7 ms·

It's time to let (most of) copyright go. Ideas are copied around the world at light speed and so much content is being produced that no individual has a chance

by elif 3y ago

It's time to let (most of) copyright go. Ideas are copied around the world at light speed and so much content is being produced that no individual has a chance to consume all the media the world produces in a single minute. The value is in the copying not the material. In having a mechanism to spread your material to as many eyes as possible. Hanging onto Micky Mouse's anachronistic paradigm does not encourage more art, it only performs an oligopolistic role for artists already at the top, already with the copy mechanism and attention to spread their ideas.

santoshalper 3y ago
But in these scenarios, it is overwhelmingly large, powerful corporations using the work of individuals. Sarah Silverman has been successful as a comedian, but when it comes to her versus Microsoft, OpenAI, AWS, et al. she is the one clearly being taken advantage of by someone far wealthier and more powerful.
- ronsor 3y ago
  I'm no fan of OpenAI's aggressive tactics, but I'd rather not risk harming open-source AI projects just to deal with them. Regardless of how any lawsuit comes out, OpenAI/Microsoft/whatever isn't going anywhere: like you said, they're powerful. They can afford to work around whatever laws or rulings that happen. OSS projects won't have this luxury. So while I have my issues with OpenAI and the other tech companies, I think advocating for more copyright is like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
  - jrm4 3y ago
    What makes you think this would strongly harm open-source AI projects? Do you mean e.g. small "companies trying to make money?" If so, I see that danger, but I also kind of don't care. What I don't think it would harm is actual "free/free-ish open source, just OUT there" AI projects in terms of pure "software that's available for everyone to mess around with, regardless of legality," -- and (as a lawyer I can't recommend doing this at all of course, but) I think it would end up mostly being a good and safer thing (in the same way that having e.g. Kali Linux out there is a good thing). The models are out there and it's hard to think that any single player could have a real big advantage here. I say let the suits commence.
    - ronsor 3y ago
      It's pretty hard to develop an open-source project in the open if your activity is seen as illegal. We don't need AI projects lumped in with Popcorn Time and movie torrents.
      - jrm4 3y ago
        Interesting examples you put there; FWIW you named the things that typically strongly favor the rights and desires of the consumer, despite the law, and give them a significantly superior experience to their legal alternatives (at least in the foreseeable short term.)
    - stale2002 3y ago
      > Do you mean e.g. small "companies trying to make money?" No they mean open source projects. The overwhelming majority of all generative AI related open source projects depend on, use, or are related to publicly available weights that were trained without permission on other people's data. The entire open source AI community wouldn't exist if those weights weren't available for everyone to use for basically any reason. One could argue that the existing weights aren't going to disappear as thats impossible to enforce. But what about the updated weights? If nobody is allowed to spend 50 million dollars training a new model and then releasing that model publicly for anyone to use, without getting permission from the entire internet to make that model, well then there aren't going to be anymore new models coming out. The government isn't going to be able to confiscate everyone's gamer PCs in order to ban inference, but they can stop someone from spending that 50 mil training the next cutting edge open source model. Which means that the existing models will be all that the open source community has. Yeah they could fine tune them, but cutting edge base models are still extremely important for open source AI progress.
      - zirgs 3y ago
        But you won't need to spend 50M in the future. Hardware improves all the time. Remember all those "can it run crysis?" memes? Those GPUs are now slower than mobile phones.
- p1dda 3y ago
  > Sarah Silverman has been successful yes, but as a performer not a real comedian though
jongjong 3y ago
Only if we first let go of patent laws. Copyright is the only law which protects the rights of regular citizens because patents are often prohibitively expensive.
- Supermancho 3y ago
  How does this follow? I take a picture (or make any other work of art), I have the copyright. This is outside of what is patented or not. They are not equivalent. Even in absence of the other, patents and copyrights do not offer the same protections. Granted, the US patent system is broken.
  - jongjong 3y ago
    They have differences but they are both forms of IP protection. Citizens need some form of automatic IP protection or else anybody could (for example) copy someone's proprietary code and start offering a competing software service without any legal repercussions. That would be completely wrong since the person who wrote the code invested a substantial amount of effort to write it. Someone who has better business connections shouldn't be able to just copy it and use it to launch a competing service... Such competitor could leverage their business connections to secure funding to drive the original author of the software out of business using their own work against them.
CPLX 3y ago
Here’s a counterpoint. Fuck that. We’ve had enough concentration of resources in the hands of those who merely build technology that connects valuable things together, after having exploited market power to siphon off all the profit from the actually valuable things.
- hackerlight 3y ago
  We need a special AI tax. Profits made by foundational models (not the application layer) get an additional tax. We're entering a new paradigm that copyright is not sufficient to handle. These AI models have sucked up the output of humanity itself, the entire commons. The public vs private distinction isn't that important. They're going to cause job losses across many fields, so we need a new solution. Relying on the court system to enforce copyright claims for the benefit of a single claimant is not a solution that scales to solve the actual problem here. Another thing is, foundational models are prone to monopoly because the barriers to access compute are so steep.
