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The Battle over Books3

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Re: The Battle over Books3

#71

Post by OfSanguineFire »

lewhoo wrote: post #59
smokel wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Texts were copied even before the printing press. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright for more information.

They were, usually to preserve the work, not distribute it on a large scale because there was no large scale. What's your argument ?

This isn’t the case. In Ancient Rome it was a common practice for someone in the audience to note down poets’ performances, then give that transcript to a team of amanuenses who would produce copies for sale, with none of the proceeds going back to the original creator. In the pre-copyright world, no one saw any problem with this practice; as the other poster mentioned, the creator economy was patronage-based. All that the poets objected to (Martial has at least one biting epigram about this) was people putting their own names on the poetry instead of crediting the creator. That is, plagiarism instead of copyright violation.

Re: The Battle over Books3

#72

Post by astrange »

jsmith99 wrote: post #35
rhdunn wrote: post #8

I wonder how this affects things like the Oxford English Dictionary, wiktionary, and other corpus-based linguistics, which rely on sample sentences of the word usage in order to determine the context. Because language is an evolving thing, it is almost certain that they have referenced sentences from copyrighted sources. E.g. I'm willing to bet that they have the sentence where Cory Doctorow introduces the term "ensh…

oed.com has 0 results for "enshittification" yet.

Thankfully. People should really stop using words that make them sound like especially zany comic book characters.

Re: The Battle over Books3

#73

Post by swyx »

astrange wrote: post #72
jsmith99 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oed.com has 0 results for "enshittification" yet.

Thankfully. People should really stop using words that make them sound like especially zany comic book characters.

"enshittification" so far is mostly a shibboleth for cranky old guys who only criticize things and don't ahem get in the arena

Re: The Battle over Books3

#74

Post by photonerd »

radarsat1 wrote: post #19
civilitty wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is all the data on the internet from 2010 to 2025 that much more valuable than all the data on the internet from 2010 to 2022? Better data yes, but more data up to the present day? Do we really need that to keep improving AI? GPT is already capable of incredible generalized language understanding and I'd wager we've long since hit diminishing returns from raw internet data. RLHF, fine tuning, and better (and more dat…

People have somehow conflated artificial intelligence with "oracle that knows everything" and so keeping models up to date with recent knowledge has become a must. Of course, that could be done by fine tuning techniques and better architectures that can outsource knowledge retrieval to tools, all very interesting ongoing work on that topic, but even these approaches require to not be "blocked" in their data retrieval…

The “somehow” being “it was explicitly marketed that way”

Re: The Battle over Books3

#75

Post by lewhoo »

OfSanguineFire wrote: post #71
lewhoo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were, usually to preserve the work, not distribute it on a large scale because there was no large scale. What's your argument ?

This isn’t the case. In Ancient Rome it was a common practice for someone in the audience to note down poets’ performances, then give that transcript to a team of amanuenses who would produce copies for sale, with none of the proceeds going back to the original creator. In the pre-copyright world, no one saw any problem with this practice; as the other poster mentioned, the creator economy was patronage-based. All th…

> In Ancient Rome it was a common practice for someone in the audience to note down poets’ performances

Which was not at scale and in a different model of economy. Since it was the printing press which introduced the issue then what's the point in making an example from times where such issues didn't exist ?

> In the pre-copyright world, no one saw any problem with this practice

Because in the pre-industrial-revolution world the scale of the problem probably wasn't noticeable.

I know works of art were occasionally copied prior to printing press, hence the usually. I guess the modern analogy to your example would be something like CAM/TS films. You go to a show and copy the content. Are you arguing this should be legal ?

Re: The Battle over Books3

#76

Post by OfSanguineFire »

lewhoo wrote: post #75
OfSanguineFire wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn’t the case. In Ancient Rome it was a common practice for someone in the audience to note down poets’ performances, then give that transcript to a team of amanuenses who would produce copies for sale, with none of the proceeds going back to the original creator. In the pre-copyright world, no one saw any problem with this practice; as the other poster mentioned, the creator economy was patronage-based. All th…

> In Ancient Rome it was a common practice for someone in the audience to note down poets’ performances Which was not at scale and in a different model of economy. Since it was the printing press which introduced the issue then what's the point in making an example from times where such issues didn't exist ? > In the pre-copyright world, no one saw any problem with this practice Because in the pre-industrial-revoluti…

> Which was not at scale

I doubt you are playing here with a good-faith definition of “at scale”. In any event, copying of works for sale in Antiquity was certainly of scale, we know that many literary works spread quickly across the Mediterranean through commercial production. Furthermore, some of the earliest printed books were made in such limited editions that Roman mass production can certainly be compared. The development of the printing press is generally viewed in contrast to the medieval manuscript era that immediately preceded it, but that was a time marked by a decline in literary rates and amanuensis workforce since Antiquity.

