alt Hacker News> stop using morally charged terms made up by future monopolists
Lets not gloss over this claim. Being: “Stealing is a morally charged term made up by future monopolists.”
I strongly disagree. Stealing is not a made up term and property rights are foundational for any society. Your take is at least sensationalist if not malicious.
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I’m pretty sure the person you’re replying to means stealing in the context of information, IP, copyright, etc.
This thread and this entire topic isn’t about stealing physical goods or money. We can all agree that if I break into your house and take your TV then that’s the ancient, obvious crime of stealing.
Grice’s maxims and common sense indicate that we’re talking about the word “stealing” as applied to infringement or unauthorized copying.
There's nothing foundational about the idea that data can be owned. It conflates these things:
- This is about me
- I created this
- Neither of the above, but according to some story I get to control who sees it
Maybe some of those ideas are worth building into our society, but let's not pretend that The Code of Hammurabi gave a damn about intellectual property. IP was invented by the church so they could censor editions of the bible they didn't like and has been used to justify similar kinds of censorship ever since.
The foundational thing about property is that when it gets stolen, somebody else has it, and you don't.
We can hold the AI companies responsible for their actions without contributing to notions about property that encourage censorship.
> property rights are foundational for any society
arguable, and even more tenuous for intellectual "property", which was a relatively recent invention. plenty of interesting arguments over this way back to even the 19th century.
How much did anthropic pay to book publishers, and everybody else whose content they stole, for stealing their content ???
They definitely stole the data to make the models, but they do not say that they stole the data to make the models, but they do say that others using their outputs for unauthorized purposes is stealing. Do you see the point?
No, and we collectively had this decades ago already. “Stealing” instead of “infringement” is originally MAFIAA language intentionally (ab)used to encourage emotional reaction despite original owner not losing their copy.
If you broke into a data center, pulled a hard drive and drive off with it - that’s stealing. If you accessed a copy of some information - that’s infringement, unauthorized access, or some other violation. But that’s not “stealing”, which fundamentally requires a loss or otherwise depriving original owner of the property that was stolen.