I feel like you're skipping over the illegal part. Something legal that puts authors out of work is quite different to blatant breaking of the law.
They're not skipping, they're keying on the exact same thing I am, which is whether or not authors have been put out of work because of AI, and to what degree. This is stated like it's a fact, but it is not a fact that is established, at least in my experience.
And the use of the data largely being considered 'fair use' means that theft is an assertion based not in law, but in perception and ignorance.
Intellectual property is a myth, as any hacker knows. A world where AI can solve diseases easily, and corporations can find ways to claim ownership over those novel solutions, is not one where we should be encouraging stronger IP laws.
> A world where AI can solve diseases easily, and corporations can find ways to claim ownership over those novel solutions, is not one where we should be encouraging stronger IP laws.
Then attack those corporations directly, instead of leaving authors in the ditch because standing up for common normal people getting fucked over would "encourage stronger IP laws". How do you get to mention random authors who did nothing but write books and hope to get credit and compensation, to potential companies who "can find ways" to claim ownership over the cure for diseases in the same breath?
There is no "IP law strength" dial that goes in two directions. That is so bereft of any contact with reality it has exactly nothing to do with hacking. Hacking starts with what is, not with fiction.
I’m sure carriage drivers were nice people, but I’m not going to pretend to be upset that they lost their jobs due to cars. I see the commoditization of art as a net win for humanity.
You understand Warhol made essentially all of his post-illustration career income, during his own lifetime, from licensing and copyright? Including licensing his own identity.
We wouldn't even know who he was without it.
One could perhaps advance an argument that he wouldn't have wanted to be a posthumous brand (this might be stretching credulity) or have all the squabbles over his estate, but one cannot possibly use him as an avatar in an argument against copyright protection for living artists, because he essentially pioneered being a living famous licensed artist.
Say you spend a hundred working hours on an ephemeral painting (that is, it won't last, it will fade, disintegrate in nature, can't be moved, etc.). You then have that painting scanned at high resolution, to make a limited series of a dozen very large prints.
Scenario 1: a scalper takes the medium resolution image from your e-commerce website, and slaps it on a series of products they sell for their own profit on Amazon without your permission.
Scenario 2: someone buys one of those prints, scans it to a high resolution, and then makes a series of slightly smaller, high quality prints that they sell for their own profit without your permission.
Is it your contention that both of these things are something that should be allowed and the original artist has no recourse?
Because it seems like your more specific concerns about e.g. disease cures could be addressed by targeted legislation creating new exemptions from intellectual property without destroying the means of protecting income from creative work.
(Scenario 1 has happened to an artist I know, luckily with a piece of non-ephemeral work)
I am not making a claim that the work has inherent value, am I?
Nor is the artist in this scenario!
They are merely saying that they have made a limited series of objects they wish to assign a price to, if the market will pay.
But if the people who can buy it can sell essentially identical reproductions for whatever price they choose, then its assigned product price tends to zero too.
If you follow your own argument, then what you are saying is that compensation for effort can only come from a one-time contract. But since intellectual work is not then protected by copyright, those contracts are really difficult to write, because the buyer is not getting any unique thing either.
It doesn't take much to get from "there's no such thing as copyright" to demand collapse for almost every industrial product. Would we even have the PC if there was no copyright protection for intellectual work?
You picked the Personal Computer, the product of hacker culture, open architectures (the IBM/Phoenix/Compaq story alone makes your example hilarious), clones, open source, and a software scene so filled with piracy that Bill Gates himself wrote the “Open Letter to Hobbyists”, as your example for why copyright was indispensable? LMFAO
PS: look up the cover of the reissued Lions’ “Commentary on UNIX”
> PS: look up the cover of the reissued Lions’ “Commentary on UNIX”
Hey, weirdly enough, I don't need to, because I have a copy of it that I bought the week it was reissued.
But Bill Gates didn't make the PC. IBM did. And it was not aimed at hacker culture: it was aimed at business, at writers, at publishers, at a knowledge industry that exists only as a result of copyright.
You think the IBM/Phoenix/Compaq story exists outside copyright? All of that is grounded in copyright. Again, PC clones exist because of clean-room techniques, within copyright.
