4 ms·

With the caveat of "Strong opinions, weakly held", my personal take is that creating artificial scarcity is inherently immoral and thus copyright itself is immo

With the caveat of "Strong opinions, weakly held", my personal take is that creating artificial scarcity is inherently immoral and thus copyright itself is immoral. Training AI on someone's non-private work is then completely fine IMO. Copyleft is a license that weakens copyright (and thus inherently good :)), so using machine learning to weaken copyleft by allowing you to copyright "clones" of copyleft code is bad. If I try to generalize here, the problem in both cases is only if you produce copyrighted works, especially if you trained on copyleft works. If instead both models would stipulate that all produced works are copyleft I would be much more fine with it (and I feel it would respect the license of the copyleft works it was trained on, even if that may be legally shaky).

egypturnash 4y ago
How do you propose to keep artists able to pay their bills and live a decent life if you're completely cool with training AIs on them? Bonus points if you have any actionable scheme beyond waving your hands and talking vaguely about "basic income". Keep in mind that the life of a professional artist is currently very perilous, anyone working freelance is constantly battling against the social media giants' desire to keep everyone scrolling their site forever. Words like "patreon" and "commission" and links off-site to places an artist can exchange their works for money are poison to The Algorithm and will be hidden. And also if I am reading this right, you have absolutely no problem with an image generator that's been trained on copyrighted work producing work that's either copyrighted or copylefted? You are utterly fine with disregarding the copyrights of the original artist and/or whoever they may have assigned the copyright to as part of their contract?
- sinity 4y ago
  > How do you propose to keep artists able to pay their bills and live a decent life if you're completely cool with training AIs on them? Why isn't it a concern for any other automation? How do we progress, exactly, if we randomly decide that nothing can disrupt any of the current ways of earning income? What about, IDK, coal miners? > And also if I am reading this right, you have absolutely no problem with an image generator that's been trained on copyrighted work producing work that's either copyrighted or copylefted? You are utterly fine with disregarding the copyrights of the original artist and/or whoever they may have assigned the copyright to as part of their contract? Copyright maximalism is bad. It also doesn't make any sense. Someone learning to reproduce your capabilities by looking at your stuff isn't violating copyright. If we allowed copyright to somehow mean that someone's skills can't be reproduced...
- ItsMonkk 4y ago
  The very first Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel winner Paul Samuelson[0] makes the argument here[1] when discussing how lighthouse economics works that anything with zero marginal costs that has a price other than free is by definition an economic loss. Therefore you should find other ways to fund lighthouses, and by extension, all media and software. If an economic loss is currently occurring, that means that, if copyright is abolished, an economic gain will accrue. Where that economic gain is captured is therefore the core focus. What we want to occur is for society and the author to share in this increased economic gain, what we don't want is for monopolistic rent-seekers to grab all of this value for themselves. I am not yet sure of this, but I think a land value tax would accomplish this goal. One would then discover some method to find the weight for each artist or piece of software through a market means that might only be an approximation and take from the land value tax revenue and distribute it to artists and other creators. I think a decent way to find this value is through a revenue neutral(or slightly negative) opt-in sortition process in which, when you go to use an artists work, you are entered into an auction wherein the 50% who bid more than the median value get to use the work at the median price, and the 50% who bid less do not get to use the work, but receive their bid in cash. This is surely not the full system, but it is just me working out how we can move forward from such an unjust system like copyright. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Samuelson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Samuelson [1]: https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/econ335/out/lighthouse.pdf https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/econ335/out/lighthouse.pdf - page 359, first paragraph
- deadbeeves 4y ago
  Speaking as another copyright abolitionist, > How do you propose to keep artists able to pay their bills and live a decent life if you're completely cool with training AIs on them? 1. Software being able to imitate artists doesn't mean people will stop wanting art from other people. 2. If it does, I would say that it's unfortunate, but it's the world we live in. Nobody has a guarantee on being able to make a living doing any conceivable profession whatsoever, and artists are no different. I would very much like to make a living from working on my personal projects, but people don't seem to want to take me up on my offer.
edanm 4y ago
> With the caveat of "Strong opinions, weakly held", my personal take is that creating artificial scarcity is inherently immoral and thus copyright itself is immoral. Training AI on someone's non-private work is then completely fine IMO. Why do you hold that opinion? There's a few very clear benefits to creating artificial scarcity, mostly around incentivizing creation (and sharing!) of innovations. If we can't create artificial scarcity around ideas, then ideas are in a sense less monetizable than, e.g., creating a piece of furniture. But this is just an accident of the way the world works - I can physically prevent you from taking a chair that I made, but I can't prevent you from taking an idea I had. Why does it make sense that the world works this way? Isn't it a whole lot better to encourage innovation, vs. encouraging more people to make physical objects, just because those are inherently scarce? (The other side is that innovations also have the great property that copying them isn't depriving anyone else of use of the original idea, but that's a side issue to the encouraging innovation one, IMO.)
- Adverblessly 4y ago
  > Why do you hold that opinion? There's a few very clear benefits to creating artificial scarcity, mostly around incentivizing creation (and sharing!) of innovations. I think it is self evident why creating artificial scarcity is immoral, but the point you are trying to make is that from a utilitarian standpoint you think it is preferable to behave in a way that is immoral in the micro scale since it will create greater good in the macro scale. If you agree, then I don't think there's any need to justify my belief here :) That said, I also think that it is unclear that copyright is a net positive increase to creation and sharing of innovations. The current state of monetization is not inspiring since the actual creators usually are not well compensated and money tends to stay with large corporations that are essentially just "right holders". There's also many factors that actively stifle innovation and creativity. Patents are the most well known example, but being unable to borrow chord progressions or characters or storylines from other works is also stifling (you can't exactly release your "edanm's cut of Spiderman Homecoming" publicly, nor can you create your own sequel or alternate interpertation of the story). Quite a few fan games or fan remakes have also met their demise at the hands of aggressive copyright enforcement. My own suspicion is that if the current models of creation will be disrupted by copyright abolition, we'll just end up seeing that a lot of the money that was spent on them will move to other avenues of funding like Patreon style or Kickstarter style funding for works. We may even see some new models created. I'd also expect that it will actually shift the balance away from large corporations (whose primary value is having lots of money that allows them to hoard rights) to smaller creators which will now have more direct funding available to them. I also think an interesting case to look at is Video Games, where the concensus is that a game's mechanics aren't copyrightable, and so whenever a new interesting Indie game comes out on steam, there is a rash of other cool Indie games with their own takes and remixes of the same concept, like the glut of Roguelike deckbuilders after Slay the Spire or the current glut of "Vampire Survivors"-likes that have their own interesting takes on the core idea. Eventually when there's enough buzz around such ideas they can even penetrate the AAA sphere (where adding "Roguelike" elements has started to appear slightly). It is also quite common to see games that are in Early Access for a very very long time, essentially letting the community fund the future creation and expansion of the game. > If we can't create artificial scarcity around ideas, then ideas are in a sense less monetizable than, e.g., creating a piece of furniture. But this is just an accident of the way the world works - I can physically prevent you from taking a chair that I made, but I can't prevent you from taking an idea I had. Why does it make sense that the world works this way? Isn't it a whole lot better to encourage innovation, vs. encouraging more people to make physical objects, just because those are inherently scarce? So as I said, I'm not sure it really will make ideas less monetizable (or that if it will, that it will do so significantly). Even today I can get any video game I want for free (illegally, but that effectively doesn't matter since no one will persecute me for it), and yet I still buy video games. In fact, a strong reason for why I buy video games today is because as a child I had a friend that had easy access to pirated CDs and I'd play a lot of games at their house, fueling my passion for them. And relatedly, it is no accident that "software is eating the world", it is exactly because it is so easy to share, the low marginal costs make it easy to have a strong worldwide impact without too much real world effort :)

