5 ms·

Copyright reform is necessary for national security

88 points by artninja1988 2y ago

qrwafn 2y ago
It is interesting that since January 20th all pro-copyright posts are downvoted. Is this the user alignment that the AI broligarchs speak of?
- martin-t 2y ago
  I haven't noticed a particular date but yes, my posts describing a fair system of compensation get downvoted incredibly fast. At least I sometimes also get replies but many of them use fallacious arguments to the point of feeling like trolling. No idea if the same people commenting are also downvoting but I am starting to think that votes should not be anonymous.
- artninja1988 2y ago
  On the contrary. It's only been since the proliferation of genai that I've seen so many copyright maximalist takes on Hackernews, reminiscent of the you wouldn't steal a car propaganda run by big corpos.
  - hnad8125 2y ago
    Both is true. There have been more pro-copyright posts but these are getting downvoted recently. Last year they were popular.
foobarbecue 2y ago
I tried to repost this on Facebook. It was very upset
TheAceOfHearts 2y ago
I hope to see copyright duration go down to a reasonable length within my lifetime. There's tons of creative derivative work which builds upon existing content which cannot be sold due to copyright. The way I think about IP is that if you grew up with something, by the time you're an adult it should be possible to remix it in any way you like, because it's part of your culture. Nobody should get to lock down an idea for their lifetime.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  14 years as originally intended would be fine. All the classic movies up to 2010, and I still have to pay a subscription to watch, and lots of them are unavailable because the studios want to haggle over licenses for 50 year old properties? It's the kind of thing that might drive a man to pirate. If your book hasn't made you rich in the first 14 years after publishing, I'm sorry, audience just isn't that into you. (I am aware movie deals can languish for many years before finally landing a deal, and with 14 years studios could just wait you out and there's no incentive to write a script anymore, but copyright should be 14 years after publishing right? And movie scripts are not generally published before they get made into a movie, if ever.)
  - jasinjames 2y ago
    Not sure if this influences your thinking at all, but whatever duration copyright applies for starts once it was made, whether it was published or not. > Copyright in a work created on or after January 1, 1978, subsists from its creation ... [1] And "creation" basically means "written down" [2]. IANAL. [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/302 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/302 [2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fixed_in_a_tangible_medium_of_expression#:~:text=A%20work%20first%20must%20be,through%20visual%20or%20audio%20means. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fixed_in_a_tangible_medium_o...
  - 8note 2y ago
    if you do suddenly become popular, you can write a second book, and get involved in TV or movie adaptations of it. GRRM isnt included on ASOIAF content because hes the copyright holder, but because his influence makes people want to see the shows
    - wisty 2y ago
      You could argue that 14 years is a little short, especially for books which can get adaptations that pay more than the book. OTOH preventing adaptations stifles things. Imagine if Tolkein had managed to lock down his orcs and elves like Disney locked down the mouse. I think 20 or 30 years is fairer. But IIRC it's not about fair, the Constitution says that it should only be to encourage innovation, and long copyright inhibits innovation.
martin-t 2y ago
I was hoping the article would propose the opposite: if you train LLMs on copyrighted data, you owe the author a part of your income from it. How big should be determined by courts but probably proportional to the amount of data. There's absolutely no reason rich people owning ML companies should be getting richer by stealing ordinary people's work. But practicality trumps morality. The west needs to beat China and China doesn't give a fuck about copyright or individual people's (intellectual) property. The ML algos demand to be fed so we gotta sink to their level.
