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Copyright is not a real thing. It's a fiction. Subverting copyright law is not like subverting the laws of physics. What happens when you subvert copyright law

by mlsu 3y ago

Copyright is not a real thing. It's a fiction. Subverting copyright law is not like subverting the laws of physics. What happens when you subvert copyright law is some guys with guns, in either an overt way or a subtle one, force a trade of your imaginary resource (copyright) for the real resource (money), through licensing or fines. Debate about what AI means for copyright is really a debate about what we choose to do, what we choose to allow. It's a debate about whether the guys with guns will stop the development of AI, or how much. It's a bit of clever misdirection to declare the output of AI's "copyrightable" or "not copyrightable." Copyrightable is made up! It's fiction! It is whatever we want it to be!

maester-of-bots 3y ago
Never knew HN catered to sovereign citizens. Yikes.
tilwidnk 3y ago
> Copyright is not a real thing. It's a fiction. Now, I don't have a college degree, but with my 60+ years life experience I can say, yes, copyright is a real thing, it protects people who create, from assholes and AI.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  It doesn’t though
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  It's not real beyond what the parent post described, which is an expectation that the state will use guns and cages in reaction to certain behaviors
  - mewpmewp2 3y ago
    But they won't if it's going to threaten their military capability vs other actors like China, Russia or otherwise.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  Am I the only one that loves a blunt and honest comment? Funny how advocates against property rights have no issue with corporations protecting their own. That’s fine. What they want is to legally steal from the average joe.
  - echelon 3y ago
    Are you stealing from your lord, serf? Perhaps you should be churning the butter, not thinking for yourself. (I kid, I kid!) It's going to be just as easy to make a movie or a song as it was to write this comment. I'm working and researching at the edge, and I promise you that the entire world will be in awe of these next 12 months. Go play with Suno for a taste. I'm a senior engineer, and now I'm tab completing Rust code 70% of the time. It's hard to believe we've come this far, and it's only going to keep climbing in capability. You're watching breakneck progress, and the genie isn't going back. More art will be created per month than the entire human history to this point. Gen alpha is growing up on this stuff and using it to great effect to communicate amongst their peers. The things they build will be incredible.
    - arrosenberg 3y ago
      > It's hard to believe we've come this far, and it's only going to keep climbing in capability. Or we hit the top of the sigmoid curve and just have fancy autocomplete.
      - SpicyLemonZest 3y ago
        I don't understand why the autocomplete meme is so compelling to people. How is drawing a picture, which modern AI systems are already capable of, "autocomplete"?
        arrosenberg 3y ago
        (1) I was responding to the actual thing OP said (70% code completion in Rust). (2) It literally is autocompleting - it draws each pixel because it statistically determines that <some color value> is the best fit given the prompt and the prior pixels it drew. It's a more advanced robot, but it's still a robot.
- echelon 3y ago
  Serfdom used to be a real thing. Dowry payments used to be a real thing. Butter churning used to be a real thing. Copyright law is, and will be, mutable. In just about a year, kids will be making entire Pixar movies from home. (The content will probably be Skibidi toilet related, but of Pixar scale and scope.) How that reconciles with copyright, you've got me. It doesn't. It's a domain mismatch. It's completely outmoded by what's coming. And the music industry is equally toast. I can already make an excellent banger song about superhero rodents in under 30 seconds.
  - mplewis 3y ago
    None of what you described is quality content that anyone actually wants to watch.
    - resolutebat 3y ago
      The YouTube watch history of any 13-year-old provides a handy counterexample to your assertion. Slightly less flippantly, the days when the nation gathered around their TVs to all watch "Leave It To Beaver" at 8pm are long gone, the media landscape has been fragmenting for decades and this is just the next step. My kids don't watch TV shows, they follow YouTubers.
    - distortedsignal 3y ago
      Interestingly, that doesn't matter for copyright. A six-year-old filmmaker has as much claim to copyright protection as Spielberg and Tarantino. Just because one uploads to YouTube and one is paid millions of dollars by a major movie studio, it doesn't mean that they're different in the eyes of the law. From what I understand, once a work is created, copyright is assigned to that work's creator. That creator may then license that work however they want. Quality doesn't factor in.
- jtriangle 3y ago
  Now, I don't have a college degree, but with my 60+ years life experience I can say, yes, copyright is a real thing, it protects people who create, from assholes and AI. There, I've stolen your post. Did copyright protect you? No, it did not. Copyright is an idea we came up with that sounded good at the time, and it's come to pass at this point that the original idea was deeply flawed in ways we could never have predicted, but now can see clearly in hindsight. The truth is, intellectual property should be protected by those creating it. Coke does a great job of this, as do many, many other companies. We call these "trade secrets", but ultimately the concept is the same. You're protecting the work you deem worth protecting. I don't buy the notion that copyright ever protected the creator. What it really protected was the interests of the entities who effectively enslave the creators via contract, and is not of any tangible benefit to the creators themselves. If one truly cares about the artisans among us, one cannot justify the existence of our ideas surrounding copyright. Yes, removing those laws from our doctrine would cause upheaval, as the market must then rebalance itself in the absence of the artificial pressure we've put on it, but in time all things find equilibrium again, and placing the value and responsibility back on the individual is, in my mind, simple human decency.
