Meta torrented & seeded 81.7 TB dataset containing copyrighted data(arstechnica.com) |
Meta torrented & seeded 81.7 TB dataset containing copyrighted data(arstechnica.com) |
so its quite funny to see they freely share it too.
It's so funny to see the law blatantly ignored by the overlords. Like, there isn't even a pretext anymore. They just steal what they want and budget for the fines and campaign donations to make the consequences go away.
Same for all the other sleazy tech bros.
We are trying to advance civilization here. To accumulate and make available all human knowledge to date. And you stand there with your hand out to stop this? You are a villain. There is no sympathy for you.
Enough with laws for thee but not for me!
Nothing in my life made me ever want to go back except for when I got back into playing hockey, and all the hockey leagues use facebook to communicate a few months ago.
I made a new account, had to literally upload a picture of my face to pass verification.. and then a few days later I was immediately banned and couldn't use my account. I assume because they searched previous data and compared my face to find out I have a "deleted" (lol) account and matched me. I've assumed they'll only let me log in if i use my original 10 years ago deleted account.
Fuck meta. Fuck zuck.
a) Financed via inflation/"cantillon effect" due to ZRP/Stimulus that absolutely flooded the market with funny money in the hand of the sharks. b) Trained upon copyrighted work without compensation. c) Trained upon open source without even asking politely for authorization.
The Robber Barons from the last century can't even get close to our modern Feudal Tech Lords.
Unless you're one of us that have amassed multi-generation wealth in a exit in the last 20 years, you're completely fucked.
You clean up the data after you acquire it, not before.
Other times a PDF of a book is big because someone scanned it and didn't have trustworthy OCR, so they figured distributing images of text at 1.5 MB per page was better than risking OCR errors.
Zuckerberg has paid the vig several times [0,1,2], which is evidently the best legal strategy under this administration. OFC, considering there are already multiple payments, there is no assurance the vig payments won't substantially increase as the Capo sees more opportunity for profit.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigorish
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/29/meta-settles-trump-...
Meta, with its "open weights" models, is one of the least guilty parties, since at least they've made the resulting blobs of mass piracy available to us. Same with Mistral, Deepseek, etc.
ClosedAI, Google, and others have all probably done this and more and refuse to make even the model available.
I think the way to deal with this is very simple:
If you have trained your model on works to which you do not have rights or permission, the resulting model is not copyrightable and cannot be sold. It must either be kept for research purposes only or released free of charge and in the public domain. All these models that have been trained on pirated works should become public domain.
Of course now that we have full capture of the US Federal Government I'm sure any suggestion like that would be neutralized with one bribe to Trump.
But we live in this stupid society where you have to move mountains to change things an inch.
I'm going to assume as it's a corporation, then the laws no longer apply.
The fact that most of the world embraced hardcore copyright troll ludditism when the means of their (badly paying creative) jobs economic production was democratized implies that most people do not believe in any "egalitarianism" and especially not the left-wing form many profess to believe in. Certainly not "information wants to be free" or any of the other idealist shit that I or Aaron Swartz believed in. What meta did was software communism - full stop. They literally released their models to the public! I support all of this 10000%. The only issue is that they're not open enough (fully open source the dataset)
So, unironically, good! Thank you, please pirate more! Please destroy the US IP system while you're at it. Copyright abolitionism is good and thank you Zuckerberg!
Rules are just for us peasants.
I suspect that if the case is reasonable they will just convict, and quickly-- appeal denied and all simply because the laws are so straightforward.
After OpenAI trained their models on the famed books2 dataset, and seeing the technological implications of ChatGPT, there was a good chance they would let them get away with it.
Would the USA really surrender its AI technological advantage for trivial matters like copyright? They would make some royalty arrangement and get it over with
I only really wanted to convey that I believed that it probably isn't obviously easy for Meta to get away with anything in this, even if the US government decides to be lenient for the sake of a high market-cap US company simply because other countries are a viable place to sue as well.
I think I misinterpreted your comment as that you thought that Meta thought that costs would be low because they imagined a US court system that simply ignored the illegality because it's they who committed it, when nothing like that is actually implied in your comment.
I'm pretty sure you can theoretically download torrents without seeding, although this is frowned upon. If they really seeded (with full bandwidth?) that's indeed pretty brazen.
It is sort of strange that Meta is being singled out here though, and sort of sad considering they at least release the model weights. What's the signal? Do illegal shit to be competitive, but make sure there is no evidence?
I'm also ok with abolishing copyright all together if he's too untouchable
The alternative is a futile legalistic attack against a monopoly entity too powerful to be meaningfully punished. That won't accomplish anything useful. It would, rather, help cement this status quo, where copyright infringement is selectively legal or illegal, for different entities at the same time; and companies like Meta thrive arbitraging that difference. You can't defeat Meta—but you can help dig them a moat.
I'm pretty sure I could list ten megacorps that would collapse overnight if copyright was abolished. The music groups, movie studios, streaming platforms...
> Level the playing field, incrementally, for everyone else who isn't a trillion-dollar corporation.
There is no level playing field when you have individuals and trillion-dollar companies in the same market.
- Ice Cube.
Meta will face no consequences. Say your a small publisher and you'd like a bit of compensation. If you dare sue Meta can just blacklist your books on its platforms. Even if they don't, you probably don't have the money to sue one of the biggest companies on earth.
I think copyrights should be limited to 25 years after first publication. This would fix plenty of issues and give the AIs of the world plenty to learn from.
Who am I kidding, Meta will take what they will. For that author making 20k a year, be honored to be of use to Meta.
but the masses are addicted to the slop that meta feeds them.
We will know why OpenAI isn't getting investigated.
At least this has been the recent experience of a friend who used libgen and anna's archive to download legal, public domain works!
Property is based on scarcity - if you take my car, I no longer have a car. But if you copy my book, I still have my book. No loss, no theft, just an outdated legal fiction designed to stifle innovation and enrich rent-seeking middlemen. An no, loss of potential sales doesn't count - it's like being able to claim a lottery ticket has real value.
Copyright was never about protecting creators—it’s about locking down ideas, preventing competition, and extracting endless fees. Shakespeare borrowed, tech companies iterate, and science thrives on free exchange. The idea that knowledge should be locked away indefinitely is absurd.
Meta’s mistake wasn’t using the data - it was pretending copyright still matters. AI is exposing the system for what it is: obsolete. The future belongs to those who create without asking permission.
https://www.engadget.com/2015-12-21-peter-sunde-kopimashin.h...
It's obviously absurd to enforce copyright as bytes are copied around instead of as it is used. Training an LLM is a different thing than re-hosting and giving away copies to other people.
If you don't want people to transform your works - keep them private. You don't own ideas.
What's the fuss about LLM training in this thread then?
From the article: Kopimashin, as in Copy Machine.
1) the concept of copyright is as old as the word suggests (copies are the least of our worries going forward - it should be possible to define processes for exploitation of ideas in a fair way)
2) we allow humans to learn from other people's ideas and transform them to commercial products and the same should happen for AIs in the future
3) we have an ill-defined concept of "personally identifying information" which gives people ownership to information that others have created via their own means - there should be better ways to ensure a level of privacy (but not absolute privacy) without overly-broad, nonsensical definitions of what is personally protected information
4) We allow social media and other telecommunications media to arbitrarily censor people's speech without recourse. This turns people's speech to property of the social media companies and imposes absolute power on it. This makes zero sense and is abusive towards the public at large. We need legal protections of speech in all media, not just state-owned media.
What information about me could a corporation create via its own means that would be legally protected but shouldn't be? PII is generally information that a corporation collects. Unless you mean that my cellphone provider creates the association between my name and phone number and should therefore be able to do with it as they please?
If you get a direct quote then you're good with your claim, surely.
Whatever the ruling one thing is for sure, plagiarism is no longer the sincerest form of flattery. The human authors are out for AI blood on this.
They need to make datasets which don’t have this problem or have entities in Singapore train the foundation models within their rules. The latter has a TDM exemption that would let AI’s use much of the Internet, maybe GPL code, licensed/purchased works they digitize, etc. Very flexible.
(imo not in accordance with the Constitution, after absurdities like deciding “limited time” the way mathematicians might define something of some order of infinity)
the alleged social contract was is not functional the way it was intended, and we see who benefits and who loses.
mass dynamic editing for vitriol and profanity occurred while writing this comment in order to remain within site rules
Meta does a lot of stuff I disagree with, but they're usually not just straight breaking the law.
They've thrown away a huge amount of communication to source code commit reinforcement training data as a result. They do it to avoid emails making it into trials like this.
Aren't they obligated by law to keep all internal communication?
If I were younger, I would be livid.
You may be thinking of certain financial institutions where it is a hard requirement, and maybe there are some other regulated industries too that have it.
Companies aggressively protect their own intellectual property but have no qualms about violating the IP rights of others. Companies. Individuals have no such privilege. If you plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers you forfeit your life.
All the sad poor people who might be hurt were already paid. The caterer on your favorite show is not getting residuals. NBC also isn't going to stop making TV shows because that is all they can do. Content creators also existed on the internet long before that was a job. They just did it because they cared about it not for ad money. If you really want to support the artist directly go to a concert or just mail them a check. If you can't actually identify a person who might be hurt, then do not care.
Oh no, that TV show I'll forget about in a year cost me $15/mo instead of $60 of blurays.
I jump in my cars and hit a button and music plays. Almost any music I want. That's amazing.
I'm also not pirating games. I'm not 12 without a job. I have a job. I pay developers for their work. I want more games, like Kingdom Come 3, to come out.
Weird ass comment. You seriously think we're going to put our lives on hold to.. what, fight "digital media"? You think I care about netflix? Or societies use of it? I haven't used netflix in years. I don't know anybody under 40 with a netflix account. Everyone on your end of the pirate spectrum uses debrid nowadays, anyway.
Next you're going to tell people to install the "Black XP Windows" edition to not support Microsoft and they all get malware and their credit cards stolen because they installed some pirated and modified cracked windows. Genius.
MSNBC just cancelled Andrea Mitchells TV show, today, because she brought in no younger audiences. So yes, shows do get cancelled by not being watched.
This comment was upvoted? Hn needs a break. This is some I'm 14 and edgy bullshit that sounds like it belongs on an eastern european piracy forum.
I'm pretty much at the point now where I don't buy the "copyright incentivizes creation" argument any more. Copyright, like advertising, incentivizes creation by enormous corporations, but also like advertising it incentivizes creations that overwhelmingly have little value.
Creative individuals don't need copyright to be incentivized to create—they need a safety net that gives them the freedom to spend time on the creativity that naturally wants to bubble out. If the goal is to encourage creativity, copyright is a lousy and enormously expensive substitute for Universal Basic Income.
This is what Meta tried to do, quietly download and use the data, to do research and advance their LLMs, without trying to establish any legal precedents or pick up fights.
In case anybody here doesn't know, that's a reference to Aaron Swartz, an activist (and Reddit co-founder) that was risking 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine just for downloading a lot of academic papers from JSTOR. He eventually took his life because of the pressure. May his soul rest in peace.
End users, not YouTube employees, right? And they would take things down following DMCA requests and what not, right? So, pretty much following the law?
> Google itself got big by indexing other people's data without compensation
Scraping public websites to build a search index isn't the same as making LLMs that can recreate the source verbatim devoid of even attribution. I do agree there's an argument to be had about the LLM's transformative nature in the end though.
> Spotify's music library was also pirated in the early days
Not any version generally available to the public, and with the copyright holder's permission to do so.
the americans cheated their way to competition,
heck, even before that, the english empire got jumpstarted by stealing gold from the spanish (who were themselves exploiting it away from aztec and other mexican natives)
I'm saying it's business as usual, but also, culture doesn't work like tangible physical widgets so we must stop letting a few steal this boon of digital copying by means of silly ideas like DRM, copyright, patents. all means to cause scarcity
"Brno’s fortunes were changed forever when a young freemason called Franz Hugo Salma set out for England in 1801. He intended to steal the plans for the most modern textile machinery in the world. His crime, the first recorded act of industrial espionage, boosted the competitiveness of Moravian textiles. Soon after smuggling the plans out disguised as a worker, and handing them over to Brno’s fledgling textile industry, Brno became the most important textile centre in the Habsburg empire."
You can even go see some of the original plans in a museum:
"Eleven designs are still preserved in the library of the Rájec chateau. They form a unique set of documents demonstrating both the level of wool processing technology at the turn of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as well as the aims and means of the relatively rare business of industrial espionage at that time."
https://www.gotobrno.cz/en/brno-phenomenon/this-is-brno-kate... https://www.gotobrno.cz/en/place/salm-reifferscheidt-palace/
Cain killed Abel and got away with it!! I can kill someone today too!!!
The issue here is not copyright/patents/etc - the issue is that the law is applied selectively — the issue is that Aaron Schwartz is dead for sharing knowledge with the public and Zuccborg is a billionaire building his torment nexus
The copyright holders then approved their concept, and subsequently Spotify got the rights to offer their service to customers. Everybody won.
I want to know more, please enlighten me (anyone who knows). I read the book "The Spotify Play" and it made it seem like the pirated music was an internal-only thing and not something available to customers. Is that true?
So while it was using pirated media, it was sanctioned by the rights holders for the experiment of building Spotify.
Another interesting note, in the early days of spotify, the app would saturate your upload bandwidth while using it. Given their close ties to utorrent, I always assumed that's how they were affording the bandwidth as well.
Pretty brilliant way to bootstrap I guess; they didn't have to pay for bandwidth or content until they already had contracts in place
Just to point, but the material in question was public domain, so nobody had even a copyrights claim over it.
It's true, and relevant, that Google would feel those consequences much less sharply than Swartz did.
I've spoken to several very wealthy/powerful people and tried to get them to negotiate a large-scale content license with the various publishers that would allow researchers and individuals to access more research in lower-friction ways. None of them (NIH, Schmidt, etc) were really interested.
Apparently he would have gotten away with downloading the JSTOR database if he made it clear that he intended to only publish half of each paper.
The limit is what you can actually get away with, not what the rules say you can get away with, and the system aggressively selects players who recognize this. It's amoral - there is no "ought", only "is". An actor gets punished or not, with absolutely no regard to whether it "should" get punished. One thing is consistent: following the rules as written means you lose.
You can see it in Y Combinator (and other) startups. The biggest ex-startups are things like AirBNB (hotels but we don't follow the rules but we don't get punished for not following them) and Uber (taxis but we don't follow the rules but we don't get punished for not following them).
One way to not get punished for not following the rules is to invent a variation of the game where the rules haven't been written yet. I again refer you to AirBNB and Uber; Omegle also comes to mind, although they didn't monetize.
Viewed in this light, Aaron Swartz's mistake was not the part where he downloaded journal articles, but the part where he got caught downloading journal articles. Shadow library sites are doing the same thing, minus the getting caught. So are Meta and Google and OpenAI. sci-hub is only involved in a lawsuit because it got caught and is now in the stage where it finds out whether it gets punished or not.
Turns out there are 2 simultaneous wars there. One where companies and individuals compete ruthlessly.
And another one where if non profit associations of individuals form, guns come out.
MegaUpload did the same, kim dotcom got raided in his sleep by FBI in New Zealand! So no I don't buy your reductionist argument, there are forces at play that allow companies with founders with the likes of Google to get away with it but not others.
To this day, there are a huge number of videos that show copyrighted content on YouTube; they are usually crappy clips, reversed and with different music playing in the background to avoid automated detection.
I don't understand why you wouldn't just buy copies of the books. Seems like such a relatively inexpensive way to strengthen your legal case.
Or so they think, I think.
Some can steal from stores and see no repercussions.
Some can steal from others and see no repercussions.
Some can violently harm others and see no repercussions.
Some can damage property and see no repercussions.
Some can’t. This world is not right.
What we should have been doing all along is YOLO-ing everything. It's only illegal if you get caught. And if you get big enough before you get caught then the rules never have to apply to you anyway.
Suckers. All of us.
> We include two book corpora in our training dataset: the Gutenberg Project, [...], and the Books3 section of ThePile (Gao et al., 2020), a publicly available dataset for training large language models.
Following that reference:
> Books3 is a dataset of books derived from a copy of the contents of the Bibliotik private tracker made available by Shawn Presser (Presser, 2020).
(Presser, 2020) refers to https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1320282149329784833. (Which funnily refers to this DMCA policy: https://the-eye.eu/dmca.mp4)
Furthermore, they state they trained on GitHub, web pages, and ArXiv, which are all contain copyrighted content.
Surely the question is: is it legal to train and/or use and/or distribute an AI model (or its weights, or its outputs) that is trained using copyrighted material. That it was trained on copyrighted material is certain.
[Touvron et al., 2023] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.13971
[Gao et al., 2020] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.00027
In particular, people often cited the case of authors who had died leaving a family in destitution, and claimed that copyright extension would be a fair way of preventing this, but in most cases the remaining family had never held the copyright; the author had initally sold the reproduction rights to a publisher who had then sat on the work without publishing it. The author, driven into penury, was then induced to sell the copyright to the publisher outright for a pittance. So in such cases a copyright extension only benefited the publisher, and indeed increased their incentive to extort the copyright.
