>How are these fruits "stolen" if they still have what was allegedley stolen?

If you write a book and I take it and embed its knowledge into my product that is so pervasive that no one needs to buy your book any more (and I don't even credit you so no one knows where that knowledge came from), to you really still have what was stolen? And I didn't even buy a copy of your book to copy it.

> If you write a book and I take it and embed its knowledge into my product that is so pervasive that no one needs to buy your book any more (and I don't even credit you so no one knows where that knowledge came from), to you really still have what was stolen?

The trouble with this analogy is that it proves too much.

Suppose you write a book, and so does someone else, but they have better marketing than you and then people in the market for that genre buy theirs instead of yours. Let's even stipulate that the existence of their book actually lowers your sales, because people who want that kind of book already bought theirs by the time they find out about yours and then some people don't have time to read or can't afford to buy both.

Notice that we haven't yet said a word about the contents of either book. They could be completely independent and they've never even heard of you or your book -- they "didn't even buy a copy of your book to copy it". All we know is that they're the same genre and the existence of theirs is costing you sales. By that logic all competition would thereby be "stealing", and that can't be right.

Which implies that you don't have a property right to the customers.

A better analogy would be that you do original research or work and produce a valuable book. Somebody else looks at your work, decides it has value, and reproduces it in a new book under their name. The new book is cheaper, or easier to find, or for whatever reason displaces your original book created through your own research and investment. Now somebody else is profiting off your creativity or work, without payment or even acknowledgement.

I'm not sure how this plays out legally, but it certainly seems unethical

So for example, when Disney sees value in public domain stories like Cinderella, Rapunzel/Tangled or Snow White, and they make movies out of them, profiting from the creativity and work of the Brothers Grimm without paying anything to their estate, or high school plays do Shakespeare, that seems unethical to you?

Would it be fair for Greece to do retroactive term extensions all the way back to Plato and then sue anyone who copies the idea of having a university or uses the Platonic solids or distributes religious texts that incorporate the dualistic theory of the soul?

Your examples, as you say, are all public domain. Are all the works we train LLMs on public domain too? Was the original book in my analogy in the public domain? What do you think about training on material that isn't yet in the public domain?

Why are you talking about this case that case nothing to do with the topic at hand? The comment you’re replying to gives a very clear and narrow analogy, and you’re talking about something else.

How is it something else? It's the same analogy. The problem with it is that the harm from the alleged theft doesn't require any use of the original material in order to happen, since that "harm" is competition rather than expropriation.

The attempt to distinguish them is through copying, but that's the part that isn't depriving anyone of anything.

The main point here is _using_ copyrighted materials to create a commercial product, that you then sell, that may be used as alternative or substitute for the original materials. You’re missing that point and talking about two independent projects competing.

What if I read your book (and a bunch of other books), and use what I learned to write my own book? Have I "stolen" your book?

Facts are not copyrightable. Only your particular way of expressing those facts is copyrightable.

My God, I can't believe chodes are still playing this "how many angels can you fit on the head of a pin" navel gazing semantic argument. Thirty years at least, it was all you saw on fin de ciecle Slashdot from anyone with a six-digit UID. No one cares about your hyper literalist meaning of "theft," that's not the goddamn point. Christ, this place looks like Reddit more and more.

This isn't a court of law. We don't have to talk like lawyers. If you replaced "theft" with "copyright infringement" in the comment you had such a problem with, what meaningfully changes besides we all have about five additional brain cells?

Even the case for copyright infringement is weak. LLMs are not copying machines, we already have copying machines at much lower price, almost zero, and perfect fidelity and much faster than generating it probabilistically. So it makes no economic sense to spend billions on training and inference to make a copier. In fact the value of LLMs is where they do not copy but apply knowledge a new situation.

> If you replaced "theft" with "copyright infringement" in the comment you had such a problem with, what meaningfully changes besides we all have about five additional brain cells?

The obvious difference that copyright is subject to fair use and various other limitations that personal property isn't.