  - adamsilkey 3y ago
    > The truth is, intellectual property should be protected by those creating it. The whole point of government and laws and societal norms is that not everyone has to be deeply involved and specialized in protecting their rights. We default to people doing the right thing and seek out specialists (e.g. lawyers) when we're wronged.
    - jtriangle 3y ago
      Yeah, and it's a terrible system, because it effectively paywalls anything remotely resembling justice.
throwboatyface 3y ago
Stop signs are made up too. See how far you get driving through all of them without stopping.
- k__ 3y ago
  But they have a point. Copyright law is already different from country to country.
  - throwboatyface 3y ago
    Some countries have roundabouts. Some countries let you make a right turn on a red light. Traffic law isn't any more universal than copyright law. All law is made up but that doesn't make it less real.
    - visarga 3y ago
      But AI models are not limited to specific countries, they can be downloaded and run anywhere. Train in Japan (unrestrictive rules), then use in US.
      - throwboatyface 3y ago
        I can drive my car over the land border between two countries and have to switch sides of the road. Or the speed limit can go up/down. Or they can mandate different safety equipment.
    - k__ 3y ago
      I didn't mean to imply that they aren't real. I just wanted to say that laws are subject to change.
    - hakfoo 3y ago
      I always found it fascinating how universal copyright law is. Countries that can't agree on almost anything else have all deigned to give (okay, now that it's 2024, we can't use the rodent anymore, what's the new symbol of eternal copyright?) holy sanction for decades at a time. Much of the heavy lifting is done by treaty-- not so much that anyone is asking legislatures directly to establish and extend copyright, but that it comes part-and-parcel with other international obligations. Without the weight of such treaties, I wonder how many countries would do without an IP regime at all, especially if they don't see any IP-related export opportunities, so copyright and patent merely limits their ability to make cheaper versions of foreign goods.
tenebrisalietum 3y ago
U.S. copyright also has a constitutionally defined purpose: `[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.` Does the current scheme really promote the progress of science and useful arts? Is the current length of copyright really "limited Times"?
- ronsor 3y ago
  > Is the current length of copyright really "limited Times"? This was argued before, and the Supreme Court decided "Yes, it is, somehow."
  - visarga 3y ago
    Choose any number of years < infinite. It's limited time.
ricardo81 3y ago
>What happens when you subvert copyright law is some guys with guns, in either an overt way or a subtle one That just seems like a sociopathic argument to circumvent perfectly clear laws intended to protect people who expend energy into offering new ideas and also trying to diminish what is already delineated as right and wrong. In the blatant sense. I'm not sure how your gun analogy funnels along to fair use. As with anyone who doesn't seem to respect copyright laws, I'd say to them, give me a copy of everything useful you've ever done in your life. Going by the same rule.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  Most copyrights are not held by the people who expended energy into the labor of producing new work, they're held by the employers of that labor. Most people have no practical choice in finding the means for their survival but through wage labor and selling the ownership of what they produce.
  - ricardo81 3y ago
    And that's fine, because presumably it's by consent.
- distortedsignal 3y ago
  The "gun analogy" is the parent saying the the government (who is supposed to be the only entity able to use force) is supposed to protect IP. You're saying the same thing. You shouldn't say anything to anyone who doesn't respect copyright laws - or, rather, you shouldn't have to. Your tax dollars, and the entity that you authorize to be the one to use force where you live, should be able to say whatever you, as the governed citizen, want to say to the person who doesn't respect copyright.
  - ricardo81 3y ago
    What parent? The comment I'm replying to has no parent and the article has no mention of a gun
kopecs 3y ago
Do you not believe that societal constructs are real? What makes (fiat) money a real resource and copyright an imaginary one? What about this logic: Debt is not a real thing. It's a fiction. Subverting contract law is not like subverting the laws of physics. Simply don't pay your bills! What happens when you subvert contract law is some guys with guns, in either an overt way or a subtle one, force a trade of your imaginary resource (money) for the real resource (labor), through a contract. It's a bit of clever misdirection to declare yourself "in debt" or "debt free." Money is made up! It's fiction! It is whatever we want it to be!
- xpe 3y ago
  Thank you, kopecs! It is nice to see a voice of reason here. Sometimes it helps me to remember that people are not that far evolved from other primates. Our abilities to form useful conceptualizations and error-correct are far from uniform. Forming and reforming mental models and continually seeking truth is not something that comes easy -- or possible -- for many.