Flippant response I know, but too many people worship at the alter of the job creater and believe these folks are moral upstanding citizens
Could make interesting case law.
Yeah, to perpetuate this system where only those who can afford lawyers get to benefit
What I mean is: when someone is prosecuted for copyright infringement, but Meta isn't, then could the case be put on hold until Meta is found guilty and pays a fine?
Also maybe the fine on the later case would have to be proportional to the prior case. So if Meta pays $1 per infringement, the penalty might be $1 for torrenting something else (which is immaterial and not worth the justice system's time) so pretty much all copyright infringement cases would get thrown out.
It reminds me of how mainstream drug addicts get convicted and spend years in prison, while celebrities get off with a warning or monetary fine.
It's a fundamental part of lawyer training, and if they want to let BigCorp go and bring the hammer down on the little guy, they can make up a hundred reasons for it.
Take for example 675k paid for 31 songs. So 20k a song. If we estimate book to be say 10MB that would 8 million works. So I think reasonable compensation is something along 163 billion. Not even 10 years of net income. Which I think is entirely fair punishment.
The only ethical problem here is that only Meta sized companies can afford to pay the "damages" for such blatant law violations at worst, or the fees of their lawyers at best.
Companies like Meta and OpenAI, however, should definitely have to pay to use the hard work of humans to train their AI.
They will be getting a lot of Frommer Legal letters...
Whether training on AI model on an array of diffentent works, many of which are copyright protected, is itself a copyright violation, in addition to or distinct from any copyright violation that goes on gathering the dataset for training (and separate from any copyright violation in the actual or intended use of the LLM), remains to be resolved as a legal question, and may or may not have a simple yes or no answer (or the same answer under every system of copyright laws globally).
My inclination is that it is probably generally not a violation in US law, but that's not something I am very confident in; how the definitions of copy and derivative work apply to determine if it would be without fair use, and how fair use analysis applies, are not clear from the available precedent.
> But legally, how does using a book to train a LLM differ from a teacher learning from a book and teaching its contents to their pupils.
It is very clear, by looking at how US copyright law is written and even more clear in its history of application, that information stored in brains of people are without exception neither copies nor new works that can be derivative works under US law, and so cannot be infringing, no matter how you gain them. It’s also very clear in the statute itself and the case law that data in media used by artificial digital computers, on the other hand, can constitute copies or derivative works that can be infringing. Even if the process is arguably similar in legally relevant manners, copyright law is critically focussed on the result and whether it is a particular kind of thing which can be infringing, not just the process.
I truly hope that whoever takes the case goes after Meta with 1000 times the pressure that was put on Swartz, but honestly I don't expect much just as the top comment precisly expressed.
And if we are going to be fair please also let's not forget about the other usual suspects, or anyone thinks they are falling behind?
Several EU countries, Switzerland, South Korea, Japan, etc. are viable countries to sue from. Even in Japan which has a law specifically permitting training on copyrighted material you must still obtain it legally-- i.e. you must license it.
Nobody will.
But if you're operating a site called Pirate Bay or something like that and it's not earning billions of dollars, expect countries to chase you across the globe trying to arrest you.
Horse has functionally bolted on this already
I’m guessing slap on wrist despite courts going after individual for a couple of movies torrented pretty hard
At a minimum the starting point of discussion here should be that if life ruining $80,000 per item is an acceptable fine for individuals then why is it not the same for corporations. Which would probably get you a number in the trillions at which point we could have a discussion about reforming this entire system.
But yes realistically slap on wrist is what is going to happen here.
Yes, of course.
It's quite possible that judges realize that if they restrict training data to licensed materials, LLMs will become stupid and China will overtake the US to become the leader in AI, and because that can't happen, they'll make up some reason to make training on unlicensed data legal. It's definitely fair use!
I'm not even joking. Last time the US Supreme Court basically said "Android is too important, we have to declare its use of Java API fair use."
The rules have always seemed different for corporations regardless.
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-settles-lawsuit-meta-m...
So, barring further Might Makes Right shit--which I'm not willing to fully rule out--Trump can't fully shield Zuckerberg et al.
"Ek, who had been the CEO of the piracy platform uTorrent, founded Spotify with his friend, another entrepreneur named Martin Lorentzon. Both-Ek at 23 and Lorentzon 37-were already millionaires from the sales of previous businesses. The name Spotify had no particular meaning, and was not associated with music. According to Spotify Teardown, the company developed a software for improved peer-to-peer network sharing, and the founders spoke of it as a general "media distribution platform." The initial choice to focus on music, the founders said at the time, was because audio files are smaller than video files, not because of a dream of saving music.
In 2007, when Spotify first publicly tested its software, it allowed users to stream songs downloaded from The Pirate Bay, a service for unlicensed downloads. By late 2008, Spotify would convince music labels in Sweden to license music to the site, and unlicensed music was removed. From there, Spotify would take off across Europe and then the world."
https://qz.com/1683609/how-the-music-industry-shifted-from-n...
I think more people, potentially anyways, would feel similar to to this if it applied even somewhat equally.
Instead, companies can seemingly do whatever they please whereas lawyers will send letters to your home for downloading a single episode of game of thrones.
At least you're not calling for jailing all the shareholders....
So in other words, it got big by providing free user traffic to people's websites without asking for compensation?
You generally don't charge the phone book money to include you in it. It's actually the other way around.
IMO part of the reason the SV tech bros are embracing right wing grift culture so publicly now is that this method, which had been serving them well for decades, doesn't really work without the infinite free money lending spigot being wide open.
By the time the cheque comes, your illicit venture either went bust or you built a bilion dollar empire capable of buying the best lawyers and lobbying to walk away clean.
I’m opposed to copyright and pro-aaronsw, but the state did not kill him.
1.8 million people are in United States jails today. It isn't a death sentence, and it is a foreseeable consequence of some ethically-appropriate actions.
Supporting folks spending time in jail is a valuable role in any social movement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbest
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy3piCUPIkc - VICE documentary and visit video. I think it contains an interview with an American woman who suffered from WR Grace and Company's asbestos mining and manufacturing in the USA, she says "they knew, they knew". WRG faced 129,000 personal injury claims and set asude $3 Bn for settling asbestos related lawsuits.
Weird framing given how much value was and is still placed on Google driving traffic to you
Google used to send customers to your site. Now they try to show you the information on their site so that the customer doesn't need to go to your site.
Basically the entire legal system needs to be retooled and rethought for computers.
And the legal system is for humans not computers.
That's how the internet works. If you want private content, you need to put up a gate mechanism of some sort with authentication or other methods of restricting access. Without that, you are literally having your server "serve" the content to whoever asks for it, without restriction or exception, without ToS or meaningful contract or agreements.
You can't have it both ways. "But they didn't know" or other post-hoc claims of innocent people publishing content to the web being misled or confused or abused is infantilizing nonsense.
The web wouldn't have been as amazing and revolutionary and liberating if the fundamental public and open nature of its systems was private and walled off by default.
Your take on YouTube going viral initially over copyrighted content isn't correct, either - it was ease of use and access. It was fairly popular by the time Google bought it, and once it was reachable and advertised by google itself, it exploded, because by that time, everyone had defaulted to using google for search.
Other people corrected your Spotify take.
The reason they pirated is because it is functionally impossible to gain access to the data in any other way. For consumers, there are lots of old shows, music, and other content that aren't accessible, so they turn to piracy. A vast majority of the time, if content is accessible, people will pay and do the technically legal and "right" thing.
Publishers exploit authors and content creators in the name of "platforming" and "marketing" , effectively doing as little as possible to take 90%+ of the value of a product and providing as little as possible to the producer of content or books or music. They get by on technicalities and have captured the legal arena entirely, with any attempt at reform or revolution meeting a messy death at the hands of lawyers and big money publishers.
Screw those people. They lie, cheat, and steal, and somehow have gotten away with fooling the world into thinking they're the good guys.
Copying bits and bytes is not stealing, and the ones trying to shill that narrative are trying to fool as many people as possible into giving them more money without any return of value in kind. I'd download the hell out of a car. Pirate everything.
And in their face, with all the fierce ignorance, broligarchs deny, evade and totally pretend this never happened. The most non open company of all even went to lengths to accuse others of stealing their IP - not theirs to begin with.
Just think of it - why did all major content platforms closed their APIs the day after GPT-2 got the word going…? Cause they knew all this very well - the content is precious and needed. They been doing it all along. Distilling the essence of world’s writing and digital imagery they had no right to.
We have a saying where I come from - no mercy for the chicken, no laws for the millions. I thought it was a local thing at first, it turned is how the world goes. Nothing new under the sun, indeed.
Napster got shut down for widespread enabling of copyright infringement. So did numerous other filesharing startups, including Travis Kalanick's first startup, Scour. Lots of small startups get put out of business all the time for being sued and not having the money to defend themselves.
Likewise, individuals like Donald Trump or Elon Musk get away with all sorts of illegal shit, because they are big enough to shut down the court systems prosecuting them.
Google's genius was in staying under the radar and aligning their incentives with everyone that might dislike them, until they were big enough that they could simply crush anyone that might dislike them.
This is exactly what I immediately thought while reading the article. It almost feels like the legal system only punishes general public, while most of these guys are above it.
> There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
If you do something wrong as "part of your job" then you're typically not held responsible and accountable but the company is (the exceptions being spectacular fraud: Enron, VW diesel).
It's not hard to see how this can go off the rails.
It’s because the legal system is not about justice, it’s about money
Most people can’t afford lawyers or expensive legal battles
On the other hand, individuals and organizations with a lot of money get to weaponize and exploit the legal system to their advantage
“To my friends, anything; to my enemies, the law”
In more general terms, the legal system punishes what can be made a profit or an example when punishing.
Also, I don't think the legal system itself wants to get too much into "big institutions against the work of others", save for the fictional TV representations of smart lawyers and clever arguments, 99.9% of the legal system output is copy/paste.
I think Aaron Swartz went to Harvard, not MIT
Welcome to the modern day aristocracy. Not only what you mentioned, this world is also divided into a group of insider who can get capital from 0 - 2%, while rest of us has a cost of 17%, 22% or 30%?
That's why democracy often feels "failed" in that no change can be achieved because "it's just more of the same". Few Lobbyists representing the interests of a few people have more power than millions voting differently.
"This problem will be solved in the favor of the (party) which has the most money to throw into the problem" (paraphrase mine).
So, yeah.
People often elevate deeply flawed figures to heroic status when those figures seem to challenge authority or "the system." This happens especially with individuals who present themselves as outsiders fighting the establishment, have a compelling personal struggle narrative, or voice grievances that resonate with public frustrations
Trump fits this pattern - his supporters overlook concerning behaviors and statements because they see him as fighting a system they distrust. Like Manning and Swartz, his mental state and fitness are often ignored in favor of the "hero against the system" narrative.
This dynamic creates a feedback loop where legitimate criticism becomes harder to discuss rationally.
For some reason, whenever you're a billionaire or company, things suddenly get so difficult that you can claim that it's impossible to be held accountable for anything. Murder, insider trading, laundering, treason, etc.
OpenAI complained about this, as did Google and everyone else. If your company can't exist without stealing data, then it's not a viable company. Companies don't have a constitutional right to exist.
Wrong.
a) Robots.txt which defines what content you wish to make available to third parties predates every search engine including Google. Web site owners chose to make it available to Google and search engines have respected their wishes despite it not being in their best interest.
b) The difference here is that OpenAI, Meta etc have not even tried to honour the wishes of copyright holders. They just considered everything as theirs.
c) Google grew big because it had no ads, fast interface and PageRank was significantly better. It wasn't because it had the most comprehensive index.
Strong disagree. Since robots.txt is optional and the default is "crawl me as you please", website owners don't "choose to make it available", they just don't choose to make it non-available.
I might well be kidding myself or self-justifying, but I believe internal rewards are at least as important. Some materially successful people are deeply unhappy.
Quibble: The majority of people voted against Trump, or at least not in his favor. He only got a plurality, not a majority.
No it isn't. The actual sucker attitude is copying what they do. You should act morally and with integrity out of respect for yourself. I never had any illusions that large tech companies act with respect towards the law, but it also has nothing to do with me.
Not quite. It's only illegal if you get caught and you are the wrong kind of person.
For the right kind of person not even a pat on the wrist.
Like when Trump said he is “smart” for evading taxes during the presidential debates (IIRC the first ones, not recent ones).
It’s absolutely despicable. Have a moral compass. Treat people fairly. Be nice. Let’s be better than toddlers who haven’t learned yet that hitting is bad, and you shouldn’t do it even if mommy and daddy aren’t in the room.
My wife, just today, told me that she was very upset that I refused to interview and take jobs for things like building weapons, the panopticon, or advertising (two of those are the same thing), which I refuse to do because of my personal morals and ethics. How do I explain to her that I just can't do that, and give her a good reason why we should lose our home and live in one room with her mother because of my brain refusing to work in such industries? I really want to know, so I can explain to her and my son why such things matter, because for some reason they are concrete and foundational in my brain, there is no changing that.
1.) Training on copyright that is publicly available. You write a poem and publish it online for the world to read. That is your IP, no one else can take it an sell it, but they are free to read and be inspired by it. The legalitly of training on this is in the courts, but so far seems to be going in favor of LLMs.
2.) Training on copyright that is not publicly available. These are pretty much pirated works or works obtained by backdoor to avoid paying for them. Your poem is behind a paywall and you never got paid, yet the poem is known by the LLM. This is just straight illegal, as you legally must pay to view the work. However there might be conditions here too like paying for access to an archive and then training on everything in it.
This is distinct from (1) where the content is streamed or only ephemeral/incidental copies are made.
IMO there's a hack about this,
authors can claim that they allow for public use unless it's used for training LLMs. And all of training work would fall under 2 because they would be used against the copyright.
Is a book publicly available? No, you have to purchase it. But once you do, you're legally allowed to let your friends and family and so forth read it too. As long as you don't sell copies of it (the "copy" part of "copyright"), or meaningfully take away the ability for the publisher to make money from sales (so you can't post it for the whole world to see on the internet).
And sure, there are lots of ToS for digital works, but are they actually enforceable? ToS can say you're not allowed to let anyone else read the book you purchased. But no court is going to say you can't lend your Kindle to your friend for them to read it too. Many ToS clauses are flat-out illegal.
Meta will argue that training on books is no different from reading all the books at a friend's house. That as long as Meta isn't reselling or making publicly available the original text, they're in the clear.
Is it truly a violation of copyright when a user hacks out bits and pieces of easily restyled raw data points from a model to look samey? what about if it takes two models? Might be time to accept humans are just cooked in their ability to discern attempts at direct plagiarism - just as it is hard to discern Sky voice from Her voice.
The one who got Hindu Sanskrit books translated in a horrible manner and then claimed: "I have no knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanskrit works. I have conversed both here and at home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia."
This chap will educate us on copyright?
No thanks!
If you reject Macaulay on copyright because he was an imperialist, you can use the exact same logic to reject the arguments of essentially every person who ever lived. Very few humans who ever wrote anything important will perfectly align with your morality, and most will be horribly misaligned in at least one way.
Very nice of you to omit the following sentences of that excerpt, where it proceeds to develop its point on the argument for institution of an English-language based education system on British India. He praised how superior in quantity and quality were the Sanskrit or Arabic corpora, compared to European works, in the lyric/poetry. But that no technical or didactical literature amounted to even the most mundane of the European manuals like those used by then in England humble schools (and it seems completely plausible).
He was a fierce abolitionist. So much for accomplishing the mission of allegedly, judging by comments in this thread, 'deranged imperialist destruction and chaos imposition over the lesser ones'.
I'm not much versed into his speeches/stance on copyright, but I can vouch for the fact that the most honest and well-intended moves (not by him, by other figures) in defence of everyone's intellectual property were done in the same century. From the Twentieth onwards, it has been only twisted for the interest of a select few, and needless to ask where we are today in terms of caring about intellectual property of anybody.
[1] Just saw your other comment where you go on with his nauseating words. One just cannot comprehend that framing the past on the actual status quo is as futile as to not being even wrong, I guess?
> The one who got Hindu Sanskrit books translated in a horrible manner and then claimed: "I have no knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic. But
... Here's what they mean, from ChatGPT."
He was able to sell it because it is something valuable, exactly because of the copyright protections. Regardless of whether author sells the rights or not, he and his family would equally be better off with copyright.
copyright as written serves the interests of publishers who don't create valuable works more than the creators of the work...
also, I don't think that implication is required, but lets pretend the implication is the only reasonable conclusion one could draw. Maybe it does make it acceptable?
If the vast majority of copyright enforcement isn't to protect creators of valuable work, but only serves to enrich those who take advantage of those creators. Then isn't it not just reasonable or acceptable, but ethically required for someone to do everything they can to dismantle the systems they're abusing against the interests of those who are actually improving the world with their creations?
When Metallica sued Napster, for many people the reaction was, "wait I can download music for free?"
Are AI-written books getting published?
