611–620 of 623 posts
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If not for copyright, you could always do that and copyleft wouldn't be needed.
Just because something is copyleft doesn't mean the person who gave you the binary you're using has to supply you with the code the used to build it. That's what the GPL does.
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Copyright is the right to make copies. The creator of a work has a government granted monopoly on that right. When I download a picture from a website and save it to my machine, I am making a copy of it. If the photographer has not given me explicit permission to do so, then I have infringed on their rights by making an unauthorized copy of their work. The mere existence of licenses like the creative commons refutes…
Downloading a picture needs to happen to show it. Without it it cannot be shown. I'm sure courts figured out that viewing a picture via browser is not infringing.
Obviously the creators want more money and control. Thus copies are only allowed to be made if it benefits them. Viewing a copy of the picture via the website might be permitted, but saving it or sharing it might not.
The truth is nobody really cares what creators want. People will save and share and edit and meme it all up because they can. It is natural. It is their delusional belief that they can control what others do with information that is out of touch with reality.
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"What happens when an LLM outputs a patented algorithm?" remains a huge land mine out there, particularly since patent infringement does not require intent or even knowledge, and these models have trained on every patent ever granted.
If you can prove that your LLM did not learn from the patent (eg cut-off for learning was before), then the LLM outputting the algorithm (or product etc) would be pretty good evidence that a practitioner of ordinary competence in the field, or whatever the exact legal wording is, found the whole invention to be trivial.
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Downloading a picture needs to happen to show it. Without it it cannot be shown. I'm sure courts figured out that viewing a picture via browser is not infringing.
You forgot the "save it to my machine" part which lets me view the picture whenever I want without visiting its creator's website repeatedly. This means I don't need to be exposed to ads, which in turn lowers the creator's income. It also means other people can get the picture from me rather from the creator. Even less ads and payments. Obviously the creators want more money and control. Thus copies are only allowed…
you said
> You infringe copyright every time you download a picture off of a website
no, browser downloads a copy of the picture in order to show it and it is fine by courts
that's why I'm saying you don't know what you're talking about
> This means I don't need to be exposed to ads, which in turn lowers the creator's income
duh.
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> that's fair use 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 noti…
> Please, understand that morality and legality are different concepts. You don't believe that fair use is a moral issue? I think obviously it is. > So something is stolen only if its gone? Yes, that's the definition of stolen. > Can I walk into your house, take some stuff and give it back before you notice and it's ok then? I was stolen and then it was returned. Very simple. If you could come to my house and can cop…
It's a moral issue, sure. That statement alone doesn't make it morally right/wrong and doesn't say anything about the extent of fair use. Why do you use words in such a manipulative way and expect to get away with it?
> Yes, that's the definition of stolen.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=steal+meaning&t=ffab&ia=web
1. To take (the property of another) without right or permission.
2. To present or use (someone else's words or ideas) as one's own.
Ok? Stop restricting words to definitions you like.
> artificial system to restrict
Should society have an artificial system to restrict passing of material property? If I find a wallet on the street, should I be free to consider it mine? Why is IP any different?
> restrict the passing of knowledge
Knowledge or information? I consider it only knowledge when it's in a human's head.
You keep buying into the idea that statistical algorithms based on ANNs are somehow "AI" and keep using it to implicitly change meanings. You first need to defend that LLMs are somehow qualitatively different from other methods of autocomplete / that they are analogous to human minds. And then you have an issue that you might have argued yourself into giving them (human) rights. Good luck.
The issue with "AI" is that if accepted as actual AI, it gives those who own/control it power similar to controlling a full human being without having to give it any rights. It gives immense power without any checks and balances. It's a discontinuity in the rights+obligations spectrum.
BTW, if I have knowledge in my head, am I required to share it? Why not? What about leaked private conversations? Leaked source code?
> I also develop intellectual property on my own time and give it away freely.
Irrelevant, you're free to give consent. That doesn't justify your opinion that other people should also be required to give consent.
> ad hominem
It's a criticism of your person (your apparent beliefs) based on observed behavior. If your goals are different, correct me. You seem to think people are somehow obligated to give away their work for free under some conditions. I encourage you to stop talking about IP and start talking about human work.
The current issue with IP laws is only a symptom of a much greater issue that if people are not compensated for the full transitive value of their work, that surplus (wealth created minus compensation) goes to the already rich owner class and causes greater and greater inequality. LLMs using other people's work without permission is just the latest fad in the constant attempts to the rich to extract more and more wealth and make number go up.
> I hope you don't have any pets because obviously that definition is way too limited.
See, this is the kind of technically correct pedantry you use to distract the conversation without addressing the actual point. It's tiresome so don't be surprised if I don't bother replying to your next message.
> ownership of ideas is actually how they got that control and how they maintain it.