- rngname22 3y ago
  Really confused to see your comment flagged. The parent comment basically says "copyright is not a physical good or law, therefore we may disregard it". As if the same couldn't be said for any verbal agreement, sexual consent, property rights, whatever. They ought to be arguing why this _particular_ verbal agreement/social contract is not worth enforcing or practicing, rather than dismissing the entire category.
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    It can and should be said about every fiction, as a healthy reminder to yourself. Fiat money, government and property rights are complete abstractions, completely abused and tarnished beyond all limits. A verbal agreement is on a much closer level to reality. Even people who have never heard of money or owned property will take a man up on his word. As for sexual consent it is not something abstract at all. It's not words. It is the will of a person and something that can never be misunderstood.
- deleted 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
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stefan_ 3y ago
This is funny, the moment the absence of IP can benefit large companies it's just a fiction, a made up concept, not too serious at all. Of course you go onto the OpenAI corporate pitch page and it will proudly say "respects your IP by not training from it!", that's not the part we are looking to get rid of apparently? That's very real?
- visarga 3y ago
  This is a clever trick, making out corporations to be the beneficiary - who is the real beneficiary? The one who prompts, because they can use the output of the model to solve their problems. In the meantime AI developers make cents on 100K tokens and are mostly in the red. Why not put the issue where it is - it's a debate about public empowerment with AI vs incumbents protecting their copyrights. Especially for open source models - this situation is not about corporations. Yes, corporations are the ones with deep pockets and easier to sue, but that's just how lawsuits go, you don't waste money suing someone who can't pay up. What is more important in the next decades - public empowerment or extending copyright to block training AI models? Can we agree to limit copyright to exact reproductions or should it cover all content generated from a model, even if when it looks different from all training examples? I think going the copyright maximalist way will indirectly hurt creatives because all their works will be checked with the same tools we use to check AI. Anyone could be secretly using generative models. The AI attribution methods will reveal all sorts of things we don't like to see.
  - axus 3y ago
    The outrage as packaged by the media really does mirror the anger against Napster from 25 years ago. I seem to recall the small-time musicians were more excited about Napster, though.
    - visarga 3y ago
      I remember when BitTorrent users were getting sued left and right, I was thinking about how can a P2P network allow downloading without revealing what was downloaded. Now we got the answer - the LLM - you can download the same LLM like anyone else and nobody knows what you're getting from it.
jprete 3y ago
Wait, what? Money is real? I thought it was just a collectively-imagined pile of IOUs to keep track of how many favors someone is owed.
efsavage 3y ago
In the sense of Sapiens†, yes, copyright is a fiction, but so is money, or any law or contract or agreement. In as much as it affects people's lives and societies and economies it is "real". The question of the article isn't about realness, it's whether it can evolve or survive this latest shift. † https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapiens:_A_Brief_History_of_Humankind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapiens:_A_Brief_History_of_Hu...
- eimrine 3y ago
  The obelisk symbol after Sapiens word put in the manner it is being put after the names of dead people emparrassed me a little.
  - galdosdi 3y ago
    Can you please clarify this cryptic comment? The OP just used a common variation of asterisk, and I am really confused what your beef with it is. "in the manner it is being put after the names of dead people " is a total non sequitur in this context, how is that in any way related to the discussion or anything the OP said?
    - Intralexical 3y ago
      To derail us even further: You know, I just realized, I think the dagger symbol marking dead people is usually shown at full size, while the dagger symbol marking a footnote is shown as a superscript. Maybe the commenter got confused by that.
andrewmutz 3y ago
I agree but I would word it a bit differently: Copyright isn't some fixed, timeless thing. It has been continuously modified to suit the times and to adapt to technological change. Rather than try to reason about how existing copyright law applies to AI models, we should be focused on changing copyright law to work well in a world with AI. We can balance the incentives of content creators with the incentives of the users and creators of AI models. I'm confident we can do it because we've done it every time in the past when technology has changed, and AI models will be no different.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  > It has been continuously modified to suit the times and to adapt to technological change. And to suit the whims of sufficiently large and influential media conglomerates. Yes, you, as an indie creator, have the exact same intellectual property rights as Disney. But if Disney steals something you made, who's going to win that fight?
- mcmoor 3y ago
  I'm pessimistic precisely because we haven't done it anytime in the past, DMCA and copyright is notoriously bad for all sides.
Fauntleroy 3y ago
This is not a solid argument because it suggests every single social contract involved in human society is not worthwhile, important, or "real".
