4 ms·

It has been funny to watch people’s attitudes on copyright change ever since ChatGPT blew up. All I used to hear and experience was copyright used by corporatio

by malwrar 5mo ago

It has been funny to watch people’s attitudes on copyright change ever since ChatGPT blew up. All I used to hear and experience was copyright used by corporations to shut down open source projects threatening their business models, but now it is the savior of the little guy who is a victim of flagrant corporate violators. In the background, the wealthy and powerful disregard all of this and seem to do whatever they want, and the little guy looks at millions of dollars in legal costs to defend themselves in either case. Costs that are increasingly a rounding error to their opposition as they continue to grow by exploiting a broken system, and the “little guy” now includes whole industries. I feel like adversarial interoperability more than free market capitalism should have been the death knell for most of the negatives highlighted in this post. Everyone is still so determined to make money from mere ideas however that we still use 1700s law designed to protect book publishers to enable the existence of “businesses” so warped in valuation that they are now trillion dollar entities yet always face the existential threat of copy+paste. What if the more profound truth is that tech is beneficial to humanity but inherently worthless to sell, and that our present woe’s shape is determined by the antiquated institutions built service this illusion of value? In an inevitable future age of generative AI as an accessible technology, as opposed to a business model with a moat, what even is our goal for such institutions? What sorts of creativity do we want motivate, and what meaningful regulatory constraints even are there to begin with? I hope we figure it out soon, because IP will be impossible to enforce post-deglobalization in any case.

krapp 5mo ago
>It has been funny to watch people’s attitudes on copyright change ever since ChatGPT blew up. All I used to hear and experience was copyright used by corporations to shut down open source projects threatening their business models, but now it is the savior of the little guy who is a victim of flagrant corporate violators. That isn't a change. Both claims are true.
- malwrar 5mo ago
  I agree. My point in short is that we seem to reflexively frame right and wrong on an axis defined by copyright, and somehow we’ve lost sight of the fact that the law itself is used much differently than we might otherwise want. Technolibertarians confuse free market capitalism via copyright-enabled businesses as a viable strategy for individual freedom, and we find with time that only bastards win in a competition with loose rules and high stakes. Those concerned for the continued flourishing of human creativity in the face of LLMs confuse copyright as a means for small creators to have some ownership over their work, when it actually just seems to be a cudgel that can only be wielded by the wealthiest. Same losing fight, different flavor. I ask: why do we continue to allow “ownership of ideas” to underlie the moral basis of our conversations to begin with?
  - krapp 5mo ago
    I think it's more that we see copyright as a necessary evil that can be used to defend our rights, but will be abused by the powerful, regardless. To me, the biggest sin of cyberlibertarianism is the assumption that "cyberspace" is de facto another universe, separate from material reality, that doesn't need to be affected by the mundane and vulgar rules of "meatspace." John Barlow refers to "your governments" as if using a computer actually separates him from the state in some meaningful way, as if he has ascended beyond the flesh and now looks down upon the world as a being of pure Mind. But of course, "cyberspace" is just computers, servers, infrastructure using power and resources and thus is inextricably subject to government and systems of law. Zion was never an escape. So yes, because cyberspace doesn't actually change the rules of the game, we have to play the game, crooked as it is, with the hand we're dealt. The legal pretense of ownership and copyright is all we have. If you want to abandon the idea of "ownership" altogether, then the wealthiest and most powerful still wind up controlling everything by virtue of their wealth and power. What do you suggest?
    - DonHopkins 5mo ago
      There’s a great moment from the Pirate Bay trial that captures this: Lawyer: "When was the first time you met IRL?" Peter Sunde: "We don't use the expression IRL. We say AFK." Judge: "IRL?" Lawyer: "In real life." Peter Sunde: "We don't like that expression. We say AFK — Away From Keyboard. We think that the internet is for real." — Peter Sunde, The Pirate Bay trial (as shown in TPB AFK) TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard; Directed by Simon Klose (2013). https://archive.org/details/TpbAfkThePirateBayAwayFromKeyboard https://archive.org/details/TpbAfkThePirateBayAwayFromKeyboa... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPB_AFK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPB_AFK
    - flomo 5mo ago
      The whole thing just shows a huge lack of imagination, at least for something which is supposedly a 'founding document'. Barlow's "cyberspace" is for irrelevant shit like furry larping or talking about the latest Deep Space 9. Its not a place where you do banking (or even watch DS9).
    - malwrar 5mo ago
pocksuppet 5mo ago
Think it's just the hypocrisy. Either copyright for everybody or copyright for nobody is much more defensible than the current state of affairs, where infringing copyright is legal as long as you're rich. Some random guy in Nebraska had to pay $250,000 to a music company for downloading one MP3, but OpenAI can download all music that ever existed and pay nothing. Meanwhile they prosecute "Anna" who did the exact same thing, because "Anna" isn't politically well-connected.
- Permit 5mo ago
  > where infringing copyright is legal as long as you're rich. This isn’t true. A rich person and a poor person can train LLMs on copyrighted material in 2026. How they acquired those materials matters. Wealthy corporations hold no legal advantage in this space. For example, Anthropic recently settled for $1.5 billion due to acquiring books via piracy: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/technology/anthropic-settlement-copyright-ai.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/technology/anthropic-sett... My understanding is that an individual could likely pirate the same books without paying a dime (not due to differing legal standards but simply due to the fact it would be hard to identify them in many jurisdictions). In a practical sense it seems corporations are held to a higher standard in this regard. The discrepancy is that some people equate training a model with piracy even though they are not the same thing. This is typically due to intellectual laziness (refusal to understand the differences) or willful misrepresentation (due to being an ideologically opposed to generative AI). No need to make such a mistake here though.
  - Anamon 5mo ago
    Of course it's not the same thing -- it's way worse. The piracy comes first, and it's exactly the same thing. GenAI Corp. can't train models on illicitly obtained media before illicitly obtaining said media. And that very thing is already what private individuals got and get sued for millions over. The GenAI Corp., having gotten away with that unpunished, then goes on to commit further violations by commercially exploiting the media with neither a license to do so, nor any intentions to pay the rights-holders for their use. By the media conglomerates' own math, these GenAI companies should all be drowning in lawsuits over kazillions of bajillions of dollars.
roenxi 5mo ago
> It has been funny to watch people’s attitudes on copyright change ever since ChatGPT blew up. I doubt many individuals actually changed their opinions. Just that a large crowd of previously-silent people decided AI is a threat to them and they can attack it on copyright grounds. The AI revolution is a great argument against copyright law. The US's lax enforcement means that the incredible, world-changing tech could be built before the luddites got organised to try and stop it. The productive path appears to be illegal, but they took it anyway and we're all the better off for it.
- goda90 5mo ago
  Why do you think we're all better off?
  - roenxi 5mo ago
    The reasons that jump out at me are that, as a society, we're setting up to produce a more stuff with less effort, provide higher quality advice to everyone at an absurdly low cost, revolutionise research and it looks like we're going to be able to get a step-change improvement in the quality of economic management which is huge in and of itself. The wins seem like they're going to be big.
    - goda90 5mo ago
      > we're setting up to produce a more stuff with less effort According to Jevon's paradox[0], this would lead to more consumption of resources. We're already straining at the limits of the Earth. Depletion and collapse won't be good for anyone. > provide higher quality advice to everyone at an absurdly low cost Given every LLM's propensity to hallucinate, the only quality advice is that which can be followed back to a human expert-vetted source. But we already have people who don't check sources and get bad advice. > revolutionise research Maybe, but AI is also being used in a mass spread of misinformation. > a step-change improvement in the quality of economic management I don't know exactly what you mean by this, but from what I'm seeing so far, this looks like it will massively increase wealth disparity, which is bad for most people. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
happytoexplain 5mo ago
As others have said, it's not a change. There's no inconsistency in applying copyright to protect people. When Gigantic Company uses copyright to bully the little guy who isn't doing anything to materially harm Gigantic Company, that's bad. When AI steals the little guy's work, that's bad. They're both bad. That's consistent. It's also obvious that it's consistent - i.e. I don't believe people making the "AI copyright complaints are funny" quip are being honest. I believe they are simply engaging in petty social politics.

