H.R. 6028 would fundamentally change the U.S. Copyright Office • Hacker News Board

Re: H.R. 6028 would fundamentally change the U.S. Copyright Office

#91

Post by armchairhacker » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 12:07 PM UTC

pona-a wrote: post #77

panny wrote: post #47

I usually agree with the EFF on things, but after reading their linked https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/us-copyright-offices-d... I couldn't disagree more. An LLM is a predict the next word algorithm. If the model is overfitting, it's basically copy paste. There have been several documented instances where that happened and full GPL code, including headers and attribution were copy/pasted by the "AI." AI is esse…

Is it actually possible to determine how much the weights were influenced by each work? I might recall reading some interpretability paper years ago that trained a special model that could attribute each answer to a part of the corpus (like Wikipedia, ArXiV, or "Blogs") but it had a non-zero effect on performance and wasn't nearly as straightforward as weights go in, attribution comes out.

It’s very possible to determine similar works that existed earlier, and from that, recover attribution.

The “downside” is you may attribute similar works that weren’t inspirations, but coincidental. But I think that’s an upside: when someone discovers something novel and great but their work fails because of bad luck or non-novel details, then the discovery is finally recognized in another work, I think they should still be attributed.

Re: H.R. 6028 would fundamentally change the U.S. Copyright Office

#92

Post by RobotToaster » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 12:16 PM UTC

tgv wrote: post #84

RobotToaster wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What entitles you to use force to stop me creating a copy of something?

Not me, the state. That is significantly different. The reason is damaging someone's livelihood in the cases I mentioned. Or large scale economic damage in case you're copying money.

The fact that you use the state as a proxy changes little.

Re: H.R. 6028 would fundamentally change the U.S. Copyright Office

#93

Post by armchairhacker » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 12:17 PM UTC

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #44

anigbrowl wrote: post #30

Odd that the article doesn't mention parties at all, although perhaps this was in an attempt to avoid accusations of partisanship that might ensue from stating facts. Anyway, a quick look at https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/6028... indicates that all 4 sponsors of the bill are Republicans. The Actions tab seems to indicated that the bill got only 12 minutes of debate before being passed,; I hop…

The article doesn't mention parties because it's irrelevant. A bad bill is bad on its merits, not because of who has brought it about.

It’s relevant, because you shouldn’t vote for politicians who make bad policies, and most party members tend to vote with their party.

Unfortunately, the Democrats haven’t demonstrated themselves to be much better (at least, I’m not aware of them opposing copyright).

Re: H.R. 6028 would fundamentally change the U.S. Copyright Office

#94

Post by ArchieScrivener » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 1:02 PM UTC

armchairhacker wrote: post #93

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article doesn't mention parties because it's irrelevant. A bad bill is bad on its merits, not because of who has brought it about.

It’s relevant, because you shouldn’t vote for politicians who make bad policies, and most party members tend to vote with their party. Unfortunately, the Democrats haven’t demonstrated themselves to be much better (at least, I’m not aware of them opposing copyright).

[dead]

Re: H.R. 6028 would fundamentally change the U.S. Copyright Office

#95

Post by rayiner » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 1:06 PM UTC

bradleyjg wrote: post #80

rayiner wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even people who believe the administrative state is constitutional rest that conclusion on the premise that "rulemaking" is merely the formalization of the exercise of enforcement discretion. But that means that rulemaking must be performed by the executive branch, because that is the branch charged with enforcement of the law. DMCA rulemaking is actually an example of something that would probably be constitutional…

I don’t think it does. Discretion is fundamentally case by case. Drawing categorical lines is legislative. It’s akin to the distinction between law and equity courts at common law. Stepping back, both doctrines (non delegation, unitary executive) are fundamentally about the courts overstepping. If both houses of Congress pass a law creating an agency with a director that can only be fired for cause and the president…

> Drawing categorical lines is legislative.

That’s even worse. If that’s the case, Congress must adopt those exemptions by law. It can’t delegate lawmaking powers to its employees.

> Stepping back, both doctrines (non delegation, unitary executive) are fundamentally about the courts overstepping

Unless you toss out the concept of judicial review altogether, policing the structural rules of the constitution is exactly what the courts should be doing. The courts have no say about the merits of Congressional acts. But they should review whether Congress has allocated powers to various entities in a way that’s consistent with separation of powers.

Re: H.R. 6028 would fundamentally change the U.S. Copyright Office

#96

Post by RiverCrochet » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 1:07 PM UTC

tgv wrote: post #81

OutOfHere wrote: post #51

Anything that destroys copyright is a good thing. It is a societal evil.

Last time someone uttered something similar, I didn't get an answer, so I'll ask it to you: what entitles you to free access to any song, movie or book?

This: The basic idea of freedom, that I should be able to generally do things including accessing media without interference from a third party.

Someone using a physical property can possibly deprive others of its use. This applies to the physical mediums of songs, movies, or books, but not the songs, movies, or text of the books themselves.

Intellectual property isn't real, it's a concept that exists to support copyright, which exists for this exact purpose stated in the Constitution:

"[the United States Congress shall have 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."

I'm ok with accepting a temporary limitation on my freedom to support those who make songs, movies, or books, but life of the author + 70 years, plus the ability to assign the right to corporations which don't die, is not reasonably "limited" these days. It should be something like 5 years today.

