Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

It's very similar to theft of service.

There's so many texts, and they're so sparse that if I could copyright a work and never publish it, the restriction would be irrelevant. The probability that you would accidentally come upon something close enough that copyright was relevant is almost infinitesimal.

Because of this copyright is an incredibly weak restriction, and that it is as weak as it is shows clearly that any use of a copyrighted work is due to the convenience that it is available.

That is, it's about making use of the work somebody else has done, not about that restricting you somehow.

Therefore copyright is much more legitimate than ordinary property. Ordinary property, especially ownership of land, can actually limit other people. But since copyright is so sparse infringing on it is like going to world with near-infinite space and picking the precise place where somebody has planted a field and deciding to harvest from that particular field.

Consequently I think copyright infringement might actually be worse than stealing.

you've created a very obvious category mistake in your final summary by confusing intellectual property--which can be copied at no penalty to an owner (except nebulous 'alternate universe' theories)--with actual property, and a farmer and his land, with a crop that cannot be enjoyed twice.

you're saying copying a book is worse than robbing a farmer of his food and/or livelihood, which cannot be replaced to duplicated. Meanwhile, someone who copies a book does not deprive the author of selling the book again (or a tasty proceedings from harvest).

I can't say I agree, for obvious reasons.

With this special infinite-land-land though, what's special about the farmer's land is that he's expended energy to make it that way, just as the author has expended energy to find his text.

Just as the farmer obtains his livelihood from the investment-of-energy-to-raise-crops-to-energy cycle the author has his livelihood by the investment-of-energy-to-finding-a-useful-work-to-energy cycle.

So he is in fact robbed in a very similar way.

> Consequently I think copyright infringement might actually be worse than stealing.

I remember when piracy wasn't theft, and information wanted to be free.

You're saying that a copy of a digital thing is the same as the "only" of a physical thing. But that's not true. You can't sell grain twice, but you can sell a movie many times (especially when you account for format changes, remasterings, platform locks, licensing for special usecases like remixing, broadcasts, etc).

You'd have to steal the author's ownership of the intellectual property in order for the comparison to be valid, just as you stole ownership of his crop.

Separately, there is a reason why theft and copyright infringement are two distinct concepts in law.

So do I, then I found this reasoning I presented in my comment and realised that piracy was actually quite bad.

Ordinary property is much worse than copyright, which is both time limited and not necessarily obtained through work, and which is much more limited in availability than the number of sequences.

When someone owns land, that's actually a place you stumble upon and can't enter, whereas you're not going to ever stumble upon the story of even 'Nasse hittar en stol' (swedish 'Nasse finds a chair') a very short book for very small children.

The difference here though is that the copyright holder sustains himself by the sales of his particular chosen text, so it doesn't matter that the text can be reproduced infinitely.

If you assume only way people are obtaining the media is by unlicensed reproduction, then it doesn’t matter.

Big if. Practically, the movie studios aren’t poor because their product has instances of infringement.