Based on the encyclopedic knowledge LLMs have of written works I assume all parties did the same. But I think there is a broader point to make here. Youtube was initially a ghost town (it started as a dating site) and it only got traction once people started uploading copyrighted TV shows to it. Google itself got big by indexing other people's data without compensation. Spotify's music library was also pirated in the early days. The contracts with the music labels came later. GPL violations by commercial products fits the theme also.
Companies aggressively protect their own intellectual property but have no qualms about violating the IP rights of others. Companies. Individuals have no such privilege. If you plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers you forfeit your life.
Everyone on here is smart enough. Just do not participate and save your money. Do not pay for digital goods. If Netflix raises their prices, it doesn't matter because there is a torrent of all of their shows. If Spotify raises their prices, it doesn't matter because your favorite artist has their entire library in a torrent. If some game company ask you to pay real life prices for a digital costume, find the crack online and play on a private server. If YouTube wants to interrupt your video with an ad in the middle of the sentence, download one of the many options that blocks all ads. Billion dollar companies have shown they do not care about you. The people who complain about losing their salary, should just get replies thanking them for paying.
All the sad poor people who might be hurt were already paid. The caterer on your favorite show is not getting residuals. NBC also isn't going to stop making TV shows because that is all they can do. Content creators also existed on the internet long before that was a job. They just did it because they cared about it not for ad money. If you really want to support the artist directly go to a concert or just mail them a check. If you can't actually identify a person who might be hurt, then do not care.
Imo it’s not about you accessing things you want for free. If your family purchased a disc copy of the goonies before you were born and you watched it as a kid, your accessing of that content you wanted for free has no moral bearing. The core question is what impact does your consumption have, and I don’t think that participating in the streaming landscape is making things any better for anyone but their ceos.
The comment I was responding to certainly seemed to be advocating uninhibited free access via torrents, but your point is reasonable. I don't think streaming is a great way to support artists either, though I do think it's better than nothing.
I just don’t think streaming is really working for anybody. Artists are being given less and less creative control as time goes on as each streaming company attempts to optimize itself in a largely fixed market. It’s working the same way cable used to work. I think a disruption is in order, but last time disruption started with people moving to nascent torrent sites.
I guess the way I’d put it is that if you can only get some particular show through one company, that company gets to treat you shitty, cause where else are you gonna go. Torrenting, even just widespread knowledge of torrenting, gives the customer more leverage.
But is torrenting better than buying music e.g. through bandcamp or directly from the artist's label? I do a combination of streaming for exploratory listening and buying to support artists. And live shows when I can. I'm not trying to suggest I'm holier than thou, but I really don't think torrents are the answer to this equation. However I strongly agree that the current system isn't working for artists and needs disruption.
Also if you pirate everything you're not incentivizing people to make things in a more ethical manner. I've mostly cancelled my streaming services (I'll get different ones for a month at a time for specific shows) but I still pay for Dropout.tv (when they turned a profit they paid out a dividend to actors) and Patreon for YouTube creators that have high quality content.
I think the point is, using Spotify is already essentially listening to your artists without supporting them. You might as well do that without supporting a company that is harming them.
A whole lot of people in the tech scene got really mad when Huawei was using obviously stolen Cisco designs and code for their switches. Didn’t humanity benefit from having cheaper access to switches because they didn’t have to pay for Cisco’s sunk costs? A whole lot of people got mad when Microsoft reportedly ganked open source code for things like DNS. Didn’t humanity benefit from one of the world’s most popular server OSs having more reliable name resolution?
Oh, but corporations were the primary beneficiaries, right?
Well, corporations are the primary beneficiaries of this too from a financial perspective. A vanishingly small percentage of people will run, let alone train these models themselves— it’s almost exclusively used to make commercial services that directly compete against the people that made the initial ” data“. But, the vanishingly small percentage of people that directly utilize this stuff for non-commercial use frequent echo chambers like this that make them think more regular people benefit directly. And the companies that are competing directly with creatives and intellectuals using their stolen work employ a whole lot of people here, directly or not.
The distinction between a reason and a justification gets pretty difficult to distinguish the closer you are to the group benefiting from injustice.
> I’d completely disagree, because China was the beneficiary and it destroyed North American jobs.
a) The whole point of commercial NN services is to replace human labor, and jobs are paid labor. Literally the entire point of LLMs is to destroy jobs; this isn't hypothetical-- US companies have openly talked about having fired people and not filled roles because they either have increased or hope to increase efficiency with LLMs. And that's in tech where there's a chance more jobs will be created as a result-- the situation is far worse in creative fields. I personally know quite a few north American creative workers that have lost their jobs because the studios they work for have replaced almost the entire department with image generators that the remaining workers use to spray-and-pray concept art and game assets. Comparatively, the argument that they will create more jobs-- even as many jobs-- as they destroy is pure speculation.
b) Considering you're willing to have in-group protectionism in the form of nationalism, I'm guessing you're willing to extend that to industry, so creative workers don't count? Is it only American tech jobs that count or are you against American LLMs that replace any American workers, also?
> China needs to respect the American trademark system!
Trademarks? I assume you're talking about the patent system rather than logos... and legally they don't, actually. The US doesn't respect Chinese patents, either. How many times have you heard of a US company stopping doing something because a Chinese company patented it first? Do you really think we just invent everything first over here?
The observation being made here is that copyright law serves to protect the interests of large companies, not the public, so violating copyright law is, in and of itself, not unethical.
Whereas i agree that the current regime of "licensing" is not good, I simultaneously find it incredibly selfish to believe that one has the right to any content one likes.
"Own nothing" is bad, but so is "access and share anything." Both positions are too extreme.
I try to buy/rent/legitimately stream all the media I consume. But I've run into issues where I would "buy" a license to a movie, and suddenly I don't have access to a movie. I'm sure it was for some publishing licensing legal reason, but the fact remains that they kept my money I paid for the movie and I don't have what I paid for.
I wouldn't say I have a fundamental right to any content, but certainly I have a right to content I paid for.
Who even thinks that ethical consumption exists under any system? Any of your consumption denies it to others. Some consumption is a necessity of course. We wouldn't speak of something absurd like "ethical breathing".
if you want to support an artist go to the show and BUY MERCH at the table! almost all of their income comes from that. the importance of buying a T-shirt at the show cannot be overstated and sometimes you get to say hi to your idol, too
It's a stupid situation, though. There are many creators I'm happy to support - but for 99% of them, I don't want their stupid merch. It's mostly low-quality garbage with high markup, that nevertheless cost something to design and produce, thus wasting both precious resources and labor - an useless tax on contributions to artists that doesn't even help anything. I really wish this wasn't necessary.
(Even the okay-quality merch is a waste, since for most artists I'd want to support, I don't identify with them enough to display that stuff, so it's again just buying to put away and eventually throw away.)
What is the point of this comment? Just a stream of consciousness for a future LLM sweep? Nobody thinks that the actual creator should get nothing. Are you asking for better T shirts? Do you want more direct ways of just giving cash?
What I want more than anything is for bands to just sell me a damned CD. I've lost track of how many times an artist I want to support doesn't release their music on CD. I'd even settle for DRM-free flacs, if it costs less than a CD.
High quality sheet music would be cool. Lindsey Stirling is the only artist I can think of that does that though. Rasputina used to at one point.
lol I absolutely do not want non digital goods nor pirating. Ever. It's 2025. I don't have a cdplayer, a tape player, a blue ray player, I don't even know what the most modern "blue ray" disc would be. I have $2k worth of vinyls that are just unique copies I display as art I'll never put in my record player, that's also never been used. I don't want to constantly worry about 60gb of mp3 files.
Oh no, that TV show I'll forget about in a year cost me $15/mo instead of $60 of blurays.
I jump in my cars and hit a button and music plays. Almost any music I want. That's amazing.
I'm also not pirating games. I'm not 12 without a job. I have a job. I pay developers for their work. I want more games, like Kingdom Come 3, to come out.
Weird ass comment. You seriously think we're going to put our lives on hold to.. what, fight "digital media"? You think I care about netflix? Or societies use of it? I haven't used netflix in years. I don't know anybody under 40 with a netflix account. Everyone on your end of the pirate spectrum uses debrid nowadays, anyway.
Next you're going to tell people to install the "Black XP Windows" edition to not support Microsoft and they all get malware and their credit cards stolen because they installed some pirated and modified cracked windows. Genius.
MSNBC just cancelled Andrea Mitchells TV show, today, because she brought in no younger audiences. So yes, shows do get cancelled by not being watched.
This comment was upvoted? Hn needs a break. This is some I'm 14 and edgy bullshit that sounds like it belongs on an eastern european piracy forum.
>MSNBC just cancelled Andrea Mitchells TV show, today, because she brought in no younger audiences. So yes, shows do get cancelled by not being watched.
Did anyone, young or old, want to watch an 80 year old stumble over her words, lose her train of thought, and speak so painfully slow? She had built up connections over her long career but was basically unwatchable. The worst part of a Kamala presidency would have been her on the news and not in retirement.
You're arguing for media as a service. I think many people are tired of the SASS everything model. It's generally user hostile, you need multiple different services, there are dark patterns and you still have to endure ads. Privacy issues too. Piracy is definitely superior.
Yes. And the problem here isn't that companies get away with doing things like this, the problem is that individuals don't. Attempting to lock information behind a nightmarish legal system is the problem.
I'm pretty much at the point now where I don't buy the "copyright incentivizes creation" argument any more. Copyright, like advertising, incentivizes creation by enormous corporations, but also like advertising it incentivizes creations that overwhelmingly have little value.
Creative individuals don't need copyright to be incentivized to create—they need a safety net that gives them the freedom to spend time on the creativity that naturally wants to bubble out. If the goal is to encourage creativity, copyright is a lousy and enormously expensive substitute for Universal Basic Income.
Also, in Canada, it's basically impossible to protect your IP as an individual due to the astronomical cost and lack of options to recover that cost. So copyright will never incentivize my creations, or those of any small creator.
Sure creative people will always create but the scope of that creativity will be limited if we do away with intellectual property. Steve Spielberg would probably always have created movies, but he wouldn't have been able to make Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan,or Indiana Jones without capital from the studio system, and the studio system wouldn't have provided him with that capital of they couldn't extract economic rents from the copyright for those films.
I think a limited, short copyright can do good that the current many-year copyright does not. Imagine a 1 year copyright in the context of film. Companies would prioritize box office sales no doubt, but that’s how it used to be and it was generally positive. It’s really the extremity of modern copyright that I think causes these issues.
Do we need to always have big-budget films and productions? Perhaps we should live smaller, and enjoy local art and low-budget films. Do I really care that Jurassic Park was made? I could read the book and it's more detailed and imaginative anyways, and any lessons to be learned are definitely better when read than when watching a blockbuster CGI film with more effects than message.
"Let's create a world where all TV and movies have the production values of Public Access" is a poor pitch. Even if you don't mind that, you have to understand that, politically, it's a non-starter.
They could have started a crowdfunded project and might still have made a great movie. If people truly like the created movie, why noch fund another one? Only no one would be paid millions for acting most likely, and that would be fine.
Nothing stops you from downloading Ann’s archive and training a model on it, right? The likelihood that you, as an individual, get sued over is is virtually zero.
This is what Meta tried to do, quietly download and use the data, to do research and advance their LLMs, without trying to establish any legal precedents or pick up fights.
In Germany people are sued for illegal movie downloading all the time. It's hard to imagine the companies behind that operation aren't aware that you can also download books.
> If you plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers you forfeit your life.
In case anybody here doesn't know, that's a reference to Aaron Swartz, an activist (and Reddit co-founder) that was risking 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine just for downloading a lot of academic papers from JSTOR. He eventually took his life because of the pressure. May his soul rest in peace.
Except he was offered 6 months in a plea bargain, which he declined because he wanted a trial. Whether 6 months was reasonable punishment for "plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers" is another matter, but "you forfeit your life" or "35 years in prison and a $1 million fine " is massively misleading.
Swartz wasn't the kind of person to accept a plea bargain from an overzealous prosecutor who was indicting him on 13 felony charges with a possible sentence up to 35 years along with a $1 million fine. I assume he wanted a trial because he wanted to continue his fight for open access. And maybe he thought he might lose, but wouldn't lose on all counts, and would make the prosecution look unreasonable in the public eye. Was that decision rational from a self-interest point of view? Maybe not.
And then you might ask, if he wanted a trial, why did he kill himself? Obviously no one knows what was going through his head when he did it. He left no note. But the prospect of being locked in a cell until he was an old man probably had something to do with it.
You can certainly argue it was his own fault for not pleading down, but even if that's your view, that doesn't absolve the prosecutor. Ortiz has a lot of blame in this too, and the fact she still hasn't acknowledged it over a decade later speaks volumes to the kind of person she is.
His criminality is one matter, but the full weight of the Federal Government on him was an entirely separate matter. A federal prosecutor's job is to jail you regardless of whether it is for downloading a file from a server or for trafficking in humans, and they will come at you with the same vigor regardless of the crime. And nothing has changed about that.
Treating a human trafficker and someone who downloaded some files from a server the same is not in the job description of a prosecutor. What an absurd statement. It's very much the job of a prosecutor to make judgements about the severity of the crime and how to respond. And in this case, the prosecutor showed incredibly poor judgement. There wasn't even a particular reason why the case should go federal in the first place. The state prosecutor saw things very differently.
That is complete bullshit as evidenced by the federal criminal sitting president.... The ONLY time I ever see this argument is to try and paint over blatant police and state injustice and tyranny.
"A federal prosecutor's job is to jail you regardless of whether it is for downloading a file from a server or for trafficking in humans, and they will come at you with the same vigor regardless of the crime."
You have to be malicious to put forward this statement in the current environment. Or you are so propagandized you think it's true? Either one is very frightening
I agree there's more nuance here than was initially stated, but I also think there's more nuance than simply "he was offered 6 months". Even if he was offered 6 days, the ways in which someone's life and livelihood changes by having ever been convicted of a crime and gone to prison, is dramatic. This is especially true in white collar work and/or knowledge work.
Schwartz was a research fellow at Harvard. Really think he would've been able to continue?
Wild to see the concept of the plea bargain being defended. It's a blatant retraction of the due process clause from the bill of rights, and here you are defending it.
> once people started uploading copyrighted TV shows to it
End users, not YouTube employees, right? And they would take things down following DMCA requests and what not, right? So, pretty much following the law?
> Google itself got big by indexing other people's data without compensation
Scraping public websites to build a search index isn't the same as making LLMs that can recreate the source verbatim devoid of even attribution. I do agree there's an argument to be had about the LLM's transformative nature in the end though.
> Spotify's music library was also pirated in the early days
Not any version generally available to the public, and with the copyright holder's permission to do so.
the english empire once tried to mantain a monopoly over steam loom machines
the americans cheated their way to competition,
heck, even before that, the english empire got jumpstarted by stealing gold from the spanish (who were themselves exploiting it away from aztec and other mexican natives)
I'm saying it's business as usual, but also, culture doesn't work like tangible physical widgets so we must stop letting a few steal this boon of digital copying by means of silly ideas like DRM, copyright, patents. all means to cause scarcity
The textile industry in Brno here in Czech Republic (sometimes called "Moravian Manchester") was hugely helped by a local noble posing as a worker in England & the smuggling detailed self-drawn plans of industrial machinery back:
"Brno’s fortunes were changed forever when a young freemason called Franz Hugo Salma set out for England in 1801. He intended to steal the plans for the most modern textile machinery in the world. His crime, the first recorded act of industrial espionage, boosted the competitiveness of Moravian textiles. Soon after smuggling the plans out disguised as a worker, and handing them over to Brno’s fledgling textile industry, Brno became the most important textile centre in the Habsburg empire."
You can even go see some of the original plans in a museum:
"Eleven designs are still preserved in the library of the Rájec chateau. They form a unique set of documents demonstrating both the level of wool processing technology at the turn of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as well as the aims and means of the relatively rare business of industrial espionage at that time."
United Kingdom was the first to steal a Chinese invention called gunpowder, use it to maximum effect and they were also at the opposite sides of the world.
Do not forget the first law passed by a new nation in which every citizen has the right to burn trees and produce potassium a critical mineral in gunpowder. That nation was either Greece or America, i forget which one.
In the Western civilizations, when we are stealing copyrighted material and patents we are not messing around. I remember when the Byzantine empire tried to steal secrets of silk production also from Chinese, that was so much fun. Great times we lived in the past, even greater now!
I think it’s fine to criticize the hypocrisy of viciously defending the copyrights you own, while gleefully running roughshod over the ones you don’t.
But it’s also possible that copyright as a concept, or in its current implementation, is bad and unjust.
I’m sure some copyright holders would like nothing more than to see an argument that elevates copyright violation to the level of murder, morally or legally. But I think it’s more akin to jaywalking - violating an unjust law that mostly shouldn’t exist.
the reform needs to happen at the layer where whether a copyright is valid or not is decided upon, not before (at the point of "should copyright exist") and not after (enforcement).
a world without copyright means those with the largest advertising budgets will reap nearly all the rewards from new IP created by small artists. BigCorp Inc. can just sit around and wait for talented musicians to post something interesting on soundcloud, for example, then just have their in-house people copy it and push it out to radio and streaming platforms via their massive ad budgets and favorable relationships for getting new material onto the waves immediately. meanwhile the original artist gets nothing.
the position of advocating against all copyright protections at all only makes sense for people who are already wealthy enough that they don't need proceeds from their art to survive.
But the point of the response is that "getting money from selling music" is, in digital era, artificial scarcity. I.e. the copyright laws that big corporations are lobbying for continued enforcement and tightening, are the very thing that create this artificial scarcity that they are best positioned to profit off.
Cut out copyright, and no one will be getting any money from selling music per copy (or equivalent) - as it should be.
digital music is not artificial scarcity, because it's not the copied bits that are the resource, it's attention. we only have so much time and attention for consuming media, and only so much attention and memory space in our brains for keeping track of where to find it. large budgets can easily dominate these channels and limit the average person's apparent choice.
this is what I mean when large players would outcompete smaller players in a digital marketplace with no copyright. the only way for this to work would be with a benevolent neutral 3rd party managing the marketplace, like Steam, so users can easily see when a large player is cloning a smaller players work - but even then it still depends on the good will of the general public to prefer the "original" artist which is not guaranteed.
> the position of advocating against all copyright protections at all only makes sense for people who are already wealthy enough that they don't need proceeds from their art to survive.
This makes it sound like the majority of people produce more content than they consume.
The reality is that 99.99999% of people do not produce "art", let alone with the intention of living of it.
Whatever harms you might envision for the tiny minority who do want to try living off copyright, those concerns are dwarfed by the benefits for the rest of us.
Further, not many people who are serious about reform are literally "advocating against all copyright" A reform that simply curbed the duration to something less insane than 150 years would resolve much of what makes copyright bad, even if it continued to exist.
וְעַתָּ֖ה אָר֣וּר אָ֑תָּה מִן־הָֽאֲדָמָה֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר פָּצְתָ֣ה אֶת־פִּ֔יהָ לָקַ֛חַת אֶת־דְּמֵ֥י אָחִ֖יךָ מִיָּדֶֽךָ׃
Therefore, you shall be more cursed than the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.
We don’t allow indiscriminate human experimentation in medicine. We have crimes against this, and yet we still have new medicines. Sure, it won’t be as quick if we could just use humans as test subjects from the start, but that’s an unethical line. Innovation done immorally is progress that shouldn’t have been made. The ends don’t justify the means, but I’m not an ethical nihilist.
The crime is downloading and copying and distributing copyrighted materials! Not creating the LLM! Get the crime right
You actually don’t know that. The question would be, what proportion of human experiments are successful, and you don’t know the answer to that question, so the victims of experiments could dwarf the beneficiaries of successful research. That’s always the hard thing with basic utilitarianism.
1) It is an experiment. The point is to test something that nobody is sure about. Whether the result is expected or unexpected there isn't really such a thing as "unsuccessful"; even duplication of work is considered useful.
2) If you think the cost-benefits are bad, my advice is don't sign up to be experimented on. Nobody has to be experimented on if they don't want to be.
1) Experiments, by their nature, must spend resources in order to produce tangible results. In this case the relevant results are saved lives, and the expenditure is often going to be lives. You framed your comment in these terms, I’m arguing the costs very well may not be justifiable by the benefits. You’d need to make a case for that.
2) What if the families of experimentees receive payment? Allowing that would be a short way down the slippery slope from allowing the experimentation, and would make the matter of consent more difficult to assess.
Interesting, if we're to trust what NotOpenAI and Facebook say about their IP, the US should pay the UK reparations for IP theft based on textile industry profits starting in the 1850s until today?
Why do I get sued when I share some BitTorrents but $bigcorp can just do it with 1000 scale without problems?
The issue here is not copyright/patents/etc - the issue is that the law is applied selectively — the issue is that Aaron Schwartz is dead for sharing knowledge with the public and Zuccborg is a billionaire building his torment nexus
I mean this news broke today. It may be premature to declare that nobody will sue Meta. In fact I would cheerfully bet that someone will, and that they will spend more in defense/settlement than any 1000 individuals would.
Is this an attempt to imply the Scots had imperial ambitions and have not been fighting to keep their homes free of invasion for several thousand years?
Didn't Scotland try to make an empire in Eastern Canada, eastern USA, Africa, and Panama, then bankrupt themselves and agree to the Act of Union with England making Great Britain?
>Is this an attempt to imply the Scots had imperial ambitions and have not been fighting to keep their homes free of invasion for several thousand years?
Obviously yes. Who have they been fighting to avoid invasion exactly?
Hmm, no you misunderstand. Scotland was consumed by monied interests from across the water long ago. Now there’s just scattered populations, many of us dispossessed of our ancestral homes and not all by choice.
The past doesn’t vanish because of what Rome and its inheritors accords as history. Some of us have long memories.
It is particularly a prescient notion because I happen to be living in Canada. If you’ve read the news you should understand what I’m saying.
In Spotify’s defense, they used the pirated data only to show a proof of concept to the copyright holders, and that use was sanctioned by the local rights holders organization STIM.
The copyright holders then approved their concept, and subsequently Spotify got the rights to offer their service to customers. Everybody won.
That’s not entirely true, in Spotify’s early days you could upload files to the service and listen to songs uploaded by other people. I think the majority of any song I wanted to listen to before they went Europe-only for a time was “pirated”.
Indeed. I remember there was one song that used a pirated variant and you could tell because it had an obvious artifact that was accidentally introduced in a pirated copy of the song!
> Spotify's music library was also pirated in the early days.
I want to know more, please enlighten me (anyone who knows). I read the book "The Spotify Play" and it made it seem like the pirated music was an internal-only thing and not something available to customers. Is that true?
Before the launch, Spotify had a deal with the music rights holders association in Sweden (STIM) that they could use a merged collection of friends and families music libraries. All this was removed before Spotify went out of beta.
So while it was using pirated media, it was sanctioned by the rights holders for the experiment of building Spotify.
Users would upload their copies of the music and spotify would replay them. This was obvious to early users, even if they were only consumers, because of the pirate-shout-out-overlays that were in a lot of the poorer quality releases.
Another interesting note, in the early days of spotify, the app would saturate your upload bandwidth while using it. Given their close ties to utorrent, I always assumed that's how they were affording the bandwidth as well.
Pretty brilliant way to bootstrap I guess; they didn't have to pay for bandwidth or content until they already had contracts in place
Afaik, the trick was to stream (via http, I assume) the first few hundred kilobytes or so from fast/expensive servers and then try to p2p the rest in some clever order. I guess seeking also triggered the fast/expensive path for a while.
"Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist" by Liz Pelly goes into more detail about their origins and the culture around piracy in Sweden at the time.
JSTOR was explicitly a library of public domain works, consolidated in a single place so that academic libraries could access those papers that nobody had an interest in distributing anymore.
It recently added a bunch of copyrighted journals. It didn't have any of those at the time.
I re-read the MIT report by Abelson and it looks like JSTOR was an archive of old scientific articles from many journals, most of them still under copyright by the journal. I'd need to see more evidence that it was public domain.
Crunchyroll started off as a straight up piracy site, it now has millions of paying subscribers and was sold to Sony for over a billion a few years ago.
I think if Google attempted to download the entirety of JSTOR with the express intent of making the full dataset freely available, then Google would also face legal consequences.
It's true, and relevant, that Google would feel those consequences much less sharply than Swartz did.
Don't buy into the rhetoric and call it "consequences". It's always a choice to sue, a choice to prosecute, and this would be true even if these choices were made consistently and impartially (which they certainly aren't).
I wasn't meaning to attach a pejorative to "consequences", but the word does typically have that meaning so you're right to call me out. Perhaps "resulting legal issues" would be a better way to put it.
For the record, I think the consequence was grossly disproportionate to the action.
Google Scholar explicitly made direct deals with publishers to scrape their content, with the constraint that while they can use the content to serve search results in Scholar, but cannot show the content of the papers on the site- just titles and short fragments that match. the deals were tenuous and I had to step carefully around my plan to use that database to implement large-scale scientific search over the literature (this was a long time before anybody was seriously considering using LLMs on research data).
I've spoken to several very wealthy/powerful people and tried to get them to negotiate a large-scale content license with the various publishers that would allow researchers and individuals to access more research in lower-friction ways. None of them (NIH, Schmidt, etc) were really interested.
Something to understand about capitalist competition (also in politics) is that it's a war. Not one with guns and bombs, but more like a cold war, with espionage and hacking and just generally doing anything you can to gain an advantage without bringing negative consequences on yourself.
The limit is what you can actually get away with, not what the rules say you can get away with, and the system aggressively selects players who recognize this. It's amoral - there is no "ought", only "is". An actor gets punished or not, with absolutely no regard to whether it "should" get punished. One thing is consistent: following the rules as written means you lose.
You can see it in Y Combinator (and other) startups. The biggest ex-startups are things like AirBNB (hotels but we don't follow the rules but we don't get punished for not following them) and Uber (taxis but we don't follow the rules but we don't get punished for not following them).
One way to not get punished for not following the rules is to invent a variation of the game where the rules haven't been written yet. I again refer you to AirBNB and Uber; Omegle also comes to mind, although they didn't monetize.
Viewed in this light, Aaron Swartz's mistake was not the part where he downloaded journal articles, but the part where he got caught downloading journal articles. Shadow library sites are doing the same thing, minus the getting caught. So are Meta and Google and OpenAI. sci-hub is only involved in a lawsuit because it got caught and is now in the stage where it finds out whether it gets punished or not.
Aaron committed suicide and FBI going after him was meant more as a lesson to the other kids at MIT than anything.
MegaUpload did the same, kim dotcom got raided in his sleep by FBI in New Zealand! So no I don't buy your reductionist argument, there are forces at play that allow companies with founders with the likes of Google to get away with it but not others.
> Youtube was initially a ghost town (it started as a dating site) and it only got traction once people started uploading copyrighted TV shows to it
To this day, there are a huge number of videos that show copyrighted content on YouTube; they are usually crappy clips, reversed and with different music playing in the background to avoid automated detection.
Pretty sure that even if you gave a purchasing team enough money for retail price and a list of all books ever published, they wouldn't be able to buy even a quarter of them.
thanks to the byzantine copyright system, you can't easily do it. Plus, just speculating, but maybe by paying, it establishes "consideration" for some implied contract? "You implicitly entered a contract with us by purchasing the book, then violated the contract by 'distributing' the material for commercial use" ?
I doubt they think that way, but even if they did, they'd be right - for 99% of the works in question, the biggest value they gave to the world is, by far, being part of the LLM training corpus.
There's lots of content out there. Most of it is noise. People forget because they're only ever exposed to an aggressively curated fraction of it.
I briefly worked for Crunchyroll, which began life as an anime pirating service with subtitles. The contracts with the Japanese anime publishers came later. Now they vigorously protect their content from "pirates".
"Spotify's music library was also pirated in the early days."
"Ek, who had been the CEO of the piracy platform uTorrent, founded Spotify with his friend, another entrepreneur named Martin Lorentzon. Both-Ek at 23 and Lorentzon 37-were already millionaires from the sales of previous businesses. The name Spotify had no particular meaning, and was not associated with music. According to Spotify Teardown, the company developed a software for improved peer-to-peer network sharing, and the founders spoke of it as a general "media distribution platform." The initial choice to focus on music, the founders said at the time, was because audio files are smaller than video files, not because of a dream of saving music.
In 2007, when Spotify first publicly tested its software, it allowed users to stream songs downloaded from The Pirate Bay, a service for unlicensed downloads. By late 2008, Spotify would convince music labels in Sweden to license music to the site, and unlicensed music was removed. From there, Spotify would take off across Europe and then the world."
And Hollywood was created on the west coast because for intellectual property it was still the far west and it allowed them to ignore patents on movie technologies.
It's roughly the Spotify story too. They had an extremely impressive catalog very early, way before they were bought by the entertainment cartel. The founders had background in torrenting and the initial product was quite similar to The Pirate Bay but with clearly capitalist ambitions and branding, in contrast to the anarchist leanings of the Pirate Bureau and rather anarchic attitude of The Pirate Bay.
The thing is Google, meta and YouTube weren't giant entities when they did this stuff. I think it's good no one cracked down on them for copyright stuff. Now they're developing an LLM that will generate potentially trillions in value to humanity and looks like they're not exactly playing by the rules. But I prefer looser intellectual property rights anyway so Im ok with it
>But I prefer looser intellectual property rights anyway so Im ok with it
I think more people, potentially anyways, would feel similar to to this if it applied even somewhat equally.
Instead, companies can seemingly do whatever they please whereas lawyers will send letters to your home for downloading a single episode of game of thrones.
> Instead, companies can seemingly do whatever they please whereas lawyers will send letters to your home for downloading a single episode of game of thrones.
I don't get it. All these companies took copyrighted data when they were tiny grew to be large, they still do that now. Google and OpenAI don't send these letters. They're not the copyright holders.
I have no idea what argument you're trying to make. Corporations bad?
>I have no idea what argument you're trying to make.
I thought my point (not really an argument) was pretty clear, sorry.
"Rules for thee, but not for me" is the point. Where "thee" is individuals and "me" is corporations. (My comment was general commentary, not specific to Meta, Google, OpenAI, LLMs, or the article)
Right now "loose restrictions" seems to apply to corporations only. More people might be in favor of looser restrictions if it also applied to individuals, not just corporations.
I'm not sure how else to reword my comment more than that. It wasn't really meant to be too deep, and it wasn't intended to be argumentative.
His argument is that it's effectively a legal moat now that protects monopoly. Like we shouldn't accept that you need to break the law to have a chance to compete with them.
From the article, they took steps to avoid using their IP addresses. Individuals doing the same using a VPN are pretty much immune from any legal issues.
IME companies take copyright way more seriously than individuals. e.g. my last 2 jobs have had scanners to ensure we're not accidentally pulling in GPL code to our products, and one of those was a startup. I'd be surprised if corporate security software weren't looking for torrent clients and if you wouldn't get fired for torrenting on corporate machines or networks at most companies. Meanwhile the same people setting those security policies have a 100TB array at home with fully automated pirating setups. They very much don't care personally, but it's a huge business risk.
In high school/university in the 00s, everyone casually pirated things. In college people passed around a USB drive with all of the books needed for our degree program. People in the dorms traded music collections with 10s of thousands of songs. Tellingly, Apple advertised that iPods could store 10,000 songs, which approximately zero people could afford to buy legitimately. If anything, the consequences for piracy have gone down since then, but streaming is convenient enough and phone storage/UX is hobbled enough that people pay.
In any case, I think the other poster is right that companies flouting copyright law is a good thing. It stops us from pretending that it's helpful for the little guy, making it easier to argue for abolition or vastly reducing the length. That they did it to build an open model is even better: it shows directly the kinds of benefits copyright is taking from us. We should be looking to scan every book out there to build better training sets (and better indexed search into scholastic datasets; at this point all of Anna's Archive only costs a little over $11k in raw storage, which puts it into "affordable as an upper middle class home library" territory. In another few years, it may be affordable to nearly everyone. Better ML models could help here with better compression as well), but copyright law restricts use of works dating back to a time before electrification was widespread. Obviously they're an evil company in general, but llama was an actual good deed from them.
Exactly. We need leaders with the political will to apply a "financial death penalty" to companies that engage in this kind of brazen behavior. That means all assets seized, the company dissolved, personal assets of executives seized, executives jailed. People running companies should live in mortal fear of ever doing the things that they routinely do today.
Do people even take civics classes anymore? That isn't how any of this works. Political will doesn't allow arbitrary punishments. You would need legislation at very least and that could face issues with the Eighth Amendment. (Which could not be post-facto of course.)
At least you're not calling for jailing all the shareholders....
VC and startups are fundamentally about disruption. You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs (laws). The incumbent players are not going to sit still and let things be "disrupted". A common response is to make sure the public knows about the broken eggs. I would say youtube, Google, Spotify, Uber, doordash, etc. all have made my life much better.
You don't know a world without them so you actually have no idea if they have made your life compared to that world much better or much worse. How your life was at the time is irrelevant.
Why would I say something is better without a point of comparison?
I was born in the 90s. So definitely alive before YouTube and Spotify albeit as a teenager rather than an adult. I guess you're right I'm not familiar with the world of Sony Walkman, Blockbuster, and IBM PC. But I definitely remember dial-up modems, CDs, Windows 95 and XP. Technology has improved most aspect of my life better since then. (maybe minus all the ads + dopamine slot machines part...)
Reminds me of recent discussions about similar topic, what may clearly look like a crime can be treated differently depending on if you do it as an individual or as a company. Somewhere down the line its all about understanding the limits and boundaries of the system, its a skill in itself.
I think the difference may be LLMs may not be laundered clean of copyright data anytime soon. Even if chatgpt got big and profitable, it's not so clear that it won't contain copyrighted data as that may simply be necessary to train the best models.
The modern solution has been to grow so fast that by the time anyone can go after you legally you've already amassed so much money/power that you can have the laws rewritten (or at least enforced) around your existence.
IMO part of the reason the SV tech bros are embracing right wing grift culture so publicly now is that this method, which had been serving them well for decades, doesn't really work without the infinite free money lending spigot being wide open.
You must be new to billionaire business practices: break the rules first, ask for forgiveness later.
By the time the cheque comes, your illicit venture either went bust or you built a bilion dollar empire capable of buying the best lawyers and lobbying to walk away clean.
1.8 million people are in United States jails today. It isn't a death sentence, and it is a foreseeable consequence of some ethically-appropriate actions.
Supporting folks spending time in jail is a valuable role in any social movement.
i know of a company that poisoned an entire town! thats terrorism if done by an individual. the company still exists, just paid a settlement and carried on...
I agree with your point, but will split hairs on using the word "terrorism". I think that should be reserved for people that commit atrocities for some political aim. I'm fairly sure the company in question (I assume Union Carbide) did not poison the town to advance a political agenda.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy3piCUPIkc - VICE documentary and visit video. I think it contains an interview with an American woman who suffered from WR Grace and Company's asbestos mining and manufacturing in the USA, she says "they knew, they knew". WRG faced 129,000 personal injury claims and set asude $3 Bn for settling asbestos related lawsuits.
Are you talking about Bhopal in 1984? If so it would be an understatement to refer to half a million people as a “town”, and an overstatement to imply it was terrorism. Willful negligence, yes, but terrorism, no.
Google used to send customers to your site. Now they try to show you the information on their site so that the customer doesn't need to go to your site.
Even before the LLM-craze Google was showing their Answers box or whatever it was called at the top of the results that told you the answer (sometimes) so that you didn’t have to visit any website.
Pantents on video game mechanics... oh how I wish this weren't true. I would love a first person adventure game with the best mechanics and controls taken from genres that did that mechanics very well.
The one that always comes to mind for me is the boxing controls from Fight Night games. It pains me a little every time I play a game where pugilistic battles come down to smash 1 or 2 buttons.
The existing laws are a problem, and are not enforced in a fair and just manner.
Yes, the legal system is for humans, but we can use technology to improve the system for humans, so it's faster, better and more fair, because humans aren't perfect, and now we have technology to be better than the system create a long time ago. You don't think the legal system should run on pens and paper right? Adapting to typewriters, was a benifit to the system?
Well, video on demand, live streaming, and things like LLMs can also make the system better for humans.
Aren't all LLMs based on models published by the big two or three, so built on IP theft and if you're using them you are guilty of handling stolen goods?
This frames Google's indexing of the web in a totally, abjectly wrong fashion. It wasn't "other people's data", it was data people published to the public internet, implicitly and explicitly granting permission to download through the act of serving that data without restriction to whoever navigated to a particular URL.
That's how the internet works. If you want private content, you need to put up a gate mechanism of some sort with authentication or other methods of restricting access. Without that, you are literally having your server "serve" the content to whoever asks for it, without restriction or exception, without ToS or meaningful contract or agreements.
You can't have it both ways. "But they didn't know" or other post-hoc claims of innocent people publishing content to the web being misled or confused or abused is infantilizing nonsense.
The web wouldn't have been as amazing and revolutionary and liberating if the fundamental public and open nature of its systems was private and walled off by default.
Your take on YouTube going viral initially over copyrighted content isn't correct, either - it was ease of use and access. It was fairly popular by the time Google bought it, and once it was reachable and advertised by google itself, it exploded, because by that time, everyone had defaulted to using google for search.
Other people corrected your Spotify take.
The reason they pirated is because it is functionally impossible to gain access to the data in any other way. For consumers, there are lots of old shows, music, and other content that aren't accessible, so they turn to piracy. A vast majority of the time, if content is accessible, people will pay and do the technically legal and "right" thing.
Publishers exploit authors and content creators in the name of "platforming" and "marketing" , effectively doing as little as possible to take 90%+ of the value of a product and providing as little as possible to the producer of content or books or music. They get by on technicalities and have captured the legal arena entirely, with any attempt at reform or revolution meeting a messy death at the hands of lawyers and big money publishers.
Screw those people. They lie, cheat, and steal, and somehow have gotten away with fooling the world into thinking they're the good guys.
Copying bits and bytes is not stealing, and the ones trying to shill that narrative are trying to fool as many people as possible into giving them more money without any return of value in kind. I'd download the hell out of a car. Pirate everything.
The most outrageous thing about the whole story is that smart people (like here and not only) knew this all since day one. They been uncovering this the whole time.
And in their face, with all the fierce ignorance, broligarchs deny, evade and totally pretend this never happened. The most non open company of all even went to lengths to accuse others of stealing their IP - not theirs to begin with.
Just think of it - why did all major content platforms closed their APIs the day after GPT-2 got the word going…? Cause they knew all this very well - the content is precious and needed. They been doing it all along. Distilling the essence of world’s writing and digital imagery they had no right to.
We have a saying where I come from - no mercy for the chicken, no laws for the millions. I thought it was a local thing at first, it turned is how the world goes. Nothing new under the sun, indeed.
A bigger lesson might be "don't get caught until you're big enough to destroy the people suing you."
Napster got shut down for widespread enabling of copyright infringement. So did numerous other filesharing startups, including Travis Kalanick's first startup, Scour. Lots of small startups get put out of business all the time for being sued and not having the money to defend themselves.
Likewise, individuals like Donald Trump or Elon Musk get away with all sorts of illegal shit, because they are big enough to shut down the court systems prosecuting them.
Google's genius was in staying under the radar and aligning their incentives with everyone that might dislike them, until they were big enough that they could simply crush anyone that might dislike them.
" If you plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers you forfeit your life."
This is exactly what I immediately thought while reading the article. It almost feels like the legal system only punishes general public, while most of these guys are above it.
Airbnb and Uber have showed us that laws matter only to the extent that the political will to enforce them exists. Throw enough lawyers and lobbying money at the problem and the laws can simply be re-written to be friendlier to your business model.
The reason there was no political will to punish Airbnb and Uber for violating the law was that initially they were subsidized with VC money and so were able to undercut traditional hotels and taxis on price. In the world of tradable goods, pricing below cost with the intent of putting competition out of business so you can raise prices later is known as "dumping" and is itself illegal.
I rooted for Uber to smash the Taxi cartels. Let us not forget that Taxi Cartels were also insidious beasts. Taxi drivers abused their walled garden with their price gouging by taking longer routes, refusal to take a credit card, and extremely poorly maintained fleets of vehicles. I have had mostly good experiences with Uber, whereas I had experiences that mostly bordered on general condescension toward me whenever I took a ride in a Taxi. I am glad the political will to block Uber never materialized.
This argument ignores the fact that there were other alternatives to Uber at the time, ones that didn't break the law! Believe it or not, there were multiple ride hailing apps on the iPhone, but none were as great at accumulating capital or breaking the law without recourse.
The laws they allegedly broke were the taxi medallion cartel laws, which were the things keeping taxis terrible by limiting supply and competition. And those laws in general apply to the drivers rather than the ride hailing service. There is also a lot of ambiguity there, e.g. if you have a ride sharing service where people go on the app to find people to carpool with on a trip they'd be making anyway and then contribute gas money, is that a taxi service?
But the taxi services obviously hated the competition and waged a continuing media campaign to paint the renegades as the villains.
The best thing to ever happen to corpo scum was that social media took over most of the news. Now there’s no trusted journalists to write a big article about this kind of stuff, instead folks just defend the corpo scum’s actions and spread lies for them, while the truth is still putting on its shoes.
It would have worked if we didn’t find out the hard way a lot of social media and alternative news outlets weren’t even scummier.
We need good journalism courses with heavy emphasis on ethics and the importance of journalism to democracy.
We also need a way to punish entertainment that passes as journalism (maybe fewer legal protections) and to incentive actual journalism (and find a decent way to distinguish between the two).
Several of those things aren't even necessarily illegal and are the sort of things they shouldn't have had have any reason to do unless they were being targeted by a media campaign or captured government. There is also some dispute about whether some of those even happened or are just mischaracterizations from the media campaign.
It's like saying "well, they weren't only violating the taxi medallion cartel laws, they were also violating laws against evading enforcement of the taxi medallion cartel laws". There is a central cause here.
Move the goalposts any more and they’re going to be outside the stadium. What laws matter to you? I agree there are shit laws but why can uber break them with impunity but individuals are jailed for smoking some fun lettuce?
The question you should be asking is, what do you want to do about it? Throw the people challenging the taxi cartels in prison, or get rid of the laws against fun lettuce?
Something else, I’m not sure what yet. Honestly, I’m not the best guy to ask but I know that I don’t want startups to continue breaking laws with impunity and I don’t want individuals to get imprisoned for stuff they do that isn’t affecting others in a meaningful way.
There isn't really a something else. You have bad laws that are in practice only enforced against the little guy. You could demand they also be enforced against the big guy, but that's hard to do when they're bad laws, isn't really a great outcome because they're bad laws, and its primary benefit would be in service of calling attention to the flaw so the bad laws can be repealed. And then maybe you should just start there to begin with.
Suppose that the status quo is the worst option, the second worst is enforcing the bad laws against the big guys, the best is getting rid of those laws.
Now, that might not be the case. Given the existence of bad laws, having someone who is able to break out of the bad cage might be better than if no one can, but let's consider what happens if we assume that it's worse.
Regardless of how they're ranked relative to each other, you would only pick either of the two worse options over the best if it was easier to do it. But getting bad laws enforced against well-heeled players is actually the hardest thing to do because they're doing something sympathetic and have the resources to fight, which is harder to do than repealing the bad laws.
I don't agree. Getting more comprehensive enforcement of laws in general against well-heeled players is a good thing. We would have a lot less bad law if laws were enforced more evenly, because people would more quickly see their true effects, rather than having to wait until companies exploited the loopholes in enforcement so egregiously.
(I also don't agree that the only problem here is bad laws. Yes, some of the laws that big players break are bad; some are fine. I'm not just talking about Uber here.)
> Getting more comprehensive enforcement of laws in general against well-heeled players is a good thing.
Whether something is good independent of what it takes to achieve it is a separate question from whether that's where you should focus your efforts.
> We would have a lot less bad law if laws were enforced more evenly, because people would more quickly see their true effects, rather than having to wait until companies exploited the loopholes in enforcement so egregiously.
Which is exactly why it's so hard to do it. The status quo is: Pass lots of laws that make everything illegal so that anyone without resources can be brought up on charges if they ruffle the wrong feathers. If you wanted to actually enforce all of those laws, they would immediately have to be repealed or everyone would be in jail. Which isn't in the interests of the people who want to keep them on the books to use for selective enforcement, so they don't enforce them that way in order to keep them on the books.
The consequence is that it takes even more political capital to have those laws rigorously enforced than to have them repealed, because then you have to fight both the big guys who don't want short-term enforcement against themselves and the autocrats who don't want to long-term have the laws repealed, instead of only the latter.
> I also don't agree that the only problem here is bad laws.
When laws are enforced against the little guys but not the big guys, it's usually because they're bad laws, because letting the rich openly get away with literal murder is highly unpopular.
The most significant category of good laws that big companies regularly violate with impunity is antitrust laws, but those also don't often get enforced against the little guy because the little guy isn't even in a position to violate them.
So I get your argument, but by that logic the only bad laws that get repealed will be those that affect big business, and the laws against individuals without resources will still be in place. I think we all agree that it’s unfair there’s a very large difference in enforcement of law between those with resources and those without, but I think to prevent that we need to figure out how to prevent the capture of the government by those with large resources. I could agree in concept that less laws are better for that overall, but also then there’s the question of who benefits from less laws and I bet those with resources will still benefit.
It’s almost like we need to ensure no one has much more resources than anyone else (ya know, workers owning the means of production) so there’s a more level field!
> So I get your argument, but by that logic the only bad laws that get repealed will be those that affect big business, and the laws against individuals without resources will still be in place.
Quite the opposite.
You have a bad law which is only enforced against the little guy. Right now, when it's not enforced against the big guy, stories are written about it to get people riled up, but that's the wrong target.
Right now, when those laws are enforced against the little guy, people say "well they broke the law". Which is true, because everyone is breaking the law all the time, because there are so many bad laws. So what should be happening is, every time they try to enforce a bad law against the little guy, that should be the thing that gets people ruled up -- even if they're guilty. Because everyone is guilty, because the laws are crazy. So get people worked up about that so that the laws can be changed. Don't accept that people guilty of violating bad laws deserve to be punished. Drag the prosecutors through the mud. Flood the legislators with complaints whenever it happens. Use jury nullification and publicize to everyone that it's their right. Get those laws repealed.
> I think to prevent that we need to figure out how to prevent the capture of the government by those with large resources.
This was supposed to be checks and balances and limited government. As soon as you unchain legislators to micromanage the economy, anyone who captures them can shape the law to their advantage and then become rich and use the money to make sure the government stays captured.
The government needs to be constrained from making laws that inhibit competition.
> It’s almost like we need to ensure no one has much more resources than anyone else (ya know, workers owning the means of production) so there’s a more level field!
The words you're looking for are "antitrust enforcement".
> It’s almost like we need to ensure no one has much more resources than anyone else (ya know, workers owning the means of production) so there’s a more level field!
Heh, yeah, I was going to post to add this as well. That is the underlying problem. I don't necessarily think it has to mean "workers owning the means of production" per se, more like "the richest person's wealth cannot be more than X times the poorest" and "the largest participant in a market cannot have more than Y% market share", but the idea is similar. :-)
Why isn't at least one of those things actually addressing (disbanding, regulating, whatever--left to people experienced in policy or with context to have some remediation plan) those taxi cartels' behavior?
The argument is that getting rid of the bad laws is better than enforcing them more rigorously. This can be applied to the laws propping up the taxi medallion cartels as well as the ones prohibiting personal drug use. Then anyone (not just Uber) could compete with them and thereby disband the taxi cartels previously using those laws to constrain competition.
I agree that removing bad laws is good. I think by introducing the second, culturally charged topic (1.) taxi cartels, 2.) recreational drugs) you diminish the possible interpretations of your perspective.
The other downstream conclusions make sense too, but the linkage is more opaque making it difficult to appreciate.
Also hard to acknowledge is--who decides which laws are "bad"? Generally, societal outcomes should test the efficacy (toward some comparably abstract societal good) of laws, which then prompts the legislature to do something between patting themselves on the back and authoring actually effective law.
It's better to ask the question in a different way. We know what bad laws are. They're laws that benefit some interest group at the expense of the general public, e.g. by constraining competition or diverting tax dollars to cronies.
So the question is, how do you eliminate bad laws? This isn't a question of what a hypothetical legislature should do if it was full of good faith actors, it's a question of how to structurally align the incentives of a real legislature with the interests of the general public so that they're inhibited from passing bad laws.
That makes sense but seems like it would only actually be a subset of bad laws. I mainly mean to highlight that it's not a comprehensive way to identify bad law.
> how to structurally align the incentives of a real legislature with the interests of the general public
This seems like a critical nuance that, like you said, needs a structural solution. I have no actual idea, but conceptually this seems like it would eliminate a subset of particularly bad laws and actions (e.g. members of the legislature trading on their insider information) which have outsized, negative outcomes for the public. But we also rely on that very rule making body to essentially self-govern. And such a grass-roots movement of reforms to put the public first seem unlikely given the attitudes and sensationalizing behaviors present in the members of that body.
I avoid politics because of just how disaffecting it is to think about most of these details.
Because more money and special interests are behind fun lettuce smoking enforcement than local taxi companies could put behind protecting their own cartel from interlopers. If the taxi companies had more money to dump on politicians than is poured into drug enforcement, then the priorities would have changed.
Taxi Medallion laws were also a Reputation Engine that was publicly queryable, subject to FOIA laws and generally had easy to search public databases for them, with detailed notes. Sure Uber/Lyft boil that into a "friendly" 5-star UI, but do you have any idea what data contributed to that star rating? Do you always trust the algorithms that compute them from a bucket of metrics you can't directly request?
Sure, Medallion laws had problems, and got Regulatory Captured in some cities to also become terrible Trusts controlling prices that needed busting. But the answer to "fix the Regulation" isn't always "break the Regulation", and the Regulation had a lot of good intent of having public accessible information about drivers and that data not just owned by a single company and locked in their opaque algorithms. It might have been nicer to fix the Regulatory Capture and Bust the Trusts.
> Taxi Medallion laws were also a Reputation Engine that was publicly queryable, subject to FOIA laws and generally had easy to search public databases for them, with detailed notes.
You just landed at the airport and need a cab. You fax your FOIA requests for each of the hundred cab companies in the area, which they're required to provide within 20 business days. Your return flight is in 3 days and it would be nice to leave the airport before then.
> Sure Uber/Lyft boil that into a "friendly" 5-star UI, but do you have any idea what data contributed to that star rating? Do you always trust the algorithms that compute them from a bucket of metrics you can't directly request?
So compete with them instead of banning them. Fund an open source ride hailing app with open data. Don't require anyone to use it. If it's better, they will. If it's not better, why should they be forced to?
> You just landed at the airport and need a cab. You fax your FOIA requests for each of the hundred cab companies in the area, which they're required to provide within 20 business days. Your return flight is in 3 days and it would be nice to leave the airport before then.
If you just landed at the airport, you rely on police enforcement keeping bad actors from having medallions. The medallion itself is the primary "this person is a reputable cab driver". That's also entirely why the Regulatory Capture in some cities was so effective in controlling supply of medallions, because it was city police enforced.
Many cities required taxis to have their medallion number painted on the outside, and there were phone numbers you could quickly call (in the days of payphones even) to get quick information about a medallion or to report a complaint/problem with one.
Today a few cities have updated that external paint requirement (and inside the car medallion papers) to include QR codes for even quicker lookup on modern phones or to even use an app to do nice things like pay for the Taxi without needing to broker/negotiate it. Those kind of technological improvements have kind of gotten lost in the wash of the speed of which Uber/Lyft moved fast and broke things, but were always possible.
> So compete with them instead of banning them. Fund an open source ride hailing app with open data. Don't require anyone to use it. If it's better, they will. If it's not better, why should they be forced to?
The history of taxi companies say that they are only as open as they are forced to be. I never said anything about banning Uber/Lyft. Competition is not the problem; destroying public safety regulations in the name of competition is the problem. I said that Uber/Lyft should have been required to do the same or similar paperwork that medallions represent, that both of their data should be open under the previously existing laws, as a public good. Break the artificial scarcity, sure, give Uber/Lyft a license to "print medallions" if that breaks existing Trusts. But get that data open and available to the public (and enforceable by the public's law enforcement). Neither would want to do that because their rating systems are secret sauce and "competitive advantage", they would need to be coerced by regulations. That's what regulations are for, the public good that competition doesn't care about/can't care about/needs to keep "secret sauce" for advantages.
Let's recap the past: Taxis were borderline unusable in almost all American cities before Uber (except for NYC)
I certainly didn't love their ruthless business practices, but let's not delude ourselves and admit that Uber or Lyft wouldn't exist if they didn't break the laws around taxi medallions.
Sometimes laws do more harm than good (by limiting supply and slowing innovation) and it requires creatively skirting regulations.
Things were always possible to improve the taxi industry. Smartphones had been around a few years. But it would've taken the industry 20 years to implement it correctly. In the same way that rampant music and movie piracy in the early 2000s hastened the development of iTunes and Netflix's subscription model way of doing business.
Uber shows the driver's name, their photo, and has a process for flagging drivers. Public safety is important to their business. As someone who's driven an Uber and Lyft and been through their process, I've seen it firsthand.
It's not like "medallions" worked - I remember driving in multiple taxis in pre 2010 days where the photo DID NOT MATCH UP to the driver. My high school physics teacher who grew up in Brooklyn in the late 1970s told stories about how he learned how to drive by illegally working and driving taxis around as a 15 year old.
Right now, we're just going through the same thing with AI again, and Silicon Valley is applying it's ethos of the past few decades.
There are reasons why in various industries, China is "winning the race", so to speak.
Regulations exist, but sometimes people who creatively ignore the "regulations" can win the tide of the public. It's one of America's best (and incredibly divisive) cultural capabilities.
> Let's recap the past: Taxis were borderline unusable in almost all American cities before Uber (except for NYC)
My experience was very different and "almost all" doesn't feel correct. It's certainly fun hyperbole. NYC the systems worked more than they didn't. In part because of spot lights from famous TV shows and 70s corruption documentaries/news exposes. Most smaller cities the taxis quietly worked with little corruption and a lot of trustworthiness. In the early oughts I had good experiences hailing cabs in cities a lot smaller than NYC that people didn't believe you could even hail cabs in.
Because Taxi regulations were so wildly different from cities, it's hard to generalize what the experience used to be. It varied a lot from city to city and was a massive spectrum, with a few national certainties like some of the big Franchises to help smooth things a bit.
> I certainly didn't love their ruthless business practices, but let's not delude ourselves and admit that Uber or Lyft wouldn't exist if they didn't break the laws around taxi medallions.
In the early oughts, a few cities like Seattle were pressuring the big national Franchise companies like Yellow Cab through a mixture of regulatory body pressure (but not actual laws) and bottom up consumer messaging/volume customer requirements to move to "Computer Dispatch". There was a growing competition in that space, and a bunch of innovation happening between the competitors, including some of the things Uber and Lyft take credit for today because Yellow Cab mostly broke apart in the onslaught of VC subsidization and rule breaking.
