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I only see 2 consistent world views: either intellectual property is real, or it is a false concept and all information should be free. If IP is real, then the

I only see 2 consistent world views: either intellectual property is real, or it is a false concept and all information should be free. If IP is real, then the AI companies have performed flagrant theft. If IP is not real, then the algorithms and weights the AI companies have developed should also be free as they are just more information. The status quo of "your knowledge has no protection, but our knowledge is sacred" is the worst of all possible worlds.

qarl 14d ago
> 2 consistent world views Allow me to suggest a third: these two options are black and white thinking and there is no objective answer to "intellectual property is real". Instead we should try to find the most practical solution that has the most benefit - which will probably be more complex than yes/no.
- deleted 14d ago
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- palmotea 14d ago
  > Allow me to suggest a third: these two options are black and white thinking and there is no objective answer to "intellectual property is real". Property is at best a social construct that is possibly supported by instinctual behavior. Intellectual property is as real as private property (which is a lot more elaborate and weird than possession and territoriality, which is the most that has any natural basis). It's really foolish to claim one doesn't exist and should be abolished and the other this fundamental sacred thing that should be respected absolutely (as many do).
  - qarl 14d ago
    Yes, that's why I said property (not just IP) is a social construct.
    - palmotea 14d ago
      Yes, I'm agreeing with you.
      - qarl 14d ago
        OH. Cool.
  - montagg 14d ago
    We made it up. We made all this up. We do it for an outcome. Intellectual property exists as a concept to foster the creation of more intellectual property. That is not the case for all private property, because I cannot copy your land or your car infinitely. That’s why IP rights expire at some point, or have fair use that doesn’t harm the IP rights holder, something other forms of property don’t have. Saying that they are equivalent is not foolish—I think that’s a bit extreme—but it doesn’t recognize that they have fundamental differences, and the laws around them have different intended outcomes. I think AI training falls most likely in the fair use category of intellectual property: there is some societal benefit* that requires no actual harm** to the IP holder, therefore it’s a good trade-off for society if we poke a hole in the social construct of property to get that benefit. *Let’s put aside the question of whether AI is good for society or private ownership of AI models is good for society. Important questions but separate from the theory. IF IT IS GOOD, it follows the above. If it is not good, then of course it does not. **Also not a fully settled question. Again, an important debate to have and the tradeoffs here matter. If the harms are small enough, the societal benefit could be worth it. Both notes have to be true for this to be worthy of “fair use”.
    - tenuousemphasis 14d ago
      This is going to blow your mind, but people created music, literature, art long before intellectual property laws existed. IP laws are nothing but rent seeking.
      - palmotea 14d ago
        > This is going to blow your mind No. it won't blow anyone's mind. Not a single person. > but people created music, literature, art long before intellectual property laws existed. ^^^ cherry-picked, incomplete reading of history.
        joquarky 14d ago
        ^^^ unsubstantiated claim.
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  - dnautics 14d ago
    > It's really foolish to claim one doesn't exist and should be abolished Hear me out. Property rights exist to assign stewardship and use rights over rivalrous goods. goods where the use of the good precludes the use of that good for its purpose by another party. If you take my bike, I cannot ride it to work. This concept exists to prevent violent conflict over non-shareables and to prevent the tragedy of the commons (see the highly successful fisheries rights, NOx and SOx emissions markets as propertization schemes) "Intellectual property" (except for trademark if you want to get pedantic), is not rivalrous, and its primary purpose is to be shared, not hoarded. Therefore intellectual property isn't a thing, creating it as a legal construct was a mistake that has hamstrung society for a long time.
    - kmeisthax 14d ago
      Copies are not rivalrous, but the underlying creativity absolutely is. If I pay someone to draw a picture, that's labor, and they've got a finite number of hours to sell. Except it's also very inconvenient to pay for creative works this way: drawings and artists are not fungible with one another. More importantly, quality and desirability of the work is incredibly variable. The buyer of the art is bearing the risk of the art being bad. What copyright lets you do[1] is offload that risk onto a publisher[0]. Instead of having to pay to commission every piece of art, a publisher can do that, and then sell the now-monopolized copies of whatever art turns out to actually be valuable. A lot of hay was made during the Piracy Wars over filesharing tools breaking this bargain. A bunch of data hoarders with an interest in sharing media made it possible to just get the shit for free. This created a social dynamic where artists were annoyed about it, but publishers were Fucking Pissed. You could even measure how publisher-brained an artist got by how angry they were over Napster[2]. AI generated art also breaks this bargain, by making creative labor nearly non-rivalrous. The only cost is electricity and GPUs. This has created nearly the opposite reaction: artists are pissed while publishers don't care, because