archontes

You can read about it right here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106

Those protections and no other does copyright afford.

You are describing your feelings, not a law.

Also, it probably is a crime to download a book from the internet (or you could live in Switzerland). The owner/operator of the server has pretty certainly committed copyright infringement. Merely receiving a copy doesn't constitute infringement. In civil court they could make the case that you caused the copy to be made by clicking.

What you do with the book cannot be controlled, save reproducing it.

But there's the crux. Does placing the words into RAM qualify as "reproduction"? The ninth circuit held that it did in MAI Systems vs. Peak Computer. The second circuit held that it did not in Cartoon Network v. CSC Holdings.

The supreme court will have to decide.

I am also of the opinion that AI weights aren't copyrightable, as they're the result of an automatic process. "Open source" weights are a laughable non-sequitur.

I am not generally of the opinion that we need to expand copyright in order to protect a status quo.

From copyright.gov "Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation, although it may protect the way these things are expressed"

What rights does copyright provide?

Reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords.

Prepare derivative works based upon the work.

Distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership or by rental, lease, or lending.

Perform the work publicly if it is a literary, musical, dramatic, or choreographic work; a pantomime; or a motion picture or other audiovisual work.

Display the work publicly if it is a literary, musical, dramatic, or choreographic work; a pantomime; or a pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work. This right also applies to the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work.

Perform the work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission if the work is a sound recording.

Training an AI isn't on this list. An AI may produce infringing outputs, but training an AI isn't a violation of copyright.

"Copyright laundering" is a nonsense idea. Copyright is not designed to prevent people or machines from producing things in a style or similar things. It protects against exact reproduction or reuse, and that only to the extent that the form is separable from function. If the form is inseparable from function, the expression cannot be copyrighted at all.

Let's assume "shuffling stuff" as you describe it would solidly place a work into the "derivative works" category.

Fine, the AI has produced a derivative work. The original copyright holder has a claim on that work if it were to be distributed, sold, displayed, or performed.

Does the AI hold a copyright? No. Only humans can hold copyrights. Does the prompter hold a copyright? No. A human has to perform the transformative work, not merely arrange for a machine to do it. AI outputs are not copyrightable.

But how you "feel" about it isn't a useful measure. It being like "cheating off someone's homework" isn't useful, either. Hell. Copyright is carefully crafted to allow "cheating off someone's homework" provided that the result doesn't reproduce elements of the original exactly.

If by some mechanism other than what a gatekeeper would call 'reasoning', a machine produces outputs that approach indistinguishable from 'well reasoned', the argument that it didn't get there by reasoning is, well, not useful at the very least.

The Martians (of which von Neumann is usually the most regarded) were mostly Hungarian jews. It's a point on which some people have mused, so it's easy for the thought to point in that direction when von Neumann is brought up.

And weirdly, the response I get is, "Oh yeah, fair."

Remove the demand and the activity will dry up.

There's some way this is enshittified.

And sounds like a great way to plead guilty to a lesser crime, but IANAL.

It is enough to say absolutely nothing, and request the government to prove its case.

If someone shot a person with my gun, I would invoke the fifth amendment, and ask the government to prove who did it beyond a reasonable doubt.

And Russell Vought is holding the weapon.

If you write a contract and give it to a lawyer with the instruction, "Anyone who satisfies this contract gets this money." And someone satisfies the contract to the lawyer's -but not your- satisfaction, and the lawyer sends the money, did the third party steal from you?

I do this of my own free will, at my own hazard. I know I'm playing this game. I have intentionally elected to use a system that will execute without any further intervention or oversight on my part. Verbally, I state that I am confident enough in the writing of my instruction that I feel secure in whatever outcome it may bring.

The system automatically executes and someone has sold me a very nice remote control car.

I sue that person.

Why should I have standing?

You could count the words in a book and publish the word count, and while the information is based on the contents of the book, that would fall incredibly short of being a derivative work.

I suspect they committed whatever copyright violation is committed when they downloaded the copyrighted works. Training an AI on them is simply not related to the protections that copyright offers.