- chromanoid 2y ago
  Maybe enforcing open sourcing the models is the best route to go. At some point everything worthwhile ever created will be processed. Models can be seen as the processed, collective cultural output of humanity. It seems fair to me to force publishing the models in the vein of some kind of copyleft clause.
  - sam_lowry_ 2y ago
    Publishing weights? Meh. Publishing code and data would lead to abolishing copyright.
    - chromanoid 2y ago
      Copyright is just not prepared for AI. Training with copyrighted material could become "officialy legal" under copyleft terms, at least when the amount of training material exceeds a certain threshold.
      - martin-t 2y ago
        The issue is treating "AI" as something special. It is just derivative work. They are called large language _models_ for a reason. They are just statistical models of existing work. If anybody seriously thought they were intelligent, they'd be arguing for giving them personhood and we'd see massive protests akin to pro-life vs pro-choice. People (well, ML companies) only use the word "intelligence" as long as it suits their marketing purposes.
thw1238129 2y ago
[flagged]
Kim_Bruning 2y ago
This wouldn't be the first time IP laws hurt Western innovation and security. When WW1 started - despite the airplane being invented in Dayton, Ohio - the US had fallen so far behind they had to use French aircraft. Why? The Wright brothers' patent wars had effectively frozen US aviation development. Today it's not just one industry - Western IP laws are slowing progress across multiple tech frontiers. While companies navigate complex IP restrictions (In EU and US), China's development is following a sharp exponential curve. You can already see it clearly in robotics, electric vehicles, and now these last weeks with AI. While in the west you deal with predatory licensing (try talking with Siemens, Oracle, or Autodesk), and everyone keeps working on barriers and moats; other nations that allow a more collaborative approach (voluntary or not) are on an accelerating trajectory. IP law is clearly no longer suitable for purpose - we need a system that encourages collaboration more directly. A complete free for all isn't ideal either - and I certainly don't advocate that- but even that appears to be better than what we have now.
- absolutelastone 2y ago
  I think our IP laws are optimized to maximize benefits for the legal system.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > our IP laws are optimized to maximize benefits for the legal system Versus the content owners?!?
  - autobodie 2y ago
    They're optimized to maximize profit for capital owners. Another word for this is capitalism.
- wrtka 2y ago
  [flagged]
- _factor 2y ago
  Copyright is a form of censorship in an absolute sense. It leads to a less skilled / educated populace and consolidates wealth. For a capitalist nation, it’s very anti free-market.
can16358p 2y ago
I honestly don't understand why this is not the case already. Actually copyright should be even less-enforceable. Information/access to data/works should be totally free and there should be other ways to support the creators. For example I could easily download MP3s of music and MP4s of series/movies but I don't: simply because of two reasons: - I want to support the artist (to an extent as possible) - Using Spotify/Apple Music/Netflix is much more convenient with a totally acceptable monthly fee. I know the article is not about entertainment but a library, same rules should apply. And if one wants to train an LLM, let them: at its essence it's just a person who has read all the books (and access to information should be free), just the person is a machine instead of a biological human being.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- jprete 2y ago
  None of those services could exist today if copyright didn't exist, because streaming services wouldn't be able to compete with free downloads. I think Patreon and Kickstarter are how creative work is funded in that world.
  - Kim_Bruning 2y ago