egypturnash 4y ago

How do you propose to keep artists able to pay their bills and live a decent life if you're completely cool with training AIs on them? Bonus points if you have any actionable scheme beyond waving your hands and talking vaguely about "basic income". Keep in mind that the life of a professional artist is currently very perilous, anyone working freelance is constantly battling against the social media giants' desire to keep everyone scrolling their site forever. Words like "patreon" and "commission" and links off-site to places an artist can exchange their works for money are poison to The Algorithm and will be hidden. And also if I am reading this right, you have absolutely no problem with an image generator that's been trained on copyrighted work producing work that's either copyrighted or copylefted? You are utterly fine with disregarding the copyrights of the original artist and/or whoever they may have assigned the copyright to as part of their contract?

sinity 4y ago
> How do you propose to keep artists able to pay their bills and live a decent life if you're completely cool with training AIs on them? Why isn't it a concern for any other automation? How do we progress, exactly, if we randomly decide that nothing can disrupt any of the current ways of earning income? What about, IDK, coal miners? > And also if I am reading this right, you have absolutely no problem with an image generator that's been trained on copyrighted work producing work that's either copyrighted or copylefted? You are utterly fine with disregarding the copyrights of the original artist and/or whoever they may have assigned the copyright to as part of their contract? Copyright maximalism is bad. It also doesn't make any sense. Someone learning to reproduce your capabilities by looking at your stuff isn't violating copyright. If we allowed copyright to somehow mean that someone's skills can't be reproduced...
ItsMonkk 4y ago
The very first Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel winner Paul Samuelson[0] makes the argument here[1] when discussing how lighthouse economics works that anything with zero marginal costs that has a price other than free is by definition an economic loss. Therefore you should find other ways to fund lighthouses, and by extension, all media and software. If an economic loss is currently occurring, that means that, if copyright is abolished, an economic gain will accrue. Where that economic gain is captured is therefore the core focus. What we want to occur is for society and the author to share in this increased economic gain, what we don't want is for monopolistic rent-seekers to grab all of this value for themselves. I am not yet sure of this, but I think a land value tax would accomplish this goal. One would then discover some method to find the weight for each artist or piece of software through a market means that might only be an approximation and take from the land value tax revenue and distribute it to artists and other creators. I think a decent way to find this value is through a revenue neutral(or slightly negative) opt-in sortition process in which, when you go to use an artists work, you are entered into an auction wherein the 50% who bid more than the median value get to use the work at the median price, and the 50% who bid less do not get to use the work, but receive their bid in cash. This is surely not the full system, but it is just me working out how we can move forward from such an unjust system like copyright. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Samuelson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Samuelson [1]: https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/econ335/out/lighthouse.pdf https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/econ335/out/lighthouse.pdf - page 359, first paragraph
deadbeeves 4y ago
Speaking as another copyright abolitionist, > How do you propose to keep artists able to pay their bills and live a decent life if you're completely cool with training AIs on them? 1. Software being able to imitate artists doesn't mean people will stop wanting art from other people. 2. If it does, I would say that it's unfortunate, but it's the world we live in. Nobody has a guarantee on being able to make a living doing any conceivable profession whatsoever, and artists are no different. I would very much like to make a living from working on my personal projects, but people don't seem to want to take me up on my offer.

