20 ms·

Based on the encyclopedic knowledge LLMs have of written works I assume all parties did the same. But I think there is a broader point to make here. Youtube was

by gizmo 2y ago

Based on the encyclopedic knowledge LLMs have of written works I assume all parties did the same. But I think there is a broader point to make here. Youtube was initially a ghost town (it started as a dating site) and it only got traction once people started uploading copyrighted TV shows to it. Google itself got big by indexing other people's data without compensation. Spotify's music library was also pirated in the early days. The contracts with the music labels came later. GPL violations by commercial products fits the theme also. Companies aggressively protect their own intellectual property but have no qualms about violating the IP rights of others. Companies. Individuals have no such privilege. If you plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers you forfeit your life.

newsclues 2y ago
Comprehensive intellectual property needs to happen for the modern (digital) era. Basically the entire legal system needs to be retooled and rethought for computers.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  Looks like the entire legal system is being retooled at the moment.
- threeseed 2y ago
  No we just need to enforce the existing laws. And the legal system is for humans not computers.
  - newsclues 2y ago
    The existing laws are a problem, and are not enforced in a fair and just manner. Yes, the legal system is for humans, but we can use technology to improve the system for humans, so it's faster, better and more fair, because humans aren't perfect, and now we have technology to be better than the system create a long time ago. You don't think the legal system should run on pens and paper right? Adapting to typewriters, was a benifit to the system? Well, video on demand, live streaming, and things like LLMs can also make the system better for humans.
    - nottorp 2y ago
      Aren't all LLMs based on models published by the big two or three, so built on IP theft and if you're using them you are guilty of handling stolen goods?
      - newsclues 2y ago
        that's the point.
  - Qwertious 2y ago
    Plenty of the existing laws are insane and indefensible. Copyright duration of life of the author plus 70 years? Patents on videogame mechanics? We need to both reform the laws and enforce them. Otherwise... >The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
    - tastyfreeze 2y ago
      Pantents on video game mechanics... oh how I wish this weren't true. I would love a first person adventure game with the best mechanics and controls taken from genres that did that mechanics very well. The one that always comes to mind for me is the boxing controls from Fight Night games. It pains me a little every time I play a game where pugilistic battles come down to smash 1 or 2 buttons.
pbh101 2y ago
> Google itself got big by indexing other people's data without compensation Weird framing given how much value was and is still placed on Google driving traffic to you
- joshstrange 2y ago
  Even before the LLM-craze Google was showing their Answers box or whatever it was called at the top of the results that told you the answer (sometimes) so that you didn’t have to visit any website.
  - pbh101 2y ago
    That was significantly after their market dominance was firmly established entirely through sending traffic to external locations.
- mrkeen 2y ago
  For Google's case the order was reversed. Google used to send customers to your site. Now they try to show you the information on their site so that the customer doesn't need to go to your site.
  - sitkack 2y ago
    Unless your site is an SEO cesspool serving THEIR ads, then you do end up there.
ysofunny 2y ago
the english empire once tried to mantain a monopoly over steam loom machines the americans cheated their way to competition, heck, even before that, the english empire got jumpstarted by stealing gold from the spanish (who were themselves exploiting it away from aztec and other mexican natives) I'm saying it's business as usual, but also, culture doesn't work like tangible physical widgets so we must stop letting a few steal this boon of digital copying by means of silly ideas like DRM, copyright, patents. all means to cause scarcity
- nottorp 2y ago
  Interesting, if we're to trust what NotOpenAI and Facebook say about their IP, the US should pay the UK reparations for IP theft based on textile industry profits starting in the 1850s until today?
- choult 2y ago
  Hollywood became popular for filmmaking because they were literally the opposite side of the country from Thomas Edison and his patents...
  - anotherhue 2y ago
    That and the predictable weather (old film needs lots of light).
  - kristianp 2y ago
    This is interesting, is it really true?
  - emporas 2y ago
    United Kingdom was the first to steal a Chinese invention called gunpowder, use it to maximum effect and they were also at the opposite sides of the world. Do not forget the first law passed by a new nation in which every citizen has the right to burn trees and produce potassium a critical mineral in gunpowder. That nation was either Greece or America, i forget which one. In the Western civilizations, when we are stealing copyrighted material and patents we are not messing around. I remember when the Byzantine empire tried to steal secrets of silk production also from Chinese, that was so much fun. Great times we lived in the past, even greater now!
illegalmemory 2y ago
" If you plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers you forfeit your life." This is exactly what I immediately thought while reading the article. It almost feels like the legal system only punishes general public, while most of these guys are above it.
- quaintdev 2y ago
  I read the same thing earlier today on Reddit, weird!
- G_o_D 2y ago
  Money speaks ! Money buys !
- rahton 2y ago
  The legal system is built to favor large corps and capital owners. See Katharina Pistor books for instance.
  - cheschire 2y ago
    I think it’s the other way around. Those large entities break all the same laws and rules as others and then get to the point where they can influence the creation of a regulatory moat around themselves to prevent competitors from taking the same path as them.
    - ttoinou 2y ago
      True but lets take examples one by one to see what we can learn : Spotify was doing illegal things until they made a deal to become legal and not to be trialed over what they done. Seems like business deals is what saved them, not regulatory capture (the regulations around IP for music pre existed Spotify)
      - cheschire 2y ago
        Sure that is what saved them initially, but following that early 2010’s period of hemorrhaging money and eventual recovery, then they started digging that moat. https://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/spotify-washington-lobbying-firms-117001 https://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/spotify-washington-lo... https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/issues?cycle=2015&id=D000068647&spec=CPT&specific_issue=Copyright%2C+Patent+%26+Trademark https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/issues?...
threeseed 2y ago
> Google itself got big by indexing other people's data without compensation Wrong. a) Robots.txt which defines what content you wish to make available to third parties predates every search engine including Google. Web site owners chose to make it available to Google and search engines have respected their wishes despite it not being in their best interest. b) The difference here is that OpenAI, Meta etc have not even tried to honour the wishes of copyright holders. They just considered everything as theirs. c) Google grew big because it had no ads, fast interface and PageRank was significantly better. It wasn't because it had the most comprehensive index.
- RALaBarge 2y ago
  To your first point, the op said without compensation, not without permission.
- fredgrott 2y ago
  point c is wrong...they had ads since the original yahoo contract....
  - threeseed 2y ago
    Yahoo contract was 2 years after it launched. I remember using Google the day it went public and it had no ads which made it unique compared to Altavista.
- karamanolev 2y ago
  > Web site owners chose to make it available to Google. Strong disagree. Since robots.txt is optional and the default is "crawl me as you please", website owners don't "choose to make it available", they just don't choose to make it non-available.
  - XorNot 2y ago
    That's a functionally meaningless distinction. If you setup a web server that responds to requests, then you're choosing to make content available because your server can choose to not respond to requests. The entire protocol includes mechanisms to negotiate access.
gnfargbl 2y ago
I think if Google attempted to download the entirety of JSTOR with the express intent of making the full dataset freely available, then Google would also face legal consequences. It's true, and relevant, that Google would feel those consequences much less sharply than Swartz did.
- vintermann 2y ago
  Don't buy into the rhetoric and call it "consequences". It's always a choice to sue, a choice to prosecute, and this would be true even if these choices were made consistently and impartially (which they certainly aren't).
  - gnfargbl 2y ago
    I wasn't meaning to attach a pejorative to "consequences", but the word does typically have that meaning so you're right to call me out. Perhaps "resulting legal issues" would be a better way to put it. For the record, I think the consequence was grossly disproportionate to the action.
- josefx 2y ago
  Google book search was declared fair use and copyright holders ended up having to explicitly request removal of their works. Apparently he would have gotten away with downloading the JSTOR database if he made it clear that he intended to only publish half of each paper.
- dekhn 2y ago
  Google Scholar explicitly made direct deals with publishers to scrape their content, with the constraint that while they can use the content to serve search results in Scholar, but cannot show the content of the papers on the site- just titles and short fragments that match. the deals were tenuous and I had to step carefully around my plan to use that database to implement large-scale scientific search over the literature (this was a long time before anybody was seriously considering using LLMs on research data). I've spoken to several very wealthy/powerful people and tried to get them to negotiate a large-scale content license with the various publishers that would allow researchers and individuals to access more research in lower-friction ways. None of them (NIH, Schmidt, etc) were really interested.
dcchambers 2y ago
I guess the solution is to create a shell company for your illegal activities?
- Cumpiler69 2y ago
  You must be new to billionaire business practices: break the rules first, ask for forgiveness later. By the time the cheque comes, your illicit venture either went bust or you built a bilion dollar empire capable of buying the best lawyers and lobbying to walk away clean.
- georgemcbay 2y ago
