[constantcrying]

IP is such a stupid concept. How does it make any sense of that an artist could own the right to let people learn from his music. The idea of an artist getting to choose who can and can't learn from their song is so patently absurd.

I hope that the adversarial attacks can be easily detected and circumvented, just like other IP protection measures have been subverted successfully.

[charonn0]

Exclusive rights over their published work encourages artists and inventors to publish their work, which is a clear benefit to society at large. The period of time it should remain exclusive and the specific rights that are made exclusive can be debated, but the utility of IP rights in general is obvious.

And generative AI is not a person in the first place, so I don't think the appeal to learning makes much sense here.

[idle_zealot]

> Exclusive rights over their published work encourages artists and inventors to publish their work

Do they? Please cite your studies.

[connicpu]

It was obvious enough to the founders of the USA to bake it into our constitution.

US Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8:

> [the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

[EvanAnderson]

We don't have that. We have functionally unlimited times now. Publishing something new today puts you at risk of litigation from existing rights-holders.

I don't believe it's morally right to license music but, if I did, I'd look at the climate of lawsuits in the the last 10-15 years and conclude that the risks might outweigh the potential rewards.

[connicpu]

I'm all in favor of reverting copyright terms to what they were before the Walt Disney Corporation was founded, but I think the idea of having a limited time to profit off of your creative works in order to incentivize their creation is still a sound concept.

[EvanAnderson]

The original agreement was fair to both creators and society and would never be remotely palatable to today's industry of middle-men and rights hoarders.

I wish we could have it back. I would feel a lot better about "intellectual property", morally, if we did.

[6510]

That isn't a study? Even if it was a perfect idea at the time things have changed dramatically. I wouldn't want my ideas applied uncritically to some alien future. It also says "useful Arts", what it is suppose to be useful for?

[barbazoo]

People have been publishing their work for thousands of years before IP even existed. We don't know if the system we have is the best one we could have, I doubt it though.

[charonn0]

Historically most artistic works, books, etc. were privately commissioned and one-of-a-kind. Publishing as we understand the idea came with the printing press and widespread literacy.

[EvanAnderson]

Publishing as we understand the idea came about at a time when physical scarcity was the limiting factor in dissemination of copies of works. That time has passed. We're in a completely different world now. The elevator operators and buggy whip manufacturers of the publishing industry would like things to remain the way they have been.

[charonn0]

I don't think the issue is the scarcity of copies, but rather the scarcity of artists. Not just anyone can write a book that people want to copy, and we should encourage and reward those that can and do.

[EvanAnderson]

Filtering the crap is now orthogonal to the concern that, historically, information dissemination has been tied to physical scarcity. Those concerns ran together because it cost money to publish something. It doesn't now.

We can come up with new models that compensate creators more directly. We can also come up with models that don't involve effectively killing any ability to build upon existing culture in the time-scale of a human life.

What came before isn't how it has to be, except that the interest that profit from the current system want it to remain so.

[os2warpman]

Some of the earliest accounts of proto-IP laws date from Ancient Greece, with protections for new works (particularly recipes and plays?!?) being granted to their creators for a set period of time.

Then you have guilds, trade marks, potter's marks, royal warrants, etc... all "IP" protections of their days.

Would open-source license violations be possible to penalize if not for intellectual property laws?

[emsign]

This! Benn Jordan hasn't published anything in months because of scrapers for AI modeling.

[delusional]

This is such a radical take on IP rights and AI "learning" that I can only assume you're consciously choosing to misunderstand both.

On the off chance that you are not: IP-rights does not cover "learning from" a source. What ML does is not in any way akin to human learning in methodology. When we call it learning that's an analogy. You can not argue a legal case from analogy alone.

[stale2002]

> You can not argue a legal case from analogy alone.

Yes they can because the analogy directly applies. The technical details of how a computer learns, vs a human learns doesn't really matter here, and is an irrelevant difference.

The reason why the analogy directly applies is because in both cases it is about how IP cannot really control how someone uses the IP.

Just like how IP laws cannot prevent you from listening to music while standing on your head, it also cannot prevent you from training your models on it (while also standing on your head, lets say!).

Instead, IP laws only prevents the publishing of copies of the IP.

So the point and the analogy stands.

[delusional]

I don't know what to tell you. You will find no judge willing to entertain your analogy without you justifying why it's useful in the particular case. You are going to have to explain the difference, and you are going to have to argue why those differences don't matter.

[stale2002]

> You will find no judge willing to entertain your

Yes they will. Judges have already ruled that you can't just ban people from using your IP, like by standing on your head.

It is only publishing someone else's IP that is disallowed.

This is copyright law 101.

You can it seriously be arguing that an IP owner could ban someone from listening to their music while standing on one's head, for example.

[delusional]

Do you have a case where a defendant tried to argue that being upside down protected him from a copyright claim? You claim that they have decided it, can you cite that decision?

