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22 points by tanelpoder 4d ago 0 comments
PHP compile time generics: yay or nay? (thephp.foundation)
83 points by moebrowne 3d ago 48 comments
Theft is not fair use
42 bgwalter 75 8/11/2025, 6:55:37 AM jskfellows.stanford.edu ↗
Iconic images (mona lisa, tank man, widely reported news stories, styles like ghibli) would of course be incorporated in as styles. It doesn't refute fair use.
So, you can't say "draw this person in the mona lisa pose, in simpsons style" and then act surprised and shocked when the model does exactly that. That's not theft.
> The yellow circles highlight areas of similarity between the original photo and the AI-generated photo
What about the person in the middle, doing the throwing? It's exactly the same. Why don't they have a circle around them? Why highlight some lens flares & distorted faces when the actual subject is the same? Or was this some kind of image-to-image generation?
In which case, the following is not theft:
- Pirating anything that is digital video
- Pirating anything that is digital audio
- Pirating anything that is digital text
- Pirating any software
etc.
EDIT: For the proponents of "it is not theft", what's your stance on personal data being stolen ("accessed")? If someone can access your medical records, are you fine with that? They can do whatever they want with that?
England has a whole bunch of legislation to prohibit activities that are not theft because it turns out that sometimes we care about other things. TWOC is an example, "Taking Without Owners Consent", because it turns out that it's also very annoying to have people take your car and then drive it somewhere and abandon it for a laugh ("Joy riding"), compared to them say, stealing it to ship abroad, break into parts or just to set it on fire.
Insisting that it's all theft gets us in the same muddle as when we decide that holding up a protest sign is terrorism, or that a billion dollar bribe is speech.
The author is a photojournalist, not a lawyer, and not qualified to comment on copyright law beyond simply giving his personal opinion.
Right. It's the debunked, bad-faith argument that "piracy is theft" because the pirates would have bought a movie were it not for The Pirate Bay, to justify calculating monetary damages that are completely unmoored from reality. We shouldn’t let people revive this nonsense, even in the context of AI.
Otherwise, we maybe can agree that people who make something should be eligible for some kind of compensation to encourage them to continue making, for our shared benefit.
You can argue that Beyoncé and George Clooney and Stephen King are so rich already they don’t need the money anyway, but that omits how even these people had to make a career from the bottom up on the sole premise that their focus on their art (regardless of your opinion on it) will pay the bills.
So just saying piracy isn’t theft and thus isn’t a problem is a wholly undercooked answer to a difficult problem.
Imagine we discovered a way to generate almost unlimited energy for very cheap, then we told poor people if they want any they have to pay it at the same price per kilowatt hour as current energy or it's stealing. It would be morally wrong. Digital content is the same, current copyright laws are unethical.
I can see where you’re coming from on a philosophical level. On a practical level that’s just asking for malware, especially for software that’s been cracked. I would tell people the opposite.
What happens is you just copy and/or modify something. Kinda like duplicating money, it's not theft since you don't steal from anybody, no ownership or similar changes.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html.en
Now you’re getting it. Keep going, you’re almost there.
Yes. Some of us might even prefer to use a positive term such as “sharing information with your neighbor.”
If you spend months crafting something unique with your livelihood being based on then selling access to that creation ( whether it be music, software or prose ) and somebody copies it in a way that deprives you of a livelihood ( and replaces it with a revenue to the entity that copied it's ) - it's that theft of your income stream?
What?! How would that even happen? Unless you limit your definition of art to performing at salon events, that doesn't make much sense. Typically art is released into the world and at best the authors can get a bit of rent from the people who consume it (typically via a publisher), but they don't have any control over who the consumers would be.
I decide if I am going to go with a publisher, which publisher and what platforms.
What you label as "typically" has only been the case for the past ≈15 years.
Several reasons:
1) The cat is out of the bag, AI is a thing now. It's not going back in the bag. So, artists are going to have to adapt to that. And are already adapting.
2) AI affecting artists is not any different than photography wiping out the market for portrait painters. Or records wiping out the market for selling music in paper form so that professional musicians might reproduce that for an audience. Those things happened a long time ago of course and any copyright issues around that were resolved over time. Copyright law hasn't really changed much since before that happened. These are the same kind of questions that exists for AIs being obviously inspired by but not really perfectly copying songs, images, text, etc. And they have answers in many decades of case law. Judges are going to take all of that into account and are historically reluctant to introduce new interpretations.