Open source licences are all grounded in copyright.
This is just weird gish-galloping of unrelated concepts now.
A gish gallop is attacking the opposing side with a flurry of different arguments, I merely supplied a long list of rebuttals to your assertion we would not have the PC without copyright. I included the IBM mention because I assumed you meant “Personal Computer” not “IBM PC”, as the latter, while vastly important in its own right, is still eclipsed by the PC as a concept. The world would be different without the IBM PC, while the world would be much MUCH poorer without computers in every home and/or pocket. The IBM lineage might be resilient, but we could just as easily have had a (non-Apple) NeXT, Magic Cap, PSION, Be, Amiga, etc descendant as predominant computing platforms instead. And my point with the Lions book, is that it’s emblematic of the control AT&T exerted on Unix, instead of letting it be free, where they (and descendants USL and SCO) attempted but failed to squash an open information revolution (*BSD and Linux) that had been seeded by Unix to begin with.
> You're mixing up copyrights and patents.
I'm not, at all. aeon_ai's original point was "Intellectual property is a myth, as any hacker knows. A world where AI can solve diseases easily, and corporations can find ways to claim ownership over those novel solutions, is not one where we should be encouraging stronger IP laws."
So what I did was mount a straightforward defence of intellectual property, and observe that his concerns about disease cure ownership could be addressed by targeted changes, and not by a world where "intellectual property" is written off as myth.
> You're mixing up copyrights and patents.
I'm not, at all. aeon_ai's original point was "Intellectual property is a myth, as any hacker knows. A world where AI can solve diseases easily, and corporations can find ways to claim ownership over those novel solutions, is not one where we should be encouraging stronger IP laws."
So what I did was mount a straightforward defence of intellectual property, and observe that his concerns about disease cure ownership could be addressed by targeted changes, and not by a world where "intellectual property" is written off as myth.
> Also, would we have something more advanced than PCs by now if we weren't hindered by unnatural "ownership" of thoughts?
No? Why on earth would you think this? Intellectual property protection is the way that you get people to invest in the development of ideas.
(It also explicitly doesn't grant "ownership" of thoughts or ideas.)
Your “simple defense” is one that misunderstands the economic value of creative work.
I know an artist who has done well for themselves. They have done so because they have revealed that they know what it is they sell. “I sell paper”
The artist is the source of value. An AI can produce visual media, but it can not be an artist. The artist is not one work, but the source of many arts.
Copyright is the protection of the creative work in a fixed media. It is not the protection of ideas or styles.
My thrust is therefore not that protection of creative work should be abolished, but that the notion of “theft” of ideas and styles is one that is not protected by copyright today, and only serves entrenched corporate interests.
We are either entering a world of hyperliquid culture or tyranny.
Well everywhere I look there’s AI generated images, songs, videos, articles, books, etc. Sure the quality is all over the place, but AI songs are charting /topping Spotify (not all of that is organic I grant), Suno exists, roughly a million other apps and sites to generate content, etc. And we have the article itself bemoaning that authors are losing jobs. Sounds like the market is speaking quite strongly to me.
I would argue that the stuff AI is replacing is not art, it’s mostly advertising. Posters and the like.
But “art has no value” is a statement way beyond that. Art collectors pay millions for original works. Copies go for pennies. People pay large sums for live music performances. Movies are a huge business. To me it seems the market indicates that art absolutely has value.
No object, labor, or knowledge has inherent economic value.
Its value is subjective, determined by what the market (i.e., a bunch of humans) will pay for it.
Given the gigantic pile of money that's spent on music, film, and books every year, it's quite clear that there can be large amounts of economic value in a piece of art.
That modern technology makes it easier to take an artist's with with absolutely no recompense, and that many choose to do so regardless of the maker's wishes, does not change that.
It just underlined what's been obvious since the dawn of civilization, that many humans are happy to ignore what other humans want and to enrich themselves at the expense of others.
...which brings us back full circle to the actual article, which is a clear illustration of the OpenAI executive team's conscious choice to do exactly that.