NoboruWataya 3y ago
Leaving aside the semantics of what is "real" - yes, that is the point, that is why the article exists. "Is A.I. The Death of Gravity" is a nonsense question, "Is A.I. the Death of I.P." is not, precisely because humans get to decide the answer. We have developed certain norms and institutions over hundreds of years and now we must decide whether to scrap them in the name of technological progress. How we decide the question will have huge implications for how wealth and power are distributed in our society.
fulladder 3y ago
Contracts are not a real thing. It's a fiction. Subverting contract law is not like subverting the laws of physics. What happens when you subvert contract law is some guys with guns, in either an overt way or a subtle one, force a trade of your imaginary resource (a contract) for the real resource (money), through licensing or fines.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
huytersd 3y ago
Well that’s a stupid argument. A good argument is that AI is in accordance with copyright law already since there are no reproductions. In the rare cases where there are reproductions, they can be DMCA taken down like we already do with post LLM output filters.
rangerelf 3y ago
I think you're sowing the seeds to undermine your own arguments, because, literally, everything of social utility is a fiction: money, law, "private property", contracts, and so forth. All of them are needed for society to function, but at the same time all of them are convenient fictions for us to build upon.
- mlsu 3y ago
  My point is that in these discussions, don't make the mistake of considering the artificial thing ("it's copyrightable/it's not copyrightable"). Rather, consider the real thing ("You will pay a licensing fee to use your GPU").
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    I'm still confused. Sure, a GPU is a real, physical thing. But licenses and fees are no more or less fiction than copyright. A license says "I have permission from the company makers to use this product", similar to how copyright is "you must get permission from me to use my product". But for the sake of this discussion: I don't think anyone can assume those permissions when using a tool to generate the base image. Ironically enough, it may make more sense to have artists for concepting, copyrighting the character or world so you obtain those permissions, and then using AI to ramp up production. That's an inversion of what's happening for early AI usage. The main question is how much concepting is needed to copyright a character? Making a few sketches in private? Releasing a full work first with no AI on what you want to copyright?
    - cush 3y ago
      > Copyright is not a real thing. > - I think you're sowing the seeds to undermine your own arguments > licensing fee... It took them exactly one reply. New record
    - mlsu 3y ago
      Sigh. I know that everyone is chomping at the bit to logically own me in this thread, and that's fine -- have your fun. There are a dozen comments informing me that "IP law around AI" and "fiat currency" are both made-up, and that's obviously true. Right now "fiat currency" or "contracts" is settled. We are not radically redefining what those are (despite the web3 crowd's insistence). The story around IP with regards to AI is quite different. We are at a fork in the road. It is actually up to us to decide what AI fundamentally is, as it relates to IP. It's genuinely up in the air, and gives us an opportunity to re-examine some aspects of how we treat ownership of information. In my opinion, this is a good thing and an exercise worth doing. A chance to re-do some of what the internet failed at. Remember Aaron Swartz? Personally, I'm quite cynical: I think the existing social power structure will win and absorb AI into its IP regime. AI will be locked down even faster than the internet was, because value can so obviously captured. The winners will be Disney, Sony, Warner, Elsevier... we'll all be poorer for it. But yeah! Good thing people can't make images of Spider Man?
belter 3y ago
This post does not exist...
nyc_data_geek1 3y ago
Money is no more real than copyright.
kajecounterhack 3y ago
As many other comments mention, copyright is as real as contract law or money. A more correct statement with the same thrust would be "copyright is not _natural_ -- it's an artificial, bolt-on construct." And yet lots of artificial constructs are useful for incentivizing / de-incentivizing massed behavior in a way that is maximally beneficial to all. For sure, getting it right is difficult but let's not write off all artificial constructs as worthless or impossible to get right (especially when you just have to get it right _enough_).
lordnacho 3y ago
The thing that separates copyright from the other fictions mentioned is that there are pretty good reasons to think this particular fiction is not useful. Property and debt have much longer histories and seem more clearly defensible. Of course there is one really big fiction out there that a lot of people no longer really believe, but that doesn't mean longevity isn't a thing to consider.
z7 3y ago
>Copyright is not a real thing. It's a fiction. Maybe, but you can also say that about money or about being married. Social fictions work as collective agreements on what is seen as useful for society. One can obviously critique their utility, but pointing out the ficitonal component isn't in itself a criticism.
tivert 3y ago
> Copyright is not a real thing. It's a fiction. Subverting copyright law is not like subverting the laws of physics. What happens when you subvert copyright law is some guys with guns... That reasoning applies to murder, too. After all, a bullet through your mom's brain is just a physically allowable reconfiguration of the position of some atoms. So you're making a true point, but a useless one, since you're operating on the wrong level of abstraction.

