this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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This line of attack against LLMs seems just foolish. The data was put into the public for public consumption. There is no right to control whether the data is used to train something; that's just something people are making up.
Google and the others have been indexing all the public content on the web for years and nobody complained about search engines “stealing” public data to make the web more usable. Turn it into a chat bot and suddenly it’s some heinous crime against humanity.
They did complain a bit when google started pulling the answers to queries out of the sources and displaying them directly in the search results, which is probably what they're concerned with now-- google (et al) is no longer driving traffic to the sites, so the benefit to the sites is no longer there.
However, this still does not magically make it illegal. Intellectual Property laws have, imo, always been of dubious value to society-- especially in the last 100 years or so-- and we shouldn't just roll over when rightsholders make up a new "right" they think they should have.
IP laws are of incredible value, and the idea is sound. The point was not to lock IP up, but actually to force it to be public instead of secret.
Imagine you publish an open source program. Companies have to pay you to use it for seven years, and after that it's public. The system is easy, requires no lawyers, and just generally works. People are rewarded for their contributions and free access to the ideas of others is preserved.
Disney, r&d labs, and the other fucks turned it into a way to suppress free use and extended the time range on these things to the degree that they are worthless while shitty court systems with hideous expense and unfair advantages to large companies annihilated the ability of the little guy to profit.
Meanwhile nations like China ignore them entirely, making parents fucking worthless because there fact they are public knowledge means that China just steals them and runs away laughing.
Make patents worth a damn again. Cut China out of our trade system. Fix the legal imbalances that fuck us over at the benefit of big companies, and restrict patent terms to a reasonable length.
I understand their rationale. I don't think there was ever a time in history where it worked in practice.
FWIW, there was a complaint about Google Books
(long ago resolved). Historical interest only.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc.