You give me your creative work for free. What I do with texts in my computer is my business, not yours. Don't like it? Stop publishing your creative work online. There is nothing being stolen.
This is strange logic that ignores the idea of copyright. Just because I allow you to view my work for free does not mean I relinquish copyright protection. If I write a song that I perform for free, it doesn’t give you license to record and sell that song, for example.
> This is strange logic that ignores the idea of copyright
What is strange in ignoring the idea of copyright?
If you write a song and I can play it in my computer, I use it the way I want in my computer. If you don't want that, don't make your work public. Copyright is a men's creation, nobody is forced to respect it.
The code I develop can be accessed for free in github and even in the browser "view source", I won't be fighting for other people to have the right to force others to pay for using their creation while they don't pay for mine and all other open source and open science creations.
Yes, copyright is a convention. It’s subject to change. However, IP protections are written into the US Constitution and the bar to change it is relatively high.
Murder is also a crime by convention, there’s no natural law against it. But we generally recognize that to live in a stable society, we must live by certain conventions.
You can play a song on your computer because that is considered appropriate use. You selling tickets to play it, or to copy it and sell it is not because they conceivably limit the authors ability to make money from their creation.
You may not realize it but software is also covered by copyright. For most intents and purposes, it’s considered the worlds worst book; you cannot legally copy and sell it if the license doesn’t allow it.
AI changes the rules here, because AI is able to automate extracting structure/meaning, and launder it of its origins.
In classical copyright, fair use allows certain.. fair uses. Going beyond that is considered stealing. You can chop things up into small parts, and there are rules governing how you can put the pieces back together and claim them wholly or partly as your own work.
LLMs behave more like a solvent. Everything goes in the pot, gets melted down, and by the time it's recast you can't say for sure where anything came from or who it once belonged to. Even if sometimes you might get a strong whiff.