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Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

newyorker.com

71–80 of 309 posts

Re: Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

#71
Here’s a story from my days at Motorola Labs around 2009 that you might find relevant: we were looking at ways for streaming content to homes (Moto owned a set-top box business at that time) and there were big debates about the future of streaming. The position that prevailed was that consumers would not be able to stream content to their heart’s content en masse because content providers would never let it. I distinctly remember a presentation poster that said you couldn’t stream because it’s against the law, hence use our solution, etc.

Moral of the story for me is that if there’s adequate money to be made laws, protocols, etc. can totally be changed.

Re: Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

#72
post #43

Copyright is not a real thing. It's a fiction. Subverting copyright law is not like subverting the laws of physics. What happens when you subvert copyright law is some guys with guns, in either an overt way or a subtle one, force a trade of your imaginary resource (copyright) for the real resource (money), through licensing or fines. Debate about what AI means for copyright is really a debate about what we choose to…

[deleted]

Re: Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

#73

No subscription and archive.is is broken on 1.1 but it seems like the conversation is finally moving in a good direction. I'm very very tentatively hopeful that we might see some reduction of IP rights in my lifetime. It's going to be a long hard fight but maybe, just maybe we will see people wake the fuck up and realize how important the building up the fucking commons is to the progress of all humanity.

Let's see how software people feel when it becomes routine to AI wash projects to de-license them.

Software people here, we dont want ai people to steal our open source code, hide it behind closed models, and sell it without attribution or other terms respected.

Many in the software world are in awe how much theft ai people do.

Re: Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What happens when you subvert copyright law is some guys with guns, in either an overt way or a subtle one 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 wit…

Most copyrights are not held by the people who expended energy into the labor of producing new work, they're held by the employers of that labor. Most people have no practical choice in finding the means for their survival but through wage labor and selling the ownership of what they produce.

And that's fine, because presumably it's by consent.

Re: Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

#75

No subscription and archive.is is broken on 1.1 but it seems like the conversation is finally moving in a good direction. I'm very very tentatively hopeful that we might see some reduction of IP rights in my lifetime. It's going to be a long hard fight but maybe, just maybe we will see people wake the fuck up and realize how important the building up the fucking commons is to the progress of all humanity.

Is that from the perspective of a reader of novels or a writer of novels? Readers love free stuff.

When it costs zero to produce a copy of a novel is the moral choice to create artificial scarcity to preserve it's value in our current system of value assignment, or is the moral choice to fight to change and improve the system to more align with the reality that novels exist in a post-scarcity world?

Do we really want to deny people something that costs nothing in order to preserve the status quo? Perhaps it's the system of value assignment that's broken.

Re: Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

#76

It's been dead a while because of big tech. YouTube, Google, Facebook, Twitter - they have no way of effectively managing IP and so you basically see people's stolen content and they monetise it, so TBF Napster and torrents are another and earlier angle. Purely IMO, big tech normalised the taking of other people's content, and it's getting to the point where content creators (as in, ones that are capable of producing…

The pharmaceutical industry continues as a giant, blood sucking, vampire squid because of IP.

> The pharmaceutical industry continues as a giant, blood sucking, vampire squid because of IP.

Let's be honest here. In order to get that way, they needed to stomp out and eradicate every trace of "evidence" that natural medicine was efficacious, because herbs, botanicals, and other natural substances can't be patented, can't be synthesized in factories, and can't be exploited for profit at megascale.

If word ever leaked out that, for example, selenium, valerian root or St. John's wort were equivalent/better than synthetic, patented medications, we'd all be in trouble.

Re: Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

#77

Depending on the outcome of the NYT case, I.P. may in fact be the death of (profitable) AI. One problem with AI (vs e.g. Google search) is that there is no mechanism for attribution. So it is impossible for rights holders to understand whether their works are being monetised (unlike, say, Spotify). Should NYT win, then either AI services will have to pay into a (very large) common pot for rights holders, which likely…

So essentially ai is profitable only if it resells stolen property. Almost as if it’s not intelligent and it only procedurally generates output. The more the better.

Re: Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

#78

Depending on the outcome of the NYT case, I.P. may in fact be the death of (profitable) AI. One problem with AI (vs e.g. Google search) is that there is no mechanism for attribution. So it is impossible for rights holders to understand whether their works are being monetised (unlike, say, Spotify). Should NYT win, then either AI services will have to pay into a (very large) common pot for rights holders, which likely…

There’s no way AI services are going anywhere. If the US kneecaps itself for parasitic rent seekers then China will win and benefit from the productivity these tools produce.

So the proposal of sociopathic thieves is that we turn into china and steal people’s property? What an odd take.

Re: Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

#79
post #45

Depending on the outcome of the NYT case, I.P. may in fact be the death of (profitable) AI. One problem with AI (vs e.g. Google search) is that there is no mechanism for attribution. So it is impossible for rights holders to understand whether their works are being monetised (unlike, say, Spotify). Should NYT win, then either AI services will have to pay into a (very large) common pot for rights holders, which likely…

It’s not impossible. AI developers can 100% trace node that contribute to a result during the processing of a prompt, therefore they can be attributed. They’ll never do this, of course, cause they’re riding high on wins of stupid people pushing “you can’t work backward from a result to find the nodes” (which is probably somewhat grounded in reality). Attribution is absolutely not impossible, they just want to think i…

> they just want to think it’s not possible

As far as I'm aware, what you propose really isn't a solved issue. Most naive approaches you'd think might work are either infeasible or give chaotic nonsense results.

Partial matching between the output text and the training data is possible as a step after generation (though doesn't determine whether it's coincidence).

Re: Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

#80
post #43

Copyright is not a real thing. It's a fiction. Subverting copyright law is not like subverting the laws of physics. What happens when you subvert copyright law is some guys with guns, in either an overt way or a subtle one, force a trade of your imaginary resource (copyright) for the real resource (money), through licensing or fines. Debate about what AI means for copyright is really a debate about what we choose to…

U.S. copyright also has a constitutionally defined purpose: `[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"?

> Is the current length of copyright really "limited Times"?

This was argued before, and the Supreme Court decided "Yes, it is, somehow."

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