Ever hear of Aaron swartz?

>> Stealing/theft requires deprivation of property

maybe you should look up the definition of property, which is a set of legally recognized rights over a thing, typically including:

* possession (what you're focusing on)

* use

* exclusion

* transfer

The last 3 seem like they have been breached, in legally that's theft.

Violation of these rights may be criminal without meeting the strict legal definition of theft.

This can even extend to stealing physical property.

Depending on local laws, stealing a car may not actually be theft if the defendent can prove they intended to return it before the owner got home from work, though it would certainly be considered theft in the colloquial sense of the term, and they would still be guilty of a lesser offense like civil and/or criminal conversion.

> Depending on local laws, stealing a car may not actually be theft if the defendent can prove they intended to return it before the owner got home from work

I doubt there's even one place where the law works like that.

> I doubt there's even one place where the law works like that.

In a lot of places, that's how it works. A key element of theft is the intent to permanently deprive someone of property.

This is why joyriding isn't classified as auto theft and is instead a lesser offense. It's because joyriding is an intent to temporarily deprive, while GTA is an intent to permanently deprive.

In some jxns (the UK is one), there is a tort called trespass to goods, and an example of this would be "stealing" someone's property to deliver to another location for them to use there. The tort of conversion is similar: interference with someone's property right to treat it as your own (silent as to length of time).

Yea in the us if someone tries to steal your car and you are in it or threatened by it you can shoot them dead or something like that (ianal) You may have a court day but in many situations no punishment will follow.

Theft is not the breach of any property right. It's specifically the deprivation of property without consent. Yes, I have checked the definition in my jurisdiction.

Getting punched in the face also violates rights, yet isn't murder. Murder is specifically about dying.

You’re splitting hairs over a definition that isn’t relevant here (theft and copyright infringement are different things) to defend something that even you agree is bad.

It isn't splitting hairs. The damages are completely different in nature.

With theft, the entire damage is the deprivation. It could be an heirloom or some other object that may have been entrusted to you, something that can never be replaced, memorabilia of loved ones. Something that you may have needed in your posession to survive (e.g. a car to go to your job).

With a given copyright violation, the damage is that maybe[1] you made less profit than you could have. The potential for profit is not property. Profit isn't guaranteed.

[1] The loss is not certain, because there's no guarantee that the ones consuming the copyrighted content could have even afforded it.

You forget that laws are made by people and at anytime they can change interpretations are arbitrary, roe vs wade today but not tomorrow.

People seem to think what ai is today is theft. If enough people agree, it will be theft. Big companies dont like this and push the other way. An objectiveness doesnt exist here. It is too wiggly

> PH = Plug-in hybrid (Same as a hybrid but you can charge up the hybrid battery at home)

You can, but in practice most people don't. And I can understand why -- it's inconvenient to have to plug in after every short trip, and the short electric range of most PHEV's means you do have to plug in after every short trip.

I plug in my EV around once a week, and it's more convenient than going to the gas station, but I'm not sure I'd want to have to plug it in every time I come home from even a short trip to the supermarket.

I plug in my EV almost every time I get home. The charger is hanging right next to my driver door in my driveway.

I own an EV. If I had a phev I'd sure love to plug it in rather than pay more for gas and have to go to the station.

That is why I setup our PHEV plug to be right next to the door, we park, grab the plug and put it in. That is at most 2 extra steps.

>I don't believe it's necessary to have multiple GPS antennas (one per device), unless signal path redundancy is required

Don't those splitters typically have an amplifier, so become a single point of failure?

If you're going through the trouble to have multiple time servers on your network, you probably want to make sure that an amplifier failure doesn't take them all down at the same time.

The antenna has an amplifier, usually with more than enough gain to support downstream splitting. But then sure the antenna is a SPOF.

Also the splitter will pass through the dc-bias on the first port to power the antenna, -- so whatever is hooked there is another spof.

I have a much higher BP when I first go to the office than after I'm sitting in the exam room for a bit.

