Earlier quoted context omitted.
This would create incentive to kill people
I would change it to "the expected natural life of the author" which is their birthday + 85 years. Regardless of whether they actually are still alive past that date.
AI companies are shredding rare books
511–520 of 559 posts
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#512Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scanning books by taking them apart into singular pages and scanning those pages is faster and cheaper. AI training is a numbers game, so they want faster and cheaper. What happens to the pages after? No one needs them anymore, so they get mulched and recycled. That would be the dominant scanning method even if copyright wasn't a thing. But then again - if copyright wasn't a thing, there would be much less need to sc…
> if copyright wasn't a thing, there would be much less need to scan any physical media. Because there’d be much less content created in any media to capture in the first place.
Less of some kinds, more of others. It has been getting easier to create creative works over time, lowering the threshold to make things even for nothing. The netto result would be a bit of an experiment even now, but for sure there are flourishing communities, open source, open content, fanfics, short stories, etc etc. Some hollywood blockbusters even started out as modern internet culture and/or online stories. So there's cross-pollination between the different kinds of communities too.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#513> You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate. Aren't they shredding only the books still under copyright protection? How is an 18th century botanical text still under copyright? IDK about the shredding, it's not nice, but it's more a problem with copyright…
Scanning books by taking them apart into singular pages and scanning those pages is faster and cheaper. AI training is a numbers game, so they want faster and cheaper. What happens to the pages after? No one needs them anymore, so they get mulched and recycled. That would be the dominant scanning method even if copyright wasn't a thing. But then again - if copyright wasn't a thing, there would be much less need to sc…
> Scanning books by taking them apart into singular pages and scanning those pages is faster and cheaper. AI training is a numbers game, so they want faster and cheaper.
It's faster and cheaper to do all sort of shitty things and people still don't generally do them. AI training may be a numbers game, but the life of none of the involved persons solely consists of AI training. They are persons, not AI training. Likewise, companies only want to make money, fine, but none of the involved people are a company.
It's just shitty people doing shitty things out of sheer greed. This isn't poor people cutting corners so they might survive, bleh to pleading for sympathy for those who are last in queue to warrant it.
> if copyright wasn't a thing, there would be much less need to scan any physical media.
Or physical media, for that matter.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#514Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if copyright wasn't a thing, there would be much less need to scan any physical media. Because there’d be much less content created in any media to capture in the first place.
Less of some kinds, more of others. It has been getting easier to create creative works over time, lowering the threshold to make things even for nothing. The netto result would be a bit of an experiment even now, but for sure there are flourishing communities, open source, open content, fanfics, short stories, etc etc. Some hollywood blockbusters even started out as modern internet culture and/or online stories. So…
> It has been getting easier to create creative works over time
When it comes to writing, paper and pens, and then typewriters, have been rather cheap for a long time. Computers made it even cheaper, but it was already so cheap that wasn't the bottleneck. Or take playing instruments, singing even.
But you are totally right about distribution being essentially free now, and with all my qualms about slop and algorithms etc. it's also true that some things become widely known simply because they're really good, sometimes leading someone from rags to riches so to speak, and I can't hate that. I'm sure it would do the same for novels or other "long texts" if more people were into reading those digitally. So while I'd say TV and other stuff killed reading by being louder and more shiny and offering instant rewards, I can't really blame the internet as such for that.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#515Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They should pay a fair amount. they should pay the marginal value that the next buyer would buy. Do you also think that a person dying of thirst ought to pay the maximum price they could possibly pay for water?
> the marginal value that the next buyer would buy Well the argument is that they should pay for the right to produce derivative works not for the physical copy.
Sure, but they're not producing derivative works.
I'm told some of the recent Qwen models were trained on something like 140TB of data or so. I can put some of the Qwen models on a slightly large USB stick (~32G) . No way that contains the whole source text. No form of compression survives that. It's an old argument, it's still the simplest argument-by-numbers.
The intuition this counters is "it's drawing from a big database" or "it memorized everything". It didn't. It still can recall passages at times. But then again, so can I for my favorite books and movies.
And no I'm not saying it's human, to stop the next big jump.
LLMs are LLMs. They have their own properties. Some of which happen to coincide with human properties. Just like a robot arm has some properties in common with humans.
Similar requirements, similar constraints; you're going to have to expect similar behaviors and failure modes at least some of the time. But I haven't heard anyone claim a robot arm can edit a python program, nor have I heard of an LLM picking 100 widgets per minute.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#516Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean that's what capitalism is about? It's about capital. It doesn't asks where you get that capital - if you have $100,000 that you inherited vrs $100,000 you earned, JPM will still see it as just $100,000. So yes, by capitalism, if your parents did a lot of hard work and saved the capital and gave it to you, you have it. Where does it make a moral judgement that it's wrong to have inheritance or right t…
To your second point: a company (or any kind of organisation) is continuous work. It's a very obvious retort to your analogy. It would be akin to the author writing a book in a series every year for twenty years, then giving their rights to their child who keeps writing books every year, and every book only has 20 years of copyright. Seems fair to me. To your first point: inheritance has a concentrating effect on wea…
> To your second point: a company (or any kind of organisation) is continuous work. It's a very obvious retort to your analogy. It would be akin to the author writing a book in a series every year for twenty years, then giving their rights to their child who keeps writing books every year, and every book only has 20 years of copyright. Seems fair to me.