  - s1gnp0st 3y ago
    I can think of several large organizations who would love small AI companies to be pushed out of the space with a tax.
    - hackerlight 3y ago
      No. These are profits on foundational models. Small companies playing catch up don't make profits on foundational models.
  - hadlock 3y ago
    The barrier of entry to building a "foundational model" is less than $400 of compute time (72 hours) on a handful of rental A100 using widely available open source data sets. Open source projects by ICs are already on par with GPT3. It's gonna be really hard to regulate stuff in its current form, which is already commercially beneficial
- jph00 3y ago
jrm4 3y ago
Nah, it's time to remember the spirit of it, not the letter. It was designed primarily to give leverage to the little guys against the big companies who had more power to copy, and it's needed now more than ever.
- ronsor 3y ago
  Then reform it and reduce term length, perhaps?
  - jrm4 3y ago
    Absolutely. 100%
    - ronsor 3y ago
      I'm on board then. Now, if only legislators actually seemed to care what average people thought.
  - corysama 3y ago
    I think the original law was: Manual registration required for 22 years of protection. Manual re-registration required for a 22-year extension. Public domain after 44 years at most. I’d support that. Make something at 18. Sell it until you are 62. “Author’s life + 70 years” is much too slow for the pace of culture in the past 70 years.
    - a_vanderbilt 3y ago
      I think this would be an equitable compromise. AI can use the older stuff to build a foundation and license the newer stuff. Artists alive today get paid for their work, and we as a society can reap the benefits of art in a reasonable time frame. I have a speech I am delivering on this issue in a few months, would you mind if I adapt your comment and cite you?
    - kemotep 3y ago
      Original copyright in the US was 14 years with the option to extend for 1 additional 14 year term. In 1831 it was changed to 28 years for the base term and the option to renew it for an additional 14 years or 42 years total. That was the copy right law for nearly 200 years. Today it is actually 95 years or 70 years after the death of the author, whichever one is sooner. I think a return to the 1831 copyright regime is pretty fair. Even just 28 years no extensions is enough time to have a full career in something.
petermcneeley 3y ago
Comments like this remind me of this sketch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fibDNwF8bjs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fibDNwF8bjs
- artninja1988 3y ago
  Reducing copyright monopolies is literally anarchy!
wwweston 3y ago
If you believe the value isn’t in the material, then it should be a simple matter for you to avoid using it, and naturally doing so won’t be an inconvenience for you because there’s no value in it. Not really clear why the means of distribution are valuable without anything of value to distribute, though…
hyggetrold 3y ago
> The value is in the copying not the material. In having a mechanism to spread your material to as many eyes as possible. Sorry friend but this is a really bad take. I sink my time and energy into creating something and then when I get ripped off I should be happy because of the exposure? https://theoatmeal.com/comics/exposure https://theoatmeal.com/comics/exposure
- Ludleth19 3y ago
  Agreed, I feel like this attitude comes from people who consume content but never have tried to make and disseminate anything themselves. I genuinely feel so bad for anyone making music the last 10/15 years, it's been so undervalued socially and from within the recording/streaming industry itself.
  - tivert 3y ago
    > Agreed, I feel like this attitude comes from people who consume content but never have tried to make and disseminate anything themselves. Yeah, I agree. I think most absolutist rejections of copyright and intellectual property are, at their core, a reaction against attempts to prevent piracy the person wants to engage in. Maybe mixed in with some misplaced Free Software idealism (that ignores stuff like the fact that copyright is the literal foundation of Free Software).
    - zirgs 3y ago
      Attempts to prevent piracy are laughable and ineffective. Even North Korea can't fully prevent imports of Western cultural products. This is why the music industry gave up and now we have services like Tidal, Spotify and Youtube.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - zirgs 3y ago
    That's because the musicians flooded the market. Good music isn't rare and it is not hard to find it. Spotify has 100M tracks - even if 99% of them were crap - that would still mean that there are 1 million good songs. More than you can listen in a lifetime.
tailspin2019 3y ago
With respect, I find this position quite baffling. The ability to use your years of experience and hard-earned skills in your particular craft to make something and then have ownership of the thing you made allowing you to make money from that thing, or sell it, should be something we absolutely protect. It’s a foundational principle behind capitalism and the very startup culture that HN/Ycombinator is built around. Saying that we should abandon copyright is a bit like saying we should abandon “ownership”. Too often I see this framing referring to the likes of Disney but this is to ignore the vast majority of individual small creators, who are not huge corporations, and absolutely need the protections that copyright provides in order to make a living from their craft.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

by elif 3y ago

santoshalper 3y ago

But in these scenarios, it is overwhelmingly large, powerful corporations using the work of individuals. Sarah Silverman has been successful as a comedian, but when it comes to her versus Microsoft, OpenAI, AWS, et al. she is the one clearly being taken advantage of by someone far wealthier and more powerful.