AI is to publishers like tort reform is to insurance companies. A publisher that gets art for free doesn't care if everyone else has it, because they have the payola dividend: they can push whatever slop they want onto the market and the market will eat it because they're big and powerful. > This concept exists to prevent violent conflict over non-shareables and to prevent the tragedy of the commons The copyright maximalists would argue that free reuse of creative works is a tragedy of the commons. I certainly remember hearing that phrase bandied about a lot during the Piracy Wars. It's also important to note that "tragedy of the commons" is not a natural law, but a specific framing that is used to justify antisocial ends. The communal ownership so decried worked perfectly well in England for hundreds of years until the ruling classes found it inconvenient and abolished it. The kind of ecological collapse the tragedy attempts to invoke did not happen because there were already communal means of preventing overuse of the land. In fact, an emissions market is probably closer to communal management than enclosure. Also none of this changes the underlying logic that AI companies are trying to enclose the intellectual commons, and that their business model relies on being able to replace human brains with machine intelligence they can rent out by the megatoken. [0] Individuals who self-publish included. [1] To be clear, copyright was created as a censorship regime, it just happens to be useful for other things. [2] In Lars Ulrich's defense, they weren't just angry that Metallica songs were on Napster, they were specifically angry that Napster had their latest album before it was in stores.
- zdragnar 14d ago
  > Property is at best a social construct that is possibly supported by instinctual behavior. That very much falls within the "IP is not real" category. Taking a utilitarian approach here is exactly what the sam altman / effective altruist crowd is doing (or claiming, at least). Believe it or not, but there are different philosophies. The US Constitution, for example, is written under the framework that all rights are innate, and the government merely endorses, not grants, those which are described. This framework creates a moral basis to rights, such that things like property are not merely social constructs but moral goods. To violate them is itself an immoral act.
  - underlipton 14d ago
    Who decides what's a right? By what criteria?
  - qarl 14d ago
    > That very much falls within the "IP is not real" category. AH. Given that framing, then I suppose anything that varies from "these axioms are perfect there can be no others" must fall into the "not real" category. But isn't there some debate about the moral axioms themselves? A space that is much more complex than "yes/no"? EDIT: I always wonder, when I get two downvotes in the same moment, if someone is cheating. It happens so often. EDIT2: And now! 3 upvotes in the same moment. I daresay someone is confessing.
    - yndoendo 14d ago
      Social constructs are bought and paid for by the wealthy. Most people want a clean environment while the current US administration is pulling back environmental regulations to allow for more pollutants. The current US Supreme Court has taken gifts from those that have invested interest in the outcome of their judgements. Social axioms are mutable while mathematical axioms are immutable. Human trafficking is bad. How many of the wealthy that partook of Epstein's trafficking have been prosecuted? This shows that human trafficking being bad is mutable based on wealth and power.
      - 14d ago
- AlexandrB 14d ago
  Property is a social construct in the sense that anything is a social construct. Like, sure, the fact that I "own" this spoon is societally constructed, but it's so foundational that almost every other aspect of human society is more abstract. Even animals have some sense of "property" - whether that's territory they defend or their stash of food. The social construct part is that we respect each other's property rights (mostly) without resorting violence, where animals resort to individual violence or threat displays.
  - qarl 14d ago
    > anything is a social construct Well, no, the physical laws aren't social. An apple falls whether there is a social group to see it or not. And yes! Animals are a perfect example. Mother Nature came up with a nice strategy for maximal benefit in a social group, and she encoded it in our instincts and intuitions. But that doesn't mean it's perfect. I have an instinctual fear of fire - but it's still better to cook my own food.
- newyankee 14d ago
  Sovereignty is the ultimate form of property ownership in a funny way.
- kiicia 14d ago
  while you mentioned how tribal property management looks like in some places (that things are dynamically moving between who needs them at the time), it does not help to solve issue at hand, that is how to call what ai companies did: - amassed then destroyed/denied largest knowledge corpora seen so far - poisoned knowledge for decades to come, deliberately or not, which would stop new developments by independent teams - now they are crying that they are being robbed of their precious models, which - at this point in time - are neither truly good not economical (not to mention actual environmental and social harm they cause) this is truly first of a kind situation, that was never seen nor heard before
pton_xd 14d ago
Yeah, this whole "we're being attacked by China, they're distilling our models!" thing is completely and utterly absurd. Insulting, even. Either IP exists and should be respected or it doesn't. And if model training is fairly "transformative" of the source work, then so is distilling. As Garry Tan suggested recently, we need to encourage a US distillation regime. Everyone should be free access and transform this information however they see fit.
RyanHamilton 14d ago
Let me introduce you instead to the one golden rule. He who has the gold, makes the rules.
