Thread

1. jacquesm · 1789726316 · focus · HN ↗

   It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up. Crimes this large are crimes against humanity. So many people whose life's work got appropriated without consideration, compensation or consent it is baffling.

   It is said that at the heart of every great fortune there is a great crime, so it should be no surprise that the most valuable companies on the planet will most likely result from this crime. And given that justice can be bought by those with the most money you can forget about anything coming of this.

   1. logicchains · 1789730285 · focus · HN ↗

      >It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up. Crimes this large are crimes against humanity. So many people whose life's work got appropriated without consideration, compensation or consent it is baffling.

      This is such a brain-dead take. By that logic there could never be any kind of AI, because unlike a human it'd be completely forbidden from learning from the sources of knowledge from which humans learn. It's stupid to suggest silicon brains should not legally be able to read copyrighted material just because you hate bigcos and capitalism.

      Learning isn't stealing, regardless of whether it's done by a human or a machine. By your logic someone reading and memorizing all somebody's life work is appropriation; completely inane.

      1. layer8 · 1789733617 · focus · HN ↗

         Learning isn’t stealing, but if you’d set up a forum or hotline where paid staff would answer questions and write essay directly based on NYT content without a license for that content, that would probably be deemed illegal.

         1. keeda · 1789747181 · focus · HN ↗

            I would highly doubt it, because news publications and blogs rehash each others' reporting all the time. How many times have you seen an article start with "Today <XYZ publication> broke the news that..."?

            Since this is a copyright fight, rights extend only to verbatim copies of the full work or significant portions thereof, and abstract things like facts, ideas, concepts, themes, and patterns have never been protected, and rightfully so. Yet those abstract things are what get repeated and distributed, and are what get encoded into model weights.

            This is probably plaintiffs' biggest challenge because it has been very hard to get models to regurgitate entire works except for a very small handful of extremely popular works (and now there are guardrails against even that.)

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