I don't think it would have taken "20 years" to implement it "correctly". We don't know because the whole thing got disrupted so sideways by the gig economy. (Which also really didn't care about making the taxi business better, but about making the labor market worse. We should also not forget that breaking the worst parts of taxi medallion laws also broke the good ones that helped build useful labor-side things like taxi driver unions and paid for things like healthcare.)
All I'm saying is that there was a path that this could have all been done under the old regulations, legally. It's a path not taken here, and probably to our detriment. Though I can't prove that just as much as you can't prove that innovations like smarter apps would have taken "20 years" in that other timeline.
> If you just landed at the airport, you rely on police enforcement keeping bad actors from having medallions.
Well that's not going to work. You now have people from outside the jurisdiction having a government they didn't elect cast in the role of their protectors. Instead what happens is the local government protects the incumbents, which is what we've seen in practice.
> Many cities required taxis to have their medallion number painted on the outside, and there were phone numbers you could quickly call (in the days of payphones even) to get quick information about a medallion or to report a complaint/problem with one.
As opposed to the license plates already on all cars?
> The history of taxi companies say that they are only as open as they are forced to be.
People keep trying to regard Uber as a taxi company. They keep claiming to be an app, because... they are. So replace the app with an open source one. Create an independent non-profit to handle payments and maintain a server to hold the driver ratings and take a small cut of the payments to cover its costs. Operate it as a live auction where drivers list how much they'll charge per mile and riders pick a driver based on their rating and price. Publish all the data.
If you do it well, people will use it voluntarily. If you do it poorly, you haven't demonstrated enough competence to be trusted making regulations that people would have to follow even if they're dumb.
> Competition is not the problem; destroying public safety regulations in the name of competition is the problem.
The problem is that incumbents call the things they use to destroy competition "public safety regulations".
> Neither would want to do that because their rating systems are secret sauce and "competitive advantage", they would need to be coerced by regulations.
Not when you can "coerce" them through competition. If people like the ratings system which is more open or the one that extracts lower margins and the app is otherwise fungible with theirs, they don't even exist unless they can be better than the competing system you created to do better, which implies that you failed to actually do better and then they're supposed to win. Which in turn applies pressure on the public system to do better itself, instead of getting captured, because if it gets captured then it becomes uncompetitive and actually has competition.
The only alternative I remember is "black car" services, eg airport limos and the like. But there was very little automation around it; you had to speak on the phone with someone to book, and it was always like 24+ hours out rather than "go to the place now" the way a cab is.
Most taxi services will send a car to your address immediately, no reservation required. Problem is, you have to know the exact address where you want to be picked up, which can sometimes be difficult to determine if you're new in town and/or standing on a street with no obvious sign or address, e.g. on the edge of a large university campus. That's where GPS-driven apps really shine, plus the ability to see the car's location in near real-time, and why I will never be sad at the demise of traditional way of having to call a cab.
Indeed, but I was referring specifically to the charge that taxi alternatives (eg, outside the medallion system) existed pre-Uber. And I think, they did, but only in very limited use cases like airport shuttles, and not with fleets anywhere near large enough to have a car five minutes from anywhere at all times— hence the need to book those things ahead.
Political will shouldn't be required to enforce existing law. If i started a 1 man illegal taxi service it would be shut down even though it has little effect on the community, but saudi vc funded startup wasn't shut down even though it violated laws in every major city. That is a weird asymmetry as a us citizen.
What's really happening here is that the laws are supposed to reflect the political will, i.e. the will of the people, but in many cases they don't, because the lawmakers have been captured by incumbents.
Then if a little guy comes in and tries to challenge them, they don't have the resources to resist the incumbents' pocket government officials and get destroyed. But if a big fish does it, people actually notice if the government tries to enforce stupid laws against them, and then government officials are afraid to do it because the public would not only not like it but actually notice the unreasonableness of the law.
But the problem here isn't that the law isn't being enforced against a well-heeled challenger, it's that those laws exist to be enforced against the little guy, when they should instead be repealed.
So there are two different categories of things here. One is, they ban cannabis and put individuals in prison for it, but then if you pay thousands a year for overpriced health insurance and the insurance pays thousands of dollars for a doctor to ask you some cursory questions and a pharma company to manufacture the drug, you can get a prescription for opioids, which are way more dangerous. But that isn't the big guys violating the law, it's them following a law that they bought and paid for. That's bad in a different way.
The relevant thing here would be that they pass excessive copyright laws, but then Meta violates them and maybe gets away with it because they're doing it in a sympathetic way and the government doesn't want to hamstring emerging industries in their country, whereas if an individual would be sued into oblivion even if the thing they were doing was equally sympathetic.
Because it's not just about the public noticing it, it's about the public noticing it in time to do something about it. If an individual gets sued or arrested, they're immediately screwed and will be under pressure to settle or plea bargain before they're bankrupted by legal fees. But once they do, the case is over. Whereas large companies can fight, or pay lawyers to stall while they wage a media campaign to counter the usual imperious press releases from the prosecution, or use their money to lobby the government while public opinion is in their favor.
I mean there are examples in the same category as well: how many years was it illegally exported from dispensaties between states? New state legalizes? day one the corporate dispensary is stocked which is curious since it takes several months to grow. Also, lots of foriegn capital involved in the industry.
Not just meta, Open AI, spotify, youtube...its become a routine exception and can now be relied upon.
I agree that the legal fees could be a big factor, but it seems cases aren't even filed.
When traveling it’s also so much safer than taxis.
My brother was robbed at gunpoint in a taxi. My wife had to jump from more than one moving taxi to escape. My ex girlfriend too. My Swiss friend had his camera and wallet stolen.
You can have issues with Uber too, but not as frequently because there’s a digital audit trail, you can report them to the platform and the police. The threat of those consequences lead to better behavior.
What's interesting is that in many cities now, Uber and Lyft are in fact more expensive than taxis. And the experience is equally mediocre. The pendulum has swung back the other way. The only thing they have going for them now is the app based convenience, which is eroding as more "yellow cab" type traditional taxis band together and get set up with their own sort of city-specific app.
> What's interesting is that in many cities now, Uber and Lyft are in fact more expensive than taxis.
Sure, agreed.
> And the experience is equally mediocre.
Absolutely not. I regret using a taxi nearly every time I opt for the cheaper option. It's only the "better" choice if you happen to be standing right in front of one. This experience is nearly universal no matter where I travel.
I think people really forget how utterly terrible Taxis were pre-Uber. I have no idea about competing apps these days, maybe they are similar to Uber, but the typical Taxi experience is nearly as awful as it's always been at least in the US.
Uber/Lyft certainly has gotten worse - but at least I can fairly reliably get a car when I need it with reasonable reliability. The rest of the "soft" product or pricing I really care far, far, less about than that simple fact.
> the typical Taxi experience is nearly as awful as it's always been at least in the US
It seems impossible/problematic to generalize the taxi experience to “The US”.
If you’re in a city center, cabs can be far easier. The number of times I’ve ordered an Uber or Lyft and regretted it while watching taxi after taxi drive by has been increasing. But I expect the Chicago loop experience to be quite different from say, the suburbs.
My small rural town of 9000 people had multiple taxi services that poorer people relied on to do even their grocery shopping. We didn't need "disruption"
Tech bros generalizing a negative experience from NYC or SV to the entire US has been so stupid.
> Uber and Lyft are in fact more expensive than taxis.
I doubt that.
I double checked, just to be sure since I paid for taxis for years for a specific trip, each way. Uber is still cheaper TODAY than taxis were when I switched 10 years ago. One way 5 minute trip, Friday 6pm in orange county, ca still under 20$ today.
20$ was a good deal (or ripoff, depending on your attitude) for a taxi in 2015, for the same distance and a variable waiting time. Let's just say it's about equal for sake of discussion. There was no app, but there was a dispatcher you could call. There was no incentive to improve, until then.
Companies have had to adapt and prices have come down. It would no doubt be 30$+ today for taxis, if not for rideshare companies.
I remember calling a taxi 3 hours before my flight to get to SFO. After an hour and four different phone calls to the taxi company, I took BART and barely made it before the counter closed.
The feedback system incentivizes drivers and riders to behave.
This is getting off-topic, but I am curious, why didn't you go with BART in the first place? If you had an hour to call the taxi company and still arrive in time, presumably, you had more than enough time.
I know there are reasons for not going with public transport, but preferring to take a taxi/uber when a train line can get you there in time maybe has more to say about public transport than about taxis. Well functioning rail is typically one of the most effective and reliable way of getting to an airport, and often much cheaper than taxis.
Not OP but many many reasons. If you have the money and you prefer comfort (and/or have kids along) taking a taxi/uber/etc. is much more preferable than dragging several (probably heavy) luggages up and down platforms (elevators may or may not work), walking long paths, etc. especially when you consider the alternative is simply putting luggages in a trunk, sit down and relax, and most likely get there faster. And all of this is before we even talk about any safety issues with BART.
I refuse to take public transit with a checked bag until the NYC subway has 99.9% escalator uptime and escalators at every station, realistically possible with redundant escalators. We will never have nice things as long as we let the trade unions bend us over
It's not really that surprising when the cities are passing laws to try to turn Uber back into the taxi cartel by e.g. making it harder for them to use part-time and on-demand contract drivers. The way you get the price down is by reducing friction, increasing flexibility and supply and taking advantage of efficiencies like people willing to do a dozen rides a week during surge pricing without making it a full-time job. Pass bad laws that make things more rigid and they get more expensive.
Forcing them to have certainty? Yeah, that's a bad law that screws over the workers. There are people who are at home doing chores or making stuff for Etsy or doing some other contract work who would like to leave the app open and then accept a fare whenever there is one, or would like to open the app to see if anyone else would pay them for a trip they were going to make themselves anyway, regardless of whether the app can guarantee back to back fares.
Instead, laws like that cause Uber to set their hours and then they can't switch on and off whenever they please and have to work miserable graveyard shifts or split shifts if that's what they're assigned.
Meanwhile there is nothing stopping anyone from taking a job with contractually guaranteed hours if that's what they want. There are plenty of jobs like that, you don't have to mandate all jobs be like that and screw over anyone who wants something different.
Last time I used curb, the cabbie told me that the curb payment wasn’t working and I had to Zelle him, ended up needing to report the driver to Curb to get my money back. Shoulda taken an uber!
> What's interesting is that in many cities now, Uber and Lyft are in fact more expensive than taxis. And the experience is equally mediocre.
That, of course, was the plan all along.
Such august figures as JP Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller,and Andrew Carnegie all made their fortune by undercutting the competition,
putting them out of business through means legal and otherwise,
and finally monopolizing the markets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)
You should look at what’s going on in Cancun Mexico with Uber and the taxis right now. Your description in the first sentence is quite accurate.
Your comment also points out the power that regulation has to enforce and protect monopolies. I’m not saying all regulation is bad obviously, but I think we can see exactly what effect it had on the taxi industry, and I’m sure glad that Uber managed to disrupt it.
The problem with Uber is that it's a lose-lose-lose money pit scenario.
Customers pay significantly more, drivers make significantly less, and Uber is still running hundreds of millions in the red. Turns out hiring thousands of devs and dumping absurd capital into... driving people around... doesn't really work.
It really screwed over a lot of regular working-class people. In some European cities getting a taxi license was a serious monetary investment. People took our huge loans for this. This was now suddenly worthless. It's like being told your very expensive university education is no longer accredited, but the student loan still exists. kthxbye.
I'm not saying the existing systems were always good (they weren't), but you need to be willing to overlook a lot of real-world suffering to be "rooting for Uber". Phrases like "taxi cartels" sound nice, but they're hardly neutral phrasings that simplify things to the point of being useless phrases.
And "I'm just going to willingly and knowingly ignore laws I don't like for personal profit" is not a great take-away either. This isn't Aaron Swartz breaking a law as a matter of "civil disobedience" – it's just a plain "how can we make money?"
And where does that leave competitors who are NOT willing to break the law? It's an unlevel playing field; there can be no free market if some people don't need to follow the same set of rules. Uber's actions are fundamentally anti-capitalist and anti-free market.
I always tell the story of this restaurant 18 km from my house. If I order their cheapest 6 euro hamburger they deliver it for free within 30 minutes. If I take a taxi to the restaurant I may have to wait for an hour and it costs about 100 euro and another 100 to get back.
I took a ~20 minute 12km taxi ride just last Monday, and it was about €22. That's in Ireland. Considering fuel, the drive back for the driver, and that taxis have a lot of downtime, that seems like a reasonable price.
You live in Netherlands according to a recent comment; I can't believe taxis are almost 4x more expensive, unless you're stuck in traffic for a long time, but then your burger can't arrive in 30 mins?
And free delivery on €6 food item is almost certainly netting them a loss.
There is no way anybody is making a profit on driving 36 km to deliver a hamburger for 6 euros, and it's a matter of time until whatever faucet of VC money subsidizing this runs dry.
In much of the world the price of food delivery has risen to the level needed to make it profitable, and it's not cheap. I paid around $10 in fees plus Uber's 30-50% markups on the food itself to get a couple of burritos yesterday from a shop a mile down the road.
A 30 min drive would be 7 euro and 3 cent in minimum wage. Then you need a car and you have to fuel or charge it.
The only solution to the riddle I can think of is that (like postal services) they can cleverly combine orders and rarely lose money on delivery. The fast delivery would have to be luck or perhaps the burger preserves poorly?
That the food is absolutely fantastic might also have something to do with it. If they can get food into your mouth repetition is almost guaranteed.
> would you rather go back to that today? really??
I absolutely said said no such thing. There are good ways to change things and bad ways to change things. Allowing a private entity reap huge profits by blatantly breaking rules and screwing people is not a good way to change things.
There was no other way to change things on less than a generational timescale.
If governments don't like it, well, bummer. They were supposed to serve the people, not the incumbent taxi cartels. They failed, so "we the people" routed around them.
Unfortunately now Ubers are exactly the same experience but more expensive/unpredictable. It’s only nicer if you spend more on black and such, which makes it easily double a standard cab fare.
They still haven’t properly digitized, curb sucks ass, I had to report a driver to curb when he made me Zelle him because “curb payment wasn’t working”
Not only was it inevitable, if we were so inclined and willing to use the regulatory pen, we could've simply written into law that for Taxi's to operate, they must be well maintained and must accept all major forms of payment. And yeah, the Taxi industry would've fought it because every company ever has fought every regulation ever no matter how much it stands to benefit both their customers and they them-fucking-selves but companies having a say in how they are regulated is both how a Taxi company would fight this, and how Uber, AirBnb, OpenAI, Meta, etc. blatantly and flagrantly violate the law and instead of consequences, they get fines, and court hearings. So maybe we just shouldn't be allowing that?
It drives me up the goddamn wall how people will say shit like "the Taxi industry needed to be upended" when like... I mean, maybe? But on balance, given all the negative externalities associated with these companies, are they really a gain? Or are they just a different set of overlords, equally disinterested in providing a good service once they reach the scale where they no longer are required to give a shit?
Just... regulate the fuckers. Are you sick of filthy Taxis that break down? Put a regulation down that says if a cab breaks down during a trip, they owe the customer a free ride and five thousand dollars. You bet your ASS those cabs will be serviced as soon as humanly possible. This isn't rocket science y'all. Make whatever consequence the government is going to dispense immeasurably, clearly worse than whatever the business is trying to weasel out of doing, and boom. Solved.
> Not only was it inevitable, if we were so inclined and willing to use the regulatory pen, we could've simply written into law that for Taxi's to operate, they must be well maintained and must accept all major forms of payment.
That was frequently already the case. They were required to accept credit cards but then the card reader would be "broken" and it wasn't worth anybody's time to dispute it instead of just paying in cash.
You also... don't really want laws like that. They're required to accept "all payment methods", which ones? Do they have to take American Express, even though the fees are much higher? Do they have to take PayPal if the customer has funds in a PayPal account? What about niche card networks like store cards accepted at more than one merchant? If not those and just Visa and Mastercard, you now have a law entrenching that duopoly in the law.
> Are you sick of filthy Taxis that break down? Put a regulation down that says if a cab breaks down during a trip, they owe the customer a free ride and five thousand dollars. You bet your ASS those cabs will be serviced as soon as humanly possible. This isn't rocket science y'all.
It's not rocket science, it's trade offs.
Is there a $5000 fine for a breakdown? You just made cab service much more expensive, because they're either going to have to pay the fines as a cost of doing business and then pass them on, or propylactically do excessive maintenance like doing full engine rebuilds every year because it costs less than getting caught out once, and then passing on the cost of that. And even then, there is no such thing as perfect. The cabbie paid to have the whole engine rebuilt by the dealership just yesterday and the dealer under-tightened one of the bolts when putting it back in, so there's a coolant leak? Normally that's just re-tightening the bolt and $20 worth of coolant, but now it's a $5000 fine on top of the $4000 engine rebuild.
The way you actually want to solve this is with competition, not rigid rules and onerous fines. If someone is always having breakdowns then they get bad rating, customers can see that when choosing and then opt for a different driver that costs slightly more -- but only if the cost is worth the difference to them. Maybe it's worth $2 for the difference between two stars and five but it isn't worth $50 for the difference between 4.7 and 4.8. Either way you shouldn't be deciding for people, you should be giving them the choice.
> That was frequently already the case. ...the card reader would be "broken"
I traveled a lot to a smallish town for work before Uber got there and ran into this several times. After the second or third time, I started just saying "well that sucks for you" and starting to leave. Suddenly it would work.
That's true, however we must also keep in mind that Uber (and alikes) happened because regular institutions failed to do this for some reason or another. I won't try to speculate why, because I have no idea (and of course it looks obvious in the hindsight).
There was a demand for safer and more reliable taxis. There was not enough supply for that. Government haven't paid enough attention to the sector. So, naturally, someone came and used that whole situation to provide supply for this demand.
Of course it's not this simple, and there were a lot of other things going on. But if we narrow the scope down to just this, then we can see that the core problem here wasn't Uber, it was that that governments were too slow to react in time.
The solution to that would not have been rabid capitalism just bulldozing over laws because the laws suck and further entrenching that "laws only matter for the poor".
The solution to the pre-Uber state of the taxi industry would be to actually have the regulations authorities enforce the regulation. But it seems across the Western world that having regulations authorities do their job and regulate is like the devil and holy water.
Additionally, in some cases the regulations themselves were crap.
Let's not pretend that the taxi situation was hunkey-dory before big-bad-tech came onto the scene. There's no regulation that says if I call dispatch to request a taxi one has to show up, and "we'll pick you up when we pick you up" was (and is still) a common mode of operation.
In NYC, it was (is?) against the law to hail a black car on the street, even if they were sitting there ready willing and able to drive you, because the taxi cartel got _regulations_ to make it that way.
> In NYC, it was (is?) against the law to hail a black car on the street, even if they were sitting there ready willing and able to drive you, because the taxi cartel got _regulations_ to make it that way.
That's precisely what I meant with "in some cases the regulations themselves were crap". But that doesn't imply the idea of regulation is bad - it is saying that maybe voters should make their voice clear to lawmakers and parties to get stuff changed. Regulation can only be as good or bad as the voters allow it to be.
VC funding allowed them to move quickly enough that they got to a scale where they could afford legal and lobbying protection when challenges eventually happened.
> The reason there was no political will to punish Airbnb and Uber for violating the law was that initially they were subsidized with VC money and so were able to undercut traditional hotels and taxis on price.
That's just a trope. They were initially losing money because they had high fixed costs (developing a platform, spending enough on advertising to get a critical mass of people using it), which are long-term investments. If you only spread the cost of the long-term investment over the short-term sales, they were "losing money" in the early years, but that's how all long-term investments work.
Dumping is when you sell below the unit cost, e.g. paying drivers more than you charge customers, which isn't what they were doing in general. And as long as they weren't doing that, the incumbents could have responded by lowering their own prices (and therefore margins) without themselves losing money on each sale, which is competition working as intended. Unless the competition is too hidebound to accept a reduction in profits in order to stay competitive or otherwise insists on using a less efficient method of operating, in which case they go under.
Part of the reason Airbnb got a pass must be how profitable it was to people who own many properties, despite the harm it does to the communities of people who only own one property.
shouldn't there be a lot of political will from the traditional hotels and taxis, and their lawyers? i can see that the answer is "no", but i don't know why
especially with hotels, i would have expected there to be small enough oligopoly to overcome the freerider problem (taxis are more regional, so i don't expect them to be able to fight an (inter)national company very easily)
> shouldn't there be a lot of political will from the traditional hotels and taxis, and their lawyers?
Yes there is, I am reminded of this every time I take an uber by the yellow cab medallion buyout fee that I’m charged because of the lobbying power of the TLC lobby in NYC
There are a lot more people who own a few properties as investments than there are hotel owners. Even if these people don't plan to rent through Airbnb, the way Airbnb distorts the housing market is still beneficial for their investments. Also, by the time Trump became president Airbnb was already entrenched for years.
The traditional taxi industry was rife with corruption, bad experiences, and poor service in many jurisdictions before uber/lyft. As terrible of a human being that I think Travis Kalanick is, it was only going to take lawbreaking to overcome such a tainted system.
Medallion systems often prevented any competition, sometimes to absurd effect. The number of licenced taxis often didn't keep pace with population growth, sometimes even staying flat. Many drivers didn't own their own medallians then had to rent from owners, often making little money. In my city (Toronto) cabs were often dirty, broken, refused short distance fares (illegal) and smelled of cigarette smoke that was obviously from the driver.
Moreover, I believe Uber fundamentally solved two problems with taxis:
The driver can't scam the passenger. The driver can't set the meter wrong, drive an unnecessarily long route, or just be an outright unlicensed taxi. Instead, the driver maintains a relationship with Uber, and the passenger can preview the fare before committing.
The passenger can't scam the driver. In a traditional taxi, you could theoretically just walk out ("dine and dash" style). The passenger can also make a call to dispatch and not show up for the ride. Instead, the passenger maintains a relationship with Uber, and the driver doesn't need to handle any payments.
> Medallion systems often prevented any competition, sometimes to absurd effect. The number of licenced taxis often didn't keep pace with population growth, sometimes even staying flat.
Meanwhile, in places with sensible rules about taxis and private hire, the only thing that Uber did was make it easier for people to break the rules. And rack up an enormous tax bill that they somehow believed they'd be able to get out of paying.
Then why do people keep using it? It seems like a pretty transactional relationship to me. If drivers aren't getting paid as much as they wanted, they should find another job with a higher price. If passengers are paying more than they wanted, then they should find another way to call a taxi with a lower price.
> they should find another way to call a taxi with a lower price.
like what? Uber's business plan was always about eliminating competition. The company successfully did so by undercutting prices, only to jack them up when they had the market to themselves. There is no Free Market Fairy way to fix that.
It sucked, but not everywhere equally. Meanwhile, Uber rode their one-trick pony (an app), which everyone quickly replicated, all the way to upending taxi businesses worldwide, thanks to their infinite money supply letting them survive long enough in any new market to get the public behind them, which took away support from local regulators trying to keep the market from being gutted by what at this point was a multinational corporation (and technically a criminal enterprise).
Sure, taxi services aren't usually known to be paragons of virtue, but then they weren't that bad everywhere; Uber is just another case of an US org trying to address an US-specific problem and then bludgeoning the entire world with their solution, whether the rest of the planet has such problems or not.
That seems a little dramatic. They never forced anyone to take an uber right? If taxis were so amazing in other countries why would anyone be interested in switching to uber?
The last time I dragged my family into a taxi because of my anti Uber ideology, the driver stank to hell of body odor, asked me to input directions on his phone covered with dried snot from him sneezing with his mouth open, he drove dangerously under the speed limit on the freeway, and it took twice as long to get home as normal.
in my experience, taxi quality varies wildly depending on where you are
in bay area, it absolutely makes sense to invent uber, because the taxis were awful. and in vancouver (canada), they're also awful, and deserve the disruption: they would often tell you it'd be a 40 minute wait, and then just not show up
taxis in new york were and continue to be totally fine. you just stand outside and get in ~20 seconds later, with no hassles or apps. i've been in an uber/lyft a handful of times in nyc, but they're just worse (possibly cheaper, but the subway also gives them stiff competition, and i don't care that much if i'm in enough of a hurry to take a cab)
Vancouver was a great example of the corruption inherent in monopolies. Vancouver had neither Lyft nor Uber until 2020. I heard (internally, when I used to work for Uber) that the reason is that some politicians there had a personal stake in the taxis, so they got a $50 minimum fare passed for all booked rides.
The thing that Uber and Lyft really provided was a surveillance economy to keep both the drivers and riders somewhat in-line. Without it, every ride is an almost anonymous one-shot transaction with almost no recourse on one side, so the game theory suggests that service only has to be good enough that the police aren't called.
Uber is still undercutting taxis in Boston, FWIW. I looked up a ride on Curb (a taxi app) and Uber today, and the prices were $17 and $12, respectively.
Every time we talk about VC money in the last 20 years, we’re really talking about a wealth transfer from workers and the middle class to the rich via the Cantillon Effect. Cheap money enters the system through banks, funds, and corporations, not through wages. The people who get access to it first (asset holders, investors, VCs) deploy it into equities, real estate, and startups before inflation devalues the currency for everyone else.
Post-2008, ZIRP and QE pumped trillions into financial markets, making capital nearly free for those who could borrow at scale. That money didn’t go into raising wages; it went into inflating asset prices. If you owned stocks or real estate, you got richer. If you earned a paycheck, you watched housing and living costs go up while your wages stagnated.
VC was one of the biggest beneficiaries. With bonds yielding nothing, institutional investors had to chase returns, flooding venture funds with capital. That’s how we got an era of insane startup valuations, SoftBank-style mega-funds, and entire sectors built on free money. Growth-at-all-costs became the norm because the cost of capital was effectively zero.
Then COVID hit, and the Fed doubled down—more QE, more stimulus, even lower rates. Another massive wealth transfer. Money printer go brrr, asset prices moon, and suddenly we have SPACs, meme stocks, and a startup funding frenzy. Meanwhile, workers got a couple of stimulus checks, and by the time the dust settled, everything from rent to food to cars was way more expensive.
Now AI companies are running the same playbook that cloud megascalers ran before them—monetizing open-source work while locking out the people who actually built it. Cloud providers took open-source databases, infrastructure, and developer tools, turned them into managed services, and extracted billions in profit without meaningfully compensating the people who did the work. AI companies are now doing the same thing—scraping open-source repositories, academic papers, and public datasets, building models upon it then slapping on proprietary fine-tuning and charging for API access all the while blatantly raising capital by promising to make the same workers they stole from obsolte. All of it built on the backs of researchers, engineers, and artists who never see a dime, but also on the backs of everyone else via the cantillon effect.
Now rates go up, the bubble deflates, and who gets left holding the bag? Not the VCs who cashed out early. Not the bankers who took their fees. It’s the workers, the middle class, the open-source devs, and the late-stage startup employees who thought they had something real. The cycle repeats.
Or is it just "illegal" for an overseas competitor to a domestic industry, in trade disputes?
What is the fine? How many days in jail does the company spend? What portion is its stock diluted by?
We remember the tale of Jeff Bezouis the Wise, who tragically lost his company when he decided he didn't want to buy diapers.com at the offered price, and instead wanted to dump 200 million dollars into selling diapers well below cost until their site folded.
This has always been the case. Laws are only as good as their enforcement. This is why the business class is so aggressive about tearing down regulation until they can wield it as a weapon. Do as I say, not as I do, etc etc
If you as an individual can prevent the enforcement of a law, or be sure that it will not be enforced against you, then it does not apply to you.
Taxis were discriminatory and "uncool" to the point were Uber has saved thousands by preventing drunk driving.
Now if you go out with the boys and get drunk, it's a 30 second casual call to get an Uber and get home.
Live in a neighborhood Taxis are afraid to service，you can either make some extra income working for Uber or use it yourself. When Ubers used as its intended purpose, to basically make a quick buck, it's a lifeline to many low income people .
Say your rents it's going to be late, you can pick up 20 or 30 hours of Uber this month to make it happen. It's not really a career though...
> Say your rents it's going to be late, you can pick up 20 or 30 hours of Uber this month to make it happen.
Maybe... I really don't get how the economics work out here though. If you look at the numbers, it mostly just seems like you're converting car equity into cash via depreciation.
But also, I'd guess that for a big chunk of people who are going to have trouble paying rent with any regularity, they'd have to overpay for their car in the first place to get something that's Uber-appropriate. My car's a couple years too old for Uber now, but is still perfectly functional, and there's just no way the math would work for me to buy a newer car so that I can convert its capital cost into cash via Uber.
It's super dystopian and it creates bad incentives (the harder the underclass is squeezed the better a product it is for the middle class), but I have to agree that gig work is often a lifeline for poor people.
I consider it similar to access to unsecured credit that way - it's easy to feel like "wow this industry is scamming these people it should be illegal" but people without any other backstop will probably need access to unsecured credit sometime and it's better than losing their house/car/job/pet/family etc..
I forgot to mention, Jitney cabs( unlicensed cabs primarily serving minority neighborhoods)came long before Ubers. They're more of less gone now though.
What's better. Taking out a 300% APR payday loan, getting evicted or working an extra 20, 30 hours of Uber.
Maybe to you, but I was broke during and shortly after college. If I could have picked up some gig work when I needed it, that would have been a huge help.
Airbnb and Uber have showed us that laws matter only to the extent that the political will to enforce them exists.
Laws matter to the extent that they don't interfere with actual progress. Laws that would have prevented the LLMs we have today from being developed should be ignored, as should laws requiring us to pay tribute to taxi and hotel cartels.
Respect for the law is going to be an increasingly-hard sell going forward, and that's mostly the lawmakers' own fault. When the law does not respect the people, the people will not respect the law.
The purpose of having an executive branch of government is explicitly to apply the law based on subjective opinions.
There's no purpose of having an executive branch of government separate from the other two branches if not to cushion the inflexible and glacial nature of the other branches of government.
The executive exists to enforce the law the legislature writes primarily to make sure the legislature isn't in charge of enforcing the laws. It's a check on the power of the legislature.
You could still have discretion with the legislature in charge of executing on their own laws. I think countries exist like that, but I don't know enough to say which.
A separate executive is not necessary to have discretion or pardons or flexibility in law. A separate executive is necessary if you want physically different human beings controlling the organizations who enforce the law (DOJ, FBI, etc)
Consider that Judges and the judicial branch of the government ALSO gets to use subjectivity and their own opinion in adjudicating cases. Another check.
The entire point of the Constitution was to put the power of a King in a bunch of different hands, and then tie some of those hands with specific constraints, and then give a couple different options on how to change those constraints over time. Leeway and discretion goes both ways, so Congress does have the ability to further constrain such discretion. A previous president tried to argue he could choose to not spend money congress told him to spend, so they wrote up a bill saying very clearly, Uh, no, if we say spend, you spend. They have that power as a check on the power of the executive. All three branches are ostensibly MEANT to be vying for power. It's an antagonistic system, like the court system. The founders loved that shit. In reality, it probably is a dysfunctional system that modern systems engineers would not like, and other countries get that "system fights and moderates itself" effect by encouraging coalitions between parties in a strong parliament. IMO those have demonstrated better stability. I'm not convinced the US would have survived getting it's whole shit blown up like the UK did.
He left out part of the quote, which is misappropriated as well. Wikipedia:
> This quotation is often incorrectly attributed to Francis M. Wilhoit:
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
> However, it was actually a 2018 blog response by 59-year-old Ohio composer Frank Wilhoit, years after Francis Wilhoit's death.
I think it’s the other way around. Those large entities break all the same laws and rules as others and then get to the point where they can influence the creation of a regulatory moat around themselves to prevent competitors from taking the same path as them.
True but lets take examples one by one to see what we can learn : Spotify was doing illegal things until they made a deal to become legal and not to be trialed over what they done. Seems like business deals is what saved them, not regulatory capture (the regulations around IP for music pre existed Spotify)
Sure that is what saved them initially, but following that early 2010’s period of hemorrhaging money and eventual recovery, then they started digging that moat.
Very interesting thank you for the links. I'm not knowledgeable in the Music Modernization Act, but maybe some of this lobbying is to avoid being sued rather than building legal long term moat
Same would be the case for YouTube. Google case was different in that AFAIK there wasn't any obvious legal problem with indexing, and, back then, they were actually doing everyone a favor.
Hardly anyone had any issue with Google search until the time when news media screwed themselves over by going all in on ads, overdoing it, then trying to bring back the paywall, only to realize no one is actually browsing their sites but instead relies on Google to find specific articles. All kinds of legal and technical nonsense started happening (and then Google improved the blurbs under search results and added the "answer box", leading publishers big and small to collectively lose their minds...).
And then news media in Canada got even worse a few years ago. They demanded the government make a law so that when Google or Facebook even links to an article, they must pay the news org. Google decided to pay the link tax. Facebook decided to block all news links. From talking to people, most think that Facebook is the villain, in reality it's the news orgs in collusion with state power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_News_Act , https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/charter-charte/c18_...
I guess I sort of understand where this idea comes from, and when I was young I was totally into it, but now being in the corporate world for a decade and having my own small business, I just don't really see it anymore.
Big corps tend to be extremely conscientious of the the law. The law may not be ideal, but they tend to be hyper aware of it and have lawyers to ensure it. Small companies on the other hand are the wild fucking west, and tend to be overflowing with "turn a blind eye to that".
What big corps love is regulation that is expensive for small shops to overcome. They can drop $500k on a product cert no problem, be legally in the clear (and graciously compliant!), while making it near impossible for small guys to compete.
If you do something wrong then you, as a person, are held responsible and accountable.
If you do something wrong as "part of your job" then you're typically not held responsible and accountable but the company is (the exceptions being spectacular fraud: Enron, VW diesel).
It's not hard to see how this can go off the rails.
At the risk of wading into politics - consider a legal environment, in any country, where laws become increasingly strict, but where prosecutorial discretion, pardon powers, and a justice system designed to allow well-resourced law firms to delay cases indefinitely, are all transparently used for political purposes. Such an environment could easily exhibit a feedback loop that allows justice to be arbitrary and opposition voices to be silenced.
I'll refrain from value judgments on the above - but for heaven's sake, we're on a site called "Hacker News." We should understand that a machine like this could turn on any one of us in an instant for any reason.
In more general terms, the legal system punishes what can be made a profit or an example when punishing.
Also, I don't think the legal system itself wants to get too much into "big institutions against the work of others", save for the fictional TV representations of smart lawyers and clever arguments, 99.9% of the legal system output is copy/paste.
>This is exactly what I immediately thought while reading the article. It almost feels like the legal system only punishes general public, while most of these guys are above it.
Welcome to the modern day aristocracy. Not only what you mentioned, this world is also divided into a group of insider who can get capital from 0 - 2%, while rest of us has a cost of 17%, 22% or 30%?
It doesn't "seem". The entire system in most countries works, by design, that way because the people in power trade in influence at a different plane.
That's why democracy often feels "failed" in that no change can be achieved because "it's just more of the same". Few Lobbyists representing the interests of a few people have more power than millions voting differently.
What happens in US right now shows that change is achieved through voting. There are other examples as well in Europe where things did change because of how people voted. If the change is good or bad depends on your perspective.
For me the annoying part is that people vote for a guy because of a couple heavily advertised issues, ignoring all the other plans or the fact that he might not keep his word. Then they are unhappy that things "fail" for them.
Yes. US and places where people can elect a democracy have a higher chance of some change than European countries with parliamentary systems where a sudden populist candidate won't make it through that system.
I'd argue that, even if some change does happen in the US. Most change (see healthcare, military spending, etc) won't happen because big money will beat the majority of the populace every time.
I like your optimistic take. My more cynical one is that what’s happening in the US shows that real change is achieved through corruption and lying: honest policy discussions and iterative improvement stand no chance against a charismatic populist who will say anything to entrench an oligarchy.
It's not primarily optimistic. I just think that education of the people can bring the best improvement on the long run, and not adjusting democracy, demonizing rich guys or another "new" system.
While I hope iterative improvement is the way, I think there are people that have it (or feel) so bad (due to various reasons) that they would take a 50% chance to die for the chance to live better.
When individuals are assigned heroic status despite clear evidence of mental illness and crimes, such as “breaking and entering”, it prevents society from having rational discussions about both law enforcement and mental health support. This dynamic repeats across multiple high-profile cases.
People often elevate deeply flawed figures to heroic status when those figures seem to challenge authority or "the system." This happens especially with individuals who present themselves as outsiders fighting the establishment, have a compelling personal struggle narrative, or voice grievances that resonate with public frustrations
Trump fits this pattern - his supporters overlook concerning behaviors and statements because they see him as fighting a system they distrust. Like Manning and Swartz, his mental state and fitness are often ignored in favor of the "hero against the system" narrative.
This dynamic creates a feedback loop where legitimate criticism becomes harder to discuss rationally.
Conscious life in general seems possible to me unless our brain tells us a better story than reality.
A story in which we are the hero, in which we are not mortal, in which we are important, in which people care about us, in which we are intelligent and our perceptions rarely fail us, in which our life has a meaning and also in which the social game we play is determined, or at least influenced, by some just principles. We would despair if we were aware of the full extent of our meaninglessness and powerlessness.
I believe that it is the core reason why we love to believe that God/Nature is good, that the king is legitimate and that the laws are fair.
They are paid, handsomely, by it. Or otherwise brainwashed by it. And pummelled into ignorance by it, as they are told that to understand is stupid or delusional, knowledge ends at STEM, and the world only exists for efficient production of capital products.
The poets write laments about such false ages. Prophecies were written about such ages thousands of years ago.
The cycles are larger than us all.
One stable insight is that the chaos breeds possibility, and thus hope. In the meantime, however…
It is more a money thing. Meta can pay x billion like pocket change. Regular people are run through the ringer to teach the plebs to not get out of line.
It's not a feeling. It's exactly what happens. It's completely blatant.
For some reason, whenever you're a billionaire or company, things suddenly get so difficult that you can claim that it's impossible to be held accountable for anything. Murder, insider trading, laundering, treason, etc.
OpenAI complained about this, as did Google and everyone else. If your company can't exist without stealing data, then it's not a viable company. Companies don't have a constitutional right to exist.
I don't think it's right to downplay the disproportionate response the FBI had to Aaron's actions. He was initially being threatened with 50 years in prison and a $1 million fine, the stress from which sent his mental health spiraling and in no small way contributed to his suicide. I think the original point of the person you are responding to still stands.
For downloading papers, paid for with government funding and gatekept by greedy rent seekers charging ~ $30 a pop. The lengths people will go to defend things that should not exist astounds.
As a general rule, I'm not a fan of prosecutors. However, blaming a prosecutor for the suicide of a defendant, because they filed charges in a clear cut case, is just as unfair as blaming friends and family.
I mean yes, the prosecutor had discretion to offer a light plea deal, and instead chose to try and ruin someone's life over papers. I absolutely blame the prosecutor.
Everyone is responsible for the full effects of his actions. One is literally responsible for all consequences, everything no matter how indirect.
This absolute responsibility is physics, while the limited 'only direct consequences' type thing is a choice made in some human legal systems.
People are smart. They know what stress they put on people and from interacting with them they get a good feel of much they can take. If they ignore that, or decide not to talk to people they're putting stress or choose to ignore things, that's only intentional negligence.
I don't think the prosecutors cared. I don't think we should judge unless there double standards or hypocrisy, but let's not imagine they aren't responsible for things that resulted from their action and inaction. You cause what you case.
> Google itself got big by indexing other people's data without compensation
Wrong.
a) Robots.txt which defines what content you wish to make available to third parties predates every search engine including Google. Web site owners chose to make it available to Google and search engines have respected their wishes despite it not being in their best interest.
b) The difference here is that OpenAI, Meta etc have not even tried to honour the wishes of copyright holders. They just considered everything as theirs.
c) Google grew big because it had no ads, fast interface and PageRank was significantly better. It wasn't because it had the most comprehensive index.
> Web site owners chose to make it available to Google.
Strong disagree. Since robots.txt is optional and the default is "crawl me as you please", website owners don't "choose to make it available", they just don't choose to make it non-available.
That's a functionally meaningless distinction. If you setup a web server that responds to requests, then you're choosing to make content available because your server can choose to not respond to requests. The entire protocol includes mechanisms to negotiate access.
And yet it is legal to produce and redistribute summaries as sufficiently transformative derivative works, and this has been court tested[1]. Of course in Australia we passed rather specific laws to the contrary, because lo and behold Rupert Murdoch wanted money and gosh darn it our government was going to give it to him[2].
This is a meaningless simplification. In this framework "robots.txt" has no role, because your server "can choose" not to respond. Heck, even DDOS is fine, because "protocol"
It's an opt-out of an opt-in. If you run a webserver hosting your files, you already opted-in to people accessing that data. If you then don't go ahead an configure it properly, that's not exactly "opt-out" anymore. By default your files are not accessible to the network, you have to first opt-in to serving them.
their own docs also specify that the robots.txt does not stop indexing or showing up in search, they even bolded it "it is not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google"
The only way for links to appear in a Google search would be to host a public resource, that is linked from another public resource.
If you have specified in your robots.txt that you do not want the page(s) or directories ingested then only the url is indexed (if it is linked from another page). It does prevent the public display of the content of a page and creation description/summary.
The more I learn about how AI companies trained their models, the more obvious it is that the rest of us are just suckers. We're out here assuming that laws matter, that we should never misrepresent or hide what we're doing for our work, that we should honor our own terms of use and the terms of use of other sites/products, that if we register for a website or piece of content we should always use our work email address so that the person or company on the other side of that exchange can make a reasonable decision about whether we can or should have access to it.
What we should have been doing all along is YOLO-ing everything. It's only illegal if you get caught. And if you get big enough before you get caught then the rules never have to apply to you anyway.
And if you were in any doubt before, this lesson is now exemplified by the holder of the highest office in the land and approved by popular vote. The rewards of acting ethically are, unfortunately, sometimes only personal. This must be a hard environment to raise children in, given the examples they see around them.
Parent here: it takes a lot of discussion, but it's a great time to talk about the reality of evil and villains. My kids are on the good side, or at least I like to think so ...
This argument may focus too much on the category of external rewards.
I might well be kidding myself or self-justifying, but I believe internal rewards are at least as important. Some materially successful people are deeply unhappy.
He didn't state 'by majority' anywhere in that comment. Approved. By popular vote, by some portion of the totality of popular vote, unspecified as far as the post goes.
Approved by enough popular vote to attain plurality. I'll take your quibble as a cute fixation with correctness when it comes to statistics, and not as it otherwise tends to manifest.
>What we should have been doing all along is YOLO-ing everything
No it isn't. The actual sucker attitude is copying what they do. You should act morally and with integrity out of respect for yourself. I never had any illusions that large tech companies act with respect towards the law, but it also has nothing to do with me.
If you have a spare few hours, the Acquired podcast episode on Meta is enlightening. They just stumbled through growth hack experiment after experiment without seemingly any risk assessment or ethics.
This sort of mindset is devoid of morals and honor. Don’t fall into the this mindset trap.
Like when Trump said he is “smart” for evading taxes during the presidential debates (IIRC the first ones, not recent ones).
It’s absolutely despicable. Have a moral compass. Treat people fairly. Be nice. Let’s be better than toddlers who haven’t learned yet that hitting is bad, and you shouldn’t do it even if mommy and daddy aren’t in the room.
I agree with you and will die to defend that position, but what existential reasons do we have to behave well? In reality, it seems like humans are just a bunch of animals, and the only important thing is survival.
My wife, just today, told me that she was very upset that I refused to interview and take jobs for things like building weapons, the panopticon, or advertising (two of those are the same thing), which I refuse to do because of my personal morals and ethics. How do I explain to her that I just can't do that, and give her a good reason why we should lose our home and live in one room with her mother because of my brain refusing to work in such industries? I really want to know, so I can explain to her and my son why such things matter, because for some reason they are concrete and foundational in my brain, there is no changing that.
> what existential reasons do we have to behave well?
Fundamentally we’re built for small group survival, so playing nice and sharing resources increases your odds for survival. That’s why we care about others, in an evolutionary perspective.
> In reality, it seems like humans are just a bunch of animals, and the only important thing is survival.
At the end of the day, yes we’re animals. But we also have built hugely complex societies and think about philosophy etc.
Throwing away all morality and just doing whatever you can get away with is like being an animal. It strips out humanity.
And personally I’d urge you to find some places you’d want to interview for that align with your morals. If your wife, or anyone, asks you to compromise your morals then try bringing home the consequences to something they care about.
For example, won’t build weapons? Ask “Would you be ok if I worked for X, and my work resulted in the deaths of children?”
> “Would you be ok if I worked for X, and my work resulted in the deaths of children?”
At this point, one can very well expect that working for X (as in 'X, the website formerly known as Twitter') will MOST SURELY result in the deaths of children.
> what existential reasons do we have to behave well?
Overall humans play pretty nice, all things considered. If you get sick someone will help you, if you lose your job you can fall back on assistance. Hell, even the fact you HAVE a job is a privilege granted to you.
Other animals don't do that. They eat their young, because they feel like it. Without the will and kindness of other humans, a fact that we take so for granted we fail to recognize it as "society", most of us wouldn't live 10 days. That's not an exaggeration either - check out infant mortality statistics throughout human history.
I don't understand why it's even a question that Meta trained their LLM on copyrighted material. They say so in their paper! Quoting from their LLaMMa paper [Touvron et al., 2023]:
> We include two book corpora in our training dataset: the Gutenberg Project, [...], and the Books3 section of ThePile (Gao et al., 2020), a publicly available dataset for training large language models.
Following that reference:
> Books3 is a dataset of books derived from a copy of the contents of the Bibliotik private tracker made available by Shawn Presser (Presser, 2020).
Furthermore, they state they trained on GitHub, web pages, and ArXiv, which are all contain copyrighted content.
Surely the question is: is it legal to train and/or use and/or distribute an AI model (or its weights, or its outputs) that is trained using copyrighted material. That it was trained on copyrighted material is certain.
Critically, by torrenting they also directly distributed the copywritten material itself. That is a standalone infringement separate from any argument about trained LLMs.
They could have only leached and refrained from sharing any part of copyrighted data. If i were to commit something as risky as this, that is what i would do.
Then it would need to be determined, whether that is the case or not. Did every single machine they used have the configuration for only leeching and no seeding? The company is liable for what its employees on the job. If only one employee was also seeding ... that could be a very interesting case.
> Did every single machine they used have the configuration for only leeching and no seeding?
I would certainly assume so. It's incredibly obvious that's what you would want to do from a legal standpoint.
> If only one employee was also seeding ... that could be a very interesting case.
The torrenting wouldn't be done casually by employees acting on their own. And it's not like multiple employees are doing it simultaneously, unsupervised, on their personal computers.
This is part of an official project. They'd spin up a machine just to download the torrent, being careful to disable seeding.
This is Meta. They have lawyers involved and advising. This isn't a teenager who doesn't fully understand how torrenting works.
Did you not read the article? There are quotes from Meta employees doing exactly what you claim they wouldn't do.
> This is part of an official project. They'd spin up a machine just to download the torrent, being careful to disable seeding.
From the article:
> "Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right," Nikolay Bashlykov, a Meta research engineer, wrote in an April 2023 message, adding a smiley emoji. In the same message, he expressed "concern about using Meta IP addresses 'to load through torrents pirate content.'"
You also claim they would be "careful to disable seeding" but we know they did in fact seed (and anyone who uses private trackers knows they couldn't get away with leeching for very long before being kicked off):
> Meta also allegedly modified settings "so that the smallest amount of seeding possible could occur," a Meta executive in charge of project management, Michael Clark, said in a deposition.
And punishing them in the normal manner will be an incredibly small slap on the wrist, and do absolutely nothing to help us find out what will play out in court regarding a fair-use defense on training AI with copyrighted material.
Isn't there a "fruit of the poisoned tree" kind of thing? Sounds to me quite similar to the situation where you would murder your parent and get to keep the inheritance, even if you are convicted of murder. Inheriting stuff isn't illegal, yet, I think most jurisdictions would not allow you to keep it in this case.
There should be a problem with stuff obtained through illegal means, even if having that stuff is in principle legal. In this case, copyrighted material.
Obviously they would argue that having the data is only a consequence of the download part, and that part is legal. What I see is that these situations are always complicated, and if you're rich enough, you get to litigate the complications and come out with a slap on the wrist or maybe even clean hands, while if you are an ordinary citizen, you can't afford to delve into the complexities and get punished.
These days I'm starting to give up on the whole concept of the legal system being fair. They're not even pretending anymore.
There are two different things when it comes to discussing training LLM's on "copyright" protected data, and I almost never see people differentiate.
1.) Training on copyright that is publicly available. You write a poem and publish it online for the world to read. That is your IP, no one else can take it an sell it, but they are free to read and be inspired by it. The legalitly of training on this is in the courts, but so far seems to be going in favor of LLMs.
2.) Training on copyright that is not publicly available. These are pretty much pirated works or works obtained by backdoor to avoid paying for them. Your poem is behind a paywall and you never got paid, yet the poem is known by the LLM. This is just straight illegal, as you legally must pay to view the work. However there might be conditions here too like paying for access to an archive and then training on everything in it.
I never gave my poem to Facebook. My site is for humans. And there was absolutely no problem with that website being public, until Facebook et al wanted to move the goalpost.. again.
Remember when companies started to claim that their abuse is on you, because you failed to publish the correct headers/robots.txt and their bot needs to be told the rules in specific language? And now we get the same attempt at making such distinction again, just this time its our fault for .. having a public website in the first place (should have operated a paywall, duh!)
3.) The company making an unauthorized copy of your work and storing it permanently in a giant corporate library of their own making which they refer to over and over.
This is distinct from (1) where the content is streamed or only ephemeral/incidental copies are made.
The very idea that LLMs are "inspired" by copyright material is so far beyond absurd I just don't know what reality you people live in. They are ingesting copyright material in order to re-use it. Yeah they remix it to add their own (incredibly annoying) tone but that's what they're doing.
authors can claim that they allow for public use unless it's used for training LLMs. And all of training work would fall under 2 because they would be used against the copyright.
I think they would need to have some explicit contract every time they want to sell the book then, though. I don’t think I am bound by some random terms someone writes into a book I’m buying. Those probably are only binding if a reasonable person would notice them before sale.
If you arrive at the point of being able to buy that book, it means it has passed the publisher's hands and I would think, that the publisher was OK with those terms then, and limiting the usage of the text may in fact be effective.
If it was self-published, then even more so.
But the license restriction would have to apply both to the publisher and the customer.
If I go to the bookstore, buy the book, make a scan, and train an LLM with it, how would you enforce your license as an author? The customer never knew that he shouldn’t have been allowed to train LLMs.
Edit: I think I misunderstood the original comment, I thought the idea was to sell books and restrict use for LLM training. If we’re only talking about stuff that’s publicly released, the restriction should be possible.
But the license doesn’t apply to me as a customer if I can’t be expected to even notice it. If I buy a book in a bookstore, no one would assume that training LLMs on it would be explicitly forbidden. And adding a note to the book would probably not be binding because no one is expected to read the legal notice in a book.
It would still be unenforceable because there's no consideration.
There is nothing of value that the license gives me that I wouldn't already have if the contract didn't exist. I can already read the book, merely by having it in front of me.
How does that give you the right to train an LLM on it?
Or are we talking about training an LLM on it and never releasing that LLM to anyone ever? Then I guess it wouldn't matter. But if that LLM is released to anyone, shouldn't the author of the book have a say on it?
I felt for a long time that it should be fair use. If an LLM can abstract what it learns from the copyrighted work, then that seems "fair" because that's what humans do.
But ... as I've thought about it more, it doesn't really feel just to me. The kind of value reaped from the works seems to suggest that the creator is due some portion of that value. Also, in practice - there's just an absolutely enormous amount of knowledge that can be consumed from the public domain. Even if Meta, OpenAI and friends decided to license a ~small handful of the long-term archives of some globally-read newspapers, they could get very broad and deep knowledge about the events, trends, terms of the last century to fill in a lot of gaps.
I'm not sure there's any legal distinction though.
Is a book publicly available? No, you have to purchase it. But once you do, you're legally allowed to let your friends and family and so forth read it too. As long as you don't sell copies of it (the "copy" part of "copyright"), or meaningfully take away the ability for the publisher to make money from sales (so you can't post it for the whole world to see on the internet).
And sure, there are lots of ToS for digital works, but are they actually enforceable? ToS can say you're not allowed to let anyone else read the book you purchased. But no court is going to say you can't lend your Kindle to your friend for them to read it too. Many ToS clauses are flat-out illegal.
Meta will argue that training on books is no different from reading all the books at a friend's house. That as long as Meta isn't reselling or making publicly available the original text, they're in the clear.
I don't know what the deal is in the relevant jurisdictions, but in Swedish copyright law, the provenance of the original matters ("lovlig förlaga").
This means that it's not legal to download a rip of e.g. a CD that was uploaded without consent, even if you own a copy.
(This exception to the general right to make copies for private use was added in 2005 to make downloading illegal -- previously, only uploading was infringing.)
I would assume just the act of downloading this content was illegal in the relevant US jurisdictions as well.
I believe the most famous cases in the US have only gone after the people sharing or seeding or uploading content. My ISP could care less what I download from use net but they will definitely care when I start seating.
But they are making unauthorized copies: Their training data set is analogous to private collection of duplicates.
What do you think copyright law(suits) would do if a regular person made copies of every book and movie and song they saw, placing the duplicate media in a room of their house?
Trained on doesn't mean significant inclusion in the final state.
Is it truly a violation of copyright when a user hacks out bits and pieces of easily restyled raw data points from a model to look samey? what about if it takes two models? Might be time to accept humans are just cooked in their ability to discern attempts at direct plagiarism - just as it is hard to discern Sky voice from Her voice.
I strongly urge people to read Thomas Babington Macaulay's speeches on copyright, its aims, terms, and hazards. Very well reasoned and explained.
In particular, people often cited the case of authors who had died leaving a family in destitution, and claimed that copyright extension would be a fair way of preventing this, but in most cases the remaining family had never held the copyright; the author had initally sold the reproduction rights to a publisher who had then sat on the work without publishing it. The author, driven into penury, was then induced to sell the copyright to the publisher outright for a pittance. So in such cases a copyright extension only benefited the publisher, and indeed increased their incentive to extort the copyright.
The one who got Hindu Sanskrit books translated in a horrible manner and then claimed: "I have no knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanskrit works. I have conversed both here and at home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia."
This is the corollary of the fallacy of appeal to authority: the rejection of an argument on the grounds that the speaker was horribly wrong on an unrelated or very loosely related topic.
If you reject Macaulay on copyright because he was an imperialist, you can use the exact same logic to reject the arguments of essentially every person who ever lived. Very few humans who ever wrote anything important will perfectly align with your morality, and most will be horribly misaligned in at least one way.