They should be allowed. The author should have an alternate way of being compensated for his work, e.g. patronage, and people who approach the e-commerce site should be able to do a reverse image search to find the print available for free elsewhere.
This is nothing more than an argument that 99% of working interior designers and artists shouldn't get an income.
But it's also an argument that software developers should be paid minimum wage; you just have to work through the consequences of the abandonment of copyright to see software development reduced to day labour.
If that is what you want, you should be honest about it.
> A world where AI can solve diseases easily, and corporations can find ways to claim ownership over those novel solutions, is not one where we should be encouraging stronger IP laws.
How about a world where readers can't even find factual autobiographies because they are so outnumbered by machine-generated hallucinations?
Unlike "AI can solve diseases easily" what I wrote describes the actual present and not a hypothetical future.
Your first paragraph is well-taken. Even if it were infringement, infringement is not theft, as HN likes so often to assert.
The Supreme Court agrees.
> Since the statutorily defined property rights of a copyright holder have a character distinct from the possessory interest of the owner of simple “goods, wares, [or] merchandise,” interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The infringer of a copyright does not assume physical control over the copyright, nor wholly deprive its owner of its use. Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud.
Betelbuddy · · focus · HN ↗
armchairhacker · · focus · HN ↗
afavour · · focus · HN ↗
rpdillon · · focus · HN ↗
aeon_ai · · focus · HN ↗
Intellectual property is a myth, as any hacker knows. A world where AI can solve diseases easily, and corporations can find ways to claim ownership over those novel solutions, is not one where we should be encouraging stronger IP laws.
customguy · · focus · HN ↗
Then attack those corporations directly, instead of leaving authors in the ditch because standing up for common normal people getting fucked over would "encourage stronger IP laws". How do you get to mention random authors who did nothing but write books and hope to get credit and compensation, to potential companies who "can find ways" to claim ownership over the cure for diseases in the same breath?
There is no "IP law strength" dial that goes in two directions. That is so bereft of any contact with reality it has exactly nothing to do with hacking. Hacking starts with what is, not with fiction.
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
We wouldn't even know who he was without it.
One could perhaps advance an argument that he wouldn't have wanted to be a posthumous brand (this might be stretching credulity) or have all the squabbles over his estate, but one cannot possibly use him as an avatar in an argument against copyright protection for living artists, because he essentially pioneered being a living famous licensed artist.
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
Scenario 1: a scalper takes the medium resolution image from your e-commerce website, and slaps it on a series of products they sell for their own profit on Amazon without your permission.
Scenario 2: someone buys one of those prints, scans it to a high resolution, and then makes a series of slightly smaller, high quality prints that they sell for their own profit without your permission.
Is it your contention that both of these things are something that should be allowed and the original artist has no recourse?
Because it seems like your more specific concerns about e.g. disease cures could be addressed by targeted legislation creating new exemptions from intellectual property without destroying the means of protecting income from creative work.
(Scenario 1 has happened to an artist I know, luckily with a piece of non-ephemeral work)
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
Nor is the artist in this scenario!
They are merely saying that they have made a limited series of objects they wish to assign a price to, if the market will pay.
But if the people who can buy it can sell essentially identical reproductions for whatever price they choose, then its assigned product price tends to zero too.
If you follow your own argument, then what you are saying is that compensation for effort can only come from a one-time contract. But since intellectual work is not then protected by copyright, those contracts are really difficult to write, because the buyer is not getting any unique thing either.
It doesn't take much to get from "there's no such thing as copyright" to demand collapse for almost every industrial product. Would we even have the PC if there was no copyright protection for intellectual work?
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗
PS: look up the cover of the reissued Lions’ “Commentary on UNIX”
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
Hey, weirdly enough, I don't need to, because I have a copy of it that I bought the week it was reissued.
But Bill Gates didn't make the PC. IBM did. And it was not aimed at hacker culture: it was aimed at business, at writers, at publishers, at a knowledge industry that exists only as a result of copyright.
You think the IBM/Phoenix/Compaq story exists outside copyright? All of that is grounded in copyright. Again, PC clones exist because of clean-room techniques, within copyright.
