It certainly wasn't today. It was some time ago, but I wanted to mark this in my blog as a reminder that once, long ago, piracy was, well, stealing.

That's all changed now.

We, the web people, already knew that companies had, without permission, slurped up all our content to train their LLMs.

To some degree it was legitimate (though I'm not sure the licence on the site would be respected, such as creative commons) - our blog posts were on the open, and public web.

I'm certainly not justifying the carte blanche scraping and repurposing of our blog posts to help line the already rich pockets of tech bros.

However, this latest realisation has completely redefined piracy. I think I could happily argue that the concept of piracy is lost and gone.

I recently read Stephie Stimacs' post entitled "In which I discover my book has been scraped by Meta for its AI" - which you might be able to guess the conclusion just from the title.

As I was reading, I was reminded of a post I'd seen on BlueSky earlier that week:

it’s possible to not care if people (humans, readers) pirate my book—or even feel pleased they do, if anything; and, at the same time, express fury when corporations grab and grind the text up like scrap metal for their word-garbage generators

With all this in mind, I thought I'd check books I had written and contributed to in this LibGen database, and yep, my work was in there too. I'd go so far as bet that if you've written a book, it is too.

So what? So, Meta knowingly took pirated content and used it to train their models.

The complicity goes all the way to the top.

There's piracy behind closed doors and private use (bad), and there's what Meta did (and yes, likely the other companies already rolling in cash they could have actually paid for this content). They've taken pirated content and they're selling it as their own.

What are the ramifications?

Actual ROFL. Are you fucking kidding me? Those with power have proven time and time again in this last decade that they're not accountable. The answer to no one. There's no ramifications. None.

So. I wanted to mark on my blog, for posterity's sake, that piracy is dead. Because without an reaction there is no action, ergo: piracy doesn't really exist in today's age of AI and the rich and powerful.

Though, I somehow suspect the hammer is being kept on the side just in case us little people step out of line and "pirate" something for our own use.