by mlsu 3y ago

maester-of-bots 3y ago

Never knew HN catered to sovereign citizens. Yikes.

tilwidnk 3y ago

> Copyright is not a real thing. It's a fiction. Now, I don't have a college degree, but with my 60+ years life experience I can say, yes, copyright is a real thing, it protects people who create, from assholes and AI.

jncfhnb 3y ago
It doesn’t though
wahnfrieden 3y ago
It's not real beyond what the parent post described, which is an expectation that the state will use guns and cages in reaction to certain behaviors
- mewpmewp2 3y ago
  But they won't if it's going to threaten their military capability vs other actors like China, Russia or otherwise.
gumballindie 3y ago
Am I the only one that loves a blunt and honest comment? Funny how advocates against property rights have no issue with corporations protecting their own. That’s fine. What they want is to legally steal from the average joe.
- echelon 3y ago
  Are you stealing from your lord, serf? Perhaps you should be churning the butter, not thinking for yourself. (I kid, I kid!) It's going to be just as easy to make a movie or a song as it was to write this comment. I'm working and researching at the edge, and I promise you that the entire world will be in awe of these next 12 months. Go play with Suno for a taste. I'm a senior engineer, and now I'm tab completing Rust code 70% of the time. It's hard to believe we've come this far, and it's only going to keep climbing in capability. You're watching breakneck progress, and the genie isn't going back. More art will be created per month than the entire human history to this point. Gen alpha is growing up on this stuff and using it to great effect to communicate amongst their peers. The things they build will be incredible.
  - arrosenberg 3y ago
    > It's hard to believe we've come this far, and it's only going to keep climbing in capability. Or we hit the top of the sigmoid curve and just have fancy autocomplete.
    - SpicyLemonZest 3y ago
      I don't understand why the autocomplete meme is so compelling to people. How is drawing a picture, which modern AI systems are already capable of, "autocomplete"?
      - arrosenberg 3y ago
        (1) I was responding to the actual thing OP said (70% code completion in Rust). (2) It literally is autocompleting - it draws each pixel because it statistically determines that <some color value> is the best fit given the prompt and the prior pixels it drew. It's a more advanced robot, but it's still a robot.
echelon 3y ago
Serfdom used to be a real thing. Dowry payments used to be a real thing. Butter churning used to be a real thing. Copyright law is, and will be, mutable. In just about a year, kids will be making entire Pixar movies from home. (The content will probably be Skibidi toilet related, but of Pixar scale and scope.) How that reconciles with copyright, you've got me. It doesn't. It's a domain mismatch. It's completely outmoded by what's coming. And the music industry is equally toast. I can already make an excellent banger song about superhero rodents in under 30 seconds.
- mplewis 3y ago
  None of what you described is quality content that anyone actually wants to watch.
  - resolutebat 3y ago
    The YouTube watch history of any 13-year-old provides a handy counterexample to your assertion. Slightly less flippantly, the days when the nation gathered around their TVs to all watch "Leave It To Beaver" at 8pm are long gone, the media landscape has been fragmenting for decades and this is just the next step. My kids don't watch TV shows, they follow YouTubers.
  - distortedsignal 3y ago
    Interestingly, that doesn't matter for copyright. A six-year-old filmmaker has as much claim to copyright protection as Spielberg and Tarantino. Just because one uploads to YouTube and one is paid millions of dollars by a major movie studio, it doesn't mean that they're different in the eyes of the law. From what I understand, once a work is created, copyright is assigned to that work's creator. That creator may then license that work however they want. Quality doesn't factor in.
jtriangle 3y ago
Now, I don't have a college degree, but with my 60+ years life experience I can say, yes, copyright is a real thing, it protects people who create, from assholes and AI. There, I've stolen your post. Did copyright protect you? No, it did not. Copyright is an idea we came up with that sounded good at the time, and it's come to pass at this point that the original idea was deeply flawed in ways we could never have predicted, but now can see clearly in hindsight. The truth is, intellectual property should be protected by those creating it. Coke does a great job of this, as do many, many other companies. We call these "trade secrets", but ultimately the concept is the same. You're protecting the work you deem worth protecting. I don't buy the notion that copyright ever protected the creator. What it really protected was the interests of the entities who effectively enslave the creators via contract, and is not of any tangible benefit to the creators themselves. If one truly cares about the artisans among us, one cannot justify the existence of our ideas surrounding copyright. Yes, removing those laws from our doctrine would cause upheaval, as the market must then rebalance itself in the absence of the artificial pressure we've put on it, but in time all things find equilibrium again, and placing the value and responsibility back on the individual is, in my mind, simple human decency.
- adamsilkey 3y ago
  > The truth is, intellectual property should be protected by those creating it. The whole point of government and laws and societal norms is that not everyone has to be deeply involved and specialized in protecting their rights. We default to people doing the right thing and seek out specialists (e.g. lawyers) when we're wronged.
  - jtriangle 3y ago
    Yeah, and it's a terrible system, because it effectively paywalls anything remotely resembling justice.

