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> IP is such a stupid concept. Both humans and AI use material to improve themselves and that material is often heavily gatekept (Try getting access to a "regul

> IP is such a stupid concept. Both humans and AI use material to improve themselves and that material is often heavily gatekept (Try getting access to a "regular" scientific paper) and should be freely accessible to anyone. No matter who. It's not a stupid concept. It exists because someone put effort in. Should we steal their effort?

bodiekane 1y ago
I put in effort to brush my teeth every day. Everyone who sees my smile is stealing that effort and should be required to pay me.
- robertlagrant 1y ago
  This is a pretty broken analogy. You brush your teeth to look after them. People who see your smile don't reverse any of that cleaning effect.
jiggawatts 1y ago
With scientific research especially the gate keeping is insanely counter-productive. Imagine if Wikipedia had a paywall for each article… but you had to pay to a different organisation for each vaguely related set of pages. Some requiring recurring subscriptions and minimum spend so you can’t cancel. Worse, the people demanding the payment aren’t even the operators of Wikipedia and they charge the article editors for the privilege of publishing on their platform! You can have government funded research at a government funded university and then both the researcher and the students at that same university have to pay to have the research published and accessed! But not too many pictures please and they can’t have color, that’s expensive, you see? Raw data hosting? No way! Do that yourself. Versioning, backlinks, ongoing feedback, comments, etc… don’t even ask! Do you think this is the future!? Meanwhile the largest collaboration of human minds on the planet takes place on GitHub and is almost entirely volunteers working for free and giving away their work for free for everyone to fork and build on. And comment, contribute, and extend. Science as it is today is a tyre fire and it is almost entirely the fault of rent seeking middlemen with misaligned incentives.
- robertlagrant 1y ago
  If scientists want to be volunteers and publish openly, that can happen today. Nothing stops them. That's the Wikipedia model, is it not?
  - jiggawatts 1y ago
    The institutions that they work for have been thoroughly bribed to make that difficult. You can't get tenure unless you publish in a "reputable" paper, for example. For IT people, the rough equivalent is why a 1 KB file costs $50/year despite containing not much more than a random number and a text field verified with a single API call. Sure, you can have a HTTPS certificate for free! You can! Just not through Azure Key Vault CA automation, because Let's Encrypt couldn't afford the kick-back to a middle manager in Redmond. Or more charitably, because "there's no margin on free". Never underestimate the ability and willingness of billions of managers to insert themselves into the middle and collect rent on everybody below them.
    - robertlagrant 1y ago
      If they're working for institutions then that's not the same as volunteering for Wikipedia. Wikipedia is staffed by volunteers. I'm replying to a comment that negatively compares science publishing to Wikipedia. What stops a scientist publishing work voluntarily on a free platform?

bodiekane 1y ago

I put in effort to brush my teeth every day. Everyone who sees my smile is stealing that effort and should be required to pay me.

robertlagrant 1y ago
This is a pretty broken analogy. You brush your teeth to look after them. People who see your smile don't reverse any of that cleaning effect.

jiggawatts 1y ago

With scientific research especially the gate keeping is insanely counter-productive. Imagine if Wikipedia had a paywall for each article… but you had to pay to a different organisation for each vaguely related set of pages. Some requiring recurring subscriptions and minimum spend so you can’t cancel. Worse, the people demanding the payment aren’t even the operators of Wikipedia and they charge the article editors for the privilege of publishing on their platform! You can have government funded research at a government funded university and then both the researcher and the students at that same university have to pay to have the research published and accessed! But not too many pictures please and they can’t have color, that’s expensive, you see? Raw data hosting? No way! Do that yourself. Versioning, backlinks, ongoing feedback, comments, etc… don’t even ask! Do you think this is the future!? Meanwhile the largest collaboration of human minds on the planet takes place on GitHub and is almost entirely volunteers working for free and giving away their work for free for everyone to fork and build on. And comment, contribute, and extend. Science as it is today is a tyre fire and it is almost entirely the fault of rent seeking middlemen with misaligned incentives.

robertlagrant 1y ago
If scientists want to be volunteers and publish openly, that can happen today. Nothing stops them. That's the Wikipedia model, is it not?
- jiggawatts 1y ago
  The institutions that they work for have been thoroughly bribed to make that difficult. You can't get tenure unless you publish in a "reputable" paper, for example. For IT people, the rough equivalent is why a 1 KB file costs $50/year despite containing not much more than a random number and a text field verified with a single API call. Sure, you can have a HTTPS certificate for free! You can! Just not through Azure Key Vault CA automation, because Let's Encrypt couldn't afford the kick-back to a middle manager in Redmond. Or more charitably, because "there's no margin on free". Never underestimate the ability and willingness of billions of managers to insert themselves into the middle and collect rent on everybody below them.
  - robertlagrant 1y ago
    If they're working for institutions then that's not the same as volunteering for Wikipedia. Wikipedia is staffed by volunteers. I'm replying to a comment that negatively compares science publishing to Wikipedia. What stops a scientist publishing work voluntarily on a free platform?