Submitted 4 months ago by some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/28/24188391/microsoft-ai-suleyman-social-contract-freeware
Pirating Windows for your own personal, private use, which will never directly make you a single dollar: HIGHLY ILLEGAL
Scraping your creative works so they can make billions by selling automated processes that compete against your work: Perfectly fine and normal!
bunch of fuckin art pirates. crying about software piracy while they have their own bots pirating everyone’s art.
It’s not even piracy though. I never saw anyone torrent Windows_XP_Home_Cracked.iso and go “Hey guys, check out this operating system I made!”
Do people still pirate Windows? You can download the iso directly from Microsoft’s website and you don’t need a registration key anymore.
You do need a registration key, but now it’s tied to the hardware so it activates as soon as you connect to the network, no need to actually type the registration key.
Sure bud, pirating some Microsoft Studio video games and windows ISOs right now. What? I found them on the open web!
Honestly just pirate their games since they keep buying every fucking studio they can get their grummy hands on
Starlancer was nice I think
I mean, Xbox one/series recently got proof of concept jailbreak…
DMCA for them, no DMCA for us.
You’re always morally justified to steal from Microsoft
copying is not theft
“Copying is theft” is the argument of corporarions for ages, but if they want or data and information, to integrate into their business, then, suddenly they have the rights to it.
If copying is not theft, then we have the rights to copy their software and AI models, as well, since it is available on the open web.
They got themselves into quite a contradiction.
If copying is not theft, then we have the rights to copy their software
Nope false dichotomy, Copying copyrighted material is copyright infringement. Which is illegal.
Oversimplifying the issue makes for an uninformed debate.
You realize that half of Lemmy is tying themselves in inconsistent logical knots trying to escape the reverse conundrum?
Copying isn’t stealing and never was. Our IP system that artificially restricts information has never made sense in the digital age, and yet now everyone is on here cheering copyright on.
You wouldn’t download a car!
Yeah, I’m not a fan of AI but I’m generally of the view that anything posted on the internet, visible without a login, is fair game for indexing a search engine, snapshotting a backup (like the internet archive’s Wayback Machine), or running user extensions on (including ad blockers).
You can’t be for piracy but against LLMs fair the same reason
And I think most of the people on Lemmy are for piracy,
Yes, it kind of is. A search engine just looks for keywords and links, and that’s all it retains after crawling a site. It’s not producing any derivative works, it’s merely looking up an index of keywords to find matches.
An LLM can essentially reproduce a work, and the whole point is to generate derivative works. So by its very nature, it runs into copyright issues. Whether a particular generated result violates copyright depends on the license of the works it’s based on and how much of those works it uses. So it’s complicated, but there’s very much a copyright argument there.
None of those things replace that content, though.
Look, I dunno if this is legally a copyrights issue, but as a society, I think a lot of people have decided they’re willing to yield to social media and search engine indexers, but not to AI training, you know? The same way I might consent to eating a mango but not a banana.
Issue is power imbalance.
There’s a clear difference between a guy in his basement on his personal computer sampling music the original musicians almost never seen a single penny from, and a megacorp trying to drive out creative professionals from the industry in the hopes they can then proceed to hike up the prices to use their generative AI software.
Didnt you hear? We stan draconian IP laws now because AI bad.
Is it that or is it that the laws are selectively applied on little guys and ignored once you make enough money? It certainly looks that way. Once you’ve achieved a level of “fuck you money” it doesn’t matter how unscrupulously you got there.
Examples:
The Pirate Bay: Only made enough money to run the site and keep the admins living a middle class lifestyle.
VERDICT: Bad, wrong, and evil. Must be put in jail.
OpenAI: Claims to be non-profit, then spins off for-profit wing. Makes a mint in a deal with Microsoft.
VERDICT: Only the goodest of good people and we must allow them to continue doing so.
The IP laws are stupid but letting fucking rich twats get away with it while regular people will still get fucked by the same rules is kind of a fucking stupid ass hill to die on.
so we can steal Microsoft’s products?
Yes. Exactly. Although there isn’t much left worth stealing from Microsoft.
(This was a low-key “Microsoft bad, Linux supreme”, comment.)
