The word "their" is overloaded, it could mean "thing I have the legal right to", or, "thing I have in my possession right now".

The latter condition is clearly true. It's their data.

If you pretend the other definitions of possession don't exist and claim "aktually it's not theirs they don't have rights to it" then that's on you for faking an incomplete understanding of language.

You are being granted a license to use the data.

But no one else is obligated to ignore the definitions of words that you're choosing to ignore, so the rest of us will go on saying it's their data.

We're not talking abstract language concepts, this is a specific case. The data was taken without license/rights/approval. It's stolen. AA calling it "our data" is disingenuous. Legally it isn't theirs. While you could use "ours"/"theirs" loosely in English, they knew it wasn't true in a legal sense when publishing this.

It would constitute computer fraud and abuse by most definitions. This is relevant because it is sufficient to prove someone has your passwords in order to convict them, you don't need to prove they used them maliciously. (Provided of course they are a third party with no legitimate reason to have your passwords)

(I really hope that was an intentional reference or this won't make any sense.)

That doesn't sound right my man. If I take your car and return it so you never knew it was taken, wouldn't it still be theft?

What if my intent isn't to sabotage you but to enjoy the car for myself and your deprivation is merely collateral damage, not my intent, is that not theft?

The chop shop well might.

Or, if I steal your car, and then go on to use it daily for the next 10 years, at some point everyone I know will refer to it as "my" car even if they're all entirely aware it was stolen.

> they knew it wasn't true in a legal sense when publishing this

I'm not sure why you're expecting the operators of a pirate site to use legally rigorous terms to refer to themselves in a blog post. This is an error in your expectations, not their terminology.

That's incorrect. A license violation isn't theft. Theft deprives others of their property, that's not what's going on here. Intellectual property is a fictional "ownership" that provides value to society, but it is much newer and different than the actual ownership of property.

No one actually owns a collection of words or ideas or thoughts.

So with that in mind, circling back to whether possession occurs in such a way to make possessive language appropriate (being able to say "my data" after stealing data but not depriving the author of the data), my opinion is that the copy of the data that the author still controls is the author's data, and the copy of the data that the stealer controls is the stealer's data. It's the author's idea, but both parties separately possess the data (the data is a record of the idea).

I found an abandoned bicycle 10 years ago. I have since replaced nearly all parts of it. I would give it back if you can prove it is yours but who owns the bicycle of theseus is more of an opinion.

I refer to it as my bicycle.

However, I think there might be a legal framework in which the stolen good might locally be yours within the context of a single transaction or dispute.

E.g: if I buy a car from you for X$, and you deliver it, that's your car for the purposes of that deal. If it later turns out it was stolen, that changes the facts and is an additive change not a transformative change to the original transaction. If we imagine a chain of transactions, you might analyze the dispute as it spreads through the contract chain through a centrallized birds-eye doctrine, or you might analyze the matter contract by contract, in a sort of distributed algorithm.

In that latter sense, it makes sense to refer to the asset as property of one party independently of whether it will truly be deemed as theirs. Under this frame, for the purpose of that contract, there is an implicit claim of property, and an implicit risk of the asset being stolen. If the car is later found to be stolen, it isn't parsed as the car being property of someone else, much less always having been of someone else, but rather there would be a new fact: of there being a competing claim of ownership over the asset, which might or might not have legal and ethical grounds, and might or might not be successfully defended in a court, resulting in an obligation to return the asset, devaluing the ownership claim to 0.

Mathematically the asset being traded is no longer the subject of the contract, rather it'd be about a legal and ethical claim to the asset itself, which has a subjective value p between 0 and 1, which when multiplied by the value of the asset yields the Expected Value EV. There is a market for ownership claims where p<1 all the way to p>0. Theft and criminal charges need not always be the reason there is uncertainty over ownership, succession disputes, bankruptcies, ongoing litigation over the asset, patents, ip claims, wars, etc...

Possession is 9/10 of the law - if you have a copy, you have possession, and thus you have SOMETHING and LEGALLY it is considered yours (now whether you legally obtained it is a different story and THAT is where charges stem from.)

It’s only the former definition that would allow an AI model to have been trained on someone else’s data

There are yet more definitions of "theirs". For example, data whose provenance can be traced back to Anna's Archive.

So the data is legally owned by the book authors, possessed by Anna's Archive, and downloaded for training usage by the AI companies. Every person in that chain could, linguistically speaking, correctly refer to the data as "theirs", or refer to the data of a different entity as "theirs".

Regardless, digital file possession and ownership doesn't map cleanly to our language. I technically don't own any Kindle books I buy, I can't share them, yet I clearly have access to an ebook. So I both do and don't currently possess said book.

