• schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business
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    5 months ago

    And this is why I don’t have ANY moral qualms about pirating shit: they’d do it to us in a heartbeat if there was a buck to be made.

  • kibiz0r@midwest.social
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    5 months ago

    Pirating Windows for your own personal, private use, which will never directly make you a single dollar: HIGHLY ILLEGAL

    Scraping your creative works so they can make billions by selling automated processes that compete against your work: Perfectly fine and normal!

    • experbia@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      bunch of fuckin art pirates. crying about software piracy while they have their own bots pirating everyone’s art.

      • kibiz0r@midwest.social
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        5 months ago

        It’s not even piracy though. I never saw anyone torrent Windows_XP_Home_Cracked.iso and go “Hey guys, check out this operating system I made!”

    • yesman@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Do people still pirate Windows? You can download the iso directly from Microsoft’s website and you don’t need a registration key anymore.

      • Scrollone@feddit.it
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        5 months ago

        You do need a registration key, but now it’s tied to the hardware so it activates as soon as you connect to the network, no need to actually type the registration key.

        • Balder@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          They’re saying Windows will lock away some customization, but you don’t need a key to use it nowadays.

  • CriticalMiss@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Sure bud, pirating some Microsoft Studio video games and windows ISOs right now. What? I found them on the open web!

  • snekerpimp@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    So if I see it on the “open web”, I’m free to use it however I please? Oh, I get thrown in jail and everything I own taken away.

    If companies are people per “citizens united”, why doesn’t the same apply to them?

    • Ænima@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      And if a company makes a negligent decision, which kills a million people over time, why is no one being put on death row? They can and do have it both ways, but I can still wish for a just world where if companies are people, they can be put to death for mass casualties caused by their decisions.

    • Zacryon@lemmy.wtf
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      5 months ago

      Yes. Exactly. Although there isn’t much left worth stealing from Microsoft.

      (This was a low-key “Microsoft bad, Linux supreme”, comment.)

      (And now it’s no longer low-key.)

      (I’m using a touch-screen keyboard for writing this. And yet I can’t open my doors using the keyboard. Ever wondered why that is?)

      (Correct, because I forgot my keys at home and didn’t put them on my keyboard.)

      (Now it’s just a –board.)

      (Oral diarrhea over. Go get some guhd Linux!)

      • glitchdx@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        This is the year of the linux desktop!

        By our powers combined, we’ll exceed 2% market share!

        (no actually, please support linux. I just switched like a month ago and while it’s so much better than windows there are so many petty annoyances that will never get resolved unless more people bitch about it and that kind of support needs more users)

  • profdc9@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    In other news: we have lawyers to protect our copyrights, you don’t. Suck it.

    • grrgyle@slrpnk.net
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      5 months ago

      No you have to run them through an elaborate model first, then it’s totally legit to use someone else’s literal words as if they were your own

        • grrgyle@slrpnk.net
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          5 months ago

          I was actually describing a piece of software, which is not considered a human being, and can in fact be treated differently without any legal or philosophical confusion

    • cmhe@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      “Copying is theft” is the argument of corporations for ages, but if they want our data and information, to integrate into their business, then, suddenly they have the rights to it.

      If copying is not theft, then we have the rights to copy their software and AI models, as well, since it is available on the open web.

      They got themselves into quite a contradiction.

      • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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        5 months ago

        You realize that half of Lemmy is tying themselves in inconsistent logical knots trying to escape the reverse conundrum?

        Copying isn’t stealing and never was. Our IP system that artificially restricts information has never made sense in the digital age, and yet now everyone is on here cheering copyright on.

      • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        If copying is not theft, then we have the rights to copy their software

        No we don’t, copying copyrighted material is copyright infringement. Which is illegal. that does not make it theft though.
        Oversimplifying the issue makes for an uninformed debate.

    • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Issue is power imbalance.

      There’s a clear difference between a guy in his basement on his personal computer sampling music the original musicians almost never seen a single penny from, and a megacorp trying to drive out creative professionals from the industry in the hopes they can then proceed to hike up the prices to use their generative AI software.

    • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Yeah, I’m not a fan of AI but I’m generally of the view that anything posted on the internet, visible without a login, is fair game for indexing a search engine, snapshotting a backup (like the internet archive’s Wayback Machine), or running user extensions on (including ad blockers). Is training an AI model all that different?

      • Evotech@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        You can’t be for piracy but against LLMs fair the same reason

        And I think most of the people on Lemmy are for piracy,

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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          5 months ago

          I’m not in favor of piracy or LLMs. I’m also not a fan of copyright as it exists today (I think we should go back to the 1790 US definition of copyright).

          I think a lot of people here on lemmy who are “in favor of piracy” just hate our current copyright system, and that’s quite understandable and I totally agree with them. Having a work protected for your entire lifetime sucks.

          • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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            5 months ago

            The problem with copyright has nothing to do with terms limits. Those exacerbate the problem, but the fundamental problem with copyright and IP law is that it is a system of artificial scarcity where there is no need for one.

            Rather than reward creators when their information is used, we hamfistedly try and prevent others from using that information so that people have to pay them to use it sometimes.

            Capitalism is flat out the wrong system for distributing digital information, because as soon as information is digitized it is effectively infinitely abundant which sends its value to $0.

            • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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              5 months ago

              Copyright is not a capitalist idea, it’s collectivist. See copyright in the Soviet Union, the initial bill of which was passed in 1925, right near the start of the USSR.

              A pure capitalist system would have no copyright, and works would instead be protected through exclusivity (I.e. paywalls) and DRM. Copyright is intended to promote sharing by providing a period of exclusivity (temporary monopoly on a work). Whether it achieves those goals is certainly up for debate.

              Long terms go against any benefit to society that copyright might have. I think it does have a benefit, but that benefit is pretty limited and should probably only last 10-15 years. I think eliminating copyright entirely would leave most people worse off and probably mostly benefit large orgs that can afford expensive DRM schemes in much the same way that our current copyright duration disproportionately benefits large orgs.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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        5 months ago

        Yes, it kind of is. A search engine just looks for keywords and links, and that’s all it retains after crawling a site. It’s not producing any derivative works, it’s merely looking up an index of keywords to find matches.

        An LLM can essentially reproduce a work, and the whole point is to generate derivative works. So by its very nature, it runs into copyright issues. Whether a particular generated result violates copyright depends on the license of the works it’s based on and how much of those works it uses. So it’s complicated, but there’s very much a copyright argument there.

        • Halosheep@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          My brain also takes information and creates derivative works from it.

          Shit, am I also a data thief?

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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            5 months ago

            That depends, do you copy verbatim? Or do you process and understand concepts, and then create new works based on that understanding? If you copy verbatim, that’s plagiarism and you’re a thief. If you create your own answer, it’s not.

            Current AI doesn’t actually “understand” anything, and “learning” is just grabbing input data. If you ask it a question, it’s not understanding anything, it just matches search terms to the part of the training data that matches, and regurgitates a mix of it, and usually omits the sources. That’s it.

            It’s a tricky line in journalism since so much of it is borrowed, and it’s likewise tricky w/ AI, but the main difference IMO is attribution, good journalists cite sources, AI rarely does.

        • TheRealKuni@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          An LLM can essentially reproduce a work, and the whole point is to generate derivative works. So by its very nature, it runs into copyright issues.

          Derivative works are not copyright infringement. If LLMs are spitting out exact copies, or near-enough-to-exact copies, that’s one thing. But as you said, the whole point is to generate derivative works.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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            5 months ago

            Derivative works are not copyright infringement

            They absolutely are, unless it’s covered by “fair use.” A “derivative work” doesn’t mean you created something that’s inspired by a work, but that you’ve modified the the work and then distributed the modified version.

      • petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        5 months ago

        None of those things replace that content, though.

        Look, I dunno if this is legally a copyrights issue, but as a society, I think a lot of people have decided they’re willing to yield to social media and search engine indexers, but not to AI training, you know? The same way I might consent to eating a mango but not a banana.

      • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        5 months ago

        Is it that or is it that the laws are selectively applied on little guys and ignored once you make enough money? It certainly looks that way. Once you’ve achieved a level of “fuck you money” it doesn’t matter how unscrupulously you got there. I’m not sure letting the big guys get away with it while little guys still get fucked over is as big of a win as you think it is?


        Examples:

        The Pirate Bay: Only made enough money to run the site and keep the admins living a middle class lifestyle.

        VERDICT: Bad, wrong, and evil. Must be put in jail.

        OpenAI: Claims to be non-profit, then spins off for-profit wing. Makes a mint in a deal with Microsoft.

        VERDICT: Only the goodest of good people and we must allow them to continue doing so.


        The IP laws are stupid but letting fucking rich twats get away with it while regular people will still get fucked by the same rules is kind of a fucking stupid ass hill to die on.

        But sure, if we allow the giant companies to do it, SOMEHOW the same rules will “trickle down” to regular people. I think I’ve heard that story before… No, they only make exceptions for people who can basically print money. They’ll still fuck you and me six ways to Sunday for the same.

        I mean, the guys who ran Jetflicks, a pirate streaming site, are being hit with potentially 48 year sentences. Longer than a lot of way more serious fucking crimes. I’ve literally seen murderers get half that.

        But yeah, somehow, the same rules will end up being applied to us? My ass. They’re literally jailing people for it right now. If that wasn’t the case, maybe this argument would have legs.

        But AI companies? Totes okay, bro.

        • Grimy@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          The laws are currently the same for everyone when it comes to what you can use to train an AI with. I, as an individual, can use whatever public facing data I wish to build or fine tune AI models, same as Microsoft.

