> In fact, I never consented for anyone to access my server. Just because it has an IP address, does not make it a public service.

If you don't take any steps to make it clear that it's not public, like an auth wall or putting pages on unguessable paths, then it is public, because that is what everyone expects.

Just like you if you have a storefront, if the door is unlocked you'd expect people to just come in and no one would take you seriously if you complain that people keep coming in if you don't somehow make it clear that they're not supposed to.

Your shop might be open sure - but aren't we talking about people coming in and taking whatever they like for free?

ie if you were an art gallery, the expectation would be people could come in and look, but you don't expect them to come in, photograph everything and then sell prints of everything online.

That's not what's happening.

Instead, it's that there's some people coming into your gallery, studying the art and its style, and leaving with the learned information. They then replicate that style in their own gallery. Of course, none of the images are copies, or would be judged to be copies by a reasonable person.

So now you, the gallery owner, want to forbid just those people who would come to learn the style. But you still want people to come and admire the art, and may be buy a print.

> Of course, none of the images are copies, or would be judged to be copies by a reasonable person.

That's the fiction of course.

Tell me how something like ChatGPT can simultaneously claim to return accurate information while at the same time being completely independent from the sources of the information?

In terms of images - copyright isn't only for exact copies - it if was then humans would have been taking the piss by making minor changes for decades.

Sure you could argue some is fair use with genuinely original content being produced in the process, but I think you are also overlooking an important part of what's considered 'fair' - industrialised copying of source material isn't really the same in terms of fairness as one person getting inspiration.

Taking the Encylopedia Britanica and running it though an algorithm to change the wording, but not the meaning, and selling it on is really not the same as a student reading it and including those facts in their essay - the latter is considered fair use, the former is taking the piss.

> ChatGPT can simultaneously claim to return accurate information while at the same time being completely independent from the sources of the information?

why can't that be true? Information is not copyrightable. The expression of information is. If chatGPT extracted information from a source works, and represent that information back to you in a form that is not a copy of the original works, then this is completely fine to me. An example would be a recipe.

So you think taking something like the Encylopedia Britanica, running it through a simple rewording algorithm, and selling it on is totally 'fair use'?

Taking all newspaper and proper journalistic output and rewording it automatically and selling it on is also 'fair use'?

Stand back from the detail ( of whether this pixel or word is the same or not ) and look at the bigger picture. You still telling me that's all fine and dandy?

I think it's obviously not 'fair use'.

It means the people doing the actual hard graft of gathering the news, or writing Encylopedias or Textbooks won't be able to make a living so these important activities will cease.

This is exactly the scenario copyright etc exists to stop.

> Taking all newspaper and proper journalistic output and rewording it automatically and selling it on is also 'fair use'?

it would be, if the transformation is substantial. If you're just asking for snippets of existing written works, then those snippets are merely derivative works.

For example, if you asked an LLM to summarize the news and stories of 2024, i reckon the output is not infringing. Because the informational contents of the news is not itself copyrightable, only the article itself. A summary, which contains a precis of the information, but not the original expression, is surely uncopyrightable - esp. if it is a small minority of the source (e.g., chatGPT used millions of sources).

> won't be able to make a living so these important activities will cease.

this is irrelevant as far as i'm concerned. They being able to make or not make a living is orthogonal. If they can't, then they should stop.

> this is irrelevant as far as i'm concerned. They being able to make or not make a living is orthogonal. If they can't, then they should stop.

It's not orthogonal - it's central. Copyright law and IP law isn't some abstract thing - it's a law with a purpose - to protect people from having their work ripped off in a way that they can no longer work.

If journalists can't gather the news, then sure events still happen but Google et al won't be able to summarise them as they will be no reports.

If scientific journals can no longer afford to operate as nobody needs to subscribe because anybody can get the content free via a rip-off, then there will be no scientific journals to rip-off.

Surely stealing stuff and selling it on is convenient for both big tech and consumers - but it's not a sustainable economic model.

Content is often publicly available and copyright protected. Paint a mural near a busy street. No locked door in that metaphor; locked door would be password protected site.