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I hear this, and I want to sympathize, but I always have trouble reconciling it with the philosophy pointed to by the phrase "information wants to be free." Sh

I hear this, and I want to sympathize, but I always have trouble reconciling it with the philosophy pointed to by the phrase "information wants to be free." Should the people be compensated for their work? Yes. Is this piracy? Yes, we know that many of these big organizations just outright copied the work with out proper payment. (No, it isn't theft, theft deprives the owner of property, not just a portion of the revenue.) But tokenization and vectorization of this data is fundamental transformation. Information wants to be free. Again, I don't know if I can reconcile this with fair use doctrine, but it smells like it, especially for books that would be in a library, or images of paintings. If we embodied these learning systems in a robot, sent it to the library, and had it read every book, would it be piracy? That's how humans learn. They take away a fundamental summary of the thing. When I read a book I'm affected by it. My vocabulary, even my writing style sometimes. The fact that these are machine systems capable of doing this at scale... does that make a difference?

Yizahi 10mo ago
Fair use doctrine is explicitly for the humans. For the better overall state of humankind. It is not logically "fair" in the terms of some abstract logic, since we are giving preference to some part of the population and not everyone equally/fairly. So the fairness is not in the perfect mathematical equality of the application of fair use law, it is in the inequality of it and this is what makes it fair. In short - fair use is a hack, which we humans invented for ourselves, for our better living. There is no some law of the universe that a hack we have invented for ourselves should be extended to literally everything everywhere, we don't "owe" this to anyone. So we don't "owe" it to our computers that fair use doctrine should be extended to the computer programs. The fairness word in the fair use doctrine doesn't mean that every entity should automatically benefit from such law. It's only for humans now. My point of this long rant is that making fair use universally fair, automatically makes it unfair for the humans, for the original recipients of the benefits of this law. And there is no compromise here. We either ignore human rights, or computer program rights.
- slowmovintarget 10mo ago
  Fair use would be applied to the humans who caused it to be tokenized and vectorized. (Transformation.) But I take your point about a robot doing it.

Yizahi 10mo ago

Fair use doctrine is explicitly for the humans. For the better overall state of humankind. It is not logically "fair" in the terms of some abstract logic, since we are giving preference to some part of the population and not everyone equally/fairly. So the fairness is not in the perfect mathematical equality of the application of fair use law, it is in the inequality of it and this is what makes it fair. In short - fair use is a hack, which we humans invented for ourselves, for our better living. There is no some law of the universe that a hack we have invented for ourselves should be extended to literally everything everywhere, we don't "owe" this to anyone. So we don't "owe" it to our computers that fair use doctrine should be extended to the computer programs. The fairness word in the fair use doctrine doesn't mean that every entity should automatically benefit from such law. It's only for humans now. My point of this long rant is that making fair use universally fair, automatically makes it unfair for the humans, for the original recipients of the benefits of this law. And there is no compromise here. We either ignore human rights, or computer program rights.

slowmovintarget 10mo ago
Fair use would be applied to the humans who caused it to be tokenized and vectorized. (Transformation.) But I take your point about a robot doing it.