- twoWhlsGud 14d ago
  Let me introduce you to the power of cynicism to normalize corruption...
AlexandrB 14d ago
IP is obviously not "real" like physical property is real. Moreso, IP is a restriction on free speech as it walls off some expression as "Copyrighted" so you can't legally express it yourself without paying someone for the privilege. That's not to say that IP is useless, but treating IP infringement as "stealing" was always a problematic shorthand. Previously, calling IP infingement "stealing" was the domain of corporate interest groups like the RIAA or MPAA, but with AI the winds have turned and supposed anti-corporate lefties are keen to treat IP infringement as theft to attack AI companies. There's very little intellectual consistency on either side of aisle here.
- tenuousemphasis 14d ago
  It's actually worse than that. IP laws trump property laws because they prevent you from using your property in ways you would otherwise be able to. It's nothing more than base rent seeking.
nostrademons 14d ago
There are a wide variety of middle-ground views between them. Copyright law itself is one of them: it provides exceptions for transformative "fair uses", and there are some courts that have ruled that AI is one of them. Another might be Harbinger taxes on IP.
verelo 14d ago
I think the blend of the two is that value added to any information, such as the first time its distilled or positioned in a certain way, that's IP and should be real. When an AI company takes that type of value, and doesnt provide value back to the person who made it, thats theft. Information / facts are real and free. But those who helped us get here should choose how to license their work, and an AI company picking it up and re-selling it is clearly unethical.
- joquarky 13d ago
  > But those who helped us get here should choose how to license their work I can reasonably wrap my head around the idea that an author should be compensated for their work, but where in the social contract does this power to control how that work is used come from? It's so destructive and tangles up courts and makes contracts complicated and we lose the original versions of the work because e.g., they have to change a background song due to complicated licensing. I can respect protecting copy rights, but it should never be conditional; if you choose to make a work available to the world, you have a legal right to defend the unauthorized copy of it but you should not have a right to say how it gets used. It reminds me of manufacturers like John Deer.
toobulkeh 14d ago
Both can be true. IP is real and they created new IP off of stolen IP.
lxgr 14d ago
Intellectual property is a legal fiction, not an empirical fact about the universe. It's as real as societies want it to be, and that view can change over time.
ericmay 14d ago
It’s real but whether you can make a profit or not is dependent on whether you can protect the information. It has been this way since civilization as we know it started, I believe. If you are freely posting sentences like this was on the internet you are giving away your IP for free. Anyone can read the sentence. If someone can make money off of it then that’s just markets at work. I can’t make money off of what I write here, for example. But I also don’t think pirating a movie is theft either. You haven’t proven to me you’ve lost money. Maybe wouldn’t have watched it anyway. Fun topic
- simoncion 14d ago
  > It’s real but whether you can make a profit or not is dependent on whether you can protect the information. That's what contracts and licenses [0] are for. Or perhaps you're arguing for a world where the only possible protection is that of trade secrets... that once protected information is made public by any means anyone can do anything they wish with it? If you are, then this quote [1] seems relevant: If IP is real, then the AI companies have performed flagrant theft. If IP is not real, then the algorithms and weights the AI companies have developed should also be free as they are just more information. [0] ...which are contracts in disguise... [1] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49754448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49754448>
  - ericmay 14d ago
    To read this post you must pay me $5. Please leave your contact information as a reply or you'll be hearing from my lawyer. [1] Those contracts and licenses are just a form of protection enforced by the State. In general once knowledge or information is widely available it's also freely available. Whether someone can further protect the distribution or the usage of that knowledge to some ends is up to them. I disagree with both of those premises. IP is real, and scraping freely given comments or published material on the Internet and doing something economically useful with it doesn't entitle you to retrospectively go back and decide that you are owed some money. If that were the case you have to prove material damages. How much is my post here worth? one quadrillionth of a cent? I think it can become different if, for example, a book was scraped or cataloged but that's primarily because it's likely that you can enforce or make a case within a given legal system to enforce your copyright or IP claims. But what if I read a book and then thought the main idea was my own, or just spoke to someone else about it and they spoke to someone else about it and it winds up in an LLM? There's nothing wrong with that or anything you can do. To expose information is to put that information at risk of being used by others. It's up to you to protect that information or enforce claims on it. If Reddit's public site gets scraped and OpenAI does something economically useful with it, well, that's just life. You can't put information out in the public for free and then demand payment later. Reddit comments are freely accessible by the public, yes? Companies are part of the public. If you want to argue that it's IP theft then distilling weights or otherwise reverse engineering the models is a violation of IP protections too. [1] Rhetorical
