I’ve gotten a fair amount of feedback on my post about LLMs and copyright, most of it expected. But I was surprised to see how many people wrote to me to inform me that copyright violation is not stealing under natural law, that stealing is an inappropriate word to use. Copyright is a societal convention only, I have been told, an invention of the government with no moral force.
I was surprised by this argument, but I shouldn’t have been, as it is in line with the δόγματα of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, as well as off-shoots of that copyright protest strain of thought including the Pirate Party in its many forms, and Pirate Bay, etc.