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I was briefly hopeful that we'd see meaningful copyright reform in the EU back when the Pirate Party had its moment in the spotlight. But nothing happened. Now

• meowface 1y ago
  I am consistent on this one, personally. Let LLMs train on anything and let YouTubers do things like this one. It's all fine to me.
  • drweevil 1y ago
    Consistency would be welcome indeed. We have courts saying it's fair use to do this at scale to train LLMs, but minor violations like this trigger man-years of investigations and threats of imprisonment. The contradiction is grating. This circle can be squared only by admitting that there is one law for the wealthy and powerful, and another for the rest of us.
    • yorwba 1y ago
      The jurisdiction is different. The alleged offense is different. The stage of legal proceedings is different. There's no contradiction between an American court finding that using legally acquired copies of copyrighted material for AI training constitutes fair use, and Italian police launching an investigation because they suspect someone might be selling illegal copies of copyrighted material.
      • navane 1y ago
        No one is claiming that the law is wrongly interpreted. We're saying that the law is wrong. How is it legal to generate the content of that YouTube with genAI but not to actually tape it with real people. Why does an AI have more rights than this YouTuber.
    • brookst 1y ago
      Consistency is the hobgoblin. If the law were truly consistent, surgeons would go to jail for cutting people with knives. As soon as you recognize that context should matter in law, consistency is no longer possible. I’m not defending big companies pirating books or saying YouTubers should go to jail, I’m just saying there are material differences in context that make it juvenile to demand perfect consistency.
• HPsquared 1y ago
  Sovereign is he who makes the exception.
  • clarionbell 1y ago
    I haven't heard Carl Schmitt doctrine in long time. I hope it doesn't become as prominent as it once was.
• Sander_Marechal 1y ago
  The pirate party is a single issue party about abolishing copyright and having no plan for what to do next. I'm not surprised it didn't go anywhere.
  • fulafel 1y ago
    The way single issue parties normally affect policy is that getting a seat signals the other parties to take the issue more seriously (eg in this case balance between interests of copyright holders vs interests of the public), so the lack of plan wouldn't normally yet mean a failure.
• pjc50 1y ago
  > Make it make sense. This is easy: law is about power and money. LLM training companies represent an even bigger concentration of money than the IP enforcers, so they can pirate all the books in the world without consequence, while the most onerous consequences are reserved for the most trivial guys.
  • rvnx 1y ago
    Law is not fair. The law is the reflection of power relations.
    • anon191928 1y ago
      Property Laws usually applies to weak in power. Courts teach to masses to show how they lack true power and wealth. It's for show
    • A_D_E_P_T 1y ago
      Natural Law is fair by definition. It is merely a reflection of ancient ethical norms. Positive Law -- the laws set down by kings and legislatures -- is much less fair, but sometimes, however rarely, it tries to embody a codification of the Natural Law. The way the Positive Law is enforced and prosecuted is an utter disaster. In civil courts, justice is bought and sold as a rule; fairness (and even adjudication itself!) is an exception. It's so bad, so transparently twisted, that I think it's fair to say that humans in general have shown that they cannot be trusted with the administration of things such as civil laws. Too corruptible.
      • immibis 1y ago
        Natural Law isn't real, and won't hurt you - it's just one particular sect's form of copium.
        • ohman876 1y ago
          You obviously are against that 'one sect', but natural law IS the thing. This is what most people consider to be the norm that governs how we behave. It's not written down, it's what you know is right or wrong. Let me give you some examples: - Raping woman on the street - wrong - Giving starving person some food - good - Stealing from your employer - wrong (unless you are not paid or cheated) - Killing random person - wrong - Caring for your spause and children - good and the list goes on And the general rule, written down by 'that sect' in their book is 'love your neighbor as you love yourself', you should prefer to live among people who really apply this in their life, whenever you share their beliefs or not, because it's so much easier to live among such people than to live among selfish people who will not hesitate to harm you if only their actions go unpunished.
• VWWHFSfQ 1y ago
  The Pirate Party lost their public support after the founder advocated for the legalization of child sexual abuse because (supposedly) without it there could never be any meaningful digital freedom. Obviously that was a bridge too far for people, and they stopped supporting even the sensible reforms the party was advocating for.
  • speeder 1y ago
    Risking a lot by commenting on this... but what he defended was that possession of images should not be illegal, only the act itself should be illegal. He used as an example of how the law was bad, that if you witnessed someone doing the act, and filmed it to hand over as evidence to the police, you would end in jail too, something that is obviously unfair.
• xienze 1y ago
  > Now LLMs are stealing everyone's data, claiming be "fair use", getting away scot free, while irrelevant YouTubers are facing threats to be jailed over nothing whatsoever. I’d like to point out that for decades the argument pro-piracy folks made was that you can’t “steal” software since it still remains. It’s only fair to apply that same standard to AI companies who are simply scraping data...
  • elric 1y ago
    The difference is obviously one of intent. LLMs are not being trained for personal use, they're being trained to be sold to the masses. Very few people download(ed?) movies or music with the intent to distribute it. They downloaded it because they wanted to consume the media.
    • xienze 1y ago
      > LLMs are not being trained for personal use, they're being trained to be sold to the masses. Come again? Deepseek and numerous other smaller models can be run locally, for free. I think what’s really behind this attitude is that “information wants to be free” when I’m pirating IP from a big, faceless corporation. But when it’s _my_ IP being pirated, it’s theft.
      • const_cast 1y ago
        Yes, it's called power dynamics. You're weak and irrelevant, they're rich and powerful. When they do the same things you do, the consequences are different. I can make selfish decisions all day long and the blast radius is pretty small. When rich people make selfish decisions, or worse, when political leaders do, the entire economy suffers and in the worst cases millions of people can die. In some developed nations, we're almost comically unaware of power dynamics, sometimes to the point of inverting power dynamics. Consider a McDonald's employee versus a Police Officer. The McDonald's employee can make almost any mistake and it's not a big deal. Pickles on your burger when you didn't want pickles? Eh, you'll get over it. When Police Officers make mistakes, innocent people die. Taxpayers pay out sometimes millions of dollars. Based on that, you would expect the standard of behavior for Police Officers to be much higher than a McDonald's cashier. But no, we've inverted it. If the Police Officer accidentally kills someone they shouldn't, they'll likely keep their job. If a McDonald's cashier's drawer comes up 1 dollar short, they're terminated immediately. Oops. Messed that up, didn't we?
• 5ersi 1y ago
  LLMs are learning in a very similar way humans are learning. So if humans can read a text (or view a video), learn from it and then use the knowledge to produce something, so can LLMs? Copyright laws have quite strict rules on what constitutes a copy, and this was tested in courts many times. This rules also apply to works produced by LLMs.
  • raron 1y ago
    Okay, but in that case humans should legally be able to pirate all the books, music and movies they can or are learning from.
  • elric 1y ago
    That's a load of hogwash. Humans are only allowed to learn from books they buy or loan from libraries. We can't download books en masse from the interwebz just because we want to learn something. We're also not allowed to read stuff on websites and then regurgitate it verbatim pretending we made it. We can't even make songs that are vaguely similar to songs thag other people have made, even if they've been dead for a good while.
• cookiengineer 1y ago
  Dead internet theory confirmed. Well, the Ministry of Truth is working on it, at least.