> If you reject Macaulay on copyright because he was an imperialist
On the contrary I would argue that this is precisely why you SHOULD NOT take his opinion on copyright. One of the main outcomes of imperialism/colonization is denigrating/destroying/appropriating works of art, literature with the primary goal of subjugation, subversion and thereupon replacement of native culture/traditions/institutions. I did not quote the other half of his nauseating take but I'll post it nevertheless:
"[...] And I certainly never met with any Orientalist who ventured to maintain that the Arabic and Sanscrit poetry could be compared to that of the great European nations. But when we pass from works of imagination to works in which facts are recorded, and general principles investigated, the superiority of the Europeans becomes absolutely immeasurable. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say, that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England. In every branch of physical or moral philosophy, the relative position of the two nations is nearly the same."
> One of the main outcomes of imperialism/colonization is denigrating/destroying/appropriating works of art, literature with the primary goal of subjugation, subversion and thereupon replacement of native culture/traditions/institutions.
Which is irrelevant to the question of whether copyright law within the country of England and within English culture is beneficial or not.
It is the nature of racism that it bypasses rational thought—it does not follow that because someone is racist they therefore don't have anything valuable to say on loosely related topics. Someone can see clearly about copyright when thinking about English authors while treating non-English authors as strictly inferior.
These kinds of contradictions are to be expected when racism is involved, because racism inherently lives in the lizard brain (occasionally justified by post hoc rationalizations). Someone's arguments about an issue touching only their own tribe will tend to be more rational than those that touch on other tribes, and you'll miss out if you assume the rationality is going to be correlated and dismiss all arguments accordingly.
> Which is irrelevant to the question of whether copyright law within the country of England and within English culture is beneficial or not
It is irrelevant from your POV because you don't see anything wrong in IP violations when it comes to Knowledge being taken out of India, credit removed and then reproduced in European Languages, including English, as if it was some novel discovery. So those who indulged in this specifically (I am not talking about current British folk but people like Macaulay) should not be giving sermons on Copyright Law.
To give you an analogy:
Using the same logic, you would have to give CCP a pass and say they did not "steal IP from the US" because Copyright Law in China specifically applies only within the Country of China and within Chinese culture. Surely you wouldn't learn about specifics of Copyright Law from the CCP I presume (yes they do have a Copyright Law that applies internally in China). If that is the case, then the same argument applies to the British Empire as well.
> it does not follow that because someone is racist they therefore don't have anything valuable to say on loosely related topics
It is not irrelevant considering many of the same Sanskrit scriptures were translated by Arabs, which were then translated by Europeans, whose concepts then went on to become foundations of Modern Science. So when it comes to Copyright, the least one can do is not wipe out credits. And least one can do is not take advice on Copyright from such people.
> It is irrelevant from your POV because you don't see anything wrong in IP violations when it comes to Knowledge being taken out of India, credit removed and then reproduced in European Languages, including English, as if it was some novel discovery.
Uh, no, I didn't say that.
There's no point in writing to you if no matter what I say you're going to just make up stuff you think I believe and respond to that instead of to my actual words.
Feels a little pat though doesn't it? If racism itself is necessarily defined by irrationality then you'd think the entire course of Western civilization would have gone a little differently. Not to mention, we have some pretty dark lessons from history already that are precisely the result of excessive rationality. One could easily demonstrate the "rationality" of a given colonial project, for example.
I'm not saying we need to choose between a broader humanism or rationality necessarily, but I just think it feels a little archaic Enlightenment-era thinking to reduce it down this particular way. Or just you know, its all Spock and no Kirk!
if Indians are so free from colonialism, why are their parents forcing them to choose between medicine or tech, simply so they can get a job on the antipode of where they are born??
Because the wealth was transferred from India to the "antipode" through Colonization. GDP reduced from 25% Pre-Colonization (and 30% if you take Pre-Islamic Colonization) to merely 4% Post-India's Independence. At least Indians are not reverse-colonizing the West.
What are you even talking about? Indians carry their culture/traditions everywhere they go. No one is "throwing it away". You are talking as if Indians have started to emigrate in just the past few decades. Indians have been navigating the World for the past 6000+ years at the very least (recorded history). The word "Navigation" is itself a Sanskrit word "Nava gatih". We are an Ancient Civilization and the oldest surviving Civilization. Everyone else either converted and destroyed their own civilization or were destroyed by invaders.
I do think that context is still important in general, but probably only if you're doing deep research into Macaulay (or the specific target in mind). Treating everything in a vacuum isn't great either. Plenty of philosophical works for example, you really have to read in the time period and in the context of the author's life.
I find an acceptable tradeoff for now is, if I want to do deep research for myself, opening myself up to this sort of mushy subjective stuff is actually really important for making deep, objectively correct observations. Especially if the goal is to steelman, not strawman, the opponent's argument.
Otherwise, this kind of worst-case analysis thinking is fine. It's a logically sound conclusion, it's just kind of unsatisfying because we can't make stronger claims.
How do we decide when to make this tradeoff and for what things? Uhh.... idk. For me though, there has been value in using both kinds of thinking before though.
On a public forum, worst-case analysis is probably fine because the discussion ain't that deep. Also probably 90% of comments are made within the intention of a "gotcha" and not actually for discussion.
Basically, I totally agree with this, it's just that I've seen one too many online forums devolve into thought-terminating cliches using "rationality" as the basis. Here, I think it's totally justified to take this line... I instinctively had the same reaction upon reading GP's post (but then you could argue it's tone policing... and ahh we're off to the good ol' internet debate race spiral)
Very nice of you to omit the following sentences of that excerpt, where it proceeds to develop its point on the argument for institution of an English-language based education system on British India. He praised how superior in quantity and quality were the Sanskrit or Arabic corpora, compared to European works, in the lyric/poetry. But that no technical or didactical literature amounted to even the most mundane of the European manuals like those used by then in England humble schools (and it seems completely plausible).
He was a fierce abolitionist. So much for accomplishing the mission of allegedly, judging by comments in this thread, 'deranged imperialist destruction and chaos imposition over the lesser ones'.
I'm not much versed into his speeches/stance on copyright, but I can vouch for the fact that the most honest and well-intended moves (not by him, by other figures) in defence of everyone's intellectual property were done in the same century. From the Twentieth onwards, it has been only twisted for the interest of a select few, and needless to ask where we are today in terms of caring about intellectual property of anybody.
[1] Just saw your other comment where you go on with his nauseating words. One just cannot comprehend that framing the past on the actual status quo is as futile as to not being even wrong, I guess?
I’m a huge IP hater and am sure that happens, but to be fair, letting copyright extend past death also increases the amount the author can sell it for in the first place.
The current workaround is to attribute footnotes to your beneficiaries, or quote them in the dedication. Those become derivative works subject to the lifetime of your beneficiary.
> in most cases the remaining family had never held the copyright; the author had initally sold the reproduction rights to a publisher
He was able to sell it because it is something valuable, exactly because of the copyright protections. Regardless of whether author sells the rights or not, he and his family would equally be better off with copyright.
Copyright infringement isn't stealing. I will die on this hill!
also, I don't think that implication is required, but lets pretend the implication is the only reasonable conclusion one could draw. Maybe it does make it acceptable?
If the vast majority of copyright enforcement isn't to protect creators of valuable work, but only serves to enrich those who take advantage of those creators. Then isn't it not just reasonable or acceptable, but ethically required for someone to do everything they can to dismantle the systems they're abusing against the interests of those who are actually improving the world with their creations?
Libgen is a civilizational project that should be endorsed, not prosecuted. I hope one day people will look at it and think how stupid we were today to shun the largest collection of literary works in human history.
Anna's Archive encourages (and monetizes!!) the use of their shadow library for LLM training. They have a page dedicated to it on their site. You pay them, and they give you high download speeds to entire datasets.
Libgen turns into a problem when you have a company developing generative AI with it, either giving money to GPU manufacturers or themselves with paid services (see OpenAI)
The issue is there's an asymmetry between buyer/seller for books, because a buyer doesn't know the contents until you buy the book. Reviews can help, but not if the reviews are fake/AI generated. In this case, these books are profitable if only a few people buy them as the marginal cost of creating such a book is close to zero.
This is starting to get pretty circular. The AI was trained on copyrighted data, so we can make a hypothesis that it would not exist - or would exist in a diminished state - without the copyright infringement. Now, the AI is being used to flood AI bookstores with cheaply produced books, many of which are bad, but are still competing against human authors.
The benefits are not clear: why should an "author" who doesn't want to bother writing a book of their own get to steal the words of people who aren't lazy slackers?
It's as much stealing as piracy is stealing, ie none at all. If you disagree, you and I (along with probably many others in this thread) have a fundamental axiomatic incompatibility that no amount of discussion can resolve.
It is not theft in the property sense, but it is theft of labor.
If a company interviewed me, had me solve a problem, didn't hire me or pay me in any way and then used the code I wrote in their production software, that would be theft.
That is the equivalent of what authors claiming they wrote AI books are doing. That they've fooled themselves into thinking the computer "wrote" the book, erasing all the humans whose labor they've appropriated, in my opinion makes it worse, not better. They are lying to the reader and themselves, and both are bad.
Stealing is not the right word perhaps, but it is bad, and this should be obvious. Because if you take the limit of these arguments as they approach infinity, it all falls apart.
For piracy, take switch games. Okay, pirating Mario isn't stealing. Suppose everyone pirates Mario. Then there's no reason to buy Mario. Then Nintendo files bankruptcy. Then some people go hungry, maybe a few die. Then you don't have a switch anymore. Then there's no more Mario games left to pirate.
If something is OK if only very, very few people do it, then it's probably not good at all. Everyone recycling? Good! Everyone reducing their beef consumption? Good! ... everyone pirating...? Society collapses and we all die, and I'm only being a tad hyperbolic.
In a vacuum making an AI book is whatever. In the context of humanity and pushing this to it's limits, we can't even begin to comprehend the consequences. I'm talking crimes against humanity beyond your wildest dreams. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you haven't thought long enough and creatively enough.
> Because if you take the limit of these arguments as they approach infinity, it all falls apart.
Not everyone is a Kantian, who has the moral philsophy you are talking about, the categorical imperative. See this [0] for a list of criticisms to said philosophy.
> In a vacuum making an AI book is whatever. In the context of humanity and pushing this to it's limits, we can't even begin to comprehend the consequences. I'm talking crimes against humanity beyond your wildest dreams. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you haven't thought long enough and creatively enough.
Not really a valid argument, again it's circular in reasoning with a lot of empty claims with no actual reasoning, why exactly is it bad? Just saying "you haven't thought long enough and creatively enough" does not cut it in any serious discussion, the burden of substantiating your own claim is on you, not the reader, because (to take your own Kantian argument) anyone you've debating could simply terminate the conversation by accusing you of not thinking about the problem deep enough, meaning that no one actually learns anything at all when everyone is shifting the burden of proof to everyone else.
It is, because the quote you quoted is in reference to what I said above.
I explained real consequences of pirating. Companies have gone under, individuals have been driven to suicide. This HAS happened.
It's logically consistent that if we do that, but increase the scale, then the harm will be proportionally increased.
You might disagree. Personally, I don't understand how. Really, I don't. My fundamental understanding of humanity is that each innovation will be pushed to it's limits. To make the most money, to do it as fast as possible, and in turn to harm the most people, if it is harmful. It is not in the nature of humanity to do something half-way when there's no friction to doing more.
This reality of humanity permeates our culture and societies. That's why the US government has checks and balances. Could the US government remain a democracy without them? Of course. We may have an infinite stream of benevolent leaders.
From my perspective, that is naive. And, certainly, the founding fathers agreed with me. That is one example - but look around you, and you will see this mentality permeates everything we do as a species.
> Stealing is not the right word perhaps, but it is bad, and this should be obvious.
Many people say things that they don't like "should be obvious"ly bad. If you can't say why, that's almost always because it actually isn't.
Have a look at almost any human rights push for examples.
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> For piracy, take switch games.
It's a bad metaphor.
With piracy, someone is taking a thing that was on the market for money, and using it without paying for it. They are selling something that belongs to other people. The creator loses potential income.
Here, nobody is actually doing that. The correct metaphor is a library. A creator is going and using content to learn to do other creation, then creating and selling novel things. The original creators aren't out money at all.
Every time this has gone to court, the courts have calmly explained that for this to be theft, first something has to get stolen.
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> If something is OK if only very, very few people do it
This is okay no matter how many people do it.
The reason that people feel the need to set up these complex explanatory metaphors based on "well under these circumstances" is that they can't give a straight answer what's bad here. Just talk about who actually gets harmed, in clear unambiguous detail.
Watch how easy it is with real crimes.
Murder is bad because someone dies without wanting to.
Burglary is bad because objects someone owns are taken, because someone loses home safety, and because there's a risk of violence
Fraud is bad because someone gets cheated after being lied to.
Then you try that here. AI is bad because some rich people I don't like got a bunch of content together and trained a piece of software to make new content and even though nobody is having anything taken away from them it's theft, and even though nobody's IP is being abused it's copyright infringement, and even though nobody's losing any money or opportunities this is bad somehow and that should be obvious, and ignore the 60 million people who can now be artists because I saw this guy on twitter who yelled a lot
Like. Be serious
This has been through international courts almost 200 times at this point. This has been through American courts more than 70 times, but we're also bound by all the rest thanks to the Berne conventions.
Every. Single. Court. Case. Has. Said. This. Is. Fine. In. Every. Single. Country.
Zero exceptions. On the entire planet for five years and counting, every single court has said "well no, this is explicitly fine."
Matthew Butterick, the lawyer that got a bunch of Hollywood people led by Sarah Silverman to try to sue over this? The judge didn't just throw out his lawsuit. He threatened to end Butterick's career for lying to the celebrities.
That's the position you're taking right now.
We've had these laws in place since the 1700s, thanks to collage. They've been hard ratified in the United States for 150 years thanks to libraries.
This is just silly. "Recycling is good and eating other things is good, but let's try piracy, and by the way, I'm just sort of asserting this, there's nothing to support any of this."
For the record, the courts have been clear: there is no piracy occurring here. Piracy would be if Meta gave you the book collection.
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> In the context of humanity and pushing this to it's limits, we can't even begin to comprehend the consequences.
That's nice. This same non-statement is used to push back against medicine, gender theory, nuclear power, yadda yadda.
The human race is not going to stop doing things because you choose to declare it incomprehensible.
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> I'm talking crimes against humanity beyond your wildest dreams.
Yeah, we're actually discussing Midjourney, here.
You can't put a description to any of these crimes against humanity. This is just melodrama.
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> If you don't know what I'm talking about,
I don't, and neither do you.
"I'm talking really big stuff! If you don't know what it is, you didn't think hard enough."
Yeah, sure. Can you give even one credible example of Midjourney committing, and I quote, "crimes against humanity beyond your wildest dreams?"
Like. You're seriously trying to say that a picture making robot is about to get dragged in front of the Hague?
Sometimes I wonder if anti-AI people even realize how silly they sound to others
Okay. AI books make books 1 million times faster, let's say. Arbitrary, pick any number.
If I, a consumer, want a book, I am therefore 1 million times more likely to pick an AI book. Finding a "real" book takes insurmountable effort. This is the "needle in a haystack" I mentioned earlier.
The result is obvious - creators look potential money. And yes, it is actually obvious. If it isn't, reread it a few times.
To be perfectly and abundantly clear because I think you're purposefully misunderstanding me - I know AI is not piracy. I know that. It's, like, the second sentence I wrote. I said those words explicitly.
I am arguing that while it is not piracy, the harm it creates it identical in form to piracy. In your words, "creators lose potential income". If that is the standard, you must agree with me.
> how silly they sound to others
I'm not silly, you're just naive and fundamentally misunderstand how our societies work.
Capitalism is founded on one very big assumption. It is the jenga block keeping everything together.
Everyone must work. You don't work, you die. Nobody works, everyone dies.
Up until now, this assumption has been sound. The "edge cases", like children and disabled people, we've been able to bandaid with money we pool from everyone - what you know as taxes.
But consider what happens if this fundamental assumption no longer holds true. Products need consumers as much as consumers need products - it's a circular relationship. To make things you need money, to make money you must sell things, to buy things you must have money, and to have money you must make things. If you outsource the making things, there's no money - period. For anyone. Everyone dies. Or, more likely, the country collapses into a socialist revolution. Depending on what country this is, the level of bloodiness varies.
This has happened in the past already, with much more primitive technologies. FDR, in his capitalist genius, very narrowly prevented the US from falling into the socialist revolution with some aforementioned bandaid solutions - what we call "The New Deal". The scale at which we're talking about now is much larger, and the consequences more drastic. I am not confident another "New Deal" can be constructed, let alone implemented. And, I'm not confident it would prevent the death spiral. Again, we cut it very, very close last time.
> If they start out-competing humans, is that bad?
Not inherently, but it depends on what you mean by out-competing. Social media outcompeted books and now everyone's addicted and mental illness is more rampant than ever. IMO, a net negative for society. AI books may very well win out through sheer spam but is that good for us?
> Nobody has responded to me with anything about how authors are harmed
i imagine if books can be published to some e-book provider through an API to extract a few dollars per book generated (mulitiplied by hundreds), then eventually it'll be borderline impossible to discover an actual author's book. breaking through for newbie writers will be even harder because of all of the noise. it'll be up to providers like Amazon to limit it, but then we're then reliant on the benevolence of a corporation and most act in self interest, and if that means AI slop pervading every corner of the e-book market, then that's what we'll have.
kind of reminds me of solana memecoins and how there are hundreds generated everyday because it's a simple script to launch one. memecoins/slop has certainly lowered the trust in crypto. can definitely draw some parallels here.
> Nobody has responded to me with anything about how authors are harmed
The same way good law-abiding folk are harmed when Heroin is introduced to the community. Then those people won't be able to lend you a cup of sugar, and may well start causing problems.
AI books take off and are easy to digest, and before long your user base is quite literally too stupid to buy and read your book even if they wanted.
And, for the record, it's trivial to "out compete" books or anything else. You just cheat. For AI, that means making 1000 books that lie for every one real book. Can you find a needle in a haystack? You can cheat by making things addictive, by overwhelming with supply, by straight up lying, by forcing people to use it... there's really a lot of ways to "outcompete".
> It feels more like we just want to punish people, particularly rich people, particularly if they get away with stuff we're afraid to try.
If by "afraid to try" you mean "know to be morally reprehensible" and if by "punish people" you mean "punish people (who do things that we know to be morally reprehensible)", then sure.
But... you might just be describing the backbone of human society since, I don't know, ever? Hm, maybe there's a reason we have that perspective. No, it must just be silly :P
I just explained how it's morally reprehensible. The argument is right there, above the quote you chose to quote. Neat trick, but I'm sorry, a retort that does not make.
You didn't explain anything about why it is so, you just said it is, hence why I said it's your opinion. If you can't explain why, in more concrete terms, then there is no reason to believe your argument.
I just explained how AI books are able to cheat - they make more, faster, cheaper, and win based not on quality, never on quality, but rather by overwhelming. Such a strategy is morally reprehensible. It's like selling water by putting extra salt in everything.
Consumers are limited by humanity. We are all just meat sacks at the end of the day. We cannot, and will not, sift through 1 billion books to find the one singular one written by a person. We will die before then. But, even on a smaller scale - we have other problems. We have to work, we have family. Consumers cannot dedicate perfect intelligence to every single decision. This, by the way, is why free market analogies fall apart in practice, and why consumers buy what is essentially rat poison and ingest it when healthier, cheaper options are available. We are flawed by our blood.
We can run a business banking on the stupidity of consumers, sure. We can use deceit, yes. To me, this is morally reprehensible. You may disagree, but I expect an argument as to why.
> I just explained how AI books are able to cheat - they make more, faster, cheaper, and win based not on quality, never on quality, but rather by overwhelming. Such a strategy is morally reprehensible.
Okay, I fundamentally disagree with your premises, analogies to water and banking (or even in your other comment about piracy [0], as I have not seen any evidence of piracy leading directly to "suicides," as you say, and have instead actually benefited many companies [1]), and therefore conclusions, so I don't think we can have a productive conversation without me spending a lot of time saying why I don't equate AI production to morality, at all, and why I don't see AI writing billions of books having anything to do with morals.
That is why I said it is your opinion, versus mine which is different. Therefore I will save both our time by not spending more of it on this discussion.
You're of course allowed to disagree, but past a certain point you're yelling at clouds and people might think you're insane.
It's very simple logic, and it doesn't require your understanding to be true. Piracy is good for companies? Really? That's... your legitimate position?
If nobody is paying for anything how does a company operate? That's not a rhetorical question. Is it fairy dust? Perhaps magical pixies keep the lights running?
If you don't have explanations for even the simplest of problems with your position, your position isn't worth listening to.
Again, you're a Kantian and I'm not. Your arguments do not sway those who aren't, as I said, they are fundamentally different moral philosophies. If you cannot produce even the evidence of harm as you previously stated (please, link me suicide news reports directly caused by piracy, as you claimed) then "your position isn't worth listening to" either.
Does it make a difference? What I'm saying is plainly true and undeniable. I'll break it down, perhaps a bit slower this time so you can keep up.
You must agree companies require money to operate. No money, no company. You must also agree that piracy OR any action which takes money away from a company results in less money. In addition, you must agree every individual will take whichever action costs them the least amount of money.
Okay. Do you see where I'm going? Following these very simple rules, the result is that there is no money left for companies, and they go under.
Whether that's bad or not is, technically, debatable. Whether that's how it works or not, isn't.
I grow tired of having to explain very simple logic to bumbling idiots. Of course you're not a bumbling idiot. Rather, you're someone with a belief and a delusion. Meaning, you will simply ignore any and all reality to maintain your belief, even if, right before your very eyes, it is refuted. I don't know why people act this way. Maybe there's some medication that can help with that.
People might say I'm a prophet, maybe some kind of psychic. Really, I'm just a guy with, like, a quarter of a brain. We can often "see into the future" if we just rub some brain cells and put two and two together.
Until you can find away around these rules, perhaps some alternative economic system which has not been invented, there is nothing for you to refute. Not that you've been trying at all, your entire "argument" has been "erm, I disagree". Which, by the way, is not an argument. It's more of a statement, and one which is embarrassing to say out loud when you don't have anything to back it up with.
And, to be clear, this is well past the land of morality. I'm operating in a much simpler framework here. Even if you're under the belief everyone is perfect, or some people are perfect and some aren't, or whatever other moral beliefs - that doesn't change the rules and therefore doesn't change the result.
Logic can seem very consistent in a vacuum but again, because you can't find a single statistic to support your claims about piracy (while I already cited some evidence for my side), you cling to what you think is true, not what is empirically studied to be true. Your bloviating in as many paragraphs doesn't really mean anything, so unless you can cite something meaningful, I'm done with this nearly two week old conversation.
I think the concern goes to the point of copyright to begin with, which is to incentive people to create things. Will the inclusion of copyrighted works in llm training (further) erode that incentive? Maybe, and I think that's a shame if so. But I also don't really think it's the primary threat to the incentive structure in publishing.
Copyright was invented by publishers (the printing guild) to ensure that the capitalists who own the printing presses could profit from artificial monopolies. It decreases the works produced, on purpose, in order to subsidize publishing.
If society decides we no longer want to subsidize publishers with artificial monopolies, we should start with legalizing human creativity. Instead we're letting computers break the law with mediocre output while continuing to keep humans from doing the same thing.
LLMs are serving as intellectual property laundering machines, funneling all the value of human creativity to a couple of capitalists. This infringement of intellectual property is just the more pure manifestation of copyright, keeping any of us from benefitting from our labor.
Few company can amass such quantities of knowledge and leverage it all for their own, very-private profits. This is unprecedented centralization of power, for a very select few. Do we actually want that? If not, why not block this until we're sure this a net positive for most people?
Because they expect not to have to opens-source future models. Easy to open stuff as long as you strengthen your position and prevent the competition from emerging.
Ask Google about Android and what they now choose to release as part of AOSP vs Play Services.
…why? Will people buy less books because we have intuitive algorithms trained on old books?
Personally, I strongly believe that the aesthetic skills of humanity are one of our most advanced faculties — we are nowhere close to replacing them with fully-automated output, AGI or no.
You got less than 1% of a book... from an author who has passed away... who wrote on a research topic that was funded by an institution that takes in hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants each year...
I'm not an author (although I do generate almost exclusively IP for a living) and I think this is about as weak a form of this argument as you possibly make.
So right back at ya... who was hurt in your example?
I think the key is to think through the incentives for future authors.
As a thought experiment, say that the idea someday becomes mainstream that there is no reason to read any book or research publication because you can just ask an AI to describe and quote at length from the contents of anything you might want to read. In such a future, I think it's reasonable to predict that there would be less incentive to publish and thus less people publishing things.
In that case, I would argue the "hurt" is primarily to society as a whole, and also to people who might have otherwise enjoyed a career in writing.
Having said that, I don't think we're particularly close to living in that future. For one thing I'd say that the ability to receive compensation from holding a copyright doesn't seem to be the most important incentive for people to create things (written or otherwise), though it is for some people. But mostly, I just don't think this idea of chatting with an AI instead of reading things is very mainstream, maybe at least in part because it isn't very easy to get them to quote at length. What I don't know is whether this is likely to change or how quickly.
there is no reason to read any book or research publication because you can just ask an AI to describe and quote at length from the contents of anything you might want to read
I think this is the fundamental misunderstanding at the heart of a lot of the anger over this, beyond the basic "corporations in general are out of control and living authors should earn a fair wage" points that existed before this.
You summarize well how we aren't there yet, but I'd say the answer to your final implied question is "not likely to change at all". Even when my fellow traitors-to-humanity are done with our cognitive AGI systems that employ intuitive algorithms in symphony with deliberative symbolic ones, at the end of the day, information theory holds for them just as much as it does for us. LLMs are not built to memorize knowledge, they're built to intuitively transform text -- the only way to get verbatim copies of "anything you might want to read" is fundamentally to store a copy of it. Full stop, end of story, will never not be true.
In that light, such a future seems as easy to avoid today as it was 5 years ago: not trivial, but well within the bounds of our legal and social systems. If someone makes a bot with copies of recent literature, and the authors wrote that lit under a social contract that promised them royalties, then the obvious move is to stop them.
Until then, as you say: only extremists and laymen who don't know better are using LLMs to replace published literature altogether. Everyone else knows that the UX isn't there, and the chance for confident error way too high.
that was just a metaphor, you can ask your AI what's that or use way less energy and use Wikipedia's search engine... or do you think OpenAI first evaluates if the author is an independent developer &/or has died &/or was funded by a public university before adding the content to the training database? /s
and one thing is publishing a paper with jargon for academics, another is to simplify the results for the masses. there's a huge difference between finishing a paper and a book
It isn't that someone was hurt. We have one private entity gaining power by centralizing knowledge (which they never contributed to) and making people pay for regurgitating the distilled knowledge, for profit.
Few entities can do that (I can't).
Most people are forced to work for companies that sell their work to the higher bidder (which are the very entities mentioned above), or ask them to use AI (under the condition that such work is accessible to the AI entities).
It's obviously a vicious circle, if people can't oppose their work to be ingested and repackaged by a few AI giants.
Like supporting Android Open Source Project… until Google decides to move the critical parts into Google Play Services? I run GrapheneOS (love it) but almost no banks will allow non-Google-sponsored Android ROMs and variants to do NFC transactions because… the AOSP is designed to miss what Google actually needs.
Idem with ML Kit loaded by Play Services, which makes Android apps fail in many cases.
And I'm not talking about biases introduced by private entities that open source their models but pursue their own goals (e.g geopolitical).
As long as AI is designed and led by huuge private entities, you'll have a hard time benefiting from it without supporting the entities' very own goals.
The answer is to censor the model output, not the training input. A dumb filter using 20 year old technology can easily stop LLM's from verbatim copyright output.
I know that this seems likely from a theoretical perspective (in other words, I would way underestimate it at the sprint planning meeting!), but
A) checking each output against a regex representing a hundred years of literature would be expensive AF no matter how streamlined you make it, and
B) latent space allows for small deviations that would still get you in trouble but are very hard to catch without a truly latent wrapper (i.e. another LLM call). A good visual example of this is the coverage early on in the Disney v. ChatGPT lawsuit:
What if the model simply substitutes synonyms here and there without changing the spirit of the material? (This might not work for poetry, obviously.) It is not such a simple matter.
I think you’re overstating its importance. The internet already makes it possible to order almost any book in existence and have it arrive at your doorstep within a week or so, or often on your ebook reader instantly. And your local library probably participates in an interlibrary loan system that lets you request any book held by any library in the country for free.
LibGen gives you access to a much smaller body of works than either of those. It’s a little more convenient. But the big difference is that it doesn’t compensate the author at all.
And what about the other billions of people on the planet that don't even have a library, let alone a doorstep to receive a first world delivery service.
2. DRM is built in to most purchased ebooks, which means you can’t consume the book on any device. “Illegal” tools exist to circumvent this.
3. Large ebook stores - like other digital stores - essentially lend you a copy of the book. So when they are forced to pull a book, they’ll pull your access too.
Of course, now that the big players have consumed/archived the entire book dump, they can go ahead and kill it to prevent others from doing the same thing.
It is *much* more convenient. When a research path takes me to an article or book - I could buy or order or go to a physical library, that would take hours or days. I could also open it as a PDF in seconds. If you need to read a chapter from a book, or an article, or skim such checking to see if it's worthwhile, 20-30 times to figure something out, then libgen is the difference between finishing in a day or a month.
There are a whole lot of books that are out of print, and if a book went out of print before ebooks were a thing, it probably doesn't have a legal digital edition either.
This. Few people here would remember ebooksclub/gigapedia/smiley/library.nu [1] which predated LibGen by several years. But that online library had a lot of books that are not availble nowadays. There were lots of scanned books (djvu) that people uploaded. So much lost knowledge.
Sure, but I have a strong feeling that scans of out-of-print books only constitute a small portion of LibGen’s traffic.
It’s like the idea that most BitTorrent users are just using it to share free software and Creative Commons media. (See the screenshots on every BitTorrent client’s website.) It would definitely be helpful if it were true, but everyone knows it’s just wishful thinking.
Academics are huge users of LibGen for academic books from the entire past century and beyond. It's infinitely more convenient to instantly get a PDF you can highlight, than wait weeks for some interlibrary loan from an institution three states away.
Just because the majority of people might be downloading Harry Potter is irrelevant.
Libraries can burn down (see Library of Alexandria), civilizations end (see various). LibGen makes it possible for an individual to backup a snapshot of cumulative human knowledge, and I think that's commendable.
> LibGen gives you access to a much smaller body of works than either of those.
> Just go to a real library.
The thrill of waiting a week for a book to arrive or navigating the labyrinthine interlibrary loan system is truly a privilege that many can afford. And who needs instant access to knowledge when you can have the pleasure of paying for shipping or commuting to a physical library?
It's also fascinating that you mention compensating authors, as if the current publishing model is a paragon of fairness and equity. I'm sure the authors are just thrilled to receive their meager royalties while the rest of the industry reaps the benefits.
LibGen, on the other hand, is a quaint little website that only offers access to a vast, sprawling library of texts, completely free of charge and accessible to anyone with an internet connection. I'm sure it's totally insignificant compared to the robust and equitable systems you mentioned.
Your suggestion to "just go to a real library" is also a brilliant solution, assuming that everyone has the luxury of living near a well-stocked library, having the time and resources to visit it, and not having any other obligations or responsibilities. I'm sure it's not at all a tone-deaf, out-of-touch recommendation.
Yes, publishers don’t pay authors as much as they deserve, but LibGen pays them literally nothing. Authors tend to love libraries but hate piracy. Why? Because earning something is better than earning nothing.
Have you ever submitted an ILL request? It’s extremely simple. Many library systems even integrate with WorldCat, so submitting a request for any book just takes a few clicks.
I’m mostly speaking about people in the US. Every single county in the entire country has a public library. Almost all of them have ILL.
I think equity is a fair argument for the existence of services like LibGen in many parts of the world, but the reality is that almost everyone using a book piracy sites in a first-world country is using it to pirate an in-print book that they just don’t want to go to the trouble of borrowing or buying.
Seeing the high prices they are charged for a digital licence which expires after a fairly small number of loans, I feel it'd be better for my library if I pirate when possible. Save those limited loans for someone who prefers/needs them.
I was responding to a comment arguing that LibGen is the largest collection of knowledge in human history, which I think is an overly romantic and totally incorrect take. It may be a very useful collection of knowledge to people in developing countries, but it simply is not larger than the collection of knowledge accessible via any first-world public library. Obviously not everyone has access to that, but again, that’s not what the comment I replied to was about, and not relevant to what I’m saying.
> but it simply is not larger than the collection of knowledge accessible via any first-world public library
How do you know or can quantify this? At a first approximation, libraries are finite in space while the internet is (for the purposes of this discussion) infinite. I'd agree with you if you had said something like Wikipedia was bigger than libgen (and probably not even then, as Wikipedia is merely a summary of primary sources, which would be theoretically contained in libgen).
We all like hating big corporations, especially Meta, and people seem to use this as an opportunity to advocate for punishing them. I think it's wiser to advocate for changing our IP laws.
While Aaron Swartz was bullied to suicide, these corporations will walk free and make billions. I say give every tech CEO the Swartz treatment, then change the law.
Swartz committed suicide because he was mentally ill. He also attempted suicide multiple times in his life while not being "bullied".
If he was acting rationally and came to the conclusion that dying was better than spending X years in jail, he would have committed suicide after sentencing, not before any trial had even happened.
Double standards is how the law is practiced since time immemorial. Copyright is Disney-Sony law made up few decades ago for no reason other than money. Pick your battles.
Two wrongs don't make a right. If a law is unjust, then what good is there in continuing to punish people who have broken it, just because other people have been punished in the past?
Either you think the law is just or unjust. If you think it's unjust, I don't possibly see how you think people should be punished for it. Meta wasn't responsible for what happened to Aaron Swartz.
Motive matters. What Swartz did was in protest for a cause, a form of civil disobedience (which has always been a valid form of protest in democratic societies).
Motive matters when you believe something should be criminal, but there are extenuating circumstances.
But if you don't think something should be illegal to begin with, why do you want to see someone punished? Regardless of motive? If you think it should be allowed, then it should be allowed period, regardless of whether it was to make a quick buck or for civil disobedience. Right?
I totally get who you respect more. What I don't get is "give every tech CEO the Swartz treatment" first. If you don't think what they did should be illegal, then there's just no justification for that.
Motivation, consequences and fairness of how rules are applied are all relevant to the ethics of a particular action.
Meta is systematically abusing copyright law for personal profit, appropriating the labor of hundreds of thousands of authors to line their own pockets without contributing anything back. That free-riding is anti-social behavior, a betrayal of the social contract. A society that permits that without censure isn't going to keep having people create for very long: who is going to create just so billionaires can get richer, with nothing in it for them?
Especially not when the same billionaires sue people for violating copyright of _their_ software. Hypocrisy in service of exploitation and greed is especially noxious.
At the same time, copyright laws are written to benefit those billionaires, keeping our mythology in private hands long past our lifetimes. Put copyright back to thirty years, strip all business methods and software patents (which should never have been a thing in the first place): then Meta will have plenty of content for their LLMs _and_ it's software will start coming out of copyright ten years from now, making an actual contribution to human knowledge instead of just pillaging it.
The central tenet of conservativism is that there is a group the law protects but does not bind and a group the law binds but does not protect. This is what Meta is doing.
They could have gone and lobbied to loosen copyright legislation. Heck, they could have gone through a DMCA exception process, which doesn't even take a new law. Instead, they figure they are powerful enough that society doesn't apply to them.
Big corporations are too big, they should just not exist. When you have corporations more powerful than the government of the biggest states, it's a bug, not a feature.
The IP laws may need rethinking. Saying that they should disappear because big corporations are above the law doesn't help, though. First kill the big corporations, then think about fair laws. Changing the law now would not change anything since those corporations are already above the law.
Anti-Trust laws are a little different though. It's specifically about bringing giant corps down a peg, and has been used multiple times against companies that otherwise skirt the law quite a bit.
Standard Oil, AT&T, the railroads, all thought they were above the law, for good reason, but they were all still broken.
Perhaps they just did, or we are doing it - basically this should lead to abolition of copyright to any published article there is. Not sure how’d it impact open source, we’ll either have all of it open, or none at all.
Even without copyright there are trade secrets, not to mention trademarks and patents. Maybe we could get rid of the latter, but I think we’d need to be pretty heavily into socialist utopia before considering nixing the former two!
Trademarks and patents are very different from copyright. Trademarks especially so because they aren't designed to "own" knowledge, just to prevent confusion about who made a product or what it is.
"Intellectual property" is an abomination of a term because it conflates 3 separate mechanisms with differing goals, pretending that they're related in any meaningful sense.
Patents protect a process. Trademarks protect identity. Copyright protects knowledge. Disparate mechanisms for disparate goals.
Not at all. I am amazed by how badly copyright is understood.
You can buy a physics book, learn about physics from it, and use that knowledge somewhere else. That's totally legal, an copyright doesn't prevent you from doing that at all.
My country believes in this "intellectual property" thing so much that our copyright, patent and trademark act's name translates to "An Act on Intellectual and Artistic Works".
We need different perspective to copyright. Besides - what is a trade secret 10, 20, 30 years ago is a common wiki article now… very often if not always.
The idea of people owning information is really beyond comprehension for me. There’s no patent for ideas, only for mechanisms or implementations.
Besides we’re already tossing world’s knowledge in our palms, all the copy shit seems so irrelevant.
I’m not against closed source or keeping trade secrets. But once a story becomes public it should be accessible at no cost or else we get where we are atm.
I recommend Jason Furman's work for the practical mechanisms by which unnatural monopolies can be broken up and natural monopolies can be regulated.
On the other hand, you are interested in why the status quo isn't an accident and what we would need to do to accomplish those things, I recommend reading Reid Hoffman's book "Blitzscaling" side-by-side with Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson's book "Winner-Take All Politics": you can see the same dynamics presented in two very different lights.
Okay, they would be smaller, but you said "big corporations should not be able to exist" and they would already be a big corporation with just search--they started this way.
Or, just to follow it through, let's say "WidgetBoss LLC" makes a new Widget that every single human has to have, they become the biggest company ever by making one widget. What will you do to make them smaller? Why?
I have a big problem with Google & Meta, and I can understand arguments about those companies. But not just "big companies" as a generality.
But that's how everyone speaks now. "Literally every billionaire is evil and exploiting blah blah blah"
I'm not sure if you're in good faith, but I will assume that you are.
> "Literally every billionaire is evil and exploiting blah blah blah"
Nope. Not every billionaire is evil and exploiting blah blah blah. But nobody deserves to be a billionaire, period.
> let's say "WidgetBoss LLC" makes a new Widget that every single human has to have, they become the biggest company ever by making one widget
Which hasn't happened because, obviously, it is not possible to become the biggest company ever by making something trivial.
It is not possible to promote your product by putting it at the top of the search results if you don't own the search engine.
It is not possible to get statistics about popular products in your webstore, copy them and put them at the top of the search results if you can't own both the webstore and the products.
It is not possible to force everybody to use your email provider in order to use their smartphone if you don't own both the email provider and the smartphone OS.
I have open sourced all work I legally can for the past 20 years, and it has only given me more exposure and made it easier for people to trust me with significant budget to solve their hardest problems.
Also I happily buy lots of books from people like Cory Doctorow and nostarchpress -because- their books are public and I want to support authors that value the freedom of their readers.
Books that are DRM or copyright protected however, I buy used paper copies or pirate because why would I financially support people that do not respect my freedom?
I do not believe copyright makes any sense in the global post-internet world.
It is a major hindrance to progress. The many countries that do not enforce copyright law will share everything that can be shared and are going to progress much faster than the US in the long run.
Impersonation would be a dick move, and would ruin my reputation. Do not need laws to avoid such things. Obvious social repercussions are enough.
Still impersonation sucks, and it happens. Thankfully we can solve this with cryptography without trying to beg the legal system of hundreds of countries to agree on enforcement tactics.
I publish 100% of code I write as FOSS. I also sign my commits. If the code shows up later without attribution to me, I would prove it publicly to call out dishonest behavior.
I would also never use legal action for this though. All information should be free. I only put FOSS licenses on code to ensure I do not get sued and so corporations bound by such silly rules have a difficult time using my work in private codebases without paying me for an alternate license.
I would abolish all IP law if I could. Let all information be free without legal risk to authors or those that share it.
MIT, ISC licenses etc offer minimum anti-liabiliy CYA here and are what I typically use. They are a hack to get around the fact you cannot actually public domain code without legal risk.
> So... you benefit from copyright laws.
I sometimes exploit laws that I feel should not exist at all specifically to target corporations who abuse them the most. In my preferred world where copyright and patents did not exist, I would not need to play such games.
Right. So you use copyright laws because you need them.
I wish we did not need money, but I don't go around telling people that they should stop using money because in my preferred world, money would not exist and we would all live happily.
I do not need copyright law. Just anti-liability licenses so i do not get sued. My interest is protecting myself, not the work.
I believe all knowledge should be freely available and live by that.
While I do not believe in IP law but I am happy to take money from those that do.
I sell my time so long as the buyer allows my work to be freely licensed for all. They can do with their own copy whatever they want and not credit me though. That is fine.
It honestly feels like your view on the topic is entirely defined around yourself. Like if a billionaire could genuinely not understand why people need medical insurance, because "you can just pay cash, like I do".
You are in a special situation where customers pay for your time. Of course it's easy to say "as long as I am paid for my time, I want my work to be public". But say you create a video game. You invest two years working on it, and at the end you sell it for 50$. The first customer buys it, and publishes online for everybody to download legally for free. Does that sound okay for you?
Because you don't need copyright laws doesn't mean that nobody does. And again, you admitted yourself that you do need them and you do use them. You just wish you didn't. And I can agree with you on that. I wish there was no war, and no poverty, too.
I am not saying that everything about IP laws or copyright is perfect. Just that it's more complicated than "it's just a ball of worms, throw it away". Some people abuse copyright, some people need it. Whoever is fine screwing those who do because it doesn't affect them are jerks.
> But say you create a video game. You invest two years working on it, and at the end you sell it for 50$. The first customer buys it, and publishes online for everybody to download legally for free. Does that sound okay for you?
More users for my game! Wonderful. Every person playing, even for free, means more people talking about it if they like it. Give every digital thing away and get people sharing it with others. If a free game is popular a small subset that can afford it will pay you if you disclose, perhaps in the game, what your financial goals are and how far you are from them kindly, but without demand.
People should be proud they make anything in a crowded internet anyone feels worth copying and sharing. That attention can be monetized all sorts of ways if a creator is paying attention. Sell merch, or a funding campaign for new upgrades or extensions.
The pay what you want (or nothing) Humble Bundle model is a step in the right direction. Gets lots of exposure to indie devs who otherwise no one might trust to give any money to sight unseen otherwise.
> a small subset that can afford it will pay you if you disclose, perhaps in the game, what your financial goals are and how far you are from them kindly, but without demand.
But you are not the one publishing it! Someone else is, because they copied your public-domain game and put their name on it. That someone else is getting a lot of money, and you aren't.
> Wonderful
Really? I genuinely don't understand how you can not see how it is a problem?!
> But you are not the one publishing it! Someone else is, because they copied your public-domain game and put their name on it. That someone else is getting a lot of money, and you aren't.
That is going to happen. Not all countries have or enforce copyright laws even if you rely on those.
It would however be trivial for the author to go public proving the third party game used their code without attribution. Apple famously used openstreetmap data without crediting them and openstreetmap publicly shamed them until they corrected the mistake.
People should have attribution if they ask for it, but it also should not be legally enforced. Only socially and technically.
> Really? I genuinely don't understand how you can not see how it is a problem?!
Anyone in the connected world has likely benefited from software I have written or security bugs I have identified and helped get fixed. Some of that work took years with little to no pay.
If you can get my work to more people than I can, do it!
My experience is still easy enough to monetize enough on a contract basis to pay my bills, and that is plenty. Often people pay to prioritize what features I add to open source projects they benefit from. Paid or not, I am always happy knowing my work benefits as many people as possible, rather than having it benefit only those that can afford to pay for it. My ego is not so fragile as to demand my name be in everyone's faces all the time.
Our mission in life as humans should not be about maximizing dollar amounts in our bank accounts. It should be about maximizing the amount of value we can give back to society. If value can be copied and replicated to benefit a lot of people, that is amazing! Shame we cannot do that with food, but at least we can do it with information, media, etc.
> My ego is not so fragile as to demand my name be in everyone's faces all the time.
Yet you keep bringing everything back to you. "It's okay for me because I manage to get a decent salary". Sure, what about those who don't?
> People should have attribution if they ask for it, but it also should not be legally enforced. Only socially and technically.
Laws are here because reputation is not enough anymore in our world. Those who think that laws are unnecessary generally don't directly need them. Can you show some empathy and accept that some people need to be protected by more than reputation?
> That is going to happen. Not all countries have or enforce copyright laws even if you rely on those.
You mentioned Doctorow as an example, right? Do you even know what he thinks of BigTech abusing their power? He's totally for more regulations for those, not fewer.
> Yet you keep bringing everything back to you. "It's okay for me because I manage to get a decent salary". Sure, what about those who don't?
You seem to be operating under the assumption I came to these views from an ivory tower.
I have been open sourcing all of the work I legally can since I was living in my car working on library computers. Yes. I stand by this for everyone.
I had no degree, no credentials, and the only reason I was able to make a career for myself as an uneducated vagrant is -because- my work was public and free, people often used it, and demonstrated my capabilities better than any degree could.
Plenty of peers have made careers for themselves the same way.
> Laws are here because reputation is not enough anymore in our world. Those who think that laws are unnecessary generally don't directly need them. Can you show some empathy and accept that some people need to be protected by more than reputation?
This -is- coming from a pace of empathy.
My meals as a kid sometimes came from food stamps and food pantries. Most of my early internet access came from abusing 30 day AOL trial dialup cds, and I had to wait in line 3 days for a $200 black friday sale laptop I could afford. I had to break a LOT of copyright laws to get unlimited access to information my local library did not have.
Laws work in a subset of countries, and a lot of countries straight up ignore them. That gives them a major advantage over us. They can pirate freely and openly to level up their skills and capabilities with no risk of legal consequences... and we cannot? Why should the poor in America not have the same free access to any digital goods the poor in other countries do?
> You mentioned Doctorow as an example, right? Do you even know what he thinks of BigTech abusing their power? He's totally for more regulations for those, not fewer.
My read of Cory Doctorow on these topics is that the copyright wars were a failed experiment. Copyright laws are almost mostly weaponized by big corporations to hurt individuals. We should regulate the shit out of corporations to protect the freedom and privacy of users and prevent monopolies. It is perfectly compatible to both anti-big-tech and also against the current IP law system.
I would like to start with this: what is the advantage of other countries enjoying the work of artists/authors for free?
My point, from the very beginning, is that the concept of copyright does not seem entirely, as in 100% stupid. I am not saying that it is perfect the way it is now. Just that throwing it away entirely is maybe not what we want. I hate it when BigTech abuses copyright, but the problem is BigTech there.
Copyright is also what makes copyleft possible. Which I believe is a good thing to protect the users from the corporations.
And finally IP laws are what prevents an employee from leaving a company with all the code, renaming/rebranding it and selling it for a fraction of the price. Doesn't seem completely ridiculous, does it?
> You seem to be operating under the assumption I came to these views from an ivory tower.
Not at all. I operate under the assumption that you don't have that need anymore. Apparently you did, and because you got to where you are, you now believe that it's all based on merit and that people who don't manage to do the same don't deserve any empathy. Or something like that?
It's a typical US mentality, though (the "all I have is based on merit and merit only, and I don't want to pay for others").
> Laws work in a subset of countries, and a lot of countries straight up ignore them. That gives them a major advantage over us.
There is plenty of need for laws inside a country as big as the US. Not seeing that suggests that you are in a pretty good situation now and don't care about those who aren't.
Reputation doesn't work. Do I need to mention the nazi billionaire who now controls the US government as an example?
> We should regulate the shit out of corporations to protect the freedom and privacy of users and prevent monopolies.
Exactly. I don't think he says "we should remove copyright as a concept entirely.
Which is beside the point. The person I am answering to says that they don't believe in copyright laws, but still they use licenses like MIT. Why not using CC0 then?
"CC0 has not been approved by the Open Source Initiative and does not license or otherwise affect any patent rights you may have. You may want to consider using an approved OSI license that does so instead of CC0, such as GPL 3.0 or Apache 2.0."
CC0 is great but it does not go far enough for software. Patent and trademark rights are complex and it caused CC0 to be withdrawn from OSI consideration.
They should sell for a price it would make pirating it pointless. Like what Spotify or Netflix did to audio and visual content. Then they can use the exposure to find other ways to make money.
Or if you don't agree with the price, do not buy it. You are NOT entitled to entertain yourself in any way you want. (unless it's funded by taxes etc, in which case... okay, it's open to discussion.)
Look, let's be honest - what gives you or others the right to steal from others?
I author a lot of technical documentation actually.
Even so, yes. I make all my work public, 100%.
I use public repositories as my backup for anything I create, regardless of stage of completion and so others can learn from or help improve my work as they see fit.
I do not believe proprietary technology should exist and I put my code where my mouth is.
Humans progress faster when we collaborate freely. Fork anything I do and make it better if you can.
So here you say that you put all your work in the public domain, and in a comment above you say that you don't put it in the public domain because you fear a lawsuit?
That is the fundamental problem with trying to project property rights onto ideas. Capitalism works fine for distributing scarce goods and resources, but information and software are both public goods.
In a reasonable world, we would be imposing high taxes on all LLMs and using that money to fund grants for future writers and artists. It would be good for the LLM makers in the long run, since it would give them more fuel for their models, and it would be good for the artists and writers because it would provide sustainable, reliable wages.
Unfortunately, that isn't the world we live in. LLM makers don't seem to care about the impact they will have on society or even their own livelihoods, as long as they get rich today. And in addition to all the regulatory capture, we are having our governments gutted on the mere fear that they might do their job and prevent the wholesale looting of society by these new robber-barons.
So with the economically-optimal approaches off the table, we have to fall back on imposing false scarcity in the hopes that maybe capitalism can limp along.
There's such a mass of possible works that it hardly constrains someone that if you could cast a magic spell preventing someone from distributing or accessing your particular work and then burned it, your spell would have essentially no effect-- no one would notice it and no one would be harmed.
As long as discussion of a work that has published is not impeded, the public is not harmed even by these 50-years after life copyrights other than by that they are accumulated by certain companies who themselves become problems.
When someone decides to use someone's work without compensation he is, even though he is not deprived of the work itself, still robbed. But it's not a theft of goods, it's theft of service. The copyright infringer isn't the guy who steals your phone, it's the guy who even you have done some work for but who refuses to pay.
With this view you can also believe, without hypocrisy, that what the LLM firms are doing is wrong while what Schwartz did was not, since the authors in question weren't deprived of any royalties or payments due to them due to due to the publishing model for scientific works.
> But it's not a theft of goods, it's theft of service.
What service? If somebody washes your windshield without you asking, it isn't a theft of service to not pay them. A theft of service arises from entering into an agreement and then failing to pay as stipulated in that agreement.
Copyright isn't an agreement you can choose whether to participate in. Copyright is a legal enforcement system that imposes legal liability even on those who don't use it. You may not see this legal liability as "harm", but it absolutely is. Arguing that copyright extends to training is arguing for a dramatic increase in the scope and power of this legal enforcement system.
But the thing here distinguishing it from the windshield thing is that there are so many possible texts that you choosing their particular text is to choose the work they've done.
You think of choosing somebody's particular text as the way of contracting him. Just as it isn't a restriction of your freedom of speech that going into restaurant and ordering a meal creates a contract to pay, so it isn't a restriction of your freedom of speech when you choose to seek out and repeat somebody's very particular text.
Why Harry Potter when you have any of hundreds of million of stories of similar sort that you could easily write yourself? When you choose that one, you choose it because it's already been prepared by somebody else, just as you choose restaurant because they've done work and have food ready for you. By choosing the one that's already written you accept that the author has done work for you.
> so it isn't a restriction of your freedom of speech when you choose to seek out and repeat somebody's very particular text.
I hadn't made that claim, but I will in now that you've brought it up. Art operates as part of a discussion, the reference to and re-use of prior art is a key part of the how that happens. There are sooo many cases of copyright being used to limit the freedom of expression, that this really isn't disputable. Copyright clearly restricts speech.
> By choosing the one that's already written you accept that the author has done work for you.
No I don't, at least not in a sense that's different from the shoulders of all the people that author learned from and so on. Cultural works exist and take on roles in our cultural semiology, our memes our language without our choice. You can coose to not engage with a work, but you can't choose which works will be culturally relevant or not.
When you publish something, it becomes part of our shared culture and no-one has an inalienable right to own that. The limited rights we granted to encourage commercial creativity have already snowballed out of control and now people are blythly buying into another dramatic expansion of them.
But we're talking about extremely direct copying. Actual computerized copying, typically verbatim.
Doing things relating to discussion of a work are typically permitted, but you have no reason to use anybody's particular work other than to make use of the work he did in creating it.
> But we're talking about extremely direct copying. Actual computerized copying, typically verbatim.
Copyright doesn't just extend to "literal direct copying". When you claim copyright doesn't harm anyone, you can't ignore all the other types of activity it prohibits.
> Doing things relating to discussion of a work are typically permitted,
Only if you limit the meaning of "discussion" so much that it no longer includes the process of making art.
> but you have no reason to use anybody's particular work other than to make use of the work he did in creating it.
Did you not ready my comment? I already explained the reason. Creative works become part of our culture, you can't choose which works will do that, you can only choose to participate in that culture or not.
Copyright is a social system for artificially limiting access to our shared culture and thus also limits participation in that culture.
I understand the value of a limited copyright system, but anyone that claims that our copyright system doesn't cause harm or cost us anything isn't being realistic. Copyright duration should be far more limited and we need significant reforms to the DMCA. Personally, I think even all non-commercial distribution should be legal as copyright should only grant commercial rights.
Big corporations don't have morale or ethics. They'll break any laws as long as it's profitable. There's no point complaining about Meta or Zuck. Meta does what it's designed to do. If people aren't happy, they should vote for more regulations.
That one is tough, because they are blind to the risk. I try to only work with people who have been burned before or have been around long enough to have seen the aftermath. Let me guess, they are probably telling you "show me the vulnerability", but refuse to delay shipping or fund the PoC.
Best advice is to communicate in writing the most likely risk and threat scenarios, with as much data or extrapolated data as possible. When the security flaws are later discovered, that is data you can refer to.
From what I read, this is what Zoom was like early on. They had amateur hour security and then when s*t hit the fan they beefed it up and retained a security team. I guess you could say it worked for them?
We may in retrospect find that the moment may have passed where "big corporations" have become more powerful and impactful on our lives than the IP laws on the books. After all, we can already plainly see they only come into effect when useful by the powerful
Something tells me stronger IP laws will be drafted by holders of that IP, with little if any regard to the potential for job losses for regular people from AI.
