Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft

That's the part of the argument in favor of copyright that is inherently flawed.

Doing some amount of work doesn't entitle you to anything besides whatever you've agreed to get for that work, or possession of the output, in case you did it for yourself. But that's all you're entitled to get.

Work itself doesn't have any intrinsic value, only output does. The scarcity of output is what dictates what is actually valuable.

Creative work has the characteristic of its marginal cost being very high for the first copy, but nearly zero for additional copies. That's true simply because of the nature of such work, it isn't something that is unfairly imposed upon creative workers. Whenever you choose to engage in creative work, you know that, or at least you should. And if you choose to give away the first copy for free, or very cheap, that's your prerrogative, but it doesn't inherently entitle you to anything else besides the value of that first copy.

Yes, there are laws such as copyright laws that exist to artificially inflate the value of additional copies, but they go against how things work naturally, so you shouldn't rely on them, and you certainly shouldn't base your moral compass on them.

Now, I do still prefer copyleft licenses over permissive ones for the work I choose to give away for free, but only to stop corporations from taking that work and then using copyright laws to keep it exclusive to them. Once copyright is no longer an issue, they won't be necessary anymore.

Stolen? They've taken it all and it's gone? No. They read it and processed it and that's fair use. Some companies might have acquired some of illegally but that doesn't make it stolen and is actually, again, mostly irrelevant. If a company just acquired it all legally (and some are doing just that) I doubt that would change your position.

> Either an AI is something with inherent value like human life and then it cannot be owned or controlled because that would be slavery. Or it's just an unfeeling ordinary tool and then it's just a sum of its parts which are stolen.

Again you're fair too liberal with the world "stolen". Your entire argument is begging the question. You've got a conclusion and your argument rests on that conclusion. That intellectual property is a real thing. That it can be stolen. And that anything learned from stealing knowledge is somehow tainted.

> Humans value their own time.

Do they? This conversation alone proves that neither of us truly values our time. But assume I do value my time, why am wasting it figuring out things that other people have already figured out. We waste so much human potential reinventing wheels.

> It's absolutely relevant. Why do we have laws? Who should they serve and protect first and foremost? Corporations? Algorithms? Humans?

Do you feel ordinary humans are protected by the current copyright laws? I feel like at least one much larger group of humans is constrained by those laws so a considerably smaller number of humans, many of which not directly involved in any creative ventures, can profit. If the whole system was torn down, are you absolutely sure that wouldn't be a benefit to society as a whole?

Why am I, as user of AI, not allowed to be protected?

> All the other people chose to make their work available under certain rules. What I object to is those rules changing without those people being able to renegotiate the deal.

I never got a say in the deal but now I can't express myself in certain ways without potentially criminal liability. The rules have changed dozens of times over the last 200 years.

> Imagine 5 years from now, AI is better at everything than humans, all white collar workers are forced to work manually. 25 years from now, robots have advanced enough that all workers are without jobs. What, however, remains is owners of AI companies who now control the entire economy, top to bottom, and we are at their mercy.

What economy? You just described a world without one. And without an economy, they are at our mercy. Their power comes entirely from the system that you imagine would no longer exist.

> > We're starving human minds of modern culture > What?

There's an entire missing middle of human culture -- basically everything from the 20th century -- because of copyright. This is a well known phenomenon.

> One thing gamedev taught me is that even if you have the best intentions and help people, you might end up helping some people more and those people will make everything worse for the others, effectively working against your goal.

There is a bias towards the status quo. That whatever system we have now, with the people who win or lose, is the correct system. That the winner deserved to win and the losers deserved to lose. It's difficult to imagine a different system, with different winners and losers, might actually be better.

Please, understand that morality and legality are different concepts. I don't care about legality. It should codify morality but it doesn't I argue about morality. Legality should follow from that.

> Some companies might have acquired some of illegally but that doesn't make it stolen

So something is stolen only if its gone? Can I walk into your house, take some stuff and give it back before you notice and it's ok then?

> mostly irrelevant

Consent matters. It's not just a sex thing.

You keep saying "irrelevant" and I think it reveals your true intentions. You just want to benefit from other people's work without even as much as attempting to negotiate how much it's worth. You see an opportunity to take and you do.

> I doubt that would change your position

Correct. I argue about right and wrong. Slavery used to be legal. The holocaust was legal. Fuck legal.

> That intellectual property is a real thing

You're right. Ownership is not a real thing either. You don't own anything you can't physically defend. Now go grab your gun, i'll grab mine and we'll see who owns what.

