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I keep waiting for the day when people realise that IP law has been used and abused and thanks to Disney extended out for many, many lifetimes and all manner of

I keep waiting for the day when people realise that IP law has been used and abused and thanks to Disney extended out for many, many lifetimes and all manner of dirty tricks/hacks to keep the late stage capitalism profit engine going. I 100% agree that if an LLM can entirely reproduce a book then that is copyright infringement, overfitting and generally a bad model. I also believe that in this case, HP (and other popular media) is overrepresented in the training data because of many fan sites/literal uploads of the book to the Internet (which the model was trained on). I believe that any & all human writing should be allowed to be used to train a model that behaves in the correct way so long as that writing is publicly available (ie on the Internet). If I watch a TV show that someone uploaded to Youtube, am I committing a crime? Or is the uploader for distribution? I also find it hilarious how many artists got their start by pirating photoshop.

ab5tract 1y ago
Laws can have been used and abused and still be important. I know it’s hard to believe but the independent artists who were already struggling need IP laws to survive. Otherwise Disney and the like can just come in, make copies or derivatives, and profit without paying those artists a penny. Which everyone usually agrees (or used to) is not a fair outcome. But somehow giant corporations not named Disney taking the same work in the same extractive mode in order to create an art-job-destroying machine is totally fine because Disney bad? Maybe most people making this argument are also all for UBI and wealth redistribution on a massive scale, but they don’t seem to mention it much when trashing IP laws.
strogonoff 1y ago
Abuse of IP does not mean the law is not relevant. Don’t you find it funny that corporations with market caps the size of small countries first sued people for singing Happy Birthday in public, and now pretend that IP is suddenly not really a thing? Do you really want to defend their interests?
- TeMPOraL 1y ago
  What abou defending our own interests? I couldn't care less about Meta or OpenAI or other tech companies as entities. I'm happy to oppose them when they act against our interests. But in this, my interests align with theirs. It's not like the alternative is any better. I'm much more in a philosophical disagreement with the pro-copyright side, for one, but the other thing is, it too is represented primarily by other large corporations, and of the two groups, the LLM side has a much more honest and useful business model.
  - strogonoff 1y ago
    First, I think they are exploiting the old conundrum where your personal interests may seem to align with theirs, but taken together our interests do not align with theirs. Sure, as it stands, an individual may enjoy personal gain—at least for the time being, while their prices are low as they operate at a loss to capture the market—but I believe this brief individual gain comes at the expense of society as a whole, and if people in more areas (not just music) made this an issue, and those megacorps put their infinite armies of lawyers to work on licensing (I recall somebody here once saying “do things that don’t scale” or something like that), everybody would benefit much more[0]. Second, copyright, or more precisely IP ownership, is not the same as the exploitation you might have in mind. Consider that copyleft—which gave us Linux, Blender, etc.—exists thanks to the ability to exercise and defend IP rights. When a stronger party takes that ability away from a weaker party, that is exploitation; maybe it is not a coincidence that Microsoft is at the forefront of this, as what they are doing is very much in line with a generalized form of EEE. (Let’s be honest, homegrown LLMs will never reach the level of commercial models, and that’s where the money is headed; even GPUs aside, no individual has the ability to scrape the entire Web the way they do, even less so now once the ruthless interests of those corporations sent every website scrambling to defend themselves against what is predominantly bot traffic with layers upon layers of captcha never seen before. They realized that if they steal, they have to steal a lot and very quickly in order for it to work, and they’re certainly hoping to get away with it.) More abstractly, being able to say that you have created something is pretty important to our willingness to create; I can’t see how inability to make this claim with a straight face (because anyone can, and already does as you have no doubt seen on this forum, reasonably claim that it may have not been your work at all) is good for society generally. [0] Starting with awareness of what is going on and the freedom to choose. Information asymmetry is the enemy of free market.
- fennecfoxy 1y ago
  I most certainly would like to see tax havens abolished worldwide. And I would most certainly like to see these corporations and their executive pay the taxes that they should be paying. But I've come to realise that the apathetic general public only care about being racist, sexist and homophobic to each other whilst the ruling class laugh all the way to the bank. And the few intelligent people who understand what's going on don't raise their voices so long as their high tech salary is protected, so long as their taxes aren't raised, so long as they can own a holiday home or two when others struggle for their first home. If you actually look into the numbers, what tax companies like Apple, Google, Amazon etc actually pay it's just...yeah.

