Charlie StrossIf your corporation's business model relies on lawbreaking, your corporation has no legal legitimacy.
We don't let narcotic cartels and trafficking rings list themselves on the stock exchange: why should OpenAI or Facebook be any different?
If your corporation's business model relies on lawbreaking, your corporation has no legal legitimacy.
We don't let narcotic cartels and trafficking rings list themselves on the stock exchange: why should OpenAI or Facebook be any different?
If your corporation's business model relies on lawbreaking, your corporation has no legal legitimacy.
We don't let narcotic cartels and trafficking rings list themselves on the stock exchange: why should OpenAI or Facebook be any different?
@jabgoe2089 100 % the same feeling
the powerful V powerless
@cstross They're not even willing to ask permission, imagine asking them retribution for one's work.
#eattherich to the last one!
@cstross "The former Meta executive"?
It's nice to see that his status as corporate quisling has already overshone his leadership of a major political party & deputy premiership.
@cstross
Treason doth never prosper: what ’s the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.
- John Harrington
I guess we are going to find out if the same applies to lawlessness.
As for your second assertion, I give you Purdue Pharma (or any of the cryptocurrency scams, but I repeat myself)
My local Jeweller refuses to hand me bags of diamonds.
These woke monsters are killing my diamond selling industry!
@cstross This argument is a pattern I've seen repeatedly in the past years. “We can't make profit without collecting huge amounts of personal data about everyone who visits our website!” or “You cannot expect us to secure our software [that handles medical data] before we go live! That inhibits innovation! We'd go broke”.
If your business model does not work without infringing someone's rights, it's not a business model. It's criminal activity.
1/2
@cstross it seems to me that there is a very simple choice. Kill AI by enforcing existing copyright laws, or take the long way around by letting AI trash copyright laws thereby killing all the creative industries AI needs to steal content from, thereby slowly starving the AI industries of the content they need to improve.
One choice at least leaves us with something valuable. The other will just take longer.
@ErikJonker @cstross the choice the government has is binary. Enforce copyright laws, or carve out an exception.
The consequences are not so binary. I don't actually think enforcing copyright will kill the AI industry. It'll reduce the amount of profit, certainly, but that's hardly an existential threat. On the other hand, I do think letting AI firms get away with ignoring copyright is going to be devastating to the creative industries, and in the long term also AI training.
@light @ErikJonker @cstross like not making it available in any readable form.
Keeping private information private is something that is done currently. Granted, not very well given the prevalence of ransomware with data extraction.
@cstross (I must show restraint. Oops! I failed...)
I'll hit it with a simple stick: Let's not allow 'industry' to do bad things.
If we can imagine a better world without those industries, then let's have that world.
Let's not preserve the bad ones for purposes of continuity. Or more directly, let's demolish the empires created using systems of exploitation, and create better.
They already did throw a shit fit over deepseek: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/29/technology/openai-deepseek-data-harvest.html
@cstross But ... tobacco and alcohol businesses are absolutely on the stock exchange.
It's all about power.
@MelvilleSpence That place you mentioned is in observable distance? Then it's not far enough away, yes.
@cstross
Kill it already then!
Mafiosis are also "industrialists", making our lives miserable by the minute ignoring rules we are bound to execute without question!
When did we - by which I mean people in general - accept that the proliferation of bullshit engines is any type of 'industry'? The end result is never going to be anything other than a shrug at all the wasted time, money, water and other resources which could've been used to solve problems, but instead went to increasing the number of jets per-capita amongst the already morbidly wealthy. That's not an industry, it doesn't produce anything in the end. That's a shell game.
@cstross copyright doesn't give you total control over your creative work.
under US and Canadian law, there are "fair use" exceptions, and "being transformative" is one of those, meaning, no consent of the original author is required. And as far as I know, most copyright lawyers expect "training an AI" as transformative.
So, artists are actually demanding a change to the law in free use, while the drug cartels are breaking law that already exists.
@cstross the first point is irrelevant, the fact that the end user can't copyright the work, has no bearing on whether the creation of the tool broke any laws.
to the second point, I'm not in the US either, and in my country of residence it is also more restrictive, but the corporations are there, so how one would litigate it internationally is interesting, but kinda ruins the drug cartel analogy (like you want to go after american weed shops because weed in the UK is illegal?)
@cstross so I guess if one could prove that OpenAI and Facebook did use torrent and did seed whatever they torrented, that would be interesting.
The international aspects are also interesting from a nerdy point of view, I'm curious how people litigate IP laws in the age of the internet when you can host content from anywhere to everywhere.
Because in the '80s, in the Eastern Bloc, you were allowed to infringe on patents even from the West, but not on patents from the USSR 😂
@cstross 100% off-topic, but when I was working in a pharma company back in my home country, people told me how when in 1990, the socialist economic system was switched to capitalism and the government became democratic, there were multiple processes that had to be re-engineered because they were a 100% copy of western patents, and later they had to prove that they don't use that old process anymore in court to be allowed to sell in western countries.
@nicemicro
> And as far as I know, most copyright lawyers expect "training an AI" as transformative.
Can you back up this claim?
I was under the impression that the debate on whether AI training falls under "fair use" hasn't reached a consesus yet.
@cstross @yaarur yes, it is true, and I have not seen any real legal analysis W.r.t. to UK or Canada law, so I can't comment on that.
But if you published your work on a platform in America, and it was used to train an AI by a company seated in the USA, then I doubt that the British law will have much relevance in the case, as the US based AI company might argue, that by "exporting" your work to the states, it is governed by laws there.
but I'm not a lawyer, so I have no idea if this stands.
@cstross @yaarur last time I checked, downloading from pirate websites in good faith is not illegal. Sharing pirated stuff on websites is. This is why copyright trolls will upload their bait to torrent sites, because they can only have a legal case against you if you start seeding back the (i.e. distributing) the stuff you downloaded.
If you (or your publisher) end up suing them, I wish you good luck, and please let us know, because I'm honestly curious how such a case would be litigated.
@yaarur @cstross Sure, it is not a consensus, the one I read in detail was the one commissioned by the Free Software Foundation to analyze the legality of Microsoft's Copiot on Github.
Maybe saying "most" is not warranted, but I have not read or heard any serious analysis by actual lawyers which said "not fair use", but this just might be based on bias.
In this write-up, section "B" has the Fair Use part.
@cstross Then kill the industry, Mr. Clegg.
Your choice, really, is if you want it to be killed metaphorically or if you want a public uprising to make it literal.
My new company is going to go out of business if the law forces me to get permission to go into people's homes without permission and take their property.
@cstross Conservatism.
According to #wilhoitslaw, conservatism consists only of a single principle:
There should be an in-group which the law protects but does not bind, alongside an out-group which the law binds but does not protect.
There is no modernity, no enlightenment, no rule of law. It’s the old divine right of kings, unchanged by centuries.
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