  The modern solution has been to grow so fast that by the time anyone can go after you legally you've already amassed so much money/power that you can have the laws rewritten (or at least enforced) around your existence. IMO part of the reason the SV tech bros are embracing right wing grift culture so publicly now is that this method, which had been serving them well for decades, doesn't really work without the infinite free money lending spigot being wide open.
  - cduzz 2y ago
    That's why you should go straight to the treasury's RSS feeds.
Wowfunhappy 2y ago
> Based on the encyclopedic knowledge LLMs have of written works I assume all parties did the same. I don't understand why you wouldn't just buy copies of the books. Seems like such a relatively inexpensive way to strengthen your legal case.
- cess11 2y ago
  Too much paperwork, too much effort. These are important people, doing much more important stuff than whatever book authors do. Or so they think, I think.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    I doubt they think that way, but even if they did, they'd be right - for 99% of the works in question, the biggest value they gave to the world is, by far, being part of the LLM training corpus. There's lots of content out there. Most of it is noise. People forget because they're only ever exposed to an aggressively curated fraction of it.
    - cess11 2y ago
      No, it's not.
- gosub100 2y ago
  thanks to the byzantine copyright system, you can't easily do it. Plus, just speculating, but maybe by paying, it establishes "consideration" for some implied contract? "You implicitly entered a contract with us by purchasing the book, then violated the contract by 'distributing' the material for commercial use" ?
  - almatabata 2y ago
    There must be a publisher out there that forbids you from training an AI on the copy you buy from them by now.
- jokethrowaway 2y ago
cess11 2y ago
It's roughly the Spotify story too. They had an extremely impressive catalog very early, way before they were bought by the entertainment cartel. The founders had background in torrenting and the initial product was quite similar to The Pirate Bay but with clearly capitalist ambitions and branding, in contrast to the anarchist leanings of the Pirate Bureau and rather anarchic attitude of The Pirate Bay.
immibis 2y ago
Something to understand about capitalist competition (also in politics) is that it's a war. Not one with guns and bombs, but more like a cold war, with espionage and hacking and just generally doing anything you can to gain an advantage without bringing negative consequences on yourself. The limit is what you can actually get away with, not what the rules say you can get away with, and the system aggressively selects players who recognize this. It's amoral - there is no "ought", only "is". An actor gets punished or not, with absolutely no regard to whether it "should" get punished. One thing is consistent: following the rules as written means you lose. You can see it in Y Combinator (and other) startups. The biggest ex-startups are things like AirBNB (hotels but we don't follow the rules but we don't get punished for not following them) and Uber (taxis but we don't follow the rules but we don't get punished for not following them). One way to not get punished for not following the rules is to invent a variation of the game where the rules haven't been written yet. I again refer you to AirBNB and Uber; Omegle also comes to mind, although they didn't monetize. Viewed in this light, Aaron Swartz's mistake was not the part where he downloaded journal articles, but the part where he got caught downloading journal articles. Shadow library sites are doing the same thing, minus the getting caught. So are Meta and Google and OpenAI. sci-hub is only involved in a lawsuit because it got caught and is now in the stage where it finds out whether it gets punished or not.
- oblio 2y ago
  > Something to understand about capitalist competition (also in politics) is that it's a war. Turns out there are 2 simultaneous wars there. One where companies and individuals compete ruthlessly. And another one where if non profit associations of individuals form, guns come out.
bko 2y ago
The thing is Google, meta and YouTube weren't giant entities when they did this stuff. I think it's good no one cracked down on them for copyright stuff. Now they're developing an LLM that will generate potentially trillions in value to humanity and looks like they're not exactly playing by the rules. But I prefer looser intellectual property rights anyway so Im ok with it
- ziddoap 2y ago
  >But I prefer looser intellectual property rights anyway so Im ok with it I think more people, potentially anyways, would feel similar to to this if it applied even somewhat equally. Instead, companies can seemingly do whatever they please whereas lawyers will send letters to your home for downloading a single episode of game of thrones.
  - ndriscoll 2y ago
    From the article, they took steps to avoid using their IP addresses. Individuals doing the same using a VPN are pretty much immune from any legal issues.
    - ziddoap 2y ago
      This is one small blip in an incredibly long history of companies being able to not care about copyright while individuals must. Workarounds with a VPN are great and all, but they are a band-aid on a systemic problem. (You are not immune, by the way, if your VPN company is subject to a subpoena and isn't one of very few actually no-log services)
      - ndriscoll 2y ago
        IME companies take copyright way more seriously than individuals. e.g. my last 2 jobs have had scanners to ensure we're not accidentally pulling in GPL code to our products, and one of those was a startup. I'd be surprised if corporate security software weren't looking for torrent clients and if you wouldn't get fired for torrenting on corporate machines or networks at most companies. Meanwhile the same people setting those security policies have a 100TB array at home with fully automated pirating setups. They very much don't care personally, but it's a huge business risk. In high school/university in the 00s, everyone casually pirated things. In college people passed around a USB drive with all of the books needed for our degree program. People in the dorms traded music collections with 10s of thousands of songs. Tellingly, Apple advertised that iPods could store 10,000 songs, which approximately zero people could afford to buy legitimately. If anything, the consequences for piracy have gone down since then, but streaming is convenient enough and phone storage/UX is hobbled enough that people pay. In any case, I think the other poster is right that companies flouting copyright law is a good thing. It stops us from pretending that it's helpful for the little guy, making it easier to argue for abolition or vastly reducing the length. That they did it to build an open model is even better: it shows directly the kinds of benefits copyright is taking from us. We should be looking to scan every book out there to build better training sets (and better indexed search into scholastic datasets; at this point all of Anna's Archive only costs a little over $11k in raw storage, which puts it into "affordable as an upper middle class home library" territory. In another few years, it may be affordable to nearly everyone. Better ML models could help here with better compression as well), but copyright law restricts use of works dating back to a time before electrification was widespread. Obviously they're an evil company in general, but llama was an actual good deed from them.
marcosdumay 2y ago
> If you plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers you forfeit your life. Just to point, but the material in question was public domain, so nobody had even a copyrights claim over it.
- scottbez1 2y ago
  Do you have a citation for that claim? I've not seen a claim that none of the material had copyright before.
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    It's a library of historical scientific work. You will find the famous Einstein's 3 1905 papers there, for example.
    - warkdarrior 2y ago
      Every scientific paper in the last 90 years or so is still under copyright, owned by the authors, the published, or the universities.
      - marcosdumay 2y ago
        JSTOR was explicitly a library of public domain works, consolidated in a single place so that academic libraries could access those papers that nobody had an interest in distributing anymore. It recently added a bunch of copyrighted journals. It didn't have any of those at the time.
        dekhn 2y ago
        I re-read the MIT report by Abelson and it looks like JSTOR was an archive of old scientific articles from many journals, most of them still under copyright by the journal. I'd need to see more evidence that it was public domain.
lolinder 2y ago
Yes. And the problem here isn't that companies get away with doing things like this, the problem is that individuals don't. Attempting to lock information behind a nightmarish legal system is the problem. I'm pretty much at the point now where I don't buy the "copyright incentivizes creation" argument any more. Copyright, like advertising, incentivizes creation by enormous corporations, but also like advertising it incentivizes creations that overwhelmingly have little value. Creative individuals don't need copyright to be incentivized to create—they need a safety net that gives them the freedom to spend time on the creativity that naturally wants to bubble out. If the goal is to encourage creativity, copyright is a lousy and enormously expensive substitute for Universal Basic Income.
- post-it 2y ago
  Also, in Canada, it's basically impossible to protect your IP as an individual due to the astronomical cost and lack of options to recover that cost. So copyright will never incentivize my creations, or those of any small creator.
- derektank 2y ago
  Sure creative people will always create but the scope of that creativity will be limited if we do away with intellectual property. Steve Spielberg would probably always have created movies, but he wouldn't have been able to make Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan,or Indiana Jones without capital from the studio system, and the studio system wouldn't have provided him with that capital of they couldn't extract economic rents from the copyright for those films.
  - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
    I think a limited, short copyright can do good that the current many-year copyright does not. Imagine a 1 year copyright in the context of film. Companies would prioritize box office sales no doubt, but that’s how it used to be and it was generally positive. It’s really the extremity of modern copyright that I think causes these issues.
  - zelphirkalt 2y ago
modzu 2y ago
i know of a company that poisoned an entire town! thats terrorism if done by an individual. the company still exists, just paid a settlement and carried on...
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  I agree with your point, but will split hairs on using the word "terrorism". I think that should be reserved for people that commit atrocities for some political aim. I'm fairly sure the company in question (I assume Union Carbide) did not poison the town to advance a political agenda.
  - winthrowe 2y ago
    Profit at all costs is a political agenda.
