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The reason we have copyright laws is that sufficient people with power believe that the world is better with them than without them. Same with fair use exceptio

The reason we have copyright laws is that sufficient people with power believe that the world is better with them than without them. Same with fair use exceptions. If an AI agent becomes just massively useful, and then a judge says that it's impossible to run it profitably with the current interpretation of copyright law, the agents won't go away: Copyright will change to make the agents legal. It really wasn't very different with copyright's evolution as the web developed: There are theoretical copyright regimes that are much harder than what we have, but basically kill the legal internet. But the damage to existing internet services was just unacceptable, including to users.

jordanb 2y ago
Another component here is that, even if nothing useful comes out of this AI boom, none of the principles of any of the companies expect to be held personally responsible for the decisions they take. The statutory penalties in copyright law are large and ruinous for small-time violators. People have had their financial security and lives ruined by bittorrent lawsuits, for instance. Applied consistently these damages would run into the hundreds of billions for folks like Altman. But Altman and all of his cohort including Schmidt do not expect them to be applied consistently.
JonChesterfield 2y ago
Notably we got this far on the GPL which we are now burning to the ground in pull up the ladder behind us fashion. It seems to be taking people a while to notice that open source is moribund. That the blow has been dealt largely by Microsoft (courtesy of GitHub and OpenAI) may explain the delayed recognition of this intellectual catastrophe.
FireBeyond 2y ago
> The reason we have copyright laws is that sufficient people with power believe that the world is better with them than without them You could equally say: The reason we have copyright laws is that sufficient people with power believe that the world is better for them with them than without them

jordanb 2y ago

Another component here is that, even if nothing useful comes out of this AI boom, none of the principles of any of the companies expect to be held personally responsible for the decisions they take. The statutory penalties in copyright law are large and ruinous for small-time violators. People have had their financial security and lives ruined by bittorrent lawsuits, for instance. Applied consistently these damages would run into the hundreds of billions for folks like Altman. But Altman and all of his cohort including Schmidt do not expect them to be applied consistently.

JonChesterfield 2y ago

Notably we got this far on the GPL which we are now burning to the ground in pull up the ladder behind us fashion. It seems to be taking people a while to notice that open source is moribund. That the blow has been dealt largely by Microsoft (courtesy of GitHub and OpenAI) may explain the delayed recognition of this intellectual catastrophe.

FireBeyond 2y ago

> The reason we have copyright laws is that sufficient people with power believe that the world is better with them than without them You could equally say: The reason we have copyright laws is that sufficient people with power believe that the world is better for them with them than without them