If capitalism was capable of actually preserving the knowledge of humanity, we wouldn't need things like Anna's Archive.

Even Youtube is no longer less hassle than piracy now.

Putin's 3 day special military operation has been going on for 4 year and 3 months, btw.

All of the international payment processors (ie, anyone piggybacking off Visanet) are in compliance with the sanctions.

It’s a shame the TV and movie people can’t seem to learn this. Most music is available on Spotify and Apple and probably other places as well.

They toyed with exclusivity for a while and I’m sure there’s still some stuff that’s exclusive to one or the other, but any time I hear a song and look it up, it’s on Spotify. Done.

Such a contrast to the stupid game of figuring out which streaming service has the show I want.

I think a better example is bandcamp - it’s actually sustainable for artists and just as convenient as pirating. Plus you get to actually own what you pay for as opposed to Spotify controlling what you can / cant listen to.

They aren’t competing with music piracy which is mostly dead outsides of niches nowadays.

streaming services do provide some conveniences over manually managing one's own library of music. i feel like "far more" is a sales pitch argument more than something that describes reality (ignoring whether you pirate or legally acquire digital music). i recently cancelled my streaming music service subscription and returned to manually managing my music. i spend maybe one day a week shuffling music on and off of my phone according to what i want to listen to in the moment. i don't really miss being able to call up any song in the world at any point - i make a note to add it to my phone next time i sync and then move on. if i simply have to play something that's not currently on my phone, i can usually find it on bandcamp or youtube without having to pay for a stream or two.

i know it's not for everybody (and trust me, apple doesn't make it particularly easy to do compared to signing up for Apple Music), but it's really not much work to manage your own music and doing so comes with some benefits you forget about when you assume you can and should have instantaneous, frictionless access to most recorded music.

Even with licensing costs at zero, the infra of Youtube, the closest thing to Spotify for video, is a very different beast. And I'd argue youtube doesn't go far enough.

So, while you are right that video streaming is much more costly than audio streaming, I think GP is overall more correct about the reasoning being production costs rather than anything to do with distribution.

Reduced hot-storage, increased playlist. Sort of media communism but the capitalists still hold the keys?

While the web UIs suck compared to local media players, they work well enough that I can cope.

But most services restrict 4K (and at least historically 1080p) web playback, even on Windows with a GPU that supports top-tier hardware DRM and an HDCP display.

My desktop display is a recent 55" LG OLED smart TV, and the streaming service apps on the TV work fine when my attention is devoted to whatever I'm watching, even if they tend to be slightly shittier than the already mediocre web UIs.

But when task switching or multitasking, my only options are reduced video quality, borrowing or purchasing a physical copy if available, or piracy.

Given how quickly everything shows up on public torrent trackers, I struggle to understand why the 4K limitations remain in place, as it obviously doesn't stop whoever uploads the torrents, and there has to be a vanishingly small number of paying customers who'd prefer to crack DRM locally or record HDMI instead of simply downloading the torrent.

Do streaming services get kickbacks from smart device vendors?

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/Valves-Gabe-Newell-Says-Pir...

YouTube premium is hassle?

It's all about playing the incentive structure. When the party who can stop you from doing something is different from the party who wants to stop you from doing it, nobody will stop you from doing it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewsRadio

[1] https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock

  >You've saved people from 21,262 segments (5d 18h 50.7 minutes of their lives)
  >
  >You've skipped 3522 segments (1d 5h 17.4 minutes)

I hope someone makes an AI-Block addon, to filter out slop channels based on the same crowd sourcing principle. It's gotten so bad I rarely venture beyond that channels I'm already subscribed to, because those are pre-sloppocalypse.

I do see hassle on things like disney and iplayer, which put now put adverts for shows I don't want to watch in front of Rivals. It's fortunately very rare that happens (on Disney), but its getting close to what I did when Amazon brought that in, and cancelled my subscription. Just like I stopped buying DVDs when they brought adverts in.

I wouldn't have any moral problem in downloading Rivals from piratebay though, as far as I'm concerned I'm paying for it.

But sometimes though there's no option to buy the thing. I want to buy the audio version of "a stitch in time" by Andrew Robinson (Garak from Star Trek).

It's not available in my country on audible -- only the German translation.

I haven't acquired it via other means yet, I'm still on the look out for another supplier which will take my money, and if I can trust that's a legitimate supplier so at least some of my money goes to the copyright holder (and thus pays for the people that create it)

I don't have a CD player so not much use, but technically it is available for £142 from "Paper Cavalier UK". That's second hand, the creator won't make any money from me doing that.

To my mind if someone won't "shut up and take my money", it's acceptable to acquire via another means.