  - mrweasel 2y ago
    Kinda terrifying that you can get away with shit if you just argue that it's not politically motivated, you did it because you really wanted a yacht.
    - Auracle 2y ago
      You also get a lesser offense killing someone accidentally as opposed to a premeditated murder. There’s a difference between an intentional act, an accident, and an accident due to extreme neglect and our laws reflect that.
      - cute_boi 2y ago
        how is it not intentional? Union Carbide higher up ppl knew there was safety issue, but because of profit they didn't give a damn. The lesson here is do criminal activities through company, so that there are chances that you can escape from it. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/dec/08/bhopals-tragedy-has-not-stopped-the-urban-disaster-still-claiming-lives-35-years-on https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/dec/08/bhopals-trage...
pockmarked19 2y ago
> Spotify's music library was also pirated in the early days. I want to know more, please enlighten me (anyone who knows). I read the book "The Spotify Play" and it made it seem like the pirated music was an internal-only thing and not something available to customers. Is that true?
- arwineap 2y ago
  Users would upload their copies of the music and spotify would replay them. This was obvious to early users, even if they were only consumers, because of the pirate-shout-out-overlays that were in a lot of the poorer quality releases. Another interesting note, in the early days of spotify, the app would saturate your upload bandwidth while using it. Given their close ties to utorrent, I always assumed that's how they were affording the bandwidth as well. Pretty brilliant way to bootstrap I guess; they didn't have to pay for bandwidth or content until they already had contracts in place
  - lysace 2y ago
    Afaik, the trick was to stream (via http, I assume) the first few hundred kilobytes or so from fast/expensive servers and then try to p2p the rest in some clever order. I guess seeking also triggered the fast/expensive path for a while.
- mzl 2y ago
  Before the launch, Spotify had a deal with the music rights holders association in Sweden (STIM) that they could use a merged collection of friends and families music libraries. All this was removed before Spotify went out of beta. So while it was using pirated media, it was sanctioned by the rights holders for the experiment of building Spotify.
- billdybas 2y ago
  "Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist" by Liz Pelly goes into more detail about their origins and the culture around piracy in Sweden at the time. https://lizpelly.info/book https://lizpelly.info/book
larodi 2y ago
The most outrageous thing about the whole story is that smart people (like here and not only) knew this all since day one. They been uncovering this the whole time. And in their face, with all the fierce ignorance, broligarchs deny, evade and totally pretend this never happened. The most non open company of all even went to lengths to accuse others of stealing their IP - not theirs to begin with. Just think of it - why did all major content platforms closed their APIs the day after GPT-2 got the word going…? Cause they knew all this very well - the content is precious and needed. They been doing it all along. Distilling the essence of world’s writing and digital imagery they had no right to. We have a saying where I come from - no mercy for the chicken, no laws for the millions. I thought it was a local thing at first, it turned is how the world goes. Nothing new under the sun, indeed.
- qup 2y ago
  Speaking of GPT2, I remember that nobody gave a shit what it was trained on, because it sucked then.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
Crunchyroll started off as a straight up piracy site, it now has millions of paying subscribers and was sold to Sony for over a billion a few years ago.
tiahura 2y ago
[flagged]
- StefanBatory 2y ago
  Shame though that corpos aren't responsible for their actions too :|
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- kendalf89 2y ago
  I don't think it's right to downplay the disproportionate response the FBI had to Aaron's actions. He was initially being threatened with 50 years in prison and a $1 million fine, the stress from which sent his mental health spiraling and in no small way contributed to his suicide. I think the original point of the person you are responding to still stands.
  - tiahura 2y ago
    You are correct. Prosecutors don’t consider whether charging a perp will upset them and stress them out. Nor should they. Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.
    - wing-_-nuts 2y ago
      Every time I wonder how authoritarian regimes gain power, I remind myself there are people who seem to delight in the suffering of others.
- wing-_-nuts 2y ago
  For downloading papers, paid for with government funding and gatekept by greedy rent seekers charging ~ $30 a pop. The lengths people will go to defend things that should not exist astounds.
  - 2y ago
belter 2y ago
"Zuckerberg was at White House for meetings on Thursday" - https://www.reuters.com/world/us/zuckerberg-was-white-house-meetings-thursday-official-says-2025-02-06/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/zuckerberg-was-white-house-...
coliveira 2y ago
Yes, these companies are based on massive IP and copyright theft. And they still want to lecture others about their "property rights".
m3nsr3a 2y ago
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throwawaygmbno 2y ago
Everyone on here is smart enough. Just do not participate and save your money. Do not pay for digital goods. If Netflix raises their prices, it doesn't matter because there is a torrent of all of their shows. If Spotify raises their prices, it doesn't matter because your favorite artist has their entire library in a torrent. If some game company ask you to pay real life prices for a digital costume, find the crack online and play on a private server. If YouTube wants to interrupt your video with an ad in the middle of the sentence, download one of the many options that blocks all ads. Billion dollar companies have shown they do not care about you. The people who complain about losing their salary, should just get replies thanking them for paying. All the sad poor people who might be hurt were already paid. The caterer on your favorite show is not getting residuals. NBC also isn't going to stop making TV shows because that is all they can do. Content creators also existed on the internet long before that was a job. They just did it because they cared about it not for ad money. If you really want to support the artist directly go to a concert or just mail them a check. If you can't actually identify a person who might be hurt, then do not care.
- hnpolicestate 2y ago
  I'm not paying for Led Zeppelin IV after having probably bought 3 copies in my lifetime. I agree with you.
- dingnuts 2y ago
  if you want to support an artist go to the show and BUY MERCH at the table! almost all of their income comes from that. the importance of buying a T-shirt at the show cannot be overstated and sometimes you get to say hi to your idol, too
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    It's a stupid situation, though. There are many creators I'm happy to support - but for 99% of them, I don't want their stupid merch. It's mostly low-quality garbage with high markup, that nevertheless cost something to design and produce, thus wasting both precious resources and labor - an useless tax on contributions to artists that doesn't even help anything. I really wish this wasn't necessary. (Even the okay-quality merch is a waste, since for most artists I'd want to support, I don't identify with them enough to display that stuff, so it's again just buying to put away and eventually throw away.)
earthnail 2y ago
In Spotify’s defense, they used the pirated data only to show a proof of concept to the copyright holders, and that use was sanctioned by the local rights holders organization STIM. The copyright holders then approved their concept, and subsequently Spotify got the rights to offer their service to customers. Everybody won.
- tanjtanjtanj 2y ago
  That’s not entirely true, in Spotify’s early days you could upload files to the service and listen to songs uploaded by other people. I think the majority of any song I wanted to listen to before they went Europe-only for a time was “pirated”.
  - earthnail 2y ago
    Fair. I stand corrected.
  - kqr 2y ago
    Indeed. I remember there was one song that used a pirated variant and you could tell because it had an obvious artifact that was accidentally introduced in a pirated copy of the song!
electriclove 2y ago
Some can pirate on a large scale and see no repercussions. Some can steal from stores and see no repercussions. Some can steal from others and see no repercussions. Some can violently harm others and see no repercussions. Some can damage property and see no repercussions. Some can’t. This world is not right.
- ls612 2y ago
  The strong do what they wish and the weak suffer what they must. Any morality beyond that is a fairy tale that the weak tell themselves.
vel0city 2y ago
> once people started uploading copyrighted TV shows to it End users, not YouTube employees, right? And they would take things down following DMCA requests and what not, right? So, pretty much following the law? > Google itself got big by indexing other people's data without compensation Scraping public websites to build a search index isn't the same as making LLMs that can recreate the source verbatim devoid of even attribution. I do agree there's an argument to be had about the LLM's transformative nature in the end though. > Spotify's music library was also pirated in the early days Not any version generally available to the public, and with the copyright holder's permission to do so.
- cma 2y ago
  I think he's thinking of Grooveshark
sylario 2y ago
And Hollywood was created on the west coast because for intellectual property it was still the far west and it allowed them to ignore patents on movie technologies.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  They became the thing they lamented. This is the inevitable.
smugma 2y ago
Spotify was born as a response to piracy. Why do you say their catalog was pirated?
chanux 2y ago
Corporations are people. Just a notch above the regular kind.
Lucasoato 2y ago
> If you plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers you forfeit your life. In case anybody here doesn't know, that's a reference to Aaron Swartz, an activist (and Reddit co-founder) that was risking 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine just for downloading a lot of academic papers from JSTOR. He eventually took his life because of the pressure. May his soul rest in peace.
- ThaDood 2y ago
  Thanks for sharing this. Reading his story is kind of insane honestly. He created the CC licenses which I did not know. What an icon, truly.
  - CuriousSkeptic 2y ago
    On that note, Lawrence Lessigs talks on copyright from that period are worth a watch https://youtu.be/9xbRE_H5hoU https://youtu.be/9xbRE_H5hoU
- gruez 2y ago