I don't understand how that is fair though? Why should the author give away their rights without any compensation to the public is my point. Continous work is not really relevant to this, otherwise you would have concede that any previous work done by the company in 20 years including their trademarks, logos, ideas should be free for the public to use? Otherwise it is clearly unfair that we treat writers with one set of law regarding property but have another set of laws for every other business?
And yes, capitalism is not good but my point is that it supports inheritance as a system. It doesn't care where you got the money. Is it fair? Of course not. The root of this is based on exploitation and it is what the world has accepted as the common form of economy.
And yes, I have experienced poverty but I don't think its viscerally unfair that "rich kids" exist. Why is it unfair in an objective term? Because they got handed things for free? Or because they have it better than you? In either case, it would be very easy to find examples of people who have it 10 times worse than you and who think your existence is unfair. But is it really?
> If your grandparents gave you a house for free, and you used that enormous advantage to pur your money elsewhere and then own 2, 3 houses, and your child then gets 10, that's 10 houses that people could own themselves, instead of paying the highest rent that your child can get away with.
Or you could also lose all your money by being stupid with it and not having any skills. If you have the skill to build upon the foundation, why is it luck? Why are we assuming just because your grandparents gave you a house for free, you'll automatically continue to build upon it and not lose it (which happens a lot more often than you would think). Should that skill not be respected? Who are you to determine what is fair and what is not.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#517Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point isn't why the state should grant me (or writers) a monopoly. But rather, why should the principle not be applied to all property and ownership and not just copyright for creative works? Why should one lose ownership over their said work if they are a writer but they shouldn't lose ownership of their trade secrets because they are a high-frequency trader? Or more so, why should only the creative field worry…
Funny that you are comparing Copyrights and Trade Secrets. The monopoly granted on Copyright is predicated on it being published. Trade Secrets, by definition, are not published. Copyright is granted based on the value to the public provided by the author publishing their works. Trade Secrets have no such protection as they are not meant for the public good. They have other protection from theft, but once they are pu…
Copyright does not depend on publication. In most countries (including the U.S. and those following the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works), copyright arises automatically the moment an original work is fixed in a tangible medium. And there is no actual legal justification for it to be "meant for the public good" in law or policy.
One philosophical justification for copyright is that it encourages creators to produce and eventually share creative works. But the law doesn't ask whether a work provides public value before granting copyright.
You are undermining the argument by including your faulty understanding of law and missing the bigger point. I am not saying copyright and trade secrets are treated the same in terms of protection by law, I am saying they should be. Because as a writer, I do not want to give my life's work away and let people do whatever they want with it. I want it to stay in my family and I should have the legal right to do it. If that means registering a company and using other laws to protect my work, so be it, but it is not meant to be given away for "public good" in my opinion just because its a work of art.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#518I've limited sympathy for the publishers. It pisses me off to reflect that they can sit on works until copyright expires, keeping them out of print. There's no real need for any of these so-called rare books to be rare while they're under copyright. And related to this, the books that are in print are mostly only in print in the shittiest way. I often see well-made books from the 17th or 18th centuries which are stil…
A friend proposed that copyright should just die with the author and / or their spouse and I'm left agreeing. I want books and music to be less strict on copyright. Some of my favorite YouTube channels break down music and songs, and go as far as recreating beats / tracks from famous hip hop songs, but someone at a record label company dings every one of their videos, they can barely sample a few seconds, its VERY CL…
I'd rather not involve the author's life in the copyright duration at all - it should be a limited time just enough for the author/heirs/whoever to recover costs plus make a modest profit and not a special kind of retirement fund or other kind of welfare scheme.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#519Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think they are very different in concept, other than one covers physical goods (and also procedures to make physical goods), and the other covers writings. The purposes of both are: "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." Like, this is a made up regime with a specific intent.…
It would also make it much easier for corporations to exploit authors. They would generally make most of their money early (in the couple of years following when the content is released). Individual authors would be much more affected, it might take years for your book to become popular. Also imagine if a studio decides to make a movie or tv show just right after your copyright expires, they wouldn't pay the author a…
> Patented inventions and technologies have some sort of direct practical value. Society does not really benefit much if anyone is allowed to created derived works based on any copyrighted content without compensating the author.
Most of copyrighted works are derived fro earlier works in some form, often ones that are older than copyright. If derived works provide no value then most copyright doesn't provide any value.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#520Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not just 30 years? Patents get a flat 20. Not that I'm arguing for 30 per se, just that I don't see what goals of copyright would be advanced more by adding an "or until death" complication.
Well imagine you write a book in your 20s or 30s and it only becomes popular after a couple of decades. The publisher gets to pocket all the money. Somebody decides to make a movie based on your book? You get nothing at all from it... The movie bit would be problematic even for books that were reasonably popular at the time. e.g the Witcher adaption came out almost exactly 20 years after the last book, for GOT it was…
So? Imagine you build a house and it only increases in value after you sold it?
Imagine you invent a new kind of computer memory and it only becomes wildly profitable after the patent expires.
The purpose of copyright is NOT to let the original author capture all value of their creations.
And even independently of copyright "with the blessing of the original author" IS a selling point that will give authors ability to market their past works without restricting everyone else's speech. And any new works they create will automatically gain much more attention after their past works become popular - encouraging them to keep creating, just as copyright should.