newyankee 14d ago
You would not download a car, would you ? Hell if a car was downloadable why would I not ? Your capability to make endless profit should be capped somewhere, if indeed it is Profit
Aurornis 14d ago
> If IP is real, then the AI companies have performed flagrant theft. It’s called Derivative Work and it’s a good feature for IP law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work You wouldn’t like a world where companies could copyright knowledge and then prevent anyone else from making a derivative of that knowledge. Imagine Wikipedia being taken down for sharing knowledge that another company wrote about first. It’s a bad idea.
- EagnaIonat 14d ago
  > It’s called Derivative Work That would be on what the AI model generates, not what it is trained on. The latter is where the contention is, and it's a valid argument. So much so that some companies are not using stolen information to build their models. IBM for example indemnifies its models for its customers and has detailed information on where the sources came from to train them.
  - Aurornis 14d ago
    > The latter is where the contention is, and it's a valid argument It has been tried in court several ways already. Remember the lawsuit that forced Anthropic to use physical books? They tried to argue that the books couldn’t be trained on at all. It failed.
    - porkshoe 14d ago
      Yes. That judge misunderstood badly, and made a bad ruling.
  - ragequittah 14d ago
    I'm not sure I understand this argument. If I go to the library every day for 10 years and learn everything there is to know about subject x I shouldn't be able to sell my skills to the world about it later because I didn't give the creators of the books I read any money? Arguably LLM companies could have made large-scale deals with libraries and got the exact same knowledge (much, much more slowly). I wonder if people would have the same issues then? My guess is probably. Goes back to the meme that if libraries were proposed today there's no way they would ever be allowed.
ang_cire 14d ago
Objectively, IP exists and is acted upon, so IP is real, obviously, but IMO it is bad, and should not exist. People tend to forget that IP was not originally about digital distribution at all (copyright), it was about giving inventors exclusivity periods to profit without competition (patents). It was a misguided attempt to stop sometimes literal theft of designs from rival inventors, by tying the design to the person instead of whoever possessed the schematic. It's also a regime that in its modern incarnation protects businesses, not artists.
GuB-42 14d ago
There are nuances. AI scraping for the goal of making a commercial LLM service is different from, say, a commercial file sharing platform. The first difference is that LLM training is highly transformative. Let's say your LLM ingests the Harry Potter novels during its training. What you get at the other end is not the Harry Potter novels, it is a LLM that can talk to you about Harry Potter, it is not the same thing, and going from one to the other requires a significant amount of work, very expensive work in this case. Not only that but there is no direct competition. People won't stop buying the Harry Potter novels because a LLM trained on it exists. If you want to read the books, you buy the books, you don't ask a LLM about it. A file sharing service on the other hand competes directly against the official channels, if you want to read the books, you can download it from this service instead of buying it on the official channels. So, about how free you should be to get these weights from the AI companies. If you just share a 1:1 copy of the weights, that's the "file sharing" situation, not transformative, you took their work, didn't do any of your own. Usually considered unacceptable by IP laws. Distillation is a more interesting case, you are using a LLM to train your own, it is transformative work, but you may also be competing directly against the LLM you are distilling. So, in a sense it is worse than scraping, but still, despite how much the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic are complaining, it seems to be legal. So it is somewhat consistent: 1:1 copy and distribution is not allowed, be it source material or LLM weights, and training is, be it source material or another LLM (as in distillation).
ndiddy 14d ago
> The status quo of "your knowledge has no protection, but our knowledge is sacred" is the worst of all possible worlds. This is how IP has always worked. It has never protected the little guy. Draw a picture and then people start putting it on t-shirts and posters without paying you? Great, you can't do anything about it unless you have enough time and money to hire a lawyer to go after them. Self publish a book and then people start uploading PDFs of it? Better hope your real passion is filing takedown requests instead of writing.
LordDragonfang 14d ago
And by constructing that false dichotomy, you're failing to see the actual truth, which is that Intellectual Property is just a legal construct to turn ideas into Capital, with the goal of incentivizing its creation. Nothing more and nothing less, and all of the normal debates about what should remain Capital and what should be The Commons apply.
amelius 14d ago
It is basically the P=IP question.
matheusmoreira 14d ago
IP could be real and LLM training could be considered fair use. IP protects published information, so even abolishing all IP would not help us since the LLM weights are secret. Nothing short of a global revolution can fix this. Proprietary LLMs should be illegal. Either we achieve post scarcity within this generation or it's literally over.
charcircuit 14d ago
Intellectual property rights only protect against certain things. IP can be real while there exists fair use like training AI models.

