You’re right, each of the 5 million books’ authors should agree to less payment for their work, to make the poor criminals feel better.
If I steal $100 from a thousand people and spend it all on hookers and blow, do I get out of paying that back because I don’t have the funds? Should the victims agree to get $20 back instead because that’s more within my budget?
You think that 150,000 dollars, or roughly 180 weeks of full time pretax wages at 15$ an hour, is a reasonable fine for making a copy of one book which doe no material harm to the copyright holder?
No I don’t, but we’re not talking about a single copy of one book, and it is grovellingly insidious to imply that we are.
We are talking about a company taking the work of an author, of thousands of authors, and using it as the backbone of a machine that’s goal is to make those authors obsolete.
When the people who own the slop-machine are making millions of dollars off the back of stolen works, they can very much afford to pay those authors. If you can’t afford to run your business without STEALING, then your business is a pile of flaming shit that deserves to fail.
Except it isnt, because the judge dismissed that part of the suit, saying that people have complete right to digitise and train on works they have a legitimate copy of. So those damages are for making the unauthorised copy, per book.
And it is not STEALING as you put it, it is making an unauthorised copy, no one loses anything from a copy being made, if I STEAL your phone you no longer have that phone. I do find it sad how many people have drunk the capitalist IP maximalist stance and have somehow convinced themselves that advocating for Disney and the publishing cartel being allowed to dictate how people use works they have is somehow sticking up for the little guy
None of the above. Every professional in the world, including me, owes our careers to looking at examples of other people’s work and incorporating their work into our own work without paying a penny for it. Freely copying and imitating what we see around us has been a human norm for thousands of years - in a process known as “the spread of civilization”. Relatively recently it was demonized - for purely business reasons, not moral ones - by people who got rich selling copies of other people’s work and paying them a pittance known as a “royalty”. That little piece of bait on the hook has convinced a lot of people to put a black hat on behavior that had been considered normal forever. If angry modern enlightened justice warriors want to treat a business concept like a moral principle and get all sweaty about it, that’s fine with me, but I’m more of a traditionalist in that area.
Nobody who is mad at this situation thinks that taking inspiration, riffing on, or referencing other people’s work is the problem when a human being does it. When a person writes, there is intention behind it.
The issue is when a business, owned by those people you think ‘demonised’ inspiration, take the works of authors and mulch them into something they lovingly named “The Pile”, in order to create derivative slop off the backs of creatives.
When you, as a “professional”, ask AI to write you a novel, who is being inspired? Who is making the connections between themes? Who is carefully crafting the text to pay loving reference to another authors work? Not you. Not the algorithm that is guessing what word to shit out next based on math.
These businesses have tricked you into thinking that what they are doing is noble.
That’s 100% rationalization. Machines have never done anything with “inspiration”, and that’s never been a problem until now. You probably don’t insist that your food be hand-carried to you from a farm, or cooked over a fire you started by rubbing two sticks together. I think the mass reaction against AI is part of a larger pattern where people want to believe they’re crusading against evil without putting out the kind of effort it takes to fight any of the genuine evils in the world.
You’re right, each of the 5 million books’ authors should agree to less payment for their work, to make the poor criminals feel better.
If I steal $100 from a thousand people and spend it all on hookers and blow, do I get out of paying that back because I don’t have the funds? Should the victims agree to get $20 back instead because that’s more within my budget?
You think that 150,000 dollars, or roughly 180 weeks of full time pretax wages at 15$ an hour, is a reasonable fine for making a copy of one book which doe no material harm to the copyright holder?
No I don’t, but we’re not talking about a single copy of one book, and it is grovellingly insidious to imply that we are.
We are talking about a company taking the work of an author, of thousands of authors, and using it as the backbone of a machine that’s goal is to make those authors obsolete.
When the people who own the slop-machine are making millions of dollars off the back of stolen works, they can very much afford to pay those authors. If you can’t afford to run your business without STEALING, then your business is a pile of flaming shit that deserves to fail.
Except it isnt, because the judge dismissed that part of the suit, saying that people have complete right to digitise and train on works they have a legitimate copy of. So those damages are for making the unauthorised copy, per book.
And it is not STEALING as you put it, it is making an unauthorised copy, no one loses anything from a copy being made, if I STEAL your phone you no longer have that phone. I do find it sad how many people have drunk the capitalist IP maximalist stance and have somehow convinced themselves that advocating for Disney and the publishing cartel being allowed to dictate how people use works they have is somehow sticking up for the little guy
None of the above. Every professional in the world, including me, owes our careers to looking at examples of other people’s work and incorporating their work into our own work without paying a penny for it. Freely copying and imitating what we see around us has been a human norm for thousands of years - in a process known as “the spread of civilization”. Relatively recently it was demonized - for purely business reasons, not moral ones - by people who got rich selling copies of other people’s work and paying them a pittance known as a “royalty”. That little piece of bait on the hook has convinced a lot of people to put a black hat on behavior that had been considered normal forever. If angry modern enlightened justice warriors want to treat a business concept like a moral principle and get all sweaty about it, that’s fine with me, but I’m more of a traditionalist in that area.
Nobody who is mad at this situation thinks that taking inspiration, riffing on, or referencing other people’s work is the problem when a human being does it. When a person writes, there is intention behind it.
The issue is when a business, owned by those people you think ‘demonised’ inspiration, take the works of authors and mulch them into something they lovingly named “The Pile”, in order to create derivative slop off the backs of creatives.
When you, as a “professional”, ask AI to write you a novel, who is being inspired? Who is making the connections between themes? Who is carefully crafting the text to pay loving reference to another authors work? Not you. Not the algorithm that is guessing what word to shit out next based on math.
These businesses have tricked you into thinking that what they are doing is noble.
That’s 100% rationalization. Machines have never done anything with “inspiration”, and that’s never been a problem until now. You probably don’t insist that your food be hand-carried to you from a farm, or cooked over a fire you started by rubbing two sticks together. I think the mass reaction against AI is part of a larger pattern where people want to believe they’re crusading against evil without putting out the kind of effort it takes to fight any of the genuine evils in the world.