And that's why it shouldn't be about IP but about work. People should own the product of their work according to their skill level and how much work they put in. Hierarchical corporations shouldn't exist, it should all be collectives, just like people realized dictatorships should be replaced with democracies. Hierarchical power always leads to exploitation.
>> I am highly confident if it's replaced with something better, it'll just benefit those who already have an advantage.
Sorry, that sentence was missing a not.
We absolutely need to replace IP with a better system, otherwise the free-for-all will only benefit those who have an advantage in other areas such as network effects and marketing money.
But until I see credibly proposals for a better system, I want to keep the parts of the current system which prevent corporations from just taking my work.
> To what end, everyone is dead now. Power over nothing.
Do you think war is about killing people? Of course not, you just need to kill enough to achieve your goals. Those can be natural resources, distracting from domestic issues, religious causes, etc. The drive of aggressors to take by force won't go away with AI.
You said "And without an economy, they are at our mercy" without even an attempt to justify it, I pointed out a flaw and you made a statement which is equally wrong and I again pointed out the flaws. At no point did you attempt to make a constructive argument for your view. Your entire approach is nitpicking what I say without saying anything coherent of your own.
> No...
And right below that I said more seriously copyright has issues and you don't seem to want to engage with that.
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The bottom line is that I engage in conversations like this to find out other people's opinions and try to figure out a way to design the system so that people who do the work benefit from it without people who don't do useful work being able to exploit them. If I can expand other people's understanding of the issue, maybe even convince them, that's great.
Your (apparent) goals of this conversation are to discredit what I say in a way which does not address the core points which makes it more likely you're not arguing to convince me but others reading this conversation.
You don't appear to want to engage in constructive discussion - e.g. no reply to any of these:
- "You're onto something but I can't say whether I agree or not unless you specify who belongs to each group."
- "Are you arguing that one ting is right because a similar thing is wrong? Isn't it that they're both wrong?"
- "More seriously, yes, copyright has issues."
- "If copyright was so bad, why don't all creators release their stuff in the public domain?"
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>Yeah, a bit of a conundrum. IMO the primary significant trend in AI. Doesn't get talked about nearly enough. Means the AI is working, I guess. >GNU should bring Stallman back ... Alternatively they could try without Stallman. Leave Britney alone >:( >copyright is deemed to be an ethical thing by many (I think for most people it is just a deduction: abiding the law is ethical, therefore copyright is ethical) I've bus…
How do you even argue such a thing? I've had no such luck, I've met many people who seem to view copyright and a person owning their ideas and work as a sort of inherent moral.
Is that anything approaching reason? Hardly. It's just how folks are taught to be persuaded. You could also frame it as a food quality issue.
Now, am I wrong to expect a better standard out of people - or am I wrong to permit underhanded approaches for the sake of getting my meme out? According to some authors, that's an irreconcilable moral dilemma for each to battle alone throughout their lives... Scratch that, though, here's what.
Considering many more people watch the ball games than the lawmaking debates, what is it that sets the baseline societal standard for convincing persuasion?Examples of acts of convincing persuasion displayed to the general public by the devices of mass communication. (And it matters very little, to our learning ape-minds, whether the image of the convincing persuader is framed as "news" or a "movie".)
What is the use of mass communication, then? A broadcasting device brings (a subset of) some Narrative - i.e. some network of meanings that people attribute to the world around them - into the life of each individual recipient, for the purpose of influencing that life.
Now, the device is working; we are shown things on the hellboxes and we reckon with the ideas which the things mean. Given the activity of mass communication is cheap and ubiquitous, and the resulting "culture soup", in which we grow up immersed, is very much non-optional to the individual, and also very much non-malleable by the individual.
So we have these 2 registers of mass communication, "news" to show "what is normal to happen" and "art" to show "what is permissible to conceptualize", which are broadcast to us obligatorily and in unclear proportions, and that rather bizarre datastream is what defines us as "humanity" and "society" to ourselves, and serves as a sort of civilizational baseline outside of any individual's personal life, studied disciplines, etc.
However, funny business with the artifacts underlying this system of organization: (1) the construction of the broadcasting devices; and (2) the construction of those narratives which seem to almost have transcendent powers over everyone affected... what's in that stuff, anyway? Oops, you're not allowed to know - it's a trade secret!
Wait a second, so the stuff which directly teaches me how I will interpret my life and that of others, is a trade secret? Explain to me that we are living in a democracy again?
When the sources from which you learn, and the contents of what you learn, are someone's property, it means that the knowledge in your head is someone's property, which means that becoming fluent in someone's intellectual property makes (part of) you their property.
...I guess those could be the rudiments of a more orderly sort of argument?
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How do you even argue such a thing? I've had no such luck, I've met many people who seem to view copyright and a person owning their ideas and work as a sort of inherent moral.
