† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapiens:_A_Brief_History_of_Hu...
"in the manner it is being put after the names of dead people " is a total non sequitur in this context, how is that in any way related to the discussion or anything the OP said?
Debt is not a real thing. It's a fiction. Subverting contract law is not like subverting the laws of physics. Simply don't pay your bills! What happens when you subvert contract law is some guys with guns, in either an overt way or a subtle one, force a trade of your imaginary resource (money) for the real resource (labor), through a contract.
It's a bit of clever misdirection to declare yourself "in debt" or "debt free." Money is made up! It's fiction! It is whatever we want it to be!
The parent comment basically says "copyright is not a physical good or law, therefore we may disregard it".
As if the same couldn't be said for any verbal agreement, sexual consent, property rights, whatever.
They ought to be arguing why this _particular_ verbal agreement/social contract is not worth enforcing or practicing, rather than dismissing the entire category.
The map: debt.
The territory: guys who come to your house and kick you out for not paying your debt.
And if you don't believe social constructs to be real, then I am confused as to why in your original comment "money" is given as something which is real. I think one could reasonably say that all social constructs are "imaginary" (whether that is useful is another question, but I would say it is not), but I find it more difficult once you engage in line-drawing within social constructs, especially so when you don't specifically articulate a boundary.
You are redefining the word "real". You know this. Some people get a delight from redefining words and seeing the reaction. It is rather tiresome; it doesn't help constructive debate. What have we accomplished here? Have you convinced anyone?
Feel free to disagree with a particular social norm or law and present your thinking.
If you want to get into epistemology, please do. But we have to find a shared language that makes sense.
All of them are needed for society to function, but at the same time all of them are convenient fictions for us to build upon.
Storytelling is as old as language itself and might even be older than our particular species, and is basically copyright infringement. The same goes for tool-making, which is thought to be one of the sparks that gave rise to our species' vast intelligence. That's how imaginary copyright and IP in general is, let's take the thing we've been doing since literally the dawn of time, copying and sharing information for free and building upon and improving it, and portray this practice as "unnatural" and "unlicensed" and in fact let's set up a restrictive framework under which most of the technological and cultural achievements in human history and before would have been impossible or severely hampered. It reeks of artificiality, way more than money and other things do.
It was created by corporations to make it easier for them to form monopolies around unchallenged control over a particular intellectual property or idea, and now that it is becoming inconvenient for them with the advent of AI, they will probably get rid of it or re-invent it in some way that even further benefits them.
It also matters very little what we do because in the end we will be out-competed by other countries like China that don't draw these artificial intellectual lines that hamper progress.
I think there's probably some modern bias in this perspective, about how "natural"/"real" money is. Early human populations certainly didn't have the same concepts of currency, land ownership, etc. that we do today. Communally sharing resources to help each other/ourselves is older than our species, in fact common to multiple species, and the other social constructs like "money" get in the way of it too.
> That's how imaginary copyright and IP in general is, let's take the thing we've been doing since literally the dawn of time, copying and sharing information for free and building upon and improving it, and portray this practice as "unnatural" and "unlicensed" and […] It was created by corporations to make it easier for them to form monopolies around unchallenged control over a particular intellectual property or idea, and now that it is becoming inconvenient for them with the advent of AI, they will probably get rid of it or re-invent it in some way that even further benefits them.
Wikipedia says that King Diarmait Mac Cerbhaill adjudicated what was basically a copyright case over the Cathach as early as the sixth century, and the legal basis of copyright is founded in moral, economic, and property rights that existed in ancient Jewish, Greek, and Roman societies. Apparently, it took the printing press for unauthorized copying to become a big enough issue to be codified in law, but the poet Martial was complaining about missed profits from unauthorized copying and "book sellers would sometimes pay a well-regarded author for first access to a text for copying" (I.E. there was something resembling IP licensing, enforced by physical access rather than law) back during Roman times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright#Early_dev...