If they start out-competing humans, is that bad? According to most naysayers, they can't do anything original.
Are people asking the AI for books? And then hoping it will spit it out a human-written book word for word?
Personally, I strongly believe that the aesthetic skills of humanity are one of our most advanced faculties — we are nowhere close to replacing them with fully-automated output, AGI or no.
LibGen gives you access to a much smaller body of works than either of those. It’s a little more convenient. But the big difference is that it doesn’t compensate the author at all.
Just go to a real library.
2. DRM is built in to most purchased ebooks, which means you can’t consume the book on any device. “Illegal” tools exist to circumvent this.
3. Large ebook stores - like other digital stores - essentially lend you a copy of the book. So when they are forced to pull a book, they’ll pull your access too.
Of course, now that the big players have consumed/archived the entire book dump, they can go ahead and kill it to prevent others from doing the same thing.
> Just go to a real library.
The thrill of waiting a week for a book to arrive or navigating the labyrinthine interlibrary loan system is truly a privilege that many can afford. And who needs instant access to knowledge when you can have the pleasure of paying for shipping or commuting to a physical library?
It's also fascinating that you mention compensating authors, as if the current publishing model is a paragon of fairness and equity. I'm sure the authors are just thrilled to receive their meager royalties while the rest of the industry reaps the benefits.
LibGen, on the other hand, is a quaint little website that only offers access to a vast, sprawling library of texts, completely free of charge and accessible to anyone with an internet connection. I'm sure it's totally insignificant compared to the robust and equitable systems you mentioned.
Your suggestion to "just go to a real library" is also a brilliant solution, assuming that everyone has the luxury of living near a well-stocked library, having the time and resources to visit it, and not having any other obligations or responsibilities. I'm sure it's not at all a tone-deaf, out-of-touch recommendation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#United_States_v._...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Death
While Aaron Swartz was bullied to suicide, these corporations will walk free and make billions. I say give every tech CEO the Swartz treatment, then change the law.
MIT students will get away with breaking bigger rules than community college students will.
If he was acting rationally and came to the conclusion that dying was better than spending X years in jail, he would have committed suicide after sentencing, not before any trial had even happened.
Two wrongs don't make a right. If a law is unjust, then what good is there in continuing to punish people who have broken it, just because other people have been punished in the past?
Either you think the law is just or unjust. If you think it's unjust, I don't possibly see how you think people should be punished for it. Meta wasn't responsible for what happened to Aaron Swartz.
Big corporations are too big, they should just not exist. When you have corporations more powerful than the government of the biggest states, it's a bug, not a feature.
The IP laws may need rethinking. Saying that they should disappear because big corporations are above the law doesn't help, though. First kill the big corporations, then think about fair laws. Changing the law now would not change anything since those corporations are already above the law.
It's not possible to kill big corporations before fair laws, because as you said yourself "corporations are already above the law"
Unfair laws don't apply to big corporations, they only apply to the people opposed to big corporations
It's akin to hamstringing a horse and saying you'll fix it when they win
The only distinction between corporations and governments is one of them are morally bankrupt arbiters of force.
For instance, what if google was still just serving search results w/ ads, and they never expanded that. How would you make them smaller?
I don’t know how you define powerful, but I highly doubt it is at that point.
Nor should big governments.
Nor should big countries, for that matter.
That said, I want them to burn for the right reasons.
Downloading data that should be available to the public is not one of them.
Also, change the law so this is legal for poor meta? smh..
That means lawsuits, prison sentences, and millions in fines. And that's just the piracy part, there's also the lying/fraud part.
Interestingly, a Dutch LLM project was sent a cease and desist after the local copyright lobby caught wind of it being trained on a bunch of pirated eBooks. The case unfortunately wasn't fought out in court, because I would be very interested to see if this could make that copyright lobby take down ChatGPT and the other AI companies for doing the same.
So a copyright warning letter in the mail from their ISP? Maybe someone should tell them about VPNs...
- Seed the torrent and publicly promote piracy pushing lawmakers.
- Contribute with digitisation and open access like Google did in the past.
- Make the part of their dataset that was pirated publicly accessible.
- Fight stupid copyright laws. I can't believe that copyright lasts more than 20 years. No field moves that slowly, and there should be tighter limits on faster moving fields.
You mean Electronic Frontier Foundation? https://www.eff.org/issues/innovation
It's incredibly rare to find people who hold ideals that are detrimental to their own life.
You can counter by insisting that these "altruistic" behaviors are simply less directly but still in the altruist's interest. I would entirely agree.
For the record, I think the consequence was grossly disproportionate to the action.
Yes, I remember that case. I do think a hefty fine can be sufficient here though. Meta has been paying out court ordered fines for years, none of which dent their growth much. And current models are trained on those models + datasets are scrubbed more vigorously now so future rehashes of this shouldn't be an issue. Also, most data online has already been hoovered up, according to Ilya the former Chief Scientist of OpenAI, so this will likely not pop back up again.
But good point, courts are often more practical given the law than we perceive them to be.
Do not forget the first law passed by a new nation in which every citizen has the right to burn trees and produce potassium a critical mineral in gunpowder. That nation was either Greece or America, i forget which one.
In the Western civilizations, when we are stealing copyrighted material and patents we are not messing around. I remember when the Byzantine empire tried to steal secrets of silk production also from Chinese, that was so much fun. Great times we lived in the past, even greater now!
Between that and pihole I see very few ads. Being out and watching a yt video is shocking with how many ads there are - and what type.
So, no, not necessarily.
There's lots of content out there. Most of it is noise. People forget because they're only ever exposed to an aggressively curated fraction of it.
I'll refrain from value judgments on the above - but for heaven's sake, we're on a site called "Hacker News." We should understand that a machine like this could turn on any one of us in an instant for any reason.
There should be a problem with stuff obtained through illegal means, even if having that stuff is in principle legal. In this case, copyrighted material.
Obviously they would argue that having the data is only a consequence of the download part, and that part is legal. What I see is that these situations are always complicated, and if you're rich enough, you get to litigate the complications and come out with a slap on the wrist or maybe even clean hands, while if you are an ordinary citizen, you can't afford to delve into the complexities and get punished.
These days I'm starting to give up on the whole concept of the legal system being fair. They're not even pretending anymore.
I remember using Google the day it went public and it had no ads which made it unique compared to Altavista.
A story in which we are the hero, in which we are not mortal, in which we are important, in which people care about us, in which we are intelligent and our perceptions rarely fail us, in which our life has a meaning and also in which the social game we play is determined, or at least influenced, by some just principles. We would despair if we were aware of the full extent of our meaninglessness and powerlessness.
I believe that it is the core reason why we love to believe that God/Nature is good, that the king is legitimate and that the laws are fair.
The poets write laments about such false ages. Prophecies were written about such ages thousands of years ago.
The cycles are larger than us all.
One stable insight is that the chaos breeds possibility, and thus hope. In the meantime, however…
It's even possible to pretend to seed whilst not transferring anything, just to boost your ratio on a private tracker.
That's the protocol we're talking about.
Did anyone, young or old, want to watch an 80 year old stumble over her words, lose her train of thought, and speak so painfully slow? She had built up connections over her long career but was basically unwatchable. The worst part of a Kamala presidency would have been her on the news and not in retirement.
Reading comprehension is a lost art nowadays.
I was born in the 90s. So definitely alive before YouTube and Spotify albeit as a teenager rather than an adult. I guess you're right I'm not familiar with the world of Sony Walkman, Blockbuster, and IBM PC. But I definitely remember dial-up modems, CDs, Windows 95 and XP. Technology has improved most aspect of my life better since then. (maybe minus all the ads + dopamine slot machines part...)
There are millions of great arguments why antibiotics made the world a better place, I'm yet to hear one of YT.
Also google cache allows users to get a copy of your site without visiting your site.
Why can they republish your data while we cannot? Why do we have to opt-out?
And then you might ask, if he wanted a trial, why did he kill himself? Obviously no one knows what was going through his head when he did it. He left no note. But the prospect of being locked in a cell until he was an old man probably had something to do with it.
You can certainly argue it was his own fault for not pleading down, but even if that's your view, that doesn't absolve the prosecutor. Ortiz has a lot of blame in this too, and the fact she still hasn't acknowledged it over a decade later speaks volumes to the kind of person she is.
"A federal prosecutor's job is to jail you regardless of whether it is for downloading a file from a server or for trafficking in humans, and they will come at you with the same vigor regardless of the crime."
You have to be malicious to put forward this statement in the current environment. Or you are so propagandized you think it's true? Either one is very frightening
Schwartz was a research fellow at Harvard. Really think he would've been able to continue?
Whether you can train your LLM on it is a very interesting question.
I've personally never been in favor of punishing people for downloading (or seeding) things.
It recently added a bunch of copyrighted journals. It didn't have any of those at the time.
But just because the scale and intention are different, does not mean we cannot compare both cases. They are not equal, far from it. But they are compareable.
as a constructive criticism, you might want to reconsider your interpretation of
>"Remembering Aaron Swartz in this moment" -> Which was arguably more innocent — scientific papers.
As in, both hold some degree of illegality (objectively), so when pointed that "he is guilty of some degree" is due to the jurisdiction laws (broken or not) regardless of societal/moral values that the context may apply.
perhaps a better answer would be to point that he shouldn't be punished for those actions.
> This quotation is often incorrectly attributed to Francis M. Wilhoit:
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
> However, it was actually a 2018 blog response by 59-year-old Ohio composer Frank Wilhoit, years after Francis Wilhoit's death.
The irony must have been lost on him.
This means that it's not legal to download a rip of e.g. a CD that was uploaded without consent, even if you own a copy.
(This exception to the general right to make copies for private use was added in 2005 to make downloading illegal -- previously, only uploading was infringing.)
I would assume just the act of downloading this content was illegal in the relevant US jurisdictions as well.
What do you think copyright law(suits) would do if a regular person made copies of every book and movie and song they saw, placing the duplicate media in a room of their house?
Citation?
There’s a difference between an intentional act, an accident, and an accident due to extreme neglect and our laws reflect that.
The lesson here is do criminal activities through company, so that there are chances that you can escape from it.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/dec/08/bhopals-trage...
[1] https://www.practicalecommerce.com/Search-Engines-Indexing-a...
[2] https://www.alrc.gov.au/publication/copyright-and-the-digita...
Fundamentally we’re built for small group survival, so playing nice and sharing resources increases your odds for survival. That’s why we care about others, in an evolutionary perspective.
> In reality, it seems like humans are just a bunch of animals, and the only important thing is survival.
At the end of the day, yes we’re animals. But we also have built hugely complex societies and think about philosophy etc.
Throwing away all morality and just doing whatever you can get away with is like being an animal. It strips out humanity.
And personally I’d urge you to find some places you’d want to interview for that align with your morals. If your wife, or anyone, asks you to compromise your morals then try bringing home the consequences to something they care about.
For example, won’t build weapons? Ask “Would you be ok if I worked for X, and my work resulted in the deaths of children?”
At this point, one can very well expect that working for X (as in 'X, the website formerly known as Twitter') will MOST SURELY result in the deaths of children.
Sorry, couldn't resist the comedic opportunity.
Overall humans play pretty nice, all things considered. If you get sick someone will help you, if you lose your job you can fall back on assistance. Hell, even the fact you HAVE a job is a privilege granted to you.
Other animals don't do that. They eat their young, because they feel like it. Without the will and kindness of other humans, a fact that we take so for granted we fail to recognize it as "society", most of us wouldn't live 10 days. That's not an exaggeration either - check out infant mortality statistics throughout human history.
Best advice is to communicate in writing the most likely risk and threat scenarios, with as much data or extrapolated data as possible. When the security flaws are later discovered, that is data you can refer to.
From what I read, this is what Zoom was like early on. They had amateur hour security and then when s*t hit the fan they beefed it up and retained a security team. I guess you could say it worked for them?
What did Aaron Swartz do that was illegal?
Standard Oil, AT&T, the railroads, all thought they were above the law, for good reason, but they were all still broken.
Not going to happen for 4 years at least.
Approved by enough popular vote to attain plurality. I'll take your quibble as a cute fixation with correctness when it comes to statistics, and not as it otherwise tends to manifest.
Cheers.
https://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/spotify-washington-lo...
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/issues?...
Hardly anyone had any issue with Google search until the time when news media screwed themselves over by going all in on ads, overdoing it, then trying to bring back the paywall, only to realize no one is actually browsing their sites but instead relies on Google to find specific articles. All kinds of legal and technical nonsense started happening (and then Google improved the blurbs under search results and added the "answer box", leading publishers big and small to collectively lose their minds...).
Big corps tend to be extremely conscientious of the the law. The law may not be ideal, but they tend to be hyper aware of it and have lawyers to ensure it. Small companies on the other hand are the wild fucking west, and tend to be overflowing with "turn a blind eye to that".
What big corps love is regulation that is expensive for small shops to overcome. They can drop $500k on a product cert no problem, be legally in the clear (and graciously compliant!), while making it near impossible for small guys to compete.
* an AI model is not a backup of the contents of all of the books in the sense that it would preserve their contents or similar such it might e.g. be useful for future generations
* Meta has (allegedly) been unfairly benefiting / profiting off of the copyrighted work of others by illegally reproducing copies of their work. Not just in the AI model sense[1], but actually (allegedly) downloading them directly from pirate repositories in a way that isn't straightforwardly fair use and even uploading some amount of this pirate data in return.
I feel like the parent commenter may have been making the typical argument for preservation of copyrighted materials, and I'm amenable to it... when it's regular people or non-profits doing that work, in a way that doesn't allow them to benefit unfairly or profit off of the hard work of others (or would be connected to such a process in some way).
Plaintiffs allege that Meta didn't just do all this, but also talked about how wrong it was and how to mitigate the seeding so they might upload as little as possible. So no matter how you slice it they allegedly 1) knew they were doing something at least a little bit wrong and 2) took steps to prevent the process that might otherwise have preserved the copied materials for the public interest.
And I feel like you probably knew all this, but maybe I'm missing something.
1: the typical argument wherein the model wouldn't exist without the ingested data, a lot of it is still in there, it is of course a derivative work and the question is really how derivative is it and what part of the work can they claim is their own contribution
Fuck this sounds familiar right now
But that would be a major misunderstanding. So no.
Obviously yes. Who have they been fighting to avoid invasion exactly?
>Fuck this sounds familiar right now
Maybe you read it in a history textbook.
The past doesn’t vanish because of what Rome and its inheritors accords as history. Some of us have long memories.
It is particularly a prescient notion because I happen to be living in Canada. If you’ve read the news you should understand what I’m saying.
I don't get it. All these companies took copyrighted data when they were tiny grew to be large, they still do that now. Google and OpenAI don't send these letters. They're not the copyright holders.
I have no idea what argument you're trying to make. Corporations bad?
Right. I'm not saying they do?
>I have no idea what argument you're trying to make.
I thought my point (not really an argument) was pretty clear, sorry.
"Rules for thee, but not for me" is the point. Where "thee" is individuals and "me" is corporations. (My comment was general commentary, not specific to Meta, Google, OpenAI, LLMs, or the article)
Right now "loose restrictions" seems to apply to corporations only. More people might be in favor of looser restrictions if it also applied to individuals, not just corporations.
I'm not sure how else to reword my comment more than that. It wasn't really meant to be too deep, and it wasn't intended to be argumentative.
Workarounds with a VPN are great and all, but they are a band-aid on a systemic problem.
(You are not immune, by the way, if your VPN company is subject to a subpoena and isn't one of very few actually no-log services)
In high school/university in the 00s, everyone casually pirated things. In college people passed around a USB drive with all of the books needed for our degree program. People in the dorms traded music collections with 10s of thousands of songs. Tellingly, Apple advertised that iPods could store 10,000 songs, which approximately zero people could afford to buy legitimately. If anything, the consequences for piracy have gone down since then, but streaming is convenient enough and phone storage/UX is hobbled enough that people pay.
In any case, I think the other poster is right that companies flouting copyright law is a good thing. It stops us from pretending that it's helpful for the little guy, making it easier to argue for abolition or vastly reducing the length. That they did it to build an open model is even better: it shows directly the kinds of benefits copyright is taking from us. We should be looking to scan every book out there to build better training sets (and better indexed search into scholastic datasets; at this point all of Anna's Archive only costs a little over $11k in raw storage, which puts it into "affordable as an upper middle class home library" territory. In another few years, it may be affordable to nearly everyone. Better ML models could help here with better compression as well), but copyright law restricts use of works dating back to a time before electrification was widespread. Obviously they're an evil company in general, but llama was an actual good deed from them.
- parents: they wanted a child and now they have to take care of it, it's not a selfless act at all
- social workers: are paid to pretend to care. Often they genuinely do care, but this isn't altruism, it's a job
- most academics: I see you haven't met many academics. Altruistic (and selfless) are not terms I would use to describe them. The majority is very much in it for themselves...
- food banks, charity in general: very true, some charity do strive on unpaid volunteers, that is altruism
- most workers in most businesses: okay now you're getting ridiculous...
