Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI companies are shredding rare books

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

521–530 of 559 posts

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#521

Post by account42 »

DrScientist wrote: post #458
delecti wrote: post #395

Earlier 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.

For inventions if you don't make money off it in the first 20 years you are unlikely to ever make any money off it - as the invention space moves on. That's not the same for a work of fiction or a piece of music. Case in point apparently books sales for the Odyssey are massively up - when it was originally written in 7-8 BC :-) Also most books etc don't make much, if any money - an publisher/author might rely on a th…

> That's not the same for a work of fiction or a piece of music. Case in point apparently books sales for the Odyssey are massively up - when it was originally written in 7-8 BC :-)

And it was written without copyright. So why should the rest of us give up part of our free speech rights for longer than 20 years in order to enrich authors, when its proven that we can get great works without doing that?

The question is not whether longer copyright ever lets authors profit more, it's whether society benefits as a whole.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#522

Post by account42 »

delecti wrote: post #463
DrScientist wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For inventions if you don't make money off it in the first 20 years you are unlikely to ever make any money off it - as the invention space moves on. That's not the same for a work of fiction or a piece of music. Case in point apparently books sales for the Odyssey are massively up - when it was originally written in 7-8 BC :-) Also most books etc don't make much, if any money - an publisher/author might rely on a th…

My personal preference is actually a flat 50 years. I think that if an author writes something at 25 and it doesn't blow up until they're 75, I think that's given them more than a fair chance to capitalize on it. My real point though is that IMO, whatever duration we pick shouldn't depend on the creator. It would tend to undervalue their later creations, treats corporations differently from people in a way that doesn…

50 years is too long - you should be able to build on your childhood experiences in your lifetime.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#523

Post by account42 »

Ekaros wrote: post #449
this_was_posted wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then just make it the rule that the copyright expires after 30 years or when the author dies, whichever comes last.

I am fine that estate gets to keep rights for whatever period is left. If estate is dissolved ofc rights would also end. So they can't be orphaned. Either someone has them or they are public domain.

Orphaning is less of a problem than copyright nondeterminism where someone owns the copyright but no one knows. A good way to solve this would be to also move move works into the public domain if they are no longer sold in some form. With digital distribution costs are now so low that there is not excuse to not at least keep selling something unless you care so little about it that you have no argument why you should retain a monopoly. Perhaps with a short enough term this is less of a problem though.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#525

Post by ralferoo »

fragmede wrote: post #495
ktm5j wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So does life insurance.. but we still have that.

What we don't have anymore though because of that, is tontines.

Never heard of it, so just googled, but it's not obvious why these would be more preferable to annuities. As you get older above about 75, people tend to spend a lot less in general (assuming they don't need care support), so getting more money when you're unlikely to spend it anyway seems pointless.

I'd speculate that the regular payments on annuities would therefore be higher than tontines because insurance companies would be able to factor in average life expectancy to the pricing more easily, rather than having to budget for possibly all the money continuing to be paid out to just one remaining person who happened to beat the odds and live well beyond 100 instead of the average around mid-80s.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#529

Post by ShinyLeftPad »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #294
shimman wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might surprise people to learn but the law isn't the final arbiter on what is moral or just. The law only decides what is legal and as we've seen over our lived history as humans, many "legal" things may not be those we want society to uphold.

It's not really a surprise to many here, but we don't want to go back there too often, because that topic is well trodden - the intellectual property in its current form is far worse offender against "what is moral or just" than anything LLM companies ever did. In fact, the whole problem of shredding books (destructive format-shifting) was created by copyright laws in the first place, and that in itself is a concessi…

> the intellectual property in its current form is far worse offender

It absolutely is... for LLM operators. For the rest of us it's a minor nuisance.

In fact, it is pretty just for the rest of us. because if it was observed by the spirit then we would either not see this tech pushing people out of jobs OR those people would be entitled to pay,

Post reply on HN