of alleged harm, but people can do that even if they don't copy anything. There isn't actually a property right to the customers. You can lose sales to someone else whether they copied anything or not.
So what that you can loose sales even without crimes being committed? This somehow makes it okay to profit off someone’s work and ignore licenses?
What if I read your book (and a bunch of other books), and use what I learned to write my own book? Have I "stolen" your book?
Facts are not copyrightable. Only your particular way of expressing those facts is copyrightable.
Yes. That's not to say that something damaging wasn't done, but nothing was stolen. Stealing/theft requires deprivation of property. It's like receiving a normal nonlethal punch in the face and calling it murder. Murder requires someone dying.
> Theft [...] is the act of taking another person's property or services without that person's permission or consent with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it. --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealing
My God, I can't believe chodes are still playing this "how many angels can you fit on the head of a pin" navel gazing semantic argument. Thirty years at least, it was all you saw on fin de ciecle Slashdot from anyone with a six-digit UID. No one cares about your hyper literalist meaning of "theft," that's not the goddamn point. Christ, this place looks like Reddit more and more.
This isn't a court of law. We don't have to talk like lawyers. If you replaced "theft" with "copyright infringement" in the comment you had such a problem with, what meaningfully changes besides we all have about five additional brain cells?
Even the case for copyright infringement is weak. LLMs are not copying machines, we already have copying machines at much lower price, almost zero, and perfect fidelity and much faster than generating it probabilistically. So it makes no economic sense to spend billions on training and inference to make a copier. In fact the value of LLMs is where they do not copy but apply knowledge a new situation.
> If you replaced "theft" with "copyright infringement" in the comment you had such a problem with, what meaningfully changes besides we all have about five additional brain cells?
The obvious difference that copyright is subject to fair use and various other limitations that personal property isn't.
Ever hear of Aaron swartz?
Aaron Swartz was charged under the CFAA, which isn't even copyright law, and the prosecution was widely condemned as draconian overreach.
>> Stealing/theft requires deprivation of property
maybe you should look up the definition of property, which is a set of legally recognized rights over a thing, typically including:
* possession (what you're focusing on)
* use
* exclusion
* transfer
The last 3 seem like they have been breached, in legally that's theft.
Violation of these rights may be criminal without meeting the strict legal definition of theft.
This can even extend to stealing physical property.
Depending on local laws, stealing a car may not actually be theft if the defendent can prove they intended to return it before the owner got home from work, though it would certainly be considered theft in the colloquial sense of the term, and they would still be guilty of a lesser offense like civil and/or criminal conversion.
> Depending on local laws, stealing a car may not actually be theft if the defendent can prove they intended to return it before the owner got home from work
I doubt there's even one place where the law works like that.
> I doubt there's even one place where the law works like that.
In a lot of places, that's how it works. A key element of theft is the intent to permanently deprive someone of property.
This is why joyriding isn't classified as auto theft and is instead a lesser offense. It's because joyriding is an intent to temporarily deprive, while GTA is an intent to permanently deprive.
In some jxns (the UK is one), there is a tort called trespass to goods, and an example of this would be "stealing" someone's property to deliver to another location for them to use there. The tort of conversion is similar: interference with someone's property right to treat it as your own (silent as to length of time).
Yea in the us if someone tries to steal your car and you are in it or threatened by it you can shoot them dead or something like that (ianal) You may have a court day but in many situations no punishment will follow.
Theft is not the breach of any property right. It's specifically the deprivation of property without consent. Yes, I have checked the definition in my jurisdiction.
Getting punched in the face also violates rights, yet isn't murder. Murder is specifically about dying.
You forget that laws are made by people and at anytime they can change interpretations are arbitrary, roe vs wade today but not tomorrow.
People seem to think what ai is today is theft. If enough people agree, it will be theft. Big companies dont like this and push the other way. An objectiveness doesnt exist here. It is too wiggly
You’re splitting hairs over a definition that isn’t relevant here (theft and copyright infringement are different things) to defend something that even you agree is bad.
It isn't splitting hairs. The damages are completely different in nature.
With theft, the entire damage is the deprivation. It could be an heirloom or some other object that may have been entrusted to you, something that can never be replaced, memorabilia of loved ones. Something that you may have needed in your posession to survive (e.g. a car to go to your job).
With a given copyright violation, the damage is that maybe[1] you made less profit than you could have. The potential for profit is not property. Profit isn't guaranteed.
[1] The loss is not certain, because there's no guarantee that the ones consuming the copyrighted content could have even afforded it.