Or if you don't agree with the price, do not buy it. You are NOT entitled to entertain yourself in any way you want. (unless it's funded by taxes etc, in which case... okay, it's open to discussion.)
Look, let's be honest - what gives you or others the right to steal from others?
I author a lot of technical documentation actually.
Even so, yes. I make all my work public, 100%.
I use public repositories as my backup for anything I create, regardless of stage of completion and so others can learn from or help improve my work as they see fit.
I do not believe proprietary technology should exist and I put my code where my mouth is.
Humans progress faster when we collaborate freely. Fork anything I do and make it better if you can.
So here you say that you put all your work in the public ___domain, and in a comment above you say that you don't put it in the public ___domain because you fear a lawsuit?
That is the fundamental problem with trying to project property rights onto ideas. Capitalism works fine for distributing scarce goods and resources, but information and software are both public goods.
In a reasonable world, we would be imposing high taxes on all LLMs and using that money to fund grants for future writers and artists. It would be good for the LLM makers in the long run, since it would give them more fuel for their models, and it would be good for the artists and writers because it would provide sustainable, reliable wages.
Unfortunately, that isn't the world we live in. LLM makers don't seem to care about the impact they will have on society or even their own livelihoods, as long as they get rich today. And in addition to all the regulatory capture, we are having our governments gutted on the mere fear that they might do their job and prevent the wholesale looting of society by these new robber-barons.
So with the economically-optimal approaches off the table, we have to fall back on imposing false scarcity in the hopes that maybe capitalism can limp along.
There's such a mass of possible works that it hardly constrains someone that if you could cast a magic spell preventing someone from distributing or accessing your particular work and then burned it, your spell would have essentially no effect-- no one would notice it and no one would be harmed.
As long as discussion of a work that has published is not impeded, the public is not harmed even by these 50-years after life copyrights other than by that they are accumulated by certain companies who themselves become problems.
When someone decides to use someone's work without compensation he is, even though he is not deprived of the work itself, still robbed. But it's not a theft of goods, it's theft of service. The copyright infringer isn't the guy who steals your phone, it's the guy who even you have done some work for but who refuses to pay.
With this view you can also believe, without hypocrisy, that what the LLM firms are doing is wrong while what Schwartz did was not, since the authors in question weren't deprived of any royalties or payments due to them due to due to the publishing model for scientific works.
> But it's not a theft of goods, it's theft of service.
What service? If somebody washes your windshield without you asking, it isn't a theft of service to not pay them. A theft of service arises from entering into an agreement and then failing to pay as stipulated in that agreement.
Copyright isn't an agreement you can choose whether to participate in. Copyright is a legal enforcement system that imposes legal liability even on those who don't use it. You may not see this legal liability as "harm", but it absolutely is. Arguing that copyright extends to training is arguing for a dramatic increase in the scope and power of this legal enforcement system.
But the thing here distinguishing it from the windshield thing is that there are so many possible texts that you choosing their particular text is to choose the work they've done.
You think of choosing somebody's particular text as the way of contracting him. Just as it isn't a restriction of your freedom of speech that going into restaurant and ordering a meal creates a contract to pay, so it isn't a restriction of your freedom of speech when you choose to seek out and repeat somebody's very particular text.
Why Harry Potter when you have any of hundreds of million of stories of similar sort that you could easily write yourself? When you choose that one, you choose it because it's already been prepared by somebody else, just as you choose restaurant because they've done work and have food ready for you. By choosing the one that's already written you accept that the author has done work for you.
> so it isn't a restriction of your freedom of speech when you choose to seek out and repeat somebody's very particular text.
I hadn't made that claim, but I will in now that you've brought it up. Art operates as part of a discussion, the reference to and re-use of prior art is a key part of the how that happens. There are sooo many cases of copyright being used to limit the freedom of expression, that this really isn't disputable. Copyright clearly restricts speech.
> By choosing the one that's already written you accept that the author has done work for you.
No I don't, at least not in a sense that's different from the shoulders of all the people that author learned from and so on. Cultural works exist and take on roles in our cultural semiology, our memes our language without our choice. You can coose to not engage with a work, but you can't choose which works will be culturally relevant or not.
When you publish something, it becomes part of our shared culture and no-one has an inalienable right to own that. The limited rights we granted to encourage commercial creativity have already snowballed out of control and now people are blythly buying into another dramatic expansion of them.
But we're talking about extremely direct copying. Actual computerized copying, typically verbatim.
Doing things relating to discussion of a work are typically permitted, but you have no reason to use anybody's particular work other than to make use of the work he did in creating it.
> But we're talking about extremely direct copying. Actual computerized copying, typically verbatim.
Copyright doesn't just extend to "literal direct copying". When you claim copyright doesn't harm anyone, you can't ignore all the other types of activity it prohibits.
> Doing things relating to discussion of a work are typically permitted,
Only if you limit the meaning of "discussion" so much that it no longer includes the process of making art.
> but you have no reason to use anybody's particular work other than to make use of the work he did in creating it.
Did you not ready my comment? I already explained the reason. Creative works become part of our culture, you can't choose which works will do that, you can only choose to participate in that culture or not.
Copyright is a social system for artificially limiting access to our shared culture and thus also limits participation in that culture.
I understand the value of a limited copyright system, but anyone that claims that our copyright system doesn't cause harm or cost us anything isn't being realistic. Copyright duration should be far more limited and we need significant reforms to the DMCA. Personally, I think even all non-commercial distribution should be legal as copyright should only grant commercial rights.
Look, let's be honest - what gives you or others the right to steal from others?