3 ms·

10 years may be too little but generally I agree. What's blowing my mind lately though is the people complaining about copyright today are some of the same peo

by datakan 2mo ago

10 years may be too little but generally I agree. What's blowing my mind lately though is the people complaining about copyright today are some of the same people I saw 30 years ago screaming "Information wants to be free" and running around with the DeCSS code on their T-Shirts. But suddenly, now that they hate AI, copyright is important and the information should be locked away. I can't wait for this all to settle down.

robrain 2mo ago
It's possible to be opposed to excessive copyright and also be opposed to the mass theft of media for profit and subsequent abuse of copyright that the scrapers are guilty of. The AI pillagers are taking everything in, then gatekeeping access. And as they acknowledge with their "nothing after 2022" preferences, they (or their users at least) are salting the earth for future seekers of knowledge.
- datakan 2mo ago
  > It's possible to be opposed to excessive copyright Define excessive. Who makes that determination and how?
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    the people who are opposed to it
  - dredmorbius 2mo ago
    There's a substantial economic literature on this topic. Among other factors: time value of money and future-value discounting mean that economically ever-expanding copyright terms offer virtually no present-value benefit. Most works see virtually all of their economic value in the first few years of publication. There are some (rare) long-tailed exceptions. The original US copyright term of 14 years, with extensions, actually fits the economics pretty well. What extreme copyright duration does do is: 1. Create vast copyright-holding monopolies, often of works for which authors were poorly compensated if at all. (For the latter: academic publishing.) 2. Create a vast category of "orphan works" which aren't or cannot be published, in the latter case because rights simply cannot be clearly established, or competing claims (survivors, estates, publishers) exist. "Seventeen Famous Economists Weigh In On Copyright : the Role of Theory , Empirics , and Network Effects" <https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/articles/pdf/v18/18HarvJLTech435.pdf https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/articles/pdf/v18/18HarvJLTech43...> (2005) "The true impact of shorter and longer copyright durations: from authors’ earnings to cultural creativity and diversity" Jimmyn Parc & Patrick Messerlin (2020) <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10286632.2020.1829608 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10286632.2020.1...> Orphan Works: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_work>
riedel 2mo ago
People must realize that it is easy to built some sentiment against on part of legislation that seems to restrict them, however, it is much more difficult to establish legislation that serves everyone. In the end we need smart people in politics and lawmaking instead of populists and libertarian cry-babies.
Quarrelsome 2mo ago
far too often people care about things for purpose, not because they care. There are things of equal sorrow that don't get cared for because it serves no purpose. If your cause isn't ammunition for something that people already want to do then it will struggle to gain traction. For example, nobody cared about data centre water or electricity use when it was serving us up cat pictures. Collectively the past 20 years of doing that is still significantly more use than AI data centres so far. We suddenly care about it because its anti-AI ammunition, not because we care.
- tzs 2mo ago
  People suddenly care about data center water and electricity use because a lot more data centers are being built now (there are more under construction now in the US than the total we had in 2020). Things being done as part of a massive boom are usually harder to accommodate then things done as part of longer term growth and data centers are no exception.
  - Quarrelsome 2mo ago
    I don't think the average person is poring over data centre plans and requesting blueprints from local governments using FOI requests. The average person is understandably apprehensive about AI and water and electricity use serve as a convenient attack vector. I don't think I've ever seen people query with such fervour; the energy usage of our existing internet structure. or supply chains to provide us all with electronic devices, despite them being inherently problematic in similar ways. I was in a British supermarket today and there were apples on the shelves that were transported there from New Zealand. Again, no protests. Do we really care about energy usage or do we simply find convenient ammunition to attack ideas that we are already apprehensive about? We live in a world that is overheating as a consequence of the energy bounty of fossil fuels and yet people are still driving cars, SUVs are more popular than ever. There is no global carbon tax in sight while every nation on the planet slinks from their responsibility for all the co2 in the atmosphere, blaming each other and charging towards our scientist's worst case outcomes. So who really cares about energy consumption on its own?
Brian_K_White 2mo ago
There are no such people. The people who object to ai's violation of copyright today, always cared about copyright. They validated the concept of copyright by employing it themselves to create the gpl, to make information free and arm it's ongoing freedom.