    Piracy isn’t a legal problem—it’s a service problem [1]. Netflix, Spotify, and Valve (Steam) didn’t succeed because of copyright enforcement. They won because they made paying for content easier, faster, and better than piracy. Piracy isn’t hard, but these services solved the friction: instant access, high quality, fair pricing, and features that free alternatives couldn’t match. That’s why they still thrive today. [1] https://www.escapistmagazine.com/valves-gabe-newell-says-piracy-is-a-service-problem/ https://www.escapistmagazine.com/valves-gabe-newell-says-pir...
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > They won because they made paying for content easier, faster, and better than piracy PopcornTime would eat their lunch if it were allowed to work [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popcorn_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popcorn_Time
RyanShook 2y ago
I’m afraid LLMs are making copyrights obsolete and unenforceable. If an author uses DeepSeek to write a book, piece of music, application, or patent did they break copyright? Is the new work protected if this is disclosed?
- fsckboy 2y ago
  that does not make copyrights unenforceable
  - EnergyAmy 2y ago
    The sheer volume of uncopyrightable work will soon kill the system. Let us dance on its corpse
- jarsin 2y ago
  As per your second question the copyright office came out this week with the following guidance: The new guidelines say that AI prompts currently don’t offer enough control to “make users of an AI system the authors of the output.”(AI systems themselves can’t hold copyrights.) That stands true whether the prompt is extremely simple or involves long strings of text and multiple iterations. “No matter how many times a prompt is revised and resubmitted, the final output reflects the user’s acceptance of the AI system’s interpretation, rather than authorship of the expression it contains,” They are suppose to come out with guidance regarding the first question in a month or so.
- ranger_danger 2y ago
  If I looked at a painting before making my own similar one, did I break copyright?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - ben_w 2y ago
    While this pattern shows the inconsistency between how humans and AI are treated, there have been many examples over history where the ability to do at an increased scale something that was already familiar, results in the law being changed. Shining a torch at a plane is usually fine, shining a laser at them usually is a crime.
mettamage 2y ago
This site is blocked in the Netherlands. Does anyone have an archive.is or archive.ph of it?
- artninja1988 2y ago
  http://archive.today/uJmE4 http://archive.today/uJmE4
  - mettamage 2y ago
    Thanks!
  - ranger_danger 2y ago
    This site is blocked by Cloudflare from many VPN providers. Is there an alternative?
    - nkurz 2y ago
      https://web.archive.org/web/20250202005342/https://annas-archive.org/blog/ai-copyright.html https://web.archive.org/web/20250202005342/https://annas-arc...
- sebazzz 2y ago
  No it not blocked. It works fine for me, though I use various DNS providers via Adguard Home.
farts_mckensy 2y ago
This has no chance of passing. Reform is out of the question. This is just navel gazing. Get it through your skulls that reform is impossible at this point, and accept the implications of that.
abetusk 2y ago
An exceptional post from people who have an ideological stake in knowledge preservation/dissemination and are at the center of it. From the post: """ Our first recommendation is straightforward: shorten the copyright term. In the US, copyright is granted for 70 years after the author’s death. This is absurd. We can bring this in line with patents, which are granted for 20 years after filing. This should be more than enough time for authors of books, papers, music, art, and other creative works, to get fully compensated for their efforts (including longer-term projects such as movie adaptations). """
jimmydoe 2y ago
> This should be more than enough time for authors of books, papers, music, art, and other creative works, to get fully compensated for their efforts (including longer-term projects such as movie adaptations). not sure I agree. a lot of work only get recognized broadly long after published.
agnishom 2y ago
Cory Doctorow's books "Chokepoint Capitalism" and "The Internet Con" discuss a good number of possible reforms, if anyone is interested
wayathr0w 2y ago
Fuck national security & fuck "the west". These are not things we should seek to protect or defend. (And yes, fuck copyright too.)