Maybe, but it's better than the current situation with 0 regard for potential job losses for regular people, probably why they're in favor of trying something vs the status quo
Most of the public has jobs based upon IP? While it is probably a bigger share than farming, I doubt that. The actual drivers appear to be a mixture of hysteria, and reflexive anti-corporate sentiment as we see even self-proclaimed leftists going "WTF, I love copyright now!".
It really makes you think about those crazy internet folks from back in the day who thought copyright law was too strict and that restricting humanity to knowledge in such a way was holding us all back for the benefit of a tiny few.
I'm all for chopping up copyright law. But until we do so, companies like Meta need to be treated just like everyone else.
That means lawsuits, prison sentences, and millions in fines. And that's just the piracy part, there's also the lying/fraud part.
Interestingly, a Dutch LLM project was sent a cease and desist after the local copyright lobby caught wind of it being trained on a bunch of pirated eBooks. The case unfortunately wasn't fought out in court, because I would be very interested to see if this could make that copyright lobby take down ChatGPT and the other AI companies for doing the same.
The more concerning thing is that the best thing these overpaid people could come up with was.. download the torrent, like everyone else. Here you are, billions of resources, and no one is willing to spend a part of it to at least digitize some new data? Like even Google did?
I think they are morally required to improve the current state.
- Seed the torrent and publicly promote piracy pushing lawmakers.
- Contribute with digitisation and open access like Google did in the past.
- Make the part of their dataset that was pirated publicly accessible.
- Fight stupid copyright laws. I can't believe that copyright lasts more than 20 years. No field moves that slowly, and there should be tighter limits on faster moving fields.
Copyright and patent aren't the same thing. "Fast moving field" doesn't make sense in terms of copyrights. There's no reason the copywriter should last some minimum duration after the life of the creator.
If I write a really popular book, I don't want Hollywood to make it into a movie without compensating me just because they waited a few years
Fast moving field does make sense in terms of copyright because the knowledge is recorded in documents which are then copyrighted. E.g. research papers.
> If I write a really popular book, I don't want Hollywood to make it into a movie without compensating me just because they waited a few years
I genuinely don't understand this. Even at a decade copyright, pretty much anybody who was going to buy the book and read it has already done so. It costs you virtually nothing in sales, and society benefits from the resulting movie.
Your goal is to deprive everyone of having a movie, because someone who isn't you is going to make some money that was never going to you anyways? Your goals for copyright appear to be a net negative to the system that enforces copyright, which begs the question why should the system offer protection at all?
> Even at a decade copyright, pretty much anybody who was going to buy the book and read it has already done so. It costs you virtually nothing in sales, and society benefits from the resulting movie.
If the movie can be made then the book can be printed and sold by any publisher, under the current system. It creates a race to the bottom on the price of the book as soon as the copyright duration is done. Perhaps extending "fair use" stuff could allow one and not the other.
That race to the bottom is a feature, not a bug. It allows poor people to engage with culture. That's the tradeoff here. At some point copyright is protecting a tiny amount of profits for the author in exchange for locking people out of access.
Copyright is supposed to be a societal benefit, or there's little reason for society to spend money on enforcing it. That's where we currently are, and I think why there's such a strong reaction to copyright currently. We pay to protect the works and then we pay again to buy them. They become free when they're so culturally irrelevant that nobody wants them even for free. The costs of enforcement are socialized and the benefits are privatized.
At some point, copyright is going to have to provide more back to society or society will get tired of paying to enforce it.
Copywrite expiring in 20 years doesn't mean access is democratized. Publishers would likely keep the price the same, but instead is the author getting a cut, they just take everything.
Besides. The public isn't owed the fruits of my labor for free.
I honestly suspect fairly little would change. The US operates with a 20 year copyright for nearly 200 years, these long copyrights are actually far newer.
Also, you are not owed a monopoly on arrangement of words enforced by the public. There are plenty of other places to spend tax dollars.
Who do you think pays for prosecutors, lawyers, jails, and investigators going after pirating sites? DMCA claims are worth less than the paper they're printed on if not for the threat of all that.
This hasn't been my observation. Instead, I see a society where people regularly help and serve one other, frequently for free. Consider parents, social workers, most academics, food banks, charity in general, most workers in most businesses, et cetera. I wonder: who do you know and work with? A minority of people profit wonderfully off this. Incidentally, they seem to also preach principals that can only lead to the end of their gravy train.
You can counter by insisting that these "altruistic" behaviors are simply less directly but still in the altruist's interest. I would entirely agree.
I don't disagree with your point that, in life, not everybody is in it for themselves. But the examples you chose to demonstrate altruism are a bit ridiculous:
- parents: they wanted a child and now they have to take care of it, it's not a selfless act at all
- social workers: are paid to pretend to care. Often they genuinely do care, but this isn't altruism, it's a job
- most academics: I see you haven't met many academics. Altruistic (and selfless) are not terms I would use to describe them. The majority is very much in it for themselves...
- food banks, charity in general: very true, some charity do strive on unpaid volunteers, that is altruism
- most workers in most businesses: okay now you're getting ridiculous...
Many children are unwanted. Consider adoption and neglect. Parents know not to admit these things broadly.
Social work is a very low paid existence and most of the social workers I know could easily have earned more elsewhere which they are pained to know but persist through regardless because they care more for living in a world with less total suffering even at the cost of their own.
I earned my MSc from the University of Edinburgh and interacted thoroughly with academics there and in the process of getting there. I know many people with their PhDs and have had personal friendships with professors, postdocs, and other researchers. I would agree that academic incentive structure have been made deeply dysfunctional and delusion abounds. Also that defection is common. I have known some of those evil actors (e.g. Sharon Oviatt) so I don't deny their existence.
The very premise of business is that it takes a profit from the excess efforts of labor. I'm not the ridiculous sort that fails to recognize that often workers productivity is both made possible and enhanced by the accumulated coordination and structure of firms and owners should capture some of that value. However, increasingly research is showing that the advantages of our society are being captured by firms. Meanwhile, too many owners are failing to responsibly reinvest in the population and have made religions out of not fostering true growth.
My claim is that multiple cultural norms live side-by-side and I'm trying to help you and others realize that different options are plausible and more advantageous. The cooperators learn self preservation and hiding while they are also harvested while and beyond doing so. My speculation is that the expanded belief holding of perspectives like yours decreases the size of that population which will be a downward spiral of inefficiency and impoverishment. I expect the bottom will fall out viciously if it gets to that.
My spending time on this conversation is altruism, what is it for you?
Yep, you even see it on HN with artists and devs complaining about AI, especially when things like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion were first announced. People who were pretty lax about copyright when it didn't affect them personally suddenly became copyright maximalists, talking about "stealing, theft, etc" Since then, people have calmed down and realized that AI is simply a tool like any other.
Beyond illegal downloading and distribution of copyrighted content, the article also describes how Meta staff seemingly lied about it in depositions (including, potentially, Mark Zuckerberg himself).
So if I torrented and seeded, I would be doing it for my own entertainment, not commercially. I expect big copy-write holders to come after myself. If Meta does it - I guess they have better lawyers ?
The last time the US Supreme Court decided on copyright law, they basically said "we like what Google is doing with Android, so what they did is fine".
I think comparing it is reasonable and valid. Equaling it would be incorrect. What Meta is (allegedly, likely) doing here is several orders of magnitude worse, in scale and intention. I'd say both ethical and probably juristical.
But just because the scale and intention are different, does not mean we cannot compare both cases. They are not equal, far from it. But they are compareable.
> Parent comment implies Swartz was guilty of some degree
as a constructive criticism, you might want to reconsider your interpretation of
>"Remembering Aaron Swartz in this moment"
-> Which was arguably more innocent — scientific papers.
As in, both hold some degree of illegality (objectively), so when pointed that "he is guilty of some degree" is due to the jurisdiction laws (broken or not) regardless of societal/moral values that the context may apply.
perhaps a better answer would be to point that he shouldn't be punished for those actions.
Is there a concept in the legal system of first-come-first-served that could be used as precedent?
What I mean is: when someone is prosecuted for copyright infringement, but Meta isn't, then could the case be put on hold until Meta is found guilty and pays a fine?
Also maybe the fine on the later case would have to be proportional to the prior case. So if Meta pays $1 per infringement, the penalty might be $1 for torrenting something else (which is immaterial and not worth the justice system's time) so pretty much all copyright infringement cases would get thrown out.
It reminds me of how mainstream drug addicts get convicted and spend years in prison, while celebrities get off with a warning or monetary fine.
Lawyers (and hence, judges) are really good at arguing why the earlier case does not apply in a present case, even if most reasonable people would think the two cases are essentially the same.
It's a fundamental part of lawyer training, and if they want to let BigCorp go and bring the hammer down on the little guy, they can make up a hundred reasons for it.
Considering prices for single work, this must be multi-billion dollar compensation.
Take for example 675k paid for 31 songs. So 20k a song. If we estimate book to be say 10MB that would 8 million works. So I think reasonable compensation is something along 163 billion. Not even 10 years of net income. Which I think is entirely fair punishment.
Beyond the absurdity of those amounts, the funny thing is that the authors wouldn’t ever see a dime of that money. Not in the music case, not in this one either. Fairness?
The article is purposely conflating the downloading from the seeding statistics. Saying "just 0.008%" the size resulted in big punishments is confusing when Meta is also saying they set their client to be leechers.
* an AI model is not a backup of the contents of all of the books in the sense that it would preserve their contents or similar such it might e.g. be useful for future generations
* Meta has (allegedly) been unfairly benefiting / profiting off of the copyrighted work of others by illegally reproducing copies of their work. Not just in the AI model sense[1], but actually (allegedly) downloading them directly from pirate repositories in a way that isn't straightforwardly fair use and even uploading some amount of this pirate data in return.
I feel like the parent commenter may have been making the typical argument for preservation of copyrighted materials, and I'm amenable to it... when it's regular people or non-profits doing that work, in a way that doesn't allow them to benefit unfairly or profit off of the hard work of others (or would be connected to such a process in some way).
Plaintiffs allege that Meta didn't just do all this, but also talked about how wrong it was and how to mitigate the seeding so they might upload as little as possible. So no matter how you slice it they allegedly 1) knew they were doing something at least a little bit wrong and 2) took steps to prevent the process that might otherwise have preserved the copied materials for the public interest.
And I feel like you probably knew all this, but maybe I'm missing something.
1: the typical argument wherein the model wouldn't exist without the ingested data, a lot of it is still in there, it is of course a derivative work and the question is really how derivative is it and what part of the work can they claim is their own contribution
My ISP will shut off my internet if it catches me torrenting copyrighted material but if you're a massive corporation that steals TBs of data its barely a blip in the news.
This should be legal. Copyright law does more harm than good.
The only ethical problem here is that only Meta sized companies can afford to pay the "damages" for such blatant law violations at worst, or the fees of their lawyers at best.
If an individual was the one tormenting almost 82 TB of copyrighted books, the damages they would have to pay would be in the trillions (mostly because of how broken the copyright law system is)
If only these corporations with vested interests in permissive copyright would put their money where their mouth is with lobbying for a change. Or is that only allowed when they're trying to do something scummy? I forget.
"Supposedly, Meta tried to conceal the seeding by not using Facebook servers while downloading the dataset to "avoid" the "risk" of anyone "tracing back the seeder/downloader" from Facebook servers, an internal message from Meta researcher Frank Zhang said, while describing the work as in "stealth mode." Meta also allegedly modified settings "so that the smallest amount of seeding possible could occur," a Meta executive in charge of project management, Michael Clark, said in a deposition..."
They will be getting a lot of Frommer Legal letters...
The question is, if they could and would have paid for each book, would it be ok to train the LLM on them? I'm talking about prior books, I'm sure new books have language forbidding their use to train LLMs at the point of sale.
But legally, how does using a book to train a LLM differ from a teacher learning from a book and teaching its contents to their pupils. Obviously, the LLM can do so at scale, but is there a legal difference?
> The question is, if they could and would have paid for each book, would it be ok to train the LLM on them?
Whether training on AI model on an array of diffentent works, many of which are copyright protected, is itself a copyright violation, in addition to or distinct from any copyright violation that goes on gathering the dataset for training (and separate from any copyright violation in the actual or intended use of the LLM), remains to be resolved as a legal question, and may or may not have a simple yes or no answer (or the same answer under every system of copyright laws globally).
My inclination is that it is probably generally not a violation in US law, but that's not something I am very confident in; how the definitions of copy and derivative work apply to determine if it would be without fair use, and how fair use analysis applies, are not clear from the available precedent.
> But legally, how does using a book to train a LLM differ from a teacher learning from a book and teaching its contents to their pupils.
It is very clear, by looking at how US copyright law is written and even more clear in its history of application, that information stored in brains of people are without exception neither copies nor new works that can be derivative works under US law, and so cannot be infringing, no matter how you gain them. It’s also very clear in the statute itself and the case law that data in media used by artificial digital computers, on the other hand, can constitute copies or derivative works that can be infringing. Even if the process is arguably similar in legally relevant manners, copyright law is critically focussed on the result and whether it is a particular kind of thing which can be infringing, not just the process.
For some misterious reason I can't see Zuckerberg in front of a judge facing 50 years imprisonment. Anyone can?
I truly hope that whoever takes the case goes after Meta with 1000 times the pressure that was put on Swartz, but honestly I don't expect much just as the top comment precisly expressed.
And if we are going to be fair please also let's not forget about the other usual suspects, or anyone thinks they are falling behind?
There are other countries than the US though and if rightsholders wish to sue, lawsuits can happen there too.
Several EU countries, Switzerland, South Korea, Japan, etc. are viable countries to sue from. Even in Japan which has a law specifically permitting training on copyrighted material you must still obtain it legally-- i.e. you must license it.
That's irrelevant. Switzerland (for example) isn't going to arrest Zuckerberg and put him in jail for this either.
Nobody will.
But if you're operating a site called Pirate Bay or something like that and it's not earning billions of dollars, expect countries to chase you across the globe trying to arrest you.
If there were a criminal prosecution for willful copyright infringement in some non-US country an extradition request for the relevant people is not an impossibility though, and there would be no legal reason to deny it.
Ideally we have a conversation about how we as society have ended up in a situations where we have a two tier justice system.
At a minimum the starting point of discussion here should be that if life ruining $80,000 per item is an acceptable fine for individuals then why is it not the same for corporations. Which would probably get you a number in the trillions at which point we could have a discussion about reforming this entire system.
But yes realistically slap on wrist is what is going to happen here.
> Is there any other possible outcome than a fine?
Yes, of course.
It's quite possible that judges realize that if they restrict training data to licensed materials, LLMs will become stupid and China will overtake the US to become the leader in AI, and because that can't happen, they'll make up some reason to make training on unlicensed data legal. It's definitely fair use!
I'm not even joking. Last time the US Supreme Court basically said "Android is too important, we have to declare its use of Java API fair use."
> Last time the US Supreme Court basically said "Android is too important, we have to declare its use of Java API fair use."
Yes, I remember that case. I do think a hefty fine can be sufficient here though. Meta has been paying out court ordered fines for years, none of which dent their growth much. And current models are trained on those models + datasets are scrubbed more vigorously now so future rehashes of this shouldn't be an issue. Also, most data online has already been hoovered up, according to Ilya the former Chief Scientist of OpenAI, so this will likely not pop back up again.
But good point, courts are often more practical given the law than we perceive them to be.
I think this one is different because the legality of training on copyrighted material is an open legal question while distributing/seeding copyrighted material is decidedly illegal.
If you were wondering why meta was making a lot of donations to the new government (including settling a lawsuit for 25 million with the New president, 1 million to the inauguration)…. I suspect there will be no federeal charges.
The rules have always seemed different for corporations regardless.
Well of course, bullies always prefer targets that can't fight back. That itself is unfortunately a basis of the legal system from it being run on flawed monkey brains. Why else is hitting vulnerable children okay but getting into a consensual bar fight illegal?
IANAL but the pardon power (A) only extends to criminal punishments, not civil liabilities and (B) copyright lawsuits can be launched by anybody, not just the Department of Justice.
So, barring further Might Makes Right shit--which I'm not willing to fully rule out--Trump can't fully shield Zuckerberg et al.
I'm more interested in piracy not being highly prosecuted than I am in Meta getting punished for this. I'm not trying to spend 20 years in jail for pirating a TV show.
> By September 2023, Bashlykov had seemingly dropped the emojis, consulting the legal team directly and emphasizing in an email that "using torrents would entail ‘seeding’ the files—i.e., sharing the content outside, this could be legally not OK."
I'm pretty sure you can theoretically download torrents without seeding, although this is frowned upon. If they really seeded (with full bandwidth?) that's indeed pretty brazen.
It is sort of strange that Meta is being singled out here though, and sort of sad considering they at least release the model weights. What's the signal? Do illegal shit to be competitive, but make sure there is no evidence?
You can, in transmission for example you can just set the seed percentage to 0%. I recognise that this makes me a bad torrenter, but I've been told in the past that my ISP wont be too happy about me seeding, and they already do something screwy to torrents I access through the surface web, so I'm just playing it safe
So according to some AI, the damages awarded per infringed work is ~$750 minimum in the US. 80TB of books, each let's say 10MB on average, would be 8 million works. So Meta should pay 6 billion USD for their copyright infringement?
Best way to "punish" Meta is to slash the Gordian knot and abolish copyright. Level the playing field, incrementally, for everyone else who isn't a trillion-dollar corporation.
The alternative is a futile legalistic attack against a monopoly entity too powerful to be meaningfully punished. That won't accomplish anything useful. It would, rather, help cement this status quo, where copyright infringement is selectively legal or illegal, for different entities at the same time; and companies like Meta thrive arbitraging that difference. You can't defeat Meta—but you can help dig them a moat.
Ridding copyright would level the playing field for individuals and companies????!!!! Getting rid of laws that protect the individual only will help the larger empowered businesses.
I'm pretty sure I could list ten megacorps that would collapse overnight if copyright was abolished. The music groups, movie studios, streaming platforms...
What's the alternative to copyright then? Anything I create will be instantly reproduced and sold for less than I can afford to by some entity far larger and more efficient than me.
> Level the playing field, incrementally, for everyone else who isn't a trillion-dollar corporation.
There is no level playing field when you have individuals and trillion-dollar companies in the same market.
Right, all this talk about getting rid of copyright and no one is talking about what should replace it? how would we we incentives people to write good books? to pour 1000s of hours of their time to produce new knowledge?
Does this mean we are willing to live in a world with less variety of books and authors? meaning only to let those who really want to advance knowledge, and willing to do so with no monetary reward? feels like this would lead to to a slow down in knowledge production. It's not like there was a healthy and vigorous book publishing industry pre creation of copyright. We're ok with going back to that era?
"Say they hood robin, ain't that a b*, take from the poor and give to the rich."
- Ice Cube.
Meta will face no consequences. Say your a small publisher and you'd like a bit of compensation. If you dare sue Meta can just blacklist your books on its platforms. Even if they don't, you probably don't have the money to sue one of the biggest companies on earth.
I think copyrights should be limited to 25 years after first publication. This would fix plenty of issues and give the AIs of the world plenty to learn from.
Who am I kidding, Meta will take what they will. For that author making 20k a year, be honored to be of use to Meta.
Maybe you should go after the worst offender (OpenAI) first before going after Meta, since the latter already gave back their model away for free for everyone and the architecture.
We will know why OpenAI isn't getting investigated.
specifically https://annas-archive.se/torrents - this is a meta-project which aggregates illegal copyrighted material from other illegal projects. You absolutely should not download any material this page links to, although you can use it for the purpose of researching about shadow libraries.
Weird shenanigans are happening in libgen at the moment; better go through Anna's Archive to look for the items you want, it will link you to the corresponding mirrors more reliably.
At least this has been the recent experience of a friend who used libgen and anna's archive to download legal, public domain works!
The usual copyright cartel is up in arms, crying theft. But here’s the truth: intellectual property is a state-enforced monopoly, not real property.
Property is based on scarcity - if you take my car, I no longer have a car. But if you copy my book, I still have my book. No loss, no theft, just an outdated legal fiction designed to stifle innovation and enrich rent-seeking middlemen. An no, loss of potential sales doesn't count - it's like being able to claim a lottery ticket has real value.
Copyright was never about protecting creators—it’s about locking down ideas, preventing competition, and extracting endless fees. Shakespeare borrowed, tech companies iterate, and science thrives on free exchange. The idea that knowledge should be locked away indefinitely is absurd.
Meta’s mistake wasn’t using the data - it was pretending copyright still matters. AI is exposing the system for what it is: obsolete. The future belongs to those who create without asking permission.
It's obviously absurd to enforce copyright as bytes are copied around instead of as it is used. Training an LLM is a different thing than re-hosting and giving away copies to other people.
If you don't want people to transform your works - keep them private. You don't own ideas.
As the article says, Meta /was/ giving away copies to other people by seeding the libgen torrents. This isn't the usual case of "should companies be allowed to train on books".
Really strange how much torrenting is demonized by all of these companies and ISPs when individuals want to use it but when a company like Meta uses it there is so little scrutiny.
We have at least 4 types of ill-defined concepts of property in the 21st century , largely due to our laziness, intellectual inertia and lack of motivation to make forward-thinking definitions for the coming age of AI and ubiquitous access to all information and all communication.
1) the concept of copyright is as old as the word suggests (copies are the least of our worries going forward - it should be possible to define processes for exploitation of ideas in a fair way)
2) we allow humans to learn from other people's ideas and transform them to commercial products and the same should happen for AIs in the future
3) we have an ill-defined concept of "personally identifying information" which gives people ownership to information that others have created via their own means - there should be better ways to ensure a level of privacy (but not absolute privacy) without overly-broad, nonsensical definitions of what is personally protected information
4) We allow social media and other telecommunications media to arbitrarily censor people's speech without recourse. This turns people's speech to property of the social media companies and imposes absolute power on it. This makes zero sense and is abusive towards the public at large. We need legal protections of speech in all media, not just state-owned media.
>we have an ill-defined concept of "personally identifying information" which gives people ownership to information that others have created via their own means - there should be better ways to ensure a level of privacy (but not absolute privacy) without overly-broad, nonsensical definitions of what is personally protected information
What information about me could a corporation create via its own means that would be legally protected but shouldn't be? PII is generally information that a corporation collects. Unless you mean that my cellphone provider creates the association between my name and phone number and should therefore be able to do with it as they please?
It's not just about corporations. Banking and government services e.g. are required to keep your personal information stored for years and years even against your will
Who would have known that BitTorrent, shadow libraries, and seeders will help to train the best AI models out there, that adds a whole new meaning to a "seed".
How about a consequentialist argument? In some fields, AI has already surpassed physicians in diagnosing illnesses. If breaking copyright laws allows AI to access and learn from a broader range of data, it could lead to earlier and more accurate diagnoses, saving lives. In this case, the ethical imperative to preserve human life outweighs the rigid enforcement of copyright laws.
No, the development of an artificial general intelligence does seem like a special case compared to usual IP debates, particularly in the potential multiplicative positive-sum effects on society overall.
If you're an author with a book likely to have be hoovered up, I wonder what you'd get from the fb models if you asked "complete this in the style of [author] in [book]: [quite a long excerpt]"
If you get a direct quote then you're good with your claim, surely.
The way it works counts if you bring prompting into it. It could easily have learned enough style chops of [author] from other sources to mimic/predict those stanzas from raw data points.
Whatever the ruling one thing is for sure, plagiarism is no longer the sincerest form of flattery. The human authors are out for AI blood on this.
That they’d focus on file sharing over transformation or outputs is exactly the risk I warned the companies about in my AI report. Most datasets, like RefinedWeb and The Pile, also require sharing copyrighted workers between people who are not licensed to do that. Many works also prohibit commercial use or have patents on them.
They need to make datasets which don’t have this problem or have entities in Singapore train the foundation models within their rules. The latter has a TDM exemption that would let AI’s use much of the Internet, maybe GPL code, licensed/purchased works they digitize, etc. Very flexible.
(imo not in accordance with the Constitution, after absurdities like deciding “limited time” the way mathematicians might define something of some order of infinity)
the alleged social contract was is not functional the way it was intended, and we see who benefits and who loses.
mass dynamic editing for vitriol and profanity occurred while writing this comment in order to remain within site rules
Meta already does that to themselves every year or so, deleting all internal communications.
They've thrown away a huge amount of communication to source code commit reinforcement training data as a result. They do it to avoid emails making it into trials like this.
When there is a specific order after proceeding starts, but not before. There can sometimes be other orders as part of govt settlements like Google was recently accused of violating.
You may be thinking of certain financial institutions where it is a hard requirement, and maybe there are some other regulated industries too that have it.
Yes, they are. But I can imagine the fine/impact for this being much, much lower than the consequences of all their nefarious communication being used in trials.
LLMs are worse than search for figuring out what value a specific asset provides to the LLM. Atleast with search your work or page is not lost and still gets a click/user interaction, and may be give you a chance to monetize the interaction. However, LLMs just don’t have any such option. Gemini adds links but the links they add are completely editorialized by the LLM and need not reflect the original at all. So how does anyone ask for compensation even if they sue?
Copyright law needs major reform. We need to figure out a way to let authors monetize their work while not making complying with the law so burdensome. We've created a system where people who (understandably) ignore the law benefit at the expense of people trying to do the right thing.
Sounds just like how Facebook got started, harvesting photos without permission. From the Wikipedia article, the Facebook precursor was known as Facemash. On Zuckerberg, "He hacked into the online intranets of Harvard Houses to obtain photos, developing algorithms and codes along the way. He referred to his hacking as "child's play.""
>>"vastly smaller acts of data piracy—just .008 percent of the amount of copyrighted works Meta pirated—have resulted in Judges referring the conduct to the US Attorneys’ office for criminal investigation.".....While Meta may be confident in its legal strategy despite the new torrenting wrinkle...
Zuckerberg has paid the vig several times [0,1,2], which is evidently the best legal strategy under this administration. OFC, considering there are already multiple payments, there is no assurance the vig payments won't substantially increase as the Capo sees more opportunity for profit.
You know the wierd thing is - I've never used Meta AI. I've never thought of using it. The only product of FB i use is whatsapp, however I've not seen/heard any of my friends using Meta AI for FB,IG,Whatsapp. I really don't understand what their ROI here is...
I thought about it for a full day, and I have one idea for how to handle copyrighted data training.
It would need to be open / regulated and training till double descent would need to be disallowed, to make sure that the model is not memorizing the data.
Damn! One of my old books can be found in the Anna's Archive search. The book has been out of print for years. I pity the Meta users who get results based on something that I wrote.
(Check Anna's for 'Keith P. Graham', and the first book listed is mine.)
At OpenAI we have seen some employees expressed their concern publicy about the moral grounds on which company was acting. We never heard about it from anyone at Meta but there were some jokes ofcourse. I guess everything is fair in AI and Corporates.
One of the largest businesses of the Internet to date has been piracy. Individual informal piracy has been the smallest component of this. By far the largest has been corporate mass-scale piracy, and LLMs are probably the largest heist to date. They've literally downloaded the sum total of all human thought and knowledge, compressed it into queryable lossy compression models (which is what LLMs are), and are selling it back to us.
Meta, with its "open weights" models, is one of the least guilty parties, since at least they've made the resulting blobs of mass piracy available to us. Same with Mistral, Deepseek, etc.
ClosedAI, Google, and others have all probably done this and more and refuse to make even the model available.
I think the way to deal with this is very simple:
If you have trained your model on works to which you do not have rights or permission, the resulting model is not copyrightable and cannot be sold. It must either be kept for research purposes only or released free of charge and in the public domain. All these models that have been trained on pirated works should become public domain.
Of course now that we have full capture of the US Federal Government I'm sure any suggestion like that would be neutralized with one bribe to Trump.
The only bad thing about this is that small time players who do it are treated poorly (Aaron Swartz). IP de-facto not existing for AI companies is a feature, not a bug.
The fact that most of the world embraced hardcore copyright troll ludditism when the means of their (badly paying creative) jobs economic production was democratized implies that most people do not believe in any "egalitarianism" and especially not the left-wing form many profess to believe in. Certainly not "information wants to be free" or any of the other idealist shit that I or Aaron Swartz believed in. What meta did was software communism - full stop. They literally released their models to the public! I support all of this 10000%. The only issue is that they're not open enough (fully open source the dataset)
So, unironically, good! Thank you, please pirate more! Please destroy the US IP system while you're at it. Copyright abolitionism is good and thank you Zuckerberg!
We're grateful to Meta for helping seed and backup our torrents. The more copies the better. Thank you Meta, for helping preserve humanity's legacy! :)
Copy-right is not learn/train-right. That said Meta full its mouth with open source while they release models that are not SOTA nor usable for commercial purposes.
Wouldn't it be a real shame if the entirety of US constitution, laws, and legal precedence went out the window these days, and the only thing left unscathed was the rotten mess that is copyright law? Just saying, this might be the moment to burn it to the ground. Not that it makes up for any of the other stuff going on, but why waste a perfectly good crisis?
We're starting to find out that Meta ruined LibGen for the rest of use who used it like a library.
Just like how Google screwed over libraries by sending interns to the Stanford library to checkout books they scanned into Google Books.
Not to increase shared knowledge or preserve human artificats,
but to put them all in a museum and, to paraphrase Joni Mitchell,
charge the people a dollar and a half just to see 'em.
We need better justice system that enforces the laws we have in the books that would help compensate right owners when big companies in emails pirate terabytes of data.
I really don't think that Meta did this because the alternative would have been too onerous; they are a huge org, they could work through whatever loopholes required. They did it because it would have cost money and there will be no penalty for not paying.
I must have failed to clearly express myself - I don't think Meta should be doing what they are doing, I hope they do end up being punished. But the only way that Meta is going to change its behaviour is by being held accountable in a way that's much more difficult and costly than if they'd simply followed the law in the first place.
Ah, I'm not sure exactly what I believe here, but this kind of torrenting is obviously illegal-- I'm personally split on how I feel about it morally, because some of these people really are trying to preserve knowledge, and I think that's commendable, at the same time, commercial piracy is something which really does screw over authors with it being some kind of theft-of-service type thing where people exploit other people's work-- and if they felt that the work had no value they could have written another text themselves.
I only really wanted to convey that I believed that it probably isn't obviously easy for Meta to get away with anything in this, even if the US government decides to be lenient for the sake of a high market-cap US company simply because other countries are a viable place to sue as well.
I think I misinterpreted your comment as that you thought that Meta thought that costs would be low because they imagined a US court system that simply ignored the illegality because it's they who committed it, when nothing like that is actually implied in your comment.
Yes it smells bad but facebook did the right thing (at least for facebook)
After OpenAI trained their models on the famed books2 dataset, and seeing the technological implications of ChatGPT, there was a good chance they would let them get away with it.
Would the USA really surrender its AI technological advantage for trivial matters like copyright? They would make some royalty arrangement and get it over with
Yeah well, OpenAI compressed the whole internet into proprietary weights and is now providing access via paid subscription while the original internet gets deleted from our culture.
Come on publishers! This is your chance! Now you can really show, how you will treat all copyright infringements equally and not only go after easy target. Show us, how you spend all that money in a lawsuit against Meta!
The article says they got datasets from Anna's Archive. It was most likely the scihub/libgen torrent which is 96.0 TB right now and contains 92,872,581 files. That's about 1 megabyte per file.
Sometimes the PDF of a book is big because the book's packed with important illustrations and charts - like a textbook or journal paper.
Other times a PDF of a book is big because someone scanned it and didn't have trustworthy OCR, so they figured distributing images of text at 1.5 MB per page was better than risking OCR errors.
So they're gonna go through every book that was stolen and apply the appropriate penalty, right? Each copyrighted work has a minimum penalty of $750 under the DMCA. That will be applied fairly in order to ensure that the rights holder is made whole by the infringer, right?
It's so funny to see the law blatantly ignored by the overlords. Like, there isn't even a pretext anymore. They just steal what they want and budget for the fines and campaign donations to make the consequences go away.
Not that I have any particular sympathy for the guy, but could we keep the tone a bit more civil around here? HN is one of the few bastions of grounded discussion on the internet, and I’d prefer to keep it that way.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
We are trying to advance civilization here. To accumulate and make available all human knowledge to date. And you stand there with your hand out to stop this? You are a villain. There is no sympathy for you.
I deleted my facebook account about 10 years ago. Downloaded data, deleted. Not deactivated.
Nothing in my life made me ever want to go back except for when I got back into playing hockey, and all the hockey leagues use facebook to communicate a few months ago.
I made a new account, had to literally upload a picture of my face to pass verification.. and then a few days later I was immediately banned and couldn't use my account. I assume because they searched previous data and compared my face to find out I have a "deleted" (lol) account and matched me. I've assumed they'll only let me log in if i use my original 10 years ago deleted account.
And they're going to get away with it simply because if you or I openly did this the DMCA fines would be for a million trillion dollars. Since Meta shareholders can't stomach a million trillion dollars in fines, their lawyers will wave their magic wands and poof! No laws were broken!
Nothing is gonna happen.
Just a slap on the hand.
And we all from the intelectual work class, writers, journalists, programmers will be proletarized by LLMs that have been:
a) Financed via inflation/"cantillon effect" due to ZRP/Stimulus that absolutely flooded the market with funny money in the hand of the sharks.
b) Trained upon copyrighted work without compensation.
c) Trained upon open source without even asking politely for authorization.
The Robber Barons from the last century can't even get close to our modern Feudal Tech Lords.
Unless you're one of us that have amassed multi-generation wealth in a exit in the last 20 years, you're completely fucked.
Based on the encyclopedic knowledge LLMs have of written works I assume all parties did the same. But I think there is a broader point to make here. Youtube was initially a ghost town (it started as a dating site) and it only got traction once people started uploading copyrighted TV shows to it. Google itself got big by indexing other people's data without compensation. Spotify's music library was also pirated in the early days. The contracts with the music labels came later. GPL violations by commercial products fits the theme also.
Companies aggressively protect their own intellectual property but have no qualms about violating the IP rights of others. Companies. Individuals have no such privilege. If you plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers you forfeit your life.
Everyone on here is smart enough. Just do not participate and save your money. Do not pay for digital goods. If Netflix raises their prices, it doesn't matter because there is a torrent of all of their shows. If Spotify raises their prices, it doesn't matter because your favorite artist has their entire library in a torrent. If some game company ask you to pay real life prices for a digital costume, find the crack online and play on a private server. If YouTube wants to interrupt your video with an ad in the middle of the sentence, download one of the many options that blocks all ads. Billion dollar companies have shown they do not care about you. The people who complain about losing their salary, should just get replies thanking them for paying.
All the sad poor people who might be hurt were already paid. The caterer on your favorite show is not getting residuals. NBC also isn't going to stop making TV shows because that is all they can do. Content creators also existed on the internet long before that was a job. They just did it because they cared about it not for ad money. If you really want to support the artist directly go to a concert or just mail them a check. If you can't actually identify a person who might be hurt, then do not care.
I just can't get behind the sentiment that the unethical behavior by big companies means I get to access all the content I want for free.
Imo it’s not about you accessing things you want for free. If your family purchased a disc copy of the goonies before you were born and you watched it as a kid, your accessing of that content you wanted for free has no moral bearing. The core question is what impact does your consumption have, and I don’t think that participating in the streaming landscape is making things any better for anyone but their ceos.
The comment I was responding to certainly seemed to be advocating uninhibited free access via torrents, but your point is reasonable. I don't think streaming is a great way to support artists either, though I do think it's better than nothing.
I just don’t think streaming is really working for anybody. Artists are being given less and less creative control as time goes on as each streaming company attempts to optimize itself in a largely fixed market. It’s working the same way cable used to work. I think a disruption is in order, but last time disruption started with people moving to nascent torrent sites.
I guess the way I’d put it is that if you can only get some particular show through one company, that company gets to treat you shitty, cause where else are you gonna go. Torrenting, even just widespread knowledge of torrenting, gives the customer more leverage.
But is torrenting better than buying music e.g. through bandcamp or directly from the artist's label? I do a combination of streaming for exploratory listening and buying to support artists. And live shows when I can. I'm not trying to suggest I'm holier than thou, but I really don't think torrents are the answer to this equation. However I strongly agree that the current system isn't working for artists and needs disruption.
I know music can be bought from the artist, but is that true for shows or movies?
Fair point, I tend to think more about music artists than film/TV.
Yeah for torrenting I tend to think more about video media.
Also if you pirate everything you're not incentivizing people to make things in a more ethical manner. I've mostly cancelled my streaming services (I'll get different ones for a month at a time for specific shows) but I still pay for Dropout.tv (when they turned a profit they paid out a dividend to actors) and Patreon for YouTube creators that have high quality content.
I think the point is, using Spotify is already essentially listening to your artists without supporting them. You might as well do that without supporting a company that is harming them.
Thank you for your service
At least your human right of watching a netflix show is unaffected
They have no morals, therefore I shouldn't either! That'll teach 'em!
A whole lot of people in the tech scene got really mad when Huawei was using obviously stolen Cisco designs and code for their switches. Didn’t humanity benefit from having cheaper access to switches because they didn’t have to pay for Cisco’s sunk costs? A whole lot of people got mad when Microsoft reportedly ganked open source code for things like DNS. Didn’t humanity benefit from one of the world’s most popular server OSs having more reliable name resolution?
Oh, but corporations were the primary beneficiaries, right?
Well, corporations are the primary beneficiaries of this too from a financial perspective. A vanishingly small percentage of people will run, let alone train these models themselves— it’s almost exclusively used to make commercial services that directly compete against the people that made the initial ” data“. But, the vanishingly small percentage of people that directly utilize this stuff for non-commercial use frequent echo chambers like this that make them think more regular people benefit directly. And the companies that are competing directly with creatives and intellectuals using their stolen work employ a whole lot of people here, directly or not.
The distinction between a reason and a justification gets pretty difficult to distinguish the closer you are to the group benefiting from injustice.
I’d completely disagree, because China was the beneficiary and it destroyed North American jobs.
China needs to respect the American trademark system!
> I’d completely disagree, because China was the beneficiary and it destroyed North American jobs.
a) The whole point of commercial NN services is to replace human labor, and jobs are paid labor. Literally the entire point of LLMs is to destroy jobs; this isn't hypothetical-- US companies have openly talked about having fired people and not filled roles because they either have increased or hope to increase efficiency with LLMs. And that's in tech where there's a chance more jobs will be created as a result-- the situation is far worse in creative fields. I personally know quite a few north American creative workers that have lost their jobs because the studios they work for have replaced almost the entire department with image generators that the remaining workers use to spray-and-pray concept art and game assets. Comparatively, the argument that they will create more jobs-- even as many jobs-- as they destroy is pure speculation.
b) Considering you're willing to have in-group protectionism in the form of nationalism, I'm guessing you're willing to extend that to industry, so creative workers don't count? Is it only American tech jobs that count or are you against American LLMs that replace any American workers, also?
> China needs to respect the American trademark system!
Trademarks? I assume you're talking about the patent system rather than logos... and legally they don't, actually. The US doesn't respect Chinese patents, either. How many times have you heard of a US company stopping doing something because a Chinese company patented it first? Do you really think we just invent everything first over here?
The observation being made here is that copyright law serves to protect the interests of large companies, not the public, so violating copyright law is, in and of itself, not unethical.
If buying is not owning, piracy is not stealing.
Whereas i agree that the current regime of "licensing" is not good, I simultaneously find it incredibly selfish to believe that one has the right to any content one likes.
"Own nothing" is bad, but so is "access and share anything." Both positions are too extreme.
I try to buy/rent/legitimately stream all the media I consume. But I've run into issues where I would "buy" a license to a movie, and suddenly I don't have access to a movie. I'm sure it was for some publishing licensing legal reason, but the fact remains that they kept my money I paid for the movie and I don't have what I paid for.
I wouldn't say I have a fundamental right to any content, but certainly I have a right to content I paid for.
I think your position is reasonable!
Well yeah, because it’s dumb.
“There is no ethical consumption under capitalism”
Who even thinks that ethical consumption exists under any system? Any of your consumption denies it to others. Some consumption is a necessity of course. We wouldn't speak of something absurd like "ethical breathing".
[dead]
I'm not paying for Led Zeppelin IV after having probably bought 3 copies in my lifetime. I agree with you.
if you want to support an artist go to the show and BUY MERCH at the table! almost all of their income comes from that. the importance of buying a T-shirt at the show cannot be overstated and sometimes you get to say hi to your idol, too
It's a stupid situation, though. There are many creators I'm happy to support - but for 99% of them, I don't want their stupid merch. It's mostly low-quality garbage with high markup, that nevertheless cost something to design and produce, thus wasting both precious resources and labor - an useless tax on contributions to artists that doesn't even help anything. I really wish this wasn't necessary.
(Even the okay-quality merch is a waste, since for most artists I'd want to support, I don't identify with them enough to display that stuff, so it's again just buying to put away and eventually throw away.)
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a band selling merch that didn’t also have a tip jar.
I've never seen a band that had. I usually end up buying CDs that then end up on the shelf or in a drawer, never opened.
Well, and like the venue will take 50% of merch sales or some , which makes Apple look kinda generous.
What is the point of this comment? Just a stream of consciousness for a future LLM sweep? Nobody thinks that the actual creator should get nothing. Are you asking for better T shirts? Do you want more direct ways of just giving cash?
I agree mostly with their comment.
What I want more than anything is for bands to just sell me a damned CD. I've lost track of how many times an artist I want to support doesn't release their music on CD. I'd even settle for DRM-free flacs, if it costs less than a CD.
High quality sheet music would be cool. Lindsey Stirling is the only artist I can think of that does that though. Rasputina used to at one point.
Let them ask a tenner for an album download code.
The latter, yes.
A lot of artists are under a 360 deal and they take a cut of everything, so that might not always be true.
By a lot you mean a minority and by artist you mean professional musician in contract with large label, correct ?
I live in New Orleans, that one of the few place where is see artists in the street living from their art. Paying rent by playing music.
None of them have a 360 deal. And their is hundred of them just in New Orleans.
I sometimes think my adblocker should very much lie to the page that "yeah, watched that, totally" in an undetectable way.
https://adnauseam.io/
It takes like a quarter hour to process the entire ad blob on my old machine, and it's over $70k in ads clicked.
Between that and pihole I see very few ads. Being out and watching a yt video is shocking with how many ads there are - and what type.
Goat
If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing
lol I absolutely do not want non digital goods nor pirating. Ever. It's 2025. I don't have a cdplayer, a tape player, a blue ray player, I don't even know what the most modern "blue ray" disc would be. I have $2k worth of vinyls that are just unique copies I display as art I'll never put in my record player, that's also never been used. I don't want to constantly worry about 60gb of mp3 files.
Oh no, that TV show I'll forget about in a year cost me $15/mo instead of $60 of blurays.
I jump in my cars and hit a button and music plays. Almost any music I want. That's amazing.
I'm also not pirating games. I'm not 12 without a job. I have a job. I pay developers for their work. I want more games, like Kingdom Come 3, to come out.
Weird ass comment. You seriously think we're going to put our lives on hold to.. what, fight "digital media"? You think I care about netflix? Or societies use of it? I haven't used netflix in years. I don't know anybody under 40 with a netflix account. Everyone on your end of the pirate spectrum uses debrid nowadays, anyway.
Next you're going to tell people to install the "Black XP Windows" edition to not support Microsoft and they all get malware and their credit cards stolen because they installed some pirated and modified cracked windows. Genius.
MSNBC just cancelled Andrea Mitchells TV show, today, because she brought in no younger audiences. So yes, shows do get cancelled by not being watched.
This comment was upvoted? Hn needs a break. This is some I'm 14 and edgy bullshit that sounds like it belongs on an eastern european piracy forum.
>MSNBC just cancelled Andrea Mitchells TV show, today, because she brought in no younger audiences. So yes, shows do get cancelled by not being watched.
Did anyone, young or old, want to watch an 80 year old stumble over her words, lose her train of thought, and speak so painfully slow? She had built up connections over her long career but was basically unwatchable. The worst part of a Kamala presidency would have been her on the news and not in retirement.
I'm celebrating it today. No idea who is replacing her but I am ecstatic.
You're arguing for media as a service. I think many people are tired of the SASS everything model. It's generally user hostile, you need multiple different services, there are dark patterns and you still have to endure ads. Privacy issues too. Piracy is definitely superior.
I don't know how you went from "don't pay for overpriced digital goods, just pirate them instead" to "hurr durr start using blurays and vinyls".
Reading comprehension is a lost art nowadays.
He just wantrd to express how superior to the young kids he is .. while all the points about ethics, freedom, and privacy went over his head.
Yes. And the problem here isn't that companies get away with doing things like this, the problem is that individuals don't. Attempting to lock information behind a nightmarish legal system is the problem.
I'm pretty much at the point now where I don't buy the "copyright incentivizes creation" argument any more. Copyright, like advertising, incentivizes creation by enormous corporations, but also like advertising it incentivizes creations that overwhelmingly have little value.
Creative individuals don't need copyright to be incentivized to create—they need a safety net that gives them the freedom to spend time on the creativity that naturally wants to bubble out. If the goal is to encourage creativity, copyright is a lousy and enormously expensive substitute for Universal Basic Income.
Also, in Canada, it's basically impossible to protect your IP as an individual due to the astronomical cost and lack of options to recover that cost. So copyright will never incentivize my creations, or those of any small creator.
Sure creative people will always create but the scope of that creativity will be limited if we do away with intellectual property. Steve Spielberg would probably always have created movies, but he wouldn't have been able to make Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan,or Indiana Jones without capital from the studio system, and the studio system wouldn't have provided him with that capital of they couldn't extract economic rents from the copyright for those films.
I think a limited, short copyright can do good that the current many-year copyright does not. Imagine a 1 year copyright in the context of film. Companies would prioritize box office sales no doubt, but that’s how it used to be and it was generally positive. It’s really the extremity of modern copyright that I think causes these issues.
Do we need to always have big-budget films and productions? Perhaps we should live smaller, and enjoy local art and low-budget films. Do I really care that Jurassic Park was made? I could read the book and it's more detailed and imaginative anyways, and any lessons to be learned are definitely better when read than when watching a blockbuster CGI film with more effects than message.
"Let's create a world where all TV and movies have the production values of Public Access" is a poor pitch. Even if you don't mind that, you have to understand that, politically, it's a non-starter.
Yea sounds dumb like that I agree.
They could have started a crowdfunded project and might still have made a great movie. If people truly like the created movie, why noch fund another one? Only no one would be paid millions for acting most likely, and that would be fine.
Nothing stops you from downloading Ann’s archive and training a model on it, right? The likelihood that you, as an individual, get sued over is is virtually zero.
This is what Meta tried to do, quietly download and use the data, to do research and advance their LLMs, without trying to establish any legal precedents or pick up fights.
In Germany people are sued for illegal movie downloading all the time. It's hard to imagine the companies behind that operation aren't aware that you can also download books.
People are also sued over books
Individuals do get away with it all of the time.
> If you plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers you forfeit your life.
In case anybody here doesn't know, that's a reference to Aaron Swartz, an activist (and Reddit co-founder) that was risking 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine just for downloading a lot of academic papers from JSTOR. He eventually took his life because of the pressure. May his soul rest in peace.
Except he was offered 6 months in a plea bargain, which he declined because he wanted a trial. Whether 6 months was reasonable punishment for "plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers" is another matter, but "you forfeit your life" or "35 years in prison and a $1 million fine " is massively misleading.
Swartz wasn't the kind of person to accept a plea bargain from an overzealous prosecutor who was indicting him on 13 felony charges with a possible sentence up to 35 years along with a $1 million fine. I assume he wanted a trial because he wanted to continue his fight for open access. And maybe he thought he might lose, but wouldn't lose on all counts, and would make the prosecution look unreasonable in the public eye. Was that decision rational from a self-interest point of view? Maybe not.
And then you might ask, if he wanted a trial, why did he kill himself? Obviously no one knows what was going through his head when he did it. He left no note. But the prospect of being locked in a cell until he was an old man probably had something to do with it.
You can certainly argue it was his own fault for not pleading down, but even if that's your view, that doesn't absolve the prosecutor. Ortiz has a lot of blame in this too, and the fact she still hasn't acknowledged it over a decade later speaks volumes to the kind of person she is.
His criminality is one matter, but the full weight of the Federal Government on him was an entirely separate matter. A federal prosecutor's job is to jail you regardless of whether it is for downloading a file from a server or for trafficking in humans, and they will come at you with the same vigor regardless of the crime. And nothing has changed about that.
Treating a human trafficker and someone who downloaded some files from a server the same is not in the job description of a prosecutor. What an absurd statement. It's very much the job of a prosecutor to make judgements about the severity of the crime and how to respond. And in this case, the prosecutor showed incredibly poor judgement. There wasn't even a particular reason why the case should go federal in the first place. The state prosecutor saw things very differently.
The job of a prosecutor is to get a guilty verdict, the judge decides the sentence. At least that's how i understand it.
The prosecutor can tack on stupid charges, e.g. Luigi Mangione getting a terrorism charge, and pursue punishments
Isn't that what this whole thread is about? They're surely not going to come after Meta with the same vigor.
That is complete bullshit as evidenced by the federal criminal sitting president.... The ONLY time I ever see this argument is to try and paint over blatant police and state injustice and tyranny.
"A federal prosecutor's job is to jail you regardless of whether it is for downloading a file from a server or for trafficking in humans, and they will come at you with the same vigor regardless of the crime."
You have to be malicious to put forward this statement in the current environment. Or you are so propagandized you think it's true? Either one is very frightening
I agree there's more nuance here than was initially stated, but I also think there's more nuance than simply "he was offered 6 months". Even if he was offered 6 days, the ways in which someone's life and livelihood changes by having ever been convicted of a crime and gone to prison, is dramatic. This is especially true in white collar work and/or knowledge work.
Schwartz was a research fellow at Harvard. Really think he would've been able to continue?
Wild to see the concept of the plea bargain being defended. It's a blatant retraction of the due process clause from the bill of rights, and here you are defending it.
[dead]
Thanks for sharing this. Reading his story is kind of insane honestly. He created the CC licenses which I did not know. What an icon, truly.
On that note, Lawrence Lessigs talks on copyright from that period are worth a watch https://youtu.be/9xbRE_H5hoU
Thanks, I thought it was a sarcastic reference to torrents. So this cleared that up
> once people started uploading copyrighted TV shows to it
End users, not YouTube employees, right? And they would take things down following DMCA requests and what not, right? So, pretty much following the law?
> Google itself got big by indexing other people's data without compensation
Scraping public websites to build a search index isn't the same as making LLMs that can recreate the source verbatim devoid of even attribution. I do agree there's an argument to be had about the LLM's transformative nature in the end though.
> Spotify's music library was also pirated in the early days
Not any version generally available to the public, and with the copyright holder's permission to do so.
I think he's thinking of Grooveshark
the english empire once tried to mantain a monopoly over steam loom machines
the americans cheated their way to competition,
heck, even before that, the english empire got jumpstarted by stealing gold from the spanish (who were themselves exploiting it away from aztec and other mexican natives)
I'm saying it's business as usual, but also, culture doesn't work like tangible physical widgets so we must stop letting a few steal this boon of digital copying by means of silly ideas like DRM, copyright, patents. all means to cause scarcity
The textile industry in Brno here in Czech Republic (sometimes called "Moravian Manchester") was hugely helped by a local noble posing as a worker in England & the smuggling detailed self-drawn plans of industrial machinery back:
"Brno’s fortunes were changed forever when a young freemason called Franz Hugo Salma set out for England in 1801. He intended to steal the plans for the most modern textile machinery in the world. His crime, the first recorded act of industrial espionage, boosted the competitiveness of Moravian textiles. Soon after smuggling the plans out disguised as a worker, and handing them over to Brno’s fledgling textile industry, Brno became the most important textile centre in the Habsburg empire."
You can even go see some of the original plans in a museum:
"Eleven designs are still preserved in the library of the Rájec chateau. They form a unique set of documents demonstrating both the level of wool processing technology at the turn of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as well as the aims and means of the relatively rare business of industrial espionage at that time."
https://www.gotobrno.cz/en/brno-phenomenon/this-is-brno-kate... https://www.gotobrno.cz/en/place/salm-reifferscheidt-palace/
Hollywood became popular for filmmaking because they were literally the opposite side of the country from Thomas Edison and his patents...
United Kingdom was the first to steal a Chinese invention called gunpowder, use it to maximum effect and they were also at the opposite sides of the world.
Do not forget the first law passed by a new nation in which every citizen has the right to burn trees and produce potassium a critical mineral in gunpowder. That nation was either Greece or America, i forget which one.
In the Western civilizations, when we are stealing copyrighted material and patents we are not messing around. I remember when the Byzantine empire tried to steal secrets of silk production also from Chinese, that was so much fun. Great times we lived in the past, even greater now!
That and the predictable weather (old film needs lots of light).
This is interesting, is it really true?
People criming in the past is not an excuse for companies committing crimes today. You’re excusing lawlessness.
Cain killed Abel and got away with it!! I can kill someone today too!!!
I think it’s fine to criticize the hypocrisy of viciously defending the copyrights you own, while gleefully running roughshod over the ones you don’t.
But it’s also possible that copyright as a concept, or in its current implementation, is bad and unjust.
I’m sure some copyright holders would like nothing more than to see an argument that elevates copyright violation to the level of murder, morally or legally. But I think it’s more akin to jaywalking - violating an unjust law that mostly shouldn’t exist.
the reform needs to happen at the layer where whether a copyright is valid or not is decided upon, not before (at the point of "should copyright exist") and not after (enforcement).
a world without copyright means those with the largest advertising budgets will reap nearly all the rewards from new IP created by small artists. BigCorp Inc. can just sit around and wait for talented musicians to post something interesting on soundcloud, for example, then just have their in-house people copy it and push it out to radio and streaming platforms via their massive ad budgets and favorable relationships for getting new material onto the waves immediately. meanwhile the original artist gets nothing.
the position of advocating against all copyright protections at all only makes sense for people who are already wealthy enough that they don't need proceeds from their art to survive.
I don’t think this is true. At least in music, bands make far more money from touring and merch than they do from music sales.
If copyright disappeared altogether, most smaller artists would be just fine because they have loyal fans and adjacent monetization strategies.
See: Grateful Dead. They did just fine despite encouraging infringement of IP.
IMO copyright mostly serves to protect the very biggest artists and companies, not the small ones.
I think the point was that the big corporations get the money from selling music.
And saying that bands currently make more money from touring kind of proves the point. They get too low % cut of music sales.
But the point of the response is that "getting money from selling music" is, in digital era, artificial scarcity. I.e. the copyright laws that big corporations are lobbying for continued enforcement and tightening, are the very thing that create this artificial scarcity that they are best positioned to profit off.