by datakan 2mo ago

robrain 2mo ago

It's possible to be opposed to excessive copyright and also be opposed to the mass theft of media for profit and subsequent abuse of copyright that the scrapers are guilty of. The AI pillagers are taking everything in, then gatekeeping access. And as they acknowledge with their "nothing after 2022" preferences, they (or their users at least) are salting the earth for future seekers of knowledge.

datakan 2mo ago
> It's possible to be opposed to excessive copyright Define excessive. Who makes that determination and how?
- inigyou 2mo ago
  the people who are opposed to it
- dredmorbius 2mo ago
  There's a substantial economic literature on this topic. Among other factors: time value of money and future-value discounting mean that economically ever-expanding copyright terms offer virtually no present-value benefit. Most works see virtually all of their economic value in the first few years of publication. There are some (rare) long-tailed exceptions. The original US copyright term of 14 years, with extensions, actually fits the economics pretty well. What extreme copyright duration does do is: 1. Create vast copyright-holding monopolies, often of works for which authors were poorly compensated if at all. (For the latter: academic publishing.) 2. Create a vast category of "orphan works" which aren't or cannot be published, in the latter case because rights simply cannot be clearly established, or competing claims (survivors, estates, publishers) exist. "Seventeen Famous Economists Weigh In On Copyright : the Role of Theory , Empirics , and Network Effects" <https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/articles/pdf/v18/18HarvJLTech435.pdf https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/articles/pdf/v18/18HarvJLTech43...> (2005) "The true impact of shorter and longer copyright durations: from authors’ earnings to cultural creativity and diversity" Jimmyn Parc & Patrick Messerlin (2020) <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10286632.2020.1829608 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10286632.2020.1...> Orphan Works: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_work>

riedel 2mo ago

People must realize that it is easy to built some sentiment against on part of legislation that seems to restrict them, however, it is much more difficult to establish legislation that serves everyone. In the end we need smart people in politics and lawmaking instead of populists and libertarian cry-babies.

Quarrelsome 2mo ago

far too often people care about things for purpose, not because they care. There are things of equal sorrow that don't get cared for because it serves no purpose. If your cause isn't ammunition for something that people already want to do then it will struggle to gain traction. For example, nobody cared about data centre water or electricity use when it was serving us up cat pictures. Collectively the past 20 years of doing that is still significantly more use than AI data centres so far. We suddenly care about it because its anti-AI ammunition, not because we care.

tzs 2mo ago
People suddenly care about data center water and electricity use because a lot more data centers are being built now (there are more under construction now in the US than the total we had in 2020). Things being done as part of a massive boom are usually harder to accommodate then things done as part of longer term growth and data centers are no exception.
- Quarrelsome 2mo ago
  I don't think the average person is poring over data centre plans and requesting blueprints from local governments using FOI requests. The average person is understandably apprehensive about AI and water and electricity use serve as a convenient attack vector. I don't think I've ever seen people query with such fervour; the energy usage of our existing internet structure. or supply chains to provide us all with electronic devices, despite them being inherently problematic in similar ways. I was in a British supermarket today and there were apples on the shelves that were transported there from New Zealand. Again, no protests. Do we really care about energy usage or do we simply find convenient ammunition to attack ideas that we are already apprehensive about? We live in a world that is overheating as a consequence of the energy bounty of fossil fuels and yet people are still driving cars, SUVs are more popular than ever. There is no global carbon tax in sight while every nation on the planet slinks from their responsibility for all the co2 in the atmosphere, blaming each other and charging towards our scientist's worst case outcomes. So who really cares about energy consumption on its own?

Brian_K_White 2mo ago

There are no such people. The people who object to ai's violation of copyright today, always cared about copyright. They validated the concept of copyright by employing it themselves to create the gpl, to make information free and arm it's ongoing freedom.