As for going to a show and copying the content, yes, I would argue that this should be legal. Plenty of people on HN are from cultures that never entirely accepted copyright on entertainment, even if their countries’ governments were pressured to enact copyright legislation.

Re: The Battle over Books3

#77

Post by Vt71fcAqt7 »

gochi wrote: post #49
crote wrote: post #34

What worries me most is that this is likely to only increase the gap between large corporate creator and small independent creators. Large AI companies probably are not too worried about making deals with corporate content creators. Having access to content from a trigger-happy creator is only going to increase their advantage over competitors, after all. And if those creators were instead to try to introduce legisla…

[flagged]

>as it's integral to capitalism functioning

Copyright in the united states begins in 1776 and even earlier in Europe. At this time the economy consisted almost solely of agriculture as well as some light manufacturing. So it seems highly unlikely that the authors of the constitution saw copyright as "integral to capitalism functioning" rather than as a way to promote the arts.

Regarding your second point:

>The first statutory police force is believed to be the High Constables of Edinburgh, who were created by the Scottish parliament in 1611 to "guard their streets and to commit to ward all person found on the streets after the said hour".[0]

I understand that you will likely view this source through a communist lens, and I wouldn't either take every primary source at face value but having a city watch and balif was common. As goverments became more centralized these were replaced by "police" but it is misleading to say police were simply invented one day, and that it was invented soley with ulterior motives.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_criminal_justice

Re: The Battle over Books3

#78

Post by walnutclosefarm »

It would be interesting to see someone dig into the differences between the capture of language and culture, and control over how it gets fed back into cultural discourse, that we fear corporations achieving with commercialized LLMs, and the control pre-internet publishers had (and to a certain extent, still do), over what content, and in what format, language was disbursed and distributed. I am not at all certain that having your work used to train LLMs is a bigger threat to writers ownership of their work than publishing houses were and are.

I also suspect that if we had an effective mechanism to prevent use of copyrighted work in training, it would necessarily behoove an artist to opt their content out. Will you really want to be excluded what may well become the canonical mechanism for searching and generating language?

Re: The Battle over Books3

#79

Post by throw10920 »

Vt71fcAqt7 wrote: post #77
gochi wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

>as it's integral to capitalism functioning Copyright in the united states begins in 1776 and even earlier in Europe. At this time the economy consisted almost solely of agriculture as well as some light manufacturing. So it seems highly unlikely that the authors of the constitution saw copyright as "integral to capitalism functioning" rather than as a way to promote the arts. Regarding your second point: >The first…

> So it seems highly unlikely that the authors of the constitution saw copyright as "integral to capitalism functioning" rather than as a way to promote the arts.

They didn't. GP is speaking out of ignorance and desire to prove that "capitalism bad".

Re: The Battle over Books3

#80

Post by lewhoo »

OfSanguineFire wrote: post #76
lewhoo wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In Ancient Rome it was a common practice for someone in the audience to note down poets’ performances Which was not at scale and in a different model of economy. Since it was the printing press which introduced the issue then what's the point in making an example from times where such issues didn't exist ? > In the pre-copyright world, no one saw any problem with this practice Because in the pre-industrial-revoluti…

> Which was not at scale I doubt you are playing here with a good-faith definition of “at scale”. In any event, copying of works for sale in Antiquity was certainly of scale, we know that many literary works spread quickly across the Mediterranean through commercial production. Furthermore, some of the earliest printed books were made in such limited editions that Roman mass production can certainly be compared. The…

> I doubt you are playing here with a good-faith definition of “at scale”.

I could say the same thing about you because you make it sound like the appearance of some works in various places on the map is equivalent to their vast abundance.

> development of the printing press is generally viewed in contrast to the medieval manuscript era that immediately preceded it

If you skip renaissance.

> As for going to a show and copying the content, yes

I guess it's one thing to argue something like that from the spectators pov and another from the artists. If you actually have evidence that there are large circles of professional artists who argue their work should be copied at will with no compensation then ok, you are right.

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