by malwrar 5mo ago

krapp 5mo ago

>It has been funny to watch people’s attitudes on copyright change ever since ChatGPT blew up. All I used to hear and experience was copyright used by corporations to shut down open source projects threatening their business models, but now it is the savior of the little guy who is a victim of flagrant corporate violators. That isn't a change. Both claims are true.

malwrar 5mo ago
I agree. My point in short is that we seem to reflexively frame right and wrong on an axis defined by copyright, and somehow we’ve lost sight of the fact that the law itself is used much differently than we might otherwise want. Technolibertarians confuse free market capitalism via copyright-enabled businesses as a viable strategy for individual freedom, and we find with time that only bastards win in a competition with loose rules and high stakes. Those concerned for the continued flourishing of human creativity in the face of LLMs confuse copyright as a means for small creators to have some ownership over their work, when it actually just seems to be a cudgel that can only be wielded by the wealthiest. Same losing fight, different flavor. I ask: why do we continue to allow “ownership of ideas” to underlie the moral basis of our conversations to begin with?
- krapp 5mo ago
  I think it's more that we see copyright as a necessary evil that can be used to defend our rights, but will be abused by the powerful, regardless. To me, the biggest sin of cyberlibertarianism is the assumption that "cyberspace" is de facto another universe, separate from material reality, that doesn't need to be affected by the mundane and vulgar rules of "meatspace." John Barlow refers to "your governments" as if using a computer actually separates him from the state in some meaningful way, as if he has ascended beyond the flesh and now looks down upon the world as a being of pure Mind. But of course, "cyberspace" is just computers, servers, infrastructure using power and resources and thus is inextricably subject to government and systems of law. Zion was never an escape. So yes, because cyberspace doesn't actually change the rules of the game, we have to play the game, crooked as it is, with the hand we're dealt. The legal pretense of ownership and copyright is all we have. If you want to abandon the idea of "ownership" altogether, then the wealthiest and most powerful still wind up controlling everything by virtue of their wealth and power. What do you suggest?
  - DonHopkins 5mo ago
    There’s a great moment from the Pirate Bay trial that captures this: Lawyer: "When was the first time you met IRL?" Peter Sunde: "We don't use the expression IRL. We say AFK." Judge: "IRL?" Lawyer: "In real life." Peter Sunde: "We don't like that expression. We say AFK — Away From Keyboard. We think that the internet is for real." — Peter Sunde, The Pirate Bay trial (as shown in TPB AFK) TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard; Directed by Simon Klose (2013). https://archive.org/details/TpbAfkThePirateBayAwayFromKeyboard https://archive.org/details/TpbAfkThePirateBayAwayFromKeyboa... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPB_AFK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPB_AFK
  - flomo 5mo ago
    The whole thing just shows a huge lack of imagination, at least for something which is supposedly a 'founding document'. Barlow's "cyberspace" is for irrelevant shit like furry larping or talking about the latest Deep Space 9. Its not a place where you do banking (or even watch DS9).
  - malwrar 5mo ago

