4 ms·

What do you think of copyright violations?

bee_rider 2y ago
IMO it is sad that the sort of… anti-establishment side of tech has suddenly become very worried about copyright. Bits inherently can be copied for free (or at least very cheap), copyright is a way to induce scarcity for the market to exploit where there isn’t any on a technical level. Currently the AI stuff kind of sucks because you have to be a giant corp to train a model. But maybe in a decade, users will be able to train their own models or at least fine-tune on basic cellphone and laptop (not dgpu) chips.
- uoaei 2y ago
  The copyright question is inherently tied to the requirement to earn money from your labor in this economy. I think the anti-establishment folks are not so rabid that they can't recognize real material conditions.
  - LordDragonfang 2y ago
    I think that would be a more valid argument if they ever cared about automating away jobs before. As it stands, anyone who was standing in the way of the glorious march of automation towards a post-scarcity future was called a luddite - right up until that automation started threatening their (material) class. I mean, you don't have to look any further than the (justified) lack of sympathy to dockworkers just a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41704618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41704618 The solution is not, and never has been, to shack up with the capital-c Capitalists in defense of copyright. It's to push for a system where having your "work" automated away is a relief, not a death sentence.
    - uoaei 2y ago
      There's both "is" and "ought" components to this conversation and we would do well to disambiguate them. I would engage with those people you're stereotyping rather than gossiping in a comments section, I suspect you will find their ideologies quite consistent once you tease out the details.
- deergomoo 2y ago
  > IMO it is sad that the sort of… anti-establishment side of tech has suddenly become very worried about copyright It shouldn't be too surprising that anti-establishment folks are more concerned with trillion-dollar companies subsuming and profiting from the work of independent artists, writers, developers, etc., than with individual people taking IP owned by multimillion/billion-dollar companies. Especially when many of the companies in the latter group are infamous for passing only a tiny portion of the money charged onto the people doing the actual creative work.
  - Earw0rm 2y ago
    This. Tech still acts like it's the scrappy underdog, the computer in the broom cupboard where "the net" is a third space separate from reality, nerds and punks writing 16-bit games. That ceased to be materially true around twenty years ago now. Once Facebook and smart phones arrived, computing touched every aspect of peoples' lives. When tech is all-pervasive, the internal logic and culture of tech isn't sufficient to describe or understand what matters.
    - bee_rider 2y ago
      IMO this is looking at it through a lens which considers “tech” a single group. Which is a way of looking at is, maybe even the best way. But an alternative could be: in the battle between scrappy underdog and centralized sellout tech, the sellouts are winning.
      - mulmen 2y ago
        > in the battle between scrappy underdog and centralized sellout tech, the sellouts are Winning by what metric?
- TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
  Copyright is the right to get a return from creative work. The physical ease - or otherwise - of copying is absolutely irrelevant to this. So is scarcity. It's also orthogonal to the current corporate dystopia which is using monopoly power to enclose the value of individual work from the other end - precisely by inserting itself into the process of physical distribution. None of this matters if you have a true abundance economy, but we don't. Pretending we do for purely selfish reasons - "I want this, and I don't see why I should pay the creator for it" - is no different to all the other ways that employers stiff their employees. I don't mean it's analogous, I mean it's exactly the same entitled mindset which is having such a catastrophic effect on everything at the moment.
- cruffle_duffle 2y ago
  > IMO it is sad that the sort of… anti-establishment side of tech has suddenly become very worried about copyright. Remember Napster? Like how rebellious was that shit? Those times are what a true social upsetting tech looks like. You cannot even import a video into OpenAI’s Sora without agreeing to a four (five?) checkbox terms & conditions screen. These LLM’s come out of the box neutered by corporate lawyers and various other safety weenies. This shit isn’t real until there are mainsteam media articles expressing outrage because some “dangerous group of dark web hackers finished training a model at home that very high school student on the planet can use to cheat on their homework” or something like that. Basically it ain’t real until it actually challenges The Man. That isn’t happening until this tech is able to be trained and inferenced from home computers.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    Yeah, or if it becomes possible to train on a peer-to-peer network somehow. (I’m sure there’s researching going on in that direction). Hopefully that sort of thing comes out of the mix.
s1artibartfast 2y ago
I think that AI output is transformative. I think the training process constitutes commercial use.
jokethrowaway 2y ago
copyrighting a sequence of numbers should have never existed in the first place great if AI accelerates its destruction (even if it's through lobbying to our mafia-style protect-the-richest-company governments)
- microtonal 2y ago
  great if AI accelerates its destruction Unfortunately this is not the way it's developing. It's more like: are you a normal person without deep pockets? Download a movie with Bittorrent and get a steep fine. Are you a company with hundreds of millions? Download half the copyrighted material on the internet, it's fine. We are increasingly shifting to a society where the rules only don't apply when you have capital. To some extend, this has always been true, but the scale is changing.
petra 2y ago
It does use knowledge from creators. But using knowledge from others is a big part of modern society, and the legal ways of protecting knowledge from commercial reuse are actually pretty limited. Is the result of an llm an accurate copy or more of an inspiration? What is the standard we use on humans? Can we code that determination into a system that when a piece of content is close enough to be a copyrighted work, prevents the llm from generating it?

