So this should be it for trying to regulate theft, right? If you can open a window without any tool other than your own body. It doesn't seem like it's possible to stop thefts without a totalitarian surveillance state (and barely event then!).
Or same can be said about media "piracy". Or ransomwares.
States have forever regulated things that are not possible to enforce purely technically.
But theft is quite a different thing, is it not? It's a physical act that someone can be caught engaging in - be it by another person, a guard or a security camera. Sure, the "barrier for entry" to commit it is low, but retailers et al. are doing as much as they can to raise it.
Piracy most often isn't treated as a criminal matter, but a civil one - few countries punish piracy severely, but companies are allowed to sue the pirate.
I agree with OP in principle - regulating generative AI use would be way harder than piracy or whatever, especially since all of it can be done purely locally and millions of people already have the software downloaded. And that's not getting into the reasoning behind a ban - piracy and similar "digital crimes" are banned because they directly harm someone, while someone launching Stable Diffusion on their PC doesn't do much of anything.
>> All States shall cooperate to the fullest possible extent in the repression of piracy on the high seas or in any other place outside the jurisdiction of any State.
We could have just added "private computer" to the definition of piracy, and it largely would have applied.
>> Definition of piracy
>> Piracy consists of any of the following acts:
>> (a) any illegal acts of violence or detention, or any act of depredation, committed for private ends by the crew or the passengers of a private ship or a private aircraft, and directed [...] on the high seas, against another ship or aircraft, or against persons or property on board such ship or aircraft;
..What? Digital piracy has absolutely no logical or legal connections to naval piracy, except for sharing the same name.
No sane person could ever implement anything like this. This is like saying that we could "just" add the word "digital" to the laws prohibiting murder to make playing GTA illegal.
You could tie essentially any two crimes by assigning more broad descriptors to them that'd boil down to "this is what countries want to discourage". Not to mention, half of this is just wrong - digital piracy most often isn't extraterritorial (it very much falls under the jurisdiction of where the piracy took place), and most individuals pirate for personal needs, not profit.
The point stands - no jurisdiction that I know of treats digital piracy similarly to naval piracy, and there is no strong argument in favor of doing so.
no, this is a lousy analogy because there is a clear harm to others in the case of theft. we've tried regulating other difficult to regulate things where the harm is unclear or indirect (drugs being a good example) to no avail.
your piracy example is better. consider that it's the rise of more convenient options (netflix and spotify) not some effective policy that curtailed the prevalence of piracy.
> consider that it's the rise of more convenient options (netflix and spotify) not some effective policy that curtailed the prevalence of piracy.
The turning point was earlier than Netflix or Spotify – it was the iTunes Store. It was such a dramatic shift, people labelled Steve Jobs as “the man who persuaded the world to pay for content”.
“Trying to regulate” and “succeeding in enforcing regulations” aren't the same thing.
In fact, a low clearance rate can be evidence of trying to regulate far beyond one's capacity to consistently enforce; if you weren't trying to regulate very hard, it would be much easier to have a high clearance rate for violations of what regulations you do have.
Or same can be said about media "piracy". Or ransomwares.
States have forever regulated things that are not possible to enforce purely technically.