I think what Swartz did was moral, and his prosecution was unjust.
I think what OpenAI did was moral, and them getting sued for it is unjust.
Why do you have one position for Swartz and a different one for OpenAI?
(Aaron Swartz was a mailing-list friend of mine, so I do have some bias here. But in part we knew each other because our moral position on this was similar)
> Why do you have one position for Swartz and a different one for OpenAI?
I think many people on HN dont mind OpenAI use of copyrighted material, but do not like how they try to do regulatory capture of a market and try to say their own copyright is now somehow more important.
Like how OpenAI trying to make "distillation" illegal while it exactly what they did with whole intetnet, books, everything.
I think it's good when eight-hundred and fifty-two billion dollar, for-profit corporation establish legal precedent than can then be used to protect activists.
Isn't the whole basis of the legal success of the AI companies so far that training an LLM is "transformative", i.e., something that would not apply in any way to archival?
There seem to be two groups of people talking past each other here, which is worth acknowledging.
On the one hand, there is a notion of consistent principles regarding the legal handling of the topic, which is being appealed to by some people such as yourself.
The other side seems to be drawing attention to the fact that these principles are not applied consistently by society. They're questioning the moral validity of holding to principle in a circumstance where it's guaranteed to be applied with very specific biases that are rarely explicitly stated.
I've noticed this talking-past happening in other subjects too. For example American drug laws. There's the principle of drug laws, and then there's the practice of which kinds of people gets the laws applied to them. One group of people focus on the one, and another focus on the other, and they just kind of talk past each other.
I think this is a fair point, except that in this case the same laws[1] are being applied to both, and the person I was replying to was literally arguing both ways!
[1] broadly the same laws: I do understand one was criminal and one is civil and yes I agree that injustice. To me neither should be criminal.
Imagine a town where (a) a corrupt cop issues tickets for fake traffic violations; but (b) he doesn't do that to his fellow cops, or the mayor's friends.
Does (b) make things more just, as certain possible unjust acts don't happen?
Or does it compound the injustice by creating a double-standard, and perpetuate it by hiding the problem from any with the power to bring an end to it?
I think what Swartz did was moral, and his prosecution was unjust.
I think what OpenAI did was moral, and them getting sued for it is unjust.
Why do you have one position for Swartz and a different one for OpenAI?
(Aaron Swartz was a mailing-list friend of mine, so I do have some bias here. But in part we knew each other because our moral position on this was similar)