Cut out copyright, and no one will be getting any money from selling music per copy (or equivalent) - as it should be.
digital music is not artificial scarcity, because it's not the copied bits that are the resource, it's attention. we only have so much time and attention for consuming media, and only so much attention and memory space in our brains for keeping track of where to find it. large budgets can easily dominate these channels and limit the average person's apparent choice.
this is what I mean when large players would outcompete smaller players in a digital marketplace with no copyright. the only way for this to work would be with a benevolent neutral 3rd party managing the marketplace, like Steam, so users can easily see when a large player is cloning a smaller players work - but even then it still depends on the good will of the general public to prefer the "original" artist which is not guaranteed.
Are you talking about mere distribution? In that case, a few large players leveraging scale to drive costs down to near zero sounds great.
I’m still not seeing how lack of copyright hurts small artists or consumers. Small distributors, maybe, but that’s not doing harm to the arts.
> the position of advocating against all copyright protections at all only makes sense for people who are already wealthy enough that they don't need proceeds from their art to survive.
This makes it sound like the majority of people produce more content than they consume.
The reality is that 99.99999% of people do not produce "art", let alone with the intention of living of it.
Whatever harms you might envision for the tiny minority who do want to try living off copyright, those concerns are dwarfed by the benefits for the rest of us.
Further, not many people who are serious about reform are literally "advocating against all copyright" A reform that simply curbed the duration to something less insane than 150 years would resolve much of what makes copyright bad, even if it continued to exist.
Cain was severely punished.
וְעַתָּ֖ה אָר֣וּר אָ֑תָּה מִן־הָֽאֲדָמָה֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר פָּצְתָ֣ה אֶת־פִּ֔יהָ לָקַ֛חַת אֶת־דְּמֵ֥י אָחִ֖יךָ מִיָּדֶֽךָ׃ Therefore, you shall be more cursed than the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.
https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.4.12
Jack the Ripper killed people and got away with it!!! Happy?
Better! Thanks.
But the crime is creating something new. If laws are enforced that criminalise creation, then the world will be rather static.
It seems to be a consistent direction of history's arc that the people who make it easy to create and innovate get ahead.
We don’t allow indiscriminate human experimentation in medicine. We have crimes against this, and yet we still have new medicines. Sure, it won’t be as quick if we could just use humans as test subjects from the start, but that’s an unethical line. Innovation done immorally is progress that shouldn’t have been made. The ends don’t justify the means, but I’m not an ethical nihilist.
The crime is downloading and copying and distributing copyrighted materials! Not creating the LLM! Get the crime right
Those medical policies have condemned thousands, possibly millions, to lives of unnecessary pain and suffering. They're more damaging than copyright.
You actually don’t know that. The question would be, what proportion of human experiments are successful, and you don’t know the answer to that question, so the victims of experiments could dwarf the beneficiaries of successful research. That’s always the hard thing with basic utilitarianism.
1) It is an experiment. The point is to test something that nobody is sure about. Whether the result is expected or unexpected there isn't really such a thing as "unsuccessful"; even duplication of work is considered useful.
2) If you think the cost-benefits are bad, my advice is don't sign up to be experimented on. Nobody has to be experimented on if they don't want to be.
1) Experiments, by their nature, must spend resources in order to produce tangible results. In this case the relevant results are saved lives, and the expenditure is often going to be lives. You framed your comment in these terms, I’m arguing the costs very well may not be justifiable by the benefits. You’d need to make a case for that.
2) What if the families of experimentees receive payment? Allowing that would be a short way down the slippery slope from allowing the experimentation, and would make the matter of consent more difficult to assess.
Ok, I’ll go tell the Nazis that their medical experiments using live humans were A-OK!!!
Interesting, if we're to trust what NotOpenAI and Facebook say about their IP, the US should pay the UK reparations for IP theft based on textile industry profits starting in the 1850s until today?
Why do I get sued when I share some BitTorrents but $bigcorp can just do it with 1000 scale without problems?
The issue here is not copyright/patents/etc - the issue is that the law is applied selectively — the issue is that Aaron Schwartz is dead for sharing knowledge with the public and Zuccborg is a billionaire building his torment nexus
I mean this news broke today. It may be premature to declare that nobody will sue Meta. In fact I would cheerfully bet that someone will, and that they will spend more in defense/settlement than any 1000 individuals would.
I don't think I've heard the term "English empire". Is it an attempt by the Scottish to pretend they weren't involved?
I was assuming they were talking about pre-1706 given the Spanish gold context.
Is this an attempt to imply the Scots had imperial ambitions and have not been fighting to keep their homes free of invasion for several thousand years?
Fuck this sounds familiar right now
Didn't Scotland try to make an empire in Eastern Canada, eastern USA, Africa, and Panama, then bankrupt themselves and agree to the Act of Union with England making Great Britain?
Lol. If you call a segment of the merchant class (kind of like silicon valley) the entirety of the country and ethnic group.
But that would be a major misunderstanding. So no.
>Is this an attempt to imply the Scots had imperial ambitions and have not been fighting to keep their homes free of invasion for several thousand years?
Obviously yes. Who have they been fighting to avoid invasion exactly?
>Fuck this sounds familiar right now
Maybe you read it in a history textbook.
Hmm, no you misunderstand. Scotland was consumed by monied interests from across the water long ago. Now there’s just scattered populations, many of us dispossessed of our ancestral homes and not all by choice.
The past doesn’t vanish because of what Rome and its inheritors accords as history. Some of us have long memories.
It is particularly a prescient notion because I happen to be living in Canada. If you’ve read the news you should understand what I’m saying.
Just like Austria's greatest historical accomplishment: convincing the world the Hitler was German
In Spotify’s defense, they used the pirated data only to show a proof of concept to the copyright holders, and that use was sanctioned by the local rights holders organization STIM.
The copyright holders then approved their concept, and subsequently Spotify got the rights to offer their service to customers. Everybody won.
That’s not entirely true, in Spotify’s early days you could upload files to the service and listen to songs uploaded by other people. I think the majority of any song I wanted to listen to before they went Europe-only for a time was “pirated”.
Indeed. I remember there was one song that used a pirated variant and you could tell because it had an obvious artifact that was accidentally introduced in a pirated copy of the song!
Fair. I stand corrected.
> Spotify's music library was also pirated in the early days.
I want to know more, please enlighten me (anyone who knows). I read the book "The Spotify Play" and it made it seem like the pirated music was an internal-only thing and not something available to customers. Is that true?
Before the launch, Spotify had a deal with the music rights holders association in Sweden (STIM) that they could use a merged collection of friends and families music libraries. All this was removed before Spotify went out of beta.
So while it was using pirated media, it was sanctioned by the rights holders for the experiment of building Spotify.
Users would upload their copies of the music and spotify would replay them. This was obvious to early users, even if they were only consumers, because of the pirate-shout-out-overlays that were in a lot of the poorer quality releases.
Another interesting note, in the early days of spotify, the app would saturate your upload bandwidth while using it. Given their close ties to utorrent, I always assumed that's how they were affording the bandwidth as well.
Pretty brilliant way to bootstrap I guess; they didn't have to pay for bandwidth or content until they already had contracts in place
Afaik, the trick was to stream (via http, I assume) the first few hundred kilobytes or so from fast/expensive servers and then try to p2p the rest in some clever order. I guess seeking also triggered the fast/expensive path for a while.
"Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist" by Liz Pelly goes into more detail about their origins and the culture around piracy in Sweden at the time.
https://lizpelly.info/book
> If you plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers you forfeit your life.
Just to point, but the material in question was public domain, so nobody had even a copyrights claim over it.
Do you have a citation for that claim? I've not seen a claim that none of the material had copyright before.
It's a library of historical scientific work. You will find the famous Einstein's 3 1905 papers there, for example.
Every scientific paper in the last 90 years or so is still under copyright, owned by the authors, the published, or the universities.
JSTOR was explicitly a library of public domain works, consolidated in a single place so that academic libraries could access those papers that nobody had an interest in distributing anymore.
It recently added a bunch of copyrighted journals. It didn't have any of those at the time.
I re-read the MIT report by Abelson and it looks like JSTOR was an archive of old scientific articles from many journals, most of them still under copyright by the journal. I'd need to see more evidence that it was public domain.
Crunchyroll started off as a straight up piracy site, it now has millions of paying subscribers and was sold to Sony for over a billion a few years ago.
I think if Google attempted to download the entirety of JSTOR with the express intent of making the full dataset freely available, then Google would also face legal consequences.
It's true, and relevant, that Google would feel those consequences much less sharply than Swartz did.
Don't buy into the rhetoric and call it "consequences". It's always a choice to sue, a choice to prosecute, and this would be true even if these choices were made consistently and impartially (which they certainly aren't).
I wasn't meaning to attach a pejorative to "consequences", but the word does typically have that meaning so you're right to call me out. Perhaps "resulting legal issues" would be a better way to put it.
For the record, I think the consequence was grossly disproportionate to the action.
Google Scholar explicitly made direct deals with publishers to scrape their content, with the constraint that while they can use the content to serve search results in Scholar, but cannot show the content of the papers on the site- just titles and short fragments that match. the deals were tenuous and I had to step carefully around my plan to use that database to implement large-scale scientific search over the literature (this was a long time before anybody was seriously considering using LLMs on research data).
I've spoken to several very wealthy/powerful people and tried to get them to negotiate a large-scale content license with the various publishers that would allow researchers and individuals to access more research in lower-friction ways. None of them (NIH, Schmidt, etc) were really interested.
Google book search was declared fair use and copyright holders ended up having to explicitly request removal of their works.
Apparently he would have gotten away with downloading the JSTOR database if he made it clear that he intended to only publish half of each paper.
Yes, these companies are based on massive IP and copyright theft. And they still want to lecture others about their "property rights".
Something to understand about capitalist competition (also in politics) is that it's a war. Not one with guns and bombs, but more like a cold war, with espionage and hacking and just generally doing anything you can to gain an advantage without bringing negative consequences on yourself.
The limit is what you can actually get away with, not what the rules say you can get away with, and the system aggressively selects players who recognize this. It's amoral - there is no "ought", only "is". An actor gets punished or not, with absolutely no regard to whether it "should" get punished. One thing is consistent: following the rules as written means you lose.
You can see it in Y Combinator (and other) startups. The biggest ex-startups are things like AirBNB (hotels but we don't follow the rules but we don't get punished for not following them) and Uber (taxis but we don't follow the rules but we don't get punished for not following them).
One way to not get punished for not following the rules is to invent a variation of the game where the rules haven't been written yet. I again refer you to AirBNB and Uber; Omegle also comes to mind, although they didn't monetize.
Viewed in this light, Aaron Swartz's mistake was not the part where he downloaded journal articles, but the part where he got caught downloading journal articles. Shadow library sites are doing the same thing, minus the getting caught. So are Meta and Google and OpenAI. sci-hub is only involved in a lawsuit because it got caught and is now in the stage where it finds out whether it gets punished or not.
> Something to understand about capitalist competition (also in politics) is that it's a war.
Turns out there are 2 simultaneous wars there. One where companies and individuals compete ruthlessly.
And another one where if non profit associations of individuals form, guns come out.
Aaron committed suicide and FBI going after him was meant more as a lesson to the other kids at MIT than anything.
MegaUpload did the same, kim dotcom got raided in his sleep by FBI in New Zealand! So no I don't buy your reductionist argument, there are forces at play that allow companies with founders with the likes of Google to get away with it but not others.
> Youtube was initially a ghost town (it started as a dating site) and it only got traction once people started uploading copyrighted TV shows to it
To this day, there are a huge number of videos that show copyrighted content on YouTube; they are usually crappy clips, reversed and with different music playing in the background to avoid automated detection.
"Zuckerberg was at White House for meetings on Thursday" - https://www.reuters.com/world/us/zuckerberg-was-white-house-...
> Based on the encyclopedic knowledge LLMs have of written works I assume all parties did the same.
I don't understand why you wouldn't just buy copies of the books. Seems like such a relatively inexpensive way to strengthen your legal case.
Buying a copy of the book doesn’t grant you the right to copy it. That is what copyright is for.
It grants you the right to read & study it though.
The right to read and study you have by default. It's getting your hands on a book that has legal caveats attached.
Yes, but getting your hands on the material isn't a very interesting legal question IMO.
Whether you can train your LLM on it is a very interesting question.
I've personally never been in favor of punishing people for downloading (or seeding) things.
One which buying books for your LLM doesn't answer either. In analogy to humans, you might as well give your LLM a library card.
They might even have gotten away with legitimate use argument if it was not seeded.
Pretty sure that even if you gave a purchasing team enough money for retail price and a list of all books ever published, they wouldn't be able to buy even a quarter of them.
Plus some people will just not sell at any price.
Buying the books won't automatically give you permission to use the content commercially
thanks to the byzantine copyright system, you can't easily do it. Plus, just speculating, but maybe by paying, it establishes "consideration" for some implied contract? "You implicitly entered a contract with us by purchasing the book, then violated the contract by 'distributing' the material for commercial use" ?
There must be a publisher out there that forbids you from training an AI on the copy you buy from them by now.
Anna's Archive has 40 million books and 100 million papers. It's unlikely they could achieve similar coverage.
Too much paperwork, too much effort. These are important people, doing much more important stuff than whatever book authors do.
Or so they think, I think.
I doubt they think that way, but even if they did, they'd be right - for 99% of the works in question, the biggest value they gave to the world is, by far, being part of the LLM training corpus.
There's lots of content out there. Most of it is noise. People forget because they're only ever exposed to an aggressively curated fraction of it.
No, it's not.
I briefly worked for Crunchyroll, which began life as an anime pirating service with subtitles. The contracts with the Japanese anime publishers came later. Now they vigorously protect their content from "pirates".
Some can pirate on a large scale and see no repercussions.
Some can steal from stores and see no repercussions.
Some can steal from others and see no repercussions.
Some can violently harm others and see no repercussions.
Some can damage property and see no repercussions.
Some can’t. This world is not right.
The strong do what they wish and the weak suffer what they must. Any morality beyond that is a fairy tale that the weak tell themselves.
"Spotify's music library was also pirated in the early days."
"Ek, who had been the CEO of the piracy platform uTorrent, founded Spotify with his friend, another entrepreneur named Martin Lorentzon. Both-Ek at 23 and Lorentzon 37-were already millionaires from the sales of previous businesses. The name Spotify had no particular meaning, and was not associated with music. According to Spotify Teardown, the company developed a software for improved peer-to-peer network sharing, and the founders spoke of it as a general "media distribution platform." The initial choice to focus on music, the founders said at the time, was because audio files are smaller than video files, not because of a dream of saving music.
In 2007, when Spotify first publicly tested its software, it allowed users to stream songs downloaded from The Pirate Bay, a service for unlicensed downloads. By late 2008, Spotify would convince music labels in Sweden to license music to the site, and unlicensed music was removed. From there, Spotify would take off across Europe and then the world."
https://qz.com/1683609/how-the-music-industry-shifted-from-n...
And Hollywood was created on the west coast because for intellectual property it was still the far west and it allowed them to ignore patents on movie technologies.
They became the thing they lamented.
This is the inevitable.
It's roughly the Spotify story too. They had an extremely impressive catalog very early, way before they were bought by the entertainment cartel. The founders had background in torrenting and the initial product was quite similar to The Pirate Bay but with clearly capitalist ambitions and branding, in contrast to the anarchist leanings of the Pirate Bureau and rather anarchic attitude of The Pirate Bay.
The thing is Google, meta and YouTube weren't giant entities when they did this stuff. I think it's good no one cracked down on them for copyright stuff. Now they're developing an LLM that will generate potentially trillions in value to humanity and looks like they're not exactly playing by the rules. But I prefer looser intellectual property rights anyway so Im ok with it
>But I prefer looser intellectual property rights anyway so Im ok with it
I think more people, potentially anyways, would feel similar to to this if it applied even somewhat equally.
Instead, companies can seemingly do whatever they please whereas lawyers will send letters to your home for downloading a single episode of game of thrones.
> Instead, companies can seemingly do whatever they please whereas lawyers will send letters to your home for downloading a single episode of game of thrones.
I don't get it. All these companies took copyrighted data when they were tiny grew to be large, they still do that now. Google and OpenAI don't send these letters. They're not the copyright holders.
I have no idea what argument you're trying to make. Corporations bad?
>Google and OpenAI don't send these letters.
Right. I'm not saying they do?
>I have no idea what argument you're trying to make.
I thought my point (not really an argument) was pretty clear, sorry.
"Rules for thee, but not for me" is the point. Where "thee" is individuals and "me" is corporations. (My comment was general commentary, not specific to Meta, Google, OpenAI, LLMs, or the article)
Right now "loose restrictions" seems to apply to corporations only. More people might be in favor of looser restrictions if it also applied to individuals, not just corporations.
I'm not sure how else to reword my comment more than that. It wasn't really meant to be too deep, and it wasn't intended to be argumentative.
His argument is that it's effectively a legal moat now that protects monopoly. Like we shouldn't accept that you need to break the law to have a chance to compete with them.
From the article, they took steps to avoid using their IP addresses. Individuals doing the same using a VPN are pretty much immune from any legal issues.
This is one small blip in an incredibly long history of companies being able to not care about copyright while individuals must.
Workarounds with a VPN are great and all, but they are a band-aid on a systemic problem.
(You are not immune, by the way, if your VPN company is subject to a subpoena and isn't one of very few actually no-log services)
IME companies take copyright way more seriously than individuals. e.g. my last 2 jobs have had scanners to ensure we're not accidentally pulling in GPL code to our products, and one of those was a startup. I'd be surprised if corporate security software weren't looking for torrent clients and if you wouldn't get fired for torrenting on corporate machines or networks at most companies. Meanwhile the same people setting those security policies have a 100TB array at home with fully automated pirating setups. They very much don't care personally, but it's a huge business risk.
In high school/university in the 00s, everyone casually pirated things. In college people passed around a USB drive with all of the books needed for our degree program. People in the dorms traded music collections with 10s of thousands of songs. Tellingly, Apple advertised that iPods could store 10,000 songs, which approximately zero people could afford to buy legitimately. If anything, the consequences for piracy have gone down since then, but streaming is convenient enough and phone storage/UX is hobbled enough that people pay.
In any case, I think the other poster is right that companies flouting copyright law is a good thing. It stops us from pretending that it's helpful for the little guy, making it easier to argue for abolition or vastly reducing the length. That they did it to build an open model is even better: it shows directly the kinds of benefits copyright is taking from us. We should be looking to scan every book out there to build better training sets (and better indexed search into scholastic datasets; at this point all of Anna's Archive only costs a little over $11k in raw storage, which puts it into "affordable as an upper middle class home library" territory. In another few years, it may be affordable to nearly everyone. Better ML models could help here with better compression as well), but copyright law restricts use of works dating back to a time before electrification was widespread. Obviously they're an evil company in general, but llama was an actual good deed from them.
DRM for thee not for me.
Well, we'll see how will it generate value and for whom.
Exactly. We need leaders with the political will to apply a "financial death penalty" to companies that engage in this kind of brazen behavior. That means all assets seized, the company dissolved, personal assets of executives seized, executives jailed. People running companies should live in mortal fear of ever doing the things that they routinely do today.
Do people even take civics classes anymore? That isn't how any of this works. Political will doesn't allow arbitrary punishments. You would need legislation at very least and that could face issues with the Eighth Amendment. (Which could not be post-facto of course.)
At least you're not calling for jailing all the shareholders....
Punishment wouldn't be arbitrary, it would be based on the crimes you committed.
Political will can be used to pass legislation and ultimately to change the Eighth Amendment.
VC and startups are fundamentally about disruption. You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs (laws). The incumbent players are not going to sit still and let things be "disrupted". A common response is to make sure the public knows about the broken eggs. I would say youtube, Google, Spotify, Uber, doordash, etc. all have made my life much better.
You don't know a world without them so you actually have no idea if they have made your life compared to that world much better or much worse. How your life was at the time is irrelevant.
Why would I say something is better without a point of comparison?
I was born in the 90s. So definitely alive before YouTube and Spotify albeit as a teenager rather than an adult. I guess you're right I'm not familiar with the world of Sony Walkman, Blockbuster, and IBM PC. But I definitely remember dial-up modems, CDs, Windows 95 and XP. Technology has improved most aspect of my life better since then. (maybe minus all the ads + dopamine slot machines part...)
This is a vacuous statement. You can say the same thing about electricity, or antibiotics, or any other modern advancement.
That's kinda the point. That type of reasoning is vacuous.
There are millions of great arguments why antibiotics made the world a better place, I'm yet to hear one of YT.
100%
> Google itself got big by indexing other people's data without compensation.
So in other words, it got big by providing free user traffic to people's websites without asking for compensation?
You generally don't charge the phone book money to include you in it. It's actually the other way around.
Reminds me of recent discussions about similar topic, what may clearly look like a crime can be treated differently depending on if you do it as an individual or as a company. Somewhere down the line its all about understanding the limits and boundaries of the system, its a skill in itself.
I think the difference may be LLMs may not be laundered clean of copyright data anytime soon. Even if chatgpt got big and profitable, it's not so clear that it won't contain copyrighted data as that may simply be necessary to train the best models.
Most of the web is copyrighted
I guess the solution is to create a shell company for your illegal activities?
The modern solution has been to grow so fast that by the time anyone can go after you legally you've already amassed so much money/power that you can have the laws rewritten (or at least enforced) around your existence.
IMO part of the reason the SV tech bros are embracing right wing grift culture so publicly now is that this method, which had been serving them well for decades, doesn't really work without the infinite free money lending spigot being wide open.
That's why you should go straight to the treasury's RSS feeds.
You must be new to billionaire business practices: break the rules first, ask for forgiveness later.
By the time the cheque comes, your illicit venture either went bust or you built a bilion dollar empire capable of buying the best lawyers and lobbying to walk away clean.
> If you plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers you forfeit your life.
I’m opposed to copyright and pro-aaronsw, but the state did not kill him.
Absolutely.
1.8 million people are in United States jails today. It isn't a death sentence, and it is a foreseeable consequence of some ethically-appropriate actions.
Supporting folks spending time in jail is a valuable role in any social movement.
i know of a company that poisoned an entire town! thats terrorism if done by an individual. the company still exists, just paid a settlement and carried on...
I agree with your point, but will split hairs on using the word "terrorism". I think that should be reserved for people that commit atrocities for some political aim. I'm fairly sure the company in question (I assume Union Carbide) did not poison the town to advance a political agenda.
Profit at all costs is a political agenda.
Kinda terrifying that you can get away with shit if you just argue that it's not politically motivated, you did it because you really wanted a yacht.
You also get a lesser offense killing someone accidentally as opposed to a premeditated murder.
There’s a difference between an intentional act, an accident, and an accident due to extreme neglect and our laws reflect that.
how is it not intentional? Union Carbide higher up ppl knew there was safety issue, but because of profit they didn't give a damn.
The lesson here is do criminal activities through company, so that there are chances that you can escape from it.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/dec/08/bhopals-trage...
Money is the ultimate political agenda.
Russia has a town called Asbest which has an open-pit asbestos mine half the size of Manhattan where they mine with explosives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbest
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy3piCUPIkc - VICE documentary and visit video. I think it contains an interview with an American woman who suffered from WR Grace and Company's asbestos mining and manufacturing in the USA, she says "they knew, they knew". WRG faced 129,000 personal injury claims and set asude $3 Bn for settling asbestos related lawsuits.
Are you talking about Bhopal in 1984? If so it would be an understatement to refer to half a million people as a “town”, and an overstatement to imply it was terrorism. Willful negligence, yes, but terrorism, no.
> Google itself got big by indexing other people's data without compensation
Weird framing given how much value was and is still placed on Google driving traffic to you
For Google's case the order was reversed.
Google used to send customers to your site. Now they try to show you the information on their site so that the customer doesn't need to go to your site.
Unless your site is an SEO cesspool serving THEIR ads, then you do end up there.
Even before the LLM-craze Google was showing their Answers box or whatever it was called at the top of the results that told you the answer (sometimes) so that you didn’t have to visit any website.
That was significantly after their market dominance was firmly established entirely through sending traffic to external locations.
Comprehensive intellectual property needs to happen for the modern (digital) era.
Basically the entire legal system needs to be retooled and rethought for computers.
Looks like the entire legal system is being retooled at the moment.
No we just need to enforce the existing laws.
And the legal system is for humans not computers.
Plenty of the existing laws are insane and indefensible. Copyright duration of life of the author plus 70 years? Patents on videogame mechanics?
We need to both reform the laws and enforce them. Otherwise...
>The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
Pantents on video game mechanics... oh how I wish this weren't true. I would love a first person adventure game with the best mechanics and controls taken from genres that did that mechanics very well.
The one that always comes to mind for me is the boxing controls from Fight Night games. It pains me a little every time I play a game where pugilistic battles come down to smash 1 or 2 buttons.
The existing laws are a problem, and are not enforced in a fair and just manner.
Yes, the legal system is for humans, but we can use technology to improve the system for humans, so it's faster, better and more fair, because humans aren't perfect, and now we have technology to be better than the system create a long time ago. You don't think the legal system should run on pens and paper right? Adapting to typewriters, was a benifit to the system?
Well, video on demand, live streaming, and things like LLMs can also make the system better for humans.
Aren't all LLMs based on models published by the big two or three, so built on IP theft and if you're using them you are guilty of handling stolen goods?
that's the point.
RIP Aaron Swartz
So be a company? Last I checked it costs a couple of hundred dollars to form an LLC, what am I missing?
Mmm, the broader point is: laws are are as real as the cash you can pay a lawyer to fight.
Spotify was born as a response to piracy. Why do you say their catalog was pirated?
Don’t forget the original developers of Skype also created Kazaa first.
Doesn't Google have their own internal scanning of books?
The sooner people learn this lesson, the sooner it might change.
Corporations are people. Just a notch above the regular kind.
So, might makes right, a tale as old as humanity
How does that prosecutor sleep at night?
This frames Google's indexing of the web in a totally, abjectly wrong fashion. It wasn't "other people's data", it was data people published to the public internet, implicitly and explicitly granting permission to download through the act of serving that data without restriction to whoever navigated to a particular URL.
That's how the internet works. If you want private content, you need to put up a gate mechanism of some sort with authentication or other methods of restricting access. Without that, you are literally having your server "serve" the content to whoever asks for it, without restriction or exception, without ToS or meaningful contract or agreements.
You can't have it both ways. "But they didn't know" or other post-hoc claims of innocent people publishing content to the web being misled or confused or abused is infantilizing nonsense.
The web wouldn't have been as amazing and revolutionary and liberating if the fundamental public and open nature of its systems was private and walled off by default.
Your take on YouTube going viral initially over copyrighted content isn't correct, either - it was ease of use and access. It was fairly popular by the time Google bought it, and once it was reachable and advertised by google itself, it exploded, because by that time, everyone had defaulted to using google for search.
Other people corrected your Spotify take.
The reason they pirated is because it is functionally impossible to gain access to the data in any other way. For consumers, there are lots of old shows, music, and other content that aren't accessible, so they turn to piracy. A vast majority of the time, if content is accessible, people will pay and do the technically legal and "right" thing.
Publishers exploit authors and content creators in the name of "platforming" and "marketing" , effectively doing as little as possible to take 90%+ of the value of a product and providing as little as possible to the producer of content or books or music. They get by on technicalities and have captured the legal arena entirely, with any attempt at reform or revolution meeting a messy death at the hands of lawyers and big money publishers.
Screw those people. They lie, cheat, and steal, and somehow have gotten away with fooling the world into thinking they're the good guys.
Copying bits and bytes is not stealing, and the ones trying to shill that narrative are trying to fool as many people as possible into giving them more money without any return of value in kind. I'd download the hell out of a car. Pirate everything.
The most outrageous thing about the whole story is that smart people (like here and not only) knew this all since day one. They been uncovering this the whole time.
And in their face, with all the fierce ignorance, broligarchs deny, evade and totally pretend this never happened. The most non open company of all even went to lengths to accuse others of stealing their IP - not theirs to begin with.
Just think of it - why did all major content platforms closed their APIs the day after GPT-2 got the word going…? Cause they knew all this very well - the content is precious and needed. They been doing it all along. Distilling the essence of world’s writing and digital imagery they had no right to.
We have a saying where I come from - no mercy for the chicken, no laws for the millions. I thought it was a local thing at first, it turned is how the world goes. Nothing new under the sun, indeed.
Speaking of GPT2, I remember that nobody gave a shit what it was trained on, because it sucked then.
A bigger lesson might be "don't get caught until you're big enough to destroy the people suing you."
Napster got shut down for widespread enabling of copyright infringement. So did numerous other filesharing startups, including Travis Kalanick's first startup, Scour. Lots of small startups get put out of business all the time for being sued and not having the money to defend themselves.
Likewise, individuals like Donald Trump or Elon Musk get away with all sorts of illegal shit, because they are big enough to shut down the court systems prosecuting them.
Google's genius was in staying under the radar and aligning their incentives with everyone that might dislike them, until they were big enough that they could simply crush anyone that might dislike them.
" If you plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers you forfeit your life."
This is exactly what I immediately thought while reading the article. It almost feels like the legal system only punishes general public, while most of these guys are above it.
Airbnb and Uber have showed us that laws matter only to the extent that the political will to enforce them exists. Throw enough lawyers and lobbying money at the problem and the laws can simply be re-written to be friendlier to your business model.
The reason there was no political will to punish Airbnb and Uber for violating the law was that initially they were subsidized with VC money and so were able to undercut traditional hotels and taxis on price. In the world of tradable goods, pricing below cost with the intent of putting competition out of business so you can raise prices later is known as "dumping" and is itself illegal.
I rooted for Uber to smash the Taxi cartels. Let us not forget that Taxi Cartels were also insidious beasts. Taxi drivers abused their walled garden with their price gouging by taking longer routes, refusal to take a credit card, and extremely poorly maintained fleets of vehicles. I have had mostly good experiences with Uber, whereas I had experiences that mostly bordered on general condescension toward me whenever I took a ride in a Taxi. I am glad the political will to block Uber never materialized.
This argument ignores the fact that there were other alternatives to Uber at the time, ones that didn't break the law! Believe it or not, there were multiple ride hailing apps on the iPhone, but none were as great at accumulating capital or breaking the law without recourse.
The laws they allegedly broke were the taxi medallion cartel laws, which were the things keeping taxis terrible by limiting supply and competition. And those laws in general apply to the drivers rather than the ride hailing service. There is also a lot of ambiguity there, e.g. if you have a ride sharing service where people go on the app to find people to carpool with on a trip they'd be making anyway and then contribute gas money, is that a taxi service?
But the taxi services obviously hated the competition and waged a continuing media campaign to paint the renegades as the villains.
No, these are not only the laws they allegedly broke.
They created a project named Greyball to identify law enforcement and mislead them.
They created a kill switch for the event of a government raid to gather evidence.
They ordered and then canceled rides on competitor apps.
They tracked journalists and politicians...
The list goes on and on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Uber
The best thing to ever happen to corpo scum was that social media took over most of the news. Now there’s no trusted journalists to write a big article about this kind of stuff, instead folks just defend the corpo scum’s actions and spread lies for them, while the truth is still putting on its shoes.
It would have worked if we didn’t find out the hard way a lot of social media and alternative news outlets weren’t even scummier.
We need good journalism courses with heavy emphasis on ethics and the importance of journalism to democracy.
We also need a way to punish entertainment that passes as journalism (maybe fewer legal protections) and to incentive actual journalism (and find a decent way to distinguish between the two).
Several of those things aren't even necessarily illegal and are the sort of things they shouldn't have had have any reason to do unless they were being targeted by a media campaign or captured government. There is also some dispute about whether some of those even happened or are just mischaracterizations from the media campaign.
It's like saying "well, they weren't only violating the taxi medallion cartel laws, they were also violating laws against evading enforcement of the taxi medallion cartel laws". There is a central cause here.
Move the goalposts any more and they’re going to be outside the stadium. What laws matter to you? I agree there are shit laws but why can uber break them with impunity but individuals are jailed for smoking some fun lettuce?
The question you should be asking is, what do you want to do about it? Throw the people challenging the taxi cartels in prison, or get rid of the laws against fun lettuce?
Something else, I’m not sure what yet. Honestly, I’m not the best guy to ask but I know that I don’t want startups to continue breaking laws with impunity and I don’t want individuals to get imprisoned for stuff they do that isn’t affecting others in a meaningful way.
There isn't really a something else. You have bad laws that are in practice only enforced against the little guy. You could demand they also be enforced against the big guy, but that's hard to do when they're bad laws, isn't really a great outcome because they're bad laws, and its primary benefit would be in service of calling attention to the flaw so the bad laws can be repealed. And then maybe you should just start there to begin with.
That is partly true, but it's also true that vastly increased enforcement against the big guys would still be better than what we have now.
Suppose that the status quo is the worst option, the second worst is enforcing the bad laws against the big guys, the best is getting rid of those laws.
Now, that might not be the case. Given the existence of bad laws, having someone who is able to break out of the bad cage might be better than if no one can, but let's consider what happens if we assume that it's worse.
Regardless of how they're ranked relative to each other, you would only pick either of the two worse options over the best if it was easier to do it. But getting bad laws enforced against well-heeled players is actually the hardest thing to do because they're doing something sympathetic and have the resources to fight, which is harder to do than repealing the bad laws.
I don't agree. Getting more comprehensive enforcement of laws in general against well-heeled players is a good thing. We would have a lot less bad law if laws were enforced more evenly, because people would more quickly see their true effects, rather than having to wait until companies exploited the loopholes in enforcement so egregiously.
(I also don't agree that the only problem here is bad laws. Yes, some of the laws that big players break are bad; some are fine. I'm not just talking about Uber here.)
> Getting more comprehensive enforcement of laws in general against well-heeled players is a good thing.
Whether something is good independent of what it takes to achieve it is a separate question from whether that's where you should focus your efforts.
> We would have a lot less bad law if laws were enforced more evenly, because people would more quickly see their true effects, rather than having to wait until companies exploited the loopholes in enforcement so egregiously.
Which is exactly why it's so hard to do it. The status quo is: Pass lots of laws that make everything illegal so that anyone without resources can be brought up on charges if they ruffle the wrong feathers. If you wanted to actually enforce all of those laws, they would immediately have to be repealed or everyone would be in jail. Which isn't in the interests of the people who want to keep them on the books to use for selective enforcement, so they don't enforce them that way in order to keep them on the books.
The consequence is that it takes even more political capital to have those laws rigorously enforced than to have them repealed, because then you have to fight both the big guys who don't want short-term enforcement against themselves and the autocrats who don't want to long-term have the laws repealed, instead of only the latter.
> I also don't agree that the only problem here is bad laws.
When laws are enforced against the little guys but not the big guys, it's usually because they're bad laws, because letting the rich openly get away with literal murder is highly unpopular.
The most significant category of good laws that big companies regularly violate with impunity is antitrust laws, but those also don't often get enforced against the little guy because the little guy isn't even in a position to violate them.
So I get your argument, but by that logic the only bad laws that get repealed will be those that affect big business, and the laws against individuals without resources will still be in place. I think we all agree that it’s unfair there’s a very large difference in enforcement of law between those with resources and those without, but I think to prevent that we need to figure out how to prevent the capture of the government by those with large resources. I could agree in concept that less laws are better for that overall, but also then there’s the question of who benefits from less laws and I bet those with resources will still benefit.
It’s almost like we need to ensure no one has much more resources than anyone else (ya know, workers owning the means of production) so there’s a more level field!
> So I get your argument, but by that logic the only bad laws that get repealed will be those that affect big business, and the laws against individuals without resources will still be in place.
Quite the opposite.
You have a bad law which is only enforced against the little guy. Right now, when it's not enforced against the big guy, stories are written about it to get people riled up, but that's the wrong target.
Right now, when those laws are enforced against the little guy, people say "well they broke the law". Which is true, because everyone is breaking the law all the time, because there are so many bad laws. So what should be happening is, every time they try to enforce a bad law against the little guy, that should be the thing that gets people ruled up -- even if they're guilty. Because everyone is guilty, because the laws are crazy. So get people worked up about that so that the laws can be changed. Don't accept that people guilty of violating bad laws deserve to be punished. Drag the prosecutors through the mud. Flood the legislators with complaints whenever it happens. Use jury nullification and publicize to everyone that it's their right. Get those laws repealed.
> I think to prevent that we need to figure out how to prevent the capture of the government by those with large resources.
This was supposed to be checks and balances and limited government. As soon as you unchain legislators to micromanage the economy, anyone who captures them can shape the law to their advantage and then become rich and use the money to make sure the government stays captured.
The government needs to be constrained from making laws that inhibit competition.
> It’s almost like we need to ensure no one has much more resources than anyone else (ya know, workers owning the means of production) so there’s a more level field!
The words you're looking for are "antitrust enforcement".
> It’s almost like we need to ensure no one has much more resources than anyone else (ya know, workers owning the means of production) so there’s a more level field!
Heh, yeah, I was going to post to add this as well. That is the underlying problem. I don't necessarily think it has to mean "workers owning the means of production" per se, more like "the richest person's wealth cannot be more than X times the poorest" and "the largest participant in a market cannot have more than Y% market share", but the idea is similar. :-)
Why isn't at least one of those things actually addressing (disbanding, regulating, whatever--left to people experienced in policy or with context to have some remediation plan) those taxi cartels' behavior?
The argument is that getting rid of the bad laws is better than enforcing them more rigorously. This can be applied to the laws propping up the taxi medallion cartels as well as the ones prohibiting personal drug use. Then anyone (not just Uber) could compete with them and thereby disband the taxi cartels previously using those laws to constrain competition.
I agree that removing bad laws is good. I think by introducing the second, culturally charged topic (1.) taxi cartels, 2.) recreational drugs) you diminish the possible interpretations of your perspective.
The other downstream conclusions make sense too, but the linkage is more opaque making it difficult to appreciate.
Also hard to acknowledge is--who decides which laws are "bad"? Generally, societal outcomes should test the efficacy (toward some comparably abstract societal good) of laws, which then prompts the legislature to do something between patting themselves on the back and authoring actually effective law.
> who decides which laws are "bad"?
It's better to ask the question in a different way. We know what bad laws are. They're laws that benefit some interest group at the expense of the general public, e.g. by constraining competition or diverting tax dollars to cronies.
So the question is, how do you eliminate bad laws? This isn't a question of what a hypothetical legislature should do if it was full of good faith actors, it's a question of how to structurally align the incentives of a real legislature with the interests of the general public so that they're inhibited from passing bad laws.
That makes sense but seems like it would only actually be a subset of bad laws. I mainly mean to highlight that it's not a comprehensive way to identify bad law.
> how to structurally align the incentives of a real legislature with the interests of the general public
This seems like a critical nuance that, like you said, needs a structural solution. I have no actual idea, but conceptually this seems like it would eliminate a subset of particularly bad laws and actions (e.g. members of the legislature trading on their insider information) which have outsized, negative outcomes for the public. But we also rely on that very rule making body to essentially self-govern. And such a grass-roots movement of reforms to put the public first seem unlikely given the attitudes and sensationalizing behaviors present in the members of that body.
I avoid politics because of just how disaffecting it is to think about most of these details.
Because more money and special interests are behind fun lettuce smoking enforcement than local taxi companies could put behind protecting their own cartel from interlopers. If the taxi companies had more money to dump on politicians than is poured into drug enforcement, then the priorities would have changed.
Taxi Medallion laws were also a Reputation Engine that was publicly queryable, subject to FOIA laws and generally had easy to search public databases for them, with detailed notes. Sure Uber/Lyft boil that into a "friendly" 5-star UI, but do you have any idea what data contributed to that star rating? Do you always trust the algorithms that compute them from a bucket of metrics you can't directly request?
Sure, Medallion laws had problems, and got Regulatory Captured in some cities to also become terrible Trusts controlling prices that needed busting. But the answer to "fix the Regulation" isn't always "break the Regulation", and the Regulation had a lot of good intent of having public accessible information about drivers and that data not just owned by a single company and locked in their opaque algorithms. It might have been nicer to fix the Regulatory Capture and Bust the Trusts.
> Taxi Medallion laws were also a Reputation Engine that was publicly queryable, subject to FOIA laws and generally had easy to search public databases for them, with detailed notes.
You just landed at the airport and need a cab. You fax your FOIA requests for each of the hundred cab companies in the area, which they're required to provide within 20 business days. Your return flight is in 3 days and it would be nice to leave the airport before then.
> Sure Uber/Lyft boil that into a "friendly" 5-star UI, but do you have any idea what data contributed to that star rating? Do you always trust the algorithms that compute them from a bucket of metrics you can't directly request?
So compete with them instead of banning them. Fund an open source ride hailing app with open data. Don't require anyone to use it. If it's better, they will. If it's not better, why should they be forced to?
> You just landed at the airport and need a cab. You fax your FOIA requests for each of the hundred cab companies in the area, which they're required to provide within 20 business days. Your return flight is in 3 days and it would be nice to leave the airport before then.
If you just landed at the airport, you rely on police enforcement keeping bad actors from having medallions. The medallion itself is the primary "this person is a reputable cab driver". That's also entirely why the Regulatory Capture in some cities was so effective in controlling supply of medallions, because it was city police enforced.
Many cities required taxis to have their medallion number painted on the outside, and there were phone numbers you could quickly call (in the days of payphones even) to get quick information about a medallion or to report a complaint/problem with one.
Today a few cities have updated that external paint requirement (and inside the car medallion papers) to include QR codes for even quicker lookup on modern phones or to even use an app to do nice things like pay for the Taxi without needing to broker/negotiate it. Those kind of technological improvements have kind of gotten lost in the wash of the speed of which Uber/Lyft moved fast and broke things, but were always possible.
> So compete with them instead of banning them. Fund an open source ride hailing app with open data. Don't require anyone to use it. If it's better, they will. If it's not better, why should they be forced to?
The history of taxi companies say that they are only as open as they are forced to be. I never said anything about banning Uber/Lyft. Competition is not the problem; destroying public safety regulations in the name of competition is the problem. I said that Uber/Lyft should have been required to do the same or similar paperwork that medallions represent, that both of their data should be open under the previously existing laws, as a public good. Break the artificial scarcity, sure, give Uber/Lyft a license to "print medallions" if that breaks existing Trusts. But get that data open and available to the public (and enforceable by the public's law enforcement). Neither would want to do that because their rating systems are secret sauce and "competitive advantage", they would need to be coerced by regulations. That's what regulations are for, the public good that competition doesn't care about/can't care about/needs to keep "secret sauce" for advantages.
Let's recap the past: Taxis were borderline unusable in almost all American cities before Uber (except for NYC)
I certainly didn't love their ruthless business practices, but let's not delude ourselves and admit that Uber or Lyft wouldn't exist if they didn't break the laws around taxi medallions.
Sometimes laws do more harm than good (by limiting supply and slowing innovation) and it requires creatively skirting regulations.
Things were always possible to improve the taxi industry. Smartphones had been around a few years. But it would've taken the industry 20 years to implement it correctly. In the same way that rampant music and movie piracy in the early 2000s hastened the development of iTunes and Netflix's subscription model way of doing business.
Uber shows the driver's name, their photo, and has a process for flagging drivers. Public safety is important to their business. As someone who's driven an Uber and Lyft and been through their process, I've seen it firsthand.
It's not like "medallions" worked - I remember driving in multiple taxis in pre 2010 days where the photo DID NOT MATCH UP to the driver. My high school physics teacher who grew up in Brooklyn in the late 1970s told stories about how he learned how to drive by illegally working and driving taxis around as a 15 year old.
Right now, we're just going through the same thing with AI again, and Silicon Valley is applying it's ethos of the past few decades.
There are reasons why in various industries, China is "winning the race", so to speak.
Regulations exist, but sometimes people who creatively ignore the "regulations" can win the tide of the public. It's one of America's best (and incredibly divisive) cultural capabilities.
> Let's recap the past: Taxis were borderline unusable in almost all American cities before Uber (except for NYC)
My experience was very different and "almost all" doesn't feel correct. It's certainly fun hyperbole. NYC the systems worked more than they didn't. In part because of spot lights from famous TV shows and 70s corruption documentaries/news exposes. Most smaller cities the taxis quietly worked with little corruption and a lot of trustworthiness. In the early oughts I had good experiences hailing cabs in cities a lot smaller than NYC that people didn't believe you could even hail cabs in.
Because Taxi regulations were so wildly different from cities, it's hard to generalize what the experience used to be. It varied a lot from city to city and was a massive spectrum, with a few national certainties like some of the big Franchises to help smooth things a bit.
> I certainly didn't love their ruthless business practices, but let's not delude ourselves and admit that Uber or Lyft wouldn't exist if they didn't break the laws around taxi medallions.
In the early oughts, a few cities like Seattle were pressuring the big national Franchise companies like Yellow Cab through a mixture of regulatory body pressure (but not actual laws) and bottom up consumer messaging/volume customer requirements to move to "Computer Dispatch". There was a growing competition in that space, and a bunch of innovation happening between the competitors, including some of the things Uber and Lyft take credit for today because Yellow Cab mostly broke apart in the onslaught of VC subsidization and rule breaking.
I don't think it would have taken "20 years" to implement it "correctly". We don't know because the whole thing got disrupted so sideways by the gig economy. (Which also really didn't care about making the taxi business better, but about making the labor market worse. We should also not forget that breaking the worst parts of taxi medallion laws also broke the good ones that helped build useful labor-side things like taxi driver unions and paid for things like healthcare.)
All I'm saying is that there was a path that this could have all been done under the old regulations, legally. It's a path not taken here, and probably to our detriment. Though I can't prove that just as much as you can't prove that innovations like smarter apps would have taken "20 years" in that other timeline.
> If you just landed at the airport, you rely on police enforcement keeping bad actors from having medallions.
Well that's not going to work. You now have people from outside the jurisdiction having a government they didn't elect cast in the role of their protectors. Instead what happens is the local government protects the incumbents, which is what we've seen in practice.
> Many cities required taxis to have their medallion number painted on the outside, and there were phone numbers you could quickly call (in the days of payphones even) to get quick information about a medallion or to report a complaint/problem with one.
As opposed to the license plates already on all cars?
> The history of taxi companies say that they are only as open as they are forced to be.
People keep trying to regard Uber as a taxi company. They keep claiming to be an app, because... they are. So replace the app with an open source one. Create an independent non-profit to handle payments and maintain a server to hold the driver ratings and take a small cut of the payments to cover its costs. Operate it as a live auction where drivers list how much they'll charge per mile and riders pick a driver based on their rating and price. Publish all the data.
If you do it well, people will use it voluntarily. If you do it poorly, you haven't demonstrated enough competence to be trusted making regulations that people would have to follow even if they're dumb.
> Competition is not the problem; destroying public safety regulations in the name of competition is the problem.
The problem is that incumbents call the things they use to destroy competition "public safety regulations".
> Neither would want to do that because their rating systems are secret sauce and "competitive advantage", they would need to be coerced by regulations.
Not when you can "coerce" them through competition. If people like the ratings system which is more open or the one that extracts lower margins and the app is otherwise fungible with theirs, they don't even exist unless they can be better than the competing system you created to do better, which implies that you failed to actually do better and then they're supposed to win. Which in turn applies pressure on the public system to do better itself, instead of getting captured, because if it gets captured then it becomes uncompetitive and actually has competition.
You understand they're a global company and broke many laws in many countries, right?
The only alternative I remember is "black car" services, eg airport limos and the like. But there was very little automation around it; you had to speak on the phone with someone to book, and it was always like 24+ hours out rather than "go to the place now" the way a cab is.
Most taxi services will send a car to your address immediately, no reservation required. Problem is, you have to know the exact address where you want to be picked up, which can sometimes be difficult to determine if you're new in town and/or standing on a street with no obvious sign or address, e.g. on the edge of a large university campus. That's where GPS-driven apps really shine, plus the ability to see the car's location in near real-time, and why I will never be sad at the demise of traditional way of having to call a cab.
Indeed, but I was referring specifically to the charge that taxi alternatives (eg, outside the medallion system) existed pre-Uber. And I think, they did, but only in very limited use cases like airport shuttles, and not with fleets anywhere near large enough to have a car five minutes from anywhere at all times— hence the need to book those things ahead.
> This argument ignores the fact that there were other alternatives to Uber at the time, ones that didn't break the law!
Yes, and they owe their current existence to Uber paving the way for them.
Political will shouldn't be required to enforce existing law. If i started a 1 man illegal taxi service it would be shut down even though it has little effect on the community, but saudi vc funded startup wasn't shut down even though it violated laws in every major city. That is a weird asymmetry as a us citizen.
What's really happening here is that the laws are supposed to reflect the political will, i.e. the will of the people, but in many cases they don't, because the lawmakers have been captured by incumbents.
Then if a little guy comes in and tries to challenge them, they don't have the resources to resist the incumbents' pocket government officials and get destroyed. But if a big fish does it, people actually notice if the government tries to enforce stupid laws against them, and then government officials are afraid to do it because the public would not only not like it but actually notice the unreasonableness of the law.
But the problem here isn't that the law isn't being enforced against a well-heeled challenger, it's that those laws exist to be enforced against the little guy, when they should instead be repealed.
i will simply disagree that the dominant social dynamic leading to this favoring of foriegn capital over us law is not systemic corruption.
So there are two different categories of things here. One is, they ban cannabis and put individuals in prison for it, but then if you pay thousands a year for overpriced health insurance and the insurance pays thousands of dollars for a doctor to ask you some cursory questions and a pharma company to manufacture the drug, you can get a prescription for opioids, which are way more dangerous. But that isn't the big guys violating the law, it's them following a law that they bought and paid for. That's bad in a different way.
The relevant thing here would be that they pass excessive copyright laws, but then Meta violates them and maybe gets away with it because they're doing it in a sympathetic way and the government doesn't want to hamstring emerging industries in their country, whereas if an individual would be sued into oblivion even if the thing they were doing was equally sympathetic.
Because it's not just about the public noticing it, it's about the public noticing it in time to do something about it. If an individual gets sued or arrested, they're immediately screwed and will be under pressure to settle or plea bargain before they're bankrupted by legal fees. But once they do, the case is over. Whereas large companies can fight, or pay lawyers to stall while they wage a media campaign to counter the usual imperious press releases from the prosecution, or use their money to lobby the government while public opinion is in their favor.
I mean there are examples in the same category as well: how many years was it illegally exported from dispensaties between states? New state legalizes? day one the corporate dispensary is stocked which is curious since it takes several months to grow. Also, lots of foriegn capital involved in the industry.
Not just meta, Open AI, spotify, youtube...its become a routine exception and can now be relied upon.
I agree that the legal fees could be a big factor, but it seems cases aren't even filed.
Uber definitely improved things.
When traveling it’s also so much safer than taxis.
My brother was robbed at gunpoint in a taxi. My wife had to jump from more than one moving taxi to escape. My ex girlfriend too. My Swiss friend had his camera and wallet stolen.
You can have issues with Uber too, but not as frequently because there’s a digital audit trail, you can report them to the platform and the police. The threat of those consequences lead to better behavior.
Were these acts committed by the drivers or somebody else?
Drivers
Here's another data point: I have taken literally thousands of taxis on 5 continents and none of this has ever happened to me
It didn't improve things for the drivers
That’s not universally true
What's interesting is that in many cities now, Uber and Lyft are in fact more expensive than taxis. And the experience is equally mediocre. The pendulum has swung back the other way. The only thing they have going for them now is the app based convenience, which is eroding as more "yellow cab" type traditional taxis band together and get set up with their own sort of city-specific app.
> What's interesting is that in many cities now, Uber and Lyft are in fact more expensive than taxis.
Sure, agreed.
> And the experience is equally mediocre.
Absolutely not. I regret using a taxi nearly every time I opt for the cheaper option. It's only the "better" choice if you happen to be standing right in front of one. This experience is nearly universal no matter where I travel.
I think people really forget how utterly terrible Taxis were pre-Uber. I have no idea about competing apps these days, maybe they are similar to Uber, but the typical Taxi experience is nearly as awful as it's always been at least in the US.
Uber/Lyft certainly has gotten worse - but at least I can fairly reliably get a car when I need it with reasonable reliability. The rest of the "soft" product or pricing I really care far, far, less about than that simple fact.
> the typical Taxi experience is nearly as awful as it's always been at least in the US
It seems impossible/problematic to generalize the taxi experience to “The US”.
If you’re in a city center, cabs can be far easier. The number of times I’ve ordered an Uber or Lyft and regretted it while watching taxi after taxi drive by has been increasing. But I expect the Chicago loop experience to be quite different from say, the suburbs.
> quite different from say, the suburbs.
My small rural town of 9000 people had multiple taxi services that poorer people relied on to do even their grocery shopping. We didn't need "disruption"
Tech bros generalizing a negative experience from NYC or SV to the entire US has been so stupid.
If you didn't need disruption, why did people choose to use the new service?
Couldn’t the same thing be said about Walmart killing small businesses?
The fact that disruption occurred doesn’t necessarily mean that the end result is better.
> Uber and Lyft are in fact more expensive than taxis.
I doubt that.
I double checked, just to be sure since I paid for taxis for years for a specific trip, each way. Uber is still cheaper TODAY than taxis were when I switched 10 years ago. One way 5 minute trip, Friday 6pm in orange county, ca still under 20$ today.
20$ was a good deal (or ripoff, depending on your attitude) for a taxi in 2015, for the same distance and a variable waiting time. Let's just say it's about equal for sake of discussion. There was no app, but there was a dispatcher you could call. There was no incentive to improve, until then.
Companies have had to adapt and prices have come down. It would no doubt be 30$+ today for taxis, if not for rideshare companies.
I remember calling a taxi 3 hours before my flight to get to SFO. After an hour and four different phone calls to the taxi company, I took BART and barely made it before the counter closed.
The feedback system incentivizes drivers and riders to behave.
This is getting off-topic, but I am curious, why didn't you go with BART in the first place? If you had an hour to call the taxi company and still arrive in time, presumably, you had more than enough time.
I know there are reasons for not going with public transport, but preferring to take a taxi/uber when a train line can get you there in time maybe has more to say about public transport than about taxis. Well functioning rail is typically one of the most effective and reliable way of getting to an airport, and often much cheaper than taxis.
Not OP but many many reasons. If you have the money and you prefer comfort (and/or have kids along) taking a taxi/uber/etc. is much more preferable than dragging several (probably heavy) luggages up and down platforms (elevators may or may not work), walking long paths, etc. especially when you consider the alternative is simply putting luggages in a trunk, sit down and relax, and most likely get there faster. And all of this is before we even talk about any safety issues with BART.
I refuse to take public transit with a checked bag until the NYC subway has 99.9% escalator uptime and escalators at every station, realistically possible with redundant escalators. We will never have nice things as long as we let the trade unions bend us over
I’ve waited an hour for a Lyft while driver after driver accepted then canceled the ride. Ridesharing does not have great reliability either.
It's not really that surprising when the cities are passing laws to try to turn Uber back into the taxi cartel by e.g. making it harder for them to use part-time and on-demand contract drivers. The way you get the price down is by reducing friction, increasing flexibility and supply and taking advantage of efficiencies like people willing to do a dozen rides a week during surge pricing without making it a full-time job. Pass bad laws that make things more rigid and they get more expensive.
