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.
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.
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.
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.
> news site unhappy about their content being scraped
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.
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.
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.
> we might do better without IP
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.