Social work is a very low paid existence and most of the social workers I know could easily have earned more elsewhere which they are pained to know but persist through regardless because they care more for living in a world with less total suffering even at the cost of their own.
I earned my MSc from the University of Edinburgh and interacted thoroughly with academics there and in the process of getting there. I know many people with their PhDs and have had personal friendships with professors, postdocs, and other researchers. I would agree that academic incentive structure have been made deeply dysfunctional and delusion abounds. Also that defection is common. I have known some of those evil actors (e.g. Sharon Oviatt) so I don't deny their existence.
The very premise of business is that it takes a profit from the excess efforts of labor. I'm not the ridiculous sort that fails to recognize that often workers productivity is both made possible and enhanced by the accumulated coordination and structure of firms and owners should capture some of that value. However, increasingly research is showing that the advantages of our society are being captured by firms. Meanwhile, too many owners are failing to responsibly reinvest in the population and have made religions out of not fostering true growth.
My claim is that multiple cultural norms live side-by-side and I'm trying to help you and others realize that different options are plausible and more advantageous. The cooperators learn self preservation and hiding while they are also harvested while and beyond doing so. My speculation is that the expanded belief holding of perspectives like yours decreases the size of that population which will be a downward spiral of inefficiency and impoverishment. I expect the bottom will fall out viciously if it gets to that.
My spending time on this conversation is altruism, what is it for you?
It’s like the idea that most BitTorrent users are just using it to share free software and Creative Commons media. (See the screenshots on every BitTorrent client’s website.) It would definitely be helpful if it were true, but everyone knows it’s just wishful thinking.
Academics are huge users of LibGen for academic books from the entire past century and beyond. It's infinitely more convenient to instantly get a PDF you can highlight, than wait weeks for some interlibrary loan from an institution three states away.
Just because the majority of people might be downloading Harry Potter is irrelevant.
Maybe also get Google to update their docs: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
“While Google won't crawl or index the content blocked by a robots.txt file”
They will show the URL if someone else has linked to it. But the content itself is not indexed.
If you have specified in your robots.txt that you do not want the page(s) or directories ingested then only the url is indexed (if it is linked from another page). It does prevent the public display of the content of a page and creation description/summary.
Have you ever submitted an ILL request? It’s extremely simple. Many library systems even integrate with WorldCat, so submitting a request for any book just takes a few clicks.
I’m mostly speaking about people in the US. Every single county in the entire country has a public library. Almost all of them have ILL.
I think equity is a fair argument for the existence of services like LibGen in many parts of the world, but the reality is that almost everyone using a book piracy sites in a first-world country is using it to pirate an in-print book that they just don’t want to go to the trouble of borrowing or buying.
I would certainly assume so. It's incredibly obvious that's what you would want to do from a legal standpoint.
> If only one employee was also seeding ... that could be a very interesting case.
The torrenting wouldn't be done casually by employees acting on their own. And it's not like multiple employees are doing it simultaneously, unsupervised, on their personal computers.
This is part of an official project. They'd spin up a machine just to download the torrent, being careful to disable seeding.
This is Meta. They have lawyers involved and advising. This isn't a teenager who doesn't fully understand how torrenting works.
> This is part of an official project. They'd spin up a machine just to download the torrent, being careful to disable seeding.
From the article:
> "Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right," Nikolay Bashlykov, a Meta research engineer, wrote in an April 2023 message, adding a smiley emoji. In the same message, he expressed "concern about using Meta IP addresses 'to load through torrents pirate content.'"
You also claim they would be "careful to disable seeding" but we know they did in fact seed (and anyone who uses private trackers knows they couldn't get away with leeching for very long before being kicked off):
> Meta also allegedly modified settings "so that the smallest amount of seeding possible could occur," a Meta executive in charge of project management, Michael Clark, said in a deposition.
For me the annoying part is that people vote for a guy because of a couple heavily advertised issues, ignoring all the other plans or the fact that he might not keep his word. Then they are unhappy that things "fail" for them.
I'd argue that, even if some change does happen in the US. Most change (see healthcare, military spending, etc) won't happen because big money will beat the majority of the populace every time.
While I hope iterative improvement is the way, I think there are people that have it (or feel) so bad (due to various reasons) that they would take a 50% chance to die for the chance to live better.
The charismatic populists are not supported only by people that are well off, without any worry (neither in US, nor in Europe). (ex: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1535295/presidential-ele...)
We need to both reform the laws and enforce them. Otherwise...
>The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
The one that always comes to mind for me is the boxing controls from Fight Night games. It pains me a little every time I play a game where pugilistic battles come down to smash 1 or 2 buttons.
Yes, the legal system is for humans, but we can use technology to improve the system for humans, so it's faster, better and more fair, because humans aren't perfect, and now we have technology to be better than the system create a long time ago. You don't think the legal system should run on pens and paper right? Adapting to typewriters, was a benifit to the system?
Well, video on demand, live streaming, and things like LLMs can also make the system better for humans.
(Even the okay-quality merch is a waste, since for most artists I'd want to support, I don't identify with them enough to display that stuff, so it's again just buying to put away and eventually throw away.)
What I want more than anything is for bands to just sell me a damned CD. I've lost track of how many times an artist I want to support doesn't release their music on CD. I'd even settle for DRM-free flacs, if it costs less than a CD.
High quality sheet music would be cool. Lindsey Stirling is the only artist I can think of that does that though. Rasputina used to at one point.
I live in New Orleans, that one of the few place where is see artists in the street living from their art. Paying rent by playing music.
None of them have a 360 deal. And their is hundred of them just in New Orleans.
The other was to make a quick buck.
I know which has earned my respect more.
But if you don't think something should be illegal to begin with, why do you want to see someone punished? Regardless of motive? If you think it should be allowed, then it should be allowed period, regardless of whether it was to make a quick buck or for civil disobedience. Right?
I totally get who you respect more. What I don't get is "give every tech CEO the Swartz treatment" first. If you don't think what they did should be illegal, then there's just no justification for that.
Meta is systematically abusing copyright law for personal profit, appropriating the labor of hundreds of thousands of authors to line their own pockets without contributing anything back. That free-riding is anti-social behavior, a betrayal of the social contract. A society that permits that without censure isn't going to keep having people create for very long: who is going to create just so billionaires can get richer, with nothing in it for them?
Especially not when the same billionaires sue people for violating copyright of _their_ software. Hypocrisy in service of exploitation and greed is especially noxious.
At the same time, copyright laws are written to benefit those billionaires, keeping our mythology in private hands long past our lifetimes. Put copyright back to thirty years, strip all business methods and software patents (which should never have been a thing in the first place): then Meta will have plenty of content for their LLMs _and_ it's software will start coming out of copyright ten years from now, making an actual contribution to human knowledge instead of just pillaging it.
The central tenet of conservativism is that there is a group the law protects but does not bind and a group the law binds but does not protect. This is what Meta is doing.
They could have gone and lobbied to loosen copyright legislation. Heck, they could have gone through a DMCA exception process, which doesn't even take a new law. Instead, they figure they are powerful enough that society doesn't apply to them.
If we let them, we're suckers.
If I go to the bookstore, buy the book, make a scan, and train an LLM with it, how would you enforce your license as an author? The customer never knew that he shouldn’t have been allowed to train LLMs.
Edit: I think I misunderstood the original comment, I thought the idea was to sell books and restrict use for LLM training. If we’re only talking about stuff that’s publicly released, the restriction should be possible.
On the other hand, you are interested in why the status quo isn't an accident and what we would need to do to accomplish those things, I recommend reading Reid Hoffman's book "Blitzscaling" side-by-side with Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson's book "Winner-Take All Politics": you can see the same dynamics presented in two very different lights.
Or, just to follow it through, let's say "WidgetBoss LLC" makes a new Widget that every single human has to have, they become the biggest company ever by making one widget. What will you do to make them smaller? Why?
I have a big problem with Google & Meta, and I can understand arguments about those companies. But not just "big companies" as a generality.
But that's how everyone speaks now. "Literally every billionaire is evil and exploiting blah blah blah"
> "Literally every billionaire is evil and exploiting blah blah blah"
Nope. Not every billionaire is evil and exploiting blah blah blah. But nobody deserves to be a billionaire, period.
> let's say "WidgetBoss LLC" makes a new Widget that every single human has to have, they become the biggest company ever by making one widget
Which hasn't happened because, obviously, it is not possible to become the biggest company ever by making something trivial.
It is not possible to promote your product by putting it at the top of the search results if you don't own the search engine.
It is not possible to get statistics about popular products in your webstore, copy them and put them at the top of the search results if you can't own both the webstore and the products.
It is not possible to force everybody to use your email provider in order to use their smartphone if you don't own both the email provider and the smartphone OS.
etc.
https://github.com/slundi/RatioUp
https://github.com/anthonyraymond/joal
The smallest amount of seeding possible would be metadata, presumably not subject to copyright.
If I write a really popular book, I don't want Hollywood to make it into a movie without compensating me just because they waited a few years
> If I write a really popular book, I don't want Hollywood to make it into a movie without compensating me just because they waited a few years
I genuinely don't understand this. Even at a decade copyright, pretty much anybody who was going to buy the book and read it has already done so. It costs you virtually nothing in sales, and society benefits from the resulting movie.
Your goal is to deprive everyone of having a movie, because someone who isn't you is going to make some money that was never going to you anyways? Your goals for copyright appear to be a net negative to the system that enforces copyright, which begs the question why should the system offer protection at all?
If the movie can be made then the book can be printed and sold by any publisher, under the current system. It creates a race to the bottom on the price of the book as soon as the copyright duration is done. Perhaps extending "fair use" stuff could allow one and not the other.
Copywrite expiring in 20 years doesn't mean access is democratized. Publishers would likely keep the price the same, but instead is the author getting a cut, they just take everything.
Besides. The public isn't owed the fruits of my labor for free.
They achieve the same, lock down knowledge and art.
> If I write a really popular book, I don't want Hollywood to make it into a movie without compensating me just because they waited a few years
If it was good enough maybe they wouldn't risk waiting and having someone else win the 10yr race.
There's just too much stuff that won't make any more money locked behind laws that pretend they magically would.
I do believe that large companies should be taxed to help improve society. This law was not the right way to do it.
"Intellectual property" is an abomination of a term because it conflates 3 separate mechanisms with differing goals, pretending that they're related in any meaningful sense.
Patents protect a process. Trademarks protect identity. Copyright protects knowledge. Disparate mechanisms for disparate goals.
Not at all. I am amazed by how badly copyright is understood.
You can buy a physics book, learn about physics from it, and use that knowledge somewhere else. That's totally legal, an copyright doesn't prevent you from doing that at all.
The idea of people owning information is really beyond comprehension for me. There’s no patent for ideas, only for mechanisms or implementations.
Besides we’re already tossing world’s knowledge in our palms, all the copy shit seems so irrelevant.
I’m not against closed source or keeping trade secrets. But once a story becomes public it should be accessible at no cost or else we get where we are atm.
On the contrary I would argue that this is precisely why you SHOULD NOT take his opinion on copyright. One of the main outcomes of imperialism/colonization is denigrating/destroying/appropriating works of art, literature with the primary goal of subjugation, subversion and thereupon replacement of native culture/traditions/institutions. I did not quote the other half of his nauseating take but I'll post it nevertheless:
"[...] And I certainly never met with any Orientalist who ventured to maintain that the Arabic and Sanscrit poetry could be compared to that of the great European nations. But when we pass from works of imagination to works in which facts are recorded, and general principles investigated, the superiority of the Europeans becomes absolutely immeasurable. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say, that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England. In every branch of physical or moral philosophy, the relative position of the two nations is nearly the same."
Which is irrelevant to the question of whether copyright law within the country of England and within English culture is beneficial or not.
It is the nature of racism that it bypasses rational thought—it does not follow that because someone is racist they therefore don't have anything valuable to say on loosely related topics. Someone can see clearly about copyright when thinking about English authors while treating non-English authors as strictly inferior.
These kinds of contradictions are to be expected when racism is involved, because racism inherently lives in the lizard brain (occasionally justified by post hoc rationalizations). Someone's arguments about an issue touching only their own tribe will tend to be more rational than those that touch on other tribes, and you'll miss out if you assume the rationality is going to be correlated and dismiss all arguments accordingly.
It is irrelevant from your POV because you don't see anything wrong in IP violations when it comes to Knowledge being taken out of India, credit removed and then reproduced in European Languages, including English, as if it was some novel discovery. So those who indulged in this specifically (I am not talking about current British folk but people like Macaulay) should not be giving sermons on Copyright Law.
To give you an analogy:
Using the same logic, you would have to give CCP a pass and say they did not "steal IP from the US" because Copyright Law in China specifically applies only within the Country of China and within Chinese culture. Surely you wouldn't learn about specifics of Copyright Law from the CCP I presume (yes they do have a Copyright Law that applies internally in China). If that is the case, then the same argument applies to the British Empire as well.
> it does not follow that because someone is racist they therefore don't have anything valuable to say on loosely related topics
It is not irrelevant considering many of the same Sanskrit scriptures were translated by Arabs, which were then translated by Europeans, whose concepts then went on to become foundations of Modern Science. So when it comes to Copyright, the least one can do is not wipe out credits. And least one can do is not take advice on Copyright from such people.
I'm not saying we need to choose between a broader humanism or rationality necessarily, but I just think it feels a little archaic Enlightenment-era thinking to reduce it down this particular way. Or just you know, its all Spock and no Kirk!
I find an acceptable tradeoff for now is, if I want to do deep research for myself, opening myself up to this sort of mushy subjective stuff is actually really important for making deep, objectively correct observations. Especially if the goal is to steelman, not strawman, the opponent's argument.
Otherwise, this kind of worst-case analysis thinking is fine. It's a logically sound conclusion, it's just kind of unsatisfying because we can't make stronger claims.
How do we decide when to make this tradeoff and for what things? Uhh.... idk. For me though, there has been value in using both kinds of thinking before though.
On a public forum, worst-case analysis is probably fine because the discussion ain't that deep. Also probably 90% of comments are made within the intention of a "gotcha" and not actually for discussion.
Basically, I totally agree with this, it's just that I've seen one too many online forums devolve into thought-terminating cliches using "rationality" as the basis. Here, I think it's totally justified to take this line... I instinctively had the same reaction upon reading GP's post (but then you could argue it's tone policing... and ahh we're off to the good ol' internet debate race spiral)
Copyright is supposed to be a societal benefit, or there's little reason for society to spend money on enforcing it. That's where we currently are, and I think why there's such a strong reaction to copyright currently. We pay to protect the works and then we pay again to buy them. They become free when they're so culturally irrelevant that nobody wants them even for free. The costs of enforcement are socialized and the benefits are privatized.
At some point, copyright is going to have to provide more back to society or society will get tired of paying to enforce it.
i think when chatGPT was around version 2 or 3, i had extracted almost 2 pages (without any alteration from the original) with questions that considered the author from this book here, https://www.amazon.com/Loneliness-Human-Nature-Social-Connec...
now it's up to you to think this is okay... but i bet you are no author
You got less than 1% of a book... from an author who has passed away... who wrote on a research topic that was funded by an institution that takes in hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants each year...
I'm not an author (although I do generate almost exclusively IP for a living) and I think this is about as weak a form of this argument as you possibly make.
So right back at ya... who was hurt in your example?
As a thought experiment, say that the idea someday becomes mainstream that there is no reason to read any book or research publication because you can just ask an AI to describe and quote at length from the contents of anything you might want to read. In such a future, I think it's reasonable to predict that there would be less incentive to publish and thus less people publishing things.
In that case, I would argue the "hurt" is primarily to society as a whole, and also to people who might have otherwise enjoyed a career in writing.
Having said that, I don't think we're particularly close to living in that future. For one thing I'd say that the ability to receive compensation from holding a copyright doesn't seem to be the most important incentive for people to create things (written or otherwise), though it is for some people. But mostly, I just don't think this idea of chatting with an AI instead of reading things is very mainstream, maybe at least in part because it isn't very easy to get them to quote at length. What I don't know is whether this is likely to change or how quickly.
and one thing is publishing a paper with jargon for academics, another is to simplify the results for the masses. there's a huge difference between finishing a paper and a book
Few entities can do that (I can't).
Most people are forced to work for companies that sell their work to the higher bidder (which are the very entities mentioned above), or ask them to use AI (under the condition that such work is accessible to the AI entities).
It's obviously a vicious circle, if people can't oppose their work to be ingested and repackaged by a few AI giants.
A) checking each output against a regex representing a hundred years of literature would be expensive AF no matter how streamlined you make it, and
B) latent space allows for small deviations that would still get you in trouble but are very hard to catch without a truly latent wrapper (i.e. another LLM call). A good visual example of this is the coverage early on in the Disney v. ChatGPT lawsuit:
[1] IEEE: https://spectrum.ieee.org/midjourney-copyright
[2] reliable ol' Gary Marcus: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/things-are-about-to-get-a-...
Also I happily buy lots of books from people like Cory Doctorow and nostarchpress -because- their books are public and I want to support authors that value the freedom of their readers.
