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Not surprising, but calling it "theft" only makes sense within the IP paradigm (we might do better without IP)
One can quickly get philosophical here ("what is ownership?"), but IMO IP theft is as real as theft of a possession, insofar as both have value that the original owner has now been deprived of.
News sites et al. provide content. Evidently that content, despite being intangible, has value to the people who consume it. The value LLMs are able to provide comes directly from the data they scrape, which they can now monetize.
I basically don't see how this is different from taking an apple from someone and selling it to someone else.
The other guy still has the apple.
There's deprivation of future value and deprivation of present value. The owner can continue to sell a digital apple, but it's not clear to me that "theft" inherently deprives the owner of future value. For example, I could steal your car for a night of joyriding and return it unharmed the next day. You might reasonably say that a theft occurred even though you retain the car afterwards. Note that I'm aware this example isn't perfectly analogous to digital goods.
Theres neither with piracy.
Like you have to assume that the lack of the piracy would lead to an actual sale. Which isnt the case at all.
Turn your apple metaphor around.
You grow an apple. You plant the seeds and scare off pests for like 12 years and then harvest your first apple.
Apples are scarce resources. You are very much entitled to compensation when selling the apple.
However, despite all the labor, if you could magically copy the apple, feeding the entire human race an infinite amount of apples forever, you would be pretty much morally obligated to do it. Like you wouldnt be faulted for pursuing the value of your labor once, but the idea that you would restrict the flow of apples, arbitrarily, just to try and get the value of your labor for each of an infinite amount of apples is absurd. To further imply that someone was stealing if they stole a copied apple is laughable. Really, any of your infinite apples that rots away in storage rather than finding its way to a hungry person is stealing from the hungry person.
What matters, is scarcity. Non scarce resources really shouldnt follow the same rules as scarce ones.
To add to this in some other direction, I have often thought that the people who have been "stolen" from... should just "get even" by making use of the LLM for their own profit in some way
They helped build an incredible tool that they should benefit from, so go ahead and reap the benefits, right?
Even if one believes that piracy on an individual level isn't the big deal that has been made of it, a large business doing it on a massive scale with the goal of destroying others' ability to continue to meaningfully subsist and produce new things is a completely different matter.
There's a world of difference between someone downloading a book and a company basically burning down the entire publishing industry and making writing as a profession increasingly non-viable. The latter should be approached in the context of antitrust (leveraging a dominant position to knock over unrelated markets) and racketeering.
IP protections are a critical foundation that ensures the software engineering profession is a profitable one. I prefer to live in a world in which I can use my skills to feed my family, thanks.
So they do know exactly what they’re doing.
Unfortunately, the Trump admin putting its thumb on the scale in favor of OpenAI makes it hard to imagine a positive outcome for the NYT and plaintiffs in this case. Despite the "the largest theft of labor in human history" according to Brent Hecht in the documents.
What's next for labor? What can we organize around politically in this new world? UBI or forcing the labs to open source everything?