## "Rhetoric and Reality in Copyright Law" by Stewart E. Sterk
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...
> Why give authors an exclusive right to their writings? Copyright rhetoric generally offers two answers. The first is instrumental: copyright provides an incentive for authors to create and disseminate works of social value. By giving authors a monopoly over their works, copyright corrects for the underincentive to create that might result if free riders were permitted to share in the value created by an author's efforts. The second answer is desert: copyright rewards authors, who simply deserve recompense for their contributions whether or not recompense would induce them to engage in creative activity.
> The rhetoric evokes sympathetic images of the author at work. The instrumental justification for copyright paints a picture of an author struggling to avoid abandoning his calling in order to feed his family. By contrast, the desert justification conjures up a genius irrevocably committed to his work, resigned - or oblivious - to living conditions not commensurate with his social contributions. The two images have a common thread: extending the scope of copyright protection relieves the author's plight.
> Indeed, the same rhetoric· - emphasizing both incentives and desert - consistently has been invoked to justify two centuries of copyright expansion. Unfortunately, however, the rhetoric captures only a small slice of contemporary copyright reality. Although some copyright protection indeed may be necessary to induce creative activity, copyright doctrine now extends well beyond the contours of the instrumental justification. ...
## "Copyright Nonconsequentialism" by David McGowan
Missouri Law Review. https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...
> This Article explores the foundations of copyright law. It tries to explain why those who debate copyright often seem to talk past each other. I contend the problem is that copyright scholars pay too much attention to instrumental arguments, which are often indeterminate, and too little to the first principles that affect how one approaches copyright law.
> Most arguments about copyright law use instrumental language to make consequentialist arguments. It is common for scholars to contend one or another rule will advance or impede innovation, the efficient allocation and production of expression, personal autonomy, consumer welfare, the "robustness" of public debate, and so on.' Most of these instrumental arguments, though not quite all of them, reduce to propositions that cannot be tested or rejected empirically. Such propositions therefore cannot explain existing doctrine or the positions taken in debate.
> These positions vary widely. Consumer advocates favor broad fair use rights and narrow liability standards for contributory infiringement; producer advocates favor the reverse.' Most of the arguments for both consumers and producers prove too much. It is easy to say that the right to exclude is needed to provide incentives for authors. It is hard to show that any particular rules provide optimal incentives. It is easy to point to deviations from the model of perfect competition. It is hard to show why these deviations imply particular rules.
But for the sake of this discussion: I don't think anyone can assume those permissions when using a tool to generate the base image. Ironically enough, it may make more sense to have artists for concepting, copyrighting the character or world so you obtain those permissions, and then using AI to ramp up production. That's an inversion of what's happening for early AI usage.
The main question is how much concepting is needed to copyright a character? Making a few sketches in private? Releasing a full work first with no AI on what you want to copyright?
> - I think you're sowing the seeds to undermine your own arguments
> licensing fee...
It took them exactly one reply. New record
I know that everyone is chomping at the bit to logically own me in this thread, and that's fine -- have your fun. There are a dozen comments informing me that "IP law around AI" and "fiat currency" are both made-up, and that's obviously true.
Right now "fiat currency" or "contracts" is settled. We are not radically redefining what those are (despite the web3 crowd's insistence). The story around IP with regards to AI is quite different. We are at a fork in the road. It is actually up to us to decide what AI fundamentally is, as it relates to IP. It's genuinely up in the air, and gives us an opportunity to re-examine some aspects of how we treat ownership of information. In my opinion, this is a good thing and an exercise worth doing. A chance to re-do some of what the internet failed at. Remember Aaron Swartz?
Personally, I'm quite cynical: I think the existing social power structure will win and absorb AI into its IP regime. AI will be locked down even faster than the internet was, because value can so obviously captured. The winners will be Disney, Sony, Warner, Elsevier... we'll all be poorer for it. But yeah! Good thing people can't make images of Spider Man?
