alt Hacker Newscopyright infringement is not theft, even if right holders often claim it is.
part of the definition of theft is that the original owner is deprived of it, which does not apply to copyright infringement.
You can only argue with damages from the perspective of potential profits, still not theft though.
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If you steal an unpopular product from a store, the damage is also only to "potential profits", so how does that differ? It's entirely possible no one would have purchased the product and it would have eventually been discarded/destroyed.
Or with services, if a barber cuts your hair and then you run away without paying them, do you not consider that theft, even though there's no change in ownership occurring?
This is almost funny to me, because in many jurisdictions, software companies sure invested a lot of effort into painting people copying software as thieves. In Germany, they (the software producer lobby, and later politicians influence by the former) even coined and spread the term "Raubkopie", which you could roughly translate as "robbed copy", i.e., that's one step worse than "theft", as a robbery in Germany legally means " theft accomplished by force or intimidation". So, yeah: like putting a knife to the throat of someone while you copy the software.
So, after literally decades of investing into advertising campaigns, lobbying to politicians to pass harsher and harsher laws against software "thieves and robbers", now that big tech are doing it, suddenly we are supposed to consider it with more nuance?
Ahhh... no thank you sir. I really enjoy them drinking their own kool-aid.
So having tons of AIs quoting various literary works and reproducing knock-offs of them has a positive effect on those books' sales?
I think you're wrong: there is absolutely damage to the authors and publishers from what the AI companies have done.