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.
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.
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.
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.