Books that are DRM or copyright protected however, I buy used paper copies or pirate because why would I financially support people that do not respect my freedom?
Are you sure they are free?
Look, let's be honest - what gives you or others the right to steal from others?
But it’s also possible that copyright as a concept, or in its current implementation, is bad and unjust.
I’m sure some copyright holders would like nothing more than to see an argument that elevates copyright violation to the level of murder, morally or legally. But I think it’s more akin to jaywalking - violating an unjust law that mostly shouldn’t exist.
a world without copyright means those with the largest advertising budgets will reap nearly all the rewards from new IP created by small artists. BigCorp Inc. can just sit around and wait for talented musicians to post something interesting on soundcloud, for example, then just have their in-house people copy it and push it out to radio and streaming platforms via their massive ad budgets and favorable relationships for getting new material onto the waves immediately. meanwhile the original artist gets nothing.
the position of advocating against all copyright protections at all only makes sense for people who are already wealthy enough that they don't need proceeds from their art to survive.
If copyright disappeared altogether, most smaller artists would be just fine because they have loyal fans and adjacent monetization strategies.
See: Grateful Dead. They did just fine despite encouraging infringement of IP.
IMO copyright mostly serves to protect the very biggest artists and companies, not the small ones.
This makes it sound like the majority of people produce more content than they consume.
The reality is that 99.99999% of people do not produce "art", let alone with the intention of living of it.
Whatever harms you might envision for the tiny minority who do want to try living off copyright, those concerns are dwarfed by the benefits for the rest of us.
Further, not many people who are serious about reform are literally "advocating against all copyright" A reform that simply curbed the duration to something less insane than 150 years would resolve much of what makes copyright bad, even if it continued to exist.
וְעַתָּ֖ה אָר֣וּר אָ֑תָּה מִן־הָֽאֲדָמָה֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר פָּצְתָ֣ה אֶת־פִּ֔יהָ לָקַ֛חַת אֶת־דְּמֵ֥י אָחִ֖יךָ מִיָּדֶֽךָ׃ Therefore, you shall be more cursed than the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.
It seems to be a consistent direction of history's arc that the people who make it easy to create and innovate get ahead.
The crime is downloading and copying and distributing copyrighted materials! Not creating the LLM! Get the crime right
Uh, no, I didn't say that.
There's no point in writing to you if no matter what I say you're going to just make up stuff you think I believe and respond to that instead of to my actual words.
I guess the way I’d put it is that if you can only get some particular show through one company, that company gets to treat you shitty, cause where else are you gonna go. Torrenting, even just widespread knowledge of torrenting, gives the customer more leverage.
Oh, but corporations were the primary beneficiaries, right?
Well, corporations are the primary beneficiaries of this too from a financial perspective. A vanishingly small percentage of people will run, let alone train these models themselves— it’s almost exclusively used to make commercial services that directly compete against the people that made the initial ” data“. But, the vanishingly small percentage of people that directly utilize this stuff for non-commercial use frequent echo chambers like this that make them think more regular people benefit directly. And the companies that are competing directly with creatives and intellectuals using their stolen work employ a whole lot of people here, directly or not.
The distinction between a reason and a justification gets pretty difficult to distinguish the closer you are to the group benefiting from injustice.
China needs to respect the American trademark system!
"Own nothing" is bad, but so is "access and share anything." Both positions are too extreme.
Whether the shop makes a scan should not affect you as the buyer of the actual book. What does the scan have to do with you?
Whether the author learns about that scan and perhaps training of some LLM using the scan or not, does not change the legality of it.
there is no reason to read any book or research publication because you can just ask an AI to describe and quote at length from the contents of anything you might want to read
You summarize well how we aren't there yet, but I'd say the answer to your final implied question is "not likely to change at all". Even when my fellow traitors-to-humanity are done with our cognitive AGI systems that employ intuitive algorithms in symphony with deliberative symbolic ones, at the end of the day, information theory holds for them just as much as it does for us. LLMs are not built to memorize knowledge, they're built to intuitively transform text -- the only way to get verbatim copies of "anything you might want to read" is fundamentally to store a copy of it. Full stop, end of story, will never not be true.
In that light, such a future seems as easy to avoid today as it was 5 years ago: not trivial, but well within the bounds of our legal and social systems. If someone makes a bot with copies of recent literature, and the authors wrote that lit under a social contract that promised them royalties, then the obvious move is to stop them.
Until then, as you say: only extremists and laymen who don't know better are using LLMs to replace published literature altogether. Everyone else knows that the UX isn't there, and the chance for confident error way too high.
Also, you are not owed a monopoly on arrangement of words enforced by the public. There are plenty of other places to spend tax dollars.
a) The whole point of commercial NN services is to replace human labor, and jobs are paid labor. Literally the entire point of LLMs is to destroy jobs; this isn't hypothetical-- US companies have openly talked about having fired people and not filled roles because they either have increased or hope to increase efficiency with LLMs. And that's in tech where there's a chance more jobs will be created as a result-- the situation is far worse in creative fields. I personally know quite a few north American creative workers that have lost their jobs because the studios they work for have replaced almost the entire department with image generators that the remaining workers use to spray-and-pray concept art and game assets. Comparatively, the argument that they will create more jobs-- even as many jobs-- as they destroy is pure speculation.
b) Considering you're willing to have in-group protectionism in the form of nationalism, I'm guessing you're willing to extend that to industry, so creative workers don't count? Is it only American tech jobs that count or are you against American LLMs that replace any American workers, also?
> China needs to respect the American trademark system!
Trademarks? I assume you're talking about the patent system rather than logos... and legally they don't, actually. The US doesn't respect Chinese patents, either. How many times have you heard of a US company stopping doing something because a Chinese company patented it first? Do you really think we just invent everything first over here?
Imagine having the copyright claim to "Person's family member is killed so they go and get revenge".
I wouldn't say I have a fundamental right to any content, but certainly I have a right to content I paid for.
I don't get the logic.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/3826 https://archive.org/details/cory-doctorow-content
I happily pay him for hardcovers though.
I do not believe copyright makes any sense in the global post-internet world.
It is a major hindrance to progress. The many countries that do not enforce copyright law will share everything that can be shared and are going to progress much faster than the US in the long run.
Idem with ML Kit loaded by Play Services, which makes Android apps fail in many cases.
And I'm not talking about biases introduced by private entities that open source their models but pursue their own goals (e.g geopolitical).
As long as AI is designed and led by huuge private entities, you'll have a hard time benefiting from it without supporting the entities' very own goals.
And saying that bands currently make more money from touring kind of proves the point. They get too low % cut of music sales.
Cut out copyright, and no one will be getting any money from selling music per copy (or equivalent) - as it should be.
this is what I mean when large players would outcompete smaller players in a digital marketplace with no copyright. the only way for this to work would be with a benevolent neutral 3rd party managing the marketplace, like Steam, so users can easily see when a large player is cloning a smaller players work - but even then it still depends on the good will of the general public to prefer the "original" artist which is not guaranteed.
2) If you think the cost-benefits are bad, my advice is don't sign up to be experimented on. Nobody has to be experimented on if they don't want to be.
2) What if the families of experimentees receive payment? Allowing that would be a short way down the slippery slope from allowing the experimentation, and would make the matter of consent more difficult to assess.
There is nothing of value that the license gives me that I wouldn't already have if the contract didn't exist. I can already read the book, merely by having it in front of me.
Or are we talking about training an LLM on it and never releasing that LLM to anyone ever? Then I guess it wouldn't matter. But if that LLM is released to anyone, shouldn't the author of the book have a say on it?
Fair use gives me that right, not a contract or license.
I’m still not seeing how lack of copyright hurts small artists or consumers. Small distributors, maybe, but that’s not doing harm to the arts.
And tell me how Doctorow sees it when you buy one of his book and start selling copies of it under your name.
Still impersonation sucks, and it happens. Thankfully we can solve this with cryptography without trying to beg the legal system of hundreds of countries to agree on enforcement tactics.
I publish 100% of code I write as FOSS. I also sign my commits. If the code shows up later without attribution to me, I would prove it publicly to call out dishonest behavior.
I would also never use legal action for this though. All information should be free. I only put FOSS licenses on code to ensure I do not get sued and so corporations bound by such silly rules have a difficult time using my work in private codebases without paying me for an alternate license.
I would abolish all IP law if I could. Let all information be free without legal risk to authors or those that share it.
This is not public domain.
> and so corporations bound by such silly rules have a difficult time using my work in private codebases without paying me for an alternate license.
So... you benefit from copyright laws.
> to ensure I do not get sued
Why would you get sued by releasing your code as public domain?
I think technically it's copying more than stealing
Like if you could wait for someone to design and build a car and then CTRL+C/V it for yourself (is it possible to steal in a post-scarcity society?)
In a reasonable world, we would be imposing high taxes on all LLMs and using that money to fund grants for future writers and artists. It would be good for the LLM makers in the long run, since it would give them more fuel for their models, and it would be good for the artists and writers because it would provide sustainable, reliable wages.
Unfortunately, that isn't the world we live in. LLM makers don't seem to care about the impact they will have on society or even their own livelihoods, as long as they get rich today. And in addition to all the regulatory capture, we are having our governments gutted on the mere fear that they might do their job and prevent the wholesale looting of society by these new robber-barons.
So with the economically-optimal approaches off the table, we have to fall back on imposing false scarcity in the hopes that maybe capitalism can limp along.
But you call it "stealing," others call it "copying."
Stealing takes, from someone, something they own.
As long as discussion of a work that has published is not impeded, the public is not harmed even by these 50-years after life copyrights other than by that they are accumulated by certain companies who themselves become problems.
When someone decides to use someone's work without compensation he is, even though he is not deprived of the work itself, still robbed. But it's not a theft of goods, it's theft of service. The copyright infringer isn't the guy who steals your phone, it's the guy who even you have done some work for but who refuses to pay.
With this view you can also believe, without hypocrisy, that what the LLM firms are doing is wrong while what Schwartz did was not, since the authors in question weren't deprived of any royalties or payments due to them due to due to the publishing model for scientific works.
What service? If somebody washes your windshield without you asking, it isn't a theft of service to not pay them. A theft of service arises from entering into an agreement and then failing to pay as stipulated in that agreement.
Copyright isn't an agreement you can choose whether to participate in. Copyright is a legal enforcement system that imposes legal liability even on those who don't use it. You may not see this legal liability as "harm", but it absolutely is. Arguing that copyright extends to training is arguing for a dramatic increase in the scope and power of this legal enforcement system.
When traveling it’s also so much safer than taxis.
My brother was robbed at gunpoint in a taxi. My wife had to jump from more than one moving taxi to escape. My ex girlfriend too. My Swiss friend had his camera and wallet stolen.
You can have issues with Uber too, but not as frequently because there’s a digital audit trail, you can report them to the platform and the police. The threat of those consequences lead to better behavior.
Your comment also points out the power that regulation has to enforce and protect monopolies. I’m not saying all regulation is bad obviously, but I think we can see exactly what effect it had on the taxi industry, and I’m sure glad that Uber managed to disrupt it.
Customers pay significantly more, drivers make significantly less, and Uber is still running hundreds of millions in the red. Turns out hiring thousands of devs and dumping absurd capital into... driving people around... doesn't really work.
I'm not saying the existing systems were always good (they weren't), but you need to be willing to overlook a lot of real-world suffering to be "rooting for Uber". Phrases like "taxi cartels" sound nice, but they're hardly neutral phrasings that simplify things to the point of being useless phrases.
And "I'm just going to willingly and knowingly ignore laws I don't like for personal profit" is not a great take-away either. This isn't Aaron Swartz breaking a law as a matter of "civil disobedience" – it's just a plain "how can we make money?"
And where does that leave competitors who are NOT willing to break the law? It's an unlevel playing field; there can be no free market if some people don't need to follow the same set of rules. Uber's actions are fundamentally anti-capitalist and anti-free market.
The solution to the pre-Uber state of the taxi industry would be to actually have the regulations authorities enforce the regulation. But it seems across the Western world that having regulations authorities do their job and regulate is like the devil and holy water.
Additionally, in some cases the regulations themselves were crap.
VC funding allowed them to move quickly enough that they got to a scale where they could afford legal and lobbying protection when challenges eventually happened.
That's just a trope. They were initially losing money because they had high fixed costs (developing a platform, spending enough on advertising to get a critical mass of people using it), which are long-term investments. If you only spread the cost of the long-term investment over the short-term sales, they were "losing money" in the early years, but that's how all long-term investments work.
Dumping is when you sell below the unit cost, e.g. paying drivers more than you charge customers, which isn't what they were doing in general. And as long as they weren't doing that, the incumbents could have responded by lowering their own prices (and therefore margins) without themselves losing money on each sale, which is competition working as intended. Unless the competition is too hidebound to accept a reduction in profits in order to stay competitive or otherwise insists on using a less efficient method of operating, in which case they go under.
especially with hotels, i would have expected there to be small enough oligopoly to overcome the freerider problem (taxis are more regional, so i don't expect them to be able to fight an (inter)national company very easily)
plus the president owning a hotel chain
Yes there is, I am reminded of this every time I take an uber by the yellow cab medallion buyout fee that I’m charged because of the lobbying power of the TLC lobby in NYC
Medallion systems often prevented any competition, sometimes to absurd effect. The number of licenced taxis often didn't keep pace with population growth, sometimes even staying flat. Many drivers didn't own their own medallians then had to rent from owners, often making little money. In my city (Toronto) cabs were often dirty, broken, refused short distance fares (illegal) and smelled of cigarette smoke that was obviously from the driver.
Examples (paywalls, but you get the idea):
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/26/nyregion/amid-a-heritage-...
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/adventure/red-li...
The driver can't scam the passenger. The driver can't set the meter wrong, drive an unnecessarily long route, or just be an outright unlicensed taxi. Instead, the driver maintains a relationship with Uber, and the passenger can preview the fare before committing.
The passenger can't scam the driver. In a traditional taxi, you could theoretically just walk out ("dine and dash" style). The passenger can also make a call to dispatch and not show up for the ride. Instead, the passenger maintains a relationship with Uber, and the driver doesn't need to handle any payments.
> Medallion systems often prevented any competition, sometimes to absurd effect. The number of licenced taxis often didn't keep pace with population growth, sometimes even staying flat.
And thus medallion owners collect economic rent on their artificially scarce resource, distorting the free market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent
Sure, taxi services aren't usually known to be paragons of virtue, but then they weren't that bad everywhere; Uber is just another case of an US org trying to address an US-specific problem and then bludgeoning the entire world with their solution, whether the rest of the planet has such problems or not.
in bay area, it absolutely makes sense to invent uber, because the taxis were awful. and in vancouver (canada), they're also awful, and deserve the disruption: they would often tell you it'd be a 40 minute wait, and then just not show up
taxis in new york were and continue to be totally fine. you just stand outside and get in ~20 seconds later, with no hassles or apps. i've been in an uber/lyft a handful of times in nyc, but they're just worse (possibly cheaper, but the subway also gives them stiff competition, and i don't care that much if i'm in enough of a hurry to take a cab)
Post-2008, ZIRP and QE pumped trillions into financial markets, making capital nearly free for those who could borrow at scale. That money didn’t go into raising wages; it went into inflating asset prices. If you owned stocks or real estate, you got richer. If you earned a paycheck, you watched housing and living costs go up while your wages stagnated.
VC was one of the biggest beneficiaries. With bonds yielding nothing, institutional investors had to chase returns, flooding venture funds with capital. That’s how we got an era of insane startup valuations, SoftBank-style mega-funds, and entire sectors built on free money. Growth-at-all-costs became the norm because the cost of capital was effectively zero.
Then COVID hit, and the Fed doubled down—more QE, more stimulus, even lower rates. Another massive wealth transfer. Money printer go brrr, asset prices moon, and suddenly we have SPACs, meme stocks, and a startup funding frenzy. Meanwhile, workers got a couple of stimulus checks, and by the time the dust settled, everything from rent to food to cars was way more expensive.
Now AI companies are running the same playbook that cloud megascalers ran before them—monetizing open-source work while locking out the people who actually built it. Cloud providers took open-source databases, infrastructure, and developer tools, turned them into managed services, and extracted billions in profit without meaningfully compensating the people who did the work. AI companies are now doing the same thing—scraping open-source repositories, academic papers, and public datasets, building models upon it then slapping on proprietary fine-tuning and charging for API access all the while blatantly raising capital by promising to make the same workers they stole from obsolte. All of it built on the backs of researchers, engineers, and artists who never see a dime, but also on the backs of everyone else via the cantillon effect.
Now rates go up, the bubble deflates, and who gets left holding the bag? Not the VCs who cashed out early. Not the bankers who took their fees. It’s the workers, the middle class, the open-source devs, and the late-stage startup employees who thought they had something real. The cycle repeats.
Or is it just "illegal" for an overseas competitor to a domestic industry, in trade disputes?
What is the fine? How many days in jail does the company spend? What portion is its stock diluted by?