IMO it is sad that the sort of… anti-establishment side of tech has suddenly become very worried about copyright. Bits inherently can be copied for free (or at least very cheap), copyright is a way to induce scarcity for the market to exploit where there isn’t any on a technical level. Currently the AI stuff kind of sucks because you have to be a giant corp to train a model. But maybe in a decade, users will be able to train their own models or at least fine-tune on basic cellphone and laptop (not dgpu) chips.

uoaei 2y ago
The copyright question is inherently tied to the requirement to earn money from your labor in this economy. I think the anti-establishment folks are not so rabid that they can't recognize real material conditions.
- LordDragonfang 2y ago
  I think that would be a more valid argument if they ever cared about automating away jobs before. As it stands, anyone who was standing in the way of the glorious march of automation towards a post-scarcity future was called a luddite - right up until that automation started threatening their (material) class. I mean, you don't have to look any further than the (justified) lack of sympathy to dockworkers just a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41704618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41704618 The solution is not, and never has been, to shack up with the capital-c Capitalists in defense of copyright. It's to push for a system where having your "work" automated away is a relief, not a death sentence.
  - uoaei 2y ago
    There's both "is" and "ought" components to this conversation and we would do well to disambiguate them. I would engage with those people you're stereotyping rather than gossiping in a comments section, I suspect you will find their ideologies quite consistent once you tease out the details.
deergomoo 2y ago
> IMO it is sad that the sort of… anti-establishment side of tech has suddenly become very worried about copyright It shouldn't be too surprising that anti-establishment folks are more concerned with trillion-dollar companies subsuming and profiting from the work of independent artists, writers, developers, etc., than with individual people taking IP owned by multimillion/billion-dollar companies. Especially when many of the companies in the latter group are infamous for passing only a tiny portion of the money charged onto the people doing the actual creative work.
- Earw0rm 2y ago
  This. Tech still acts like it's the scrappy underdog, the computer in the broom cupboard where "the net" is a third space separate from reality, nerds and punks writing 16-bit games. That ceased to be materially true around twenty years ago now. Once Facebook and smart phones arrived, computing touched every aspect of peoples' lives. When tech is all-pervasive, the internal logic and culture of tech isn't sufficient to describe or understand what matters.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    IMO this is looking at it through a lens which considers “tech” a single group. Which is a way of looking at is, maybe even the best way. But an alternative could be: in the battle between scrappy underdog and centralized sellout tech, the sellouts are winning.
    - mulmen 2y ago
      > in the battle between scrappy underdog and centralized sellout tech, the sellouts are Winning by what metric?
TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
Copyright is the right to get a return from creative work. The physical ease - or otherwise - of copying is absolutely irrelevant to this. So is scarcity. It's also orthogonal to the current corporate dystopia which is using monopoly power to enclose the value of individual work from the other end - precisely by inserting itself into the process of physical distribution. None of this matters if you have a true abundance economy, but we don't. Pretending we do for purely selfish reasons - "I want this, and I don't see why I should pay the creator for it" - is no different to all the other ways that employers stiff their employees. I don't mean it's analogous, I mean it's exactly the same entitled mindset which is having such a catastrophic effect on everything at the moment.
cruffle_duffle 2y ago
> IMO it is sad that the sort of… anti-establishment side of tech has suddenly become very worried about copyright. Remember Napster? Like how rebellious was that shit? Those times are what a true social upsetting tech looks like. You cannot even import a video into OpenAI’s Sora without agreeing to a four (five?) checkbox terms & conditions screen. These LLM’s come out of the box neutered by corporate lawyers and various other safety weenies. This shit isn’t real until there are mainsteam media articles expressing outrage because some “dangerous group of dark web hackers finished training a model at home that very high school student on the planet can use to cheat on their homework” or something like that. Basically it ain’t real until it actually challenges The Man. That isn’t happening until this tech is able to be trained and inferenced from home computers.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  Yeah, or if it becomes possible to train on a peer-to-peer network somehow. (I’m sure there’s researching going on in that direction). Hopefully that sort of thing comes out of the mix.

s1artibartfast 2y ago

I think that AI output is transformative. I think the training process constitutes commercial use.

jokethrowaway 2y ago

copyrighting a sequence of numbers should have never existed in the first place great if AI accelerates its destruction (even if it's through lobbying to our mafia-style protect-the-richest-company governments)

microtonal 2y ago
great if AI accelerates its destruction Unfortunately this is not the way it's developing. It's more like: are you a normal person without deep pockets? Download a movie with Bittorrent and get a steep fine. Are you a company with hundreds of millions? Download half the copyrighted material on the internet, it's fine. We are increasingly shifting to a society where the rules only don't apply when you have capital. To some extend, this has always been true, but the scale is changing.

petra 2y ago

It does use knowledge from creators. But using knowledge from others is a big part of modern society, and the legal ways of protecting knowledge from commercial reuse are actually pretty limited. Is the result of an llm an accurate copy or more of an inspiration? What is the standard we use on humans? Can we code that determination into a system that when a piece of content is close enough to be a copyrighted work, prevents the llm from generating it?