ronsor 3y ago
I'm no fan of OpenAI's aggressive tactics, but I'd rather not risk harming open-source AI projects just to deal with them. Regardless of how any lawsuit comes out, OpenAI/Microsoft/whatever isn't going anywhere: like you said, they're powerful. They can afford to work around whatever laws or rulings that happen. OSS projects won't have this luxury. So while I have my issues with OpenAI and the other tech companies, I think advocating for more copyright is like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
- jrm4 3y ago
  What makes you think this would strongly harm open-source AI projects? Do you mean e.g. small "companies trying to make money?" If so, I see that danger, but I also kind of don't care. What I don't think it would harm is actual "free/free-ish open source, just OUT there" AI projects in terms of pure "software that's available for everyone to mess around with, regardless of legality," -- and (as a lawyer I can't recommend doing this at all of course, but) I think it would end up mostly being a good and safer thing (in the same way that having e.g. Kali Linux out there is a good thing). The models are out there and it's hard to think that any single player could have a real big advantage here. I say let the suits commence.
  - ronsor 3y ago
    It's pretty hard to develop an open-source project in the open if your activity is seen as illegal. We don't need AI projects lumped in with Popcorn Time and movie torrents.
    - jrm4 3y ago
      Interesting examples you put there; FWIW you named the things that typically strongly favor the rights and desires of the consumer, despite the law, and give them a significantly superior experience to their legal alternatives (at least in the foreseeable short term.)
  - stale2002 3y ago
    > Do you mean e.g. small "companies trying to make money?" No they mean open source projects. The overwhelming majority of all generative AI related open source projects depend on, use, or are related to publicly available weights that were trained without permission on other people's data. The entire open source AI community wouldn't exist if those weights weren't available for everyone to use for basically any reason. One could argue that the existing weights aren't going to disappear as thats impossible to enforce. But what about the updated weights? If nobody is allowed to spend 50 million dollars training a new model and then releasing that model publicly for anyone to use, without getting permission from the entire internet to make that model, well then there aren't going to be anymore new models coming out. The government isn't going to be able to confiscate everyone's gamer PCs in order to ban inference, but they can stop someone from spending that 50 mil training the next cutting edge open source model. Which means that the existing models will be all that the open source community has. Yeah they could fine tune them, but cutting edge base models are still extremely important for open source AI progress.
    - zirgs 3y ago
      But you won't need to spend 50M in the future. Hardware improves all the time. Remember all those "can it run crysis?" memes? Those GPUs are now slower than mobile phones.
p1dda 3y ago
> Sarah Silverman has been successful yes, but as a performer not a real comedian though

jongjong 3y ago

Only if we first let go of patent laws. Copyright is the only law which protects the rights of regular citizens because patents are often prohibitively expensive.

Supermancho 3y ago
How does this follow? I take a picture (or make any other work of art), I have the copyright. This is outside of what is patented or not. They are not equivalent. Even in absence of the other, patents and copyrights do not offer the same protections. Granted, the US patent system is broken.
- jongjong 3y ago
  They have differences but they are both forms of IP protection. Citizens need some form of automatic IP protection or else anybody could (for example) copy someone's proprietary code and start offering a competing software service without any legal repercussions. That would be completely wrong since the person who wrote the code invested a substantial amount of effort to write it. Someone who has better business connections shouldn't be able to just copy it and use it to launch a competing service... Such competitor could leverage their business connections to secure funding to drive the original author of the software out of business using their own work against them.