qarl 14d ago

> 2 consistent world views Allow me to suggest a third: these two options are black and white thinking and there is no objective answer to "intellectual property is real". Instead we should try to find the most practical solution that has the most benefit - which will probably be more complex than yes/no.

deleted 14d ago
[deleted]
palmotea 14d ago
> Allow me to suggest a third: these two options are black and white thinking and there is no objective answer to "intellectual property is real". Property is at best a social construct that is possibly supported by instinctual behavior. Intellectual property is as real as private property (which is a lot more elaborate and weird than possession and territoriality, which is the most that has any natural basis). It's really foolish to claim one doesn't exist and should be abolished and the other this fundamental sacred thing that should be respected absolutely (as many do).
- qarl 14d ago
  Yes, that's why I said property (not just IP) is a social construct.
  - palmotea 14d ago
    Yes, I'm agreeing with you.
    - qarl 14d ago
      OH. Cool.
- montagg 14d ago
  We made it up. We made all this up. We do it for an outcome. Intellectual property exists as a concept to foster the creation of more intellectual property. That is not the case for all private property, because I cannot copy your land or your car infinitely. That’s why IP rights expire at some point, or have fair use that doesn’t harm the IP rights holder, something other forms of property don’t have. Saying that they are equivalent is not foolish—I think that’s a bit extreme—but it doesn’t recognize that they have fundamental differences, and the laws around them have different intended outcomes. I think AI training falls most likely in the fair use category of intellectual property: there is some societal benefit* that requires no actual harm** to the IP holder, therefore it’s a good trade-off for society if we poke a hole in the social construct of property to get that benefit. *Let’s put aside the question of whether AI is good for society or private ownership of AI models is good for society. Important questions but separate from the theory. IF IT IS GOOD, it follows the above. If it is not good, then of course it does not. **Also not a fully settled question. Again, an important debate to have and the tradeoffs here matter. If the harms are small enough, the societal benefit could be worth it. Both notes have to be true for this to be worthy of “fair use”.
  - tenuousemphasis 14d ago
    This is going to blow your mind, but people created music, literature, art long before intellectual property laws existed. IP laws are nothing but rent seeking.
    - palmotea 14d ago
      > This is going to blow your mind No. it won't blow anyone's mind. Not a single person. > but people created music, literature, art long before intellectual property laws existed. ^^^ cherry-picked, incomplete reading of history.
      - joquarky 14d ago
        ^^^ unsubstantiated claim.
    - 14d ago
- dnautics 14d ago
  > It's really foolish to claim one doesn't exist and should be abolished Hear me out. Property rights exist to assign stewardship and use rights over rivalrous goods. goods where the use of the good precludes the use of that good for its purpose by another party. If you take my bike, I cannot ride it to work. This concept exists to prevent violent conflict over non-shareables and to prevent the tragedy of the commons (see the highly successful fisheries rights, NOx and SOx emissions markets as propertization schemes) "Intellectual property" (except for trademark if you want to get pedantic), is not rivalrous, and its primary purpose is to be shared, not hoarded. Therefore intellectual property isn't a thing, creating it as a legal construct was a mistake that has hamstrung society for a long time.
  - kmeisthax 14d ago
    Copies are not rivalrous, but the underlying creativity absolutely is. If I pay someone to draw a picture, that's labor, and they've got a finite number of hours to sell. Except it's also very inconvenient to pay for creative works this way: drawings and artists are not fungible with one another. More importantly, quality and desirability of the work is incredibly variable. The buyer of the art is bearing the risk of the art being bad. What copyright lets you do[1] is offload that risk onto a publisher[0]. Instead of having to pay to commission every piece of art, a publisher can do that, and then sell the now-monopolized copies of whatever art turns out to actually be valuable. A lot of hay was made during the Piracy Wars over filesharing tools breaking this bargain. A bunch of data hoarders with an interest in sharing media made it possible to just get the shit for free. This created a social dynamic where artists were annoyed about it, but publishers were Fucking Pissed. You could even measure how publisher-brained an artist got by how angry they were over Napster[2]. AI generated art also breaks this bargain, by making creative labor nearly non-rivalrous. The only cost is electricity and GPUs. This has created nearly the opposite reaction: artists are pissed while publishers don't care, because AI is to publishers like tort reform is to insurance companies. A publisher that gets art for free doesn't