Just gonna say... Aaron Swartz faced years of prison time and ultimately decided to take his own life... for downloading scientific journal articles... to share freely with the world (aka not even profiting from it).
But a multi-billion dollar corporation downloading millions of copyrighted creative works so that they can reshape the entire labor market by training a new type of artificial intelligence model on that data set? Meh, sounds like Silicon Valley disruption, give the man a medal!
One man illegally downloading copyrighted material is a crime. Multinational corporations illegally downloading copyrighted material is the only remaining growth area in the US economy and vital to national security.
It's absolutely unthinkable that Meta and friends aren't still using a corpus containing the entirety of every book they can obtain. There is no way they're building frontier LLMs without it. You can be sure as hell the Chinese are doing it, so the US corps are absolutely still doing it.
Aaron Swartz was treated unjustly because copyright sucks. we should oppose such laws and treatment, not wield them as retributive tools against our opponents
it is wrong to advocate for everyone to be treated equally unjustly. better to advocate for the removal of the bad laws/structures
Social norms and laws influence each other but often it is norms that change first, then laws change.
Once a technology becomes massively useful and socially normalized, it is our legal systems that adapt around the new reality.
You can make the bet copyright laws won't change in the future but it's one you'd likely lose.
For one, laws would probably be weakened to allow/look the other way for "wanton" training with copyrighted works for one simple reason: governments are unlikely to go for strict copyright maximalism because that would permanently cripple domestic AI development.
> not wield them as retributive tools against our opponents
No, we should apply them equally to Mark Fucking Zuckerberg (which is decidedly not retributive, however much you want to make an emotional appeal) until such time as they are repealed as laws. It’s not really that complicated.
But a multi-billion dollar corporation downloading millions of copyrighted creative works so that they can reshape the entire labor market by training a new type of artificial intelligence model on that data set? Meh, sounds like Silicon Valley disruption, give the man a medal!