cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/41302017
The SoA is organising a day of protest against Meta following revelations of pirated books being used to train their large language models
On Thursday 20 March, The Atlantic broke the story of how Meta has used the Library Genesis (LIbGen) dataset, which is full of pirated material, to develop their AI systems.
The revelations detailed by The Atlantic come against the background of the recent government consultation into Artificial Intelligence (AI) and copyright and the #MakeItFair campaign which sees the UK creative industries fighting back against the proposed changes to copyright law, which would favour multinational tech companies, but irremediably damage the creative industries.
Piracy is not theft.
Let's be honest here, if the "product" someone sell it's data (video, audio, text, programs, ecc...) and you copy it without giving the creator a cent, that's pretty much theft. ALSO>>> Piracy itself it's not the issue. That's something that everyone (me included) do. And to some extent it's free advertising to the creator of the work, expanding by many times the market for his creations. Also OLD CONTENT's "piracy" it's basically a necessity for the digital preservation of many piece of media art.
BUT
AI training it's different. Without control it will eat up the whole market with cheap knockoffs and enshittificate everything.
No it is absolutely not theft. It is not theft by law. (There's a reason why we have both "theft" and "infringement" in the lawbooks: they're different things!) It is not theft morally. (Theft removes the owner's ability to use something. Infringement does not. Infringement is a lesser moral crime if it is a crime at all.)
Please do not fall into the trap the IP holders like to lay by equating theft and infringement in your mind. You can have your opinions on whether infringement is bad or not (and the facts are … complicated with both sides being largely full of shit on this), but it is a matter of fact that theft and infringement are entirely different things.
Use the right term for the offence. Don't let IP holders' deliberate conflation to confuse the issue get to you.
Commercial/state-enforced AI crawlers overburdening services and forcing admins to increase cost and time spent dealing with these DDoS attacks is much closer to theft than the piracy itself. Piracy doesn't make people lose money, AI crawlers do.
If I host a website for the general public, I'm not paying money for 200 foreign AI crawlers to consume most of the bandwidth and CPU and leave legit users, whom I created the website for, with scraps. Even Wikipedia is feeling it.
Many AI crawlers are immoral for other reasons as well, especially when we are talking about companies (Meta, Google) or states (CCP) doing it who are known for corporating with intelligence/defense or are engaged in human rights abuses.
Turning this discussion to be about piracy is imo a distraction.
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Every person who says "piracy makes me lose money" is lying (or at least profoundly confused about how "income" works).
Crawlers take up actual assets (bandwidth and time) that actually take money from your pocket. Piracy may or may not reduce your potential (key word!) income.
One of those two is legitimately a property crime.
I mean what Meta did hardly counts as piracy imo. They used the authors’ works without their permission to train their ai for profit. There’s a big difference between that and individuals pirating books to read and maybe making those books more accessible to others for free