The Code Sharing Tax
The only thing wealthy people seem to be very good at is making money without doing any work. It has been this way for time immemorial. The means by which they scam people changes over the centuries, with changes in societal structure, and changes in technology, but the overall grift remains consistent:
find a natural resource that everyone uses,
convince people (yourself first of all) that you somehow "own" the resource and that you are entitled to restrict how other people use it,
then force everyone else (usually through violence) to pay you for using the resource they would have otherwise enjoyed for free.
Lazy and wealthy squatters who love to claim ownership of things they don't own so they levy taxes on everyone else are endlessly innovative in tricking people into believing they own things, and are endlessly innovative in figuring out ways to squeeze some value out of you. But here I want to talk about a novel technique they have discovered involving "large language models" (LLMs), or what people just call "Artificial Intelligence" (AI) nowadays, even though the term AI is much broader than LLMs and predates LLMs by decades, but that is beside the point.
TL;DR: we used to share computer code in a form known as code "libraries." Wealthy people and institutions used copyright law to squat on these libraries as their own property and tax people for using them. Then the "Freedom Software" movement defied these taxes by writing software protected by copyright, but legally granting licensing rights to use this software only to other people who agreed to share freely and "share-alike" those code libraries. The Freedom Software movement then proceded to write all known computer algorithms as software shared freely through this license agreement. But now, LLMs have consumed this code and are copying it directly into other software, not through libraries, but by copy-pasting, and not at all respecting the "share-alike" license agreement, but they are still charging for use of the LLMs, effectively collecting taxes on natural resources they do not own: code written by other people for the purpose of sharing freely. And the grift continues.