>Personally, I'm quite cynical: I think the existing social power structure will win and absorb AI into its IP regime
Yes, that's my fear as well. Which is why I hope these LLVMs get reigned in before it gets out of hand, as it did with DMCA (very rarely used to make sure proper parties are compensated and used just as often to make digital creators kowtow to the whims of the elite).
In your words, I don't see a future where AI wins these cases and the little guy gets to make images of Spiderman without Sony/Marvel/whoever squashing them down. All while probably using that artist's own prompts and existing art to make Spiderman 57.
What is a licensing fee? What does it mean to "use" a GPU?
Copyrights are as much a fiction as the fines levied on those who violate them.
1. You can derive realness from materialistic, physical phenomena. So in this case, quark-gluon-electron interactions are real, and basically everything else is like 99% imaginary. "Society" is no more and no less real than anything else.
And/or:
2. You can derive realness from minds' conscious perception, experience, and interaction. In this case, "society", being an aggregate of many minds' mutual and conflicting experiences and interactions, is probably one of the most real things there are.
And of course you can unify the two, by framing the latter within the former based on the information-theoretic complexity of the physical substrate of the minds, and by framing the former within the latter as the common, shared basis of perceived and lived experiences.
---
But I'm not sure what concept of realness would let you say ""Society" is the most abstract illusion of them all".
Or do you mean that the rigidity of currently existing societies and their specific laws and customs, as universal and immutable constants, is what "has always been a complete fiction and pretend"? In that case I would fully agree; You can have multiple possible societies, in any number of shapes and configurations. But that does not make extant societies, as they are right now, any less real for those that live in or otherwise interact with them.
> So, maintaining a bunch of fictions in order to maintain another fiction becomes circular reasoning.
Uh, no. Not circular reasoning. Fear of starvation, more like. Fear of marauders killing your loved ones to take their resources. Fear of entropy.
Agriculture, presently existing as a function of society, is certainly very real– assuming your body obeys the laws of thermodynamics.
The second category of what exists in reality is human souls / consciousness and animal souls / consciousness. Beyond those two categories, there is nothing that exists, unless you enter supernatural territory. Which is not to be discarded, but here we're talking about man-made stuff. We can talk about money, society, ownership of land, and such. But they are always only imagined by people, they themselves can never transcend from the realm of idea and imagination into the realm of the real. Even though we have to relate to these ideas in everyday life because how they control the behaviours of our peers and ourselves, we can never forget that they are not real. But most forget.
In the past and in some regions even today, people held deep beliefs about curses and individual taboos. That a jealous neighbour or romantic rival would curse them, or more likely that a Shaman at their birth informed their family that this person can not eat this or do that, or they would die. And from accounts I've read, people believed this so deeply that they would have convulsions and even die if they broke their taboo by mistake. Just by the power of a false belief. Or the countless who waste their lives believing in some lie about "society". Or people who live under the curses of shame and guilt. And the curse of pride for that matter.
It is much more beneficial and easy on the soul to disregard all and any idea of society and instead deal with people as individuals. Because you're almost always dealing with individuals. And stay away from those who are too deep in the illusion and false belief of "society" or any such thing, because they only know how to bow to those they perceive as higher and kick down on those they perceive as lower.
As humans and individuals, the best thing we can do for ourselves is cleanse our mind from false beliefs. That doesn't mean that we will forget how these ideas work on people, it means we can see them from a higher perspective and that they do not exist. They can be used as pleased, but should never control a superior being.
Agriculture is not a function of society, it's a function of tilling the earth with a plow and sowing seeds. Nothing about it is abstract. I frankly didn't understand that example.