          If we make copyright laws even stronger, the only one getting locked out of the game are the little guys. Microsoft, google and company can afford to pay ridiculous prices for datasets. What they don’t own mainly comes from aggregators like Reddit, Getty, Instagram and Stack.

          Boosting copyright laws essentially kill all legal forms of open source AI. It would force the open source scene to go underground as a pirate network and lead to the scenario you mentioned.

        • Womble@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Yes, it is a travesty that people are being hounded for sharing information, but the solution to that isn’t to lock up information tighter by restricting access to the open web and saying if you download something we put up to be freely accessed and then use it in a way we don’t like you owe us.

          The solution to bad laws being applied unevenly isn’t to apply the bad laws to everyone equally, its to get rid of the bad laws.

    • ayaya@lemdro.id
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      5 months ago

      If the model isn’t overfitted it’s also not even copying. By their nature LLMs are transformative which is the whole point of fair use.

      • profdc9@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        So I have a LLM read a book and paraphrase its contents, that’s not stealing?

        • ayaya@lemdro.id
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          5 months ago

          Again, even an exact copy is not stealing. It’s copyright infringement. Theft is a different crime.

          But paraphrasing is not copyright infringement either. It’s no different than Wikipedia having a synopsis for every single episode of a TV series. Telling someone about what a work contains for informational purposes is perfectly fine.

        • kureta@lemmy.ml
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          5 months ago

          copyright laws are broken. what seems ethical can be illegal and what seems unethical can be legal.

        • A_Very_Big_Fan@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          !Arthur Dent has his home demolished while humans simultaneously have Earth demolished by an alien race called Vogons, but him and Ford Prefect escape by hitchhiking onto the Vogon ship. They’re discovered and thrown into space, but miraculously saved by Ford’s relative (can’t remember how they’re related) and his ship The Heart of Gold, which is powerful but unpredictable. They wind up on a mythical planet due to that unpredictability, and learn that Earth was a designer planet created to calculate the ultimate answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. (The famous “42” thing). The whole crew escapes the planet and decides to go to The Restaurant at the End of The Universe to eat and watch the universe end.!<

          Have I just stolen The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and given it to you?

          • oo1@lemmings.world
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            5 months ago

            You’ve probably not infringed the copyright, only the court can decide though; if you were to be challenged by the rights holder.

            I think there are lots of factors in your defence:

            • you’re not selling it , your use is an example for education
            • I don’t think you’re reducing the market value for the original(s) in any way
            • you’ve not included substantial verbaitim sections of the original works , but I think you have used more than just facts and ideas (not sure though).

            But add in some more quotes, flesh it out, and then try to sell it . . . each step weakens the ‘fair use’ defence.

            This the the problem for the LLM, it can be used for many things, and if it has no filter or limit, then eventually the collective derived works might add up to commercial, substantial reuse, and might include enough to have copied a substantial portion of the original. Very hard to determine I’d think. Each individual use might be fair, but did the LLM itself go too far at some point?

            Copyright holder probably struggles to challenge the LLM on the basis of all the things infinite mokeys might use it for in future.

            • A_Very_Big_Fan@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              This the the problem for the LLM, it can be used for many things, and if it has no filter or limit

              I agree with pretty much everything before this but that particular comment was just talking about summaries, which imo is a lot more cut and dry. (SparkNotes, for example)

              An LLM by itself is unlimited and unfiltered, but it’s not impossible to limit one and sell it. For all the shit OpenAI deserves to get, I have to give them one thing, their copyright restriction system seems to be on par with YouTube. I paid for a month of it when GPT4 came out and tried my hardest to bypass it, but it won’t even give me copyrighted texts when the words are all replaced with synonyms or jumbled around.

              I think if someone’s offering their LLM as a service and has a system like that in place, they aren’t stealing any more than YouTube is stealing. Otherwise I agree that there’s a strong argument for copyright infringement.

  • orcrist@lemm.ee
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    5 months ago

    He spoke carelessly, but he didn’t exactly say what the author said he said. You can in fact do many things with it. Copyright doesn’t care what you do if you aren’t copying. That’s the definition of the word.

    • Todd Bonzalez@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      So I can pirate as many movies as I want as long as I’m only watching them?

      Let these rich guys keep talking for a sec. I can get behind this somewhat.

        • Todd Bonzalez@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          Copyright is a mental illness

          Well, I happen to have a great deal of respect for and routinely offer my support to those who suffer from mental illnesses, so maybe find a better way to say this that doesn’t denigrate disabled people.

      • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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        5 months ago

        No. It’s only illegal if you republish what you scrape. Absolutely nothing prevents any company from scraping the web and using that information internally.

      • orcrist@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        I think that depends how you write your web scraper. Of course the web scraper is going to load the page, just like your web browser does, which by all accounts is not an issue. What happens after the page is loaded depends on how the software is written.