care if everyone else has it, because they have the payola dividend: they can push whatever slop they want onto the market and the market will eat it because they're big and powerful. > This concept exists to prevent violent conflict over non-shareables and to prevent the tragedy of the commons The copyright maximalists would argue that free reuse of creative works is a tragedy of the commons. I certainly remember hearing that phrase bandied about a lot during the Piracy Wars. It's also important to note that "tragedy of the commons" is not a natural law, but a specific framing that is used to justify antisocial ends. The communal ownership so decried worked perfectly well in England for hundreds of years until the ruling classes found it inconvenient and abolished it. The kind of ecological collapse the tragedy attempts to invoke did not happen because there were already communal means of preventing overuse of the land. In fact, an emissions market is probably closer to communal management than enclosure. Also none of this changes the underlying logic that AI companies are trying to enclose the intellectual commons, and that their business model relies on being able to replace human brains with machine intelligence they can rent out by the megatoken. [0] Individuals who self-publish included. [1] To be clear, copyright was created as a censorship regime, it just happens to be useful for other things. [2] In Lars Ulrich's defense, they weren't just angry that Metallica songs were on Napster, they were specifically angry that Napster had their latest album before it was in stores.
zdragnar 14d ago
> Property is at best a social construct that is possibly supported by instinctual behavior. That very much falls within the "IP is not real" category. Taking a utilitarian approach here is exactly what the sam altman / effective altruist crowd is doing (or claiming, at least). Believe it or not, but there are different philosophies. The US Constitution, for example, is written under the framework that all rights are innate, and the government merely endorses, not grants, those which are described. This framework creates a moral basis to rights, such that things like property are not merely social constructs but moral goods. To violate them is itself an immoral act.
- underlipton 14d ago
  Who decides what's a right? By what criteria?
- qarl 14d ago
  > That very much falls within the "IP is not real" category. AH. Given that framing, then I suppose anything that varies from "these axioms are perfect there can be no others" must fall into the "not real" category. But isn't there some debate about the moral axioms themselves? A space that is much more complex than "yes/no"? EDIT: I always wonder, when I get two downvotes in the same moment, if someone is cheating. It happens so often. EDIT2: And now! 3 upvotes in the same moment. I daresay someone is confessing.
  - yndoendo 14d ago
    Social constructs are bought and paid for by the wealthy. Most people want a clean environment while the current US administration is pulling back environmental regulations to allow for more pollutants. The current US Supreme Court has taken gifts from those that have invested interest in the outcome of their judgements. Social axioms are mutable while mathematical axioms are immutable. Human trafficking is bad. How many of the wealthy that partook of Epstein's trafficking have been prosecuted? This shows that human trafficking being bad is mutable based on wealth and power.
    - 14d ago
AlexandrB 14d ago
Property is a social construct in the sense that anything is a social construct. Like, sure, the fact that I "own" this spoon is societally constructed, but it's so foundational that almost every other aspect of human society is more abstract. Even animals have some sense of "property" - whether that's territory they defend or their stash of food. The social construct part is that we respect each other's property rights (mostly) without resorting violence, where animals resort to individual violence or threat displays.
- qarl 14d ago
  > anything is a social construct Well, no, the physical laws aren't social. An apple falls whether there is a social group to see it or not. And yes! Animals are a perfect example. Mother Nature came up with a nice strategy for maximal benefit in a social group, and she encoded it in our instincts and intuitions. But that doesn't mean it's perfect. I have an instinctual fear of fire - but it's still better to cook my own food.
newyankee 14d ago
Sovereignty is the ultimate form of property ownership in a funny way.
kiicia 14d ago
while you mentioned how tribal property management looks like in some places (that things are dynamically moving between who needs them at the time), it does not help to solve issue at hand, that is how to call what ai companies did: - amassed then destroyed/denied largest knowledge corpora seen so far - poisoned knowledge for decades to come, deliberately or not, which would stop new developments by independent teams - now they are crying that they are being robbed of their precious models, which - at this point in time - are neither truly good not economical (not to mention actual environmental and social harm they cause) this is truly first of a kind situation, that was never seen nor heard before

