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Comment by tcp_handshaker | Hacker News Reader

What about stealing 12 million books of copyrighted human culture, at massive scale, and then enclosing the value created inside proprietary, investor-backed systems? Something wrong with that?

What happens if you go tomorrow, downtown San Francisco, and leave a bookstore with one book without paying?

   "Behind every great fortune there is a crime"
         - Honoré de Balzac

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> What about stealing 12 million books

Who's missing the books? 12 million books is a rather large warehouse!

I thought HN was in the "information wants to be free" camp...

HN isn't a person and "information" doesn't have anything resembling desires

I think there might be a difference between “I’m violating copyright law to enjoy a work of art” and “I’m violating copyright law on a global, species-wide scale to create a trillion dollar company and enrich myself.” Maybe you can argue the former is wrong but there’s no way it’s equivalent to the latter.

Those books are not free for us, aren't they? This argument would meant one iota sense if the outcome was free information or free access to books.

Instead, overall outcome is more centralization, formerly accessible resources of information hard to find and starved.

> Those books are not free for us, aren't they?

The library card is really cheap tho.

haha, thanks for my daily.

LLM weights deserve to be free

I thought information wanted to be expensive because the right information at the right time can change your life...

> enclosing the value created inside proprietary, investor-backed systems

What do you think copyright does. Human culture is owned by humanity, not Disney or the New York Times.

It creates an incentive to create new things and share it with the world, duh.

Do you ask the same question about why we patent drugs?

Walt Disney died 60 years ago. We don't need to incentivize him to do anything.

Are you arguing that copyright lasts too long or that copyright shouldn't exist?

Your prior comment, "human culture is owned by humanity", sure sounds like the latter.

I think copyright is a valid incentive.

I don't think reading books (whether by human or by machine) is copyright infringement.

I think that attaining books that are still under copyright by downloading a pirate torrent is wrong.

I think a machine reading those books by borrowing them from a public library is fine.

I think copyright holders restricting their books from being in a public library is just as wrong as downloading a pirated copy.

I think deliberately reproducing a copyrighted book is wrong, but the infringement is by the person who did that, not by the person who built a tool which can incidentally be used for that.

Even though the founders of OpenAI are not exactly someone you'd root for, comparisons to theft are silly.

By that token it would be illegal to go into a library, read a book, and actually remember what was in it. Except in this case the reader is a robot.

LLMs are such a fundamentally different thing that existing laws don't really make sense. Wait! Put the pitchfork down! I know, I know, stealing is stealing, and OpenAI founders are slimy. But what about derivative works? Why is a human making a hip-hop track allowed to sample, and a robot is not? Again, LLMs are such a fundamentally different thing that existing laws don't really make sense.

It's actually surprising in retrospect that nobody did this sooner. Even back in the 80s books about computers would gush about how a computer has enough memory to store an entire library's worth of books. It's just that someone finally figured out how to put an index on it.

Where I agree: given that this is basically the sum of all humanity's knowledge, the company should have been a non-profit. It was a non-profit. And then greed won.

I think you make a good point but the use of samples in hip hop doesn’t support it; those samples need to be licensed.

This is very much untrue, and the debate about exactly how much sampling constitutes fair use has gone one for many years and court cases.

There are a lot of things that are fine individually that are extremely problematic at scale. Like "reading a book" vs "ingesting all the books and art that ever existed into a plagiarism machine"

If they illegally pirated books, i.e. downloading pdfs. thats illegal and piracy by no other name. If any of us do it, it's called pirating, why are you being disingenuous and saying it's not theft when a company does it?

Oh and by the way, their employee got murdered who was testified to speak at a hearing about copyright.

and that murderee's mom is publically resentful against and tweets anti-sam Altman content regularly. It tells me that founder Altman has clearly not demonstrated proper empathy, sympathy or repaired what should be an emotional easy case of delivering to the mom whatever she needs for her peace (or maybe he's actually guilty of complicit in crimes).

Learning is not theft.

That will not hold on court.

Won't somebody please think of the copyright holders!?

"This material is valuable enough for me to steal, but not valuable enough to care about there being an incentive to create in the first place!"

Totally makes sense /s

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