You think that workers having certainty of their work hours is a bad law? What are your work hours?
Forcing them to have certainty? Yeah, that's a bad law that screws over the workers. There are people who are at home doing chores or making stuff for Etsy or doing some other contract work who would like to leave the app open and then accept a fare whenever there is one, or would like to open the app to see if anyone else would pay them for a trip they were going to make themselves anyway, regardless of whether the app can guarantee back to back fares.
Instead, laws like that cause Uber to set their hours and then they can't switch on and off whenever they please and have to work miserable graveyard shifts or split shifts if that's what they're assigned.
Meanwhile there is nothing stopping anyone from taking a job with contractually guaranteed hours if that's what they want. There are plenty of jobs like that, you don't have to mandate all jobs be like that and screw over anyone who wants something different.
Last time I used curb, the cabbie told me that the curb payment wasn’t working and I had to Zelle him, ended up needing to report the driver to Curb to get my money back. Shoulda taken an uber!
It does always seem like a race to the bottom.
The price people are willing to pay sets how nice a cab fleet can be while still turning a profit.
Same reason you don't see landscaping crews filled out with stellar employees.
> What's interesting is that in many cities now, Uber and Lyft are in fact more expensive than taxis. And the experience is equally mediocre.
That, of course, was the plan all along. Such august figures as JP Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller,and Andrew Carnegie all made their fortune by undercutting the competition, putting them out of business through means legal and otherwise, and finally monopolizing the markets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)
You should look at what’s going on in Cancun Mexico with Uber and the taxis right now. Your description in the first sentence is quite accurate.
Your comment also points out the power that regulation has to enforce and protect monopolies. I’m not saying all regulation is bad obviously, but I think we can see exactly what effect it had on the taxi industry, and I’m sure glad that Uber managed to disrupt it.
The problem with Uber is that it's a lose-lose-lose money pit scenario.
Customers pay significantly more, drivers make significantly less, and Uber is still running hundreds of millions in the red. Turns out hiring thousands of devs and dumping absurd capital into... driving people around... doesn't really work.
It really screwed over a lot of regular working-class people. In some European cities getting a taxi license was a serious monetary investment. People took our huge loans for this. This was now suddenly worthless. It's like being told your very expensive university education is no longer accredited, but the student loan still exists. kthxbye.
I'm not saying the existing systems were always good (they weren't), but you need to be willing to overlook a lot of real-world suffering to be "rooting for Uber". Phrases like "taxi cartels" sound nice, but they're hardly neutral phrasings that simplify things to the point of being useless phrases.
And "I'm just going to willingly and knowingly ignore laws I don't like for personal profit" is not a great take-away either. This isn't Aaron Swartz breaking a law as a matter of "civil disobedience" – it's just a plain "how can we make money?"
And where does that leave competitors who are NOT willing to break the law? It's an unlevel playing field; there can be no free market if some people don't need to follow the same set of rules. Uber's actions are fundamentally anti-capitalist and anti-free market.
I always tell the story of this restaurant 18 km from my house. If I order their cheapest 6 euro hamburger they deliver it for free within 30 minutes. If I take a taxi to the restaurant I may have to wait for an hour and it costs about 100 euro and another 100 to get back.
I took a ~20 minute 12km taxi ride just last Monday, and it was about €22. That's in Ireland. Considering fuel, the drive back for the driver, and that taxis have a lot of downtime, that seems like a reasonable price.
You live in Netherlands according to a recent comment; I can't believe taxis are almost 4x more expensive, unless you're stuck in traffic for a long time, but then your burger can't arrive in 30 mins?
And free delivery on €6 food item is almost certainly netting them a loss.
There is no way anybody is making a profit on driving 36 km to deliver a hamburger for 6 euros, and it's a matter of time until whatever faucet of VC money subsidizing this runs dry.
In much of the world the price of food delivery has risen to the level needed to make it profitable, and it's not cheap. I paid around $10 in fees plus Uber's 30-50% markups on the food itself to get a couple of burritos yesterday from a shop a mile down the road.
A 30 min drive would be 7 euro and 3 cent in minimum wage. Then you need a car and you have to fuel or charge it.
The only solution to the riddle I can think of is that (like postal services) they can cleverly combine orders and rarely lose money on delivery. The fast delivery would have to be luck or perhaps the burger preserves poorly?
That the food is absolutely fantastic might also have something to do with it. If they can get food into your mouth repetition is almost guaranteed.
> getting a taxi license was a serious monetary investment. People took our huge loans for this
it was a terrible system that sucked for everyone involved. For all of Uber's flaws, would you rather go back to that today? really??
> would you rather go back to that today? really??
I absolutely said said no such thing. There are good ways to change things and bad ways to change things. Allowing a private entity reap huge profits by blatantly breaking rules and screwing people is not a good way to change things.
There was no other way to change things on less than a generational timescale.
If governments don't like it, well, bummer. They were supposed to serve the people, not the incumbent taxi cartels. They failed, so "we the people" routed around them.
Unfortunately now Ubers are exactly the same experience but more expensive/unpredictable. It’s only nicer if you spend more on black and such, which makes it easily double a standard cab fare.
It is possible that digitization and improvement of taxi services was inevitable anyway
They still haven’t properly digitized, curb sucks ass, I had to report a driver to curb when he made me Zelle him because “curb payment wasn’t working”
Possible, yes. Probable?
Not only was it inevitable, if we were so inclined and willing to use the regulatory pen, we could've simply written into law that for Taxi's to operate, they must be well maintained and must accept all major forms of payment. And yeah, the Taxi industry would've fought it because every company ever has fought every regulation ever no matter how much it stands to benefit both their customers and they them-fucking-selves but companies having a say in how they are regulated is both how a Taxi company would fight this, and how Uber, AirBnb, OpenAI, Meta, etc. blatantly and flagrantly violate the law and instead of consequences, they get fines, and court hearings. So maybe we just shouldn't be allowing that?
It drives me up the goddamn wall how people will say shit like "the Taxi industry needed to be upended" when like... I mean, maybe? But on balance, given all the negative externalities associated with these companies, are they really a gain? Or are they just a different set of overlords, equally disinterested in providing a good service once they reach the scale where they no longer are required to give a shit?
Just... regulate the fuckers. Are you sick of filthy Taxis that break down? Put a regulation down that says if a cab breaks down during a trip, they owe the customer a free ride and five thousand dollars. You bet your ASS those cabs will be serviced as soon as humanly possible. This isn't rocket science y'all. Make whatever consequence the government is going to dispense immeasurably, clearly worse than whatever the business is trying to weasel out of doing, and boom. Solved.
> Not only was it inevitable, if we were so inclined and willing to use the regulatory pen, we could've simply written into law that for Taxi's to operate, they must be well maintained and must accept all major forms of payment.
That was frequently already the case. They were required to accept credit cards but then the card reader would be "broken" and it wasn't worth anybody's time to dispute it instead of just paying in cash.
You also... don't really want laws like that. They're required to accept "all payment methods", which ones? Do they have to take American Express, even though the fees are much higher? Do they have to take PayPal if the customer has funds in a PayPal account? What about niche card networks like store cards accepted at more than one merchant? If not those and just Visa and Mastercard, you now have a law entrenching that duopoly in the law.
> Are you sick of filthy Taxis that break down? Put a regulation down that says if a cab breaks down during a trip, they owe the customer a free ride and five thousand dollars. You bet your ASS those cabs will be serviced as soon as humanly possible. This isn't rocket science y'all.
It's not rocket science, it's trade offs.
Is there a $5000 fine for a breakdown? You just made cab service much more expensive, because they're either going to have to pay the fines as a cost of doing business and then pass them on, or propylactically do excessive maintenance like doing full engine rebuilds every year because it costs less than getting caught out once, and then passing on the cost of that. And even then, there is no such thing as perfect. The cabbie paid to have the whole engine rebuilt by the dealership just yesterday and the dealer under-tightened one of the bolts when putting it back in, so there's a coolant leak? Normally that's just re-tightening the bolt and $20 worth of coolant, but now it's a $5000 fine on top of the $4000 engine rebuild.
The way you actually want to solve this is with competition, not rigid rules and onerous fines. If someone is always having breakdowns then they get bad rating, customers can see that when choosing and then opt for a different driver that costs slightly more -- but only if the cost is worth the difference to them. Maybe it's worth $2 for the difference between two stars and five but it isn't worth $50 for the difference between 4.7 and 4.8. Either way you shouldn't be deciding for people, you should be giving them the choice.
> That was frequently already the case. ...the card reader would be "broken"
I traveled a lot to a smallish town for work before Uber got there and ran into this several times. After the second or third time, I started just saying "well that sucks for you" and starting to leave. Suddenly it would work.
Yes it sucked, but it didn't really impact much.
> Just... regulate the fuckers.
That's true, however we must also keep in mind that Uber (and alikes) happened because regular institutions failed to do this for some reason or another. I won't try to speculate why, because I have no idea (and of course it looks obvious in the hindsight).
There was a demand for safer and more reliable taxis. There was not enough supply for that. Government haven't paid enough attention to the sector. So, naturally, someone came and used that whole situation to provide supply for this demand.
Of course it's not this simple, and there were a lot of other things going on. But if we narrow the scope down to just this, then we can see that the core problem here wasn't Uber, it was that that governments were too slow to react in time.
I would rather ruin the taxi livelihood than have to argue with my driver about turning on the meter again
The solution to that would not have been rabid capitalism just bulldozing over laws because the laws suck and further entrenching that "laws only matter for the poor".
The solution to the pre-Uber state of the taxi industry would be to actually have the regulations authorities enforce the regulation. But it seems across the Western world that having regulations authorities do their job and regulate is like the devil and holy water.
Additionally, in some cases the regulations themselves were crap.
Let's not pretend that the taxi situation was hunkey-dory before big-bad-tech came onto the scene. There's no regulation that says if I call dispatch to request a taxi one has to show up, and "we'll pick you up when we pick you up" was (and is still) a common mode of operation.
In NYC, it was (is?) against the law to hail a black car on the street, even if they were sitting there ready willing and able to drive you, because the taxi cartel got _regulations_ to make it that way.
> In NYC, it was (is?) against the law to hail a black car on the street, even if they were sitting there ready willing and able to drive you, because the taxi cartel got _regulations_ to make it that way.
That's precisely what I meant with "in some cases the regulations themselves were crap". But that doesn't imply the idea of regulation is bad - it is saying that maybe voters should make their voice clear to lawmakers and parties to get stuff changed. Regulation can only be as good or bad as the voters allow it to be.
The reason is that everyone who was supposed to do something about it was "subsidized with VC money".
Or in Ubers case, used to actively hinder those doing the investigation
Speed had a lot to do with this as well.
VC funding allowed them to move quickly enough that they got to a scale where they could afford legal and lobbying protection when challenges eventually happened.
> The reason there was no political will to punish Airbnb and Uber for violating the law was that initially they were subsidized with VC money and so were able to undercut traditional hotels and taxis on price.
That's just a trope. They were initially losing money because they had high fixed costs (developing a platform, spending enough on advertising to get a critical mass of people using it), which are long-term investments. If you only spread the cost of the long-term investment over the short-term sales, they were "losing money" in the early years, but that's how all long-term investments work.
Dumping is when you sell below the unit cost, e.g. paying drivers more than you charge customers, which isn't what they were doing in general. And as long as they weren't doing that, the incumbents could have responded by lowering their own prices (and therefore margins) without themselves losing money on each sale, which is competition working as intended. Unless the competition is too hidebound to accept a reduction in profits in order to stay competitive or otherwise insists on using a less efficient method of operating, in which case they go under.
Part of the reason Airbnb got a pass must be how profitable it was to people who own many properties, despite the harm it does to the communities of people who only own one property.
shouldn't there be a lot of political will from the traditional hotels and taxis, and their lawyers? i can see that the answer is "no", but i don't know why
especially with hotels, i would have expected there to be small enough oligopoly to overcome the freerider problem (taxis are more regional, so i don't expect them to be able to fight an (inter)national company very easily)
plus the president owning a hotel chain
> shouldn't there be a lot of political will from the traditional hotels and taxis, and their lawyers?
Yes there is, I am reminded of this every time I take an uber by the yellow cab medallion buyout fee that I’m charged because of the lobbying power of the TLC lobby in NYC
There are a lot more people who own a few properties as investments than there are hotel owners. Even if these people don't plan to rent through Airbnb, the way Airbnb distorts the housing market is still beneficial for their investments. Also, by the time Trump became president Airbnb was already entrenched for years.
The traditional taxi industry was rife with corruption, bad experiences, and poor service in many jurisdictions before uber/lyft. As terrible of a human being that I think Travis Kalanick is, it was only going to take lawbreaking to overcome such a tainted system.
Medallion systems often prevented any competition, sometimes to absurd effect. The number of licenced taxis often didn't keep pace with population growth, sometimes even staying flat. Many drivers didn't own their own medallians then had to rent from owners, often making little money. In my city (Toronto) cabs were often dirty, broken, refused short distance fares (illegal) and smelled of cigarette smoke that was obviously from the driver.
Examples (paywalls, but you get the idea):
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/26/nyregion/amid-a-heritage-...
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/adventure/red-li...
Moreover, I believe Uber fundamentally solved two problems with taxis:
The driver can't scam the passenger. The driver can't set the meter wrong, drive an unnecessarily long route, or just be an outright unlicensed taxi. Instead, the driver maintains a relationship with Uber, and the passenger can preview the fare before committing.
The passenger can't scam the driver. In a traditional taxi, you could theoretically just walk out ("dine and dash" style). The passenger can also make a call to dispatch and not show up for the ride. Instead, the passenger maintains a relationship with Uber, and the driver doesn't need to handle any payments.
> Medallion systems often prevented any competition, sometimes to absurd effect. The number of licenced taxis often didn't keep pace with population growth, sometimes even staying flat.
And thus medallion owners collect economic rent on their artificially scarce resource, distorting the free market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent
Meanwhile, in places with sensible rules about taxis and private hire, the only thing that Uber did was make it easier for people to break the rules. And rack up an enormous tax bill that they somehow believed they'd be able to get out of paying.
https://www.londonreconnections.com/2021/uber-loses-appeal-a...
> The driver can't scam the passenger
> The passenger can't scam the driver.
Progress! Uber scams both passenger and driver. Hooray for Free Markets™!
> Uber scams both passenger and driver.
Then why do people keep using it? It seems like a pretty transactional relationship to me. If drivers aren't getting paid as much as they wanted, they should find another job with a higher price. If passengers are paying more than they wanted, then they should find another way to call a taxi with a lower price.
> they should find another way to call a taxi with a lower price.
like what? Uber's business plan was always about eliminating competition. The company successfully did so by undercutting prices, only to jack them up when they had the market to themselves. There is no Free Market Fairy way to fix that.
Under what definition of “scam” is that the case?
https://locusmag.com/2024/05/cory-doctorow-no-one-is-the-ens...
It sucked, but not everywhere equally. Meanwhile, Uber rode their one-trick pony (an app), which everyone quickly replicated, all the way to upending taxi businesses worldwide, thanks to their infinite money supply letting them survive long enough in any new market to get the public behind them, which took away support from local regulators trying to keep the market from being gutted by what at this point was a multinational corporation (and technically a criminal enterprise).
Sure, taxi services aren't usually known to be paragons of virtue, but then they weren't that bad everywhere; Uber is just another case of an US org trying to address an US-specific problem and then bludgeoning the entire world with their solution, whether the rest of the planet has such problems or not.
That seems a little dramatic. They never forced anyone to take an uber right? If taxis were so amazing in other countries why would anyone be interested in switching to uber?
Uber was able to subsidize prices, that's why.
> It sucked, but not everywhere equally.
Ok, but “everywhere” isn’t my problem. They sucked everywhere I had to use one which is my problem.
> they weren’t that bad everywhere
They were beyond a joke where I am from, which is not the US. Even today, they remain a worse option.
> US specific problem
There was nothing US specific about it.
I've never been a huge user of either, but my worst Uber ride was much better than my best taxi ride.
The last time I dragged my family into a taxi because of my anti Uber ideology, the driver stank to hell of body odor, asked me to input directions on his phone covered with dried snot from him sneezing with his mouth open, he drove dangerously under the speed limit on the freeway, and it took twice as long to get home as normal.
But at least I didn’t give Uber any money…
I'm immediately reminded of the Slavoj Zizek quote,
"I already am eating from the trashcan all the time. The name of this trashcan is ideology"
Strange, my last Uber driver had BO. Normally they are fine however.
in my experience, taxi quality varies wildly depending on where you are
in bay area, it absolutely makes sense to invent uber, because the taxis were awful. and in vancouver (canada), they're also awful, and deserve the disruption: they would often tell you it'd be a 40 minute wait, and then just not show up
taxis in new york were and continue to be totally fine. you just stand outside and get in ~20 seconds later, with no hassles or apps. i've been in an uber/lyft a handful of times in nyc, but they're just worse (possibly cheaper, but the subway also gives them stiff competition, and i don't care that much if i'm in enough of a hurry to take a cab)
>taxis in new york were and continue to be totally fine. you just stand outside and get in ~20 seconds later, with no hassles or apps
Unless you weren't white, or you wanted to leave Manhattan (or even go north of 96th street). Otherwise, yeah I guess they were okay.
Vancouver was a great example of the corruption inherent in monopolies. Vancouver had neither Lyft nor Uber until 2020. I heard (internally, when I used to work for Uber) that the reason is that some politicians there had a personal stake in the taxis, so they got a $50 minimum fare passed for all booked rides.
The thing that Uber and Lyft really provided was a surveillance economy to keep both the drivers and riders somewhat in-line. Without it, every ride is an almost anonymous one-shot transaction with almost no recourse on one side, so the game theory suggests that service only has to be good enough that the police aren't called.
https://www.urbanyvr.com/uber-lyft-vancouver-launches/
> taxis in new york were and continue to be totally fine. you just stand outside and get in ~20 seconds later, with no hassles or apps.
This is only true in a small subset of New York.
When it's not raining.
Uber is still undercutting taxis in Boston, FWIW. I looked up a ride on Curb (a taxi app) and Uber today, and the prices were $17 and $12, respectively.
Taxis and hotels suck compared to Airbnb and uber even at the same price, so I find it hard to be upset.
Every time we talk about VC money in the last 20 years, we’re really talking about a wealth transfer from workers and the middle class to the rich via the Cantillon Effect. Cheap money enters the system through banks, funds, and corporations, not through wages. The people who get access to it first (asset holders, investors, VCs) deploy it into equities, real estate, and startups before inflation devalues the currency for everyone else.
Post-2008, ZIRP and QE pumped trillions into financial markets, making capital nearly free for those who could borrow at scale. That money didn’t go into raising wages; it went into inflating asset prices. If you owned stocks or real estate, you got richer. If you earned a paycheck, you watched housing and living costs go up while your wages stagnated.
VC was one of the biggest beneficiaries. With bonds yielding nothing, institutional investors had to chase returns, flooding venture funds with capital. That’s how we got an era of insane startup valuations, SoftBank-style mega-funds, and entire sectors built on free money. Growth-at-all-costs became the norm because the cost of capital was effectively zero.
Then COVID hit, and the Fed doubled down—more QE, more stimulus, even lower rates. Another massive wealth transfer. Money printer go brrr, asset prices moon, and suddenly we have SPACs, meme stocks, and a startup funding frenzy. Meanwhile, workers got a couple of stimulus checks, and by the time the dust settled, everything from rent to food to cars was way more expensive.
Now AI companies are running the same playbook that cloud megascalers ran before them—monetizing open-source work while locking out the people who actually built it. Cloud providers took open-source databases, infrastructure, and developer tools, turned them into managed services, and extracted billions in profit without meaningfully compensating the people who did the work. AI companies are now doing the same thing—scraping open-source repositories, academic papers, and public datasets, building models upon it then slapping on proprietary fine-tuning and charging for API access all the while blatantly raising capital by promising to make the same workers they stole from obsolte. All of it built on the backs of researchers, engineers, and artists who never see a dime, but also on the backs of everyone else via the cantillon effect.
Now rates go up, the bubble deflates, and who gets left holding the bag? Not the VCs who cashed out early. Not the bankers who took their fees. It’s the workers, the middle class, the open-source devs, and the late-stage startup employees who thought they had something real. The cycle repeats.
Is it? Really?
Or is it just "illegal" for an overseas competitor to a domestic industry, in trade disputes?
What is the fine? How many days in jail does the company spend? What portion is its stock diluted by?
We remember the tale of Jeff Bezouis the Wise, who tragically lost his company when he decided he didn't want to buy diapers.com at the offered price, and instead wanted to dump 200 million dollars into selling diapers well below cost until their site folded.
You're right. Dumping refers to international trade. I believe parent commenter was thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing
This has always been the case. Laws are only as good as their enforcement. This is why the business class is so aggressive about tearing down regulation until they can wield it as a weapon. Do as I say, not as I do, etc etc
If you as an individual can prevent the enforcement of a law, or be sure that it will not be enforced against you, then it does not apply to you.
I've also heard the term "regulatory arbitrage" to describe this.
its a term used to describe "corporate criminal acts" yes
The hotel and taxi industry were legit terrible before those two disrupted them.
Laws are ment to be broken. Especially in cronist systems where incumbents write the laws.
Hotels were just fine.
Taxis were discriminatory and "uncool" to the point were Uber has saved thousands by preventing drunk driving.
Now if you go out with the boys and get drunk, it's a 30 second casual call to get an Uber and get home.
Live in a neighborhood Taxis are afraid to service，you can either make some extra income working for Uber or use it yourself. When Ubers used as its intended purpose, to basically make a quick buck, it's a lifeline to many low income people .
Say your rents it's going to be late, you can pick up 20 or 30 hours of Uber this month to make it happen. It's not really a career though...
> Say your rents it's going to be late, you can pick up 20 or 30 hours of Uber this month to make it happen.
Maybe... I really don't get how the economics work out here though. If you look at the numbers, it mostly just seems like you're converting car equity into cash via depreciation.
But also, I'd guess that for a big chunk of people who are going to have trouble paying rent with any regularity, they'd have to overpay for their car in the first place to get something that's Uber-appropriate. My car's a couple years too old for Uber now, but is still perfectly functional, and there's just no way the math would work for me to buy a newer car so that I can convert its capital cost into cash via Uber.
> Say your rents it's going to be late, you can pick up 20 or 30 hours of Uber this month to make it happen
that sounds so incredibly dystopian, not sure if that was the intention :(
It's super dystopian and it creates bad incentives (the harder the underclass is squeezed the better a product it is for the middle class), but I have to agree that gig work is often a lifeline for poor people.
I consider it similar to access to unsecured credit that way - it's easy to feel like "wow this industry is scamming these people it should be illegal" but people without any other backstop will probably need access to unsecured credit sometime and it's better than losing their house/car/job/pet/family etc..
maintaining a precarious class benefits those in power
I forgot to mention, Jitney cabs( unlicensed cabs primarily serving minority neighborhoods)came long before Ubers. They're more of less gone now though.
What's better. Taking out a 300% APR payday loan, getting evicted or working an extra 20, 30 hours of Uber.
Maybe to you, but I was broke during and shortly after college. If I could have picked up some gig work when I needed it, that would have been a huge help.
The level of casual criminality in this industry is astounding sometimes.
Not terrible everywhere.
Airbnb and Uber have showed us that laws matter only to the extent that the political will to enforce them exists.
Laws matter to the extent that they don't interfere with actual progress. Laws that would have prevented the LLMs we have today from being developed should be ignored, as should laws requiring us to pay tribute to taxi and hotel cartels.
Respect for the law is going to be an increasingly-hard sell going forward, and that's mostly the lawmakers' own fault. When the law does not respect the people, the people will not respect the law.
That's what makes a banana republic, and for all intents and purposes the U.S. are exhibit A.
The purpose of having an executive branch of government is explicitly to apply the law based on subjective opinions.
There's no purpose of having an executive branch of government separate from the other two branches if not to cushion the inflexible and glacial nature of the other branches of government.
>The purpose of having an executive branch of government is explicitly to apply the law based on subjective opinions.
What? No, the purpose of having a separate executive is separation of powers and checks and balances.
You haven't explained why there is an executive branch in the first place.
Why does the executive branch exist at all if it's simply to enforce written law?
Why do we elect the executive at all if they are merely to enforce written law?
Why do executives have the power to pardon someone when a court of law finds a person guilty of breaking law?
> Why does the executive branch exist at all if it's simply to enforce written law?
Someone has to be in charge of enforcing things.
> Why do we elect the executive at all if they are merely to enforce written law?
Do you have a suggestion of another way to do it that doesn't put congress in charge?
Also the president has some other very important roles.
> Why do executives have the power to pardon someone when a court of law finds a person guilty of breaking law?
That one is definitely subjective by its nature, but also the average number of pardons is around two thousand, a very small fraction of cases.
The executive exists to enforce the law the legislature writes primarily to make sure the legislature isn't in charge of enforcing the laws. It's a check on the power of the legislature.
You could still have discretion with the legislature in charge of executing on their own laws. I think countries exist like that, but I don't know enough to say which.
A separate executive is not necessary to have discretion or pardons or flexibility in law. A separate executive is necessary if you want physically different human beings controlling the organizations who enforce the law (DOJ, FBI, etc)
Consider that Judges and the judicial branch of the government ALSO gets to use subjectivity and their own opinion in adjudicating cases. Another check.
The entire point of the Constitution was to put the power of a King in a bunch of different hands, and then tie some of those hands with specific constraints, and then give a couple different options on how to change those constraints over time. Leeway and discretion goes both ways, so Congress does have the ability to further constrain such discretion. A previous president tried to argue he could choose to not spend money congress told him to spend, so they wrote up a bill saying very clearly, Uh, no, if we say spend, you spend. They have that power as a check on the power of the executive. All three branches are ostensibly MEANT to be vying for power. It's an antagonistic system, like the court system. The founders loved that shit. In reality, it probably is a dysfunctional system that modern systems engineers would not like, and other countries get that "system fights and moderates itself" effect by encouraging coalitions between parties in a strong parliament. IMO those have demonstrated better stability. I'm not convinced the US would have survived getting it's whole shit blown up like the UK did.
Checks. And. Balances. 5th grade civics class.
Wilhoit’s law:
> There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
Is that a prescriptive or descriptive law?
He left out part of the quote, which is misappropriated as well. Wikipedia:
> This quotation is often incorrectly attributed to Francis M. Wilhoit:
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
> However, it was actually a 2018 blog response by 59-year-old Ohio composer Frank Wilhoit, years after Francis Wilhoit's death.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_M._Wilhoit
A restatement of Orwell's "all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others".
The irony must have been lost on him.
Lol, that's clearly a descriptive law/maxim not an actual law.
The legal system is built to favor large corps and capital owners. See Katharina Pistor books for instance.
I think it’s the other way around. Those large entities break all the same laws and rules as others and then get to the point where they can influence the creation of a regulatory moat around themselves to prevent competitors from taking the same path as them.
True but lets take examples one by one to see what we can learn : Spotify was doing illegal things until they made a deal to become legal and not to be trialed over what they done. Seems like business deals is what saved them, not regulatory capture (the regulations around IP for music pre existed Spotify)
Sure that is what saved them initially, but following that early 2010’s period of hemorrhaging money and eventual recovery, then they started digging that moat.
https://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/spotify-washington-lo...
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/issues?...
Very interesting thank you for the links. I'm not knowledgeable in the Music Modernization Act, but maybe some of this lobbying is to avoid being sued rather than building legal long term moat
Same would be the case for YouTube. Google case was different in that AFAIK there wasn't any obvious legal problem with indexing, and, back then, they were actually doing everyone a favor.
Hardly anyone had any issue with Google search until the time when news media screwed themselves over by going all in on ads, overdoing it, then trying to bring back the paywall, only to realize no one is actually browsing their sites but instead relies on Google to find specific articles. All kinds of legal and technical nonsense started happening (and then Google improved the blurbs under search results and added the "answer box", leading publishers big and small to collectively lose their minds...).
And then news media in Canada got even worse a few years ago. They demanded the government make a law so that when Google or Facebook even links to an article, they must pay the news org. Google decided to pay the link tax. Facebook decided to block all news links. From talking to people, most think that Facebook is the villain, in reality it's the news orgs in collusion with state power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_News_Act , https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/charter-charte/c18_...
Then Facebook complied with the new law which had negative outcomes for Canadians. The politicians then blamed Facebook for the negative outcomes: https://www.wired.com/story/meta-facebook-instagram-news-blo...
I do believe that large companies should be taxed to help improve society. This law was not the right way to do it.
I guess I sort of understand where this idea comes from, and when I was young I was totally into it, but now being in the corporate world for a decade and having my own small business, I just don't really see it anymore.
Big corps tend to be extremely conscientious of the the law. The law may not be ideal, but they tend to be hyper aware of it and have lawyers to ensure it. Small companies on the other hand are the wild fucking west, and tend to be overflowing with "turn a blind eye to that".
What big corps love is regulation that is expensive for small shops to overcome. They can drop $500k on a product cert no problem, be legally in the clear (and graciously compliant!), while making it near impossible for small guys to compete.
RIP Aaron
If you do something wrong then you, as a person, are held responsible and accountable.
If you do something wrong as "part of your job" then you're typically not held responsible and accountable but the company is (the exceptions being spectacular fraud: Enron, VW diesel).
It's not hard to see how this can go off the rails.
“The revolution will be incorporated.”
> the legal system only punishes general public, while most of these guys are above it
It’s because the legal system is not about justice, it’s about money
Most people can’t afford lawyers or expensive legal battles
On the other hand, individuals and organizations with a lot of money get to weaponize and exploit the legal system to their advantage
“To my friends, anything; to my enemies, the law”
At the risk of wading into politics - consider a legal environment, in any country, where laws become increasingly strict, but where prosecutorial discretion, pardon powers, and a justice system designed to allow well-resourced law firms to delay cases indefinitely, are all transparently used for political purposes. Such an environment could easily exhibit a feedback loop that allows justice to be arbitrary and opposition voices to be silenced.
I'll refrain from value judgments on the above - but for heaven's sake, we're on a site called "Hacker News." We should understand that a machine like this could turn on any one of us in an instant for any reason.
> the legal system only punishes general public.
In more general terms, the legal system punishes what can be made a profit or an example when punishing.
Also, I don't think the legal system itself wants to get too much into "big institutions against the work of others", save for the fictional TV representations of smart lawyers and clever arguments, 99.9% of the legal system output is copy/paste.
> MIT
I think Aaron Swartz went to Harvard, not MIT
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz
Yes, he went to Harvard; the laptop was plugged in at MIT using his Harvard Fellow credentials to access JSTOR.
At this point, I think it's safe to say it doesn't 'feel' that way. It is that way. Sorry if you were being facetious and I didn't pick up on it.
>This is exactly what I immediately thought while reading the article. It almost feels like the legal system only punishes general public, while most of these guys are above it.
Welcome to the modern day aristocracy. Not only what you mentioned, this world is also divided into a group of insider who can get capital from 0 - 2%, while rest of us has a cost of 17%, 22% or 30%?
It doesn't "seem". The entire system in most countries works, by design, that way because the people in power trade in influence at a different plane.
That's why democracy often feels "failed" in that no change can be achieved because "it's just more of the same". Few Lobbyists representing the interests of a few people have more power than millions voting differently.
What happens in US right now shows that change is achieved through voting. There are other examples as well in Europe where things did change because of how people voted. If the change is good or bad depends on your perspective.
For me the annoying part is that people vote for a guy because of a couple heavily advertised issues, ignoring all the other plans or the fact that he might not keep his word. Then they are unhappy that things "fail" for them.
Yes. US and places where people can elect a democracy have a higher chance of some change than European countries with parliamentary systems where a sudden populist candidate won't make it through that system.
I'd argue that, even if some change does happen in the US. Most change (see healthcare, military spending, etc) won't happen because big money will beat the majority of the populace every time.
I like your optimistic take. My more cynical one is that what’s happening in the US shows that real change is achieved through corruption and lying: honest policy discussions and iterative improvement stand no chance against a charismatic populist who will say anything to entrench an oligarchy.
It's not primarily optimistic. I just think that education of the people can bring the best improvement on the long run, and not adjusting democracy, demonizing rich guys or another "new" system.
While I hope iterative improvement is the way, I think there are people that have it (or feel) so bad (due to various reasons) that they would take a 50% chance to die for the chance to live better.
The charismatic populists are not supported only by people that are well off, without any worry (neither in US, nor in Europe). (ex: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1535295/presidential-ele...)
It's unclear yet whether anything will really change. It is a perfect example though of how the rich are above the law.
USAID has already been shut down
What I mean is that people are going to sue, and they will go to the courts. It's unclear how much will really stick.
They may have just been the friendly step A. We didn't end up seeing where that was going to go.
Money speaks ! Money buys !
It's not "almost" like that. The legal system IS that.
How so? It is still illegal if meta does it, they will face trial.
I read the same thing earlier today on Reddit, weird!
if you get a group of people and call it an llc then criminal elements are largely eliminated.
As Venus Theory elaborates the issue on his video [0]:
"This problem will be solved in the favor of the (party) which has the most money to throw into the problem" (paraphrase mine).
So, yeah.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrkAORPiaEA
When individuals are assigned heroic status despite clear evidence of mental illness and crimes, such as “breaking and entering”, it prevents society from having rational discussions about both law enforcement and mental health support. This dynamic repeats across multiple high-profile cases.
People often elevate deeply flawed figures to heroic status when those figures seem to challenge authority or "the system." This happens especially with individuals who present themselves as outsiders fighting the establishment, have a compelling personal struggle narrative, or voice grievances that resonate with public frustrations
Trump fits this pattern - his supporters overlook concerning behaviors and statements because they see him as fighting a system they distrust. Like Manning and Swartz, his mental state and fitness are often ignored in favor of the "hero against the system" narrative.
This dynamic creates a feedback loop where legitimate criticism becomes harder to discuss rationally.
Welcome to the two-tier legal system of the modern world. Why obey the law when the penalty is a rounding error?
It's an oligarchy, always has been. I don't know how colossal the pile of evidence supporting this has to get before people finally accept it.
Conscious life in general seems possible to me unless our brain tells us a better story than reality.
A story in which we are the hero, in which we are not mortal, in which we are important, in which people care about us, in which we are intelligent and our perceptions rarely fail us, in which our life has a meaning and also in which the social game we play is determined, or at least influenced, by some just principles. We would despair if we were aware of the full extent of our meaninglessness and powerlessness.
I believe that it is the core reason why we love to believe that God/Nature is good, that the king is legitimate and that the laws are fair.
They are paid, handsomely, by it. Or otherwise brainwashed by it. And pummelled into ignorance by it, as they are told that to understand is stupid or delusional, knowledge ends at STEM, and the world only exists for efficient production of capital products.
The poets write laments about such false ages. Prophecies were written about such ages thousands of years ago.
The cycles are larger than us all.
One stable insight is that the chaos breeds possibility, and thus hope. In the meantime, however…
It is more a money thing. Meta can pay x billion like pocket change. Regular people are run through the ringer to teach the plebs to not get out of line.
It's not a feeling. It's exactly what happens. It's completely blatant.
For some reason, whenever you're a billionaire or company, things suddenly get so difficult that you can claim that it's impossible to be held accountable for anything. Murder, insider trading, laundering, treason, etc.
OpenAI complained about this, as did Google and everyone else. If your company can't exist without stealing data, then it's not a viable company. Companies don't have a constitutional right to exist.
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I don't think it's right to downplay the disproportionate response the FBI had to Aaron's actions. He was initially being threatened with 50 years in prison and a $1 million fine, the stress from which sent his mental health spiraling and in no small way contributed to his suicide. I think the original point of the person you are responding to still stands.
You are correct. Prosecutors don’t consider whether charging a perp will upset them and stress them out. Nor should they.
Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.
Every time I wonder how authoritarian regimes gain power, I remind myself there are people who seem to delight in the suffering of others.
For downloading papers, paid for with government funding and gatekept by greedy rent seekers charging ~ $30 a pop. The lengths people will go to defend things that should not exist astounds.
What about his family and friends? Do you blame them as well?
What does that even mean?
Why would I?
As a general rule, I'm not a fan of prosecutors. However, blaming a prosecutor for the suicide of a defendant, because they filed charges in a clear cut case, is just as unfair as blaming friends and family.
I mean yes, the prosecutor had discretion to offer a light plea deal, and instead chose to try and ruin someone's life over papers. I absolutely blame the prosecutor.
Everyone is responsible for the full effects of his actions. One is literally responsible for all consequences, everything no matter how indirect.
This absolute responsibility is physics, while the limited 'only direct consequences' type thing is a choice made in some human legal systems.
People are smart. They know what stress they put on people and from interacting with them they get a good feel of much they can take. If they ignore that, or decide not to talk to people they're putting stress or choose to ignore things, that's only intentional negligence.
I don't think the prosecutors cared. I don't think we should judge unless there double standards or hypocrisy, but let's not imagine they aren't responsible for things that resulted from their action and inaction. You cause what you case.
What a repulsive comment.
Shame though that corpos aren't responsible for their actions too :|
> Google itself got big by indexing other people's data without compensation
Wrong.
a) Robots.txt which defines what content you wish to make available to third parties predates every search engine including Google. Web site owners chose to make it available to Google and search engines have respected their wishes despite it not being in their best interest.
b) The difference here is that OpenAI, Meta etc have not even tried to honour the wishes of copyright holders. They just considered everything as theirs.
c) Google grew big because it had no ads, fast interface and PageRank was significantly better. It wasn't because it had the most comprehensive index.
> Web site owners chose to make it available to Google.
Strong disagree. Since robots.txt is optional and the default is "crawl me as you please", website owners don't "choose to make it available", they just don't choose to make it non-available.
That's a functionally meaningless distinction. If you setup a web server that responds to requests, then you're choosing to make content available because your server can choose to not respond to requests. The entire protocol includes mechanisms to negotiate access.
Granting access and granting right to redistribute (even just title + snippet) and use your content commercially are two completely different things.
And yet it is legal to produce and redistribute summaries as sufficiently transformative derivative works, and this has been court tested[1]. Of course in Australia we passed rather specific laws to the contrary, because lo and behold Rupert Murdoch wanted money and gosh darn it our government was going to give it to him[2].
[1] https://www.practicalecommerce.com/Search-Engines-Indexing-a...
[2] https://www.alrc.gov.au/publication/copyright-and-the-digita...
This is a meaningless simplification. In this framework "robots.txt" has no role, because your server "can choose" not to respond. Heck, even DDOS is fine, because "protocol"
To your first point, the op said without compensation, not without permission.
a) If you don't have a robots.txt, you're indexed by default. It's opt-out, not opt-in. If you do nothing, you're being indexed.
It's an opt-out of an opt-in. If you run a webserver hosting your files, you already opted-in to people accessing that data. If you then don't go ahead an configure it properly, that's not exactly "opt-out" anymore. By default your files are not accessible to the network, you have to first opt-in to serving them.
Google makes a copy of your data and serves that data to users before they visit your site.
Also google cache allows users to get a copy of your site without visiting your site.
Why can they republish your data while we cannot? Why do we have to opt-out?
Robots.txt is irrelevant after hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn (2019)
point c is wrong...they had ads since the original yahoo contract....
Yahoo contract was 2 years after it launched.
I remember using Google the day it went public and it had no ads which made it unique compared to Altavista.
Wrong. Google ignores robots.txt entirely
I wasn't aware. Can you please update Wikipedia then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt
Maybe also get Google to update their docs: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
their own docs also specify that the robots.txt does not stop indexing or showing up in search, they even bolded it "it is not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google"
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
From the docs:
“While Google won't crawl or index the content blocked by a robots.txt file”
They will show the URL if someone else has linked to it. But the content itself is not indexed.
The only way for links to appear in a Google search would be to host a public resource, that is linked from another public resource.
If you have specified in your robots.txt that you do not want the page(s) or directories ingested then only the url is indexed (if it is linked from another page). It does prevent the public display of the content of a page and creation description/summary.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7489871?hl=en
It must be nice to believe everything people say by default... ;)
The more I learn about how AI companies trained their models, the more obvious it is that the rest of us are just suckers. We're out here assuming that laws matter, that we should never misrepresent or hide what we're doing for our work, that we should honor our own terms of use and the terms of use of other sites/products, that if we register for a website or piece of content we should always use our work email address so that the person or company on the other side of that exchange can make a reasonable decision about whether we can or should have access to it.
What we should have been doing all along is YOLO-ing everything. It's only illegal if you get caught. And if you get big enough before you get caught then the rules never have to apply to you anyway.
Suckers. All of us.
And if you were in any doubt before, this lesson is now exemplified by the holder of the highest office in the land and approved by popular vote. The rewards of acting ethically are, unfortunately, sometimes only personal. This must be a hard environment to raise children in, given the examples they see around them.
Parent here: it takes a lot of discussion, but it's a great time to talk about the reality of evil and villains. My kids are on the good side, or at least I like to think so ...
This argument may focus too much on the category of external rewards.
I might well be kidding myself or self-justifying, but I believe internal rewards are at least as important. Some materially successful people are deeply unhappy.
> approved by popular vote
Quibble: The majority of people voted against Trump, or at least not in his favor. He only got a plurality, not a majority.
He didn't state 'by majority' anywhere in that comment. Approved. By popular vote, by some portion of the totality of popular vote, unspecified as far as the post goes.
Approved by enough popular vote to attain plurality. I'll take your quibble as a cute fixation with correctness when it comes to statistics, and not as it otherwise tends to manifest.
Cheers.
Also, no-vote is a vote for the winner, so the majority at least tacitly approves.
THIS.
>What we should have been doing all along is YOLO-ing everything
No it isn't. The actual sucker attitude is copying what they do. You should act morally and with integrity out of respect for yourself. I never had any illusions that large tech companies act with respect towards the law, but it also has nothing to do with me.
If you have a spare few hours, the Acquired podcast episode on Meta is enlightening. They just stumbled through growth hack experiment after experiment without seemingly any risk assessment or ethics.
Excellent podcast, slowly working my way through the back catalogue.
> It's only illegal if you get caught
Not quite. It's only illegal if you get caught and you are the wrong kind of person.
For the right kind of person not even a pat on the wrist.
yep, pretty much.
This sort of mindset is devoid of morals and honor. Don’t fall into the this mindset trap.
Like when Trump said he is “smart” for evading taxes during the presidential debates (IIRC the first ones, not recent ones).
It’s absolutely despicable. Have a moral compass. Treat people fairly. Be nice. Let’s be better than toddlers who haven’t learned yet that hitting is bad, and you shouldn’t do it even if mommy and daddy aren’t in the room.
I agree with you and will die to defend that position, but what existential reasons do we have to behave well? In reality, it seems like humans are just a bunch of animals, and the only important thing is survival.
My wife, just today, told me that she was very upset that I refused to interview and take jobs for things like building weapons, the panopticon, or advertising (two of those are the same thing), which I refuse to do because of my personal morals and ethics. How do I explain to her that I just can't do that, and give her a good reason why we should lose our home and live in one room with her mother because of my brain refusing to work in such industries? I really want to know, so I can explain to her and my son why such things matter, because for some reason they are concrete and foundational in my brain, there is no changing that.
> what existential reasons do we have to behave well?
Fundamentally we’re built for small group survival, so playing nice and sharing resources increases your odds for survival. That’s why we care about others, in an evolutionary perspective.
> In reality, it seems like humans are just a bunch of animals, and the only important thing is survival.
At the end of the day, yes we’re animals. But we also have built hugely complex societies and think about philosophy etc.
Throwing away all morality and just doing whatever you can get away with is like being an animal. It strips out humanity.
And personally I’d urge you to find some places you’d want to interview for that align with your morals. If your wife, or anyone, asks you to compromise your morals then try bringing home the consequences to something they care about.
For example, won’t build weapons? Ask “Would you be ok if I worked for X, and my work resulted in the deaths of children?”
> “Would you be ok if I worked for X, and my work resulted in the deaths of children?”
At this point, one can very well expect that working for X (as in 'X, the website formerly known as Twitter') will MOST SURELY result in the deaths of children.
Sorry, couldn't resist the comedic opportunity.
> what existential reasons do we have to behave well?
Overall humans play pretty nice, all things considered. If you get sick someone will help you, if you lose your job you can fall back on assistance. Hell, even the fact you HAVE a job is a privilege granted to you.
Other animals don't do that. They eat their young, because they feel like it. Without the will and kindness of other humans, a fact that we take so for granted we fail to recognize it as "society", most of us wouldn't live 10 days. That's not an exaggeration either - check out infant mortality statistics throughout human history.
I feel like morality is decreasing. And, I feel like with all these rising issue eg. climate change it will decrease and bite most of us.
<Tether's ears burning>
I don't understand why it's even a question that Meta trained their LLM on copyrighted material. They say so in their paper! Quoting from their LLaMMa paper [Touvron et al., 2023]:
> We include two book corpora in our training dataset: the Gutenberg Project, [...], and the Books3 section of ThePile (Gao et al., 2020), a publicly available dataset for training large language models.
Following that reference:
> Books3 is a dataset of books derived from a copy of the contents of the Bibliotik private tracker made available by Shawn Presser (Presser, 2020).
(Presser, 2020) refers to https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1320282149329784833. (Which funnily refers to this DMCA policy: https://the-eye.eu/dmca.mp4)
Furthermore, they state they trained on GitHub, web pages, and ArXiv, which are all contain copyrighted content.
Surely the question is: is it legal to train and/or use and/or distribute an AI model (or its weights, or its outputs) that is trained using copyrighted material. That it was trained on copyrighted material is certain.
[Touvron et al., 2023] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.13971
[Gao et al., 2020] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.00027
Critically, by torrenting they also directly distributed the copywritten material itself. That is a standalone infringement separate from any argument about trained LLMs.
They could have only leached and refrained from sharing any part of copyrighted data. If i were to commit something as risky as this, that is what i would do.
Then it would need to be determined, whether that is the case or not. Did every single machine they used have the configuration for only leeching and no seeding? The company is liable for what its employees on the job. If only one employee was also seeding ... that could be a very interesting case.
> Did every single machine they used have the configuration for only leeching and no seeding?
I would certainly assume so. It's incredibly obvious that's what you would want to do from a legal standpoint.
> If only one employee was also seeding ... that could be a very interesting case.
The torrenting wouldn't be done casually by employees acting on their own. And it's not like multiple employees are doing it simultaneously, unsupervised, on their personal computers.
This is part of an official project. They'd spin up a machine just to download the torrent, being careful to disable seeding.
This is Meta. They have lawyers involved and advising. This isn't a teenager who doesn't fully understand how torrenting works.
Did you not read the article? There are quotes from Meta employees doing exactly what you claim they wouldn't do.
> This is part of an official project. They'd spin up a machine just to download the torrent, being careful to disable seeding.
From the article:
> "Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right," Nikolay Bashlykov, a Meta research engineer, wrote in an April 2023 message, adding a smiley emoji. In the same message, he expressed "concern about using Meta IP addresses 'to load through torrents pirate content.'"
You also claim they would be "careful to disable seeding" but we know they did in fact seed (and anyone who uses private trackers knows they couldn't get away with leeching for very long before being kicked off):
> Meta also allegedly modified settings "so that the smallest amount of seeding possible could occur," a Meta executive in charge of project management, Michael Clark, said in a deposition.
Seeding can be trivially faked to trackers.
https://github.com/slundi/RatioUp
https://github.com/anthonyraymond/joal
http://ratiomaster.net/
The smallest amount of seeding possible would be metadata, presumably not subject to copyright.
And punishing them in the normal manner will be an incredibly small slap on the wrist, and do absolutely nothing to help us find out what will play out in court regarding a fair-use defense on training AI with copyrighted material.
Isn't there a "fruit of the poisoned tree" kind of thing? Sounds to me quite similar to the situation where you would murder your parent and get to keep the inheritance, even if you are convicted of murder. Inheriting stuff isn't illegal, yet, I think most jurisdictions would not allow you to keep it in this case.
There should be a problem with stuff obtained through illegal means, even if having that stuff is in principle legal. In this case, copyrighted material.
Obviously they would argue that having the data is only a consequence of the download part, and that part is legal. What I see is that these situations are always complicated, and if you're rich enough, you get to litigate the complications and come out with a slap on the wrist or maybe even clean hands, while if you are an ordinary citizen, you can't afford to delve into the complexities and get punished.
These days I'm starting to give up on the whole concept of the legal system being fair. They're not even pretending anymore.
There are two different things when it comes to discussing training LLM's on "copyright" protected data, and I almost never see people differentiate.
1.) Training on copyright that is publicly available. You write a poem and publish it online for the world to read. That is your IP, no one else can take it an sell it, but they are free to read and be inspired by it. The legalitly of training on this is in the courts, but so far seems to be going in favor of LLMs.
2.) Training on copyright that is not publicly available. These are pretty much pirated works or works obtained by backdoor to avoid paying for them. Your poem is behind a paywall and you never got paid, yet the poem is known by the LLM. This is just straight illegal, as you legally must pay to view the work. However there might be conditions here too like paying for access to an archive and then training on everything in it.
I never gave my poem to Facebook. My site is for humans. And there was absolutely no problem with that website being public, until Facebook et al wanted to move the goalpost.. again. Remember when companies started to claim that their abuse is on you, because you failed to publish the correct headers/robots.txt and their bot needs to be told the rules in specific language? And now we get the same attempt at making such distinction again, just this time its our fault for .. having a public website in the first place (should have operated a paywall, duh!)
3.) The company making an unauthorized copy of your work and storing it permanently in a giant corporate library of their own making which they refer to over and over.
This is distinct from (1) where the content is streamed or only ephemeral/incidental copies are made.
The very idea that LLMs are "inspired" by copyright material is so far beyond absurd I just don't know what reality you people live in. They are ingesting copyright material in order to re-use it. Yeah they remix it to add their own (incredibly annoying) tone but that's what they're doing.
good distinction
IMO there's a hack about this,
authors can claim that they allow for public use unless it's used for training LLMs. And all of training work would fall under 2 because they would be used against the copyright.
I think they would need to have some explicit contract every time they want to sell the book then, though. I don’t think I am bound by some random terms someone writes into a book I’m buying. Those probably are only binding if a reasonable person would notice them before sale.
If you arrive at the point of being able to buy that book, it means it has passed the publisher's hands and I would think, that the publisher was OK with those terms then, and limiting the usage of the text may in fact be effective. If it was self-published, then even more so.
But the license restriction would have to apply both to the publisher and the customer.
If I go to the bookstore, buy the book, make a scan, and train an LLM with it, how would you enforce your license as an author? The customer never knew that he shouldn’t have been allowed to train LLMs.
Edit: I think I misunderstood the original comment, I thought the idea was to sell books and restrict use for LLM training. If we’re only talking about stuff that’s publicly released, the restriction should be possible.
Whether you make a scan of it or not, the license applies to the IP, I guess (IANAL).
Whether the shop makes a scan should not affect you as the buyer of the actual book. What does the scan have to do with you?
Whether the author learns about that scan and perhaps training of some LLM using the scan or not, does not change the legality of it.
But the license doesn’t apply to me as a customer if I can’t be expected to even notice it. If I buy a book in a bookstore, no one would assume that training LLMs on it would be explicitly forbidden. And adding a note to the book would probably not be binding because no one is expected to read the legal notice in a book.
Ah, I assumed, that the clauses regarding the use in training of an LLM are printed inside the book somewhere.
It would still be unenforceable because there's no consideration.
There is nothing of value that the license gives me that I wouldn't already have if the contract didn't exist. I can already read the book, merely by having it in front of me.
How does that give you the right to train an LLM on it?
Or are we talking about training an LLM on it and never releasing that LLM to anyone ever? Then I guess it wouldn't matter. But if that LLM is released to anyone, shouldn't the author of the book have a say on it?
> How does that give you the right to train an LLM on it?
Fair use gives me that right, not a contract or license.
Whether that falls under fair use is highly debatable.
It's going through the courts right now. We'll probably have an answer in a year or two.
I felt for a long time that it should be fair use. If an LLM can abstract what it learns from the copyrighted work, then that seems "fair" because that's what humans do.
But ... as I've thought about it more, it doesn't really feel just to me. The kind of value reaped from the works seems to suggest that the creator is due some portion of that value. Also, in practice - there's just an absolutely enormous amount of knowledge that can be consumed from the public domain. Even if Meta, OpenAI and friends decided to license a ~small handful of the long-term archives of some globally-read newspapers, they could get very broad and deep knowledge about the events, trends, terms of the last century to fill in a lot of gaps.
I'm not sure there's any legal distinction though.
Is a book publicly available? No, you have to purchase it. But once you do, you're legally allowed to let your friends and family and so forth read it too. As long as you don't sell copies of it (the "copy" part of "copyright"), or meaningfully take away the ability for the publisher to make money from sales (so you can't post it for the whole world to see on the internet).
And sure, there are lots of ToS for digital works, but are they actually enforceable? ToS can say you're not allowed to let anyone else read the book you purchased. But no court is going to say you can't lend your Kindle to your friend for them to read it too. Many ToS clauses are flat-out illegal.
Meta will argue that training on books is no different from reading all the books at a friend's house. That as long as Meta isn't reselling or making publicly available the original text, they're in the clear.
I don't know what the deal is in the relevant jurisdictions, but in Swedish copyright law, the provenance of the original matters ("lovlig förlaga").
This means that it's not legal to download a rip of e.g. a CD that was uploaded without consent, even if you own a copy.
(This exception to the general right to make copies for private use was added in 2005 to make downloading illegal -- previously, only uploading was infringing.)
I would assume just the act of downloading this content was illegal in the relevant US jurisdictions as well.
I believe the most famous cases in the US have only gone after the people sharing or seeding or uploading content. My ISP could care less what I download from use net but they will definitely care when I start seating.
But they are making unauthorized copies: Their training data set is analogous to private collection of duplicates.
What do you think copyright law(suits) would do if a regular person made copies of every book and movie and song they saw, placing the duplicate media in a room of their house?
Trained on doesn't mean significant inclusion in the final state.
Is it truly a violation of copyright when a user hacks out bits and pieces of easily restyled raw data points from a model to look samey? what about if it takes two models? Might be time to accept humans are just cooked in their ability to discern attempts at direct plagiarism - just as it is hard to discern Sky voice from Her voice.
I strongly urge people to read Thomas Babington Macaulay's speeches on copyright, its aims, terms, and hazards. Very well reasoned and explained.
In particular, people often cited the case of authors who had died leaving a family in destitution, and claimed that copyright extension would be a fair way of preventing this, but in most cases the remaining family had never held the copyright; the author had initally sold the reproduction rights to a publisher who had then sat on the work without publishing it. The author, driven into penury, was then induced to sell the copyright to the publisher outright for a pittance. So in such cases a copyright extension only benefited the publisher, and indeed increased their incentive to extort the copyright.
