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> 1. You are assuming just training a model on copyrighted material is a violation. It is not. It may be under certain conditions but not by default.

Using copyrighted content for commercial purposes should be a violation if it's not already considered to be one. No different from playing copyrighted songs in your restaurant without paying a licensing fee.

> 2. Why should we aim for harsh punitive punishments just because it was done so in the past?

I'd be fine with abolishing, or overhauling, the copyright system. This rules with harsh penalties for consumers/small companies but not for bigtech double standard is bullshit, though.



> Using copyrighted content for commercial purposes should be a violation

so reading a book and using the book contents to help you in your job would be a violation too based on your logic


A business cannot read a book, and your machine learning model is not given human rights.


> A business cannot read a book

Assume the human read the book as part of their job. Is that using copyrighted material for commercial purposes?

If that doesn't count then I'm not sure why you brought up "commercial purposes" at all.

> This rules with harsh penalties for consumers/small companies but not for bigtech double standard is bullshit, though.

Consumers and small companies get away with small copyright violations all the time. And still bigger than having your image be one of millions in a training set.


> Assume the human

Humans have rights. They get to do things that businesses, and machine learning models, or general automation, don't.

Just like you can sit in a library and tell people the contents of books when they ask, but if you go ahead and upload everything you get bullied into suicide by the US government[1]

> Consumers and small companies get away with small copyright violations all the time

Yeah, because people don't notice so they don't care. Everyone knows what these bigtech criminals are doing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz


> Humans have rights. They get to do things that businesses, and machine learning models, or general automation, don't.

So is that a yes to my question?

If humans are allowed to do it for commercial purposes, and it's entirely about human versus machine, then why did you say "Using copyrighted content for commercial purposes should be a violation" in the first place?

> Just like you can sit in a library and tell people the contents of books when they ask,

You know there a huge difference between describing a book and uploading the entire contents verbatim, right?

If "tell the contents" means reading the book out loud, that becomes illegal as soon as enough people are listening to make it a public performance.

> but if you go ahead and upload everything you get bullied into suicide by the US government[1]

They did that to a human... So I've totally lost track of what your point is now.


> and it's entirely about human versus machine

It's not. Those were what's called examples. There is of course more to it. Stop trying to pigeonhole a complex discussion onto a few talking points. There are many reasons why what OpenAI did is bad, and I gave you a few examples.


I'm not trying to be reductive or nitpick your example, I was trying to understand your original statement and I still don't understand it.

There's a reason I keep asking a very generic "why did you bring it up", it's because I'm not trying to pigeonhole.

But if it's not worth explaining at this point and the conversation should be over, that's okay.


A business is... made of people.




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