throwboatyface 3y ago

Stop signs are made up too. See how far you get driving through all of them without stopping.

k__ 3y ago
But they have a point. Copyright law is already different from country to country.
- throwboatyface 3y ago
  Some countries have roundabouts. Some countries let you make a right turn on a red light. Traffic law isn't any more universal than copyright law. All law is made up but that doesn't make it less real.
  - visarga 3y ago
    But AI models are not limited to specific countries, they can be downloaded and run anywhere. Train in Japan (unrestrictive rules), then use in US.
    - throwboatyface 3y ago
      I can drive my car over the land border between two countries and have to switch sides of the road. Or the speed limit can go up/down. Or they can mandate different safety equipment.
  - k__ 3y ago
    I didn't mean to imply that they aren't real. I just wanted to say that laws are subject to change.
  - hakfoo 3y ago
    I always found it fascinating how universal copyright law is. Countries that can't agree on almost anything else have all deigned to give (okay, now that it's 2024, we can't use the rodent anymore, what's the new symbol of eternal copyright?) holy sanction for decades at a time. Much of the heavy lifting is done by treaty-- not so much that anyone is asking legislatures directly to establish and extend copyright, but that it comes part-and-parcel with other international obligations. Without the weight of such treaties, I wonder how many countries would do without an IP regime at all, especially if they don't see any IP-related export opportunities, so copyright and patent merely limits their ability to make cheaper versions of foreign goods.

tenebrisalietum 3y ago

U.S. copyright also has a constitutionally defined purpose: `[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.` Does the current scheme really promote the progress of science and useful arts? Is the current length of copyright really "limited Times"?

ronsor 3y ago
> Is the current length of copyright really "limited Times"? This was argued before, and the Supreme Court decided "Yes, it is, somehow."
- visarga 3y ago
  Choose any number of years < infinite. It's limited time.

ricardo81 3y ago

>What happens when you subvert copyright law is some guys with guns, in either an overt way or a subtle one That just seems like a sociopathic argument to circumvent perfectly clear laws intended to protect people who expend energy into offering new ideas and also trying to diminish what is already delineated as right and wrong. In the blatant sense. I'm not sure how your gun analogy funnels along to fair use. As with anyone who doesn't seem to respect copyright laws, I'd say to them, give me a copy of everything useful you've ever done in your life. Going by the same rule.

wahnfrieden 3y ago
Most copyrights are not held by the people who expended energy into the labor of producing new work, they're held by the employers of that labor. Most people have no practical choice in finding the means for their survival but through wage labor and selling the ownership of what they produce.
- ricardo81 3y ago
  And that's fine, because presumably it's by consent.
distortedsignal 3y ago
The "gun analogy" is the parent saying the the government (who is supposed to be the only entity able to use force) is supposed to protect IP. You're saying the same thing. You shouldn't say anything to anyone who doesn't respect copyright laws - or, rather, you shouldn't have to. Your tax dollars, and the entity that you authorize to be the one to use force where you live, should be able to say whatever you, as the governed citizen, want to say to the person who doesn't respect copyright.
- ricardo81 3y ago
  What parent? The comment I'm replying to has no parent and the article has no mention of a gun

kopecs 3y ago

Do you not believe that societal constructs are real? What makes (fiat) money a real resource and copyright an imaginary one? What about this logic: Debt is not a real thing. It's a fiction. Subverting contract law is not like subverting the laws of physics. Simply don't pay your bills! What happens when you subvert contract law is some guys with guns, in either an overt way or a subtle one, force a trade of your imaginary resource (money) for the real resource (labor), through a contract. It's a bit of clever misdirection to declare yourself "in debt" or "debt free." Money is made up! It's fiction! It is whatever we want it to be!