pton_xd 14d ago

Yeah, this whole "we're being attacked by China, they're distilling our models!" thing is completely and utterly absurd. Insulting, even. Either IP exists and should be respected or it doesn't. And if model training is fairly "transformative" of the source work, then so is distilling. As Garry Tan suggested recently, we need to encourage a US distillation regime. Everyone should be free access and transform this information however they see fit.

RyanHamilton 14d ago

Let me introduce you instead to the one golden rule. He who has the gold, makes the rules.

twoWhlsGud 14d ago
Let me introduce you to the power of cynicism to normalize corruption...

AlexandrB 14d ago

IP is obviously not "real" like physical property is real. Moreso, IP is a restriction on free speech as it walls off some expression as "Copyrighted" so you can't legally express it yourself without paying someone for the privilege. That's not to say that IP is useless, but treating IP infringement as "stealing" was always a problematic shorthand. Previously, calling IP infingement "stealing" was the domain of corporate interest groups like the RIAA or MPAA, but with AI the winds have turned and supposed anti-corporate lefties are keen to treat IP infringement as theft to attack AI companies. There's very little intellectual consistency on either side of aisle here.

tenuousemphasis 14d ago
It's actually worse than that. IP laws trump property laws because they prevent you from using your property in ways you would otherwise be able to. It's nothing more than base rent seeking.

nostrademons 14d ago

There are a wide variety of middle-ground views between them. Copyright law itself is one of them: it provides exceptions for transformative "fair uses", and there are some courts that have ruled that AI is one of them. Another might be Harbinger taxes on IP.

verelo 14d ago

I think the blend of the two is that value added to any information, such as the first time its distilled or positioned in a certain way, that's IP and should be real. When an AI company takes that type of value, and doesnt provide value back to the person who made it, thats theft. Information / facts are real and free. But those who helped us get here should choose how to license their work, and an AI company picking it up and re-selling it is clearly unethical.

joquarky 13d ago
> But those who helped us get here should choose how to license their work I can reasonably wrap my head around the idea that an author should be compensated for their work, but where in the social contract does this power to control how that work is used come from? It's so destructive and tangles up courts and makes contracts complicated and we lose the original versions of the work because e.g., they have to change a background song due to complicated licensing. I can respect protecting copy rights, but it should never be conditional; if you choose to make a work available to the world, you have a legal right to defend the unauthorized copy of it but you should not have a right to say how it gets used. It reminds me of manufacturers like John Deer.

toobulkeh 14d ago

Both can be true. IP is real and they created new IP off of stolen IP.

lxgr 14d ago

Intellectual property is a legal fiction, not an empirical fact about the universe. It's as real as societies want it to be, and that view can change over time.

ericmay 14d ago

It’s real but whether you can make a profit or not is dependent on whether you can protect the information. It has been this way since civilization as we know it started, I believe. If you are freely posting sentences like this was on the internet you are giving away your IP for free. Anyone can read the sentence. If someone can make money off of it then that’s just markets at work. I can’t make money off of what I write here, for example. But I also don’t think pirating a movie is theft either. You haven’t proven to me you’ve lost money. Maybe wouldn’t have watched it anyway. Fun topic

simoncion 14d ago
> It’s real but whether you can make a profit or not is dependent on whether you can protect the information. That's what contracts and licenses [0] are for. Or perhaps you're arguing for a world where the only possible protection is that of trade secrets... that once protected information is made public by any means anyone can do anything they wish with it? If you are, then this quote [1] seems relevant: If IP is real, then the AI companies have performed flagrant theft. If IP is not real, then the algorithms and weights the AI companies have developed should also be free as they are just more information. [0] ...which are contracts in disguise... [1] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49754448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49754448>
- ericmay 14d ago
  To read this post you must pay me $5. Please leave your contact information as a reply or you'll be hearing from my lawyer. [1] Those contracts and licenses are just a form of protection enforced by the State. In general once knowledge or information is widely available it's also freely available. Whether someone can further protect the distribution or the usage of that knowledge to some ends is up to them. I disagree with both of those premises. IP is real, and scraping freely given comments or published material on the Internet and doing something economically useful with it doesn't entitle you to retrospectively go back and decide that you are owed some money. If that were the case you have to prove material damages. How much is my post here worth? one quadrillionth of a cent? I think it can become different if, for example, a book was scraped or cataloged but that's primarily because it's likely that you can enforce or make a case within a given legal system to enforce your copyright or IP claims. But what if I read a book and then thought the main idea was my own, or just spoke to someone else about it and they spoke to someone else about it and it winds up in an LLM? There's nothing wrong with that or anything you can do. To expose information is to put that information at risk of being used by others. It's up to you to protect that information or enforce claims on it. If Reddit's public site gets scraped and OpenAI does something economically useful with it, well, that's just life. You can't put information out in the public for free and then demand payment later. Reddit comments are freely accessible by the public, yes? Companies are part of the public. If you want to argue that it's IP theft then distilling weights or otherwise reverse engineering the models is a violation of IP protections too. [1] Rhetorical

newyankee 14d ago

You would not download a car, would you ? Hell if a car was downloadable why would I not ? Your capability to make endless profit should be capped somewhere, if indeed it is Profit

Aurornis 14d ago

> If IP is real, then the AI companies have performed flagrant theft. It’s called Derivative Work and it’s a good feature for IP law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work You wouldn’t like a world where companies could copyright knowledge and then prevent anyone else from making a derivative of that knowledge. Imagine Wikipedia being taken down for sharing knowledge that another company wrote about first. It’s a bad idea.