  Except he was offered 6 months in a plea bargain, which he declined because he wanted a trial. Whether 6 months was reasonable punishment for "plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers" is another matter, but "you forfeit your life" or "35 years in prison and a $1 million fine " is massively misleading.
  - breakitmakeit 2y ago
    [dead]
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 2y ago
    Swartz wasn't the kind of person to accept a plea bargain from an overzealous prosecutor who was indicting him on 13 felony charges with a possible sentence up to 35 years along with a $1 million fine. I assume he wanted a trial because he wanted to continue his fight for open access. And maybe he thought he might lose, but wouldn't lose on all counts, and would make the prosecution look unreasonable in the public eye. Was that decision rational from a self-interest point of view? Maybe not. And then you might ask, if he wanted a trial, why did he kill himself? Obviously no one knows what was going through his head when he did it. He left no note. But the prospect of being locked in a cell until he was an old man probably had something to do with it. You can certainly argue it was his own fault for not pleading down, but even if that's your view, that doesn't absolve the prosecutor. Ortiz has a lot of blame in this too, and the fact she still hasn't acknowledged it over a decade later speaks volumes to the kind of person she is.
danju 2y ago
[dead]
sneak 2y ago
> If you plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers you forfeit your life. I’m opposed to copyright and pro-aaronsw, but the state did not kill him.
- roguecoder 2y ago
  Absolutely. 1.8 million people are in United States jails today. It isn't a death sentence, and it is a foreseeable consequence of some ethically-appropriate actions. Supporting folks spending time in jail is a valuable role in any social movement.
yurlungur 2y ago
I think the difference may be LLMs may not be laundered clean of copyright data anytime soon. Even if chatgpt got big and profitable, it's not so clear that it won't contain copyrighted data as that may simply be necessary to train the best models.
- cma 2y ago
  Most of the web is copyrighted
yowzadave 2y ago
> Youtube was initially a ghost town (it started as a dating site) and it only got traction once people started uploading copyrighted TV shows to it To this day, there are a huge number of videos that show copyrighted content on YouTube; they are usually crappy clips, reversed and with different music playing in the background to avoid automated detection.
soheil 2y ago
So be a company? Last I checked it costs a couple of hundred dollars to form an LLC, what am I missing?
wcfrobert 2y ago
VC and startups are fundamentally about disruption. You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs (laws). The incumbent players are not going to sit still and let things be "disrupted". A common response is to make sure the public knows about the broken eggs. I would say youtube, Google, Spotify, Uber, doordash, etc. all have made my life much better.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- soheil 2y ago
  You don't know a world without them so you actually have no idea if they have made your life compared to that world much better or much worse. How your life was at the time is irrelevant.
  - theatomheart 2y ago
    100%
  - warkdarrior 2y ago
    This is a vacuous statement. You can say the same thing about electricity, or antibiotics, or any other modern advancement.
    - soheil 2y ago
      That's kinda the point. That type of reasoning is vacuous. There are millions of great arguments why antibiotics made the world a better place, I'm yet to hear one of YT.
  - wcfrobert 2y ago
    Why would I say something is better without a point of comparison? I was born in the 90s. So definitely alive before YouTube and Spotify albeit as a teenager rather than an adult. I guess you're right I'm not familiar with the world of Sony Walkman, Blockbuster, and IBM PC. But I definitely remember dial-up modems, CDs, Windows 95 and XP. Technology has improved most aspect of my life better since then. (maybe minus all the ads + dopamine slot machines part...)
soheil 2y ago
Aaron committed suicide and FBI going after him was meant more as a lesson to the other kids at MIT than anything. MegaUpload did the same, kim dotcom got raided in his sleep by FBI in New Zealand! So no I don't buy your reductionist argument, there are forces at play that allow companies with founders with the likes of Google to get away with it but not others.
whatever1 2y ago
How does that prosecutor sleep at night?
observationist 2y ago
This frames Google's indexing of the web in a totally, abjectly wrong fashion. It wasn't "other people's data", it was data people published to the public internet, implicitly and explicitly granting permission to download through the act of serving that data without restriction to whoever navigated to a particular URL. That's how the internet works. If you want private content, you need to put up a gate mechanism of some sort with authentication or other methods of restricting access. Without that, you are literally having your server "serve" the content to whoever asks for it, without restriction or exception, without ToS or meaningful contract or agreements. You can't have it both ways. "But they didn't know" or other post-hoc claims of innocent people publishing content to the web being misled or confused or abused is infantilizing nonsense. The web wouldn't have been as amazing and revolutionary and liberating if the fundamental public and open nature of its systems was private and walled off by default. Your take on YouTube going viral initially over copyrighted content isn't correct, either - it was ease of use and access. It was fairly popular by the time Google bought it, and once it was reachable and advertised by google itself, it exploded, because by that time, everyone had defaulted to using google for search. Other people corrected your Spotify take. The reason they pirated is because it is functionally impossible to gain access to the data in any other way. For consumers, there are lots of old shows, music, and other content that aren't accessible, so they turn to piracy. A vast majority of the time, if content is accessible, people will pay and do the technically legal and "right" thing. Publishers exploit authors and content creators in the name of "platforming" and "marketing" , effectively doing as little as possible to take 90%+ of the value of a product and providing as little as possible to the producer of content or books or music. They get by on technicalities and have captured the legal arena entirely, with any attempt at reform or revolution meeting a messy death at the hands of lawyers and big money publishers. Screw those people. They lie, cheat, and steal, and somehow have gotten away with fooling the world into thinking they're the good guys. Copying bits and bytes is not stealing, and the ones trying to shill that narrative are trying to fool as many people as possible into giving them more money without any return of value in kind. I'd download the hell out of a car. Pirate everything.
mrtesthah 2y ago
Don’t forget the original developers of Skype also created Kazaa first.
sandeepkd 2y ago
Reminds me of recent discussions about similar topic, what may clearly look like a crime can be treated differently depending on if you do it as an individual or as a company. Somewhere down the line its all about understanding the limits and boundaries of the system, its a skill in itself.
cyanydeez 2y ago
Mmm, the broader point is: laws are are as real as the cash you can pay a lawyer to fight.
plasticbugs 2y ago
I briefly worked for Crunchyroll, which began life as an anime pirating service with subtitles. The contracts with the Japanese anime publishers came later. Now they vigorously protect their content from "pirates".
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
"Spotify's music library was also pirated in the early days." "Ek, who had been the CEO of the piracy platform uTorrent, founded Spotify with his friend, another entrepreneur named Martin Lorentzon. Both-Ek at 23 and Lorentzon 37-were already millionaires from the sales of previous businesses. The name Spotify had no particular meaning, and was not associated with music. According to Spotify Teardown, the company developed a software for improved peer-to-peer network sharing, and the founders spoke of it as a general "media distribution platform." The initial choice to focus on music, the founders said at the time, was because audio files are smaller than video files, not because of a dream of saving music. In 2007, when Spotify first publicly tested its software, it allowed users to stream songs downloaded from The Pirate Bay, a service for unlicensed downloads. By late 2008, Spotify would convince music labels in Sweden to license music to the site, and unlicensed music was removed. From there, Spotify would take off across Europe and then the world." https://qz.com/1683609/how-the-music-industry-shifted-from-napster-to-spotify https://qz.com/1683609/how-the-music-industry-shifted-from-n...
BrenBarn 2y ago
Exactly. We need leaders with the political will to apply a "financial death penalty" to companies that engage in this kind of brazen behavior. That means all assets seized, the company dissolved, personal assets of executives seized, executives jailed. People running companies should live in mortal fear of ever doing the things that they routinely do today.
- Nasrudith 2y ago
  Do people even take civics classes anymore? That isn't how any of this works. Political will doesn't allow arbitrary punishments. You would need legislation at very least and that could face issues with the Eighth Amendment. (Which could not be post-facto of course.) At least you're not calling for jailing all the shareholders....
  - BrenBarn 2y ago
    Political will can be used to pass legislation and ultimately to change the Eighth Amendment.
  - immibis 2y ago
    Punishment wouldn't be arbitrary, it would be based on the crimes you committed.
ctrlp 2y ago
The sooner people learn this lesson, the sooner it might change.
nostrademons 2y ago
A bigger lesson might be "don't get caught until you're big enough to destroy the people suing you." Napster got shut down for widespread enabling of copyright infringement. So did numerous other filesharing startups, including Travis Kalanick's first startup, Scour. Lots of small startups get put out of business all the time for being sued and not having the money to defend themselves. Likewise, individuals like Donald Trump or Elon Musk get away with all sorts of illegal shit, because they are big enough to shut down the court systems prosecuting them. Google's genius was in staying under the radar and aligning their incentives with everyone that might dislike them, until they were big enough that they could simply crush anyone that might dislike them.
vkou 2y ago
> Google itself got big by indexing other people's data without compensation. So in other words, it got big by providing free user traffic to people's websites without asking for compensation? You generally don't charge the phone book money to include you in it. It's actually the other way around.
Izikiel43 2y ago
So, might makes right, a tale as old as humanity
yard2010 2y ago
RIP Aaron Swartz
djmips 2y ago
Doesn't Google have their own internal scanning of books?