pocksuppet 5mo ago

Think it's just the hypocrisy. Either copyright for everybody or copyright for nobody is much more defensible than the current state of affairs, where infringing copyright is legal as long as you're rich. Some random guy in Nebraska had to pay $250,000 to a music company for downloading one MP3, but OpenAI can download all music that ever existed and pay nothing. Meanwhile they prosecute "Anna" who did the exact same thing, because "Anna" isn't politically well-connected.

Permit 5mo ago
> where infringing copyright is legal as long as you're rich. This isn’t true. A rich person and a poor person can train LLMs on copyrighted material in 2026. How they acquired those materials matters. Wealthy corporations hold no legal advantage in this space. For example, Anthropic recently settled for $1.5 billion due to acquiring books via piracy: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/technology/anthropic-settlement-copyright-ai.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/technology/anthropic-sett... My understanding is that an individual could likely pirate the same books without paying a dime (not due to differing legal standards but simply due to the fact it would be hard to identify them in many jurisdictions). In a practical sense it seems corporations are held to a higher standard in this regard. The discrepancy is that some people equate training a model with piracy even though they are not the same thing. This is typically due to intellectual laziness (refusal to understand the differences) or willful misrepresentation (due to being an ideologically opposed to generative AI). No need to make such a mistake here though.
- Anamon 5mo ago
  Of course it's not the same thing -- it's way worse. The piracy comes first, and it's exactly the same thing. GenAI Corp. can't train models on illicitly obtained media before illicitly obtaining said media. And that very thing is already what private individuals got and get sued for millions over. The GenAI Corp., having gotten away with that unpunished, then goes on to commit further violations by commercially exploiting the media with neither a license to do so, nor any intentions to pay the rights-holders for their use. By the media conglomerates' own math, these GenAI companies should all be drowning in lawsuits over kazillions of bajillions of dollars.

roenxi 5mo ago

> It has been funny to watch people’s attitudes on copyright change ever since ChatGPT blew up. I doubt many individuals actually changed their opinions. Just that a large crowd of previously-silent people decided AI is a threat to them and they can attack it on copyright grounds. The AI revolution is a great argument against copyright law. The US's lax enforcement means that the incredible, world-changing tech could be built before the luddites got organised to try and stop it. The productive path appears to be illegal, but they took it anyway and we're all the better off for it.

goda90 5mo ago
Why do you think we're all better off?
- roenxi 5mo ago
  The reasons that jump out at me are that, as a society, we're setting up to produce a more stuff with less effort, provide higher quality advice to everyone at an absurdly low cost, revolutionise research and it looks like we're going to be able to get a step-change improvement in the quality of economic management which is huge in and of itself. The wins seem like they're going to be big.
  - goda90 5mo ago
    > we're setting up to produce a more stuff with less effort According to Jevon's paradox[0], this would lead to more consumption of resources. We're already straining at the limits of the Earth. Depletion and collapse won't be good for anyone. > provide higher quality advice to everyone at an absurdly low cost Given every LLM's propensity to hallucinate, the only quality advice is that which can be followed back to a human expert-vetted source. But we already have people who don't check sources and get bad advice. > revolutionise research Maybe, but AI is also being used in a mass spread of misinformation. > a step-change improvement in the quality of economic management I don't know exactly what you mean by this, but from what I'm seeing so far, this looks like it will massively increase wealth disparity, which is bad for most people. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

happytoexplain 5mo ago

As others have said, it's not a change. There's no inconsistency in applying copyright to protect people. When Gigantic Company uses copyright to bully the little guy who isn't doing anything to materially harm Gigantic Company, that's bad. When AI steals the little guy's work, that's bad. They're both bad. That's consistent. It's also obvious that it's consistent - i.e. I don't believe people making the "AI copyright complaints are funny" quip are being honest. I believe they are simply engaging in petty social politics.