xpe 3y ago
Thank you, kopecs! It is nice to see a voice of reason here. Sometimes it helps me to remember that people are not that far evolved from other primates. Our abilities to form useful conceptualizations and error-correct are far from uniform. Forming and reforming mental models and continually seeking truth is not something that comes easy -- or possible -- for many.
rngname22 3y ago
Really confused to see your comment flagged. The parent comment basically says "copyright is not a physical good or law, therefore we may disregard it". As if the same couldn't be said for any verbal agreement, sexual consent, property rights, whatever. They ought to be arguing why this _particular_ verbal agreement/social contract is not worth enforcing or practicing, rather than dismissing the entire category.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  It can and should be said about every fiction, as a healthy reminder to yourself. Fiat money, government and property rights are complete abstractions, completely abused and tarnished beyond all limits. A verbal agreement is on a much closer level to reality. Even people who have never heard of money or owned property will take a man up on his word. As for sexual consent it is not something abstract at all. It's not words. It is the will of a person and something that can never be misunderstood.
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stefan_ 3y ago

This is funny, the moment the absence of IP can benefit large companies it's just a fiction, a made up concept, not too serious at all. Of course you go onto the OpenAI corporate pitch page and it will proudly say "respects your IP by not training from it!", that's not the part we are looking to get rid of apparently? That's very real?

visarga 3y ago
This is a clever trick, making out corporations to be the beneficiary - who is the real beneficiary? The one who prompts, because they can use the output of the model to solve their problems. In the meantime AI developers make cents on 100K tokens and are mostly in the red. Why not put the issue where it is - it's a debate about public empowerment with AI vs incumbents protecting their copyrights. Especially for open source models - this situation is not about corporations. Yes, corporations are the ones with deep pockets and easier to sue, but that's just how lawsuits go, you don't waste money suing someone who can't pay up. What is more important in the next decades - public empowerment or extending copyright to block training AI models? Can we agree to limit copyright to exact reproductions or should it cover all content generated from a model, even if when it looks different from all training examples? I think going the copyright maximalist way will indirectly hurt creatives because all their works will be checked with the same tools we use to check AI. Anyone could be secretly using generative models. The AI attribution methods will reveal all sorts of things we don't like to see.
- axus 3y ago
  The outrage as packaged by the media really does mirror the anger against Napster from 25 years ago. I seem to recall the small-time musicians were more excited about Napster, though.
  - visarga 3y ago
    I remember when BitTorrent users were getting sued left and right, I was thinking about how can a P2P network allow downloading without revealing what was downloaded. Now we got the answer - the LLM - you can download the same LLM like anyone else and nobody knows what you're getting from it.

jprete 3y ago

Wait, what? Money is real? I thought it was just a collectively-imagined pile of IOUs to keep track of how many favors someone is owed.

efsavage 3y ago

In the sense of Sapiens†, yes, copyright is a fiction, but so is money, or any law or contract or agreement. In as much as it affects people's lives and societies and economies it is "real". The question of the article isn't about realness, it's whether it can evolve or survive this latest shift. † https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapiens:_A_Brief_History_of_Humankind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapiens:_A_Brief_History_of_Hu...

eimrine 3y ago
The obelisk symbol after Sapiens word put in the manner it is being put after the names of dead people emparrassed me a little.
- galdosdi 3y ago
  Can you please clarify this cryptic comment? The OP just used a common variation of asterisk, and I am really confused what your beef with it is. "in the manner it is being put after the names of dead people " is a total non sequitur in this context, how is that in any way related to the discussion or anything the OP said?
  - Intralexical 3y ago
    To derail us even further: You know, I just realized, I think the dagger symbol marking dead people is usually shown at full size, while the dagger symbol marking a footnote is shown as a superscript. Maybe the commenter got confused by that.

andrewmutz 3y ago

I agree but I would word it a bit differently: Copyright isn't some fixed, timeless thing. It has been continuously modified to suit the times and to adapt to technological change. Rather than try to reason about how existing copyright law applies to AI models, we should be focused on changing copyright law to work well in a world with AI. We can balance the incentives of content creators with the incentives of the users and creators of AI models. I'm confident we can do it because we've done it every time in the past when technology has changed, and AI models will be no different.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago
> It has been continuously modified to suit the times and to adapt to technological change. And to suit the whims of sufficiently large and influential media conglomerates. Yes, you, as an indie creator, have the exact same intellectual property rights as Disney. But if Disney steals something you made, who's going to win that fight?
mcmoor 3y ago
I'm pessimistic precisely because we haven't done it anytime in the past, DMCA and copyright is notoriously bad for all sides.

Fauntleroy 3y ago

This is not a solid argument because it suggests every single social contract involved in human society is not worthwhile, important, or "real".

