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.
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.
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.
- 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.
This is just communism. If everyone did this, you would have a community-based economy and society. Communism.
The sheer idea of competition is antithetical to this world view. Because you would never compete against yourself - but you MUST compete against your neighbors. You would never advocate against yourself, either.
Look, it's a nice idea, everyone hold hands and sing Kumbaya. But it's not a Christian thing, Marx figured this out much more concretely. Like, he thought about the actual economic and political consequences of it.
And, I don't know, maybe it could work. But I think it's important we're all on the same page about what we're asking for.
Nobody would ever advocate against themselves - that's self-destructive. So, following the golden rule, competition is immoral. You shouldn't advocate against others, because you wouldn't do it to yourself.
More concretely, when you compete you are trying to take money away from other people and give it to yourself. Right? Because a customer could go to them - but you want the customer to go to you. So you get 5 bucks your competitor wouldn't have.
What we're noticing here is one of two things: either the golden rule is not at all a rule, and we have to make exceptions, or capitalism at a conceptual level is immoral.
One of these two has to be true, no way around it. Personally, I suspect Jesus would never allow capitalism. He would say everyone should share, so everyone can be prosperous.
Again... sounds like communism to me.
The Bible explicitly states that judgment is immoral, and is the sole duty of God. If someone is committing a sin, it is not your job to fix them of that sin - and actually by doing so, you yourself are sinning.
If your competitor is lazy, the moral choice is to do nothing, and let God handle it. You do not know what is or is not a sin, because you are not the arbiter of morality - God is. Casting judgement on your competitor is sinful.
Really, no matter how you cut it, I think it's obvious Jesus Christ was a communist. He would absolutely not be happy with capitalism. Are we helping other's out of the goodness of our heart? No. Are we giving to the community? No.
In an ideal world where everyone follows the golden rule, the only outcome could possibly be communism. And, there would never be any problems, ever. Because nobody would be greedy - there would be no grounds for capitalism to even form. A revolution could not occur.
There is no such thing.
Why is slavery wrong? Does human life have no innate (non-relative, not bestowed) dignity, in your view?
When judges refer (as they frequently do) to uncodified notions of "fair play" or "good faith and fair dealing," what are they basing those notions on? Is it not a continuation of the ancient Natural Law inclination towards promise-keeping, reflected in many human societies as the oath-breaking taboo?
The rule of law is one of the greatest achievements of western society and a major reason for the west's global dominance.
True, it was always imperfect due to the realpolitik of power. But that doesn't change the fact that the very idea of rule of law is in opposition to rule of power.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Very few people download(ed?) movies or music with the intent to distribute it. They downloaded it because they wanted to consume the media.
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.
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?
So the problem regarding AI is more nuanced and complicated than the plain copyright-question of piracy. It's more akin to cases of plagiarism, which go case by case.
There at least two documented cases of the major AI companies downloading millions of books of torrents. Anthropic is in litigation about it right now, meta was in the news about it. I would be surprised if it's not all of them.
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.
Obviously that was a bridge too far for people, and they stopped supporting even the sensible reforms the party was advocating for.
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.
Well, the Ministry of Truth is working on it, at least.