We remember the tale of Jeff Bezouis the Wise, who tragically lost his company when he decided he didn't want to buy diapers.com at the offered price, and instead wanted to dump 200 million dollars into selling diapers well below cost until their site folded.
If you as an individual can prevent the enforcement of a law, or be sure that it will not be enforced against you, then it does not apply to you.
Laws are ment to be broken. Especially in cronist systems where incumbents write the laws.
Taxis were discriminatory and "uncool" to the point were Uber has saved thousands by preventing drunk driving.
Now if you go out with the boys and get drunk, it's a 30 second casual call to get an Uber and get home.
Live in a neighborhood Taxis are afraid to service，you can either make some extra income working for Uber or use it yourself. When Ubers used as its intended purpose, to basically make a quick buck, it's a lifeline to many low income people .
Say your rents it's going to be late, you can pick up 20 or 30 hours of Uber this month to make it happen. It's not really a career though...
Maybe... I really don't get how the economics work out here though. If you look at the numbers, it mostly just seems like you're converting car equity into cash via depreciation.
But also, I'd guess that for a big chunk of people who are going to have trouble paying rent with any regularity, they'd have to overpay for their car in the first place to get something that's Uber-appropriate. My car's a couple years too old for Uber now, but is still perfectly functional, and there's just no way the math would work for me to buy a newer car so that I can convert its capital cost into cash via Uber.
that sounds so incredibly dystopian, not sure if that was the intention :(
Laws matter to the extent that they don't interfere with actual progress. Laws that would have prevented the LLMs we have today from being developed should be ignored, as should laws requiring us to pay tribute to taxi and hotel cartels.
Respect for the law is going to be an increasingly-hard sell going forward, and that's mostly the lawmakers' own fault. When the law does not respect the people, the people will not respect the law.
There's no purpose of having an executive branch of government separate from the other two branches if not to cushion the inflexible and glacial nature of the other branches of government.
What? No, the purpose of having a separate executive is separation of powers and checks and balances.
But ... as I've thought about it more, it doesn't really feel just to me. The kind of value reaped from the works seems to suggest that the creator is due some portion of that value. Also, in practice - there's just an absolutely enormous amount of knowledge that can be consumed from the public domain. Even if Meta, OpenAI and friends decided to license a ~small handful of the long-term archives of some globally-read newspapers, they could get very broad and deep knowledge about the events, trends, terms of the last century to fill in a lot of gaps.
Yes, online bookstores are full of them:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/travel/amazon-guidebooks-...
The issue is there's an asymmetry between buyer/seller for books, because a buyer doesn't know the contents until you buy the book. Reviews can help, but not if the reviews are fake/AI generated. In this case, these books are profitable if only a few people buy them as the marginal cost of creating such a book is close to zero.
If you can't tell how the content is before you read it, it could be written by a monkey.
actually i think they are. lots of e-book slop
> If they start out-competing humans, is that bad?
Not inherently, but it depends on what you mean by out-competing. Social media outcompeted books and now everyone's addicted and mental illness is more rampant than ever. IMO, a net negative for society. AI books may very well win out through sheer spam but is that good for us?
It feels more like we just want to punish people, particularly rich people, particularly if they get away with stuff we're afraid to try.
i imagine if books can be published to some e-book provider through an API to extract a few dollars per book generated (mulitiplied by hundreds), then eventually it'll be borderline impossible to discover an actual author's book. breaking through for newbie writers will be even harder because of all of the noise. it'll be up to providers like Amazon to limit it, but then we're then reliant on the benevolence of a corporation and most act in self interest, and if that means AI slop pervading every corner of the e-book market, then that's what we'll have.
kind of reminds me of solana memecoins and how there are hundreds generated everyday because it's a simple script to launch one. memecoins/slop has certainly lowered the trust in crypto. can definitely draw some parallels here.
The same way good law-abiding folk are harmed when Heroin is introduced to the community. Then those people won't be able to lend you a cup of sugar, and may well start causing problems.
AI books take off and are easy to digest, and before long your user base is quite literally too stupid to buy and read your book even if they wanted.
And, for the record, it's trivial to "out compete" books or anything else. You just cheat. For AI, that means making 1000 books that lie for every one real book. Can you find a needle in a haystack? You can cheat by making things addictive, by overwhelming with supply, by straight up lying, by forcing people to use it... there's really a lot of ways to "outcompete".
> It feels more like we just want to punish people, particularly rich people, particularly if they get away with stuff we're afraid to try.
If by "afraid to try" you mean "know to be morally reprehensible" and if by "punish people" you mean "punish people (who do things that we know to be morally reprehensible)", then sure.
But... you might just be describing the backbone of human society since, I don't know, ever? Hm, maybe there's a reason we have that perspective. No, it must just be silly :P
Is it?
(I don't agree)
I haven't read the primary source material, so you could teach me something here, but my understanding is that the idea was to incentive creators.
Copyright was invented by publishers (the printing guild) to ensure that the capitalists who own the printing presses could profit from artificial monopolies. It decreases the works produced, on purpose, in order to subsidize publishing.
If society decides we no longer want to subsidize publishers with artificial monopolies, we should start with legalizing human creativity. Instead we're letting computers break the law with mediocre output while continuing to keep humans from doing the same thing.
LLMs are serving as intellectual property laundering machines, funneling all the value of human creativity to a couple of capitalists. This infringement of intellectual property is just the more pure manifestation of copyright, keeping any of us from benefitting from our labor.
Few company can amass such quantities of knowledge and leverage it all for their own, very-private profits. This is unprecedented centralization of power, for a very select few. Do we actually want that? If not, why not block this until we're sure this a net positive for most people?
Ask Google about Android and what they now choose to release as part of AOSP vs Play Services.
But at least I didn’t give Uber any money…
In NYC, it was (is?) against the law to hail a black car on the street, even if they were sitting there ready willing and able to drive you, because the taxi cartel got _regulations_ to make it that way.
That's precisely what I meant with "in some cases the regulations themselves were crap". But that doesn't imply the idea of regulation is bad - it is saying that maybe voters should make their voice clear to lawmakers and parties to get stuff changed. Regulation can only be as good or bad as the voters allow it to be.
Unless you weren't white, or you wanted to leave Manhattan (or even go north of 96th street). Otherwise, yeah I guess they were okay.
The thing that Uber and Lyft really provided was a surveillance economy to keep both the drivers and riders somewhat in-line. Without it, every ride is an almost anonymous one-shot transaction with almost no recourse on one side, so the game theory suggests that service only has to be good enough that the police aren't called.
This is only true in a small subset of New York.
Why does the executive branch exist at all if it's simply to enforce written law?
Why do we elect the executive at all if they are merely to enforce written law?
Why do executives have the power to pardon someone when a court of law finds a person guilty of breaking law?
Someone has to be in charge of enforcing things.
> Why do we elect the executive at all if they are merely to enforce written law?
Do you have a suggestion of another way to do it that doesn't put congress in charge?
Also the president has some other very important roles.
> Why do executives have the power to pardon someone when a court of law finds a person guilty of breaking law?
That one is definitely subjective by its nature, but also the average number of pardons is around two thousand, a very small fraction of cases.
You could still have discretion with the legislature in charge of executing on their own laws. I think countries exist like that, but I don't know enough to say which.
A separate executive is not necessary to have discretion or pardons or flexibility in law. A separate executive is necessary if you want physically different human beings controlling the organizations who enforce the law (DOJ, FBI, etc)
Consider that Judges and the judicial branch of the government ALSO gets to use subjectivity and their own opinion in adjudicating cases. Another check.
The entire point of the Constitution was to put the power of a King in a bunch of different hands, and then tie some of those hands with specific constraints, and then give a couple different options on how to change those constraints over time. Leeway and discretion goes both ways, so Congress does have the ability to further constrain such discretion. A previous president tried to argue he could choose to not spend money congress told him to spend, so they wrote up a bill saying very clearly, Uh, no, if we say spend, you spend. They have that power as a check on the power of the executive. All three branches are ostensibly MEANT to be vying for power. It's an antagonistic system, like the court system. The founders loved that shit. In reality, it probably is a dysfunctional system that modern systems engineers would not like, and other countries get that "system fights and moderates itself" effect by encouraging coalitions between parties in a strong parliament. IMO those have demonstrated better stability. I'm not convinced the US would have survived getting it's whole shit blown up like the UK did.
Checks. And. Balances. 5th grade civics class.
Ok, but “everywhere” isn’t my problem. They sucked everywhere I had to use one which is my problem.
> they weren’t that bad everywhere
They were beyond a joke where I am from, which is not the US. Even today, they remain a worse option.
> US specific problem
There was nothing US specific about it.
You think of choosing somebody's particular text as the way of contracting him. Just as it isn't a restriction of your freedom of speech that going into restaurant and ordering a meal creates a contract to pay, so it isn't a restriction of your freedom of speech when you choose to seek out and repeat somebody's very particular text.
Why Harry Potter when you have any of hundreds of million of stories of similar sort that you could easily write yourself? When you choose that one, you choose it because it's already been prepared by somebody else, just as you choose restaurant because they've done work and have food ready for you. By choosing the one that's already written you accept that the author has done work for you.
I hadn't made that claim, but I will in now that you've brought it up. Art operates as part of a discussion, the reference to and re-use of prior art is a key part of the how that happens. There are sooo many cases of copyright being used to limit the freedom of expression, that this really isn't disputable. Copyright clearly restricts speech.
> By choosing the one that's already written you accept that the author has done work for you.
No I don't, at least not in a sense that's different from the shoulders of all the people that author learned from and so on. Cultural works exist and take on roles in our cultural semiology, our memes our language without our choice. You can coose to not engage with a work, but you can't choose which works will be culturally relevant or not.
When you publish something, it becomes part of our shared culture and no-one has an inalienable right to own that. The limited rights we granted to encourage commercial creativity have already snowballed out of control and now people are blythly buying into another dramatic expansion of them.
Doing things relating to discussion of a work are typically permitted, but you have no reason to use anybody's particular work other than to make use of the work he did in creating it.
I consider it similar to access to unsecured credit that way - it's easy to feel like "wow this industry is scamming these people it should be illegal" but people without any other backstop will probably need access to unsecured credit sometime and it's better than losing their house/car/job/pet/family etc..
What's better. Taking out a 300% APR payday loan, getting evicted or working an extra 20, 30 hours of Uber.
Then if a little guy comes in and tries to challenge them, they don't have the resources to resist the incumbents' pocket government officials and get destroyed. But if a big fish does it, people actually notice if the government tries to enforce stupid laws against them, and then government officials are afraid to do it because the public would not only not like it but actually notice the unreasonableness of the law.
But the problem here isn't that the law isn't being enforced against a well-heeled challenger, it's that those laws exist to be enforced against the little guy, when they should instead be repealed.
The relevant thing here would be that they pass excessive copyright laws, but then Meta violates them and maybe gets away with it because they're doing it in a sympathetic way and the government doesn't want to hamstring emerging industries in their country, whereas if an individual would be sued into oblivion even if the thing they were doing was equally sympathetic.
Because it's not just about the public noticing it, it's about the public noticing it in time to do something about it. If an individual gets sued or arrested, they're immediately screwed and will be under pressure to settle or plea bargain before they're bankrupted by legal fees. But once they do, the case is over. Whereas large companies can fight, or pay lawyers to stall while they wage a media campaign to counter the usual imperious press releases from the prosecution, or use their money to lobby the government while public opinion is in their favor.
The more people that share and copy data the better.
It drives me up the goddamn wall how people will say shit like "the Taxi industry needed to be upended" when like... I mean, maybe? But on balance, given all the negative externalities associated with these companies, are they really a gain? Or are they just a different set of overlords, equally disinterested in providing a good service once they reach the scale where they no longer are required to give a shit?
Just... regulate the fuckers. Are you sick of filthy Taxis that break down? Put a regulation down that says if a cab breaks down during a trip, they owe the customer a free ride and five thousand dollars. You bet your ASS those cabs will be serviced as soon as humanly possible. This isn't rocket science y'all. Make whatever consequence the government is going to dispense immeasurably, clearly worse than whatever the business is trying to weasel out of doing, and boom. Solved.
That was frequently already the case. They were required to accept credit cards but then the card reader would be "broken" and it wasn't worth anybody's time to dispute it instead of just paying in cash.
You also... don't really want laws like that. They're required to accept "all payment methods", which ones? Do they have to take American Express, even though the fees are much higher? Do they have to take PayPal if the customer has funds in a PayPal account? What about niche card networks like store cards accepted at more than one merchant? If not those and just Visa and Mastercard, you now have a law entrenching that duopoly in the law.
> Are you sick of filthy Taxis that break down? Put a regulation down that says if a cab breaks down during a trip, they owe the customer a free ride and five thousand dollars. You bet your ASS those cabs will be serviced as soon as humanly possible. This isn't rocket science y'all.
It's not rocket science, it's trade offs.
Is there a $5000 fine for a breakdown? You just made cab service much more expensive, because they're either going to have to pay the fines as a cost of doing business and then pass them on, or propylactically do excessive maintenance like doing full engine rebuilds every year because it costs less than getting caught out once, and then passing on the cost of that. And even then, there is no such thing as perfect. The cabbie paid to have the whole engine rebuilt by the dealership just yesterday and the dealer under-tightened one of the bolts when putting it back in, so there's a coolant leak? Normally that's just re-tightening the bolt and $20 worth of coolant, but now it's a $5000 fine on top of the $4000 engine rebuild.
The way you actually want to solve this is with competition, not rigid rules and onerous fines. If someone is always having breakdowns then they get bad rating, customers can see that when choosing and then opt for a different driver that costs slightly more -- but only if the cost is worth the difference to them. Maybe it's worth $2 for the difference between two stars and five but it isn't worth $50 for the difference between 4.7 and 4.8. Either way you shouldn't be deciding for people, you should be giving them the choice.
I traveled a lot to a smallish town for work before Uber got there and ran into this several times. After the second or third time, I started just saying "well that sucks for you" and starting to leave. Suddenly it would work.
Yes it sucked, but it didn't really impact much.
That's true, however we must also keep in mind that Uber (and alikes) happened because regular institutions failed to do this for some reason or another. I won't try to speculate why, because I have no idea (and of course it looks obvious in the hindsight).
There was a demand for safer and more reliable taxis. There was not enough supply for that. Government haven't paid enough attention to the sector. So, naturally, someone came and used that whole situation to provide supply for this demand.
Of course it's not this simple, and there were a lot of other things going on. But if we narrow the scope down to just this, then we can see that the core problem here wasn't Uber, it was that that governments were too slow to react in time.
it's not clear that detriments actually exist, and the benefits are clear
Not just meta, Open AI, spotify, youtube...its become a routine exception and can now be relied upon.
I agree that the legal fees could be a big factor, but it seems cases aren't even filed.
https://www.londonreconnections.com/2021/uber-loses-appeal-a...
> The passenger can't scam the driver.
Progress! Uber scams both passenger and driver. Hooray for Free Markets™!
Then why do people keep using it? It seems like a pretty transactional relationship to me. If drivers aren't getting paid as much as they wanted, they should find another job with a higher price. If passengers are paying more than they wanted, then they should find another way to call a taxi with a lower price.
like what? Uber's business plan was always about eliminating competition. The company successfully did so by undercutting prices, only to jack them up when they had the market to themselves. There is no Free Market Fairy way to fix that.
Copyright doesn't just extend to "literal direct copying". When you claim copyright doesn't harm anyone, you can't ignore all the other types of activity it prohibits.
> Doing things relating to discussion of a work are typically permitted,
Only if you limit the meaning of "discussion" so much that it no longer includes the process of making art.
> but you have no reason to use anybody's particular work other than to make use of the work he did in creating it.
Did you not ready my comment? I already explained the reason. Creative works become part of our culture, you can't choose which works will do that, you can only choose to participate in that culture or not.
Copyright is a social system for artificially limiting access to our shared culture and thus also limits participation in that culture.
I understand the value of a limited copyright system, but anyone that claims that our copyright system doesn't cause harm or cost us anything isn't being realistic. Copyright duration should be far more limited and we need significant reforms to the DMCA. Personally, I think even all non-commercial distribution should be legal as copyright should only grant commercial rights.
MIT, ISC licenses etc offer minimum anti-liabiliy CYA here and are what I typically use. They are a hack to get around the fact you cannot actually public domain code without legal risk.
> So... you benefit from copyright laws.
I sometimes exploit laws that I feel should not exist at all specifically to target corporations who abuse them the most. In my preferred world where copyright and patents did not exist, I would not need to play such games.
I wish we did not need money, but I don't go around telling people that they should stop using money because in my preferred world, money would not exist and we would all live happily.
I believe all knowledge should be freely available and live by that.
While I do not believe in IP law but I am happy to take money from those that do.
I sell my time so long as the buyer allows my work to be freely licensed for all. They can do with their own copy whatever they want and not credit me though. That is fine.
https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ
CC0 is great but it does not go far enough for software. Patent and trademark rights are complex and it caused CC0 to be withdrawn from OSI consideration.
https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists....
I do not know why it has to be so legally complicated to say TAKE MY WORK IT IS FREE FOR ALL.
