YHK - yet another hacker news clone

This doesn't seem to be true. There's a clear legal path via the first-sale doctrine to train models on copyrighted works. It's been years now, and publishers still don't seem to be offering anything for training (e.g. bulk licenses solely for training use), but adversarial interoperability via cutting up books and scanning them remains perfectly legal.

There's also the ability to distill other models, which is also not illegal (though I'm sure they like to come after whomever for TOS violations, but thats a civil matter).

And, of course, the obligatory copying-isn't-theft observation. A recent supreme court judgment put it well.

> Since the statutorily defined property rights of a copyright holder have a character distinct from the possessory interest of the owner of simple “goods, wares, [or] merchandise,” interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The infringer of a copyright does not assume physical control over the copyright, nor wholly deprive its owner of its use. Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud.

Folks are pretty smart here, I think we can handle these nuances, even if we don't agree about whether they are good.

Is it noble? The entire notion that training data can be "stolen" at all is quite silly. If I "steal" content that someone created to use for training, what am I actually stealing? They didn't lose anything. They still have everything they had before. What was "stolen" was "unrealized profit", or put another way: money that wasn't theirs, that they had no entitlement to. The only actual crime that is committed is "unauthorized copying", not stealing. Support and enforcement of copyright feels wildly authoritarian. It's hard to see it as noble.