Well thought out and sensible position overall [LWN.net]

Well thought out and sensible position overall

Posted Apr 27, 2026 23:28 UTC (Mon) by cypherpunks2 (guest, #152408)
In reply to: Well thought out and sensible position overall by bluca
Parent article: The future of AI in Ubuntu

> No doubt the incoherent ramblings from MPA's and RIAA's best friends about "akschtually ai is theft!!11" and "yOu WoUlDn'T dOwNlOaD a CaR!!!!11" will start in 3... 2...

That mentality has always confused me. The very anti-capitalist people who say copyright should be abolished are now accusing LLM companies of "theft". I would understand if people tried to point out the double standard by saying that these companies should not be given a free pirate pass when copyright law is enforced against everyone else, but that's not what they seem to argue.

There are plenty of _real_ issues with generative AI. Environmental damage, erosion of privacy, the RAM crisis, proliferation of slop, security issues, spiders effectively DDoSing websites as they rush to download training materials, insufficient (or excessive) "guardrails", job losses, immoral military uses, propaganda baked into the model weights... There are so many valid reasons to take issue with the technology's use and promoters, but copyright infringement? Really?

to post comments

Well thought out and sensible position overall

Posted Apr 27, 2026 23:41 UTC (Mon) by dilinger (subscriber, #2867) [Link] (3 responses)

The difference (for anti-capitalists) is who is doing the theft, and to whom. People are saying that copyright should be abolished because it is a tool that is being used by global conglomerates to impoverish people. Those same people who that AI is theft are saying that because AI is a tool being used by global conglomerates to impoverish people*. It's actually an extremely consistent worldview.

In other words, it's not about copyright, it's about power and class.

* Yes, you could make arguments about open models and AI sometimes being a useful tool to empower people, but by and large the discussion is about AI that is controlled by large corporations and that is being used to further concentrate wealth and power.

Well thought out and sensible position overall

Posted Apr 28, 2026 2:48 UTC (Tue) by cypherpunks2 (guest, #152408) [Link]

> It's actually an extremely consistent worldview.

A consistent worldview but not a consistent argument. It's possible that those people are just wording their argument extremely poorly.

It would make sense if they argued that theft in one direction is sometimes justified, if they argued that allowing AI companies but not individuals to infringe copyright is a double standard, or if they argued that copyright should not exist but that copyright laws are at least a way to reign in the harm caused by AI training, but I can't see any consistency between "copyright is a legal fiction that should not exist and copying data is never theft" and "AI companies are stealing because they're infringing copyright".

Well thought out and sensible position overall

Posted Apr 29, 2026 5:31 UTC (Wed) by Rudd-O (guest, #61155) [Link] (1 responses)

> Who, whom? (Russian: кто кого?, Kto kogo?) is a Bolshevist principle...invoked by Stalin: "We live according to Lenin's formula: Kto–Kovo?: will we knock them, the capitalists, flat ... or will they knock us flat?"

The friend-enemy distinction could indeed be called a principle, technically speaking.

Well thought out and sensible position overall

Posted Apr 29, 2026 11:52 UTC (Wed) by daroc (editor, #160859) [Link]

I will invite you all to consider the wise words of XKCD 1475, and to let this topic of conversation end here before it goes further astray.

Well thought out and sensible position overall

Posted Apr 28, 2026 10:23 UTC (Tue) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644) [Link] (7 responses)

What's inconsistent about that?

Well thought out and sensible position overall

Posted Apr 28, 2026 10:45 UTC (Tue) by bluca (subscriber, #118303) [Link] (6 responses)

> Copyright should be abolished, but until that happens megacorps should be held to the same standard as regular people.

They are

> What's inconsistent about that?

The inconsistency is that all the copyright reforms to _weaken_ copyright are being vehemently opposed by alleged free software enthusiats who are now arguing for copyright maximalism (the Disney corporation thanks you for your services), instead of being celebrated as they should

Well thought out and sensible position overall

Posted Apr 28, 2026 10:51 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (3 responses)

> > Copyright should be abolished, but until that happens megacorps should be held to the same standard as regular people.
> They are

No, they are not.

"When you owe the bank $100, it's your problem. When you owe the bank $100 Million, it's the bank's problem."

> The inconsistency is that all the copyright reforms to _weaken_ copyright are being vehemently opposed by alleged free software enthusiats

That's because this "weakening" only benefits the large-scale takers.

Well thought out and sensible position overall

Posted Apr 28, 2026 11:08 UTC (Tue) by bluca (subscriber, #118303) [Link] (2 responses)

> No, they are not.

Yes, they are

> That's because this "weakening" only benefits the large-scale takers.