If you don't like the idea, that's normal, that's why people wrote down rules to mostly avoid that. And the rules should be based on a moral system agreed to by humans and they'll still go grab their guns.

> learned

Your definition of "stolen" is that it must be gone. My definition of "learning" is that it must be done by a human.

> Do you feel ordinary humans are protected by the current copyright laws?

Irrelevant. You argue about what is, I argue about what should be.

> I feel like at least one much larger group of humans is constrained by those laws so a considerably smaller number of humans, many of which not directly involved in any creative ventures, can profit.

You're onto something but I can't say whether I agree or not unless you specify who belongs to each group.

> If the whole system was torn down, are you absolutely sure that wouldn't be a benefit to society as a whole?

I am highly confident if it's replaced with something better, it'll just benefit those who already have an advantage. The system has massive flaws, yes, but at least nobody can just take all my work and post it as theirs. Or could to be precise.

> I never got a say in the deal but now I can't express myself in certain ways without potentially criminal liability.

And that's wrong too. Are you arguing that one ting is right because a similar thing is wrong? Isn't it that they're both wrong? Any reasonable interpretation of what you just said is that both are wrong.

> And without an economy, they are at our mercy. Their power comes entirely from the system that you imagine would no longer exist.

All real-world power comes from violence materialized or threatened, direct or indirect. Most power currently comes from convincing other people to do it or threaten to do it. They don't even have to own a gun, they just point to a bit of text a lot of people agreed to follow which says for example that you both present your argument to a guy who decides if people with guns come into your home and put you in a small room for a few years.

Now imagine you have no economical value. You still have your right to vote, for now. A guy owns an AI company, a robotics company which builds brushless motors, ballbearings, etc., and a chemical plant which makes composition B. All of these are completely autonomous because AI and robots took all jobs. A cop takes 18 years to make, how many is your country making in parallel? How long does a drone take to make and how many can the owner's plant make in parallel. And then your right to vote can be gone with one prompt. The cop won't protect you, it's probably already a robot anyway.

Previously you needed to convince people to do violence for you. With AI, you just prompt it.

> There's an entire missing middle of human culture -- basically everything from the 20th century -- because of copyright. This is a well known phenomenon.

Piracy? If something is copyrighted but not commercially available, it's also unlikely you'll get sued.

More seriously, yes, copyright has issues. But some people just see those issues and instead of trying to identify the root causes and trying to fix then, you just wanna throw out the whole system and you never seem to game out what happens afterwards. Do you think any system of rules should be thrown out or is copyright somehow uniquely bad?

If there's no copyright and somebody makes a video host competing with youtube (e.g. Nebula), what's stopping youtube from just taking all the videos and making them available for free until the competitor runs out of money? Youtube has much stronger network effects by orders of magnitude. Youtube has cash reserves larger by orders of magnitude.

The only time I saw a guy try to game out what happens without copyright, the best he did is come up with a opt-in reputation system which IMO wouldn't work but which can already exist now. If copyright was so bad, why don't all creators release their stuff in the public domain? Pick a licence which doesn't even require attribution and only rejects liability.

> It's difficult to imagine a different system, with different winners and losers, might actually be better.

I never said that. What I wanted is for the difference to be smaller. If the scores are regularly 10:0 and sometimes 10:1, while the winning side is not even breaking a sweat, then the losing side is likely not having much fun. If the scores are more like 10:6, sometimes 10:8, then both sides had their moments, both sides can see how the game could have ended up the other way and both sides probably had fun.

Please don't take other people's arguments to extremes which are obviously not what the author meant.

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EDIT:

You had some reasonable points like "That's not to say I don't support copyright as a means to support creative works but I would argue that it's an imperfect system."

But I also didn't express how strongly I disagree with your "The short answer is no."

When talking about limited resources like housing or real estate, then the rules need to be such that those who own a lot can't use it to squeeze out those who own less more and more over time.

But art, code and other intellectual work is not like that. If you think somebody is charging too much for his work, just do it yourself from scratch without basing your work on theirs. It's very easy to say something is too expensive. I've fallen into the trap myself when evaluating software contracts. It's often not as easy to do in-house as it was at first glance. If the work didn't have value, the author would give it away for free or somebody else would. If the work had less value than being asked for, somebody else would offer it for less or you can do it for less.

However, the purported reimplementations did not usurp the names of the reimplemented product. Reimplement chardet using AI and insisting in calling the product the same as old chardet with a new version number and a new license is, I think, not exactly honest. At least he should have used something like "chardet-ng", "chardet-fresh", or whatever, and a completely different source tree.