[fimdomeio]

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.

[jeroenhd]

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.

[Workaccount2]

>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...

[stefan_]

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?

[dietr1ch]

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.

[malfist]

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

[everforward]

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?

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

> 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.

[everforward]

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.

[malfist]

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.

[everforward]

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.

[dietr1ch]

> 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.

[fsflover]

> crazy internet folks from back in the day

You mean Electronic Frontier Foundation? https://www.eff.org/issues/innovation

[Workaccount2]

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.

[erikerikson]

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.

[tredre3]

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...

[erikerikson]

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?

[satvikpendem]

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.

[Der_Einzige]

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