by gizmo 2y ago

newsclues 2y ago

Comprehensive intellectual property needs to happen for the modern (digital) era. Basically the entire legal system needs to be retooled and rethought for computers.

actionfromafar 2y ago
Looks like the entire legal system is being retooled at the moment.
threeseed 2y ago
No we just need to enforce the existing laws. And the legal system is for humans not computers.
- newsclues 2y ago
  The existing laws are a problem, and are not enforced in a fair and just manner. Yes, the legal system is for humans, but we can use technology to improve the system for humans, so it's faster, better and more fair, because humans aren't perfect, and now we have technology to be better than the system create a long time ago. You don't think the legal system should run on pens and paper right? Adapting to typewriters, was a benifit to the system? Well, video on demand, live streaming, and things like LLMs can also make the system better for humans.
  - nottorp 2y ago
    Aren't all LLMs based on models published by the big two or three, so built on IP theft and if you're using them you are guilty of handling stolen goods?
    - newsclues 2y ago
      that's the point.
- Qwertious 2y ago
  Plenty of the existing laws are insane and indefensible. Copyright duration of life of the author plus 70 years? Patents on videogame mechanics? We need to both reform the laws and enforce them. Otherwise... >The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
  - tastyfreeze 2y ago
    Pantents on video game mechanics... oh how I wish this weren't true. I would love a first person adventure game with the best mechanics and controls taken from genres that did that mechanics very well. The one that always comes to mind for me is the boxing controls from Fight Night games. It pains me a little every time I play a game where pugilistic battles come down to smash 1 or 2 buttons.

pbh101 2y ago

> Google itself got big by indexing other people's data without compensation Weird framing given how much value was and is still placed on Google driving traffic to you

joshstrange 2y ago
Even before the LLM-craze Google was showing their Answers box or whatever it was called at the top of the results that told you the answer (sometimes) so that you didn’t have to visit any website.
- pbh101 2y ago
  That was significantly after their market dominance was firmly established entirely through sending traffic to external locations.
mrkeen 2y ago
For Google's case the order was reversed. Google used to send customers to your site. Now they try to show you the information on their site so that the customer doesn't need to go to your site.
- sitkack 2y ago
  Unless your site is an SEO cesspool serving THEIR ads, then you do end up there.

ysofunny 2y ago

the english empire once tried to mantain a monopoly over steam loom machines the americans cheated their way to competition, heck, even before that, the english empire got jumpstarted by stealing gold from the spanish (who were themselves exploiting it away from aztec and other mexican natives) I'm saying it's business as usual, but also, culture doesn't work like tangible physical widgets so we must stop letting a few steal this boon of digital copying by means of silly ideas like DRM, copyright, patents. all means to cause scarcity

nottorp 2y ago
Interesting, if we're to trust what NotOpenAI and Facebook say about their IP, the US should pay the UK reparations for IP theft based on textile industry profits starting in the 1850s until today?
choult 2y ago
Hollywood became popular for filmmaking because they were literally the opposite side of the country from Thomas Edison and his patents...
- anotherhue 2y ago
  That and the predictable weather (old film needs lots of light).
- kristianp 2y ago
  This is interesting, is it really true?
- emporas 2y ago
  United Kingdom was the first to steal a Chinese invention called gunpowder, use it to maximum effect and they were also at the opposite sides of the world. Do not forget the first law passed by a new nation in which every citizen has the right to burn trees and produce potassium a critical mineral in gunpowder. That nation was either Greece or America, i forget which one. In the Western civilizations, when we are stealing copyrighted material and patents we are not messing around. I remember when the Byzantine empire tried to steal secrets of silk production also from Chinese, that was so much fun. Great times we lived in the past, even greater now!

illegalmemory 2y ago

" If you plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers you forfeit your life." This is exactly what I immediately thought while reading the article. It almost feels like the legal system only punishes general public, while most of these guys are above it.

quaintdev 2y ago
I read the same thing earlier today on Reddit, weird!
G_o_D 2y ago
Money speaks ! Money buys !
rahton 2y ago
The legal system is built to favor large corps and capital owners. See Katharina Pistor books for instance.
- cheschire 2y ago
  I think it’s the other way around. Those large entities break all the same laws and rules as others and then get to the point where they can influence the creation of a regulatory moat around themselves to prevent competitors from taking the same path as them.
  - ttoinou 2y ago
    True but lets take examples one by one to see what we can learn : Spotify was doing illegal things until they made a deal to become legal and not to be trialed over what they done. Seems like business deals is what saved them, not regulatory capture (the regulations around IP for music pre existed Spotify)
    - cheschire 2y ago
      Sure that is what saved them initially, but following that early 2010’s period of hemorrhaging money and eventual recovery, then they started digging that moat. https://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/spotify-washington-lobbying-firms-117001 https://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/spotify-washington-lo... https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/issues?cycle=2015&id=D000068647&spec=CPT&specific_issue=Copyright%2C+Patent+%26+Trademark https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/issues?...

threeseed 2y ago

> Google itself got big by indexing other people's data without compensation Wrong. a) Robots.txt which defines what content you wish to make available to third parties predates every search engine including Google. Web site owners chose to make it available to Google and search engines have respected their wishes despite it not being in their best interest. b) The difference here is that OpenAI, Meta etc have not even tried to honour the wishes of copyright holders. They just considered everything as theirs. c) Google grew big because it had no ads, fast interface and PageRank was significantly better. It wasn't because it had the most comprehensive index.

RALaBarge 2y ago
To your first point, the op said without compensation, not without permission.
fredgrott 2y ago
point c is wrong...they had ads since the original yahoo contract....
- threeseed 2y ago
  Yahoo contract was 2 years after it launched. I remember using Google the day it went public and it had no ads which made it unique compared to Altavista.
karamanolev 2y ago
> Web site owners chose to make it available to Google. Strong disagree. Since robots.txt is optional and the default is "crawl me as you please", website owners don't "choose to make it available", they just don't choose to make it non-available.
- XorNot 2y ago
  That's a functionally meaningless distinction. If you setup a web server that responds to requests, then you're choosing to make content available because your server can choose to not respond to requests. The entire protocol includes mechanisms to negotiate access.

gnfargbl 2y ago

I think if Google attempted to download the entirety of JSTOR with the express intent of making the full dataset freely available, then Google would also face legal consequences. It's true, and relevant, that Google would feel those consequences much less sharply than Swartz did.

vintermann 2y ago
Don't buy into the rhetoric and call it "consequences". It's always a choice to sue, a choice to prosecute, and this would be true even if these choices were made consistently and impartially (which they certainly aren't).
- gnfargbl 2y ago
  I wasn't meaning to attach a pejorative to "consequences", but the word does typically have that meaning so you're right to call me out. Perhaps "resulting legal issues" would be a better way to put it. For the record, I think the consequence was grossly disproportionate to the action.
josefx 2y ago
Google book search was declared fair use and copyright holders ended up having to explicitly request removal of their works. Apparently he would have gotten away with downloading the JSTOR database if he made it clear that he intended to only publish half of each paper.
dekhn 2y ago
Google Scholar explicitly made direct deals with publishers to scrape their content, with the constraint that while they can use the content to serve search results in Scholar, but cannot show the content of the papers on the site- just titles and short fragments that match. the deals were tenuous and I had to step carefully around my plan to use that database to implement large-scale scientific search over the literature (this was a long time before anybody was seriously considering using LLMs on research data). I've spoken to several very wealthy/powerful people and tried to get them to negotiate a large-scale content license with the various publishers that would allow researchers and individuals to access more research in lower-friction ways. None of them (NIH, Schmidt, etc) were really interested.

dcchambers 2y ago

I guess the solution is to create a shell company for your illegal activities?

Cumpiler69 2y ago
You must be new to billionaire business practices: break the rules first, ask for forgiveness later. By the time the cheque comes, your illicit venture either went bust or you built a bilion dollar empire capable of buying the best lawyers and lobbying to walk away clean.
georgemcbay 2y ago
The modern solution has been to grow so fast that by the time anyone can go after you legally you've already amassed so much money/power that you can have the laws rewritten (or at least enforced) around your existence. IMO part of the reason the SV tech bros are embracing right wing grift culture so publicly now is that this method, which had been serving them well for decades, doesn't really work without the infinite free money lending spigot being wide open.
- cduzz 2y ago
  That's why you should go straight to the treasury's RSS feeds.