IMO ISC is the current best OSI approved option for ensuring technical work can be used as broadly as possible and is what I use for recent work.
https://www.tldrlegal.com/license/isc-license
Show me something OSI compatible less restrictive than ISC and I will use that.
In your opinion, not to everyone. There has been no actual argument as to why it's supposedly "morally reprehensible."
You live in Netherlands according to a recent comment; I can't believe taxis are almost 4x more expensive, unless you're stuck in traffic for a long time, but then your burger can't arrive in 30 mins?
And free delivery on €6 food item is almost certainly netting them a loss.
In much of the world the price of food delivery has risen to the level needed to make it profitable, and it's not cheap. I paid around $10 in fees plus Uber's 30-50% markups on the food itself to get a couple of burritos yesterday from a shop a mile down the road.
The only solution to the riddle I can think of is that (like postal services) they can cleverly combine orders and rarely lose money on delivery. The fast delivery would have to be luck or perhaps the burger preserves poorly?
That the food is absolutely fantastic might also have something to do with it. If they can get food into your mouth repetition is almost guaranteed.
it was a terrible system that sucked for everyone involved. For all of Uber's flaws, would you rather go back to that today? really??
I absolutely said said no such thing. There are good ways to change things and bad ways to change things. Allowing a private entity reap huge profits by blatantly breaking rules and screwing people is not a good way to change things.
If governments don't like it, well, bummer. They were supposed to serve the people, not the incumbent taxi cartels. They failed, so "we the people" routed around them.
Even so, yes. I make all my work public, 100%.
I use public repositories as my backup for anything I create, regardless of stage of completion and so others can learn from or help improve my work as they see fit.
I do not believe proprietary technology should exist and I put my code where my mouth is.
Humans progress faster when we collaborate freely. Fork anything I do and make it better if you can.
How the hell does that work?
I'm more of a copyleft person, so I can't help there. But I can say that copyleft requires copyright laws.
But the taxi services obviously hated the competition and waged a continuing media campaign to paint the renegades as the villains.
They created a project named Greyball to identify law enforcement and mislead them.
They created a kill switch for the event of a government raid to gather evidence.
They ordered and then canceled rides on competitor apps.
They tracked journalists and politicians...
The list goes on and on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Uber
It's like saying "well, they weren't only violating the taxi medallion cartel laws, they were also violating laws against evading enforcement of the taxi medallion cartel laws". There is a central cause here.
Sure, Medallion laws had problems, and got Regulatory Captured in some cities to also become terrible Trusts controlling prices that needed busting. But the answer to "fix the Regulation" isn't always "break the Regulation", and the Regulation had a lot of good intent of having public accessible information about drivers and that data not just owned by a single company and locked in their opaque algorithms. It might have been nicer to fix the Regulatory Capture and Bust the Trusts.
You just landed at the airport and need a cab. You fax your FOIA requests for each of the hundred cab companies in the area, which they're required to provide within 20 business days. Your return flight is in 3 days and it would be nice to leave the airport before then.
> Sure Uber/Lyft boil that into a "friendly" 5-star UI, but do you have any idea what data contributed to that star rating? Do you always trust the algorithms that compute them from a bucket of metrics you can't directly request?
So compete with them instead of banning them. Fund an open source ride hailing app with open data. Don't require anyone to use it. If it's better, they will. If it's not better, why should they be forced to?
Yes, and they owe their current existence to Uber paving the way for them.
We need good journalism courses with heavy emphasis on ethics and the importance of journalism to democracy.
We also need a way to punish entertainment that passes as journalism (maybe fewer legal protections) and to incentive actual journalism (and find a decent way to distinguish between the two).
You are in a special situation where customers pay for your time. Of course it's easy to say "as long as I am paid for my time, I want my work to be public". But say you create a video game. You invest two years working on it, and at the end you sell it for 50$. The first customer buys it, and publishes online for everybody to download legally for free. Does that sound okay for you?
Because you don't need copyright laws doesn't mean that nobody does. And again, you admitted yourself that you do need them and you do use them. You just wish you didn't. And I can agree with you on that. I wish there was no war, and no poverty, too.
I am not saying that everything about IP laws or copyright is perfect. Just that it's more complicated than "it's just a ball of worms, throw it away". Some people abuse copyright, some people need it. Whoever is fine screwing those who do because it doesn't affect them are jerks.
More users for my game! Wonderful. Every person playing, even for free, means more people talking about it if they like it. Give every digital thing away and get people sharing it with others. If a free game is popular a small subset that can afford it will pay you if you disclose, perhaps in the game, what your financial goals are and how far you are from them kindly, but without demand.
People should be proud they make anything in a crowded internet anyone feels worth copying and sharing. That attention can be monetized all sorts of ways if a creator is paying attention. Sell merch, or a funding campaign for new upgrades or extensions.
The pay what you want (or nothing) Humble Bundle model is a step in the right direction. Gets lots of exposure to indie devs who otherwise no one might trust to give any money to sight unseen otherwise.
But you are not the one publishing it! Someone else is, because they copied your public-domain game and put their name on it. That someone else is getting a lot of money, and you aren't.
> Wonderful
Really? I genuinely don't understand how you can not see how it is a problem?!
Consumers are limited by humanity. We are all just meat sacks at the end of the day. We cannot, and will not, sift through 1 billion books to find the one singular one written by a person. We will die before then. But, even on a smaller scale - we have other problems. We have to work, we have family. Consumers cannot dedicate perfect intelligence to every single decision. This, by the way, is why free market analogies fall apart in practice, and why consumers buy what is essentially rat poison and ingest it when healthier, cheaper options are available. We are flawed by our blood.
We can run a business banking on the stupidity of consumers, sure. We can use deceit, yes. To me, this is morally reprehensible. You may disagree, but I expect an argument as to why.
Okay, I fundamentally disagree with your premises, analogies to water and banking (or even in your other comment about piracy [0], as I have not seen any evidence of piracy leading directly to "suicides," as you say, and have instead actually benefited many companies [1]), and therefore conclusions, so I don't think we can have a productive conversation without me spending a lot of time saying why I don't equate AI production to morality, at all, and why I don't see AI writing billions of books having anything to do with morals.
That is why I said it is your opinion, versus mine which is different. Therefore I will save both our time by not spending more of it on this discussion.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42971446#43054300
[1] https://www.wfyi.org/news/articles/research-finds-digital-pi...
It's very simple logic, and it doesn't require your understanding to be true. Piracy is good for companies? Really? That's... your legitimate position?
If nobody is paying for anything how does a company operate? That's not a rhetorical question. Is it fairy dust? Perhaps magical pixies keep the lights running?
If you don't have explanations for even the simplest of problems with your position, your position isn't worth listening to.
Sure, agreed.
> And the experience is equally mediocre.
Absolutely not. I regret using a taxi nearly every time I opt for the cheaper option. It's only the "better" choice if you happen to be standing right in front of one. This experience is nearly universal no matter where I travel.
I think people really forget how utterly terrible Taxis were pre-Uber. I have no idea about competing apps these days, maybe they are similar to Uber, but the typical Taxi experience is nearly as awful as it's always been at least in the US.
Uber/Lyft certainly has gotten worse - but at least I can fairly reliably get a car when I need it with reasonable reliability. The rest of the "soft" product or pricing I really care far, far, less about than that simple fact.
It seems impossible/problematic to generalize the taxi experience to “The US”.
If you’re in a city center, cabs can be far easier. The number of times I’ve ordered an Uber or Lyft and regretted it while watching taxi after taxi drive by has been increasing. But I expect the Chicago loop experience to be quite different from say, the suburbs.
My small rural town of 9000 people had multiple taxi services that poorer people relied on to do even their grocery shopping. We didn't need "disruption"
Tech bros generalizing a negative experience from NYC or SV to the entire US has been so stupid.
I doubt that.
I double checked, just to be sure since I paid for taxis for years for a specific trip, each way. Uber is still cheaper TODAY than taxis were when I switched 10 years ago. One way 5 minute trip, Friday 6pm in orange county, ca still under 20$ today.
20$ was a good deal (or ripoff, depending on your attitude) for a taxi in 2015, for the same distance and a variable waiting time. Let's just say it's about equal for sake of discussion. There was no app, but there was a dispatcher you could call. There was no incentive to improve, until then.
Companies have had to adapt and prices have come down. It would no doubt be 30$+ today for taxis, if not for rideshare companies.
The feedback system incentivizes drivers and riders to behave.
If a company interviewed me, had me solve a problem, didn't hire me or pay me in any way and then used the code I wrote in their production software, that would be theft.
That is the equivalent of what authors claiming they wrote AI books are doing. That they've fooled themselves into thinking the computer "wrote" the book, erasing all the humans whose labor they've appropriated, in my opinion makes it worse, not better. They are lying to the reader and themselves, and both are bad.
For piracy, take switch games. Okay, pirating Mario isn't stealing. Suppose everyone pirates Mario. Then there's no reason to buy Mario. Then Nintendo files bankruptcy. Then some people go hungry, maybe a few die. Then you don't have a switch anymore. Then there's no more Mario games left to pirate.
If something is OK if only very, very few people do it, then it's probably not good at all. Everyone recycling? Good! Everyone reducing their beef consumption? Good! ... everyone pirating...? Society collapses and we all die, and I'm only being a tad hyperbolic.
In a vacuum making an AI book is whatever. In the context of humanity and pushing this to it's limits, we can't even begin to comprehend the consequences. I'm talking crimes against humanity beyond your wildest dreams. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you haven't thought long enough and creatively enough.
I know there are reasons for not going with public transport, but preferring to take a taxi/uber when a train line can get you there in time maybe has more to say about public transport than about taxis. Well functioning rail is typically one of the most effective and reliable way of getting to an airport, and often much cheaper than taxis.
Instead, laws like that cause Uber to set their hours and then they can't switch on and off whenever they please and have to work miserable graveyard shifts or split shifts if that's what they're assigned.
Meanwhile there is nothing stopping anyone from taking a job with contractually guaranteed hours if that's what they want. There are plenty of jobs like that, you don't have to mandate all jobs be like that and screw over anyone who wants something different.
Same reason you don't see landscaping crews filled out with stellar employees.
That, of course, was the plan all along. Such august figures as JP Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller,and Andrew Carnegie all made their fortune by undercutting the competition, putting them out of business through means legal and otherwise, and finally monopolizing the markets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)
Not everyone is a Kantian, who has the moral philsophy you are talking about, the categorical imperative. See this [0] for a list of criticisms to said philosophy.
> In a vacuum making an AI book is whatever. In the context of humanity and pushing this to it's limits, we can't even begin to comprehend the consequences. I'm talking crimes against humanity beyond your wildest dreams. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you haven't thought long enough and creatively enough.
Not really a valid argument, again it's circular in reasoning with a lot of empty claims with no actual reasoning, why exactly is it bad? Just saying "you haven't thought long enough and creatively enough" does not cut it in any serious discussion, the burden of substantiating your own claim is on you, not the reader, because (to take your own Kantian argument) anyone you've debating could simply terminate the conversation by accusing you of not thinking about the problem deep enough, meaning that no one actually learns anything at all when everyone is shifting the burden of proof to everyone else.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative#Critici...
It is, because the quote you quoted is in reference to what I said above.
I explained real consequences of pirating. Companies have gone under, individuals have been driven to suicide. This HAS happened.
It's logically consistent that if we do that, but increase the scale, then the harm will be proportionally increased.
You might disagree. Personally, I don't understand how. Really, I don't. My fundamental understanding of humanity is that each innovation will be pushed to it's limits. To make the most money, to do it as fast as possible, and in turn to harm the most people, if it is harmful. It is not in the nature of humanity to do something half-way when there's no friction to doing more.
This reality of humanity permeates our culture and societies. That's why the US government has checks and balances. Could the US government remain a democracy without them? Of course. We may have an infinite stream of benevolent leaders.
From my perspective, that is naive. And, certainly, the founding fathers agreed with me. That is one example - but look around you, and you will see this mentality permeates everything we do as a species.
Many people say things that they don't like "should be obvious"ly bad. If you can't say why, that's almost always because it actually isn't.
Have a look at almost any human rights push for examples.
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> For piracy, take switch games.
It's a bad metaphor.
With piracy, someone is taking a thing that was on the market for money, and using it without paying for it. They are selling something that belongs to other people. The creator loses potential income.
Here, nobody is actually doing that. The correct metaphor is a library. A creator is going and using content to learn to do other creation, then creating and selling novel things. The original creators aren't out money at all.
Every time this has gone to court, the courts have calmly explained that for this to be theft, first something has to get stolen.
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> If something is OK if only very, very few people do it
This is okay no matter how many people do it.
The reason that people feel the need to set up these complex explanatory metaphors based on "well under these circumstances" is that they can't give a straight answer what's bad here. Just talk about who actually gets harmed, in clear unambiguous detail.
Watch how easy it is with real crimes.
Murder is bad because someone dies without wanting to.
Burglary is bad because objects someone owns are taken, because someone loses home safety, and because there's a risk of violence
Fraud is bad because someone gets cheated after being lied to.
Then you try that here. AI is bad because some rich people I don't like got a bunch of content together and trained a piece of software to make new content and even though nobody is having anything taken away from them it's theft, and even though nobody's IP is being abused it's copyright infringement, and even though nobody's losing any money or opportunities this is bad somehow and that should be obvious, and ignore the 60 million people who can now be artists because I saw this guy on twitter who yelled a lot
Like. Be serious
This has been through international courts almost 200 times at this point. This has been through American courts more than 70 times, but we're also bound by all the rest thanks to the Berne conventions.
Every. Single. Court. Case. Has. Said. This. Is. Fine. In. Every. Single. Country.
Zero exceptions. On the entire planet for five years and counting, every single court has said "well no, this is explicitly fine."
Matthew Butterick, the lawyer that got a bunch of Hollywood people led by Sarah Silverman to try to sue over this? The judge didn't just throw out his lawsuit. He threatened to end Butterick's career for lying to the celebrities.
That's the position you're taking right now.
We've had these laws in place since the 1700s, thanks to collage. They've been hard ratified in the United States for 150 years thanks to libraries.
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> Everyone recycling? Good! Everyone reducing their beef consumption? Good! ... everyone pirating...?
This is just silly. "Recycling is good and eating other things is good, but let's try piracy, and by the way, I'm just sort of asserting this, there's nothing to support any of this."
For the record, the courts have been clear: there is no piracy occurring here. Piracy would be if Meta gave you the book collection.
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> In the context of humanity and pushing this to it's limits, we can't even begin to comprehend the consequences.
That's nice. This same non-statement is used to push back against medicine, gender theory, nuclear power, yadda yadda.
The human race is not going to stop doing things because you choose to declare it incomprehensible.
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> I'm talking crimes against humanity beyond your wildest dreams.
Yeah, we're actually discussing Midjourney, here.
You can't put a description to any of these crimes against humanity. This is just melodrama.
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> If you don't know what I'm talking about,
I don't, and neither do you.
"I'm talking really big stuff! If you don't know what it is, you didn't think hard enough."
Yeah, sure. Can you give even one credible example of Midjourney committing, and I quote, "crimes against humanity beyond your wildest dreams?"
Like. You're seriously trying to say that a picture making robot is about to get dragged in front of the Hague?
Sometimes I wonder if anti-AI people even realize how silly they sound to others
Okay. AI books make books 1 million times faster, let's say. Arbitrary, pick any number.
If I, a consumer, want a book, I am therefore 1 million times more likely to pick an AI book. Finding a "real" book takes insurmountable effort. This is the "needle in a haystack" I mentioned earlier.
The result is obvious - creators look potential money. And yes, it is actually obvious. If it isn't, reread it a few times.
To be perfectly and abundantly clear because I think you're purposefully misunderstanding me - I know AI is not piracy. I know that. It's, like, the second sentence I wrote. I said those words explicitly.
I am arguing that while it is not piracy, the harm it creates it identical in form to piracy. In your words, "creators lose potential income". If that is the standard, you must agree with me.
> how silly they sound to others
I'm not silly, you're just naive and fundamentally misunderstand how our societies work.
Capitalism is founded on one very big assumption. It is the jenga block keeping everything together.
Everyone must work. You don't work, you die. Nobody works, everyone dies.
Up until now, this assumption has been sound. The "edge cases", like children and disabled people, we've been able to bandaid with money we pool from everyone - what you know as taxes.
But consider what happens if this fundamental assumption no longer holds true. Products need consumers as much as consumers need products - it's a circular relationship. To make things you need money, to make money you must sell things, to buy things you must have money, and to have money you must make things. If you outsource the making things, there's no money - period. For anyone. Everyone dies. Or, more likely, the country collapses into a socialist revolution. Depending on what country this is, the level of bloodiness varies.
This has happened in the past already, with much more primitive technologies. FDR, in his capitalist genius, very narrowly prevented the US from falling into the socialist revolution with some aforementioned bandaid solutions - what we call "The New Deal". The scale at which we're talking about now is much larger, and the consequences more drastic. I am not confident another "New Deal" can be constructed, let alone implemented. And, I'm not confident it would prevent the death spiral. Again, we cut it very, very close last time.
