Yeah, copyright infringement isn't stealing, copyright shouldn't even exist to begin with.
I just think it's especially asinine how corporations are perfectly willing to launder copyrighted works via LLMs when it's profitable to do so. We have to perpetually pay them for their works and if we break their little software locks it's felony contempt of business model, but they get to train their AIs on our works and reproduce them infinitely and with total impunity without paying us a cent.
It's that "rules for thee but not for me" nonsense that makes me reach such extreme logical conclusions that I feel empathy for terrorists.
Secrets? Just leak them, it only has to happen once. Guilds? Revoke their privileges and protections, and there's nothing they can do about it.
Absolutely an improvement. Information wants to be free. Stop criminalizing it and people will find a way to free it. And once it's out there it's over, there is no containing it.
People want to be paid for their work. If you don't let them, they won't do the work. "Information" does not have a mind of its own.
Even when the idea of a thing is "out there" there is a lot of grunt work and special stuff that needs to be implemented to get the best outcomes. Nobody owes you that work for free. Regardless of what GPL copers say, it is very hard to make money with software without enforcing some access restrictions and IP. Open source is great when it works, but it does not work for most things nor is it at the leading edge for most things.
Then let it be unjustified, and let it stay undone.
Copyright is a functionally perpetual state granted monopoly on information, on numbers. A business model that depends on such a delusion should not even exist to begin with.
Sorry, a piece of software is no more a bunch of numbers than a musical score or a novel. Intellectual property exists for valid reasons. It's clearly not delusional because we've made it work for hundreds of years.
Saying that intellectual property is founded on a delusion because someone can infringe on it or it's mere numbers is like saying your physical property rights are a delusion because the stuff is mere matter and can be manipulated by anyone. While true, such statements add absolutely nothing to the conversation. If people are willing to copy from others rather than make their own creations, there is value in the original works that is a direct result of someone's labor, not some immutable law of the universe.
It's not the age of printing presses anymore. It's the 21st century, the age of information, the age of globally networked pocket supercomputers. Copying is so trivial that it's become normal. It happens every day at massive scales. People do not even realize they are doing it.
We're discussing this in a thread about AI laundering of copyrighted works, for god's sake. If you keep believing this delusion, you'll eventually watch it shatter right before your eyes.
Let's not waste time comparing bits of infomation to physical objects either. We can revisit this discussion when Star Trek replicators are invented.
>It's the 21st century, the age of information, the age of globally networked pocket supercomputers. Copying is so trivial that it's become normal. It happens every day at massive scales. People do not even realize they are doing it.
This is a bunch of hand-waving. Information is still bought and sold, and protected by law. Dissemination by the Internet is not all that different from dissemination on paper or via radio waves. People who make illegal copies of media know what they are doing.
>We're discussing this in a thread about AI laundering of copyrighted works, for god's sake. If you keep believing this delusion, you'll eventually watch it shatter right before your eyes.
Again, the AI is doing something not all that different from what an intelligent human would do. The fact it is done by a machine is only marginally relevant, because we are getting into philosophical questions about how it works and so on. Even if AGI is achieved, I think copyright will be extended to include the output of the machines. But what might change is that the value of information goes down as it gets easier to produce.
>Let's not waste time comparing bits of infomation to physical objects either. We can revisit this discussion when Star Trek replicators are invented.
It's not a waste. Even in the case where replicators existed, the output of a replicator would cost something because energy is not free. I don't think it is free in Star Trek if memory serves me right. The replicator and the holodeck, being finite resources, must be allocated intelligently and fairly among the crew. Same for the physical space aboard the ship. If anyone was to be a pack rat with unlimited replicator access, they might flood an entire deck with trinkets.
Likewise, even though copying is easy, it still represents a theft from the producer of the information. We are only debating details of the mechanics of how it works, to decide whether AI actually copies enough to be infringing and what the damages might actually be. That is one big question. That's one line of questioning. The other is, can the output of an AI be copyrighted? I think the answer to that question is definitely yes.
Your views are contradictory. Copyright shouldn't exist, but the businesses infringing on it are the bad ones?
>We have to perpetually pay them for their works and if we break their little software locks it's felony contempt of business model
You don't have to pay them, or break their restrictions.
>but they get to train their AIs on our works and reproduce them infinitely and with total impunity without paying us a cent.
You don't need to allow this either. Unfortunately open-source code is necessarily public.
>It's that "rules for thee but not for me" nonsense that makes me reach such extreme logical conclusions that I feel empathy for terrorists.
