it worked for google, youtube, facebook, reddit, discord, tumblr, twitter . it's not exactly rocket science
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Ex-Google CEO: AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to 'clean up the mess'
41–50 of 201 posts
Re: Ex-Google CEO: AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to 'clean up the mess'
#42Isn't it what the companies already do? specially google
The playbook of "Do something legally gray > raise funding & expand > pivot away from legally gray OR employ lawyers to make it not legally gray" is basically the standard playbook of startups, the examples are countless: AirBnb, YouTube, Spotify, Uber, OpenAI, etc, etc... I'm sure it isn't always a bad idea, but struggling to come up with good examples for when the outcome from doing so have been more than just "sha…
It’s the ideology of disruption. As if this were an inherently good thing.
They could go the democratic route and raise awareness, create enough support within the constituency for their idea and have the democratic institutions adapt the respective laws.
Or they can decide that they are above such trivialities as the law and democratic process, move fast and break things and grab the fortune they feel entitled to have.
That’s the ideology behind this anti-democratic capitalist system.
Re: Ex-Google CEO: AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to 'clean up the mess'
#43Re: Ex-Google CEO: AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to 'clean up the mess'
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
It just works, and if anything, it's a sign the law is broken if you have to ignore it to succeed (and it's profitable to do so).
That's absurd. It's also incredibly profitable to rob a bank or to dump chemicals in the river instead of properly cleaning them up, but that's not a signal the law is broken.
Considering that it is solely a function of how influential, powerful, how much part of the aristocratic circle you are, or have bought them off that determines whether you are thrown in jail or are celebrated; by definition is is a clear signal that the law is broken.
Just because you can't rob a bank or pollute a river does not mean that the law is applied equally at all levels and, e.g., the government/Fed is stopped robbing our banks through inflation and debt, or the corporations they are beholden to are punished ro polluting and poisoning our bodies and environments.
Re: Ex-Google CEO: AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to 'clean up the mess'
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the law is broken according to some theory, the law is always broken in some ways, but the practice of a lawful society is to converge towards not-broken, over and over again. Is theory consistent with practice? well, ask yourself which governance, which language group, which implementors of law.. since they are composed of humans. While we are at it with a thought exercise.. how are large tech companies with new s…
You can make a loose analogy, but there's an enormous difference between violating IP rights and literally stealing things with physical violence.
There was a time when things like the music industry's comparison of piracy to stealing cars would be laughed at.
Re: Ex-Google CEO: AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to 'clean up the mess'
#46It's crazy to see the repercussions of the talk he gave at Stanford, even after the video was made private by the Stanford YouTube channel. I thought the talk was great. I remember in the talk he said something like this, but he was being really open about what normally happens in these types of companies. I think the problem is that he, as someone in a position of power, was too open about it?
Re: Ex-Google CEO: AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to 'clean up the mess'
#47That's not a nice way to say it - but it's true that startups don't have time or money to go through detailed legal clearances. That's for medium size companies with incumbent advantage, cash, and plenty to lose in a lawsuit. It's both a liability and an advantage for startups.
If you can’t do it legally, you have a choice. Become a criminal. Or just don’t do it. It’s that easy.
Because with your rationalization I could argue for any solipsistic behavior.
Re: Ex-Google CEO: AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to 'clean up the mess'
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
He’s describing agentic LLM tools which don’t exist in a usable state yet but also may not require full on AGI to create later on with the help of code/rules on top and from within. And he’s saying why this is useful beyond being able to do it without a workforce that costs a lot - because it’s fast enough for anyone large or small to iterate quickly with once it works, like the next step beyond continuous deployment…
He's describing a completely absurd fantasy. No matter how amazing your agent's code generation capabilities are, you can't simply snap your fingers and acquire the userbase that makes social media sites notionally valuable, and even if you could the market would be so flooded with people creating the same kind of garbage that absolutely nothing would "go viral".
Occasionally a song by a new recording artist will go viral even when it's no better than the thousands of other songs released every week. Popularity in media and entertainment often comes down to timing and luck.
Re: Ex-Google CEO: AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to 'clean up the mess'
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mass scraping the Internet and linking to different places was also legally questionable until lawyers hammered it out. Would the world be a better place if search engines had been preemptively ruled illegal?
As a regular joe, try to do something legally questionable against Oracle, and then "have the lawyers hammer it out". See how much of a good place the world is in this case. The problem is this stuff is highly asymmetric. Things are always "hammered out" in their favor, because you cannot afford to be a party to the "hammering out".
Regular joes use adblockers and torrents etc to do legally questionable things all the time, so not sure what you mean.
Personally I played hundreds of pirated games growing up for free, don't personally know anyone who got into trouble for doing that sort of thing.
Re: Ex-Google CEO: AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to 'clean up the mess'
#50That's not a nice way to say it - but it's true that startups don't have time or money to go through detailed legal clearances. That's for medium size companies with incumbent advantage, cash, and plenty to lose in a lawsuit. It's both a liability and an advantage for startups.
If you can’t do it legally, you have a choice. Become a criminal. Or just don’t do it. It’s that easy. Because with your rationalization I could argue for any solipsistic behavior.
You seem to be confused about the legal context. What he described are only potential civil law violations, not criminal. It's a completely different thing. Civil law has a lot of gray areas, especially around novel IP issues.