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this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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No, it is considered copyright violation. That's a crime too (well, often a civil tort) but it is not theft. It's a different crime.
If you want something to be illegal there needs to be an actual law making it illegal. There isn't one in the case of AI training because it isn't theft and it isn't copyright violation. This is a new thing and new things are not illegal by default.
Calling it "theft" is simply incorrect, and meaningfully so since it's an emotionally charged and prejudicial term.
You skipped the identity theft part because I guess it kinda takes all the wind out of your argument lol.
Even then, “Theft” isn’t a single unique crime or law that’s distinct from copyright infringement, it’s an umbrella term. What you’re thinking of as the crime of “theft” is “larceny”, which actually does refer to taking physical property specifically. But Stephen Fry didn’t use the term Larceny here.
Copyright infringement when dealing with the theft of intellectual property is a type of theft. And since the rights to your voice and or performance is a thing you can own, it can easily be considered theft. It doesn’t need a new law, it’s just a new way to commit an old crime.
I skipped it because it's not related to what's going on here. "Identity theft" is fraud, not just impersonation. People impersonate other people with no problem, eg this Dolly Parton impersonation contest that was the first hit when I went googling for "look-alike contest". You could perhaps use AI voice emulation as part of an identity theft scheme, but the crime is in how it's used not in the emulation itself.
No, it is emphatically not a type of theft. That's the fundamental point you keep missing here.
Judges have explicitly and specifically said that this is not the case. In Dowling v. United States the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that copyright infringement was not stealing. This is a legal matter, which is not subject to personal opinion - it's not theft. Full stop.
The fact remains that in the case of identity theft, it is not the case that the thing being stolen must be a singular finite thing that is removed from your possession, which directly contradicts your original statement, which your entire argument depends on. You claim that it isn’t theft because his voice is “still where he left it”. Well in the crime of identity theft your identity remains right where you left it. This is the point you keep missing.
As for the Dowling v. United States ruling, it’s not the case that the judge held that copyright infringement isn’t theft, you’ve misinterpreted it entirely. What was held was that “Copies of copyrighted works cannot be regarded as "stolen property" for the purposes of a prosecution under the National Stolen Property Act of 1934.”
That is a very narrow ruling that clarified the definition of stolen property only as it applies to potential prosecution over law unrelated to copyright infringement. Like I said, there are different types of theft, and this ruling simply solidified the difference between crimes of the nature of theft, and larceny.
So, do you have a ruling somewhere that states that copies of copyrighted works can be regarded as "stolen property" for some other purpose?
Why are there completely separate laws regarding theft of physical property and the violation of copyrights if they can be regarded as the same?
No because those other related purposes are generally applicable to larceny specifically, as opposed to other crimes of theft.
The same reason there are completely separate killing laws, or drug laws, or property laws, or environmental laws. We’re not limited to one single law that covers an entire category of crime. State and federal governments pass new laws in existing categories every day. Thats why being a lawyer is hard, there are a lot of laws and the way they interact is complicated and inherently modular. Just like there are different kinds of those other crimes, there are different kinds of theft, so you need different laws for each kind. Larceny or larceny-theft, embezzlement, fraud, identity theft, copyright infringement. All theft, different definitions, requirements, circumstances, punishment, interactions with different laws (Receiving stolen properly, transporting stolen property across state lines etc.). You’re just latching on to larceny-theft, one very specific kind of theft, and mistakenly assuming that it is the only theft related law we have on the books.