ab5tract 1y ago

Laws can have been used and abused and still be important. I know it’s hard to believe but the independent artists who were already struggling need IP laws to survive. Otherwise Disney and the like can just come in, make copies or derivatives, and profit without paying those artists a penny. Which everyone usually agrees (or used to) is not a fair outcome. But somehow giant corporations not named Disney taking the same work in the same extractive mode in order to create an art-job-destroying machine is totally fine because Disney bad? Maybe most people making this argument are also all for UBI and wealth redistribution on a massive scale, but they don’t seem to mention it much when trashing IP laws.

strogonoff 1y ago

Abuse of IP does not mean the law is not relevant. Don’t you find it funny that corporations with market caps the size of small countries first sued people for singing Happy Birthday in public, and now pretend that IP is suddenly not really a thing? Do you really want to defend their interests?

TeMPOraL 1y ago
What abou defending our own interests? I couldn't care less about Meta or OpenAI or other tech companies as entities. I'm happy to oppose them when they act against our interests. But in this, my interests align with theirs. It's not like the alternative is any better. I'm much more in a philosophical disagreement with the pro-copyright side, for one, but the other thing is, it too is represented primarily by other large corporations, and of the two groups, the LLM side has a much more honest and useful business model.
- strogonoff 1y ago
  First, I think they are exploiting the old conundrum where your personal interests may seem to align with theirs, but taken together our interests do not align with theirs. Sure, as it stands, an individual may enjoy personal gain—at least for the time being, while their prices are low as they operate at a loss to capture the market—but I believe this brief individual gain comes at the expense of society as a whole, and if people in more areas (not just music) made this an issue, and those megacorps put their infinite armies of lawyers to work on licensing (I recall somebody here once saying “do things that don’t scale” or something like that), everybody would benefit much more[0]. Second, copyright, or more precisely IP ownership, is not the same as the exploitation you might have in mind. Consider that copyleft—which gave us Linux, Blender, etc.—exists thanks to the ability to exercise and defend IP rights. When a stronger party takes that ability away from a weaker party, that is exploitation; maybe it is not a coincidence that Microsoft is at the forefront of this, as what they are doing is very much in line with a generalized form of EEE. (Let’s be honest, homegrown LLMs will never reach the level of commercial models, and that’s where the money is headed; even GPUs aside, no individual has the ability to scrape the entire Web the way they do, even less so now once the ruthless interests of those corporations sent every website scrambling to defend themselves against what is predominantly bot traffic with layers upon layers of captcha never seen before. They realized that if they steal, they have to steal a lot and very quickly in order for it to work, and they’re certainly hoping to get away with it.) More abstractly, being able to say that you have created something is pretty important to our willingness to create; I can’t see how inability to make this claim with a straight face (because anyone can, and already does as you have no doubt seen on this forum, reasonably claim that it may have not been your work at all) is good for society generally. [0] Starting with awareness of what is going on and the freedom to choose. Information asymmetry is the enemy of free market.
fennecfoxy 1y ago
I most certainly would like to see tax havens abolished worldwide. And I would most certainly like to see these corporations and their executive pay the taxes that they should be paying. But I've come to realise that the apathetic general public only care about being racist, sexist and homophobic to each other whilst the ruling class laugh all the way to the bank. And the few intelligent people who understand what's going on don't raise their voices so long as their high tech salary is protected, so long as their taxes aren't raised, so long as they can own a holiday home or two when others struggle for their first home. If you actually look into the numbers, what tax companies like Apple, Google, Amazon etc actually pay it's just...yeah.