(And now it’s no longer low-key.)
(I’m using a touch-screen keyboard for writing this. And yet I can’t open my doors using the keyboard. Ever wondered why that is?)
(Correct, because I forgot my keys at home and didn’t put them on my keyboard.)
(Now it’s just a –board.)
(Oral diarrhea over. Go get some guhd Linux!)
This is the year of the linux desktop!
By our powers combined, we’ll exceed 2% market share!
(no actually, please support linux. I just switched like a month ago and while it’s so much better than windows there are so many petty annoyances that will never get resolved unless more people bitch about it and that kind of support needs more users)
Skype is Worth the most, probably.
Let’s be real, they let most of it be stolen
In ex-USSR it was pretty intentional.
That explains why my friend’s Xbox got stolen. It was an original Xbox, too. Holds eggs perfectly.
i meant stealing like it all not just some random person’s version.
So if I see it on the “open web”, I’m free to use it however I please? Oh, I get thrown in jail and everything I own taken away.
If companies are people per “citizens united”, why doesn’t the same apply to them?
And if a company makes a negligent decision, which kills a million people over time, why is no one being put on death row? They can and do have it both ways, but I can still wish for a just world where if companies are people, they can be put to death for mass casualties caused by their decisions.
It’s okay to plagiarize books if they’re in a library.
No you have to run them through an elaborate model first, then it’s totally legit to use someone else’s literal words as if they were your own
You’re describing how human beings learn and create.
I mean, that’s how I got through high school. So sure.
In other news: we have lawyers to protect our copyrights, you don’t. Suck it.
copying isn’t stealing
If the model isn’t overfitted it’s also not even copying. By their nature LLMs are transformative which is the whole point of fair use.
So I have a LLM read a book and paraphrase its contents, that’s not stealing?
He spoke carelessly, but he didn’t exactly say what the author said he said. You can in fact do many things with it. Copyright doesn’t care what you do if you aren’t copying. That’s the definition of the word.
So I can pirate as many movies as I want as long as I’m only watching them?
Let these rich guys keep talking for a sec. I can get behind this somewhat.
Yes, it’s streamer making a copy. You’re fine. Sharing is caring. Copyright is a mental illness.
Isn’t web scraping copying ?
No. It’s only illegal if you republish what you scrape. Absolutely nothing prevents any company from scraping the web and using that information internally.
I think that depends how you write your web scraper. Of course the web scraper is going to load the page, just like your web browser does, which by all accounts is not an issue. What happens after the page is loaded depends on how the software is written.
Well see what the results of the music industry vs suno.ai will be
he gets paid a lot to not speak carelessly
Aight, I’ma steal leaked Windows XP source code :3
There is a thing called usage licenses.
So its no longer intellectual property if its on the internet? The nerves on this guy…
So you could just copy and use every single helpful support article from Microsoft?
Oh shit, there aren’t any
Just yet another proof, that the more 0’s you have in your valuation, the less the laws apply to you
You cant steal data. violating copywright (Which ai training does not do) is not theft.
violating copywright (Which ai training does not do) I would say that’s still very much up for debate, legally and morally
At the risk of being pedantic, I should point out that morality doesn’t come into the question. Copyright is a matter of law, and nothing else. Personally, I don’t consider it a legitimate institution; the immorality is how companies wield it like a cudgel to entrench their control over culture.
There is no moral issue.
Apparently he thinks data is like the ducks you find in the park
Wait, you can steal from those ducks?
No one ever tells you this, but you can just take the ducks. Just like with the city pigeons. Just make sure you don’t take a government drone by accident.
In that I can take a picture of them and you wouldn’t notice or be impacted by it?
You can take the ducks you know
Clearly ducks you find in the park is just free meat. Why else would they be there?
To ask of you have any grapes
Does Netflix count as the open web? It definitely feels like so, but I’m ready for a wealth hoarder to tell me otherwise!
I agree
Is his personal-information on the dark-web?
Is he saying that if his personal-information is on the dark-web, then it’s perfectly-OK for everybody & their robot to be using it??