EagnaIonat 14d ago
> It’s called Derivative Work That would be on what the AI model generates, not what it is trained on. The latter is where the contention is, and it's a valid argument. So much so that some companies are not using stolen information to build their models. IBM for example indemnifies its models for its customers and has detailed information on where the sources came from to train them.
- Aurornis 14d ago
  > The latter is where the contention is, and it's a valid argument It has been tried in court several ways already. Remember the lawsuit that forced Anthropic to use physical books? They tried to argue that the books couldn’t be trained on at all. It failed.
  - porkshoe 14d ago
    Yes. That judge misunderstood badly, and made a bad ruling.
- ragequittah 14d ago
  I'm not sure I understand this argument. If I go to the library every day for 10 years and learn everything there is to know about subject x I shouldn't be able to sell my skills to the world about it later because I didn't give the creators of the books I read any money? Arguably LLM companies could have made large-scale deals with libraries and got the exact same knowledge (much, much more slowly). I wonder if people would have the same issues then? My guess is probably. Goes back to the meme that if libraries were proposed today there's no way they would ever be allowed.

ang_cire 14d ago

Objectively, IP exists and is acted upon, so IP is real, obviously, but IMO it is bad, and should not exist. People tend to forget that IP was not originally about digital distribution at all (copyright), it was about giving inventors exclusivity periods to profit without competition (patents). It was a misguided attempt to stop sometimes literal theft of designs from rival inventors, by tying the design to the person instead of whoever possessed the schematic. It's also a regime that in its modern incarnation protects businesses, not artists.

GuB-42 14d ago

There are nuances. AI scraping for the goal of making a commercial LLM service is different from, say, a commercial file sharing platform. The first difference is that LLM training is highly transformative. Let's say your LLM ingests the Harry Potter novels during its training. What you get at the other end is not the Harry Potter novels, it is a LLM that can talk to you about Harry Potter, it is not the same thing, and going from one to the other requires a significant amount of work, very expensive work in this case. Not only that but there is no direct competition. People won't stop buying the Harry Potter novels because a LLM trained on it exists. If you want to read the books, you buy the books, you don't ask a LLM about it. A file sharing service on the other hand competes directly against the official channels, if you want to read the books, you can download it from this service instead of buying it on the official channels. So, about how free you should be to get these weights from the AI companies. If you just share a 1:1 copy of the weights, that's the "file sharing" situation, not transformative, you took their work, didn't do any of your own. Usually considered unacceptable by IP laws. Distillation is a more interesting case, you are using a LLM to train your own, it is transformative work, but you may also be competing directly against the LLM you are distilling. So, in a sense it is worse than scraping, but still, despite how much the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic are complaining, it seems to be legal. So it is somewhat consistent: 1:1 copy and distribution is not allowed, be it source material or LLM weights, and training is, be it source material or another LLM (as in distillation).

ndiddy 14d ago

> The status quo of "your knowledge has no protection, but our knowledge is sacred" is the worst of all possible worlds. This is how IP has always worked. It has never protected the little guy. Draw a picture and then people start putting it on t-shirts and posters without paying you? Great, you can't do anything about it unless you have enough time and money to hire a lawyer to go after them. Self publish a book and then people start uploading PDFs of it? Better hope your real passion is filing takedown requests instead of writing.

LordDragonfang 14d ago

And by constructing that false dichotomy, you're failing to see the actual truth, which is that Intellectual Property is just a legal construct to turn ideas into Capital, with the goal of incentivizing its creation. Nothing more and nothing less, and all of the normal debates about what should remain Capital and what should be The Commons apply.

amelius 14d ago

It is basically the P=IP question.

matheusmoreira 14d ago

IP could be real and LLM training could be considered fair use. IP protects published information, so even abolishing all IP would not help us since the LLM weights are secret. Nothing short of a global revolution can fix this. Proprietary LLMs should be illegal. Either we achieve post scarcity within this generation or it's literally over.

charcircuit 14d ago

Intellectual property rights only protect against certain things. IP can be real while there exists fair use like training AI models.