Comment by YPPH
6 months ago
"Stealing" isn't an apt term here. Stealing a thing permanently deprives the owner of the thing. What you're describing is copyright infringement, not stealing.
In this context, stealing is often used as a pejorative term to make piracy sound worse than it is. Except for mass distribution, piracy is often regarded as a civil wrong, and not a crime.
Then it is not possible to 'steal' an idea? Afaik 'to steal'is simply to take without permission. If the thing is abstract, then you might not have deprived the original owner of that thing. If the thing is a physical object, then the implication is tou now have physical possession (in which case your definition seemingly holds)
edit/addendum: considering this a bit more - the extent to which the original party is deprived of the stolen thing is pertinent for awarding damages. For example, imagine a small entity stealing from a large one, like a small creator steals dungeon and dragons rules. That doesn't deprive Hasbro of DnD, but it is still theft (we're assuming a verbatim copy here lifted directly from DnD books)
The example that I was pondering were shows in russia that were almost literally "the sampsons." Did that stop the Simpson's from airing in the US, its primary market? No, but it was still theft, something was taken without permission.
I think you make a good point, but there is some irony in pointing out the distinction between colloquial and legal use of the term “stealing” while also misusing the term “piracy” to describe legal matters.
It would be more clear if you stick to either legal or colloquial variants, instead of switching back and forth. (Tbf, the judge in this case also used the term “piracy” colloquially).
I'm not sure that's irony. Just an plain error on my part, which you're right to point out. Piracy is also a pejorative label for copyright infringement.
Crashing your car is an error. Crashing your car while lecturing someone else about safe driving is irony.
In this case it seemed like you were making a point about the strict legal sense of a word, but misusing a different legal term to do so.
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Best/most succinct explanation I've seen to date.
Pirating a book and selling it on claude.ai is stealing, both legally and morally.
Pirating 7 million books, remixing their content, and using that to make money on Claude.ai is like counterfeiting 7 million branded products and selling them on your Shopify website. The original creators don't get payment, and someone's profiting off their work.
Try doing that yourself and you'd get a knock on the door real quick.
There are tests that determine if a work infringes on the copyright of another. That is well established law. Just use that test and show that this work is infringing on that work. If you cant it doesn't.
Properly remixing the content so that it can be considered distinct would be fair use. You can't copyright a style, concept or idea.
Also mostly this would be a civil lawsuit for "damages".
It might be legal in the US, but not in the rest of the world.
The trial is scheduled for December 2025. That’s when a jury will decide how much Anthropic owes for copying and storing over seven million pirated books
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There seems to be an unwritten rule for VC-backed tech companies, that if a law is broken at massive scale and very quickly, it’s ok. It’s the fait accompli strategy many of the large tech companies used to get where they are.
Don’t have legal access to training data? Simply steal it, but move fast enough to keep ahead of the law. By the time lawsuits hit the company is worth billions and the product is embedded in everyday life.