88 points by artninja1988 2y ago

It is interesting that since January 20th all pro-copyright posts are downvoted. Is this the user alignment that the AI broligarchs speak of?

martin-t 2y ago
I haven't noticed a particular date but yes, my posts describing a fair system of compensation get downvoted incredibly fast. At least I sometimes also get replies but many of them use fallacious arguments to the point of feeling like trolling. No idea if the same people commenting are also downvoting but I am starting to think that votes should not be anonymous.
artninja1988 2y ago
On the contrary. It's only been since the proliferation of genai that I've seen so many copyright maximalist takes on Hackernews, reminiscent of the you wouldn't steal a car propaganda run by big corpos.
- hnad8125 2y ago
  Both is true. There have been more pro-copyright posts but these are getting downvoted recently. Last year they were popular.

foobarbecue 2y ago

I tried to repost this on Facebook. It was very upset

TheAceOfHearts 2y ago

I hope to see copyright duration go down to a reasonable length within my lifetime. There's tons of creative derivative work which builds upon existing content which cannot be sold due to copyright. The way I think about IP is that if you grew up with something, by the time you're an adult it should be possible to remix it in any way you like, because it's part of your culture. Nobody should get to lock down an idea for their lifetime.

jazzyjackson 2y ago
14 years as originally intended would be fine. All the classic movies up to 2010, and I still have to pay a subscription to watch, and lots of them are unavailable because the studios want to haggle over licenses for 50 year old properties? It's the kind of thing that might drive a man to pirate. If your book hasn't made you rich in the first 14 years after publishing, I'm sorry, audience just isn't that into you. (I am aware movie deals can languish for many years before finally landing a deal, and with 14 years studios could just wait you out and there's no incentive to write a script anymore, but copyright should be 14 years after publishing right? And movie scripts are not generally published before they get made into a movie, if ever.)
- jasinjames 2y ago
  Not sure if this influences your thinking at all, but whatever duration copyright applies for starts once it was made, whether it was published or not. > Copyright in a work created on or after January 1, 1978, subsists from its creation ... [1] And "creation" basically means "written down" [2]. IANAL. [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/302 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/302 [2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fixed_in_a_tangible_medium_of_expression#:~:text=A%20work%20first%20must%20be,through%20visual%20or%20audio%20means. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fixed_in_a_tangible_medium_o...
- 8note 2y ago
  if you do suddenly become popular, you can write a second book, and get involved in TV or movie adaptations of it. GRRM isnt included on ASOIAF content because hes the copyright holder, but because his influence makes people want to see the shows
  - wisty 2y ago
    You could argue that 14 years is a little short, especially for books which can get adaptations that pay more than the book. OTOH preventing adaptations stifles things. Imagine if Tolkein had managed to lock down his orcs and elves like Disney locked down the mouse. I think 20 or 30 years is fairer. But IIRC it's not about fair, the Constitution says that it should only be to encourage innovation, and long copyright inhibits innovation.

martin-t 2y ago

I was hoping the article would propose the opposite: if you train LLMs on copyrighted data, you owe the author a part of your income from it. How big should be determined by courts but probably proportional to the amount of data. There's absolutely no reason rich people owning ML companies should be getting richer by stealing ordinary people's work. But practicality trumps morality. The west needs to beat China and China doesn't give a fuck about copyright or individual people's (intellectual) property. The ML algos demand to be fed so we gotta sink to their level.

chromanoid 2y ago
Maybe enforcing open sourcing the models is the best route to go. At some point everything worthwhile ever created will be processed. Models can be seen as the processed, collective cultural output of humanity. It seems fair to me to force publishing the models in the vein of some kind of copyleft clause.
- sam_lowry_ 2y ago
  Publishing weights? Meh. Publishing code and data would lead to abolishing copyright.
  - chromanoid 2y ago
    Copyright is just not prepared for AI. Training with copyrighted material could become "officialy legal" under copyleft terms, at least when the amount of training material exceeds a certain threshold.
    - martin-t 2y ago
      The issue is treating "AI" as something special. It is just derivative work. They are called large language _models_ for a reason. They are just statistical models of existing work. If anybody seriously thought they were intelligent, they'd be arguing for giving them personhood and we'd see massive protests akin to pro-life vs pro-choice. People (well, ML companies) only use the word "intelligence" as long as it suits their marketing purposes.

thw1238129 2y ago

[flagged]

Kim_Bruning 2y ago

This wouldn't be the first time IP laws hurt Western innovation and security. When WW1 started - despite the airplane being invented in Dayton, Ohio - the US had fallen so far behind they had to use French aircraft. Why? The Wright brothers' patent wars had effectively frozen US aviation development. Today it's not just one industry - Western IP laws are slowing progress across multiple tech frontiers. While companies navigate complex IP restrictions (In EU and US), China's development is following a sharp exponential curve. You can already see it clearly in robotics, electric vehicles, and now these last weeks with AI. While in the west you deal with predatory licensing (try talking with Siemens, Oracle, or Autodesk), and everyone keeps working on barriers and moats; other nations that allow a more collaborative approach (voluntary or not) are on an accelerating trajectory. IP law is clearly no longer suitable for purpose - we need a system that encourages collaboration more directly. A complete free for all isn't ideal either - and I certainly don't advocate that- but even that appears to be better than what we have now.

absolutelastone 2y ago
I think our IP laws are optimized to maximize benefits for the legal system.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > our IP laws are optimized to maximize benefits for the legal system Versus the content owners?!?
- autobodie 2y ago
  They're optimized to maximize profit for capital owners. Another word for this is capitalism.
wrtka 2y ago
[flagged]
_factor 2y ago
Copyright is a form of censorship in an absolute sense. It leads to a less skilled / educated populace and consolidates wealth. For a capitalist nation, it’s very anti free-market.

