[ndsipa_pomu]

This suggests to me that copyright laws are becoming out of date.

The original intent was to provide an incentive for human authors to publish work, but has become more out of touch since the internet allowed virtually free publishing and copying. I think with the dawn of LLMs, copyright law is now mainly incentivising lawyers.

[Aurornis]

> The original intent was to provide an incentive for human authors to publish work, but has become more out of touch since the internet allowed virtually free publishing and copying. I think with the dawn of LLMs, copyright law is now mainly incentivising lawyers.

And yet the content industry still creates massive profits every year from people buying content.

I think internet-native people can forget that internet piracy doesn’t immediately make copyright obsolete simply because someone can copy an article or a movie if sufficiently motivated. These businesses still exist because copyright allows them to monetize their work.

Eliminating copyright and letting anyone resell or copy anything would end production of the content many people enjoy. You can’t remove content protections and also maintain the existence of the same content we have now.

[belter]

Maybe a specific example will help here. An Author spends a year writing a technical book, researching subtle technical issues, creating original code and finding novel ways of explaining difficult abstractions.

A few weeks after the release it finds books on Amazon who plagiarized the book. Finds copies of the book available for free from Russian sites, and ChatGPT spitting verbatim parts of the source code on the book.

Which parts of copyright law would you say are out of date for the example above?

[ndsipa_pomu]

> Which parts of copyright law would you say are out of date for the example above?

The expectation that the author will get life+70 years of protection and income, when technical publications are very rarely still relevant after 5 years. Also, the modern ease of copying/distribution makes it almost impossible for the author to even locate which people to try to prosecute.

[CaptainFever]

The expectation to make money from artificially restricting an abundant resource. While copyright is a way to create funding, it also massively harms society by restricting future creators from being able to freely reuse previous works. Modern ways to deal with this are patronage, government funding, foundations (e.g. NLNet) and crowdfunding.

Also, plagiarism has nothing to do with copyright. It has to do with attribution. This is easily proven: you can plagiarise Beethoven's music even though it's public domain.

https://questioncopyright.org/minute-memes-credit-is-due

[phone[phone]]

What incentive do people have to publish work if their work is going to primarily be consumed by a LLM and spat out without attribution at people who are using the LLM?

[footy]

I notice this in myself, even though I've never particularly made money from published prose on the internet.

But (under different accounts) I used to be very active on both HN and reddit. I just don't want to be anymore now for LLM reasons. I still comment on HN, but more like every couple of weeks than every day. And I have made exactly one (1) comment on reddit in all of 2023.

I'm not the only one, and a lot of smaller reddit communities I used to be active on have basically been destroyed by either LLMs, or by API pricing meant to reflect the value of LLM training data.

[politician]

Without 200 years of copyright protection, how will any author be able to afford food?

[tsimionescu]

The fact that copyright protection is far too long is entirely separate from the need for some kind of copyright protection to exist at all. All evidence suggests that it's completely impossible to live off your work unless you copyright it for some reasonable period, with the possible exception of performance art (music, theater, ballet).

A writer or journalist just can't make money if any huge company can package their writing and market it without paying them a cent. This is not comparable to piracy, by the way, since huge companies don't move into piracy. But you try to compete with both Disney and Fox for selling your new script/movie, as an individual.

This experiment has also been tried to some extent in software: no company has been able to live off selling open source software. RedHat is the one that came closest, and they actually live by selling support for the free software they sell. Others like MySQL or Mongo lived by selling the non-GPL version of their software. And the GPL itself depends critically on copyright existing. Not to mention, software is still a best case scenario, since just having a binary version is often not enough, you need the original sources which are easy to guard even without copyright - no one cares so much for the "sources" of a movie or book.

[denton-scratch]

> All evidence suggests that it's completely impossible to live off your work unless you copyright it for some reasonable period

Which evidence?

[bitsage]

Chinas’s accession to the Universal Copyright Convention, and an alleged desire to comply with international IP law, led to an influx of OECD IP and foreign direct investment(FDI).

In hindsight, China wasn’t diligent in the enforcement of IP violations. However, it’s clear foreign presences and investment grew substantially in China during the early 90s upon the belief IP would be protected, or at the very least there would be recourse for violations.

[tsimionescu]

The fact that it has never been done successfully outside performance arts.