By looking convincing enough to be selling good shit and not bad shit; then by playing to their biases well enough for them to try and get something out of the exchange. Idealism, i.e. not doing this because of selling anything, immediately disqualifies. Is that anything approaching reason? Hardly. It's just how folks are taught to be persuaded. You could also frame it as a food quality issue. Now, am I wrong to expe…
If food preparation is a trade secret, and you go eat, how could you be sure that what you've been sold is food and not just particularly well-processed... wood shavings? (you let them expect you to say "faeces" here, and/or reference Soylent Green if they are of its demographic)
Similarly, if knowledge preparation is a trade secret:
- how do you know that the skill you're studying is a real discipline, and is not just the setup to an elaborate rug-pull? - how do you know the work you're doing has an impact other than training your AI replacement? - how do you know the relatable human interactions shown on the telly are as non-toxic as they're framed, and are not simply the producers' way of normalizing fraudulence?
Obviously does not work on people who have not professed to acknowledge one of the above values, such as believers, nihilists... As always, adapt to listener (and if the listener prevents you from doing that - that's very much the same principle of disempowerment as drives the intellectual property regime, only inverted).
Both sorts of question then can be answered "by trusting the evaluation of a third party", which is what epistemically illiterate people will default to, and boils down to a more general argument which must be conducted even more personally. E.g. you take all instances in which the norms of society have failed the person, and extrapolate how the intellectual property regime's influence is equivalent.
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Reset it back to 20 years and make that a hard limit for both patents and copyright. No renewals. Zero exceptions. Let the market sort the rest out. There's always going to be downsides and edgecases when granting any party a monopoly over anything. At least if it's limited to 2 decades any unintended consequences, philosophical objections, and etc are hopefully kept within reason.
That would be insane for aerospace software, where you might spend most of that time getting the code certified (required to break the $0 revenue threshold), let alone paying back your costs and then making an actual profit. Meanwhile, there are cases where copyright of more than 2 years is overkill. I don't know what, but it seems like we need some sort of mechanism for variable-length IP duration is needed.
I've always liked the idea of a Harberger tax-style patent enforcement fee:
The patent owner declares the value of their patent on an annual basis and pays 1-5% of that declared value per year for the privilege of relying on the government to enforce their exclusive ownership of the patent. At any point, another party can buy the patent at its declared value, which discourages patent-holders from declaring artificially low values. The annual fee discourages artificially high valuations for indefinite periods of time -- as the patent yields less return over time it makes less sense to keep paying a high annual fee, encouraging owners to lower the declared valuation or end the patent protection altogether when it's no longer profitable.
To discourage hoarding patents indefinitely one could either set a hard upper limit (e.g. 60 years) or increase the fee over time, for example every few years the fee increases by 1% until at some point the patent is effectively publicly owned.
1) Legality and morality are obviously different and unrelated concepts. More people should understand that. 2) Copyright was the wrong mechanism to use for code from the start, LLMs just exposed the issue. The thing to protect shouldn't be creativity, it should be human work - any kind of work. The hard part of programming isn't creativity, it's making correct decisions. It's getting the information you need to make…
> The person who did the work deserved credit and compensation. 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.…
What if many people want to buy a copy but nobody wants to be the first because he'd pay the full cost and the others could get the next copy for free? What if they instead agree to share the cost equally?
But then this group doesn't wanna be the first because the next group could get it for free? So what if they get the whole country together and agree to share the cost?
How much? They agree to determine that by supply and demand.
Congratulations, we're just reinvented copyright laws.
Anarchists and especially ancaps never game things out in their heads because they'd arrive at some variation of the current system. Sad because they usually could come up with an improved version. But they choose to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
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This is not true, and I'd love to see some actual citation here. The courts have repeatedly said that copyright only applies to human creativity. The Supreme Court explicitly said this when they refused to hear the appeal: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Thaler_v._Perlmutter,_Refusal... > "We affirm our decision to refuse registration for the Work because it lacks the human authorship necessary to be eligible for copy…
> So they're saying that the LLM cannot be the author, because LLMs cannot claim copyright. They're saying that the LLM can't be the author. Now suppose you supply the LLM with a prompt that contains human creativity, it performs a deterministic mathematical transformation on the prompt to produce a derivative text, and you want to copyright that, claiming yourself as the author. What happens then? If you think the a…
My understanding was that they did in fact do just that, but the court somehow misunderstood what they were doing, and assumed that the LLM was working completely autonomously without any human input at all, which isn't really possible IMO. Someone told it what to do.
They also argued that you couldn't copyright an output that you can't explain how it came to be, i.e. if they had been able to articulate how an LLM works, the outcome might have been quite different, which I found surprising.
If art in general (human-made or otherwise) is always derived from existing influences... should we really be forced to explain how or why we created a piece of art in order to defend it?
The usual bar for copyright infringement of a derivative work is, from what I have seen, "how much did you copy from the original, and how obvious is it", which is of course a subjective determination that would be made by each individual judge or jury of a case.