Wowfunhappy 2y ago

> Based on the encyclopedic knowledge LLMs have of written works I assume all parties did the same. I don't understand why you wouldn't just buy copies of the books. Seems like such a relatively inexpensive way to strengthen your legal case.

cess11 2y ago
Too much paperwork, too much effort. These are important people, doing much more important stuff than whatever book authors do. Or so they think, I think.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  I doubt they think that way, but even if they did, they'd be right - for 99% of the works in question, the biggest value they gave to the world is, by far, being part of the LLM training corpus. There's lots of content out there. Most of it is noise. People forget because they're only ever exposed to an aggressively curated fraction of it.
  - cess11 2y ago
    No, it's not.
gosub100 2y ago
thanks to the byzantine copyright system, you can't easily do it. Plus, just speculating, but maybe by paying, it establishes "consideration" for some implied contract? "You implicitly entered a contract with us by purchasing the book, then violated the contract by 'distributing' the material for commercial use" ?
- almatabata 2y ago
  There must be a publisher out there that forbids you from training an AI on the copy you buy from them by now.
jokethrowaway 2y ago

cess11 2y ago

It's roughly the Spotify story too. They had an extremely impressive catalog very early, way before they were bought by the entertainment cartel. The founders had background in torrenting and the initial product was quite similar to The Pirate Bay but with clearly capitalist ambitions and branding, in contrast to the anarchist leanings of the Pirate Bureau and rather anarchic attitude of The Pirate Bay.

immibis 2y ago

Something to understand about capitalist competition (also in politics) is that it's a war. Not one with guns and bombs, but more like a cold war, with espionage and hacking and just generally doing anything you can to gain an advantage without bringing negative consequences on yourself. The limit is what you can actually get away with, not what the rules say you can get away with, and the system aggressively selects players who recognize this. It's amoral - there is no "ought", only "is". An actor gets punished or not, with absolutely no regard to whether it "should" get punished. One thing is consistent: following the rules as written means you lose. You can see it in Y Combinator (and other) startups. The biggest ex-startups are things like AirBNB (hotels but we don't follow the rules but we don't get punished for not following them) and Uber (taxis but we don't follow the rules but we don't get punished for not following them). One way to not get punished for not following the rules is to invent a variation of the game where the rules haven't been written yet. I again refer you to AirBNB and Uber; Omegle also comes to mind, although they didn't monetize. Viewed in this light, Aaron Swartz's mistake was not the part where he downloaded journal articles, but the part where he got caught downloading journal articles. Shadow library sites are doing the same thing, minus the getting caught. So are Meta and Google and OpenAI. sci-hub is only involved in a lawsuit because it got caught and is now in the stage where it finds out whether it gets punished or not.

oblio 2y ago
> Something to understand about capitalist competition (also in politics) is that it's a war. Turns out there are 2 simultaneous wars there. One where companies and individuals compete ruthlessly. And another one where if non profit associations of individuals form, guns come out.

bko 2y ago

The thing is Google, meta and YouTube weren't giant entities when they did this stuff. I think it's good no one cracked down on them for copyright stuff. Now they're developing an LLM that will generate potentially trillions in value to humanity and looks like they're not exactly playing by the rules. But I prefer looser intellectual property rights anyway so Im ok with it

ziddoap 2y ago
>But I prefer looser intellectual property rights anyway so Im ok with it I think more people, potentially anyways, would feel similar to to this if it applied even somewhat equally. Instead, companies can seemingly do whatever they please whereas lawyers will send letters to your home for downloading a single episode of game of thrones.
- ndriscoll 2y ago
  From the article, they took steps to avoid using their IP addresses. Individuals doing the same using a VPN are pretty much immune from any legal issues.
  - ziddoap 2y ago
    This is one small blip in an incredibly long history of companies being able to not care about copyright while individuals must. Workarounds with a VPN are great and all, but they are a band-aid on a systemic problem. (You are not immune, by the way, if your VPN company is subject to a subpoena and isn't one of very few actually no-log services)
    - ndriscoll 2y ago
      IME companies take copyright way more seriously than individuals. e.g. my last 2 jobs have had scanners to ensure we're not accidentally pulling in GPL code to our products, and one of those was a startup. I'd be surprised if corporate security software weren't looking for torrent clients and if you wouldn't get fired for torrenting on corporate machines or networks at most companies. Meanwhile the same people setting those security policies have a 100TB array at home with fully automated pirating setups. They very much don't care personally, but it's a huge business risk. In high school/university in the 00s, everyone casually pirated things. In college people passed around a USB drive with all of the books needed for our degree program. People in the dorms traded music collections with 10s of thousands of songs. Tellingly, Apple advertised that iPods could store 10,000 songs, which approximately zero people could afford to buy legitimately. If anything, the consequences for piracy have gone down since then, but streaming is convenient enough and phone storage/UX is hobbled enough that people pay. In any case, I think the other poster is right that companies flouting copyright law is a good thing. It stops us from pretending that it's helpful for the little guy, making it easier to argue for abolition or vastly reducing the length. That they did it to build an open model is even better: it shows directly the kinds of benefits copyright is taking from us. We should be looking to scan every book out there to build better training sets (and better indexed search into scholastic datasets; at this point all of Anna's Archive only costs a little over $11k in raw storage, which puts it into "affordable as an upper middle class home library" territory. In another few years, it may be affordable to nearly everyone. Better ML models could help here with better compression as well), but copyright law restricts use of works dating back to a time before electrification was widespread. Obviously they're an evil company in general, but llama was an actual good deed from them.

marcosdumay 2y ago

> If you plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers you forfeit your life. Just to point, but the material in question was public domain, so nobody had even a copyrights claim over it.

scottbez1 2y ago
Do you have a citation for that claim? I've not seen a claim that none of the material had copyright before.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  It's a library of historical scientific work. You will find the famous Einstein's 3 1905 papers there, for example.
  - warkdarrior 2y ago
    Every scientific paper in the last 90 years or so is still under copyright, owned by the authors, the published, or the universities.
    - marcosdumay 2y ago
      JSTOR was explicitly a library of public domain works, consolidated in a single place so that academic libraries could access those papers that nobody had an interest in distributing anymore. It recently added a bunch of copyrighted journals. It didn't have any of those at the time.
      - dekhn 2y ago
        I re-read the MIT report by Abelson and it looks like JSTOR was an archive of old scientific articles from many journals, most of them still under copyright by the journal. I'd need to see more evidence that it was public domain.

lolinder 2y ago

Yes. And the problem here isn't that companies get away with doing things like this, the problem is that individuals don't. Attempting to lock information behind a nightmarish legal system is the problem. I'm pretty much at the point now where I don't buy the "copyright incentivizes creation" argument any more. Copyright, like advertising, incentivizes creation by enormous corporations, but also like advertising it incentivizes creations that overwhelmingly have little value. Creative individuals don't need copyright to be incentivized to create—they need a safety net that gives them the freedom to spend time on the creativity that naturally wants to bubble out. If the goal is to encourage creativity, copyright is a lousy and enormously expensive substitute for Universal Basic Income.

post-it 2y ago
Also, in Canada, it's basically impossible to protect your IP as an individual due to the astronomical cost and lack of options to recover that cost. So copyright will never incentivize my creations, or those of any small creator.
derektank 2y ago
Sure creative people will always create but the scope of that creativity will be limited if we do away with intellectual property. Steve Spielberg would probably always have created movies, but he wouldn't have been able to make Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan,or Indiana Jones without capital from the studio system, and the studio system wouldn't have provided him with that capital of they couldn't extract economic rents from the copyright for those films.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
  I think a limited, short copyright can do good that the current many-year copyright does not. Imagine a 1 year copyright in the context of film. Companies would prioritize box office sales no doubt, but that’s how it used to be and it was generally positive. It’s really the extremity of modern copyright that I think causes these issues.
- zelphirkalt 2y ago

modzu 2y ago

i know of a company that poisoned an entire town! thats terrorism if done by an individual. the company still exists, just paid a settlement and carried on...