Usually they call me back to the hallway where they check my weight, then have me sit in a chair and check my temperature, pulse ox and BP, with maybe only a minute sitting down before they do the BP check. My BP is usually in the "hypertension" range there.

But, if they come back to the exam room after I've been sitting in that quiet room for 5 or 10 minutes and check my BP , it's almost always in the "normal" BP range (same as what I see when I check it at home).

Doctor calls it "white coat hypertension", I call it "rushed BP check in the hallway".

Same. I measure at home and my relaxed systolic is 30-40 lower than the first measurement in their office.

But those idiots "in charge" are what matters, right? Since they set the tone for the department, and lately they sure are acting more like a DoW than a DoD.

Its quite laughable to pretend that DoD was never on the offense between 1948 and 2025.

Even Hitler's army, which attacked large parts of Europe in WW2, was called the Wehrmacht ("defense force" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wehrmacht). But, as a famous German who was almost 150 years older than Hitler already knew, "Namen sind Schall und Rauch" ("names are but sound and smoke").

I like having location in my photo album (so I can easily search for vacation photos, or figure out where a photo was taken), but I don't want it stored in the photo metadata I share the photo. Is there any way to have Apple or Google photos track the location when the photo is uploaded, but not store it in the photo itself?

That's the default behavior on Android these days - using the share sheet strips location data.

>the fact that it scans for specific extensions sounds more like a product of an API limitation (i.e. no available getAllExtensions() or somesuch)

Why should a website be able to scan for extensions at all?

Or if there's a legitimate need (like linkedin.com wants to see if you installed the linkedin extension), leave it up to the extension to decide if it wants to reveal itself. The extension can register a list of URL patterns it will reveal itself to. So the linkedin extension might reveal itself only to *.linkedin.com, a language translation extension might reveal itself to everyone, and an adblocker extension might not choose to reveal itself to anyone.

that's basically how it already works...

extensions choose on which site they're active and if they provide any available assets (e.g. some extensions modify CSS of the website by injecting their CSS, so that asset is public and then any website where the extension is active can call fetch("chrome-extension://<extension_id>/whatever/file/needed.css" if it knows the extension ID (fixed for each extension) and the file path to such asset... if the fetch result is 404, it can assume the extension is not installed, if the result is 200 it can assume the extension is installed.

This is what LinkedIn is doing... they have their own database of extension IDs and a known working file path, and they are just calling these fetches... they have been doing it for years, I've noticed it a few years back when I was developing a chrome extension which also worked with LinkedIn, but back then it was less than 100 extensions scanned, so I just assumed they want to detect specific extensions which break their site or their terms of use... now it's apparently 6000+ extensions...

No one likes feeling like they got less than they paid for, but without regulation, how do you know that you got less than you paid for unless you're going to carry around a measuring glass yourself?

If the places that were shorting you have to raise prices when they have to give you what you paid for, that's false economy -- you're not saving money, if you want to drink less beer to save money, ask for a smaller glass.

Bars are dying and are on thin margins so they have to do short pours, but if I just talk to a bartender, he'll give me plenty of free beer?

Yes, generally food service operates on thin margins. A neighborhood brewery probably won't be profitable for the first few years, then if successful might stabilize around 15% net* profit margin.

If you go to a beer bar or a tap room, a large part of the role of a bartender is helping you find beer that you like. Successful bars and bartenders thrive from repeat customers. Community is important. This is very obvious if you actually sit down at bars and talk to the people behind them.

I guess I feel the same way about that as I do about a steak. How do I know that the steak is the 16oz I ordered? Ultimately the most important part is if I found the experience satisfying enough to return, not whether the steak was within .5oz of its stated measurement.

The problem with buying a $2000 iPhone as a status symbol is that no one knows whether you bought the $1100 256GB model or the $2000 1TB model unless you tell them.

But someone that cares about watches knows whether you paid $5000 or $50000 for your Rolex just by looking.