[denton-scratch]

I used to work as a computer programmer until I retired. Nearly always, my work was part of a collaborative effort, and latterly didn't include any copyright claim. My income was never impacted by unauthorized copying. Until the 80s, there was no copyright on software, and yet even then people made a living programming.

Craftsmen don't claim copyright on their artifacts. Furniture designs were widely copied; but Chippendale did alright for himself. Gardeners at stately homes didn't rely on copyright. Vergil, Plato and Aristotle managed OK without copyright. People made a living composing music, songs and poetry before the idea of copyright was invented. Truck-drivers make a living; driving a truck is hardly a performance art. Labourers and factory workers get by successfully. Accountants and legal advocates get rich without copyright.

None of these trades amounts to "performance arts".

[CaptainFever]

That's a large category that includes everything from YouTubers to furry artists to live concerts.

[repelsteeltje]

I think you're making a profound point here.

I believe you equate incentive to monetary rewards. And while that it probably true for the majority of news outlets, money isn't always necessarily what motivates journalists.

So considering the hypothetical situation where journalists (or more generally, people that might publish stuff) were somehow compensated. But in this hypothetical, they would not be attributed (or only to very limited extent) because LLMs are just bad at attribution.

Shouldn't in that case the fact that information distribution by the LLM were "better" be enough to satisfy the deeper goal of wanting to publish stuff? Ie.: reach as many people looking for that information as possible, without blasting it out or targeting and tracking audiences?

[asvitkine]

To have a positive impact on the world? Also, presumably NYT still has a business model unrelated to whatever OpenAI is doing with their data and everyone working there is still getting paid for their work...

[ethanbond]

Oh thank goodness we can rely on charity for our information economy

> Also, presumably NYT still has a business model unrelated to whatever OpenAI is doing with [NYT’s] data…

That’s exactly the question. They are claiming it is destroying their business, which is pretty much self-evident given all the people in here defending the convenience of OpenAI’s product: they’re getting the fruits of NYTimes’ labor without paying for it in eyeballs or dollars. That’s the entire value prop of putting this particular data into the LLMs.

[Zambyte]

> Oh thank goodness we can rely on charity for our information economy

You seem to be assuming an "information economy" should exist at all. Can you justify that?

[ethanbond]

Yep! I like having access to high-quality information and producing, collecting, editing, and publishing that is not free.

Much of it is only cost-effective to produce if you can share it with a massive audience, I.e. sure if I want to read a great investigative piece on the corruption of a Supreme Court Justice I can hypothetically commission one, but in practice it seems much much better to allow people to have businesses that undertake such matters and publish their findings to a large audience at a low unit price.

Now what’s your argument for removing such an incentive?

[denton-scratch]

> that is not free

Why did you specify that this stuff you like, you only like if it's "not free"?

The hidden assumption is that the information you like wouldn't be made available unless someone was paying for it. But that's not in evidence; a lot of information and content is provided to the public due to other incentives: self-promotion, marketing, or just plain interest.

Would you prefer not to have access to Wikipedia?

[rqtwteye]

We absolutely need an information economy where people can research things and publish what they find without needing some deep pocketed sponsors. Some may do it for money, some may do it for recognition. Once AI absorbs all that information and uses it without attribution these incentives go away. I am sure OpenAI, Microsoft and others will love a world where they have a quasi monopoly on what information goes to the public but I don't think we want that.

[ndsipa_pomu]

I would guess the monetisation is going to be limited to either subscriptions or advertising if your reputation allows people to especially value your curation of facts/reporting etc. The big issue with LLMs is the lack of reliability - it might be accurate or it might be an hallucination.

Personally, I think it would be a lot simpler if the internet was declared a non-copyright zone for sites that aren't paywalled as there's already a legal grey area as viewing a site invariably involves copying it.

Maybe we'll end up with publishers introducing traps/paper towns like mapmakers are prone to do. That way, if an LLM reproduces the false "fact", it'll be obvious where they got it from.

[tsimionescu]

The cost of copying and publishing has been almost irrelevant to the need for copyright at least since the times of the printing press. In fact, when copying books was extremely expensive work, copyright was not even that needed - the physical book was about as valuable as the contents, so no money was there to be made from copying someone else's work vs coming up with your own.