No, it benefits everyone. Models can be trained locally with open source software. Thanks to recent laws weakening copyright protection, absolutely everyone is legally allowed to train models on any publicly available dataset, no questions asked. This is an amazing development that furthers the goal of "information yearns to be free", and any self-respecting so-called "free software enthusiast" should be celebrating it day and night. Instead, they are being the MPA's useful idiots and clamoring for copyright maximalism.

Well thought out and sensible position overall

Posted Apr 28, 2026 11:56 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> Thanks to recent laws weakening copyright protection,

[citation needed] please?

Because IIUC no actual laws have changed; at best there were court cases that upheld already-existing law.

> Thanks to recent laws weakening copyright protection, absolutely everyone is legally allowed to train models on any publicly available dataset, no questions asked

The legal beef revolves around how one *obtains* the training material, not the use of said material for training. [1]

I personally hope Meta prevails here, because "I'm pirating <X> to train my personal AI" will completely eviscerate all copyright(+software) industry enforcement activities. Of course, that won't be allowed to stand, resulting in a veritable popcorn fest of dueling lobbyists, their captured legislators, and ever-more extravagant library+ballroom donations.

(Meanwhile, It's easy to say "information wants to be free" when you're not the one stuck with the hosting bill from everyone's "training" bots)

[1] https://torrentfreak.com/uploading-pirated-books-via-bitt...

Well thought out and sensible position overall

Posted Apr 28, 2026 12:04 UTC (Tue) by bluca (subscriber, #118303) [Link]

> [citation needed] please?

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/790/oj

which is then referenced by

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1689/oj/eng

> The legal beef revolves around how one *obtains* the training material, not the use of said material for training.

Yes torrenting stuff was just plain stupid of them. The law of course requires that the source material is publicly available, if one has to break the law to obtain it, then no exception applies. We are not there yet - but every step in that direction, however small, is good progress.

Well thought out and sensible position overall

Posted Apr 29, 2026 0:13 UTC (Wed) by cypherpunks2 (guest, #152408) [Link] (1 responses)

> The inconsistency is that all the copyright reforms to _weaken_ copyright are being vehemently opposed by alleged free software enthusiats who are now arguing for copyright maximalism (the Disney corporation thanks you for your services), instead of being celebrated as they should

To be fair, free software _relies_ on copyright. Copyright enforcement is the very reason VMWare got slapped for violating the GPL. Don't get me wrong, I think copyright law in its current state is garbage that benefits the corporations, but FOSS enthusiasts generally realize that copyright, as flawed as it is, is the only tool at their disposal for protecting our freedoms.

I do think there is a moral difference (and there should be a legal difference) between "pirating" something for personal use and abusing someone else's intellectual property for profit. The AI training case is neither. They aren't taking books and selling them for their own profit, nor are they taking them purely to enjoy reading them. They're using it to train an algorithm. I don't think that, alone, is a big deal. There are far worse issues with generative AI, and I fear attacking things from a copyright perspective is going to backfire.

Well thought out and sensible position overall

Posted Apr 29, 2026 8:35 UTC (Wed) by bluca (subscriber, #118303) [Link]

> To be fair, free software _relies_ on copyright.

As a means to an end. The end was, "information yearns to be free". Well, it's a bit more free now, so it's time to rejoice

Well thought out and sensible position overall

Posted Apr 28, 2026 14:11 UTC (Tue) by Rudd-O (guest, #61155) [Link] (1 responses)

> The very anti-capitalist people who say copyright should be abolished are now accusing LLM companies of "theft".

That's because the reaction has nothing to do with principled stances. Simply put, being anti-artificial intelligence is left coded because most of the famous people working on the artificial intelligence space are right-wing coded. Elon Musk, Sam Altman, etc.

(this is not a statement on whether they are, in fact, right-wingers. I have no way of knowing that. I am just telling you that a lot of people perceive them to be that way.)

It is perfectly possible to have a principled stance that is pro-AI in anti-copyright because, well, anarcho-capitalistists have that position, and that position is compatible with the principles.

(again, I'm not here to debate the validity of those principles, any of you looking for a fight can have that fight somewhere else, it's not my problem.)

But the common anti-AI + anti-copyright stance of people just doesn't follow any principles. It's just vibes based "thinking", friend enemy distinction.

Let's stop here

Posted Apr 28, 2026 14:19 UTC (Tue) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link]

Before this turns into (more of) a political debate, let's stop here. We've clearly detoured off topic and do not need to go on the left/right/whatever tangent any further. Please keep that in mind for future comments as well.

This goes for all commenters, not just the parent comment here.

Well thought out and sensible position overall

Posted May 1, 2026 12:26 UTC (Fri) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link]

people who say copyright should be abolished are now accusing LLM companies of "theft".

Can you give an example of such people? Or is it just that there are some people who say that copyright should be abolished, and some that accuse LLM companies of "theft", with no overlap between the groups. But for some reason you think it's the same people. Or maybe that's not what they are saying.