> I find the "precedence" approach taken by English / Common Law incredibly silly — and actively harmful, [...] Judges' interpretative rulings should not have (almost) the same effect as the legislative passing a law.
Precedents are visible. They're the outcome of prior cases. If the people or the legislature doesn't like the rulings they can look at the judges' reasoning and fix the law, invalidating the old precedents at the same time.
> Anyway the original argument was that you could apply some license-like terms onto spam mails, and for that — no, you very much can't.
By the act of giving you the email they're implicitly giving you permission to do email things with it - read it, forward it, store it, etc. But you don't own the copyright and can't create and publish derivative works, etc.
We never questioned the anti-spam use because it's obvious. You aren't storing data for the purpose of recreating the spam, you're storing details about what spam looks like for the purposes of recognizing more of it.
> The situation for AI is, to my knowledge, still very muddy at this point.
The question is if the NN weights in an AGI are materially different than the NN weights in a spam filter.
> If the people or the legislature doesn't like the rulings they can look at the judges' reasoning and fix the law,
That's exactly the point. In common law, when a precedent is cited in a later case, it is (like a law) largely protected from "reasoning about". You need to involve the legislature to change it. In civil law, other cases are of course also invoked as references - but not law-like, they're just shortcuts in transferring prior reasoning, and fully open to challenge. Unlike laws.
(But this is really off-topic here anyway.)
> By the act of giving you the email they're implicitly giving you permission to do email things with it - read it, forward it, store it, etc. But you don't own the copyright and can't create and publish derivative works, etc.
None of these things come about from something written in the e-mail. They are that way because it is an e-mail. If you want to tack on other semantics, that's an entirely different thing.
> The question is if the NN weights in an AGI are materially different than the NN weights in a spam filter.
No, that's completely besides the point. The question is whether NN weights trained on data that you received, in this case without any agreement, are materially different from NN weights trained on data that you crawled and that had "you may retrieve and use this data under terms XYZ" restrictions attached. It legally very much matters whether the data got thrown at you or whether you went looking for it on your own accord.
Precedents are visible. They're the outcome of prior cases. If the people or the legislature doesn't like the rulings they can look at the judges' reasoning and fix the law, invalidating the old precedents at the same time.
> Anyway the original argument was that you could apply some license-like terms onto spam mails, and for that — no, you very much can't.
By the act of giving you the email they're implicitly giving you permission to do email things with it - read it, forward it, store it, etc. But you don't own the copyright and can't create and publish derivative works, etc.
We never questioned the anti-spam use because it's obvious. You aren't storing data for the purpose of recreating the spam, you're storing details about what spam looks like for the purposes of recognizing more of it.
> The situation for AI is, to my knowledge, still very muddy at this point.
The question is if the NN weights in an AGI are materially different than the NN weights in a spam filter.