The Bible goes on and on about not having other gods besides God, but it also says that you should not _make_ idols, which I think is a very important and overlooked part. Anything that is undeniably created by humans is a false idol and worshipping it is a mistake. Most people alive right now worship their government, or more accurately their idea of what their government is. Because most do not know how their own government works on paper. Most people would die and kill for their government, while at the same time being nonplussed by other things that should make their blood boil. The slightly smarter ones worship money. One day when they're old, they'll be rich and have their own yacht. If they forgot about their fake money god for a moment, they could go sail the oceans as crew on a yacht while they are young and can enjoy the experience. Can they buy back their youth with some fake money printed in limitless quantities? No, because reality does not bow to the non-real, even if every single person on the planet believed in a falsehood. But a lot of people will have a whole lot of suffering from false beliefs. That's how literal hell on earth is created.
Therefore, people talking about morals or ethics or creativity or human inspiration or whatever are wasting their time on a false premise.
Now, I don't have a college degree, but with my 60+ years life experience I can say, yes, copyright is a real thing, it protects people who create, from assholes and AI.
Funny how advocates against property rights have no issue with corporations protecting their own. That’s fine. What they want is to legally steal from the average joe.
It's going to be just as easy to make a movie or a song as it was to write this comment. I'm working and researching at the edge, and I promise you that the entire world will be in awe of these next 12 months. Go play with Suno for a taste.
I'm a senior engineer, and now I'm tab completing Rust code 70% of the time. It's hard to believe we've come this far, and it's only going to keep climbing in capability.
You're watching breakneck progress, and the genie isn't going back.
More art will be created per month than the entire human history to this point. Gen alpha is growing up on this stuff and using it to great effect to communicate amongst their peers. The things they build will be incredible.
Or we hit the top of the sigmoid curve and just have fancy autocomplete.
(2) It literally is autocompleting - it draws each pixel because it statistically determines that <some color value> is the best fit given the prompt and the prior pixels it drew. It's a more advanced robot, but it's still a robot.
Llama, ollama, etc are not the issue here. Nor is ai. The issue is theft for training.
This is the same argument the horse people had about the cars taking over the streets. In the end, progress will win.
Do we really want people spending hours and hours practicing and performing legacy acts of creation, with some people never able to summon the opportunity cost to even begin? For people to endlessly labor over creating a small amount of unrepeatable output?
Or do we want a world where everybody on the planet is able to turn their thoughts into something visible and tangible quickly? For society as a whole to have orders of magnitude bigger and better works?
This is a horse to car moment, but for thought itself.
I think it's quite telling that sooner or later, every discussion about "AI" and copyright ends up equating people to statistical models controlled by predatory megacorporations.
My connectome, in the eyes of the law, has a special legal status which is not shared by inanimate and non-sentient objects. In fact, some would argue that the entire point of the law should be to protect the special legal status of my connectome from those that would draw an equivalence between people and property.
"Open-source AI" is interesting in multiple ways, but not relevant to the legality of the models.
You know the "If ML is IP infringement then your brain is owned by Disney" take is just as sensible (and specious) for pre-ML stuff too, right? You're allowed to memorize the full script of any movie you want, without anyone trying even a little to claim that doing so should reduce your legal status to chattel, but obviously you're not allowed to just rip the subtitles from a DVD and sell it as a book.
That's not correct. We are now increasing the capabilities of everyone creative, to achieve much more, almost free and instantly. The painter now, will have a 100 million film studio on his fingertips to create movies. The musician will be able make a high quality album, just from his snoring.
One usual misconception is that talent is not important anymore. That's certainly not true. Talent is not going anywhere. People not so talented can get some results which are ok or good enough, but talented people can create magnificent art, without even trying.
Also "tab completing Rust code 70% of the time" is breadcrumbs. I am working in making, Rust specifically, 100% code generated.
Generating code is trivial. Generating code that works is not. I suspect you are at around 10-15% of reaching that. All models out there are probably at 2-3% as they barely equal a google prompt in reliability.
I don't put it to work for the moment, cause i am trying to create a TUI for HN, or a TUI forum more generally, like HN, maybe even backed by version control like Pijul instead of a database. 100% computer generated obviously, that goes without saying.