XOR is he saying that there are 2 kinds of law:
1 for protecting his entitlement,
the other for disallowing rights from the lives he consumes, through his beloved herd/corporation/pseudo-person?
( obviously, he’s already answered the latter )
Copyright infrigment is not theft, training models is not copyright infringement either. We need a law equivalent to when an artist says “he’s inpired by someone else” . That it specifically is illegal to do that without permission if you use a machine. That will force big tech to pay a pittance for it and it will instakill all the small player.
Creating a derivative work without a license to do so would be copyright infringement.
Copyright Infringment strawman arguement. When considering AI, we are not talking legal copyright infringement in the relationship between humans vs AI. Humans are mostly concerned with being obsoleted by Big Tech so the real issue is Intellectual Property Theft.
artificial INTELLIGENCE stole our Intellectual Property
Do you see it now?
What I see is a system of laws that came about during the Middle Ages and have been manipulated by the powers that be to kill off any good parts of them.
We all knew copyright was broken. It was broken before my grandparents were born. It didn’t encourage artists or promise them proper income, it didn’t allow creations to gradually move into public domain. It punished all forms of innovation from player pianos to fanfiction on Tumblr.
It’s only theft as long as you cling to the failed “copyright” model.
Big tech couldn’t steal anything if we don’t respect their property rights in the first place.
By reifying copyright under the AI paradigm, we maintain big tech’s power over us.
The truth is chatgpt belong to us. ClosedAI is just the compiler of the data.
If we finally end the failed experiment of copyright, we destroy their mote.
He’s right, information wants to be free. Don’t support stronger copyright just to spite people it’ll benefit
In fact just the other day information wanted a ham sandwhich before I set it free so it could find more people not on an empty stomach :/
Its not stolen if it is still there afterwards.
Oh yeah, tell me about Intellectual Property, Patent, Invention, and Ideation thievery, was it still there afterwards? IP theft has been recognized for centuries.
Back to the basement Mustafa Jr…
Yes but you don’t have a right to create derivative works which by definition is all that AI can spit out.
I am so glad humans are never derivative with culture. Just look at the movie The Fast and Furious. If we were making derivative works we would live in some crazy world where that would be a franchise with ten movies, six video games, a fashion line, board games, toys, theme park attractions, and an animated series that ran for six seasons.
I think that with respect to content that’s already on microsoft.com, the social contract of that content since the ‘90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been “freeware,” if you like, that’s been the understanding.
Yeah, that’s how I’ve always thought of it.
Essentially the joke everyone made about nfts.
Anyone in this thread is creating derivative works and you should not be reading it without the written permission of verge.com’s parent company.
So Mustafa steals from the entire world and justifies it by pointing to an abstraction that cannot be proven. It’s already complete as they can admit it now and throw Billions at corrupt judges.
These tech-god pyschopaths hate us.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Microsoft AI boss Mustafa Suleyman incorrectly believes that the moment you publish anything on the open web, it becomes “freeware” that anyone can freely copy and use.
When CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin asked him whether “AI companies have effectively stolen the world’s IP,” he said:
That certainly hasn’t kept many AI companies from claiming that training on copyrighted content is “fair use,” but most haven’t been as brazen as Suleyman when talking about it.
Speaking of brazen, he’s got a choice quote about the purpose of humanity shortly after his “fair use” remark:
Suleyman does seem to think there’s something to the robots.txt idea — that specifying which bots can’t scrape a particular website within a text file might keep people from taking its content.
Disclosure: Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company, has a technology and content deal with OpenAI.
The original article contains 351 words, the summary contains 139 words. Saved 60%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Vanth@reddthat.com 4 months ago
catloaf@lemm.ee 4 months ago
fun fact, windows is posted on the web: www.microsoft.com/en-us/…/windows10
refurbishedrefurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org 4 months ago
Microsoft would prefer that you pirate Windows rather than use Linux, as it further entrenches their dominance in the market.
They mainly make their money off of business licenses anyway, similar to Adobe and Autodesk.
WalnutLum@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
My one dark hope is AI will be enough of an impetus for somebody to update DMCA
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 4 months ago
If that gets updated, then it will favor big corporations.
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 4 months ago
When is the last time a crisis resulted in a better solution for the general public?