The way LLMs use code is fundamentally different from wholesale copying. If someone read your code and paraphrased it and tweaked it, it would be a completely new work not subject to the original copyright. At least it would be really hard to get a court to regard it as an infringement. This is like what LLMs do.
How is it contradictory? Tell it to the corporations who defend copyright for you and public domain fair use for themselves. If they were honest, they'd abolish copyright straight up instead of creating this idiotic caste system.
> Copyright shouldn't exist, but the businesses infringing on it are the bad ones?
Yes. Copyright shouldn't exist to begin with, but since it does, one would expect the corporations to work within the legal framework they themselves created and lobbied so heavily for. One would expect them to reap the consequences of their actions and be bound by the exact same limitations they seek to impose on us.
It is absolutely asinine to watch them make trillions of dollars by breaking their own rules while simultaneously pretendinf that nothing is happening and insisting that you mortal citizen must still abide by the same rules they are breaking.
The sheer dishonesty of it makes me sick to my core.
> If someone read your code and paraphrased it and tweaked it, it would be a completely new work not subject to the original copyright.
Derivative work.
I was once told that corporate programmers are warned by legal not to even read AGPLv3 source code, lest it subconsciously infect their thought processes and the final result. This is also the reason we have clean room reverse engineering where one team produces documentation and another uses it to reimplement the thing. Isolating minds from the copyrighted inputs is the whole point of it. All of this is risk management meant to disallow even the mere possibility that a derivative work was created in the process.
There is absolutely no reason to believe LLMs are any different. They are literally trained on copyrighted inputs. Either they're violating copyrights or we're being oppressed by these copyright monopolists who say we can't do stuff we should be able to do. Both cannot be true at the same time.
> At least it would be really hard to get a court to regard it as an infringement.
It's extremely hard to get a court to do anything. As in tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars difficult. Nothing is decided until actual judges start deciding things, and to get to that point you need to actually go through the legal system, and to do that you need to pay expensive lawyers lots of money. It's the reason people instantly fold the second legal action is threatened, doesn't matter if they're right. Corporations have money to burn, we don't.
And that's assuming that courts are presided by honest human beings who believe in law and reason instead of political activist judges or straight up corrupt judges who can be lobbied by industry.
>I was once told that corporate programmers are warned by legal not to even read AGPLv3 source code, lest it subconsciously infect their thought processes and the final result.
There are different views out there about this. If you literally just copy a piece of code and make stupid changes, it might be a derivative work. But this is not guaranteed. There are times when there is one idiomatic way to do a thing, so your code will necessarily be similar to other code in the world. That type of code is not copyrightable, even if it appears in a larger work that is copyrightable. A small amount of bog standard code resembling something in another project is not in and of itself evidence of infringement.
Corporations would rather not have to deal with unnecessarily similar code or deliberate copyright or patent infringement. So they generally tell you not to look at anything else.
The biggest issue is that any individual part of a copyrighted work may not be copyrightable. If you dissect a large copyrighted work, it probably contains many uncopyrightable structures. For example, in a book, most phrases and grammatical structures are not copyrightable. The style is not copyrightable. In code, common boilerplate is probably not copyrightable. Please don't make your stuff bizarre to add to its originality though. We need to be able to read and understand it lol.
>There is absolutely no reason to believe LLMs are any different. They are literally trained on copyrighted inputs. Either they're violating copyrights or we're being oppressed by these copyright monopolists who say we can't do stuff we should be able to do. Both cannot be true at the same time.
People who learn to program by reading open-source code are also trained on copyrighted inputs. Copyright may need some rethinking to cope with the reality of LLMs. Unless it is proven that AI is spitting out unique and copyrightable blocks of code from other projects, it really isn't infringing. People do this type of shit all the time. Have you ever looked at Stack Overflow and copied a couple of lines from it? You probably infringed on someone's copyright.
Ultimately, even if you prove copyright infringement happened, you have basically no recourse unless you also prove damages. Since open-source code is public and given away for free, the only possible damage is generally in being deprived of contributions that might have resulted from direct usage of your code. But direct integration of your entire project might have been highly unlikely anyway. Like it or not, people can be inspired by your work in a way that can't be proven without their direct confession.
I just think it's especially asinine how corporations are perfectly willing to launder copyrighted works via LLMs when it's profitable to do so. We have to perpetually pay them for their works and if we break their little software locks it's felony contempt of business model, but they get to train their AIs on our works and reproduce them infinitely and with total impunity without paying us a cent.
It's that "rules for thee but not for me" nonsense that makes me reach such extreme logical conclusions that I feel empathy for terrorists.