My biggest problem so far, is that GPT doesn't write idiomatic Rust. The code it generates is very C or Pythonic, and i am trying to figure out a way to guide it, to write beautiful code, instead of just correct code. When the machine generates just correct code, it doesn't cut it for me, is what i am saying. I am reading "Command Line Rust" to get a sense of idiomatic Rust, and then i have to study github projects as well to really figure out how beautiful idiomatic Rust code really is structured and written. Like, i know what idiomatic Rust is, just not that well at the moment.
The tool i want to create, to use GPT instead of Copilot, is something like Aider [1] but not in Python and maybe a TUI.
https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider [1] https://github.com/pramatias/hnotify
People were saying the same thing 12 months ago.
Are you just not aware that the most outspoken advocates against private property (and rights to it, including IP/copyright), also strongly oppose capitalism and the idea of corporations?
However, I am strongly against using artist or writer work against their will. That also benefits corporations. Also ironic that we can use against them the play they used against us. Imagine open models that the artist or legal or writing community can use but not corporations unless they open their models.
Dowry payments used to be a real thing.
Butter churning used to be a real thing.
Copyright law is, and will be, mutable.
In just about a year, kids will be making entire Pixar movies from home. (The content will probably be Skibidi toilet related, but of Pixar scale and scope.)
How that reconciles with copyright, you've got me. It doesn't. It's a domain mismatch. It's completely outmoded by what's coming.
And the music industry is equally toast. I can already make an excellent banger song about superhero rodents in under 30 seconds.
Slightly less flippantly, the days when the nation gathered around their TVs to all watch "Leave It To Beaver" at 8pm are long gone, the media landscape has been fragmenting for decades and this is just the next step. My kids don't watch TV shows, they follow YouTubers.
A six-year-old filmmaker has as much claim to copyright protection as Spielberg and Tarantino. Just because one uploads to YouTube and one is paid millions of dollars by a major movie studio, it doesn't mean that they're different in the eyes of the law.
From what I understand, once a work is created, copyright is assigned to that work's creator. That creator may then license that work however they want. Quality doesn't factor in.
There, I've stolen your post. Did copyright protect you? No, it did not. Copyright is an idea we came up with that sounded good at the time, and it's come to pass at this point that the original idea was deeply flawed in ways we could never have predicted, but now can see clearly in hindsight.
The truth is, intellectual property should be protected by those creating it. Coke does a great job of this, as do many, many other companies. We call these "trade secrets", but ultimately the concept is the same. You're protecting the work you deem worth protecting.
I don't buy the notion that copyright ever protected the creator. What it really protected was the interests of the entities who effectively enslave the creators via contract, and is not of any tangible benefit to the creators themselves. If one truly cares about the artisans among us, one cannot justify the existence of our ideas surrounding copyright.
Yes, removing those laws from our doctrine would cause upheaval, as the market must then rebalance itself in the absence of the artificial pressure we've put on it, but in time all things find equilibrium again, and placing the value and responsibility back on the individual is, in my mind, simple human decency.
The whole point of government and laws and societal norms is that not everyone has to be deeply involved and specialized in protecting their rights. We default to people doing the right thing and seek out specialists (e.g. lawyers) when we're wronged.
These are both social constructs.
That reasoning applies to murder, too. After all, a bullet through your mom's brain is just a physically allowable reconfiguration of the position of some atoms.
So you're making a true point, but a useless one, since you're operating on the wrong level of abstraction.
Property and debt have much longer histories and seem more clearly defensible.
Of course there is one really big fiction out there that a lot of people no longer really believe, but that doesn't mean longevity isn't a thing to consider.
A more correct statement with the same thrust would be "copyright is not _natural_ -- it's an artificial, bolt-on construct."
And yet lots of artificial constructs are useful for incentivizing / de-incentivizing massed behavior in a way that is maximally beneficial to all. For sure, getting it right is difficult but let's not write off all artificial constructs as worthless or impossible to get right (especially when you just have to get it right _enough_).