JKCalhoun 2y ago
I agree with your point, but will split hairs on using the word "terrorism". I think that should be reserved for people that commit atrocities for some political aim. I'm fairly sure the company in question (I assume Union Carbide) did not poison the town to advance a political agenda.
- winthrowe 2y ago
  Profit at all costs is a political agenda.
- mrweasel 2y ago
  Kinda terrifying that you can get away with shit if you just argue that it's not politically motivated, you did it because you really wanted a yacht.
  - Auracle 2y ago
    You also get a lesser offense killing someone accidentally as opposed to a premeditated murder. There’s a difference between an intentional act, an accident, and an accident due to extreme neglect and our laws reflect that.
    - cute_boi 2y ago
      how is it not intentional? Union Carbide higher up ppl knew there was safety issue, but because of profit they didn't give a damn. The lesson here is do criminal activities through company, so that there are chances that you can escape from it. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/dec/08/bhopals-tragedy-has-not-stopped-the-urban-disaster-still-claiming-lives-35-years-on https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/dec/08/bhopals-trage...

pockmarked19 2y ago

> Spotify's music library was also pirated in the early days. I want to know more, please enlighten me (anyone who knows). I read the book "The Spotify Play" and it made it seem like the pirated music was an internal-only thing and not something available to customers. Is that true?

arwineap 2y ago
Users would upload their copies of the music and spotify would replay them. This was obvious to early users, even if they were only consumers, because of the pirate-shout-out-overlays that were in a lot of the poorer quality releases. Another interesting note, in the early days of spotify, the app would saturate your upload bandwidth while using it. Given their close ties to utorrent, I always assumed that's how they were affording the bandwidth as well. Pretty brilliant way to bootstrap I guess; they didn't have to pay for bandwidth or content until they already had contracts in place
- lysace 2y ago
  Afaik, the trick was to stream (via http, I assume) the first few hundred kilobytes or so from fast/expensive servers and then try to p2p the rest in some clever order. I guess seeking also triggered the fast/expensive path for a while.
mzl 2y ago
Before the launch, Spotify had a deal with the music rights holders association in Sweden (STIM) that they could use a merged collection of friends and families music libraries. All this was removed before Spotify went out of beta. So while it was using pirated media, it was sanctioned by the rights holders for the experiment of building Spotify.
billdybas 2y ago
"Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist" by Liz Pelly goes into more detail about their origins and the culture around piracy in Sweden at the time. https://lizpelly.info/book https://lizpelly.info/book

larodi 2y ago

The most outrageous thing about the whole story is that smart people (like here and not only) knew this all since day one. They been uncovering this the whole time. And in their face, with all the fierce ignorance, broligarchs deny, evade and totally pretend this never happened. The most non open company of all even went to lengths to accuse others of stealing their IP - not theirs to begin with. Just think of it - why did all major content platforms closed their APIs the day after GPT-2 got the word going…? Cause they knew all this very well - the content is precious and needed. They been doing it all along. Distilling the essence of world’s writing and digital imagery they had no right to. We have a saying where I come from - no mercy for the chicken, no laws for the millions. I thought it was a local thing at first, it turned is how the world goes. Nothing new under the sun, indeed.

qup 2y ago
Speaking of GPT2, I remember that nobody gave a shit what it was trained on, because it sucked then.
- deleted 2y ago
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Cthulhu_ 2y ago

Crunchyroll started off as a straight up piracy site, it now has millions of paying subscribers and was sold to Sony for over a billion a few years ago.

tiahura 2y ago

[flagged]

StefanBatory 2y ago
Shame though that corpos aren't responsible for their actions too :|
- deleted 2y ago
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kendalf89 2y ago
I don't think it's right to downplay the disproportionate response the FBI had to Aaron's actions. He was initially being threatened with 50 years in prison and a $1 million fine, the stress from which sent his mental health spiraling and in no small way contributed to his suicide. I think the original point of the person you are responding to still stands.
- tiahura 2y ago
  You are correct. Prosecutors don’t consider whether charging a perp will upset them and stress them out. Nor should they. Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.
  - wing-_-nuts 2y ago
    Every time I wonder how authoritarian regimes gain power, I remind myself there are people who seem to delight in the suffering of others.
wing-_-nuts 2y ago
For downloading papers, paid for with government funding and gatekept by greedy rent seekers charging ~ $30 a pop. The lengths people will go to defend things that should not exist astounds.
- 2y ago

belter 2y ago

"Zuckerberg was at White House for meetings on Thursday" - https://www.reuters.com/world/us/zuckerberg-was-white-house-meetings-thursday-official-says-2025-02-06/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/zuckerberg-was-white-house-...

coliveira 2y ago

Yes, these companies are based on massive IP and copyright theft. And they still want to lecture others about their "property rights".

m3nsr3a 2y ago

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throwawaygmbno 2y ago

Everyone on here is smart enough. Just do not participate and save your money. Do not pay for digital goods. If Netflix raises their prices, it doesn't matter because there is a torrent of all of their shows. If Spotify raises their prices, it doesn't matter because your favorite artist has their entire library in a torrent. If some game company ask you to pay real life prices for a digital costume, find the crack online and play on a private server. If YouTube wants to interrupt your video with an ad in the middle of the sentence, download one of the many options that blocks all ads. Billion dollar companies have shown they do not care about you. The people who complain about losing their salary, should just get replies thanking them for paying. All the sad poor people who might be hurt were already paid. The caterer on your favorite show is not getting residuals. NBC also isn't going to stop making TV shows because that is all they can do. Content creators also existed on the internet long before that was a job. They just did it because they cared about it not for ad money. If you really want to support the artist directly go to a concert or just mail them a check. If you can't actually identify a person who might be hurt, then do not care.

hnpolicestate 2y ago
I'm not paying for Led Zeppelin IV after having probably bought 3 copies in my lifetime. I agree with you.
dingnuts 2y ago
if you want to support an artist go to the show and BUY MERCH at the table! almost all of their income comes from that. the importance of buying a T-shirt at the show cannot be overstated and sometimes you get to say hi to your idol, too
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  It's a stupid situation, though. There are many creators I'm happy to support - but for 99% of them, I don't want their stupid merch. It's mostly low-quality garbage with high markup, that nevertheless cost something to design and produce, thus wasting both precious resources and labor - an useless tax on contributions to artists that doesn't even help anything. I really wish this wasn't necessary. (Even the okay-quality merch is a waste, since for most artists I'd want to support, I don't identify with them enough to display that stuff, so it's again just buying to put away and eventually throw away.)

earthnail 2y ago

In Spotify’s defense, they used the pirated data only to show a proof of concept to the copyright holders, and that use was sanctioned by the local rights holders organization STIM. The copyright holders then approved their concept, and subsequently Spotify got the rights to offer their service to customers. Everybody won.

tanjtanjtanj 2y ago
That’s not entirely true, in Spotify’s early days you could upload files to the service and listen to songs uploaded by other people. I think the majority of any song I wanted to listen to before they went Europe-only for a time was “pirated”.
- earthnail 2y ago
  Fair. I stand corrected.
- kqr 2y ago
  Indeed. I remember there was one song that used a pirated variant and you could tell because it had an obvious artifact that was accidentally introduced in a pirated copy of the song!

electriclove 2y ago

Some can pirate on a large scale and see no repercussions. Some can steal from stores and see no repercussions. Some can steal from others and see no repercussions. Some can violently harm others and see no repercussions. Some can damage property and see no repercussions. Some can’t. This world is not right.

ls612 2y ago
The strong do what they wish and the weak suffer what they must. Any morality beyond that is a fairy tale that the weak tell themselves.

vel0city 2y ago

> once people started uploading copyrighted TV shows to it End users, not YouTube employees, right? And they would take things down following DMCA requests and what not, right? So, pretty much following the law? > Google itself got big by indexing other people's data without compensation Scraping public websites to build a search index isn't the same as making LLMs that can recreate the source verbatim devoid of even attribution. I do agree there's an argument to be had about the LLM's transformative nature in the end though. > Spotify's music library was also pirated in the early days Not any version generally available to the public, and with the copyright holder's permission to do so.

cma 2y ago
I think he's thinking of Grooveshark

sylario 2y ago

And Hollywood was created on the west coast because for intellectual property it was still the far west and it allowed them to ignore patents on movie technologies.

bayindirh 2y ago
They became the thing they lamented. This is the inevitable.

smugma 2y ago

Spotify was born as a response to piracy. Why do you say their catalog was pirated?

chanux 2y ago

Corporations are people. Just a notch above the regular kind.

Lucasoato 2y ago

> If you plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers you forfeit your life. In case anybody here doesn't know, that's a reference to Aaron Swartz, an activist (and Reddit co-founder) that was risking 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine just for downloading a lot of academic papers from JSTOR. He eventually took his life because of the pressure. May his soul rest in peace.