> Thomas Babington Macaulay
The one who got Hindu Sanskrit books translated in a horrible manner and then claimed: "I have no knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanskrit works. I have conversed both here and at home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia."
This chap will educate us on copyright?
No thanks!
This is the corollary of the fallacy of appeal to authority: the rejection of an argument on the grounds that the speaker was horribly wrong on an unrelated or very loosely related topic.
If you reject Macaulay on copyright because he was an imperialist, you can use the exact same logic to reject the arguments of essentially every person who ever lived. Very few humans who ever wrote anything important will perfectly align with your morality, and most will be horribly misaligned in at least one way.
> If you reject Macaulay on copyright because he was an imperialist
On the contrary I would argue that this is precisely why you SHOULD NOT take his opinion on copyright. One of the main outcomes of imperialism/colonization is denigrating/destroying/appropriating works of art, literature with the primary goal of subjugation, subversion and thereupon replacement of native culture/traditions/institutions. I did not quote the other half of his nauseating take but I'll post it nevertheless:
"[...] And I certainly never met with any Orientalist who ventured to maintain that the Arabic and Sanscrit poetry could be compared to that of the great European nations. But when we pass from works of imagination to works in which facts are recorded, and general principles investigated, the superiority of the Europeans becomes absolutely immeasurable. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say, that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England. In every branch of physical or moral philosophy, the relative position of the two nations is nearly the same."
> One of the main outcomes of imperialism/colonization is denigrating/destroying/appropriating works of art, literature with the primary goal of subjugation, subversion and thereupon replacement of native culture/traditions/institutions.
Which is irrelevant to the question of whether copyright law within the country of England and within English culture is beneficial or not.
It is the nature of racism that it bypasses rational thought—it does not follow that because someone is racist they therefore don't have anything valuable to say on loosely related topics. Someone can see clearly about copyright when thinking about English authors while treating non-English authors as strictly inferior.
These kinds of contradictions are to be expected when racism is involved, because racism inherently lives in the lizard brain (occasionally justified by post hoc rationalizations). Someone's arguments about an issue touching only their own tribe will tend to be more rational than those that touch on other tribes, and you'll miss out if you assume the rationality is going to be correlated and dismiss all arguments accordingly.
> Which is irrelevant to the question of whether copyright law within the country of England and within English culture is beneficial or not
It is irrelevant from your POV because you don't see anything wrong in IP violations when it comes to Knowledge being taken out of India, credit removed and then reproduced in European Languages, including English, as if it was some novel discovery. So those who indulged in this specifically (I am not talking about current British folk but people like Macaulay) should not be giving sermons on Copyright Law.
To give you an analogy:
Using the same logic, you would have to give CCP a pass and say they did not "steal IP from the US" because Copyright Law in China specifically applies only within the Country of China and within Chinese culture. Surely you wouldn't learn about specifics of Copyright Law from the CCP I presume (yes they do have a Copyright Law that applies internally in China). If that is the case, then the same argument applies to the British Empire as well.
> it does not follow that because someone is racist they therefore don't have anything valuable to say on loosely related topics
It is not irrelevant considering many of the same Sanskrit scriptures were translated by Arabs, which were then translated by Europeans, whose concepts then went on to become foundations of Modern Science. So when it comes to Copyright, the least one can do is not wipe out credits. And least one can do is not take advice on Copyright from such people.
> It is irrelevant from your POV because you don't see anything wrong in IP violations when it comes to Knowledge being taken out of India, credit removed and then reproduced in European Languages, including English, as if it was some novel discovery.
Uh, no, I didn't say that.
There's no point in writing to you if no matter what I say you're going to just make up stuff you think I believe and respond to that instead of to my actual words.
Feels a little pat though doesn't it? If racism itself is necessarily defined by irrationality then you'd think the entire course of Western civilization would have gone a little differently. Not to mention, we have some pretty dark lessons from history already that are precisely the result of excessive rationality. One could easily demonstrate the "rationality" of a given colonial project, for example.
I'm not saying we need to choose between a broader humanism or rationality necessarily, but I just think it feels a little archaic Enlightenment-era thinking to reduce it down this particular way. Or just you know, its all Spock and no Kirk!
Touche.
if Indians are so free from colonialism, why are their parents forcing them to choose between medicine or tech, simply so they can get a job on the antipode of where they are born??
Because the wealth was transferred from India to the "antipode" through Colonization. GDP reduced from 25% Pre-Colonization (and 30% if you take Pre-Islamic Colonization) to merely 4% Post-India's Independence. At least Indians are not reverse-colonizing the West.
They are throwing away their own culture chasing the "wealth" though. Seems to be the same lust for money that drove the colonists.
What are you even talking about? Indians carry their culture/traditions everywhere they go. No one is "throwing it away". You are talking as if Indians have started to emigrate in just the past few decades. Indians have been navigating the World for the past 6000+ years at the very least (recorded history). The word "Navigation" is itself a Sanskrit word "Nava gatih". We are an Ancient Civilization and the oldest surviving Civilization. Everyone else either converted and destroyed their own civilization or were destroyed by invaders.
I do think that context is still important in general, but probably only if you're doing deep research into Macaulay (or the specific target in mind). Treating everything in a vacuum isn't great either. Plenty of philosophical works for example, you really have to read in the time period and in the context of the author's life.
I find an acceptable tradeoff for now is, if I want to do deep research for myself, opening myself up to this sort of mushy subjective stuff is actually really important for making deep, objectively correct observations. Especially if the goal is to steelman, not strawman, the opponent's argument.
Otherwise, this kind of worst-case analysis thinking is fine. It's a logically sound conclusion, it's just kind of unsatisfying because we can't make stronger claims.
How do we decide when to make this tradeoff and for what things? Uhh.... idk. For me though, there has been value in using both kinds of thinking before though.
On a public forum, worst-case analysis is probably fine because the discussion ain't that deep. Also probably 90% of comments are made within the intention of a "gotcha" and not actually for discussion.
Basically, I totally agree with this, it's just that I've seen one too many online forums devolve into thought-terminating cliches using "rationality" as the basis. Here, I think it's totally justified to take this line... I instinctively had the same reaction upon reading GP's post (but then you could argue it's tone policing... and ahh we're off to the good ol' internet debate race spiral)
Edit.: OMIT THIS FIRST PARAGRAPH¹.
Very nice of you to omit the following sentences of that excerpt, where it proceeds to develop its point on the argument for institution of an English-language based education system on British India. He praised how superior in quantity and quality were the Sanskrit or Arabic corpora, compared to European works, in the lyric/poetry. But that no technical or didactical literature amounted to even the most mundane of the European manuals like those used by then in England humble schools (and it seems completely plausible).
He was a fierce abolitionist. So much for accomplishing the mission of allegedly, judging by comments in this thread, 'deranged imperialist destruction and chaos imposition over the lesser ones'.
I'm not much versed into his speeches/stance on copyright, but I can vouch for the fact that the most honest and well-intended moves (not by him, by other figures) in defence of everyone's intellectual property were done in the same century. From the Twentieth onwards, it has been only twisted for the interest of a select few, and needless to ask where we are today in terms of caring about intellectual property of anybody.
[1] Just saw your other comment where you go on with his nauseating words. One just cannot comprehend that framing the past on the actual status quo is as futile as to not being even wrong, I guess?
I kind of hate it that the auto-complete in brain launched off in this direction:
> The one who got Hindu Sanskrit books translated in a horrible manner and then claimed: "I have no knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic. But
... Here's what they mean, from ChatGPT."
I’m a huge IP hater and am sure that happens, but to be fair, letting copyright extend past death also increases the amount the author can sell it for in the first place.
The current workaround is to attribute footnotes to your beneficiaries, or quote them in the dedication. Those become derivative works subject to the lifetime of your beneficiary.
> in most cases the remaining family had never held the copyright; the author had initally sold the reproduction rights to a publisher
He was able to sell it because it is something valuable, exactly because of the copyright protections. Regardless of whether author sells the rights or not, he and his family would equally be better off with copyright.
Why does this argument remind me so much of those of slavery apologist arguments?
copyright as written serves the interests of publishers who don't create valuable works more than the creators of the work...
This one example does not make stealing acceptable which is what you’re implying.
Copyright infringement isn't stealing. I will die on this hill!
also, I don't think that implication is required, but lets pretend the implication is the only reasonable conclusion one could draw. Maybe it does make it acceptable?
If the vast majority of copyright enforcement isn't to protect creators of valuable work, but only serves to enrich those who take advantage of those creators. Then isn't it not just reasonable or acceptable, but ethically required for someone to do everything they can to dismantle the systems they're abusing against the interests of those who are actually improving the world with their creations?
Libgen is a civilizational project that should be endorsed, not prosecuted. I hope one day people will look at it and think how stupid we were today to shun the largest collection of literary works in human history.
Anna's Archive encourages (and monetizes!!) the use of their shadow library for LLM training. They have a page dedicated to it on their site. You pay them, and they give you high download speeds to entire datasets.
I wonder how much more libgen traffic can be attributed to the lawsuit.
When Metallica sued Napster, for many people the reaction was, "wait I can download music for free?"
Libgen turns into a problem when you have a company developing generative AI with it, either giving money to GPU manufacturers or themselves with paid services (see OpenAI)
What are we actually worried about happening?
Are AI-written books getting published?
If they start out-competing humans, is that bad? According to most naysayers, they can't do anything original.
Are people asking the AI for books? And then hoping it will spit it out a human-written book word for word?
> Are AI-written books getting published?
Yes, online bookstores are full of them:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/travel/amazon-guidebooks-...
The issue is there's an asymmetry between buyer/seller for books, because a buyer doesn't know the contents until you buy the book. Reviews can help, but not if the reviews are fake/AI generated. In this case, these books are profitable if only a few people buy them as the marginal cost of creating such a book is close to zero.
This really has fuck-all to do with copyright though, correct?
If you can't tell how the content is before you read it, it could be written by a monkey.
This is starting to get pretty circular. The AI was trained on copyrighted data, so we can make a hypothesis that it would not exist - or would exist in a diminished state - without the copyright infringement. Now, the AI is being used to flood AI bookstores with cheaply produced books, many of which are bad, but are still competing against human authors.
the problem with how circular the argument is is that the essence of there being an actual problem is being taken for granted
it's not clear that detriments actually exist, and the benefits are clear
The benefits are not clear: why should an "author" who doesn't want to bother writing a book of their own get to steal the words of people who aren't lazy slackers?
It's as much stealing as piracy is stealing, ie none at all. If you disagree, you and I (along with probably many others in this thread) have a fundamental axiomatic incompatibility that no amount of discussion can resolve.
It is not theft in the property sense, but it is theft of labor.
If a company interviewed me, had me solve a problem, didn't hire me or pay me in any way and then used the code I wrote in their production software, that would be theft.
That is the equivalent of what authors claiming they wrote AI books are doing. That they've fooled themselves into thinking the computer "wrote" the book, erasing all the humans whose labor they've appropriated, in my opinion makes it worse, not better. They are lying to the reader and themselves, and both are bad.
Stealing is not the right word perhaps, but it is bad, and this should be obvious. Because if you take the limit of these arguments as they approach infinity, it all falls apart.
For piracy, take switch games. Okay, pirating Mario isn't stealing. Suppose everyone pirates Mario. Then there's no reason to buy Mario. Then Nintendo files bankruptcy. Then some people go hungry, maybe a few die. Then you don't have a switch anymore. Then there's no more Mario games left to pirate.
If something is OK if only very, very few people do it, then it's probably not good at all. Everyone recycling? Good! Everyone reducing their beef consumption? Good! ... everyone pirating...? Society collapses and we all die, and I'm only being a tad hyperbolic.
In a vacuum making an AI book is whatever. In the context of humanity and pushing this to it's limits, we can't even begin to comprehend the consequences. I'm talking crimes against humanity beyond your wildest dreams. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you haven't thought long enough and creatively enough.
> Because if you take the limit of these arguments as they approach infinity, it all falls apart.
Not everyone is a Kantian, who has the moral philsophy you are talking about, the categorical imperative. See this [0] for a list of criticisms to said philosophy.
> In a vacuum making an AI book is whatever. In the context of humanity and pushing this to it's limits, we can't even begin to comprehend the consequences. I'm talking crimes against humanity beyond your wildest dreams. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you haven't thought long enough and creatively enough.
Not really a valid argument, again it's circular in reasoning with a lot of empty claims with no actual reasoning, why exactly is it bad? Just saying "you haven't thought long enough and creatively enough" does not cut it in any serious discussion, the burden of substantiating your own claim is on you, not the reader, because (to take your own Kantian argument) anyone you've debating could simply terminate the conversation by accusing you of not thinking about the problem deep enough, meaning that no one actually learns anything at all when everyone is shifting the burden of proof to everyone else.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative#Critici...
> Not really a valid argument
It is, because the quote you quoted is in reference to what I said above.
I explained real consequences of pirating. Companies have gone under, individuals have been driven to suicide. This HAS happened.
It's logically consistent that if we do that, but increase the scale, then the harm will be proportionally increased.
You might disagree. Personally, I don't understand how. Really, I don't. My fundamental understanding of humanity is that each innovation will be pushed to it's limits. To make the most money, to do it as fast as possible, and in turn to harm the most people, if it is harmful. It is not in the nature of humanity to do something half-way when there's no friction to doing more.
This reality of humanity permeates our culture and societies. That's why the US government has checks and balances. Could the US government remain a democracy without them? Of course. We may have an infinite stream of benevolent leaders.
From my perspective, that is naive. And, certainly, the founding fathers agreed with me. That is one example - but look around you, and you will see this mentality permeates everything we do as a species.
> Stealing is not the right word perhaps, but it is bad, and this should be obvious.
Many people say things that they don't like "should be obvious"ly bad. If you can't say why, that's almost always because it actually isn't.
Have a look at almost any human rights push for examples.
.
> For piracy, take switch games.
It's a bad metaphor.
With piracy, someone is taking a thing that was on the market for money, and using it without paying for it. They are selling something that belongs to other people. The creator loses potential income.
Here, nobody is actually doing that. The correct metaphor is a library. A creator is going and using content to learn to do other creation, then creating and selling novel things. The original creators aren't out money at all.
Every time this has gone to court, the courts have calmly explained that for this to be theft, first something has to get stolen.
.
> If something is OK if only very, very few people do it
This is okay no matter how many people do it.
The reason that people feel the need to set up these complex explanatory metaphors based on "well under these circumstances" is that they can't give a straight answer what's bad here. Just talk about who actually gets harmed, in clear unambiguous detail.
Watch how easy it is with real crimes.
Murder is bad because someone dies without wanting to.
Burglary is bad because objects someone owns are taken, because someone loses home safety, and because there's a risk of violence
Fraud is bad because someone gets cheated after being lied to.
Then you try that here. AI is bad because some rich people I don't like got a bunch of content together and trained a piece of software to make new content and even though nobody is having anything taken away from them it's theft, and even though nobody's IP is being abused it's copyright infringement, and even though nobody's losing any money or opportunities this is bad somehow and that should be obvious, and ignore the 60 million people who can now be artists because I saw this guy on twitter who yelled a lot
Like. Be serious
This has been through international courts almost 200 times at this point. This has been through American courts more than 70 times, but we're also bound by all the rest thanks to the Berne conventions.
Every. Single. Court. Case. Has. Said. This. Is. Fine. In. Every. Single. Country.
Zero exceptions. On the entire planet for five years and counting, every single court has said "well no, this is explicitly fine."
Matthew Butterick, the lawyer that got a bunch of Hollywood people led by Sarah Silverman to try to sue over this? The judge didn't just throw out his lawsuit. He threatened to end Butterick's career for lying to the celebrities.
That's the position you're taking right now.
We've had these laws in place since the 1700s, thanks to collage. They've been hard ratified in the United States for 150 years thanks to libraries.
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> Everyone recycling? Good! Everyone reducing their beef consumption? Good! ... everyone pirating...?
This is just silly. "Recycling is good and eating other things is good, but let's try piracy, and by the way, I'm just sort of asserting this, there's nothing to support any of this."
For the record, the courts have been clear: there is no piracy occurring here. Piracy would be if Meta gave you the book collection.
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> In the context of humanity and pushing this to it's limits, we can't even begin to comprehend the consequences.
That's nice. This same non-statement is used to push back against medicine, gender theory, nuclear power, yadda yadda.
The human race is not going to stop doing things because you choose to declare it incomprehensible.
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> I'm talking crimes against humanity beyond your wildest dreams.
Yeah, we're actually discussing Midjourney, here.
You can't put a description to any of these crimes against humanity. This is just melodrama.
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> If you don't know what I'm talking about,
I don't, and neither do you.
"I'm talking really big stuff! If you don't know what it is, you didn't think hard enough."
Yeah, sure. Can you give even one credible example of Midjourney committing, and I quote, "crimes against humanity beyond your wildest dreams?"
Like. You're seriously trying to say that a picture making robot is about to get dragged in front of the Hague?
Sometimes I wonder if anti-AI people even realize how silly they sound to others
> The creator loses potential income
Okay. AI books make books 1 million times faster, let's say. Arbitrary, pick any number.
If I, a consumer, want a book, I am therefore 1 million times more likely to pick an AI book. Finding a "real" book takes insurmountable effort. This is the "needle in a haystack" I mentioned earlier.
The result is obvious - creators look potential money. And yes, it is actually obvious. If it isn't, reread it a few times.
To be perfectly and abundantly clear because I think you're purposefully misunderstanding me - I know AI is not piracy. I know that. It's, like, the second sentence I wrote. I said those words explicitly.
I am arguing that while it is not piracy, the harm it creates it identical in form to piracy. In your words, "creators lose potential income". If that is the standard, you must agree with me.
> how silly they sound to others
I'm not silly, you're just naive and fundamentally misunderstand how our societies work.
Capitalism is founded on one very big assumption. It is the jenga block keeping everything together.
Everyone must work. You don't work, you die. Nobody works, everyone dies.
Up until now, this assumption has been sound. The "edge cases", like children and disabled people, we've been able to bandaid with money we pool from everyone - what you know as taxes.
But consider what happens if this fundamental assumption no longer holds true. Products need consumers as much as consumers need products - it's a circular relationship. To make things you need money, to make money you must sell things, to buy things you must have money, and to have money you must make things. If you outsource the making things, there's no money - period. For anyone. Everyone dies. Or, more likely, the country collapses into a socialist revolution. Depending on what country this is, the level of bloodiness varies.
This has happened in the past already, with much more primitive technologies. FDR, in his capitalist genius, very narrowly prevented the US from falling into the socialist revolution with some aforementioned bandaid solutions - what we call "The New Deal". The scale at which we're talking about now is much larger, and the consequences more drastic. I am not confident another "New Deal" can be constructed, let alone implemented. And, I'm not confident it would prevent the death spiral. Again, we cut it very, very close last time.
shop at a real bookstore, they don't have this problem.
> Are AI-written books getting published?
actually i think they are. lots of e-book slop
> If they start out-competing humans, is that bad?
Not inherently, but it depends on what you mean by out-competing. Social media outcompeted books and now everyone's addicted and mental illness is more rampant than ever. IMO, a net negative for society. AI books may very well win out through sheer spam but is that good for us?
Nobody has responded to me with anything about how authors are harmed, so I don't really get who we're protecting here.
It feels more like we just want to punish people, particularly rich people, particularly if they get away with stuff we're afraid to try.
> Nobody has responded to me with anything about how authors are harmed
i imagine if books can be published to some e-book provider through an API to extract a few dollars per book generated (mulitiplied by hundreds), then eventually it'll be borderline impossible to discover an actual author's book. breaking through for newbie writers will be even harder because of all of the noise. it'll be up to providers like Amazon to limit it, but then we're then reliant on the benevolence of a corporation and most act in self interest, and if that means AI slop pervading every corner of the e-book market, then that's what we'll have.
kind of reminds me of solana memecoins and how there are hundreds generated everyday because it's a simple script to launch one. memecoins/slop has certainly lowered the trust in crypto. can definitely draw some parallels here.
> Nobody has responded to me with anything about how authors are harmed
The same way good law-abiding folk are harmed when Heroin is introduced to the community. Then those people won't be able to lend you a cup of sugar, and may well start causing problems.
AI books take off and are easy to digest, and before long your user base is quite literally too stupid to buy and read your book even if they wanted.
And, for the record, it's trivial to "out compete" books or anything else. You just cheat. For AI, that means making 1000 books that lie for every one real book. Can you find a needle in a haystack? You can cheat by making things addictive, by overwhelming with supply, by straight up lying, by forcing people to use it... there's really a lot of ways to "outcompete".
> It feels more like we just want to punish people, particularly rich people, particularly if they get away with stuff we're afraid to try.
If by "afraid to try" you mean "know to be morally reprehensible" and if by "punish people" you mean "punish people (who do things that we know to be morally reprehensible)", then sure.
But... you might just be describing the backbone of human society since, I don't know, ever? Hm, maybe there's a reason we have that perspective. No, it must just be silly :P
> know to be morally reprehensible
In your opinion, not to everyone. There has been no actual argument as to why it's supposedly "morally reprehensible."
I just explained how it's morally reprehensible. The argument is right there, above the quote you chose to quote. Neat trick, but I'm sorry, a retort that does not make.
You didn't explain anything about why it is so, you just said it is, hence why I said it's your opinion. If you can't explain why, in more concrete terms, then there is no reason to believe your argument.
I just explained how AI books are able to cheat - they make more, faster, cheaper, and win based not on quality, never on quality, but rather by overwhelming. Such a strategy is morally reprehensible. It's like selling water by putting extra salt in everything.
Consumers are limited by humanity. We are all just meat sacks at the end of the day. We cannot, and will not, sift through 1 billion books to find the one singular one written by a person. We will die before then. But, even on a smaller scale - we have other problems. We have to work, we have family. Consumers cannot dedicate perfect intelligence to every single decision. This, by the way, is why free market analogies fall apart in practice, and why consumers buy what is essentially rat poison and ingest it when healthier, cheaper options are available. We are flawed by our blood.
We can run a business banking on the stupidity of consumers, sure. We can use deceit, yes. To me, this is morally reprehensible. You may disagree, but I expect an argument as to why.
> I just explained how AI books are able to cheat - they make more, faster, cheaper, and win based not on quality, never on quality, but rather by overwhelming. Such a strategy is morally reprehensible.
Okay, I fundamentally disagree with your premises, analogies to water and banking (or even in your other comment about piracy [0], as I have not seen any evidence of piracy leading directly to "suicides," as you say, and have instead actually benefited many companies [1]), and therefore conclusions, so I don't think we can have a productive conversation without me spending a lot of time saying why I don't equate AI production to morality, at all, and why I don't see AI writing billions of books having anything to do with morals.
That is why I said it is your opinion, versus mine which is different. Therefore I will save both our time by not spending more of it on this discussion.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42971446#43054300
[1] https://www.wfyi.org/news/articles/research-finds-digital-pi...
You're of course allowed to disagree, but past a certain point you're yelling at clouds and people might think you're insane.
It's very simple logic, and it doesn't require your understanding to be true. Piracy is good for companies? Really? That's... your legitimate position?
If nobody is paying for anything how does a company operate? That's not a rhetorical question. Is it fairy dust? Perhaps magical pixies keep the lights running?
If you don't have explanations for even the simplest of problems with your position, your position isn't worth listening to.
Again, you're a Kantian and I'm not. Your arguments do not sway those who aren't, as I said, they are fundamentally different moral philosophies. If you cannot produce even the evidence of harm as you previously stated (please, link me suicide news reports directly caused by piracy, as you claimed) then "your position isn't worth listening to" either.
Does it make a difference? What I'm saying is plainly true and undeniable. I'll break it down, perhaps a bit slower this time so you can keep up.
You must agree companies require money to operate. No money, no company. You must also agree that piracy OR any action which takes money away from a company results in less money. In addition, you must agree every individual will take whichever action costs them the least amount of money.
Okay. Do you see where I'm going? Following these very simple rules, the result is that there is no money left for companies, and they go under.
Whether that's bad or not is, technically, debatable. Whether that's how it works or not, isn't.
I grow tired of having to explain very simple logic to bumbling idiots. Of course you're not a bumbling idiot. Rather, you're someone with a belief and a delusion. Meaning, you will simply ignore any and all reality to maintain your belief, even if, right before your very eyes, it is refuted. I don't know why people act this way. Maybe there's some medication that can help with that.
People might say I'm a prophet, maybe some kind of psychic. Really, I'm just a guy with, like, a quarter of a brain. We can often "see into the future" if we just rub some brain cells and put two and two together.
Until you can find away around these rules, perhaps some alternative economic system which has not been invented, there is nothing for you to refute. Not that you've been trying at all, your entire "argument" has been "erm, I disagree". Which, by the way, is not an argument. It's more of a statement, and one which is embarrassing to say out loud when you don't have anything to back it up with.
And, to be clear, this is well past the land of morality. I'm operating in a much simpler framework here. Even if you're under the belief everyone is perfect, or some people are perfect and some aren't, or whatever other moral beliefs - that doesn't change the rules and therefore doesn't change the result.
Logic can seem very consistent in a vacuum but again, because you can't find a single statistic to support your claims about piracy (while I already cited some evidence for my side), you cling to what you think is true, not what is empirically studied to be true. Your bloviating in as many paragraphs doesn't really mean anything, so unless you can cite something meaningful, I'm done with this nearly two week old conversation.
I think the concern goes to the point of copyright to begin with, which is to incentive people to create things. Will the inclusion of copyrighted works in llm training (further) erode that incentive? Maybe, and I think that's a shame if so. But I also don't really think it's the primary threat to the incentive structure in publishing.
> the point of copyright to begin with, which is to incentive people to create things
Is it?
(I don't agree)
Yes, it is. It's not actually an opinion thing. It's a "what did the people who came up with the idea of copyright think it was for?" thing.
I haven't read the primary source material, so you could teach me something here, but my understanding is that the idea was to incentive creators.
That is not actually the goal of it.
Copyright was invented by publishers (the printing guild) to ensure that the capitalists who own the printing presses could profit from artificial monopolies. It decreases the works produced, on purpose, in order to subsidize publishing.
If society decides we no longer want to subsidize publishers with artificial monopolies, we should start with legalizing human creativity. Instead we're letting computers break the law with mediocre output while continuing to keep humans from doing the same thing.
LLMs are serving as intellectual property laundering machines, funneling all the value of human creativity to a couple of capitalists. This infringement of intellectual property is just the more pure manifestation of copyright, keeping any of us from benefitting from our labor.
Interesting! I'd love a citation on this...
People have created for millennia before the modern institution of copyright, so I'm not sure how that's a cogent argument.
Yeah it's an interesting point, but it was also hard to physically copy things for all of those millennia.
i wrote a book and copyright was not once on my mind. having created something is the incentive to create for most artists
I don't think we can infer the motives of most artists from your personal motives.
fine, because that means your claim that artists create for the copyright incentive is also false
>What are we actually worried about happening?
Few company can amass such quantities of knowledge and leverage it all for their own, very-private profits. This is unprecedented centralization of power, for a very select few. Do we actually want that? If not, why not block this until we're sure this a net positive for most people?
Meta open-sourced it my guy
Because they expect not to have to opens-source future models. Easy to open stuff as long as you strengthen your position and prevent the competition from emerging.
Ask Google about Android and what they now choose to release as part of AOSP vs Play Services.
…why? Will people buy less books because we have intuitive algorithms trained on old books?
Personally, I strongly believe that the aesthetic skills of humanity are one of our most advanced faculties — we are nowhere close to replacing them with fully-automated output, AGI or no.
old books? i can imagine the shit/hallucinated-like generative AI we would have if the training weight was restricted to public domain stuff...
i think when chatGPT was around version 2 or 3, i had extracted almost 2 pages (without any alteration from the original) with questions that considered the author from this book here, https://www.amazon.com/Loneliness-Human-Nature-Social-Connec...
now it's up to you to think this is okay... but i bet you are no author
I find this such a strange remark on this front.
You got less than 1% of a book... from an author who has passed away... who wrote on a research topic that was funded by an institution that takes in hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants each year...
I'm not an author (although I do generate almost exclusively IP for a living) and I think this is about as weak a form of this argument as you possibly make.
So right back at ya... who was hurt in your example?
I think the key is to think through the incentives for future authors.
As a thought experiment, say that the idea someday becomes mainstream that there is no reason to read any book or research publication because you can just ask an AI to describe and quote at length from the contents of anything you might want to read. In such a future, I think it's reasonable to predict that there would be less incentive to publish and thus less people publishing things.
In that case, I would argue the "hurt" is primarily to society as a whole, and also to people who might have otherwise enjoyed a career in writing.
Having said that, I don't think we're particularly close to living in that future. For one thing I'd say that the ability to receive compensation from holding a copyright doesn't seem to be the most important incentive for people to create things (written or otherwise), though it is for some people. But mostly, I just don't think this idea of chatting with an AI instead of reading things is very mainstream, maybe at least in part because it isn't very easy to get them to quote at length. What I don't know is whether this is likely to change or how quickly.
You summarize well how we aren't there yet, but I'd say the answer to your final implied question is "not likely to change at all". Even when my fellow traitors-to-humanity are done with our cognitive AGI systems that employ intuitive algorithms in symphony with deliberative symbolic ones, at the end of the day, information theory holds for them just as much as it does for us. LLMs are not built to memorize knowledge, they're built to intuitively transform text -- the only way to get verbatim copies of "anything you might want to read" is fundamentally to store a copy of it. Full stop, end of story, will never not be true.
In that light, such a future seems as easy to avoid today as it was 5 years ago: not trivial, but well within the bounds of our legal and social systems. If someone makes a bot with copies of recent literature, and the authors wrote that lit under a social contract that promised them royalties, then the obvious move is to stop them.
Until then, as you say: only extremists and laymen who don't know better are using LLMs to replace published literature altogether. Everyone else knows that the UX isn't there, and the chance for confident error way too high.
that was just a metaphor, you can ask your AI what's that or use way less energy and use Wikipedia's search engine... or do you think OpenAI first evaluates if the author is an independent developer &/or has died &/or was funded by a public university before adding the content to the training database? /s
and one thing is publishing a paper with jargon for academics, another is to simplify the results for the masses. there's a huge difference between finishing a paper and a book
It isn't that someone was hurt. We have one private entity gaining power by centralizing knowledge (which they never contributed to) and making people pay for regurgitating the distilled knowledge, for profit.
Few entities can do that (I can't).
Most people are forced to work for companies that sell their work to the higher bidder (which are the very entities mentioned above), or ask them to use AI (under the condition that such work is accessible to the AI entities).
It's obviously a vicious circle, if people can't oppose their work to be ingested and repackaged by a few AI giants.
Are you talking about Meta? They released the model. It's free to use.
Then you should be in support of OSS models over private entity ones like OpenAI's.
Like supporting Android Open Source Project… until Google decides to move the critical parts into Google Play Services? I run GrapheneOS (love it) but almost no banks will allow non-Google-sponsored Android ROMs and variants to do NFC transactions because… the AOSP is designed to miss what Google actually needs.
Idem with ML Kit loaded by Play Services, which makes Android apps fail in many cases.
And I'm not talking about biases introduced by private entities that open source their models but pursue their own goals (e.g geopolitical).
As long as AI is designed and led by huuge private entities, you'll have a hard time benefiting from it without supporting the entities' very own goals.
Something is better than nothing, better to have AOSP than to have a fully closed-source OS like iOS.
The answer is to censor the model output, not the training input. A dumb filter using 20 year old technology can easily stop LLM's from verbatim copyright output.
I know that this seems likely from a theoretical perspective (in other words, I would way underestimate it at the sprint planning meeting!), but
A) checking each output against a regex representing a hundred years of literature would be expensive AF no matter how streamlined you make it, and
B) latent space allows for small deviations that would still get you in trouble but are very hard to catch without a truly latent wrapper (i.e. another LLM call). A good visual example of this is the coverage early on in the Disney v. ChatGPT lawsuit:
[1] IEEE: https://spectrum.ieee.org/midjourney-copyright
[2] reliable ol' Gary Marcus: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/things-are-about-to-get-a-...
What if the model simply substitutes synonyms here and there without changing the spirit of the material? (This might not work for poetry, obviously.) It is not such a simple matter.
It's pretty simple, you are absolutely allowed to do that, and it's been done forever.
Imagine having the copyright claim to "Person's family member is killed so they go and get revenge".
So I can duplicate a book and change and word or two and sell it? That does not sound right.
I think you’re overstating its importance. The internet already makes it possible to order almost any book in existence and have it arrive at your doorstep within a week or so, or often on your ebook reader instantly. And your local library probably participates in an interlibrary loan system that lets you request any book held by any library in the country for free.
LibGen gives you access to a much smaller body of works than either of those. It’s a little more convenient. But the big difference is that it doesn’t compensate the author at all.
Just go to a real library.
And what about the other billions of people on the planet that don't even have a library, let alone a doorstep to receive a first world delivery service.
1. We are not talking about physical books.
2. DRM is built in to most purchased ebooks, which means you can’t consume the book on any device. “Illegal” tools exist to circumvent this.
3. Large ebook stores - like other digital stores - essentially lend you a copy of the book. So when they are forced to pull a book, they’ll pull your access too.
Of course, now that the big players have consumed/archived the entire book dump, they can go ahead and kill it to prevent others from doing the same thing.
It is *much* more convenient. When a research path takes me to an article or book - I could buy or order or go to a physical library, that would take hours or days. I could also open it as a PDF in seconds. If you need to read a chapter from a book, or an article, or skim such checking to see if it's worthwhile, 20-30 times to figure something out, then libgen is the difference between finishing in a day or a month.
There are a whole lot of books that are out of print, and if a book went out of print before ebooks were a thing, it probably doesn't have a legal digital edition either.
This. Few people here would remember ebooksclub/gigapedia/smiley/library.nu [1] which predated LibGen by several years. But that online library had a lot of books that are not availble nowadays. There were lots of scanned books (djvu) that people uploaded. So much lost knowledge.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library.nu
No one sells scans of older books, which are often sparsely available in obscure (often private) libraries.
Sure, but I have a strong feeling that scans of out-of-print books only constitute a small portion of LibGen’s traffic.
It’s like the idea that most BitTorrent users are just using it to share free software and Creative Commons media. (See the screenshots on every BitTorrent client’s website.) It would definitely be helpful if it were true, but everyone knows it’s just wishful thinking.
Why does the proportion matter?
Academics are huge users of LibGen for academic books from the entire past century and beyond. It's infinitely more convenient to instantly get a PDF you can highlight, than wait weeks for some interlibrary loan from an institution three states away.
Just because the majority of people might be downloading Harry Potter is irrelevant.
Libraries can burn down (see Library of Alexandria), civilizations end (see various). LibGen makes it possible for an individual to backup a snapshot of cumulative human knowledge, and I think that's commendable.
> LibGen gives you access to a much smaller body of works than either of those.
> Just go to a real library.
The thrill of waiting a week for a book to arrive or navigating the labyrinthine interlibrary loan system is truly a privilege that many can afford. And who needs instant access to knowledge when you can have the pleasure of paying for shipping or commuting to a physical library?
It's also fascinating that you mention compensating authors, as if the current publishing model is a paragon of fairness and equity. I'm sure the authors are just thrilled to receive their meager royalties while the rest of the industry reaps the benefits.
LibGen, on the other hand, is a quaint little website that only offers access to a vast, sprawling library of texts, completely free of charge and accessible to anyone with an internet connection. I'm sure it's totally insignificant compared to the robust and equitable systems you mentioned.
Your suggestion to "just go to a real library" is also a brilliant solution, assuming that everyone has the luxury of living near a well-stocked library, having the time and resources to visit it, and not having any other obligations or responsibilities. I'm sure it's not at all a tone-deaf, out-of-touch recommendation.
Yes, publishers don’t pay authors as much as they deserve, but LibGen pays them literally nothing. Authors tend to love libraries but hate piracy. Why? Because earning something is better than earning nothing.
Have you ever submitted an ILL request? It’s extremely simple. Many library systems even integrate with WorldCat, so submitting a request for any book just takes a few clicks.
I’m mostly speaking about people in the US. Every single county in the entire country has a public library. Almost all of them have ILL.
I think equity is a fair argument for the existence of services like LibGen in many parts of the world, but the reality is that almost everyone using a book piracy sites in a first-world country is using it to pirate an in-print book that they just don’t want to go to the trouble of borrowing or buying.
Your library almost definitely offers digital loans as well.
Seeing the high prices they are charged for a digital licence which expires after a fairly small number of loans, I feel it'd be better for my library if I pirate when possible. Save those limited loans for someone who prefers/needs them.
[flagged]
I definitely do know what I think.
Do you think developing countries are just peppered with libraries, and their inhabitants order books from Amazon?
Libgen originated in Russia, and its users are global. This is not a purely American issue.
I was responding to a comment arguing that LibGen is the largest collection of knowledge in human history, which I think is an overly romantic and totally incorrect take. It may be a very useful collection of knowledge to people in developing countries, but it simply is not larger than the collection of knowledge accessible via any first-world public library. Obviously not everyone has access to that, but again, that’s not what the comment I replied to was about, and not relevant to what I’m saying.
> but it simply is not larger than the collection of knowledge accessible via any first-world public library
How do you know or can quantify this? At a first approximation, libraries are finite in space while the internet is (for the purposes of this discussion) infinite. I'd agree with you if you had said something like Wikipedia was bigger than libgen (and probably not even then, as Wikipedia is merely a summary of primary sources, which would be theoretically contained in libgen).
We all like hating big corporations, especially Meta, and people seem to use this as an opportunity to advocate for punishing them. I think it's wiser to advocate for changing our IP laws.
We're sick of the double standards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#United_States_v._...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Death
While Aaron Swartz was bullied to suicide, these corporations will walk free and make billions. I say give every tech CEO the Swartz treatment, then change the law.
The lesson here is make sure you only break the rules in the limits of severity that your wealth class allows.
MIT students will get away with breaking bigger rules than community college students will.
Ah, you're citing that inviolable document, the United States Constitution, which brought forth the even-handed dawn of a legal caste system.
Swartz committed suicide because he was mentally ill. He also attempted suicide multiple times in his life while not being "bullied".
If he was acting rationally and came to the conclusion that dying was better than spending X years in jail, he would have committed suicide after sentencing, not before any trial had even happened.
> He also attempted suicide multiple times in his life while not being "bullied".
Citation?
You think the jail will give you a way to commit suicide after you're sentenced?
Double standards is how the law is practiced since time immemorial. Copyright is Disney-Sony law made up few decades ago for no reason other than money. Pick your battles.
Why not change the law first?
Two wrongs don't make a right. If a law is unjust, then what good is there in continuing to punish people who have broken it, just because other people have been punished in the past?
Either you think the law is just or unjust. If you think it's unjust, I don't possibly see how you think people should be punished for it. Meta wasn't responsible for what happened to Aaron Swartz.
Motive matters. What Swartz did was in protest for a cause, a form of civil disobedience (which has always been a valid form of protest in democratic societies).
The other was to make a quick buck.
I know which has earned my respect more.
Motive matters when you believe something should be criminal, but there are extenuating circumstances.
But if you don't think something should be illegal to begin with, why do you want to see someone punished? Regardless of motive? If you think it should be allowed, then it should be allowed period, regardless of whether it was to make a quick buck or for civil disobedience. Right?
I totally get who you respect more. What I don't get is "give every tech CEO the Swartz treatment" first. If you don't think what they did should be illegal, then there's just no justification for that.
Motivation, consequences and fairness of how rules are applied are all relevant to the ethics of a particular action.
Meta is systematically abusing copyright law for personal profit, appropriating the labor of hundreds of thousands of authors to line their own pockets without contributing anything back. That free-riding is anti-social behavior, a betrayal of the social contract. A society that permits that without censure isn't going to keep having people create for very long: who is going to create just so billionaires can get richer, with nothing in it for them?
Especially not when the same billionaires sue people for violating copyright of _their_ software. Hypocrisy in service of exploitation and greed is especially noxious.
At the same time, copyright laws are written to benefit those billionaires, keeping our mythology in private hands long past our lifetimes. Put copyright back to thirty years, strip all business methods and software patents (which should never have been a thing in the first place): then Meta will have plenty of content for their LLMs _and_ it's software will start coming out of copyright ten years from now, making an actual contribution to human knowledge instead of just pillaging it.
The central tenet of conservativism is that there is a group the law protects but does not bind and a group the law binds but does not protect. This is what Meta is doing.
They could have gone and lobbied to loosen copyright legislation. Heck, they could have gone through a DMCA exception process, which doesn't even take a new law. Instead, they figure they are powerful enough that society doesn't apply to them.
If we let them, we're suckers.
You're conflating different problems.
Big corporations are too big, they should just not exist. When you have corporations more powerful than the government of the biggest states, it's a bug, not a feature.
The IP laws may need rethinking. Saying that they should disappear because big corporations are above the law doesn't help, though. First kill the big corporations, then think about fair laws. Changing the law now would not change anything since those corporations are already above the law.
> First kill the big corporations, then think about fair laws.
It's not possible to kill big corporations before fair laws, because as you said yourself "corporations are already above the law"
Unfair laws don't apply to big corporations, they only apply to the people opposed to big corporations
It's akin to hamstringing a horse and saying you'll fix it when they win
Anti-Trust laws are a little different though. It's specifically about bringing giant corps down a peg, and has been used multiple times against companies that otherwise skirt the law quite a bit.
Standard Oil, AT&T, the railroads, all thought they were above the law, for good reason, but they were all still broken.
Not going to happen for 4 years at least.
Perhaps they just did, or we are doing it - basically this should lead to abolition of copyright to any published article there is. Not sure how’d it impact open source, we’ll either have all of it open, or none at all.
Even without copyright there are trade secrets, not to mention trademarks and patents. Maybe we could get rid of the latter, but I think we’d need to be pretty heavily into socialist utopia before considering nixing the former two!
Trademarks and patents are very different from copyright. Trademarks especially so because they aren't designed to "own" knowledge, just to prevent confusion about who made a product or what it is.
"Intellectual property" is an abomination of a term because it conflates 3 separate mechanisms with differing goals, pretending that they're related in any meaningful sense.
Patents protect a process. Trademarks protect identity. Copyright protects knowledge. Disparate mechanisms for disparate goals.
> Copyright protects knowledge.
Not at all. I am amazed by how badly copyright is understood.
You can buy a physics book, learn about physics from it, and use that knowledge somewhere else. That's totally legal, an copyright doesn't prevent you from doing that at all.
My country believes in this "intellectual property" thing so much that our copyright, patent and trademark act's name translates to "An Act on Intellectual and Artistic Works".
We need different perspective to copyright. Besides - what is a trade secret 10, 20, 30 years ago is a common wiki article now… very often if not always.
The idea of people owning information is really beyond comprehension for me. There’s no patent for ideas, only for mechanisms or implementations.
Besides we’re already tossing world’s knowledge in our palms, all the copy shit seems so irrelevant.
I’m not against closed source or keeping trade secrets. But once a story becomes public it should be accessible at no cost or else we get where we are atm.
Copyright does not protect knowledge. If you can write a full OS from scratch, Microsoft will not come sue you because they had the knowledge before.
> When you have corporations more powerful than the government of the biggest states, it's a bug, not a feature.
The only distinction between corporations and governments is one of them are morally bankrupt arbiters of force.
If that's the only distinction you see, then you don't really understand the concept of "government".
How do you suggest making them smaller?
For instance, what if google was still just serving search results w/ ads, and they never expanded that. How would you make them smaller?
I recommend Jason Furman's work for the practical mechanisms by which unnatural monopolies can be broken up and natural monopolies can be regulated.
On the other hand, you are interested in why the status quo isn't an accident and what we would need to do to accomplish those things, I recommend reading Reid Hoffman's book "Blitzscaling" side-by-side with Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson's book "Winner-Take All Politics": you can see the same dynamics presented in two very different lights.
Then they'd already be smaller, so there's no reason to make them smaller. Or am I misunderstanding your question?
Okay, they would be smaller, but you said "big corporations should not be able to exist" and they would already be a big corporation with just search--they started this way.
Or, just to follow it through, let's say "WidgetBoss LLC" makes a new Widget that every single human has to have, they become the biggest company ever by making one widget. What will you do to make them smaller? Why?
I have a big problem with Google & Meta, and I can understand arguments about those companies. But not just "big companies" as a generality.
But that's how everyone speaks now. "Literally every billionaire is evil and exploiting blah blah blah"
I'm not sure if you're in good faith, but I will assume that you are.
> "Literally every billionaire is evil and exploiting blah blah blah"
Nope. Not every billionaire is evil and exploiting blah blah blah. But nobody deserves to be a billionaire, period.
> let's say "WidgetBoss LLC" makes a new Widget that every single human has to have, they become the biggest company ever by making one widget
Which hasn't happened because, obviously, it is not possible to become the biggest company ever by making something trivial.
It is not possible to promote your product by putting it at the top of the search results if you don't own the search engine.
It is not possible to get statistics about popular products in your webstore, copy them and put them at the top of the search results if you can't own both the webstore and the products.
It is not possible to force everybody to use your email provider in order to use their smartphone if you don't own both the email provider and the smartphone OS.
etc.
> When you have corporations more powerful than the government of the biggest states
I don’t know how you define powerful, but I highly doubt it is at that point.
> Big corporations are too big, they should just not exist.
Nor should big governments.
Nor should big countries, for that matter.
Economies of scale generate value
And monopolies do the opposite.
I truly hope Meta has a serious security issue that burns their company to the ground.
That said, I want them to burn for the right reasons.
Downloading data that should be available to the public is not one of them.
Exactly. Everyone should have the right to have access to this.
Are you sure that everything should be in the public domain? Say you spend a year writing a book, shouldn't you be able to sell it?
I have open sourced all work I legally can for the past 20 years, and it has only given me more exposure and made it easier for people to trust me with significant budget to solve their hardest problems.
Also I happily buy lots of books from people like Cory Doctorow and nostarchpress -because- their books are public and I want to support authors that value the freedom of their readers.
Books that are DRM or copyright protected however, I buy used paper copies or pirate because why would I financially support people that do not respect my freedom?
Where do you find Cory Doctorow's books for free? Because here it requires me to pay: https://craphound.com/shop/
Are you sure they are free?
He has released many of his stories and novels under Creative Commons:
https://www.freesfonline.net/authors/Cory_Doctorow.html
So... because he releases parts of his work under Creative Commons means that it is okay for him to have copyright over his books?
I don't get the logic.
You can buy his work DRM-free, and much of it is public:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/3826 https://archive.org/details/cory-doctorow-content
I happily pay him for hardcovers though.
I do not believe copyright makes any sense in the global post-internet world.
It is a major hindrance to progress. The many countries that do not enforce copyright law will share everything that can be shared and are going to progress much faster than the US in the long run.
You're entitled to your own opinion, but please make a difference between "free", "no-DRM" and "copyright".
And tell me how Doctorow sees it when you buy one of his book and start selling copies of it under your name.
Impersonation would be a dick move, and would ruin my reputation. Do not need laws to avoid such things. Obvious social repercussions are enough.
Still impersonation sucks, and it happens. Thankfully we can solve this with cryptography without trying to beg the legal system of hundreds of countries to agree on enforcement tactics.
I publish 100% of code I write as FOSS. I also sign my commits. If the code shows up later without attribution to me, I would prove it publicly to call out dishonest behavior.
I would also never use legal action for this though. All information should be free. I only put FOSS licenses on code to ensure I do not get sued and so corporations bound by such silly rules have a difficult time using my work in private codebases without paying me for an alternate license.
I would abolish all IP law if I could. Let all information be free without legal risk to authors or those that share it.
> I publish 100% of code I write as FOSS.
This is not public domain.
> and so corporations bound by such silly rules have a difficult time using my work in private codebases without paying me for an alternate license.
So... you benefit from copyright laws.
> to ensure I do not get sued
Why would you get sued by releasing your code as public domain?
> This is not public domain.
MIT, ISC licenses etc offer minimum anti-liabiliy CYA here and are what I typically use. They are a hack to get around the fact you cannot actually public domain code without legal risk.
> So... you benefit from copyright laws.
I sometimes exploit laws that I feel should not exist at all specifically to target corporations who abuse them the most. In my preferred world where copyright and patents did not exist, I would not need to play such games.
Right. So you use copyright laws because you need them.
I wish we did not need money, but I don't go around telling people that they should stop using money because in my preferred world, money would not exist and we would all live happily.
I do not need copyright law. Just anti-liability licenses so i do not get sued. My interest is protecting myself, not the work.
I believe all knowledge should be freely available and live by that.
While I do not believe in IP law but I am happy to take money from those that do.
I sell my time so long as the buyer allows my work to be freely licensed for all. They can do with their own copy whatever they want and not credit me though. That is fine.
It honestly feels like your view on the topic is entirely defined around yourself. Like if a billionaire could genuinely not understand why people need medical insurance, because "you can just pay cash, like I do".
You are in a special situation where customers pay for your time. Of course it's easy to say "as long as I am paid for my time, I want my work to be public". But say you create a video game. You invest two years working on it, and at the end you sell it for 50$. The first customer buys it, and publishes online for everybody to download legally for free. Does that sound okay for you?
Because you don't need copyright laws doesn't mean that nobody does. And again, you admitted yourself that you do need them and you do use them. You just wish you didn't. And I can agree with you on that. I wish there was no war, and no poverty, too.
I am not saying that everything about IP laws or copyright is perfect. Just that it's more complicated than "it's just a ball of worms, throw it away". Some people abuse copyright, some people need it. Whoever is fine screwing those who do because it doesn't affect them are jerks.
> But say you create a video game. You invest two years working on it, and at the end you sell it for 50$. The first customer buys it, and publishes online for everybody to download legally for free. Does that sound okay for you?
More users for my game! Wonderful. Every person playing, even for free, means more people talking about it if they like it. Give every digital thing away and get people sharing it with others. If a free game is popular a small subset that can afford it will pay you if you disclose, perhaps in the game, what your financial goals are and how far you are from them kindly, but without demand.
People should be proud they make anything in a crowded internet anyone feels worth copying and sharing. That attention can be monetized all sorts of ways if a creator is paying attention. Sell merch, or a funding campaign for new upgrades or extensions.
The pay what you want (or nothing) Humble Bundle model is a step in the right direction. Gets lots of exposure to indie devs who otherwise no one might trust to give any money to sight unseen otherwise.
> a small subset that can afford it will pay you if you disclose, perhaps in the game, what your financial goals are and how far you are from them kindly, but without demand.
But you are not the one publishing it! Someone else is, because they copied your public-domain game and put their name on it. That someone else is getting a lot of money, and you aren't.
> Wonderful
Really? I genuinely don't understand how you can not see how it is a problem?!
> But you are not the one publishing it! Someone else is, because they copied your public-domain game and put their name on it. That someone else is getting a lot of money, and you aren't.
That is going to happen. Not all countries have or enforce copyright laws even if you rely on those.
It would however be trivial for the author to go public proving the third party game used their code without attribution. Apple famously used openstreetmap data without crediting them and openstreetmap publicly shamed them until they corrected the mistake.
People should have attribution if they ask for it, but it also should not be legally enforced. Only socially and technically.
> Really? I genuinely don't understand how you can not see how it is a problem?!
Anyone in the connected world has likely benefited from software I have written or security bugs I have identified and helped get fixed. Some of that work took years with little to no pay.
If you can get my work to more people than I can, do it!
My experience is still easy enough to monetize enough on a contract basis to pay my bills, and that is plenty. Often people pay to prioritize what features I add to open source projects they benefit from. Paid or not, I am always happy knowing my work benefits as many people as possible, rather than having it benefit only those that can afford to pay for it. My ego is not so fragile as to demand my name be in everyone's faces all the time.
Our mission in life as humans should not be about maximizing dollar amounts in our bank accounts. It should be about maximizing the amount of value we can give back to society. If value can be copied and replicated to benefit a lot of people, that is amazing! Shame we cannot do that with food, but at least we can do it with information, media, etc.
> My ego is not so fragile as to demand my name be in everyone's faces all the time.
Yet you keep bringing everything back to you. "It's okay for me because I manage to get a decent salary". Sure, what about those who don't?
> People should have attribution if they ask for it, but it also should not be legally enforced. Only socially and technically.
Laws are here because reputation is not enough anymore in our world. Those who think that laws are unnecessary generally don't directly need them. Can you show some empathy and accept that some people need to be protected by more than reputation?
> That is going to happen. Not all countries have or enforce copyright laws even if you rely on those.
You mentioned Doctorow as an example, right? Do you even know what he thinks of BigTech abusing their power? He's totally for more regulations for those, not fewer.
> Yet you keep bringing everything back to you. "It's okay for me because I manage to get a decent salary". Sure, what about those who don't?
You seem to be operating under the assumption I came to these views from an ivory tower.
I have been open sourcing all of the work I legally can since I was living in my car working on library computers. Yes. I stand by this for everyone.
I had no degree, no credentials, and the only reason I was able to make a career for myself as an uneducated vagrant is -because- my work was public and free, people often used it, and demonstrated my capabilities better than any degree could.
Plenty of peers have made careers for themselves the same way.
> Laws are here because reputation is not enough anymore in our world. Those who think that laws are unnecessary generally don't directly need them. Can you show some empathy and accept that some people need to be protected by more than reputation?
This -is- coming from a pace of empathy.
My meals as a kid sometimes came from food stamps and food pantries. Most of my early internet access came from abusing 30 day AOL trial dialup cds, and I had to wait in line 3 days for a $200 black friday sale laptop I could afford. I had to break a LOT of copyright laws to get unlimited access to information my local library did not have.
Laws work in a subset of countries, and a lot of countries straight up ignore them. That gives them a major advantage over us. They can pirate freely and openly to level up their skills and capabilities with no risk of legal consequences... and we cannot? Why should the poor in America not have the same free access to any digital goods the poor in other countries do?
> You mentioned Doctorow as an example, right? Do you even know what he thinks of BigTech abusing their power? He's totally for more regulations for those, not fewer.
My read of Cory Doctorow on these topics is that the copyright wars were a failed experiment. Copyright laws are almost mostly weaponized by big corporations to hurt individuals. We should regulate the shit out of corporations to protect the freedom and privacy of users and prevent monopolies. It is perfectly compatible to both anti-big-tech and also against the current IP law system.
https://gizmodo.com/cory-doctorow-copyright-laws-tech-antitr...
> That gives them a major advantage over us.
I would like to start with this: what is the advantage of other countries enjoying the work of artists/authors for free?
My point, from the very beginning, is that the concept of copyright does not seem entirely, as in 100% stupid. I am not saying that it is perfect the way it is now. Just that throwing it away entirely is maybe not what we want. I hate it when BigTech abuses copyright, but the problem is BigTech there.
Copyright is also what makes copyleft possible. Which I believe is a good thing to protect the users from the corporations.
And finally IP laws are what prevents an employee from leaving a company with all the code, renaming/rebranding it and selling it for a fraction of the price. Doesn't seem completely ridiculous, does it?
> You seem to be operating under the assumption I came to these views from an ivory tower.