Rather than try to reason about how existing copyright law applies to AI models, we should be focused on changing copyright law to work well in a world with AI.
We can balance the incentives of content creators with the incentives of the users and creators of AI models. I'm confident we can do it because we've done it every time in the past when technology has changed, and AI models will be no different.
And to suit the whims of sufficiently large and influential media conglomerates.
Yes, you, as an indie creator, have the exact same intellectual property rights as Disney. But if Disney steals something you made, who's going to win that fight?
Maybe, but you can also say that about money or about being married. Social fictions work as collective agreements on what is seen as useful for society. One can obviously critique their utility, but pointing out the ficitonal component isn't in itself a criticism.
Copyright law is already different from country to country.
I just wanted to say that laws are subject to change.
Much of the heavy lifting is done by treaty-- not so much that anyone is asking legislatures directly to establish and extend copyright, but that it comes part-and-parcel with other international obligations.
Without the weight of such treaties, I wonder how many countries would do without an IP regime at all, especially if they don't see any IP-related export opportunities, so copyright and patent merely limits their ability to make cheaper versions of foreign goods.
`[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.`
Does the current scheme really promote the progress of science and useful arts? Is the current length of copyright really "limited Times"?
This was argued before, and the Supreme Court decided "Yes, it is, somehow."
Of course you go onto the OpenAI corporate pitch page and it will proudly say "respects your IP by not training from it!", that's not the part we are looking to get rid of apparently? That's very real?
Why not put the issue where it is - it's a debate about public empowerment with AI vs incumbents protecting their copyrights. Especially for open source models - this situation is not about corporations. Yes, corporations are the ones with deep pockets and easier to sue, but that's just how lawsuits go, you don't waste money suing someone who can't pay up.
What is more important in the next decades - public empowerment or extending copyright to block training AI models? Can we agree to limit copyright to exact reproductions or should it cover all content generated from a model, even if when it looks different from all training examples?
I think going the copyright maximalist way will indirectly hurt creatives because all their works will be checked with the same tools we use to check AI. Anyone could be secretly using generative models. The AI attribution methods will reveal all sorts of things we don't like to see.
That just seems like a sociopathic argument to circumvent perfectly clear laws intended to protect people who expend energy into offering new ideas and also trying to diminish what is already delineated as right and wrong. In the blatant sense.
I'm not sure how your gun analogy funnels along to fair use.
As with anyone who doesn't seem to respect copyright laws, I'd say to them, give me a copy of everything useful you've ever done in your life. Going by the same rule.
Scientific publications also share knowledge openly. Only private journals are locking up papers, but they are losing ground. At least AI papers are free to read and implement. They share even code, datasets and trained models.
I think the ethos of progress is with open culture not closed copyrights.
Put yourself in their shoes. Maybe you use some AI derivative work for your own life's work and then when you've finally accomplished what you want to do, someone else duplicates it, or uses the majority of your work?
What do you expect out of it. If you don't expect to be paid, great - I guess you'll be spending X other hours supporting yourself and possible family.
And if you do, you don't expect the hard work of others to be compensated? Rhetorical question.
You can go to Watt's steam engine or some such. I doubt he'd argue that his engine had intellectual property on the manual labour people did since time immemorial. But yet it did make their jobs obsolete.
Maybe some of them died while his patents were still in play. All the same, his invention, his idea, plays by the rules.
You shouldn't say anything to anyone who doesn't respect copyright laws - or, rather, you shouldn't have to. Your tax dollars, and the entity that you authorize to be the one to use force where you live, should be able to say whatever you, as the governed citizen, want to say to the person who doesn't respect copyright.
Debate about what AI means for copyright is really a debate about what we choose to do, what we choose to allow. It's a debate about whether the guys with guns will stop the development of AI, or how much.
It's a bit of clever misdirection to declare the output of AI's "copyrightable" or "not copyrightable." Copyrightable is made up! It's fiction! It is whatever we want it to be!