3) AI companies are big enough to outright buy the larger copyright holders. That doesn't mean they will; but it suggests they might reach some settlement that doesn't involve pleading guilty in a court. In the end this is about money, not about principles. At least not for the parties paying the lawyers.
4) If a settlement doesn't happen, judges will be forced to look at existing cases to assess what is and isn't an infringement. And if you remove all the outrage and moralism from the equation (which judges tend to do), AI companies are simply not distributing copies of original works to anyone. They are using them, for sure. But it's distributing copies that gets you in trouble. Not using copies. That narrows it down to whether those copies, which are freely distributed on the internet, were obtained legally.
(Mitchell & Webb Sound - Identity Theft)
The difference is subtle, but potentially important. If the bank unfortunately gives money to someone else, that's their problem: I can say to the bank, I'm sorry you were the victim of fraud, but you still owe me my money. If I unfortunately "have my identity stolen", then that makes it seem like it's my problem -- the bank may say, we're sorry you "had your identity stolen" and thus lost your money, but that's not really our problem.
If I steal your ID card, then nothing really happens at all. I can spend years watching it, draw something on it, cut it in pieces, whatever.
The moment I start trying to impersonate you, then it becomes a problem for you.
If Bobby the metalhead downloads a copy of Enter the Sandman, then Metallica and brand doesn’t lose anything at all. If you were to make it industrial, then maybe we can talk about it.
This should be called "identity validation failure".
When scammers impersonate a company to steal your money it's no longer called identity theft.
Sadly these things are often decided by rhetoric in society, but then again, there's no actual debate if it's just throwing slogans.
Now some of the same rhetoric is used in the AI battle. The only question worth asking here is what's the social benefit, as human culture is by nature all commons and derivation. But in this case, the AI companies are also accumulating power, and LLMs are removing attribution which could be argued to discourage publishing new works more than piracy. A "pirate" may learn about you and later buy from you in different ways, a LLM user won't even know that you exist.
[1] Not even discussing how exaggerated these privileges are from what would be reasonable.
LLM could commit plagiarism if authorship of generated media was claimed for either the LLM or its creators.
That is, public funds, tribunals and lawmaking power, shouldn’t be used to protect a private interests.
Corollary: 1. DRM is ok. 2. If one cracks it, it’s ok too, 3. You gotta find other ways to conduct business than retaining information (licenses, movies, etc.) 4. For software companies, cloud is one of those ways, compared to licensing downloads, 5. Netflix is the cloud of the movies and you pay for earlier access to a shared experience that is synchronized with other friends who will watch the same thing, 5. Patents are another stupid attempt by the state to protect corporations against citizens.
The first example is the image: the AI has seen the famous photograph of the Ferguson riots, and (with 6 prompts?!) manages to get something fairly similar. But suppose a human had seen that photo, and then you asked that human to draw you a photo of the riots; and then continued prompting them to make it look similar. Is it really unrealistic that the human could generate something that looks as similar? Is the human themselves therefore inherently a violation of copyright?
The NYT article to begin with looks a bit more damning -- except that, it appears that they prompted the AI directly with the beginning of the article. My son, when a toddler, for a long time could recite nearly the full text of his favorite story books with minimal prompting -- does that mean he's inherently a violation of copyright? Because he can recite The Gruffalo almost verbatim when prompted, is he a walking violation of Julia Donaldson's copyright? What about people with photographic memory, that can recite long sections of books verbatim -- are they inherently violating copyright?
Now sure, in both cases, the output might be a violation of copyright, if it's clearly derived from it -- both for humans and for AI. But I don't think the fact that AI can be prompted to generate copyright-violating material is proof that the AI training itself has violated copyright, any more than the fact that a human can be prompted to generate copyright-violating material is proof that human training has violated copyright.
> But suppose a human [...]
A human doesn't ingest half of the web and simultaneously deal with millions of people.
We've be been through this times and times again. Justice didn't go after humans copying books by hand, it went after reprints of existing copyrighted material.
Music industry didn't go after people singing tunes in their kitchen, but after wide distribution networks.
Removing scale from the discussion leads to absurd conclusions.
1. The ability of an entity (human or AI) which can be prompted to produce copyright-infringing material.
2. Actually producing copyright-infringing material.
Sure, if OpenAI is actually producing copyright-infringing material at scale, unprompted, then that needs to be addressed. If a common way around NYT's paywall were to copy & paste the first few lines into ChatGPT and then read the rest of the article, then yes, that's a hole that needs to be filled. But that's with the production and dissemination, not the training.
