It’s real but whether you can make a profit or not is dependent on whether you can protect the information. It has been this way since civilization as we know it started, I believe.
If you are freely posting sentences like this was on the internet you are giving away your IP for free. Anyone can read the sentence. If someone can make money off of it then that’s just markets at work. I can’t make money off of what I write here, for example.
But I also don’t think pirating a movie is theft either. You haven’t proven to me you’ve lost money. Maybe wouldn’t have watched it anyway.
Fun topic
> It’s real but whether you can make a profit or not is dependent on whether you can protect the information.
That's what contracts and licenses [0] are for. Or perhaps you're arguing for a world where the only possible protection is that of trade secrets... that once protected information is made public by any means anyone can do anything they wish with it? If you are, then this quote [1] seems relevant:
[0] ...which are contracts in disguise...[1] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49754448>
To read this post you must pay me $5. Please leave your contact information as a reply or you'll be hearing from my lawyer. [1]
Those contracts and licenses are just a form of protection enforced by the State. In general once knowledge or information is widely available it's also freely available. Whether someone can further protect the distribution or the usage of that knowledge to some ends is up to them.
I disagree with both of those premises.
IP is real, and scraping freely given comments or published material on the Internet and doing something economically useful with it doesn't entitle you to retrospectively go back and decide that you are owed some money. If that were the case you have to prove material damages. How much is my post here worth? one quadrillionth of a cent?
I think it can become different if, for example, a book was scraped or cataloged but that's primarily because it's likely that you can enforce or make a case within a given legal system to enforce your copyright or IP claims. But what if I read a book and then thought the main idea was my own, or just spoke to someone else about it and they spoke to someone else about it and it winds up in an LLM? There's nothing wrong with that or anything you can do.
To expose information is to put that information at risk of being used by others. It's up to you to protect that information or enforce claims on it. If Reddit's public site gets scraped and OpenAI does something economically useful with it, well, that's just life. You can't put information out in the public for free and then demand payment later. Reddit comments are freely accessible by the public, yes? Companies are part of the public.
If you want to argue that it's IP theft then distilling weights or otherwise reverse engineering the models is a violation of IP protections too.
[1] Rhetorical
> Those contracts and licenses are just a form of protection enforced by the State.
Yes, that's how property works most anywhere that has stable government. Societies where The State has a monopoly on violence are usually far more stable and pleasant to live in than ones where vigilantism is how correction of injuries is done.
> Reddit comments are freely accessible by the public, yes?
In exactly the same way that the books in my local public library are freely accessibly to the public, yes. I'm sure that you're aware there are so many things you can't legally do with books in your local public library. Reddit isn't substantially different... go read the "User Agreement" contract that governs use of the site when you get a free hour or two.
> To read this post you must pay me $5. Please leave your contact information...
You can totally prevent me from -among other things- making many sorts of commercial uses of your post, but -as I'm sure you know- the made-up system you're gesturing at not how software licenses have worked for roughly as long as software has been a thing that was commonly licensed.
Anyway. It sounds like you want a return to "publish nothing, keep everything of worth secret to anyone not in the guild, and do what needs done to people who the guild suspects has betrayed its secrets". Those were the really bad old days, and the awfulness of that system was why the US adopted the patent system back in the late 1700s. It's also part of why it adopted the copyright system [0] as well as limited term lengths (fourteen years, with an option for fourteen more if the work's author was still alive and explicitly requested an extension).
[0] Though, you had to explicitly register your work with the relevant authorities to get protection... unregistered works received no protection. Things stayed this way for roughly two hundred years, and -IMO- should have stayed that way.
> In exactly the same way that the books in my local public library are freely accessibly to the public, yes. I'm sure that you're aware there are so many things you can't legally do with books in your local public library. Reddit isn't substantially different... go read the "User Agreement" contract that governs use of the site when you get a free hour or two.
I don't think those user agreements are really enforceable or should be enforceable given how the public utilizes them. That's a digression though.
With respect to your library example, the difference is the author made the big with an intent to sell. There is a market for the book, it has some value as evidenced by the sale of the book. Public Reddit comments have no marketable value on their own. If Reddit doesn't want the public to use them, they must protect them. Potentially via the State, but generally they would have to take some other protective measure.
> You can totally prevent me from -among other things- making many sorts of commercial uses of your post, but -as I'm sure you know- the made-up system you're gesturing at not how software licenses have worked for roughly as long as software has been a thing that was commonly licensed.
How things work now or in the past can change. Maybe you're just slow to adopting a new paradigm? I can't prevent you from doing anything with my post unless you go on to make enough money that it is worthwhile. But if you just use it for your own private coffee cup there's nothing I can do nor is there anything the State is interested in doing about it. Similarly you can deconstruct Reddit comments into individual ones and assess the value, but the value is 0. Aggregating those into something useful is economically useful and Reddit doesn't really own the data if they are publishing it for free, the users do, despite what either party says.
It's similar to how copying != stealing. First you have to prove I'd have bought the movie. Second of all you have to enforce cases where I might accidentally see it I was walking down the street and someone was playing it in their living room. If you can't enforce it, you don't really own it.
Information economics is difficult because it's a mix of different things.