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Failed Writer's Journey: Meta Thinks Its Legal to Steal Your Individual Dollars [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-18
The headline is not precisely what Meta wrote in response to the lawsuit against their theft of people’s writing but it is pretty much what they mean. Their argument is that a single book is worthless for imitative AI training. It is only in the aggregate that they become valuable. Therefore, the books have no individual economic value, and it is okay to steal them. They also argue that training is transformative and not in economic competition with books, an argument that has already been rejected by one court. But marvel at their economic argument for a moment.
It is truly only something the American legal and business education, with their focus on law as a game and their complete lack of human ethics, could produce. A book, something that an author has been paid to write, and people pay to own, has no economic value because each book individually is not sufficient to train a model. Let’s extend that to other areas of life.
Disney needed a lot of land to build its theme parks and tried to keep their buying up parcels quite so as to not drive up the price. I don’t understand why they bothered — they could have just done what Zuckerberg’s firm suggested and stolen each individual property. After all, no one property had economic value by itself, since no one property is sufficiently large to build Disney World on. Or how about banks? You can’t buy anything with a dollar bill nowadays, so why not just take the individual dollar bills from a bank? Surely that is not theft, as each individual dollar is worthless?
This attitude, by the way, stems from the relentless assault on artists rights by people like the EFF. (Yeah, yeah. But this is my hobbyhorse, and I will ride it as long as I like!) Yes, copyright laws have problems, and contract law often screws artists using copyright. But the calls for reform, not for getting rid of IP laws or claiming that just because digital copying is cheap it is not wrong to take a copy of a work as if no one is hurt. Copyright, as imperfect and flawed as it is, does protect the livelihoods of artists. Obviously, digital copies do have economic value. And just as obviously, intellectual property laws allow for artists to make a living as artists and not depend upon the artistically stifling patronage of rich people. There is a reason that our tech money overlords, having built their businesses on IP protected software, now want to end all IP laws. Those laws, contra the EFF, protect artists, allow them some measure of economic and thus artistic freedom, and thus enriches not diminishes our culture.
Or, you know, we can all just steal as much money as we want, one dollar bill at a time.
Weekly Word Count
Technically 2500, since I did write this little story, but since that was published by me, it doesn’t really count. Otherwise, I am still reworking the outline for the Tech Abortion novel based on feedback form the first draft. Getting closer, so hopefully next week I will have some actual word counts to talk about.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/4/18/2317180/-Failed-Writer-s-Journey-Meta-Thinks-Its-Legal-to-Steal-Your-Individual-Dollars?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web
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