CPLX 3y ago

Here’s a counterpoint. Fuck that. We’ve had enough concentration of resources in the hands of those who merely build technology that connects valuable things together, after having exploited market power to siphon off all the profit from the actually valuable things.

hackerlight 3y ago
We need a special AI tax. Profits made by foundational models (not the application layer) get an additional tax. We're entering a new paradigm that copyright is not sufficient to handle. These AI models have sucked up the output of humanity itself, the entire commons. The public vs private distinction isn't that important. They're going to cause job losses across many fields, so we need a new solution. Relying on the court system to enforce copyright claims for the benefit of a single claimant is not a solution that scales to solve the actual problem here. Another thing is, foundational models are prone to monopoly because the barriers to access compute are so steep.
- s1gnp0st 3y ago
  I can think of several large organizations who would love small AI companies to be pushed out of the space with a tax.
  - hackerlight 3y ago
    No. These are profits on foundational models. Small companies playing catch up don't make profits on foundational models.
- hadlock 3y ago
  The barrier of entry to building a "foundational model" is less than $400 of compute time (72 hours) on a handful of rental A100 using widely available open source data sets. Open source projects by ICs are already on par with GPT3. It's gonna be really hard to regulate stuff in its current form, which is already commercially beneficial
jph00 3y ago

jrm4 3y ago

Nah, it's time to remember the spirit of it, not the letter. It was designed primarily to give leverage to the little guys against the big companies who had more power to copy, and it's needed now more than ever.

ronsor 3y ago
Then reform it and reduce term length, perhaps?
- jrm4 3y ago
  Absolutely. 100%
  - ronsor 3y ago
    I'm on board then. Now, if only legislators actually seemed to care what average people thought.
- corysama 3y ago
  I think the original law was: Manual registration required for 22 years of protection. Manual re-registration required for a 22-year extension. Public domain after 44 years at most. I’d support that. Make something at 18. Sell it until you are 62. “Author’s life + 70 years” is much too slow for the pace of culture in the past 70 years.
  - a_vanderbilt 3y ago
    I think this would be an equitable compromise. AI can use the older stuff to build a foundation and license the newer stuff. Artists alive today get paid for their work, and we as a society can reap the benefits of art in a reasonable time frame. I have a speech I am delivering on this issue in a few months, would you mind if I adapt your comment and cite you?
  - kemotep 3y ago
    Original copyright in the US was 14 years with the option to extend for 1 additional 14 year term. In 1831 it was changed to 28 years for the base term and the option to renew it for an additional 14 years or 42 years total. That was the copy right law for nearly 200 years. Today it is actually 95 years or 70 years after the death of the author, whichever one is sooner. I think a return to the 1831 copyright regime is pretty fair. Even just 28 years no extensions is enough time to have a full career in something.

petermcneeley 3y ago

Comments like this remind me of this sketch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fibDNwF8bjs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fibDNwF8bjs

artninja1988 3y ago
Reducing copyright monopolies is literally anarchy!

wwweston 3y ago

If you believe the value isn’t in the material, then it should be a simple matter for you to avoid using it, and naturally doing so won’t be an inconvenience for you because there’s no value in it. Not really clear why the means of distribution are valuable without anything of value to distribute, though…

hyggetrold 3y ago

> The value is in the copying not the material. In having a mechanism to spread your material to as many eyes as possible. Sorry friend but this is a really bad take. I sink my time and energy into creating something and then when I get ripped off I should be happy because of the exposure? https://theoatmeal.com/comics/exposure https://theoatmeal.com/comics/exposure

Ludleth19 3y ago
Agreed, I feel like this attitude comes from people who consume content but never have tried to make and disseminate anything themselves. I genuinely feel so bad for anyone making music the last 10/15 years, it's been so undervalued socially and from within the recording/streaming industry itself.
- tivert 3y ago
  > Agreed, I feel like this attitude comes from people who consume content but never have tried to make and disseminate anything themselves. Yeah, I agree. I think most absolutist rejections of copyright and intellectual property are, at their core, a reaction against attempts to prevent piracy the person wants to engage in. Maybe mixed in with some misplaced Free Software idealism (that ignores stuff like the fact that copyright is the literal foundation of Free Software).
  - zirgs 3y ago
    Attempts to prevent piracy are laughable and ineffective. Even North Korea can't fully prevent imports of Western cultural products. This is why the music industry gave up and now we have services like Tidal, Spotify and Youtube.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- zirgs 3y ago
  That's because the musicians flooded the market. Good music isn't rare and it is not hard to find it. Spotify has 100M tracks - even if 99% of them were crap - that would still mean that there are 1 million good songs. More than you can listen in a lifetime.

tailspin2019 3y ago

With respect, I find this position quite baffling. The ability to use your years of experience and hard-earned skills in your particular craft to make something and then have ownership of the thing you made allowing you to make money from that thing, or sell it, should be something we absolutely protect. It’s a foundational principle behind capitalism and the very startup culture that HN/Ycombinator is built around. Saying that we should abandon copyright is a bit like saying we should abandon “ownership”. Too often I see this framing referring to the likes of Disney but this is to ignore the vast majority of individual small creators, who are not huge corporations, and absolutely need the protections that copyright provides in order to make a living from their craft.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]