Regarding scale, yes, there is a difference here, but it's more subtle than you think. There are probably millions of toddlers who can recite The Gruffalo nearly verbatim. However, each of those toddlers were trained individually. Similarly, there are probably thousands, maybe tens of thousands of artists who, when prompted, could generate an image that would be similar enough to the presented image to violate copyright. But again, each of those individuals were trained separately.
The difference that modern tech companies have is that they can train their systems once, and then duplicate the same training across millions of instances.
One potential argument to make here would be to say: Training with this material is fair use; but fair use or not, those weights are now a derivative work. You can use exactly one copy of those weights, but you can't copy those weights millions of times, any more than it would be fair use to distribute one copy of that image to everyone in the company. You need to either train millions of copies, or pay licensing fees.
I'm not sure I agree with that argument, but at least it seems to me to bring the actual issues into more clarity.
Not sure who "justice" is, but copyright owners most definitely did go after individuals copying even small excerpts of copyrighted material, in fact that is currently still going on in libraries:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/09/us-lib...
(yes, they explicitly made taking excerpts impossible and fought against any attempt to change that)
> Music industry didn't go after people singing tunes in their kitchen
Again, yes they did. I'm not aware of kitchen incidents, but this happened:
https://stanforddaily.com/2020/08/04/warner-chappell-music-s...
Legal copyright claims (not the YouTube kind) need to justify harm to the original piece.
> libraries
Setting aside my opinion on the situation of public libraries, I wouldn't call libraries "humans copying books by hand"
> this happened: [...]
"This article is purely satirical and fictitious. "
Yes, be damned and fuck them. And stop pursuing individuals too.
You can have omniscient AI without feeding all of the data into it.
1. OpenAI must be fined according to law.
2. Piracy is decriminalized.
Failing to do neither is an admission that the US has become a corporatocracy. That is, a form of oligarchy where the rule of law is not by a majority or plurality of people, but by a number or corporations you can count with one hand.
Not sure it really matters unless there’s something that will or can be done about it.
As much as I think that what these companies is doing has moral and legal issues, reframing copyright violations as "theft" will cut both ways and make the arguments for open culture more difficult.
Do we need to limit scraping and learning to only free publicly available data? Therefore is a Reuters photo still not publicly available for learning style of photo, composition, lighting, even with a watermark. What you pay for is the license to reproduce the image, you can still look at them beforehand.
There is also the nonconsensual aspect of it. I make things for humans. Just because it’s free for humans does not mean it’s free to be used by corporations, especially they use my work to kill the economics of my industry. It feels like a parasitic relationship.
Since it changes incentives and mechanics of the creativity market so much it forces us to reassess current approaches. I can't agree that mechanism behind this tech and the approach to IP is of any consequence. We don't make laws, norms and judgements for the sake of our tools.
It's ok to say that we're not ready to arrange things in a proper way yet, without letting everything slide on some arbitrary technicality.
Why should "AI" companies be allowed more than I?
Thank you!
So ridiculous.
The whole idea of copyright is wrong. Anything that is popular and therefore successful, owes that to the crowd that made it popular. The crowd has is what gives it the interest.
I personally wouldn't even be averse to some sort period of copyright, say 2 years, with the possibility to extend to say 5, but these things are common.
This is machinery that can not suggest experimental jazz- unless it is already mainstream. It can not go to the fringes and shove the species towards new and wild discoveries.
I find it hilarious though, that it may destroy the cultural behemoths with their IPs by mashUp. Death by a million beatles-clone songs, yesterday came suddenly indeed. And after all that is sad and done for- some of us, might even venture out to the fringe and find the weird and wild parts again.
The more it changes, the more it stays the same.
As a sibling commenter said in fewer words: the models will still consume the fringe content and will be able to regurgitate it given the right prompt; suggesting experimental jazz or whatever other fringe art pursuit the committed freaks have an itch for.
I'll still slowly progress may way through John Zorn's catalogue, and occasionally re-invigorate my appreciation for HR Giger's bleak works, and keep listening (and subscribing) to the local community radio station, and seeking out uncomfortable movies, safe in the knowledge that likely I'll be watching, listening, and appreciating them all in solitude.
I do not think that "culture" can be forced, it must be slowly, almost imperceptibly, absorbed.