Not at all. I operate under the assumption that you don't have that need anymore. Apparently you did, and because you got to where you are, you now believe that it's all based on merit and that people who don't manage to do the same don't deserve any empathy. Or something like that?
It's a typical US mentality, though (the "all I have is based on merit and merit only, and I don't want to pay for others").
> Laws work in a subset of countries, and a lot of countries straight up ignore them. That gives them a major advantage over us.
There is plenty of need for laws inside a country as big as the US. Not seeing that suggests that you are in a pretty good situation now and don't care about those who aren't.
Reputation doesn't work. Do I need to mention the nazi billionaire who now controls the US government as an example?
> We should regulate the shit out of corporations to protect the freedom and privacy of users and prevent monopolies.
Exactly. I don't think he says "we should remove copyright as a concept entirely.
Liability laws often don't care if something is free.
Which is beside the point. The person I am answering to says that they don't believe in copyright laws, but still they use licenses like MIT. Why not using CC0 then?
"CC0 has not been approved by the Open Source Initiative and does not license or otherwise affect any patent rights you may have. You may want to consider using an approved OSI license that does so instead of CC0, such as GPL 3.0 or Apache 2.0."
https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ
CC0 is great but it does not go far enough for software. Patent and trademark rights are complex and it caused CC0 to be withdrawn from OSI consideration.
https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists....
I do not know why it has to be so legally complicated to say TAKE MY WORK IT IS FREE FOR ALL.
IMO ISC is the current best OSI approved option for ensuring technical work can be used as broadly as possible and is what I use for recent work.
https://www.tldrlegal.com/license/isc-license
Show me something OSI compatible less restrictive than ISC and I will use that.
> Show me something OSI compatible less restrictive than ISC and I will use that.
I'm more of a copyleft person, so I can't help there. But I can say that copyleft requires copyright laws.
They should sell for a price it would make pirating it pointless. Like what Spotify or Netflix did to audio and visual content. Then they can use the exposure to find other ways to make money.
Or if you don't agree with the price, do not buy it. You are NOT entitled to entertain yourself in any way you want. (unless it's funded by taxes etc, in which case... okay, it's open to discussion.)
Look, let's be honest - what gives you or others the right to steal from others?
If buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.
Which is completely off topic. You can buy a paper book and own it, but it doesn't mean that you are allowed to make copies of it and sell them.
If you cannot copy it, alter it, and share it as you see fit, you do not own it.
Well when you buy a book, you own the copy of the book. Not the author's life work.
And I disagree with this. IP law should not exist. If I buy a thing it should be mine to do with as I see fit.
The more people that share and copy data the better.
You're not an author, obviously. Do you put all - and I mean 100% - the code you write in the public domain?
I author a lot of technical documentation actually.
Even so, yes. I make all my work public, 100%.
I use public repositories as my backup for anything I create, regardless of stage of completion and so others can learn from or help improve my work as they see fit.
I do not believe proprietary technology should exist and I put my code where my mouth is.
Humans progress faster when we collaborate freely. Fork anything I do and make it better if you can.
So here you say that you put all your work in the public domain, and in a comment above you say that you don't put it in the public domain because you fear a lawsuit?
How the hell does that work?
I do, save for code I'm simply too lazy to publish...
> what gives you or others the right to steal from others?
I think technically it's copying more than stealing
Like if you could wait for someone to design and build a car and then CTRL+C/V it for yourself (is it possible to steal in a post-scarcity society?)
That is the fundamental problem with trying to project property rights onto ideas. Capitalism works fine for distributing scarce goods and resources, but information and software are both public goods.
In a reasonable world, we would be imposing high taxes on all LLMs and using that money to fund grants for future writers and artists. It would be good for the LLM makers in the long run, since it would give them more fuel for their models, and it would be good for the artists and writers because it would provide sustainable, reliable wages.
Unfortunately, that isn't the world we live in. LLM makers don't seem to care about the impact they will have on society or even their own livelihoods, as long as they get rich today. And in addition to all the regulatory capture, we are having our governments gutted on the mere fear that they might do their job and prevent the wholesale looting of society by these new robber-barons.
So with the economically-optimal approaches off the table, we have to fall back on imposing false scarcity in the hopes that maybe capitalism can limp along.
That's what I do, personally.
But you call it "stealing," others call it "copying."
Stealing takes, from someone, something they own.
There's such a mass of possible works that it hardly constrains someone that if you could cast a magic spell preventing someone from distributing or accessing your particular work and then burned it, your spell would have essentially no effect-- no one would notice it and no one would be harmed.
As long as discussion of a work that has published is not impeded, the public is not harmed even by these 50-years after life copyrights other than by that they are accumulated by certain companies who themselves become problems.
When someone decides to use someone's work without compensation he is, even though he is not deprived of the work itself, still robbed. But it's not a theft of goods, it's theft of service. The copyright infringer isn't the guy who steals your phone, it's the guy who even you have done some work for but who refuses to pay.
With this view you can also believe, without hypocrisy, that what the LLM firms are doing is wrong while what Schwartz did was not, since the authors in question weren't deprived of any royalties or payments due to them due to due to the publishing model for scientific works.
> But it's not a theft of goods, it's theft of service.
What service? If somebody washes your windshield without you asking, it isn't a theft of service to not pay them. A theft of service arises from entering into an agreement and then failing to pay as stipulated in that agreement.
Copyright isn't an agreement you can choose whether to participate in. Copyright is a legal enforcement system that imposes legal liability even on those who don't use it. You may not see this legal liability as "harm", but it absolutely is. Arguing that copyright extends to training is arguing for a dramatic increase in the scope and power of this legal enforcement system.
But the thing here distinguishing it from the windshield thing is that there are so many possible texts that you choosing their particular text is to choose the work they've done.
You think of choosing somebody's particular text as the way of contracting him. Just as it isn't a restriction of your freedom of speech that going into restaurant and ordering a meal creates a contract to pay, so it isn't a restriction of your freedom of speech when you choose to seek out and repeat somebody's very particular text.
Why Harry Potter when you have any of hundreds of million of stories of similar sort that you could easily write yourself? When you choose that one, you choose it because it's already been prepared by somebody else, just as you choose restaurant because they've done work and have food ready for you. By choosing the one that's already written you accept that the author has done work for you.
> so it isn't a restriction of your freedom of speech when you choose to seek out and repeat somebody's very particular text.
I hadn't made that claim, but I will in now that you've brought it up. Art operates as part of a discussion, the reference to and re-use of prior art is a key part of the how that happens. There are sooo many cases of copyright being used to limit the freedom of expression, that this really isn't disputable. Copyright clearly restricts speech.
> By choosing the one that's already written you accept that the author has done work for you.
No I don't, at least not in a sense that's different from the shoulders of all the people that author learned from and so on. Cultural works exist and take on roles in our cultural semiology, our memes our language without our choice. You can coose to not engage with a work, but you can't choose which works will be culturally relevant or not.
When you publish something, it becomes part of our shared culture and no-one has an inalienable right to own that. The limited rights we granted to encourage commercial creativity have already snowballed out of control and now people are blythly buying into another dramatic expansion of them.
But we're talking about extremely direct copying. Actual computerized copying, typically verbatim.
Doing things relating to discussion of a work are typically permitted, but you have no reason to use anybody's particular work other than to make use of the work he did in creating it.
> But we're talking about extremely direct copying. Actual computerized copying, typically verbatim.
Copyright doesn't just extend to "literal direct copying". When you claim copyright doesn't harm anyone, you can't ignore all the other types of activity it prohibits.
> Doing things relating to discussion of a work are typically permitted,
Only if you limit the meaning of "discussion" so much that it no longer includes the process of making art.
> but you have no reason to use anybody's particular work other than to make use of the work he did in creating it.
Did you not ready my comment? I already explained the reason. Creative works become part of our culture, you can't choose which works will do that, you can only choose to participate in that culture or not.
Copyright is a social system for artificially limiting access to our shared culture and thus also limits participation in that culture.
I understand the value of a limited copyright system, but anyone that claims that our copyright system doesn't cause harm or cost us anything isn't being realistic. Copyright duration should be far more limited and we need significant reforms to the DMCA. Personally, I think even all non-commercial distribution should be legal as copyright should only grant commercial rights.
You do realise that artists don't make a living from Spotify, right?
Big corporations don't have morale or ethics. They'll break any laws as long as it's profitable. There's no point complaining about Meta or Zuck. Meta does what it's designed to do. If people aren't happy, they should vote for more regulations.
...and boycott the offender's products.
First punish them. Then change the laws.
In many countries, that'd trigger an automatic release/repayment of unjustly sentenced fines.
I bet you and my "first build the product, then worry about security" manager would get along.
That one is tough, because they are blind to the risk. I try to only work with people who have been burned before or have been around long enough to have seen the aftermath. Let me guess, they are probably telling you "show me the vulnerability", but refuse to delay shipping or fund the PoC.
Best advice is to communicate in writing the most likely risk and threat scenarios, with as much data or extrapolated data as possible. When the security flaws are later discovered, that is data you can refer to.
From what I read, this is what Zoom was like early on. They had amateur hour security and then when s*t hit the fan they beefed it up and retained a security team. I guess you could say it worked for them?
My approach is same. First fire that manager. Then define security.
We may in retrospect find that the moment may have passed where "big corporations" have become more powerful and impactful on our lives than the IP laws on the books. After all, we can already plainly see they only come into effect when useful by the powerful
I think most of the public is probably in favor of stronger IP laws now that big corps are threatening to make them jobless with IP-disrespecting AIs
Something tells me stronger IP laws will be drafted by holders of that IP, with little if any regard to the potential for job losses for regular people from AI.
Maybe, but it's better than the current situation with 0 regard for potential job losses for regular people, probably why they're in favor of trying something vs the status quo
Most of the public has jobs based upon IP? While it is probably a bigger share than farming, I doubt that. The actual drivers appear to be a mixture of hysteria, and reflexive anti-corporate sentiment as we see even self-proclaimed leftists going "WTF, I love copyright now!".
The point is about the hypocrisy and double-standards evinced by this behavior.
First we must prosecute Meta into committing suicide like was done to Aaron Swartz. After justice is served, we should change IP laws.
They broke the law and should be punished for that. Whether the law should change is a separate discussion.
Also, change the law so this is legal for poor meta? smh..
Big corporations all like hating their consumers abd legal laws. You love committing crimes it seems.
I fail to see how you arrived at GP being a hobbyist criminal based on their suggestion that IP laws need to be modernized.
It really makes you think about those crazy internet folks from back in the day who thought copyright law was too strict and that restricting humanity to knowledge in such a way was holding us all back for the benefit of a tiny few.
I'm all for chopping up copyright law. But until we do so, companies like Meta need to be treated just like everyone else.
That means lawsuits, prison sentences, and millions in fines. And that's just the piracy part, there's also the lying/fraud part.
Interestingly, a Dutch LLM project was sent a cease and desist after the local copyright lobby caught wind of it being trained on a bunch of pirated eBooks. The case unfortunately wasn't fought out in court, because I would be very interested to see if this could make that copyright lobby take down ChatGPT and the other AI companies for doing the same.
>need to be treated just like everyone else.
So a copyright warning letter in the mail from their ISP? Maybe someone should tell them about VPNs...
The more concerning thing is that the best thing these overpaid people could come up with was.. download the torrent, like everyone else. Here you are, billions of resources, and no one is willing to spend a part of it to at least digitize some new data? Like even Google did?
I think they are morally required to improve the current state.
- Seed the torrent and publicly promote piracy pushing lawmakers.
- Contribute with digitisation and open access like Google did in the past.
- Make the part of their dataset that was pirated publicly accessible.
- Fight stupid copyright laws. I can't believe that copyright lasts more than 20 years. No field moves that slowly, and there should be tighter limits on faster moving fields.
Copyright and patent aren't the same thing. "Fast moving field" doesn't make sense in terms of copyrights. There's no reason the copywriter should last some minimum duration after the life of the creator.
If I write a really popular book, I don't want Hollywood to make it into a movie without compensating me just because they waited a few years
Fast moving field does make sense in terms of copyright because the knowledge is recorded in documents which are then copyrighted. E.g. research papers.
> If I write a really popular book, I don't want Hollywood to make it into a movie without compensating me just because they waited a few years
I genuinely don't understand this. Even at a decade copyright, pretty much anybody who was going to buy the book and read it has already done so. It costs you virtually nothing in sales, and society benefits from the resulting movie.
Your goal is to deprive everyone of having a movie, because someone who isn't you is going to make some money that was never going to you anyways? Your goals for copyright appear to be a net negative to the system that enforces copyright, which begs the question why should the system offer protection at all?
> Even at a decade copyright, pretty much anybody who was going to buy the book and read it has already done so. It costs you virtually nothing in sales, and society benefits from the resulting movie.
If the movie can be made then the book can be printed and sold by any publisher, under the current system. It creates a race to the bottom on the price of the book as soon as the copyright duration is done. Perhaps extending "fair use" stuff could allow one and not the other.
That race to the bottom is a feature, not a bug. It allows poor people to engage with culture. That's the tradeoff here. At some point copyright is protecting a tiny amount of profits for the author in exchange for locking people out of access.
Copyright is supposed to be a societal benefit, or there's little reason for society to spend money on enforcing it. That's where we currently are, and I think why there's such a strong reaction to copyright currently. We pay to protect the works and then we pay again to buy them. They become free when they're so culturally irrelevant that nobody wants them even for free. The costs of enforcement are socialized and the benefits are privatized.
At some point, copyright is going to have to provide more back to society or society will get tired of paying to enforce it.
You know what would happen right?
Copywrite expiring in 20 years doesn't mean access is democratized. Publishers would likely keep the price the same, but instead is the author getting a cut, they just take everything.
Besides. The public isn't owed the fruits of my labor for free.
I honestly suspect fairly little would change. The US operates with a 20 year copyright for nearly 200 years, these long copyrights are actually far newer.
Also, you are not owed a monopoly on arrangement of words enforced by the public. There are plenty of other places to spend tax dollars.
What tax dollars are we spending enforcing copywrite laws?
Who do you think pays for prosecutors, lawyers, jails, and investigators going after pirating sites? DMCA claims are worth less than the paper they're printed on if not for the threat of all that.
> Copyright and patent aren't the same thing.
They achieve the same, lock down knowledge and art.
> If I write a really popular book, I don't want Hollywood to make it into a movie without compensating me just because they waited a few years
If it was good enough maybe they wouldn't risk waiting and having someone else win the 10yr race.
There's just too much stuff that won't make any more money locked behind laws that pretend they magically would.
> crazy internet folks from back in the day
You mean Electronic Frontier Foundation? https://www.eff.org/issues/innovation
Probably the single biggest thing I learned growing up is that you can safely live by "Everyone is in it for themselves".
It's incredibly rare to find people who hold ideals that are detrimental to their own life.
This hasn't been my observation. Instead, I see a society where people regularly help and serve one other, frequently for free. Consider parents, social workers, most academics, food banks, charity in general, most workers in most businesses, et cetera. I wonder: who do you know and work with? A minority of people profit wonderfully off this. Incidentally, they seem to also preach principals that can only lead to the end of their gravy train.
You can counter by insisting that these "altruistic" behaviors are simply less directly but still in the altruist's interest. I would entirely agree.
I don't disagree with your point that, in life, not everybody is in it for themselves. But the examples you chose to demonstrate altruism are a bit ridiculous:
- parents: they wanted a child and now they have to take care of it, it's not a selfless act at all
- social workers: are paid to pretend to care. Often they genuinely do care, but this isn't altruism, it's a job
- most academics: I see you haven't met many academics. Altruistic (and selfless) are not terms I would use to describe them. The majority is very much in it for themselves...
- food banks, charity in general: very true, some charity do strive on unpaid volunteers, that is altruism
- most workers in most businesses: okay now you're getting ridiculous...
Many children are unwanted. Consider adoption and neglect. Parents know not to admit these things broadly.
Social work is a very low paid existence and most of the social workers I know could easily have earned more elsewhere which they are pained to know but persist through regardless because they care more for living in a world with less total suffering even at the cost of their own.
I earned my MSc from the University of Edinburgh and interacted thoroughly with academics there and in the process of getting there. I know many people with their PhDs and have had personal friendships with professors, postdocs, and other researchers. I would agree that academic incentive structure have been made deeply dysfunctional and delusion abounds. Also that defection is common. I have known some of those evil actors (e.g. Sharon Oviatt) so I don't deny their existence.
The very premise of business is that it takes a profit from the excess efforts of labor. I'm not the ridiculous sort that fails to recognize that often workers productivity is both made possible and enhanced by the accumulated coordination and structure of firms and owners should capture some of that value. However, increasingly research is showing that the advantages of our society are being captured by firms. Meanwhile, too many owners are failing to responsibly reinvest in the population and have made religions out of not fostering true growth.
My claim is that multiple cultural norms live side-by-side and I'm trying to help you and others realize that different options are plausible and more advantageous. The cooperators learn self preservation and hiding while they are also harvested while and beyond doing so. My speculation is that the expanded belief holding of perspectives like yours decreases the size of that population which will be a downward spiral of inefficiency and impoverishment. I expect the bottom will fall out viciously if it gets to that.
My spending time on this conversation is altruism, what is it for you?
Yep, you even see it on HN with artists and devs complaining about AI, especially when things like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion were first announced. People who were pretty lax about copyright when it didn't affect them personally suddenly became copyright maximalists, talking about "stealing, theft, etc" Since then, people have calmed down and realized that AI is simply a tool like any other.
Hence why I became obsessed with just about the only Philosopher who engaged with this idea seriously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ego_and_Its_Own
[flagged]
Beyond illegal downloading and distribution of copyrighted content, the article also describes how Meta staff seemingly lied about it in depositions (including, potentially, Mark Zuckerberg himself).
Huh, a big tech CEO lied to us?
Flippant response I know, but too many people worship at the alter of the job creater and believe these folks are moral upstanding citizens
So if I torrented and seeded, I would be doing it for my own entertainment, not commercially. I expect big copy-write holders to come after myself. If Meta does it - I guess they have better lawyers ?
Could make interesting case law.
> Could make interesting case law.
Yeah, to perpetuate this system where only those who can afford lawyers get to benefit
Since it’s case law, everyone would benefit from the precedent
The last time the US Supreme Court decided on copyright law, they basically said "we like what Google is doing with Android, so what they did is fine".
So, no, not necessarily.
There already is precedent with cases like Aaron Swartz.
No there’s not, he killed himself before there was a decision. That doesn’t create precedent.
Remembering Aaron Swartz in this moment
Which was arguably more innocent — scientific papers.
Meta is not “innocent”, and comparing this instance with Swartz is a huge offense to his legacy.
I think comparing it is reasonable and valid. Equaling it would be incorrect. What Meta is (allegedly, likely) doing here is several orders of magnitude worse, in scale and intention. I'd say both ethical and probably juristical.
But just because the scale and intention are different, does not mean we cannot compare both cases. They are not equal, far from it. But they are compareable.
I don't think you've read the parent comment correctly?
Parent comment implies Swartz was guilty of some degree. I vehemently disagree with that.
> Parent comment implies Swartz was guilty of some degree
as a constructive criticism, you might want to reconsider your interpretation of
>"Remembering Aaron Swartz in this moment" -> Which was arguably more innocent — scientific papers.
As in, both hold some degree of illegality (objectively), so when pointed that "he is guilty of some degree" is due to the jurisdiction laws (broken or not) regardless of societal/moral values that the context may apply.
perhaps a better answer would be to point that he shouldn't be punished for those actions.
You're quoting a different user
> As in, both hold some degree of illegality (objectively)
What did Aaron Swartz do that was illegal?
Would Aaron have preferred us to download the material and train the AI?
Is there a concept in the legal system of first-come-first-served that could be used as precedent?
What I mean is: when someone is prosecuted for copyright infringement, but Meta isn't, then could the case be put on hold until Meta is found guilty and pays a fine?
Also maybe the fine on the later case would have to be proportional to the prior case. So if Meta pays $1 per infringement, the penalty might be $1 for torrenting something else (which is immaterial and not worth the justice system's time) so pretty much all copyright infringement cases would get thrown out.
It reminds me of how mainstream drug addicts get convicted and spend years in prison, while celebrities get off with a warning or monetary fine.
Lawyers (and hence, judges) are really good at arguing why the earlier case does not apply in a present case, even if most reasonable people would think the two cases are essentially the same.
It's a fundamental part of lawyer training, and if they want to let BigCorp go and bring the hammer down on the little guy, they can make up a hundred reasons for it.
Considering prices for single work, this must be multi-billion dollar compensation.
Take for example 675k paid for 31 songs. So 20k a song. If we estimate book to be say 10MB that would 8 million works. So I think reasonable compensation is something along 163 billion. Not even 10 years of net income. Which I think is entirely fair punishment.
Beyond the absurdity of those amounts, the funny thing is that the authors wouldn’t ever see a dime of that money. Not in the music case, not in this one either. Fairness?
Meta argues that it's fair use, and that they just downloaded, and never seeded, all the torrents.
They have so much bandwidth and never seeded anything? Damn leechers! That is not fair use of torrents at all!
The article is purposely conflating the downloading from the seeding statistics. Saying "just 0.008%" the size resulted in big punishments is confusing when Meta is also saying they set their client to be leechers.
No they never seeded the essence of it ALL :;))
Seeding and downloading are in the same protocol. You can't do one without the other
Why comment if you have no idea what youre talking about?
I've written my own torrent clients. Have you?
So have I. So we both know that it's possible to not seed a torrent while downloading it.
It's even possible to pretend to seed whilst not transferring anything, just to boost your ratio on a private tracker.
That's the protocol we're talking about.
clearly not good ones
For creating a backup of library genesis. No. They should be awarded a philanthropic prize.
There's evidence of them seeding back as little as possible. I'm not sure how that's "creating a backup".
In that case they should also be sued for not complying with bittorrent's tit-for-tat ethiquette. Leechers should be punished. :)
They're talking about creating and releasing Llama...not seeding the torrent
A model is not a backup.
Then why are we mad about the copyright stuff?
Both things can be true:
* an AI model is not a backup of the contents of all of the books in the sense that it would preserve their contents or similar such it might e.g. be useful for future generations
* Meta has (allegedly) been unfairly benefiting / profiting off of the copyrighted work of others by illegally reproducing copies of their work. Not just in the AI model sense[1], but actually (allegedly) downloading them directly from pirate repositories in a way that isn't straightforwardly fair use and even uploading some amount of this pirate data in return.
I feel like the parent commenter may have been making the typical argument for preservation of copyrighted materials, and I'm amenable to it... when it's regular people or non-profits doing that work, in a way that doesn't allow them to benefit unfairly or profit off of the hard work of others (or would be connected to such a process in some way).
Plaintiffs allege that Meta didn't just do all this, but also talked about how wrong it was and how to mitigate the seeding so they might upload as little as possible. So no matter how you slice it they allegedly 1) knew they were doing something at least a little bit wrong and 2) took steps to prevent the process that might otherwise have preserved the copied materials for the public interest.
And I feel like you probably knew all this, but maybe I'm missing something.
1: the typical argument wherein the model wouldn't exist without the ingested data, a lot of it is still in there, it is of course a derivative work and the question is really how derivative is it and what part of the work can they claim is their own contribution
They could have at the very least seeded some more, to give something back to the, uh, community.
Before I decided my opinion on this I need to know their ratio.
Article states: Meta also allegedly modified settings "so that the smallest amount of seeding possible could occur"
Big tech taking and not giving back, where have I heard this before?
Damn leechers!
The jury of their peers finds them guilty!
In that case, throw the book at them.
My ISP will shut off my internet if it catches me torrenting copyrighted material but if you're a massive corporation that steals TBs of data its barely a blip in the news.
Wouldn't it be amazing if all of Meta's ISPs cut them off for torrenting? One can dream...
You should look into changing your ISP, or at least get a VPN.
This should be legal. Copyright law does more harm than good.
The only ethical problem here is that only Meta sized companies can afford to pay the "damages" for such blatant law violations at worst, or the fees of their lawyers at best.
Copyright law does more harm than good to individuals who just want to learn and enjoy content without profiting from it.
Companies like Meta and OpenAI, however, should definitely have to pay to use the hard work of humans to train their AI.
If an individual was the one tormenting almost 82 TB of copyrighted books, the damages they would have to pay would be in the trillions (mostly because of how broken the copyright law system is)
If only these corporations with vested interests in permissive copyright would put their money where their mouth is with lobbying for a change. Or is that only allowed when they're trying to do something scummy? I forget.
"Supposedly, Meta tried to conceal the seeding by not using Facebook servers while downloading the dataset to "avoid" the "risk" of anyone "tracing back the seeder/downloader" from Facebook servers, an internal message from Meta researcher Frank Zhang said, while describing the work as in "stealth mode." Meta also allegedly modified settings "so that the smallest amount of seeding possible could occur," a Meta executive in charge of project management, Michael Clark, said in a deposition..."
They will be getting a lot of Frommer Legal letters...
The question is, if they could and would have paid for each book, would it be ok to train the LLM on them? I'm talking about prior books, I'm sure new books have language forbidding their use to train LLMs at the point of sale. But legally, how does using a book to train a LLM differ from a teacher learning from a book and teaching its contents to their pupils. Obviously, the LLM can do so at scale, but is there a legal difference?
> The question is, if they could and would have paid for each book, would it be ok to train the LLM on them?
Whether training on AI model on an array of diffentent works, many of which are copyright protected, is itself a copyright violation, in addition to or distinct from any copyright violation that goes on gathering the dataset for training (and separate from any copyright violation in the actual or intended use of the LLM), remains to be resolved as a legal question, and may or may not have a simple yes or no answer (or the same answer under every system of copyright laws globally).
My inclination is that it is probably generally not a violation in US law, but that's not something I am very confident in; how the definitions of copy and derivative work apply to determine if it would be without fair use, and how fair use analysis applies, are not clear from the available precedent.
> But legally, how does using a book to train a LLM differ from a teacher learning from a book and teaching its contents to their pupils.
It is very clear, by looking at how US copyright law is written and even more clear in its history of application, that information stored in brains of people are without exception neither copies nor new works that can be derivative works under US law, and so cannot be infringing, no matter how you gain them. It’s also very clear in the statute itself and the case law that data in media used by artificial digital computers, on the other hand, can constitute copies or derivative works that can be infringing. Even if the process is arguably similar in legally relevant manners, copyright law is critically focussed on the result and whether it is a particular kind of thing which can be infringing, not just the process.
Thank you for a good answer.
A LLM is not a person. That is the legal difference...until we have Citizens United v2
For some misterious reason I can't see Zuckerberg in front of a judge facing 50 years imprisonment. Anyone can?
I truly hope that whoever takes the case goes after Meta with 1000 times the pressure that was put on Swartz, but honestly I don't expect much just as the top comment precisly expressed.
And if we are going to be fair please also let's not forget about the other usual suspects, or anyone thinks they are falling behind?
There are other countries than the US though and if rightsholders wish to sue, lawsuits can happen there too.
Several EU countries, Switzerland, South Korea, Japan, etc. are viable countries to sue from. Even in Japan which has a law specifically permitting training on copyrighted material you must still obtain it legally-- i.e. you must license it.
That's irrelevant. Switzerland (for example) isn't going to arrest Zuckerberg and put him in jail for this either.
Nobody will.
But if you're operating a site called Pirate Bay or something like that and it's not earning billions of dollars, expect countries to chase you across the globe trying to arrest you.
If there were a criminal prosecution for willful copyright infringement in some non-US country an extradition request for the relevant people is not an impossibility though, and there would be no legal reason to deny it.
Really curious what the judges are going to do here.
Horse has functionally bolted on this already
I’m guessing slap on wrist despite courts going after individual for a couple of movies torrented pretty hard
Is there any other possible outcome than a fine? That too one which will not really affect Meta's overall earnings
Ideally we have a conversation about how we as society have ended up in a situations where we have a two tier justice system.
At a minimum the starting point of discussion here should be that if life ruining $80,000 per item is an acceptable fine for individuals then why is it not the same for corporations. Which would probably get you a number in the trillions at which point we could have a discussion about reforming this entire system.
But yes realistically slap on wrist is what is going to happen here.
> Is there any other possible outcome than a fine?
Yes, of course.
It's quite possible that judges realize that if they restrict training data to licensed materials, LLMs will become stupid and China will overtake the US to become the leader in AI, and because that can't happen, they'll make up some reason to make training on unlicensed data legal. It's definitely fair use!
I'm not even joking. Last time the US Supreme Court basically said "Android is too important, we have to declare its use of Java API fair use."
> Last time the US Supreme Court basically said "Android is too important, we have to declare its use of Java API fair use."
Yes, I remember that case. I do think a hefty fine can be sufficient here though. Meta has been paying out court ordered fines for years, none of which dent their growth much. And current models are trained on those models + datasets are scrubbed more vigorously now so future rehashes of this shouldn't be an issue. Also, most data online has already been hoovered up, according to Ilya the former Chief Scientist of OpenAI, so this will likely not pop back up again.
But good point, courts are often more practical given the law than we perceive them to be.
The reality of the situation is that the economic value and utility of AI is going to cause the laws to be restructured around them.
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I wonder what happened to the related OpenAI training GPT3 on the books3 dataset story[1] from ~2 years ago?
[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/battle-over-books3/
I think this one is different because the legality of training on copyrighted material is an open legal question while distributing/seeding copyrighted material is decidedly illegal.
A good chance for federal prosectutors to "send a message" as they did with Aaron Swartz but I don't see things going that way.
If you were wondering why meta was making a lot of donations to the new government (including settling a lawsuit for 25 million with the New president, 1 million to the inauguration)…. I suspect there will be no federeal charges.
The rules have always seemed different for corporations regardless.
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-settles-lawsuit-meta-m...
Well of course, bullies always prefer targets that can't fight back. That itself is unfortunately a basis of the legal system from it being run on flawed monkey brains. Why else is hitting vulnerable children okay but getting into a consensual bar fight illegal?
Even after JSTOR declined to press charges in that case. Despicable. The US has dug the hole it's going down.
Something tells me uncle Donald will exonerate his new favourite lapdog from any criminal or civil liability.
IANAL but the pardon power (A) only extends to criminal punishments, not civil liabilities and (B) copyright lawsuits can be launched by anybody, not just the Department of Justice.
So, barring further Might Makes Right shit--which I'm not willing to fully rule out--Trump can't fully shield Zuckerberg et al.
They can also sue in France, or Spain, or Japan.
How unlikely it is for Trump to declare AI national security and simply make it lawless playground fro Zuck & Co.
If you owe the bank $1,000 it's your problem; if you owe the bank $1,000,000,000 it's the bank's problem.
I'm more interested in piracy not being highly prosecuted than I am in Meta getting punished for this. I'm not trying to spend 20 years in jail for pirating a TV show.
Support EFF if you think that the copyright laws should be changed and also applied equally to all: https://www.eff.org/issues/innovation
> By September 2023, Bashlykov had seemingly dropped the emojis, consulting the legal team directly and emphasizing in an email that "using torrents would entail ‘seeding’ the files—i.e., sharing the content outside, this could be legally not OK."
I'm pretty sure you can theoretically download torrents without seeding, although this is frowned upon. If they really seeded (with full bandwidth?) that's indeed pretty brazen.
It is sort of strange that Meta is being singled out here though, and sort of sad considering they at least release the model weights. What's the signal? Do illegal shit to be competitive, but make sure there is no evidence?
You can, in transmission for example you can just set the seed percentage to 0%. I recognise that this makes me a bad torrenter, but I've been told in the past that my ISP wont be too happy about me seeding, and they already do something screwy to torrents I access through the surface web, so I'm just playing it safe
I think your client may still be sharing IP addresses, not sure about the legality of that
Great, can we get the full Kim Dotcom treatment for Zuckenberg now?
I'm also ok with abolishing copyright all together if he's too untouchable
So according to some AI, the damages awarded per infringed work is ~$750 minimum in the US. 80TB of books, each let's say 10MB on average, would be 8 million works. So Meta should pay 6 billion USD for their copyright infringement?
Minimum doesn't cover willful copyright infractions, for which maximum penalty is $150K per work. That comes out to quite a different number.
Nice calculation, that’s actually quite doable for them, they have already been paying similar fines for a while.
Prosecutors filed for Swartz 50 years of imprisonment and $1 million in fines.
Can you calculate how many years that would be for Mark and his people?
I ran it, it came out to zero
Best way to "punish" Meta is to slash the Gordian knot and abolish copyright. Level the playing field, incrementally, for everyone else who isn't a trillion-dollar corporation.
The alternative is a futile legalistic attack against a monopoly entity too powerful to be meaningfully punished. That won't accomplish anything useful. It would, rather, help cement this status quo, where copyright infringement is selectively legal or illegal, for different entities at the same time; and companies like Meta thrive arbitraging that difference. You can't defeat Meta—but you can help dig them a moat.
Ridding copyright would level the playing field for individuals and companies????!!!! Getting rid of laws that protect the individual only will help the larger empowered businesses.
>only will help the larger empowered businesses.
I'm pretty sure I could list ten megacorps that would collapse overnight if copyright was abolished. The music groups, movie studios, streaming platforms...
What's the alternative to copyright then? Anything I create will be instantly reproduced and sold for less than I can afford to by some entity far larger and more efficient than me.
> Level the playing field, incrementally, for everyone else who isn't a trillion-dollar corporation.
There is no level playing field when you have individuals and trillion-dollar companies in the same market.
Right, all this talk about getting rid of copyright and no one is talking about what should replace it? how would we we incentives people to write good books? to pour 1000s of hours of their time to produce new knowledge?
As we all know, not a single book or work of art was produced before the creation of copyright.
Does this mean we are willing to live in a world with less variety of books and authors? meaning only to let those who really want to advance knowledge, and willing to do so with no monetary reward? feels like this would lead to to a slow down in knowledge production. It's not like there was a healthy and vigorous book publishing industry pre creation of copyright. We're ok with going back to that era?
"Say they hood robin, ain't that a b*, take from the poor and give to the rich."
- Ice Cube.
Meta will face no consequences. Say your a small publisher and you'd like a bit of compensation. If you dare sue Meta can just blacklist your books on its platforms. Even if they don't, you probably don't have the money to sue one of the biggest companies on earth.
I think copyrights should be limited to 25 years after first publication. This would fix plenty of issues and give the AIs of the world plenty to learn from.
Who am I kidding, Meta will take what they will. For that author making 20k a year, be honored to be of use to Meta.
can people vote with their feet, and leave the platform ?
but the masses are addicted to the slop that meta feeds them.
Maybe you should go after the worst offender (OpenAI) first before going after Meta, since the latter already gave back their model away for free for everyone and the architecture.
We will know why OpenAI isn't getting investigated.
So true. It seems like there is a controlled operation to shut open models down starting with Meta. Obviously they can't go after deepseek atm
Could be why OpenAI paid them so much, to go after their open-source competition hardest of all.
That's horrible! Magnet anyone?
Anna's Archive: https://annas-archive.org
specifically https://annas-archive.se/torrents - this is a meta-project which aggregates illegal copyrighted material from other illegal projects. You absolutely should not download any material this page links to, although you can use it for the purpose of researching about shadow libraries.
Library genesis
Weird shenanigans are happening in libgen at the moment; better go through Anna's Archive to look for the items you want, it will link you to the corresponding mirrors more reliably.
At least this has been the recent experience of a friend who used libgen and anna's archive to download legal, public domain works!
No, AA is rate limited to being unusable, while libgen is fast enough.
The usual copyright cartel is up in arms, crying theft. But here’s the truth: intellectual property is a state-enforced monopoly, not real property.
Property is based on scarcity - if you take my car, I no longer have a car. But if you copy my book, I still have my book. No loss, no theft, just an outdated legal fiction designed to stifle innovation and enrich rent-seeking middlemen. An no, loss of potential sales doesn't count - it's like being able to claim a lottery ticket has real value.
Copyright was never about protecting creators—it’s about locking down ideas, preventing competition, and extracting endless fees. Shakespeare borrowed, tech companies iterate, and science thrives on free exchange. The idea that knowledge should be locked away indefinitely is absurd.
Meta’s mistake wasn’t using the data - it was pretending copyright still matters. AI is exposing the system for what it is: obsolete. The future belongs to those who create without asking permission.
This reminds me of Peter Sunde's "komimashin"
https://www.engadget.com/2015-12-21-peter-sunde-kopimashin.h...
It's obviously absurd to enforce copyright as bytes are copied around instead of as it is used. Training an LLM is a different thing than re-hosting and giving away copies to other people.
If you don't want people to transform your works - keep them private. You don't own ideas.
As the article says, Meta /was/ giving away copies to other people by seeding the libgen torrents. This isn't the usual case of "should companies be allowed to train on books".
Then it's a simple case of a rights holder taking them to court.
What's the fuss about LLM training in this thread then?
Thanks for the link. I wondered what that word meant.
From the article: Kopimashin, as in Copy Machine.
Really strange how much torrenting is demonized by all of these companies and ISPs when individuals want to use it but when a company like Meta uses it there is so little scrutiny.
We have at least 4 types of ill-defined concepts of property in the 21st century , largely due to our laziness, intellectual inertia and lack of motivation to make forward-thinking definitions for the coming age of AI and ubiquitous access to all information and all communication.
1) the concept of copyright is as old as the word suggests (copies are the least of our worries going forward - it should be possible to define processes for exploitation of ideas in a fair way)
2) we allow humans to learn from other people's ideas and transform them to commercial products and the same should happen for AIs in the future
3) we have an ill-defined concept of "personally identifying information" which gives people ownership to information that others have created via their own means - there should be better ways to ensure a level of privacy (but not absolute privacy) without overly-broad, nonsensical definitions of what is personally protected information
4) We allow social media and other telecommunications media to arbitrarily censor people's speech without recourse. This turns people's speech to property of the social media companies and imposes absolute power on it. This makes zero sense and is abusive towards the public at large. We need legal protections of speech in all media, not just state-owned media.
>we have an ill-defined concept of "personally identifying information" which gives people ownership to information that others have created via their own means - there should be better ways to ensure a level of privacy (but not absolute privacy) without overly-broad, nonsensical definitions of what is personally protected information
What information about me could a corporation create via its own means that would be legally protected but shouldn't be? PII is generally information that a corporation collects. Unless you mean that my cellphone provider creates the association between my name and phone number and should therefore be able to do with it as they please?
It's not just about corporations. Banking and government services e.g. are required to keep your personal information stored for years and years even against your will
Who would have known that BitTorrent, shadow libraries, and seeders will help to train the best AI models out there, that adds a whole new meaning to a "seed".
Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42673628
How about a consequentialist argument? In some fields, AI has already surpassed physicians in diagnosing illnesses. If breaking copyright laws allows AI to access and learn from a broader range of data, it could lead to earlier and more accurate diagnoses, saving lives. In this case, the ethical imperative to preserve human life outweighs the rigid enforcement of copyright laws.
There’s nothing particular to AI about your comment, it’s a general downside of IP.
No, the development of an artificial general intelligence does seem like a special case compared to usual IP debates, particularly in the potential multiplicative positive-sum effects on society overall.
If you're an author with a book likely to have be hoovered up, I wonder what you'd get from the fb models if you asked "complete this in the style of [author] in [book]: [quite a long excerpt]"
If you get a direct quote then you're good with your claim, surely.
That's the NYT's case. Not necessarily very strong. https://www.techdirt.com/2024/03/05/openais-motion-to-dismis...
The way it works counts if you bring prompting into it. It could easily have learned enough style chops of [author] from other sources to mimic/predict those stanzas from raw data points.
Whatever the ruling one thing is for sure, plagiarism is no longer the sincerest form of flattery. The human authors are out for AI blood on this.
I believe that is part of this lawsuit pretty much
You wouldn't download a car.
That they’d focus on file sharing over transformation or outputs is exactly the risk I warned the companies about in my AI report. Most datasets, like RefinedWeb and The Pile, also require sharing copyrighted workers between people who are not licensed to do that. Many works also prohibit commercial use or have patents on them.
They need to make datasets which don’t have this problem or have entities in Singapore train the foundation models within their rules. The latter has a TDM exemption that would let AI’s use much of the Internet, maybe GPL code, licensed/purchased works they digitize, etc. Very flexible.
I think everyone can see that whatever
(imo not in accordance with the Constitution, after absurdities like deciding “limited time” the way mathematicians might define something of some order of infinity)
the alleged social contract was is not functional the way it was intended, and we see who benefits and who loses.
mass dynamic editing for vitriol and profanity occurred while writing this comment in order to remain within site rules
Wow, I'm actually a bit shocked that senior levels of management at Meta were fine with torrenting pirated books. WTaF.
Meta does a lot of stuff I disagree with, but they're usually not just straight breaking the law.
Eye for an eye. Meta losses rights to 81.7 TB of IP. Transcribed into a text file
Meta already does that to themselves every year or so, deleting all internal communications.
They've thrown away a huge amount of communication to source code commit reinforcement training data as a result. They do it to avoid emails making it into trials like this.
No large company will ever consider training a public LLM on all their internal communications.
Could be a private finetune, or even a complete private model. They already have one for their internal codebase.
> Meta already does that to themselves every year or so, deleting all internal communications.
Aren't they obligated by law to keep all internal communication?
When there is a specific order after proceeding starts, but not before. There can sometimes be other orders as part of govt settlements like Google was recently accused of violating.
You may be thinking of certain financial institutions where it is a hard requirement, and maybe there are some other regulated industries too that have it.
Yes, they are. But I can imagine the fine/impact for this being much, much lower than the consequences of all their nefarious communication being used in trials.
Companies often don't do what they're obligated to. As long as they can keep plausible deniability.
Seeding it was probably most societally useful thing Meta ever did.
LLMs are worse than search for figuring out what value a specific asset provides to the LLM. Atleast with search your work or page is not lost and still gets a click/user interaction, and may be give you a chance to monetize the interaction. However, LLMs just don’t have any such option. Gemini adds links but the links they add are completely editorialized by the LLM and need not reflect the original at all. So how does anyone ask for compensation even if they sue?
Copyright law needs major reform. We need to figure out a way to let authors monetize their work while not making complying with the law so burdensome. We've created a system where people who (understandably) ignore the law benefit at the expense of people trying to do the right thing.
Sounds just like how Facebook got started, harvesting photos without permission. From the Wikipedia article, the Facebook precursor was known as Facemash. On Zuckerberg, "He hacked into the online intranets of Harvard Houses to obtain photos, developing algorithms and codes along the way. He referred to his hacking as "child's play.""
If I were younger, I would be livid.
>>"vastly smaller acts of data piracy—just .008 percent of the amount of copyrighted works Meta pirated—have resulted in Judges referring the conduct to the US Attorneys’ office for criminal investigation.".....While Meta may be confident in its legal strategy despite the new torrenting wrinkle...
Zuckerberg has paid the vig several times [0,1,2], which is evidently the best legal strategy under this administration. OFC, considering there are already multiple payments, there is no assurance the vig payments won't substantially increase as the Capo sees more opportunity for profit.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigorish
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/29/meta-settles-trump-...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8j9e1x9z2xo
I love this. Large corpos should torrent more. Maybe we'll get better copyright law as a result.
You know the wierd thing is - I've never used Meta AI. I've never thought of using it. The only product of FB i use is whatsapp, however I've not seen/heard any of my friends using Meta AI for FB,IG,Whatsapp. I really don't understand what their ROI here is...
I thought about it for a full day, and I have one idea for how to handle copyrighted data training. It would need to be open / regulated and training till double descent would need to be disallowed, to make sure that the model is not memorizing the data.
Damn! One of my old books can be found in the Anna's Archive search. The book has been out of print for years. I pity the Meta users who get results based on something that I wrote. (Check Anna's for 'Keith P. Graham', and the first book listed is mine.)
At OpenAI we have seen some employees expressed their concern publicy about the moral grounds on which company was acting. We never heard about it from anyone at Meta but there were some jokes ofcourse. I guess everything is fair in AI and Corporates.
One of the largest businesses of the Internet to date has been piracy. Individual informal piracy has been the smallest component of this. By far the largest has been corporate mass-scale piracy, and LLMs are probably the largest heist to date. They've literally downloaded the sum total of all human thought and knowledge, compressed it into queryable lossy compression models (which is what LLMs are), and are selling it back to us.
Meta, with its "open weights" models, is one of the least guilty parties, since at least they've made the resulting blobs of mass piracy available to us. Same with Mistral, Deepseek, etc.
ClosedAI, Google, and others have all probably done this and more and refuse to make even the model available.
I think the way to deal with this is very simple:
If you have trained your model on works to which you do not have rights or permission, the resulting model is not copyrightable and cannot be sold. It must either be kept for research purposes only or released free of charge and in the public domain. All these models that have been trained on pirated works should become public domain.
Of course now that we have full capture of the US Federal Government I'm sure any suggestion like that would be neutralized with one bribe to Trump.
Did they at least seed back?
I’d think people can get together to put this on a public space strictly for training purposes and have the consortium of some sort get paid per use.
But we live in this stupid society where you have to move mountains to change things an inch.
I as a individual would be liable to pay ~1000$ of damages if I'd downloaded a movie in Germany or Poland and the publisher would get to me.
I'm going to assume as it's a corporation, then the laws no longer apply.
That's okay, they should just charge The Zuck with it personally; I'd be fine with that.
The only bad thing about this is that small time players who do it are treated poorly (Aaron Swartz). IP de-facto not existing for AI companies is a feature, not a bug.
The fact that most of the world embraced hardcore copyright troll ludditism when the means of their (badly paying creative) jobs economic production was democratized implies that most people do not believe in any "egalitarianism" and especially not the left-wing form many profess to believe in. Certainly not "information wants to be free" or any of the other idealist shit that I or Aaron Swartz believed in. What meta did was software communism - full stop. They literally released their models to the public! I support all of this 10000%. The only issue is that they're not open enough (fully open source the dataset)
So, unironically, good! Thank you, please pirate more! Please destroy the US IP system while you're at it. Copyright abolitionism is good and thank you Zuckerberg!
We're grateful to Meta for helping seed and backup our torrents. The more copies the better. Thank you Meta, for helping preserve humanity's legacy! :)
“Behind every great fortune lies a great crime” -Honoré de Balzac
Copy-right is not learn/train-right. That said Meta full its mouth with open source while they release models that are not SOTA nor usable for commercial purposes.
Wouldn't it be a real shame if the entirety of US constitution, laws, and legal precedence went out the window these days, and the only thing left unscathed was the rotten mess that is copyright law? Just saying, this might be the moment to burn it to the ground. Not that it makes up for any of the other stuff going on, but why waste a perfectly good crisis?
I'm sure they'll throw the book at them.
We're starting to find out that Meta ruined LibGen for the rest of use who used it like a library. Just like how Google screwed over libraries by sending interns to the Stanford library to checkout books they scanned into Google Books. Not to increase shared knowledge or preserve human artificats, but to put them all in a museum and, to paraphrase Joni Mitchell, charge the people a dollar and a half just to see 'em.
Unless Meta 'fessed up to this (which seems unlikely), the headline here is missing the word "allegedly".
Meta admitted to the torrenting more than a month ago. The reason this is in the news is because some of the emails discussing it have been unsealed.
It's okay - they are multi-billion company. Rules don't apply to them.
Rules are just for us peasants.
I'm fine with them using my books to train an open source model, but it would have been nice to be asked.
It's okay when large corporations download cars. But when you do it, you'll be in trouble.
We need better laws that would create a better way to do this legally whilst compensating rights holders.
We need better justice system that enforces the laws we have in the books that would help compensate right owners when big companies in emails pirate terabytes of data.
I really don't think that Meta did this because the alternative would have been too onerous; they are a huge org, they could work through whatever loopholes required. They did it because it would have cost money and there will be no penalty for not paying.
So, if they're sued in Japan, or France, do you think that the courts will take any special measures because it's a valuable American corporation?
I suspect that if the case is reasonable they will just convict, and quickly-- appeal denied and all simply because the laws are so straightforward.
I must have failed to clearly express myself - I don't think Meta should be doing what they are doing, I hope they do end up being punished. But the only way that Meta is going to change its behaviour is by being held accountable in a way that's much more difficult and costly than if they'd simply followed the law in the first place.
Ah, I'm not sure exactly what I believe here, but this kind of torrenting is obviously illegal-- I'm personally split on how I feel about it morally, because some of these people really are trying to preserve knowledge, and I think that's commendable, at the same time, commercial piracy is something which really does screw over authors with it being some kind of theft-of-service type thing where people exploit other people's work-- and if they felt that the work had no value they could have written another text themselves.
I only really wanted to convey that I believed that it probably isn't obviously easy for Meta to get away with anything in this, even if the US government decides to be lenient for the sake of a high market-cap US company simply because other countries are a viable place to sue as well.
I think I misinterpreted your comment as that you thought that Meta thought that costs would be low because they imagined a US court system that simply ignored the illegality because it's they who committed it, when nothing like that is actually implied in your comment.
Yes it smells bad but facebook did the right thing (at least for facebook)
After OpenAI trained their models on the famed books2 dataset, and seeing the technological implications of ChatGPT, there was a good chance they would let them get away with it.
Would the USA really surrender its AI technological advantage for trivial matters like copyright? They would make some royalty arrangement and get it over with
Remember people getting sued insane amounts of money per-song they torrented. If we applied that precedent to Meta, Meta would need to declare bankruptcy. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/file-sharing-mom-fined-19-milli...
Yeah well, OpenAI compressed the whole internet into proprietary weights and is now providing access via paid subscription while the original internet gets deleted from our culture.
Zuckerberg did more copyright infringement? Shocking!
Hooray! Or wait, are we not doing that anymore?
Based. Free knowledge to the people
Come on publishers! This is your chance! Now you can really show, how you will treat all copyright infringements equally and not only go after easy target. Show us, how you spend all that money in a lawsuit against Meta!
Death to intellectual property!
ebooks are a 1-2 mb each max. 81.7 TB are a lot of books, like 42-85 million books.
The article says they got datasets from Anna's Archive. It was most likely the scihub/libgen torrent which is 96.0 TB right now and contains 92,872,581 files. That's about 1 megabyte per file.
https://annas-archive.org/datasets
Where does one find these torrent datasets? Did they download the books in bits and pieces or as a single huge multi-TB file?
I’ve got 70-80mb pirated books, I think because of the illustrations. Guess it depends on the book.
I don’t think they’re using picture heavy book for LLM training, no?
Just because the LLMs are trained on text doesn't mean that images we're a part of what they downloaded.
You clean up the data after you acquire it, not before.
Even if they didn't use the illustration(which isn't clear given multimodal models), they'd still make use the text in the books.
Presumably they didn't create the torrent
Whoever created it has a lot of spare hard disk space.
100TB is like 6 hard drives...
> 100TB is like 6 hard drives...
Discounted Seagates ? /s
You can get recertified 18TB drives, but still it's a lot of disk space. I simply don't have enough data.
Yes they do, there's multimodal models.
I don't think they need to be selective. It's not like Meta can run out of storage.
For multi-modal models, why not? They would be probably some of the best data.
Sometimes the PDF of a book is big because the book's packed with important illustrations and charts - like a textbook or journal paper.
Other times a PDF of a book is big because someone scanned it and didn't have trustworthy OCR, so they figured distributing images of text at 1.5 MB per page was better than risking OCR errors.
Why not ? Do you think that AI doesn't enjoy porn ? /s
It could be anywhere from a few million to a hundred million
https://annas-archive.org/datasets
their whole business is stealing data..
so its quite funny to see they freely share it too.
At least they seeded!
The powerful do what they can, the weak suffer what they must
They are getting shittier and shittier
So they're gonna go through every book that was stolen and apply the appropriate penalty, right? Each copyrighted work has a minimum penalty of $750 under the DMCA. That will be applied fairly in order to ensure that the rights holder is made whole by the infringer, right?
It's so funny to see the law blatantly ignored by the overlords. Like, there isn't even a pretext anymore. They just steal what they want and budget for the fines and campaign donations to make the consequences go away.
did they not seed enough, is that the crime? lol
Laws are for poor people.
I love it. This plotline feels out of cryptonomicon or silicon valley series.
One of the many reasons why Zuck’s been sucking up to Trump. He’s in desperate need of some Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free cards.
Same for all the other sleazy tech bros.
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Not that I have any particular sympathy for the guy, but could we keep the tone a bit more civil around here? HN is one of the few bastions of grounded discussion on the internet, and I’d prefer to keep it that way.
> HN is one of the few bastions of grounded discussion on the internet
Hacker News has its fair share of irrationality.
I submitted an article about efforts to undermine Wikipedia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42962971
But it was flagged and locked to commenting.
Wikipedia is one of the internet's greatest projects. Hacker News apparently doesn't have the stomach to discuss the threats to Wikipedia.
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You can't post like this here, regardless of whom you want to kill. Between this and other abusive comments, we've banned the account.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42946919
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42690711
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
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Lmao. Using A Jesus quote to defend a megacorp’s illegal piracy. Wow
Pretty confident most of us haven't pirated 82tb of media in order to train an AI but maybe I'm naive?
I'm doing exactly that over the weekend with a RPi that I found in the junk drawer.
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abolish knowledge rentiers
Boo hoo.
We are trying to advance civilization here. To accumulate and make available all human knowledge to date. And you stand there with your hand out to stop this? You are a villain. There is no sympathy for you.
Good, we know it. Nothing will happen, because nothing happens to billionaires and their companies. Musk is proving it every day now.
This is why we need to abolish the government. If the government doesn't have any power, they can't do preferential treatment to their cronies.
Enough with laws for thee but not for me!
I was having difficulty figuring out if this was parody or not. But I guess the username checks out.
The problem is precisely that those billionaires are too powerful. If anything, we need to abolish the billionaires.
I deleted my facebook account about 10 years ago. Downloaded data, deleted. Not deactivated.
Nothing in my life made me ever want to go back except for when I got back into playing hockey, and all the hockey leagues use facebook to communicate a few months ago.
I made a new account, had to literally upload a picture of my face to pass verification.. and then a few days later I was immediately banned and couldn't use my account. I assume because they searched previous data and compared my face to find out I have a "deleted" (lol) account and matched me. I've assumed they'll only let me log in if i use my original 10 years ago deleted account.
Fuck meta. Fuck zuck.
And they're going to get away with it simply because if you or I openly did this the DMCA fines would be for a million trillion dollars. Since Meta shareholders can't stomach a million trillion dollars in fines, their lawyers will wave their magic wands and poof! No laws were broken!
Nothing is gonna happen. Just a slap on the hand. And we all from the intelectual work class, writers, journalists, programmers will be proletarized by LLMs that have been:
a) Financed via inflation/"cantillon effect" due to ZRP/Stimulus that absolutely flooded the market with funny money in the hand of the sharks. b) Trained upon copyrighted work without compensation. c) Trained upon open source without even asking politely for authorization.
The Robber Barons from the last century can't even get close to our modern Feudal Tech Lords.
Unless you're one of us that have amassed multi-generation wealth in a exit in the last 20 years, you're completely fucked.