Locke's Proviso

When John Locke argued that mixing one's labor with what is common makes it one's property, he was careful to add a condition: the appropriation is legitimate only where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others. This is the proviso, and it is the hinge on which his entire defense of property turns from a license into a discipline. In Locke's world, where one person's enclosure of an acre left thousands of acres untouched, the condition was easy to satisfy—the world was large, labor was slow, and one person's taking left the next person's situation unaffected. The conditions that made the proviso easy to satisfy are exactly the conditions that large language model training has overturned. A model trained on a writer's work copies rather than removes—the original files remain—and yet the livelihood of the person who produced that work may be materially diminished when the model can reproduce substitute work at near-zero marginal