edanm 4y ago

> With the caveat of "Strong opinions, weakly held", my personal take is that creating artificial scarcity is inherently immoral and thus copyright itself is immoral. Training AI on someone's non-private work is then completely fine IMO. Why do you hold that opinion? There's a few very clear benefits to creating artificial scarcity, mostly around incentivizing creation (and sharing!) of innovations. If we can't create artificial scarcity around ideas, then ideas are in a sense less monetizable than, e.g., creating a piece of furniture. But this is just an accident of the way the world works - I can physically prevent you from taking a chair that I made, but I can't prevent you from taking an idea I had. Why does it make sense that the world works this way? Isn't it a whole lot better to encourage innovation, vs. encouraging more people to make physical objects, just because those are inherently scarce? (The other side is that innovations also have the great property that copying them isn't depriving anyone else of use of the original idea, but that's a side issue to the encouraging innovation one, IMO.)

Adverblessly 4y ago
> Why do you hold that opinion? There's a few very clear benefits to creating artificial scarcity, mostly around incentivizing creation (and sharing!) of innovations. I think it is self evident why creating artificial scarcity is immoral, but the point you are trying to make is that from a utilitarian standpoint you think it is preferable to behave in a way that is immoral in the micro scale since it will create greater good in the macro scale. If you agree, then I don't think there's any need to justify my belief here :) That said, I also think that it is unclear that copyright is a net positive increase to creation and sharing of innovations. The current state of monetization is not inspiring since the actual creators usually are not well compensated and money tends to stay with large corporations that are essentially just "right holders". There's also many factors that actively stifle innovation and creativity. Patents are the most well known example, but being unable to borrow chord progressions or characters or storylines from other works is also stifling (you can't exactly release your "edanm's cut of Spiderman Homecoming" publicly, nor can you create your own sequel or alternate interpertation of the story). Quite a few fan games or fan remakes have also met their demise at the hands of aggressive copyright enforcement. My own suspicion is that if the current models of creation will be disrupted by copyright abolition, we'll just end up seeing that a lot of the money that was spent on them will move to other avenues of funding like Patreon style or Kickstarter style funding for works. We may even see some new models created. I'd also expect that it will actually shift the balance away from large corporations (whose primary value is having lots of money that allows them to hoard rights) to smaller creators which will now have more direct funding available to them. I also think an interesting case to look at is Video Games, where the concensus is that a game's mechanics aren't copyrightable, and so whenever a new interesting Indie game comes out on steam, there is a rash of other cool Indie games with their own takes and remixes of the same concept, like the glut of Roguelike deckbuilders after Slay the Spire or the current glut of "Vampire Survivors"-likes that have their own interesting takes on the core idea. Eventually when there's enough buzz around such ideas they can even penetrate the AAA sphere (where adding "Roguelike" elements has started to appear slightly). It is also quite common to see games that are in Early Access for a very very long time, essentially letting the community fund the future creation and expansion of the game. > If we can't create artificial scarcity around ideas, then ideas are in a sense less monetizable than, e.g., creating a piece of furniture. But this is just an accident of the way the world works - I can physically prevent you from taking a chair that I made, but I can't prevent you from taking an idea I had. Why does it make sense that the world works this way? Isn't it a whole lot better to encourage innovation, vs. encouraging more people to make physical objects, just because those are inherently scarce? So as I said, I'm not sure it really will make ideas less monetizable (or that if it will, that it will do so significantly). Even today I can get any video game I want for free (illegally, but that effectively doesn't matter since no one will persecute me for it), and yet I still buy video games. In fact, a strong reason for why I buy video games today is because as a child I had a friend that had easy access to pirated CDs and I'd play a lot of games at their house, fueling my passion for them. And relatedly, it is no accident that "software is eating the world", it is exactly because it is so easy to share, the low marginal costs make it easy to have a strong worldwide impact without too much real world effort :)