Open source licences are all grounded in copyright.
This is just weird gish-galloping of unrelated concepts now.
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗
joquarky · · focus · HN ↗
Also, would we have something more advanced than current PCs if we weren't hindered by unnatural "ownership" of thought?
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
I'm not, at all. aeon_ai's original point was "Intellectual property is a myth, as any hacker knows. A world where AI can solve diseases easily, and corporations can find ways to claim ownership over those novel solutions, is not one where we should be encouraging stronger IP laws."
So what I did was mount a straightforward defence of intellectual property, and observe that his concerns about disease cure ownership could be addressed by targeted changes, and not by a world where "intellectual property" is written off as myth.
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
I'm not, at all. aeon_ai's original point was "Intellectual property is a myth, as any hacker knows. A world where AI can solve diseases easily, and corporations can find ways to claim ownership over those novel solutions, is not one where we should be encouraging stronger IP laws."
So what I did was mount a straightforward defence of intellectual property, and observe that his concerns about disease cure ownership could be addressed by targeted changes, and not by a world where "intellectual property" is written off as myth.
> Also, would we have something more advanced than PCs by now if we weren't hindered by unnatural "ownership" of thoughts?
No? Why on earth would you think this? Intellectual property protection is the way that you get people to invest in the development of ideas.
(It also explicitly doesn't grant "ownership" of thoughts or ideas.)
aeon_ai · · focus · HN ↗
I know an artist who has done well for themselves. They have done so because they have revealed that they know what it is they sell. “I sell paper”
The artist is the source of value. An AI can produce visual media, but it can not be an artist. The artist is not one work, but the source of many arts.
Copyright is the protection of the creative work in a fixed media. It is not the protection of ideas or styles.
My thrust is therefore not that protection of creative work should be abolished, but that the notion of “theft” of ideas and styles is one that is not protected by copyright today, and only serves entrenched corporate interests.
We are either entering a world of hyperliquid culture or tyranny.
afavour · · focus · HN ↗
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗
afavour · · focus · HN ↗
But “art has no value” is a statement way beyond that. Art collectors pay millions for original works. Copies go for pennies. People pay large sums for live music performances. Movies are a huge business. To me it seems the market indicates that art absolutely has value.
NateEag · · focus · HN ↗
Its value is subjective, determined by what the market (i.e., a bunch of humans) will pay for it.
Given the gigantic pile of money that's spent on music, film, and books every year, it's quite clear that there can be large amounts of economic value in a piece of art.
That modern technology makes it easier to take an artist's with with absolutely no recompense, and that many choose to do so regardless of the maker's wishes, does not change that.
It just underlined what's been obvious since the dawn of civilization, that many humans are happy to ignore what other humans want and to enrich themselves at the expense of others.
...which brings us back full circle to the actual article, which is a clear illustration of the OpenAI executive team's conscious choice to do exactly that.
armchairhacker · · focus · HN ↗
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
This is nothing more than an argument that 99% of working interior designers and artists shouldn't get an income.
But it's also an argument that software developers should be paid minimum wage; you just have to work through the consequences of the abandonment of copyright to see software development reduced to day labour.
If that is what you want, you should be honest about it.
RunSet · · focus · HN ↗
How about a world where readers can't even find factual autobiographies because they are so outnumbered by machine-generated hallucinations?
Unlike "AI can solve diseases easily" what I wrote describes the actual present and not a hypothetical future.
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/technology/ai-slop-books-biography-amazon.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/technology/ai-slop-books-...
rpdillon · · focus · HN ↗
The Supreme Court agrees.
> Since the statutorily defined property rights of a copyright holder have a character distinct from the possessory interest of the owner of simple “goods, wares, [or] merchandise,” interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The infringer of a copyright does not assume physical control over the copyright, nor wholly deprive its owner of its use. Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud.
<a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/473/207/" rel="nofollow">https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/473/207/
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS · · focus · HN ↗
Sadly, like keeping track of "attempted burglaries"[0], it's impossible to know the extent.
[0] how do you count attempts where the burglar was unsuccessful/left no trace and nobody was home to notice the attempt?
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