Earlier quoted context omitted.
> very nature of information is that it yearns to be free. Information cannot be "owned." The nature of information is to dissolve into entropy.
You bought a Western Digital drive too, eh?
Underrated comment!
Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”
261–270 of 296 posts
Re: Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
So again, I guess you’re stealing from me by coming up with the same idea that I had.
You're being disingenuous. I would be stealing if I prevented you from making money from it.
By doing what exactly? Selling spades because you also figured out how to put a stone on a stick? If you believe such things should be illegal, do we agree that you don’t follow the force is only justified in response to force principle?
Re: Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same. The very nature of information is that it yearns to be free. Information cannot be "owned." The point of copyright should be to grant temporary monopolies to encourage creation, not to confer ownership. Thomas Jefferson put it beautifully: If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclus…
Not merely the point of copyright, but also the basis for copyright in the USA. Specifically all forms of intellectual property in the USA trace back to Article I Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution. Which gives Congress the 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".
> limited times
Technically life + 70 years - or 1 million years for that matter - is "limited" - but I imagine 14+14 is probably closer to what they had in mind.
Re: Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”
#264[dead]
Re: Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd argue that land is owned because it's a finite resource, and that without property ownership people would be in conflict with one another. "Creative expression" is not finite, in fact every human possesses it, it's also intangible, it's ideas, thoughts, ... , which I personally do not believe should be owned.
> "Creative expression" is not finite It absolutely is. Doing it at all requires time & attentive focus, which is a finite resource for anybody mortal, and moreover a resource that's scarce and has to be spent in multiple places. Doing it well requires significant investment in practice and training, often years of it, maybe even decades in order to develop certain levels of expressive fluency. As with any issue of s…
I think the concept that PP may be trying to get across is scarcity:
"goods are scarce because there are not enough resources to produce all the goods that people want to consume".(quoted at [1])
Physical books are intrinsically scarce because they require physical resources to make and distribute copies. Libraries are often limited by physical shelf space.
Ebooks are not intrinsically scarce because there are enough resources to enable anyone on the internet to download any one of millions of ebooks at close to zero marginal cost, with minimal physical space requirements per book. Archive.org and Z-Library are examples of this.
Consider also free goods:
"Examples of free goods are ideas and works that are reproducible at zero cost, or almost zero cost. For example, if someone invents a new device, many people could copy this invention, with no danger of this "resource" running out."[2]
Re: Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Don't recruit me into some bullshit argument that rewrites history and entrenches Disney's ill-gotten monopoly. You don't think it's them being allowed to buy Marvel, Pixar, Lucasfilm? Is creativity ruined because I can't make a Mickey Mouse cartoon or t-shirt? Does the world need Luke Skywalker coming from any individual studio? People are free to make the Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Hunchback of Notre D…
The three acquisitions you mentioned all took place many years after the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. Without the financial benefits conferred by that law (the timing and content of which benefited them more than it did their competitors), they might not have made all of those acquisitions. A lot of people in this thread seem to be undervaluing those old school Disney characters, yes now Disney is huge and h…
What's needed regardless of copyright or patent terms, is a similar attitude to legal predation as there is to physical stalking and threatening.
i.e. enforce egregious IP violations while criminalizing trolls.
Re: Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
and why should "creative expression" be owned?
Why should land be owned? None of us created the planet... But we have selected an economic system that depends on ownership to drive exchange in a market, so... that's why.
> But we have selected an economic system that depends on ownership to drive exchange in a market, so... that's why.
For extremely loose values of "we", perhaps - I didn't select it, and I would vote "no" if the idea were proposed...
Re: Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why should land be owned? None of us created the planet... But we have selected an economic system that depends on ownership to drive exchange in a market, so... that's why.
> Why should land be owned? it shouldn't. Or, well, it should, but it should be the one and only thing taxed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
I live in Washington state where the state taxes are mainly sales tax and property tax. Both end up being regressive. Sales tax is because it is not proportional to income. You might think that property tax would hit higher income people more but what happens is that the property tax makes homes more expensive for low income people and is also passed on to renters in their monthly rent.
Re: Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're being disingenuous. I would be stealing if I prevented you from making money from it.
By doing what exactly? Selling spades because you also figured out how to put a stone on a stick? If you believe such things should be illegal, do we agree that you don’t follow the force is only justified in response to force principle?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader
Then once smaller competitors are out of business, raise prices.
Of course, force can go into it, such as when a big company sues a smaller company with a frivolous lawsuit that the smaller company can't afford to fight. Then the smaller company goes out of business, and the big company can use their ideas free.
Re: Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Creative expression" is not finite It absolutely is. Doing it at all requires time & attentive focus, which is a finite resource for anybody mortal, and moreover a resource that's scarce and has to be spent in multiple places. Doing it well requires significant investment in practice and training, often years of it, maybe even decades in order to develop certain levels of expressive fluency. As with any issue of s…
I think the concept that PP may be trying to get across is scarcity : "goods are scarce because there are not enough resources to produce all the goods that people want to consume".(quoted at [1]) Physical books are intrinsically scarce because they require physical resources to make and distribute copies. Libraries are often limited by physical shelf space. Ebooks are not intrinsically scarce because there are enoug…
> the concept that PP may be trying to get across is scarcity:
It's pretty mysterious that you think you need to introduce this to the conversation at this point given how prominently scarcity dynamics figure into the comment you're replying to.
> Physical books are intrinsically scarce
Once their production was industrialized with printing press tech, copies of books weren't scarce, they were actually revolutionarily cheap.
The copyright bargain isn't borne out of ignorance of how changes in that direction affect the overall dynamic, it's borne out of deep understanding of what remains scarce and risky and difficult to compensate for when the marginal cost of producing copies drops drastically, and what kind of claims might help.