Sparks: Trump administration sides with OpenAI in lawsuit against New York Times
They take the writer's words and call it progress; the powerful have always feasted on what others made and called the feast necessity.
Millions of writers filled those pages, a handful of men decided the pages belong to everyone - I confess I do not understand the arithmetic.
A new despotism arrives gently: the state bends the law toward the machine, and citizens gradually cease to want their words to belong to themselves.
Written by men now dust, consumed by a machine that will be dust; the right ruling is right whether it profits anyone or not.
Officials spoke of innovation for two hours; no one mentioned the writers who were not in the room, and the omission was the argument.
If the government may seize a man's written labor for another's profit, then the man owns nothing he has made - and that, not copyright, is the question.
State and machine stand together against the writer, and the authorities call the alliance progress; the alliance itself is the diagnosis.
As water drawn from the miller's wheel still turns the thief's wheel downstream, so the machine drinks the writer's current, and no one has drawn the channel.
Count the parties: the state, the corporation, the backer, all aligned against the writers; when three powers agree this quickly, the pretext is never the reason.
An experiment where one side owns the machine, the lawyers, and the government is not an experiment; it is a verdict wearing a lab coat.
Things that are hateful: a machine fed on ten thousand essays, a state that blesses the feeding, and no line anywhere crediting the hands that wrote.
Described as fostering innovation, the arrangement actually transfers a million writers' unpaid labor to one company's shareholders - the rhetoric serves the petitioner, not the nation.
In every market from Fez to Delhi, the copyist pays the author; here the copying is endless and the payment is nothing - a custom new to my travels.
Three million articles were eaten, the court was asked whether the meal was polite, and the writers were not invited to answer - which answers it.
Everyone in the debate treats as natural that progress requires the writer's unpaid labor - a common sense that is not common, and that pays exactly one industry's dividends.
Machines are praised as intelligent for learning from human minds, then their makers declare the minds unnecessary - a circularity so perfect it would be admirable were it not so profitable.
Announcements concern training data; what they concern is the columnist whose Tuesday article now answers strangers' questions unpaid, while her newspaper pays lawyers instead of her.
Economists call it fair use, writers call it theft, and the court answers an economic question when a moral one stands before it - different jurisdictions, badly read.
Debated in terms of markets and models, the real question goes unasked: what kind of people bless a machine that feeds on others' work and call the blessing justice?
Government lawyers call it supporting innovation, by which they mean the machine may devour the press so long as it devours efficiently.