And the TLDR version is that if you are a rich person /big company you'd rather sue for copyright violation, not theft, but you like to call it theft because that makes a civil issue seem criminal. Though as Hitch writes copyright violation can be morally theft.
Cable & Satellite & Streaming Pay TV here:
There is a law, Theft of Service.
But there are two components, the viewers (who for the streaming may genuinely think the "box", and there may even be a subscription, is legitimate) and the enablers.
The viewers are usually offered an amnesty from prosecution or being sued if they agree to pay x months subscription, if a private person. If they are a pub or hotel or such (which pay a high subscription, not the regular one) they are sued, unless they "settle" some large demand.
The providers or enablers are sued, usually for €100,000 minimum. Fraud can have a higher tariff than than theft, so if they were running a subscription (see card sharing for how that might work), they'll get prosecuted too.
Talking about LLM providers committing "theft" or normal copyright violation is simplistic and misleading.
Paying up front? Needed for very many kinds of creative activities and services where the work can't be resold elsewhere.
Very often service contracts have to be paid up front. Since forever Accountants then calculate "profit" only on what has been delivered, since the unfulfilled part of the contract is a liability for the seller.
I saw this on Mastodon.
Quote:
ajsadauskas@aus.social
AJ Sadauskas
@ajsadauskas@aus.social
Hi, we're a tech startup run by libertarian Silicon Valley tech bros.
We're not a newspaper, we're a content portal.
We're not a taxi service, we're a ride sharing app.
We're not a pay TV service, we're a streaming platform.
We're not a department store, we're an e-commerce marketplace.
We're not a financial services firm, we're crypto.
We're not a space agency, we're a group of visionaries who are totally going to Mars next year.
We're not a copywriting and graphic design agency, we're a large language model generative AI platform.
Oh sure, we compete against those established businesses. We basically provide the same goods and services.
But we're totally not those things. At least from a legal and PR standpoint.
And that means all the laws and regulations that have built up over the decades around those industries don't apply to us.
Things like consumer protections, privacy protections, minimum wage laws, local content requirements, safety regulations, environmental protections... They totally don't apply to us.
Even copyright laws — as long as we're talking about everyone else's intellectual property.
We're going to move fast and break things — and then externalise the costs of the things we break.
We've also raised several billion in VC funding, and we'll sell our products below cost — even give them away for free for a time — until we run our competition out of the market.
Once we have a near monopoly, we'll enshitify the hell out of our service and jack up prices.
You won't believe what you agreed to in our terms of service agreement.
We may also be secretly hoarding your personal information. We know who you are, we know where you work, we know where you live. But you can trust us.
By the time the regulators and the general public catch on to what we're doing, we will have well and truly moved on to our next grift.
By the way, don't forget to check out our latest innovation. It's the Uber of toothpaste!
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As it was posted publicly on SM, a human posting it with attribution on a Forum seems reasonable. Would it be reasonable for a "bot" to scrape it and use it in a LLM powering a chatbot with zero attribution?
For department store, add electronic mail order which has existed using telegraph, phone and fax since Victorian times.
AJ Sadauskas also missed Holiday Rental. People thinking they can ignore tax and planning laws and landlord/mortgage holder contracts because it's AirBnB.
The fact that some laws need reformed (copyright, patents, taxi plates etc) is no reason to make your own rules.