can16358p 2y ago

I honestly don't understand why this is not the case already. Actually copyright should be even less-enforceable. Information/access to data/works should be totally free and there should be other ways to support the creators. For example I could easily download MP3s of music and MP4s of series/movies but I don't: simply because of two reasons: - I want to support the artist (to an extent as possible) - Using Spotify/Apple Music/Netflix is much more convenient with a totally acceptable monthly fee. I know the article is not about entertainment but a library, same rules should apply. And if one wants to train an LLM, let them: at its essence it's just a person who has read all the books (and access to information should be free), just the person is a machine instead of a biological human being.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jprete 2y ago
None of those services could exist today if copyright didn't exist, because streaming services wouldn't be able to compete with free downloads. I think Patreon and Kickstarter are how creative work is funded in that world.
- Kim_Bruning 2y ago
  Piracy isn’t a legal problem—it’s a service problem [1]. Netflix, Spotify, and Valve (Steam) didn’t succeed because of copyright enforcement. They won because they made paying for content easier, faster, and better than piracy. Piracy isn’t hard, but these services solved the friction: instant access, high quality, fair pricing, and features that free alternatives couldn’t match. That’s why they still thrive today. [1] https://www.escapistmagazine.com/valves-gabe-newell-says-piracy-is-a-service-problem/ https://www.escapistmagazine.com/valves-gabe-newell-says-pir...
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > They won because they made paying for content easier, faster, and better than piracy PopcornTime would eat their lunch if it were allowed to work [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popcorn_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popcorn_Time

RyanShook 2y ago

I’m afraid LLMs are making copyrights obsolete and unenforceable. If an author uses DeepSeek to write a book, piece of music, application, or patent did they break copyright? Is the new work protected if this is disclosed?

fsckboy 2y ago
that does not make copyrights unenforceable
- EnergyAmy 2y ago
  The sheer volume of uncopyrightable work will soon kill the system. Let us dance on its corpse
jarsin 2y ago
As per your second question the copyright office came out this week with the following guidance: The new guidelines say that AI prompts currently don’t offer enough control to “make users of an AI system the authors of the output.”(AI systems themselves can’t hold copyrights.) That stands true whether the prompt is extremely simple or involves long strings of text and multiple iterations. “No matter how many times a prompt is revised and resubmitted, the final output reflects the user’s acceptance of the AI system’s interpretation, rather than authorship of the expression it contains,” They are suppose to come out with guidance regarding the first question in a month or so.
ranger_danger 2y ago
If I looked at a painting before making my own similar one, did I break copyright?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ben_w 2y ago
  While this pattern shows the inconsistency between how humans and AI are treated, there have been many examples over history where the ability to do at an increased scale something that was already familiar, results in the law being changed. Shining a torch at a plane is usually fine, shining a laser at them usually is a crime.

mettamage 2y ago

This site is blocked in the Netherlands. Does anyone have an archive.is or archive.ph of it?

artninja1988 2y ago
http://archive.today/uJmE4 http://archive.today/uJmE4
- mettamage 2y ago
  Thanks!
- ranger_danger 2y ago
  This site is blocked by Cloudflare from many VPN providers. Is there an alternative?
  - nkurz 2y ago
    https://web.archive.org/web/20250202005342/https://annas-archive.org/blog/ai-copyright.html https://web.archive.org/web/20250202005342/https://annas-arc...
sebazzz 2y ago
No it not blocked. It works fine for me, though I use various DNS providers via Adguard Home.

farts_mckensy 2y ago

This has no chance of passing. Reform is out of the question. This is just navel gazing. Get it through your skulls that reform is impossible at this point, and accept the implications of that.

abetusk 2y ago

An exceptional post from people who have an ideological stake in knowledge preservation/dissemination and are at the center of it. From the post: """ Our first recommendation is straightforward: shorten the copyright term. In the US, copyright is granted for 70 years after the author’s death. This is absurd. We can bring this in line with patents, which are granted for 20 years after filing. This should be more than enough time for authors of books, papers, music, art, and other creative works, to get fully compensated for their efforts (including longer-term projects such as movie adaptations). """

jimmydoe 2y ago

> This should be more than enough time for authors of books, papers, music, art, and other creative works, to get fully compensated for their efforts (including longer-term projects such as movie adaptations). not sure I agree. a lot of work only get recognized broadly long after published.

agnishom 2y ago

Cory Doctorow's books "Chokepoint Capitalism" and "The Internet Con" discuss a good number of possible reforms, if anyone is interested

wayathr0w 2y ago

Fuck national security & fuck "the west". These are not things we should seek to protect or defend. (And yes, fuck copyright too.)