NoboruWataya 3y ago

Leaving aside the semantics of what is "real" - yes, that is the point, that is why the article exists. "Is A.I. The Death of Gravity" is a nonsense question, "Is A.I. the Death of I.P." is not, precisely because humans get to decide the answer. We have developed certain norms and institutions over hundreds of years and now we must decide whether to scrap them in the name of technological progress. How we decide the question will have huge implications for how wealth and power are distributed in our society.

fulladder 3y ago

Contracts are not a real thing. It's a fiction. Subverting contract law is not like subverting the laws of physics. What happens when you subvert contract law is some guys with guns, in either an overt way or a subtle one, force a trade of your imaginary resource (a contract) for the real resource (money), through licensing or fines.

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huytersd 3y ago

Well that’s a stupid argument. A good argument is that AI is in accordance with copyright law already since there are no reproductions. In the rare cases where there are reproductions, they can be DMCA taken down like we already do with post LLM output filters.

rangerelf 3y ago

I think you're sowing the seeds to undermine your own arguments, because, literally, everything of social utility is a fiction: money, law, "private property", contracts, and so forth. All of them are needed for society to function, but at the same time all of them are convenient fictions for us to build upon.

mlsu 3y ago
My point is that in these discussions, don't make the mistake of considering the artificial thing ("it's copyrightable/it's not copyrightable"). Rather, consider the real thing ("You will pay a licensing fee to use your GPU").
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  I'm still confused. Sure, a GPU is a real, physical thing. But licenses and fees are no more or less fiction than copyright. A license says "I have permission from the company makers to use this product", similar to how copyright is "you must get permission from me to use my product". But for the sake of this discussion: I don't think anyone can assume those permissions when using a tool to generate the base image. Ironically enough, it may make more sense to have artists for concepting, copyrighting the character or world so you obtain those permissions, and then using AI to ramp up production. That's an inversion of what's happening for early AI usage. The main question is how much concepting is needed to copyright a character? Making a few sketches in private? Releasing a full work first with no AI on what you want to copyright?
  - cush 3y ago
    > Copyright is not a real thing. > - I think you're sowing the seeds to undermine your own arguments > licensing fee... It took them exactly one reply. New record
  - mlsu 3y ago
    Sigh. I know that everyone is chomping at the bit to logically own me in this thread, and that's fine -- have your fun. There are a dozen comments informing me that "IP law around AI" and "fiat currency" are both made-up, and that's obviously true. Right now "fiat currency" or "contracts" is settled. We are not radically redefining what those are (despite the web3 crowd's insistence). The story around IP with regards to AI is quite different. We are at a fork in the road. It is actually up to us to decide what AI fundamentally is, as it relates to IP. It's genuinely up in the air, and gives us an opportunity to re-examine some aspects of how we treat ownership of information. In my opinion, this is a good thing and an exercise worth doing. A chance to re-do some of what the internet failed at. Remember Aaron Swartz? Personally, I'm quite cynical: I think the existing social power structure will win and absorb AI into its IP regime. AI will be locked down even faster than the internet was, because value can so obviously captured. The winners will be Disney, Sony, Warner, Elsevier... we'll all be poorer for it. But yeah! Good thing people can't make images of Spider Man?

belter 3y ago

This post does not exist...

nyc_data_geek1 3y ago

Money is no more real than copyright.

kajecounterhack 3y ago

As many other comments mention, copyright is as real as contract law or money. A more correct statement with the same thrust would be "copyright is not _natural_ -- it's an artificial, bolt-on construct." And yet lots of artificial constructs are useful for incentivizing / de-incentivizing massed behavior in a way that is maximally beneficial to all. For sure, getting it right is difficult but let's not write off all artificial constructs as worthless or impossible to get right (especially when you just have to get it right _enough_).

lordnacho 3y ago

The thing that separates copyright from the other fictions mentioned is that there are pretty good reasons to think this particular fiction is not useful. Property and debt have much longer histories and seem more clearly defensible. Of course there is one really big fiction out there that a lot of people no longer really believe, but that doesn't mean longevity isn't a thing to consider.

z7 3y ago

>Copyright is not a real thing. It's a fiction. Maybe, but you can also say that about money or about being married. Social fictions work as collective agreements on what is seen as useful for society. One can obviously critique their utility, but pointing out the ficitonal component isn't in itself a criticism.

tivert 3y ago

> Copyright is not a real thing. It's a fiction. Subverting copyright law is not like subverting the laws of physics. What happens when you subvert copyright law is some guys with guns... That reasoning applies to murder, too. After all, a bullet through your mom's brain is just a physically allowable reconfiguration of the position of some atoms. So you're making a true point, but a useless one, since you're operating on the wrong level of abstraction.