If you just landed at the airport, you rely on police enforcement keeping bad actors from having medallions. The medallion itself is the primary "this person is a reputable cab driver". That's also entirely why the Regulatory Capture in some cities was so effective in controlling supply of medallions, because it was city police enforced.
Many cities required taxis to have their medallion number painted on the outside, and there were phone numbers you could quickly call (in the days of payphones even) to get quick information about a medallion or to report a complaint/problem with one.
Today a few cities have updated that external paint requirement (and inside the car medallion papers) to include QR codes for even quicker lookup on modern phones or to even use an app to do nice things like pay for the Taxi without needing to broker/negotiate it. Those kind of technological improvements have kind of gotten lost in the wash of the speed of which Uber/Lyft moved fast and broke things, but were always possible.
> So compete with them instead of banning them. Fund an open source ride hailing app with open data. Don't require anyone to use it. If it's better, they will. If it's not better, why should they be forced to?
The history of taxi companies say that they are only as open as they are forced to be. I never said anything about banning Uber/Lyft. Competition is not the problem; destroying public safety regulations in the name of competition is the problem. I said that Uber/Lyft should have been required to do the same or similar paperwork that medallions represent, that both of their data should be open under the previously existing laws, as a public good. Break the artificial scarcity, sure, give Uber/Lyft a license to "print medallions" if that breaks existing Trusts. But get that data open and available to the public (and enforceable by the public's law enforcement). Neither would want to do that because their rating systems are secret sauce and "competitive advantage", they would need to be coerced by regulations. That's what regulations are for, the public good that competition doesn't care about/can't care about/needs to keep "secret sauce" for advantages.
I certainly didn't love their ruthless business practices, but let's not delude ourselves and admit that Uber or Lyft wouldn't exist if they didn't break the laws around taxi medallions.
Sometimes laws do more harm than good (by limiting supply and slowing innovation) and it requires creatively skirting regulations.
Things were always possible to improve the taxi industry. Smartphones had been around a few years. But it would've taken the industry 20 years to implement it correctly. In the same way that rampant music and movie piracy in the early 2000s hastened the development of iTunes and Netflix's subscription model way of doing business.
Uber shows the driver's name, their photo, and has a process for flagging drivers. Public safety is important to their business. As someone who's driven an Uber and Lyft and been through their process, I've seen it firsthand.
It's not like "medallions" worked - I remember driving in multiple taxis in pre 2010 days where the photo DID NOT MATCH UP to the driver. My high school physics teacher who grew up in Brooklyn in the late 1970s told stories about how he learned how to drive by illegally working and driving taxis around as a 15 year old.
Right now, we're just going through the same thing with AI again, and Silicon Valley is applying it's ethos of the past few decades.
There are reasons why in various industries, China is "winning the race", so to speak.
Regulations exist, but sometimes people who creatively ignore the "regulations" can win the tide of the public. It's one of America's best (and incredibly divisive) cultural capabilities.
My experience was very different and "almost all" doesn't feel correct. It's certainly fun hyperbole. NYC the systems worked more than they didn't. In part because of spot lights from famous TV shows and 70s corruption documentaries/news exposes. Most smaller cities the taxis quietly worked with little corruption and a lot of trustworthiness. In the early oughts I had good experiences hailing cabs in cities a lot smaller than NYC that people didn't believe you could even hail cabs in.
Because Taxi regulations were so wildly different from cities, it's hard to generalize what the experience used to be. It varied a lot from city to city and was a massive spectrum, with a few national certainties like some of the big Franchises to help smooth things a bit.
> I certainly didn't love their ruthless business practices, but let's not delude ourselves and admit that Uber or Lyft wouldn't exist if they didn't break the laws around taxi medallions.
In the early oughts, a few cities like Seattle were pressuring the big national Franchise companies like Yellow Cab through a mixture of regulatory body pressure (but not actual laws) and bottom up consumer messaging/volume customer requirements to move to "Computer Dispatch". There was a growing competition in that space, and a bunch of innovation happening between the competitors, including some of the things Uber and Lyft take credit for today because Yellow Cab mostly broke apart in the onslaught of VC subsidization and rule breaking.
I don't think it would have taken "20 years" to implement it "correctly". We don't know because the whole thing got disrupted so sideways by the gig economy. (Which also really didn't care about making the taxi business better, but about making the labor market worse. We should also not forget that breaking the worst parts of taxi medallion laws also broke the good ones that helped build useful labor-side things like taxi driver unions and paid for things like healthcare.)
All I'm saying is that there was a path that this could have all been done under the old regulations, legally. It's a path not taken here, and probably to our detriment. Though I can't prove that just as much as you can't prove that innovations like smarter apps would have taken "20 years" in that other timeline.
Well that's not going to work. You now have people from outside the jurisdiction having a government they didn't elect cast in the role of their protectors. Instead what happens is the local government protects the incumbents, which is what we've seen in practice.
> Many cities required taxis to have their medallion number painted on the outside, and there were phone numbers you could quickly call (in the days of payphones even) to get quick information about a medallion or to report a complaint/problem with one.
As opposed to the license plates already on all cars?
> The history of taxi companies say that they are only as open as they are forced to be.
People keep trying to regard Uber as a taxi company. They keep claiming to be an app, because... they are. So replace the app with an open source one. Create an independent non-profit to handle payments and maintain a server to hold the driver ratings and take a small cut of the payments to cover its costs. Operate it as a live auction where drivers list how much they'll charge per mile and riders pick a driver based on their rating and price. Publish all the data.
If you do it well, people will use it voluntarily. If you do it poorly, you haven't demonstrated enough competence to be trusted making regulations that people would have to follow even if they're dumb.
> Competition is not the problem; destroying public safety regulations in the name of competition is the problem.
The problem is that incumbents call the things they use to destroy competition "public safety regulations".
> Neither would want to do that because their rating systems are secret sauce and "competitive advantage", they would need to be coerced by regulations.
Not when you can "coerce" them through competition. If people like the ratings system which is more open or the one that extracts lower margins and the app is otherwise fungible with theirs, they don't even exist unless they can be better than the competing system you created to do better, which implies that you failed to actually do better and then they're supposed to win. Which in turn applies pressure on the public system to do better itself, instead of getting captured, because if it gets captured then it becomes uncompetitive and actually has competition.
That is going to happen. Not all countries have or enforce copyright laws even if you rely on those.
It would however be trivial for the author to go public proving the third party game used their code without attribution. Apple famously used openstreetmap data without crediting them and openstreetmap publicly shamed them until they corrected the mistake.
People should have attribution if they ask for it, but it also should not be legally enforced. Only socially and technically.
> Really? I genuinely don't understand how you can not see how it is a problem?!
Anyone in the connected world has likely benefited from software I have written or security bugs I have identified and helped get fixed. Some of that work took years with little to no pay.
If you can get my work to more people than I can, do it!
My experience is still easy enough to monetize enough on a contract basis to pay my bills, and that is plenty. Often people pay to prioritize what features I add to open source projects they benefit from. Paid or not, I am always happy knowing my work benefits as many people as possible, rather than having it benefit only those that can afford to pay for it. My ego is not so fragile as to demand my name be in everyone's faces all the time.
Our mission in life as humans should not be about maximizing dollar amounts in our bank accounts. It should be about maximizing the amount of value we can give back to society. If value can be copied and replicated to benefit a lot of people, that is amazing! Shame we cannot do that with food, but at least we can do it with information, media, etc.
Yet you keep bringing everything back to you. "It's okay for me because I manage to get a decent salary". Sure, what about those who don't?
> People should have attribution if they ask for it, but it also should not be legally enforced. Only socially and technically.
Laws are here because reputation is not enough anymore in our world. Those who think that laws are unnecessary generally don't directly need them. Can you show some empathy and accept that some people need to be protected by more than reputation?
> That is going to happen. Not all countries have or enforce copyright laws even if you rely on those.
You mentioned Doctorow as an example, right? Do you even know what he thinks of BigTech abusing their power? He's totally for more regulations for those, not fewer.
You seem to be operating under the assumption I came to these views from an ivory tower.
I have been open sourcing all of the work I legally can since I was living in my car working on library computers. Yes. I stand by this for everyone.
I had no degree, no credentials, and the only reason I was able to make a career for myself as an uneducated vagrant is -because- my work was public and free, people often used it, and demonstrated my capabilities better than any degree could.
Plenty of peers have made careers for themselves the same way.
> Laws are here because reputation is not enough anymore in our world. Those who think that laws are unnecessary generally don't directly need them. Can you show some empathy and accept that some people need to be protected by more than reputation?
This -is- coming from a pace of empathy.
My meals as a kid sometimes came from food stamps and food pantries. Most of my early internet access came from abusing 30 day AOL trial dialup cds, and I had to wait in line 3 days for a $200 black friday sale laptop I could afford. I had to break a LOT of copyright laws to get unlimited access to information my local library did not have.
Laws work in a subset of countries, and a lot of countries straight up ignore them. That gives them a major advantage over us. They can pirate freely and openly to level up their skills and capabilities with no risk of legal consequences... and we cannot? Why should the poor in America not have the same free access to any digital goods the poor in other countries do?
> You mentioned Doctorow as an example, right? Do you even know what he thinks of BigTech abusing their power? He's totally for more regulations for those, not fewer.
My read of Cory Doctorow on these topics is that the copyright wars were a failed experiment. Copyright laws are almost mostly weaponized by big corporations to hurt individuals. We should regulate the shit out of corporations to protect the freedom and privacy of users and prevent monopolies. It is perfectly compatible to both anti-big-tech and also against the current IP law system.
https://gizmodo.com/cory-doctorow-copyright-laws-tech-antitr...
Now, that might not be the case. Given the existence of bad laws, having someone who is able to break out of the bad cage might be better than if no one can, but let's consider what happens if we assume that it's worse.
Regardless of how they're ranked relative to each other, you would only pick either of the two worse options over the best if it was easier to do it. But getting bad laws enforced against well-heeled players is actually the hardest thing to do because they're doing something sympathetic and have the resources to fight, which is harder to do than repealing the bad laws.
You must agree companies require money to operate. No money, no company. You must also agree that piracy OR any action which takes money away from a company results in less money. In addition, you must agree every individual will take whichever action costs them the least amount of money.
Okay. Do you see where I'm going? Following these very simple rules, the result is that there is no money left for companies, and they go under.
Whether that's bad or not is, technically, debatable. Whether that's how it works or not, isn't.
I grow tired of having to explain very simple logic to bumbling idiots. Of course you're not a bumbling idiot. Rather, you're someone with a belief and a delusion. Meaning, you will simply ignore any and all reality to maintain your belief, even if, right before your very eyes, it is refuted. I don't know why people act this way. Maybe there's some medication that can help with that.
People might say I'm a prophet, maybe some kind of psychic. Really, I'm just a guy with, like, a quarter of a brain. We can often "see into the future" if we just rub some brain cells and put two and two together.
Until you can find away around these rules, perhaps some alternative economic system which has not been invented, there is nothing for you to refute. Not that you've been trying at all, your entire "argument" has been "erm, I disagree". Which, by the way, is not an argument. It's more of a statement, and one which is embarrassing to say out loud when you don't have anything to back it up with.
And, to be clear, this is well past the land of morality. I'm operating in a much simpler framework here. Even if you're under the belief everyone is perfect, or some people are perfect and some aren't, or whatever other moral beliefs - that doesn't change the rules and therefore doesn't change the result.
The other downstream conclusions make sense too, but the linkage is more opaque making it difficult to appreciate.
Also hard to acknowledge is--who decides which laws are "bad"? Generally, societal outcomes should test the efficacy (toward some comparably abstract societal good) of laws, which then prompts the legislature to do something between patting themselves on the back and authoring actually effective law.
It's better to ask the question in a different way. We know what bad laws are. They're laws that benefit some interest group at the expense of the general public, e.g. by constraining competition or diverting tax dollars to cronies.
So the question is, how do you eliminate bad laws? This isn't a question of what a hypothetical legislature should do if it was full of good faith actors, it's a question of how to structurally align the incentives of a real legislature with the interests of the general public so that they're inhibited from passing bad laws.
I would like to start with this: what is the advantage of other countries enjoying the work of artists/authors for free?
My point, from the very beginning, is that the concept of copyright does not seem entirely, as in 100% stupid. I am not saying that it is perfect the way it is now. Just that throwing it away entirely is maybe not what we want. I hate it when BigTech abuses copyright, but the problem is BigTech there.
Copyright is also what makes copyleft possible. Which I believe is a good thing to protect the users from the corporations.
And finally IP laws are what prevents an employee from leaving a company with all the code, renaming/rebranding it and selling it for a fraction of the price. Doesn't seem completely ridiculous, does it?
> You seem to be operating under the assumption I came to these views from an ivory tower.
Not at all. I operate under the assumption that you don't have that need anymore. Apparently you did, and because you got to where you are, you now believe that it's all based on merit and that people who don't manage to do the same don't deserve any empathy. Or something like that?
It's a typical US mentality, though (the "all I have is based on merit and merit only, and I don't want to pay for others").
> Laws work in a subset of countries, and a lot of countries straight up ignore them. That gives them a major advantage over us.
There is plenty of need for laws inside a country as big as the US. Not seeing that suggests that you are in a pretty good situation now and don't care about those who aren't.
Reputation doesn't work. Do I need to mention the nazi billionaire who now controls the US government as an example?
> We should regulate the shit out of corporations to protect the freedom and privacy of users and prevent monopolies.
Exactly. I don't think he says "we should remove copyright as a concept entirely.
> how to structurally align the incentives of a real legislature with the interests of the general public
This seems like a critical nuance that, like you said, needs a structural solution. I have no actual idea, but conceptually this seems like it would eliminate a subset of particularly bad laws and actions (e.g. members of the legislature trading on their insider information) which have outsized, negative outcomes for the public. But we also rely on that very rule making body to essentially self-govern. And such a grass-roots movement of reforms to put the public first seem unlikely given the attitudes and sensationalizing behaviors present in the members of that body.
I avoid politics because of just how disaffecting it is to think about most of these details.
(I also don't agree that the only problem here is bad laws. Yes, some of the laws that big players break are bad; some are fine. I'm not just talking about Uber here.)
Whether something is good independent of what it takes to achieve it is a separate question from whether that's where you should focus your efforts.
> We would have a lot less bad law if laws were enforced more evenly, because people would more quickly see their true effects, rather than having to wait until companies exploited the loopholes in enforcement so egregiously.
Which is exactly why it's so hard to do it. The status quo is: Pass lots of laws that make everything illegal so that anyone without resources can be brought up on charges if they ruffle the wrong feathers. If you wanted to actually enforce all of those laws, they would immediately have to be repealed or everyone would be in jail. Which isn't in the interests of the people who want to keep them on the books to use for selective enforcement, so they don't enforce them that way in order to keep them on the books.
The consequence is that it takes even more political capital to have those laws rigorously enforced than to have them repealed, because then you have to fight both the big guys who don't want short-term enforcement against themselves and the autocrats who don't want to long-term have the laws repealed, instead of only the latter.
> I also don't agree that the only problem here is bad laws.
When laws are enforced against the little guys but not the big guys, it's usually because they're bad laws, because letting the rich openly get away with literal murder is highly unpopular.
The most significant category of good laws that big companies regularly violate with impunity is antitrust laws, but those also don't often get enforced against the little guy because the little guy isn't even in a position to violate them.
It’s almost like we need to ensure no one has much more resources than anyone else (ya know, workers owning the means of production) so there’s a more level field!
Quite the opposite.
You have a bad law which is only enforced against the little guy. Right now, when it's not enforced against the big guy, stories are written about it to get people riled up, but that's the wrong target.
Right now, when those laws are enforced against the little guy, people say "well they broke the law". Which is true, because everyone is breaking the law all the time, because there are so many bad laws. So what should be happening is, every time they try to enforce a bad law against the little guy, that should be the thing that gets people ruled up -- even if they're guilty. Because everyone is guilty, because the laws are crazy. So get people worked up about that so that the laws can be changed. Don't accept that people guilty of violating bad laws deserve to be punished. Drag the prosecutors through the mud. Flood the legislators with complaints whenever it happens. Use jury nullification and publicize to everyone that it's their right. Get those laws repealed.
> I think to prevent that we need to figure out how to prevent the capture of the government by those with large resources.
This was supposed to be checks and balances and limited government. As soon as you unchain legislators to micromanage the economy, anyone who captures them can shape the law to their advantage and then become rich and use the money to make sure the government stays captured.
The government needs to be constrained from making laws that inhibit competition.
> It’s almost like we need to ensure no one has much more resources than anyone else (ya know, workers owning the means of production) so there’s a more level field!
The words you're looking for are "antitrust enforcement".
Heh, yeah, I was going to post to add this as well. That is the underlying problem. I don't necessarily think it has to mean "workers owning the means of production" per se, more like "the richest person's wealth cannot be more than X times the poorest" and "the largest participant in a market cannot have more than Y% market share", but the idea is similar. :-)