ThaDood 2y ago
Thanks for sharing this. Reading his story is kind of insane honestly. He created the CC licenses which I did not know. What an icon, truly.
- CuriousSkeptic 2y ago
  On that note, Lawrence Lessigs talks on copyright from that period are worth a watch https://youtu.be/9xbRE_H5hoU https://youtu.be/9xbRE_H5hoU
gruez 2y ago
Except he was offered 6 months in a plea bargain, which he declined because he wanted a trial. Whether 6 months was reasonable punishment for "plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers" is another matter, but "you forfeit your life" or "35 years in prison and a $1 million fine " is massively misleading.
- breakitmakeit 2y ago
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- mtlmtlmtlmtl 2y ago
  Swartz wasn't the kind of person to accept a plea bargain from an overzealous prosecutor who was indicting him on 13 felony charges with a possible sentence up to 35 years along with a $1 million fine. I assume he wanted a trial because he wanted to continue his fight for open access. And maybe he thought he might lose, but wouldn't lose on all counts, and would make the prosecution look unreasonable in the public eye. Was that decision rational from a self-interest point of view? Maybe not. And then you might ask, if he wanted a trial, why did he kill himself? Obviously no one knows what was going through his head when he did it. He left no note. But the prospect of being locked in a cell until he was an old man probably had something to do with it. You can certainly argue it was his own fault for not pleading down, but even if that's your view, that doesn't absolve the prosecutor. Ortiz has a lot of blame in this too, and the fact she still hasn't acknowledged it over a decade later speaks volumes to the kind of person she is.

danju 2y ago

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sneak 2y ago

> If you plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers you forfeit your life. I’m opposed to copyright and pro-aaronsw, but the state did not kill him.

roguecoder 2y ago
Absolutely. 1.8 million people are in United States jails today. It isn't a death sentence, and it is a foreseeable consequence of some ethically-appropriate actions. Supporting folks spending time in jail is a valuable role in any social movement.

yurlungur 2y ago

I think the difference may be LLMs may not be laundered clean of copyright data anytime soon. Even if chatgpt got big and profitable, it's not so clear that it won't contain copyrighted data as that may simply be necessary to train the best models.

cma 2y ago
Most of the web is copyrighted

yowzadave 2y ago

> Youtube was initially a ghost town (it started as a dating site) and it only got traction once people started uploading copyrighted TV shows to it To this day, there are a huge number of videos that show copyrighted content on YouTube; they are usually crappy clips, reversed and with different music playing in the background to avoid automated detection.

soheil 2y ago

So be a company? Last I checked it costs a couple of hundred dollars to form an LLC, what am I missing?

wcfrobert 2y ago

VC and startups are fundamentally about disruption. You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs (laws). The incumbent players are not going to sit still and let things be "disrupted". A common response is to make sure the public knows about the broken eggs. I would say youtube, Google, Spotify, Uber, doordash, etc. all have made my life much better.

deleted 2y ago
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soheil 2y ago
You don't know a world without them so you actually have no idea if they have made your life compared to that world much better or much worse. How your life was at the time is irrelevant.
- theatomheart 2y ago
  100%
- warkdarrior 2y ago
  This is a vacuous statement. You can say the same thing about electricity, or antibiotics, or any other modern advancement.
  - soheil 2y ago
    That's kinda the point. That type of reasoning is vacuous. There are millions of great arguments why antibiotics made the world a better place, I'm yet to hear one of YT.
- wcfrobert 2y ago
  Why would I say something is better without a point of comparison? I was born in the 90s. So definitely alive before YouTube and Spotify albeit as a teenager rather than an adult. I guess you're right I'm not familiar with the world of Sony Walkman, Blockbuster, and IBM PC. But I definitely remember dial-up modems, CDs, Windows 95 and XP. Technology has improved most aspect of my life better since then. (maybe minus all the ads + dopamine slot machines part...)

soheil 2y ago

Aaron committed suicide and FBI going after him was meant more as a lesson to the other kids at MIT than anything. MegaUpload did the same, kim dotcom got raided in his sleep by FBI in New Zealand! So no I don't buy your reductionist argument, there are forces at play that allow companies with founders with the likes of Google to get away with it but not others.

whatever1 2y ago

How does that prosecutor sleep at night?

observationist 2y ago

This frames Google's indexing of the web in a totally, abjectly wrong fashion. It wasn't "other people's data", it was data people published to the public internet, implicitly and explicitly granting permission to download through the act of serving that data without restriction to whoever navigated to a particular URL. That's how the internet works. If you want private content, you need to put up a gate mechanism of some sort with authentication or other methods of restricting access. Without that, you are literally having your server "serve" the content to whoever asks for it, without restriction or exception, without ToS or meaningful contract or agreements. You can't have it both ways. "But they didn't know" or other post-hoc claims of innocent people publishing content to the web being misled or confused or abused is infantilizing nonsense. The web wouldn't have been as amazing and revolutionary and liberating if the fundamental public and open nature of its systems was private and walled off by default. Your take on YouTube going viral initially over copyrighted content isn't correct, either - it was ease of use and access. It was fairly popular by the time Google bought it, and once it was reachable and advertised by google itself, it exploded, because by that time, everyone had defaulted to using google for search. Other people corrected your Spotify take. The reason they pirated is because it is functionally impossible to gain access to the data in any other way. For consumers, there are lots of old shows, music, and other content that aren't accessible, so they turn to piracy. A vast majority of the time, if content is accessible, people will pay and do the technically legal and "right" thing. Publishers exploit authors and content creators in the name of "platforming" and "marketing" , effectively doing as little as possible to take 90%+ of the value of a product and providing as little as possible to the producer of content or books or music. They get by on technicalities and have captured the legal arena entirely, with any attempt at reform or revolution meeting a messy death at the hands of lawyers and big money publishers. Screw those people. They lie, cheat, and steal, and somehow have gotten away with fooling the world into thinking they're the good guys. Copying bits and bytes is not stealing, and the ones trying to shill that narrative are trying to fool as many people as possible into giving them more money without any return of value in kind. I'd download the hell out of a car. Pirate everything.

mrtesthah 2y ago

Don’t forget the original developers of Skype also created Kazaa first.

sandeepkd 2y ago

Reminds me of recent discussions about similar topic, what may clearly look like a crime can be treated differently depending on if you do it as an individual or as a company. Somewhere down the line its all about understanding the limits and boundaries of the system, its a skill in itself.

cyanydeez 2y ago

Mmm, the broader point is: laws are are as real as the cash you can pay a lawyer to fight.

plasticbugs 2y ago

I briefly worked for Crunchyroll, which began life as an anime pirating service with subtitles. The contracts with the Japanese anime publishers came later. Now they vigorously protect their content from "pirates".

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

"Spotify's music library was also pirated in the early days." "Ek, who had been the CEO of the piracy platform uTorrent, founded Spotify with his friend, another entrepreneur named Martin Lorentzon. Both-Ek at 23 and Lorentzon 37-were already millionaires from the sales of previous businesses. The name Spotify had no particular meaning, and was not associated with music. According to Spotify Teardown, the company developed a software for improved peer-to-peer network sharing, and the founders spoke of it as a general "media distribution platform." The initial choice to focus on music, the founders said at the time, was because audio files are smaller than video files, not because of a dream of saving music. In 2007, when Spotify first publicly tested its software, it allowed users to stream songs downloaded from The Pirate Bay, a service for unlicensed downloads. By late 2008, Spotify would convince music labels in Sweden to license music to the site, and unlicensed music was removed. From there, Spotify would take off across Europe and then the world." https://qz.com/1683609/how-the-music-industry-shifted-from-napster-to-spotify https://qz.com/1683609/how-the-music-industry-shifted-from-n...

BrenBarn 2y ago

Exactly. We need leaders with the political will to apply a "financial death penalty" to companies that engage in this kind of brazen behavior. That means all assets seized, the company dissolved, personal assets of executives seized, executives jailed. People running companies should live in mortal fear of ever doing the things that they routinely do today.

Nasrudith 2y ago
Do people even take civics classes anymore? That isn't how any of this works. Political will doesn't allow arbitrary punishments. You would need legislation at very least and that could face issues with the Eighth Amendment. (Which could not be post-facto of course.) At least you're not calling for jailing all the shareholders....
- BrenBarn 2y ago
  Political will can be used to pass legislation and ultimately to change the Eighth Amendment.
- immibis 2y ago
  Punishment wouldn't be arbitrary, it would be based on the crimes you committed.

ctrlp 2y ago

The sooner people learn this lesson, the sooner it might change.

nostrademons 2y ago

A bigger lesson might be "don't get caught until you're big enough to destroy the people suing you." Napster got shut down for widespread enabling of copyright infringement. So did numerous other filesharing startups, including Travis Kalanick's first startup, Scour. Lots of small startups get put out of business all the time for being sued and not having the money to defend themselves. Likewise, individuals like Donald Trump or Elon Musk get away with all sorts of illegal shit, because they are big enough to shut down the court systems prosecuting them. Google's genius was in staying under the radar and aligning their incentives with everyone that might dislike them, until they were big enough that they could simply crush anyone that might dislike them.

vkou 2y ago

> Google itself got big by indexing other people's data without compensation. So in other words, it got big by providing free user traffic to people's websites without asking for compensation? You generally don't charge the phone book money to include you in it. It's actually the other way around.

Izikiel43 2y ago

So, might makes right, a tale as old as humanity

yard2010 2y ago

RIP Aaron Swartz

djmips 2y ago

Doesn't Google have their own internal scanning of books?