No one is entitled to be a songwriter, movie director, or author; society needs people doing other things too.

Re: H.R. 6028 would fundamentally change the U.S. Copyright Office

#97

Post by rayiner » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 1:08 PM UTC

avmich wrote: post #72

rayiner wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Shilling" would require me to care about the policy, which I don't. The genius of the founders is that they realized that structure and power allocation was more important than policy, so that's what I'm commenting about. On that point, Congress cannot "set things up as it sees fit." The constitution goes to great lengths to create a complex, three-branch system of government with specific powers allocated to each b…

Looks like an opinion. If structural principles are legally binding, we can remember other cases from other areas.

This isn’t an “opinion.” It’s how almost everyone thinks the constitution works, including people who think modern administrative agencies are permissible. They don’t deny the tripartite structure is binding; they think that executive agencies exercising quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative functions can be defended as really being an exercise of executive discretion.

Re: H.R. 6028 would fundamentally change the U.S. Copyright Office

#98

Post by jklowden » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 1:10 PM UTC

Hey, the economy is great and gas is cheap. All we had to put up with is mean tweets.

Whenever anyone complains about Trump, remind them he’s not the cause but the product. Seventy million voted for him, and Republicans in congress let him do illegally what they cannot accomplish legislatively. And all the while they’re busy selling the country for parts, whether through tax policy, or neutering the CAFE standards, or handing copyright to Disney.

Re: H.R. 6028 would fundamentally change the U.S. Copyright Office

#99

Post by panny » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 1:16 PM UTC

pona-a wrote: post #77

panny wrote: post #47

I usually agree with the EFF on things, but after reading their linked https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/us-copyright-offices-d... I couldn't disagree more. An LLM is a predict the next word algorithm. If the model is overfitting, it's basically copy paste. There have been several documented instances where that happened and full GPL code, including headers and attribution were copy/pasted by the "AI." AI is esse…

Is it actually possible to determine how much the weights were influenced by each work? I might recall reading some interpretability paper years ago that trained a special model that could attribute each answer to a part of the corpus (like Wikipedia, ArXiV, or "Blogs") but it had a non-zero effect on performance and wasn't nearly as straightforward as weights go in, attribution comes out.

>Is it actually possible to determine how much the weights were influenced by each work?

It will be very possible once they become the owners of the intellectual property being infringed. Think about how it was "impossible" to implement DRM on music and movies in the early days of youtube. Now, Google owns the content and platform, and suddenly their "rolling cypher" which involves no encryption at all is supposedly enforcable DRM.

The Silicon Valley tech bros play the same game every time. They violate the law, say it's just too darn difficult to obey the law without stifling progress, and then they get away with it until they kill all the competition. At which point, the law is once again applicable to anyone that might try to challenge them.

Remember how Amazon destroyed all the other retailers when they had a decade of no sales tax while brick & mortar had to obey it. "Calculating sales tax for 50 different states?! That's impossible!!!" What a load of shit...

Now, knowing that they're going to do this playbook again, how do you think it's going to play out? We've already seen it. Anthropic steals your copyrighted code, puts together their claude code project, the code for that project leaks, but now THEY own it! They sent DMCA takedowns on that AI generated code. AI generated code enjoys no copyright protection, it cannot be DMCAed under the law, there's no copyright on it. But Anthropic claims there is, and Github will obey the takedown, and nobody has the money to step up and stop them.

See where this is going? Once they achieve market dominance, they will claim that all the code generated by claude belongs to Anthropic, your prompts belong to you, but THEIR machine generated THEIR code and you only purchase a license to it with your tokens. A limited license. It might be revokable, it might expire, maybe you need to pay an annual fee to keep using THEIR code Claude generated for you. And if you actually just write code on your own, without Claude? Well, prepare to be sued like a network printer is sued by the RIAA because that's going to happen too. They will have their robot scour your code for "fair use" training and discover that it's just too similar to something their machine generated a year earlier. Sorry open source programmer, here's your legalese nasty gram. It appears you owe Anthropic some money.

Re: H.R. 6028 would fundamentally change the U.S. Copyright Office

#100

Post by Altern4tiveAcc » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 1:43 PM UTC

palmotea wrote: post #68

OutOfHere wrote: post #51

Anything that destroys copyright is a good thing. It is a societal evil.

> [Copyright] is a societal evil. Such an extreme and emotional statement makes me think you've never really thought it through. For instance: without copyright the GPL is nothing . Also without copyright, all of the profit made on creative works (of a perhaps smaller pie) would get be kept by distributors like Amazon or Netflix. Authors wouldn't get a dime anymore, it'll all go to the likes of Bezos.

> without copyright, all of the profit made on creative works (of a perhaps smaller pie) would get be kept by distributors like Amazon or Netflix

Assuming copyright gets dismantled is a good-faith way, Netflix/Amazon remaining as gatekeepers sounds unlikely, IMO. Free software clients like Popcorn Time provide a better experience and would be able to exist without threats from copyright trolls.

It's also much more robust regarding cultural preservation (as users and organizations can keep DRM-free local copies) and censorship (being torrent-based makes it much harder to delete a movie from existence).