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by UebVar 9 days ago
No, you are wrong.

In German and French (roman) legal systems this is a "Vermögensdelikt", and explicitly about material damage and gain. Yes, common law can be more broad (in canada it isn't really, it just also includes service, btw.), and yet it clearly does not meet the definition, as there is a damaged/defraued party and fraudulent/gaining party. We are not talking about somebody usurping somebody else reputation, after all.

You misuse a technical term that is well established since antiquity.

You do not know what this word means. If you want to argue about semantics, look up the definition. This works especially well for legal terms as laws define them.

(That said, IANAL and there are very many different legal systems and I am not ruling out there exists one that is competently different - laws can be changed a will, after all.)

It is also obviously not copyright infringement, because this is simply not how copyright works, at all. I cannot and will explain of all copyright here. Instead I will point this out: Every code produced by a human who read copyrighted code would fall under your definition.

1 comments

No, you are wrong. You are either willfully misunderstanding what I’m calling fraud, or you are misinformed as to what “material gain” means in many legal systems.

With respect to the former, “fraud” is a shorthand for “fraudulent misrepresentation,” which is what you’re doing when you take someone else’s IP and try to contribute it to a project without securing the right to do so. It can be read as implicit in the attempt to contribute to the project that you have secured this permission (or do not need to, because the work is original to you). Whether the code came out of an LLM or was copied from another project or Stack Overflow doesn’t matter, it’s that you’re misrepresenting the rights you have that’s the fraudulent part.

For the latter, I specifically pointed out that the gain from fraudulent misrepresentation need not be monetary. The gain can be reputational or any other sort of benefit. For example, someone pretending to a fictional person to gain access to a space they otherwise wouldn’t is still committing fraud.

Finally, you’re wrong about whether the output of an LLM infringes copyright of material in its training set. Just running a copyrighted work through an LLM does not remove the copyright on that work if reproduced by the LLM.

You are misinformed, I suspect you have no idea what you are talking about.

As I said, I do not know all legal systems in the world. If there one where "material gain" matches your idea, please cite the law or a case that includes LLM usage. As I explained in the canadian law even includes services and yet it is so much very much not matching the defintion for reasons explained.

I do understand very well what you mean by "fraud", I do not miss represent it - your opinion on what it should be is plain and simple wrong. I explained why in my previous posts.

You are under the impression that legal science is some kind of folk etymology. It absolutely is not. Fraud is §263 StGB, Art. 313-1 Code penal or §380 of the canadian criminal code. (They all are remarkably similar, because they share a millennia old tradition. Making them IMHO fascinating cultural artifacts.) Here [0] is a structured version of on of these texts. Think of it as a symbolic execution of the law. You can see there is structural mismatch with your "case". Nobody ubsurbs anything from somebody else, and all three laws incude that in their defintion. That was my original claim.

You think you somehow can make up your own private definitions, develop your own private theories about them, apply them and argue about the semantics your made up terms. That is the opposite of how jurisprudence works. It rigorous, with well established scientific and scholastic methods. It operates on term defined by the law. In the case of "fraud" the previous citations, especially in criminal law, and nothing else. German legal science has its own theory what counts as "nothing else" under the name "Wortlautgrenze". These terms and methods vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but by surprisingly little.

Dont call your code a decorator pattern, because you think it is decorative. Different pattern libraries have definitions for that and you need to be able to argue it fits. Like wise, if you feel something involves some kind of misrepresentation its probably not fraud. If things have different names, that probably for a good reasons, especially in legal science.

[0] https://www.iurastudent.de/schemata/schema-zum-betrug-263-i-...