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You cannot steal what is not owned. At least in the EU there is no copyright for LLM outputs, so I guess all they might do is violate the terms of service.
by niemandhier 2mo ago
You cannot steal what is not owned.
At least in the EU there is no copyright for LLM outputs, so I guess all they might do is violate the terms of service.
- Zambyte 2mo agoEven copyrighted information can never be "stolen". It can only copied without authorization.
- otterley 2mo agoStealing is not a word that applies only to physical objects.
- niemandhier 2mo agoFunnily enough in some legal systems it does. Where I live the legal definition of “theft” is: Taking away a movable thing.
- kube-system 2mo agoThat's also... a different word.
- niemandhier 2mo agoNot in my language.
- otterley 2mo agoWe're discussing the English language here.
- margalabargala 2mo agoAny word can be applied to any concept with any meaning thanks to the fluidity of vernacular. Language is all just sounds and markings. Anything can be redefined to mean anything, and anyone can decide to aggressively assert their preferred definition of a word.
- kube-system 2mo agoWords can change meaning, but whether or not they actually do is a social function of how they are observably used. Words can also have multiple meanings concurrently. When it comes to the word "steal" in these discussions, people generally are arguing past each other in regards to the single definition they're thinking of. Of course, you can assert that the meaning of "steal" only applies to physical items. You are well within your right to do so. You'd be wrong, but you can do it.
- otterley 2mo ago> people generally are arguing past each other in regards to the single definition they're thinking of. It's more than that. By claiming that copyright infringement isn't stealing, they're usually doing so to justify such behavior: if the original thing remains with the owner, it couldn't have harmed him, could it?
- kube-system 2mo agoMaybe but I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, especially when the argument at face value is factually incorrect.
- otterley 2mo agoThis tired argument--that copyright infringement is not "stealing"--is at least as old as my Commodore 64.
- blackqueeriroh 2mo ago
- kube-system 2mo agoStole the words right out of my mouth!
- Zambyte 2mo agoPlease provide an example of an action legally considered "stealing" that does not involve stealing physical objects.
- breezybottom 2mo agoDigital piracy is considered stealing in most countries.
- polymer8563 2mo agolet me copy your data without authorization over here real quick
- twigger2 2mo ago[dead]
- cyanydeez 2mo agothey also can't claim to be the owner of the output either because they can't claim to have had a valid license for the inputs.
- blackqueeriroh 2mo agoActually, this is untrue
- Terr_ 2mo agoWhile I feel it is morally OK for users to access the metadata of their own exchanges, there's something awry with that formulation, (not-)"stealing" is about more than just copyright or ToS. For example, consider my browser cookies that authenticate me to HN right now. Nobody even wants to copyright them, but if you were to somehow acquire a copy I'd very much consider it "stealing."
- 8note 2mo agoIm not so worried about that. Im worried about somebody impersonating me or doing something bad and not authorized with the cookies
- qwytw 2mo agoIf someone acquired a copy of them by breaking into your device and stealing the files sure. If you consciously sent them out to every person who asked for them (even if in their encrypted form) well.. that's a choice you made.
- iamniels 2mo agoOn top of that, the user paid for those tokens, so if there is an owner, it should be the user, not the provider.
- Perseids 2mo agoI think they are doing us a disservice by perpetuating this focus on intellectual "property" [1] in regard to AI. The real issue with Anthropic, OpenAI etc. is not that they have used all of our public knowledge for training their LLMs. Creating new work from old and learning from prior generations is what we all do. The issue is that they want to claim all of the benefits for themselves. They are standing on the shoulders of giants and have contributed an inch themselves, yet want to privatize the power of the whole giant. We shouldn't let them "own" these models. The influence on society by AI is so novel that it's reasonable to craft new laws specifically for them. There are a lot of ways to deal with their power grab. We could force them to open source the models after two years. Or we could tax tokens or compute. We just need to agree that the power grab is the problem, the privatization of our cumulative knowledge, and not some details about copyright infringement. [1] I know I'm going to risk dissent just by putting quotation marks here. But I think for this topic specifically it is crucial to understand that intellectual property is an arbitrary social/legal construct. With physical stuff, there is an inherent scarcity. If you steal my smartphone, I no longer have it. If you steal the character from my book, I... have a harder time selling my next book? Our ancestors have invented copyright to solve a specific problem, but the solution has become perverted over time. There are a lot of egregious cases out there (looking at you, Disney), but even relatively tame success cases don't look good. Society has paid J.K. Rowling a literal billion for her work and still this cultural touchstone of a generation remains privatized. Imagine what other authors could have build upon her stories, if only they were allowed to publish their own stories with these characters. She has not been a particularly good steward in the past decades.
- breezybottom 2mo agoThat is the issue, you just rephrased it to sound softer (public knowledge isn't a legal term). Fair use law isn't supposed to apply to commercial activity. So it is absolutely about using copyrighted work for LLM training.
- Perseids 2mo agoThe thing is, I explicitly wanted to not focus on current legality, because I believe this is leading us astray. This is about how we want to shape our society, not about how their actions fit into a legal system that wasn't designed to handle AI training. If, by chance, all of this was legal, the same arguments would still apply. For example, see how Adobe is training their image generating AI on licensed work. The result -- privatized intelligence -- is the same as when illegitimate training data would have been used. Or, say, an AI company makes a deal with all the publishers to license their books for training. Or a court decides that training AI with MIT licensed code is totally fine. Or an AI company pays legions of software developers to train their AI. All of this still ends in a power grab. All of this still privatizes knowledge and skills accumulated over centuries, if not millennia.
- levocardia 2mo agoIf I hire you for a consulting project, do I own the screen recording of your computer while you completed it?
- platinumrad 2mo agoLLMs aren't people.
- paxys 2mo agoComputer screens aren’t people either. What’s your point?
- hamandcheese 2mo agoIf I'm paying you per-second of screen on time: yes.
- articulatepang 2mo agoI think it depends on whatever contract you signed. If you signed a contract that says “you pay per minute of screen time but only get the end result” then I bet that if you went to court demanding the screen recording, you’d lose.