[stale2002]

You don't understand. The point here is that a copyright holder does not have infinite ability to prevent other people from using their IP.

Instead, they can only prevent copies from being distributed.

[ImPleadThe5th]

It makes me so uncomfortable that the relatively informed people on HN seem to equate a human learning to AI learning.

[andy99]

Care to elaborate?

[constantcrying]

I believe that a creator has no right to dictate what other people do with his creations.

I thought this was the most common anti-IP sentiment.

[6P58r3MXJSLi]

Isn't it the opposite: the author is the only one who has the right to dictate what other people do with his creation?

An extreme example: I do not want my code to be used in weapons guidance systems. Am I not expressing my rights as an author?

[constantcrying]

I am against IP, so you should not have that right.

[6P58r3MXJSLi]

I am against corporations profiting from others people works, for free.

If that was not allowed, if people could only use my work for no profit purposes, I agree.

That's what CC (creative commons) is for, though.

I am also in favour of people "remixing" and even making money out of it, but the intent it's paramount to me.

As a long time copyleft activist, I do not understand what limiting authors rights brings to the table, in your opinion.

More than once I contacted the author of some work I liked and they gave me free license to use it, no questions asked (after explaining what I would use it for).

IMO basic cooperation between good willing people goes a long way, without stripping authors of their rights.

Edit: typos

[constantcrying]

>As a long time copyleft activist, I do not understand what limiting authors rights brings to the table, in your opinion.

IP is nonsense. It is putting an ownership over an idea, but ideas aren't objects. You can not steal or destroy an idea, giving ownership rights to ideas is absurd.

If you think IP should not exist then creative output is free to use by everyone and of course corporations are also free to profit from it.

[throwway120385]

Or, even more extreme: I don't want anyone to view or read my work, at all.

[SamBam]

"no right to dictate what other people do with his creations" seems a little radical -- i.e., you don't believe copyright should exist?

Do you think a movie's creator can dictate that I'm not allowed to use a pirated version of a movie to display for 100% profit at my 10,000 AMC movie theaters? Or a book's creator can dictate that I'm not allowed to copy their book, put my name on it, and sell it on Amazon for half-price?

If you agree that a creator can do those things, then you're already in a gray area between "they can dictate everything" and "they have no rights." At that point, you're arguing over the precise location of the line.

[constantcrying]

>you don't believe copyright should exist?

Yes. It should not. I think that was very clear when I said I was against intellectual property, not for it being more limited.

>Do you think a movie's creator can dictate that I'm not allowed to use a pirated version of a movie to display for 100% profit at my 10,000 AMC movie theaters? Or a book's creator can dictate that I'm not allowed to copy their book, put my name on it, and sell it on Amazon for half-price?

I do not care at all.

[vunderba]

I must be misreading this. Are you saying the following is/should be okay/ethically okay/perfectly legal:

Author A spends a year writing a fiction book. They are not well known in the industry. They publish the book, it sells very few copies (perhaps none at all).

Person B (a well known Instagram influencer with tens of thousands of followers) downloads a copy of your book. Replaces your name with their name as the author, and promotes it as a book they've finished writing. Goes on to sell at a very profitable rate.

If your answer is NO this should be illegal, what about if Person B searches/replaces all definite articles with indefinite articles, or changes all the proper nouns to begin with "schmla"? Where do we draw the line?

If your answer is YES, then my gut instinct tells me you are neither a writer, composer, or creator in any meaningful sense of the word.

[daeken]

I wrote a fiction book, which has sold virtually nothing (maybe $50 gross, against an out-of-pocket cost of ~$4k). Both of these would piss me off if they happened to me or my author friends; I also don't think they should be illegal.

I am an author, a digital artist, a programmer, and an extremely amateur musician. None of those things have demonstrated to me why copyright law is necessary, a net positive for the world, or ethical.

[constantcrying]

Yes, I think it is okay.

I think a very interesting case study would be YouTube. This exact scenario happens there regularly, with various consequences for the creators.

[6510]

What are your thoughts on peoples identity and trade marks?

[EvanAnderson]

Not the OP, but I have some feelings about that. The limits on trademark law are much more fair, in terms of the balance afforded to the public and the limited monopoly granted to the rightsholder. Trademark law can be abused, for sure, but it hasn't been used in the same abusive way as copyright law, nor has it expanded to be functionally infinite and all-encompassing.

[constantcrying]

I think the creative part of trademarks should be free to use, e.g. a film can have Coca-Cola bottles or some corporate mascot. But if you are commiting fraud, e.g. by labeling a Coca-Cola bottle, not from the company, as such then this should be forbidden. Not on the basis that Coca-Cola has any right to be the only ones using their logo, but that customers have a right to not be defrauded and make choices from whom they buy. As long as the trademark is not used to defraud people it can be used however people want.

Someone's identity, e.g. their likeness and identification aren't just ideas. They actually physically exist. (I assume here that by identity you don't mean how they view themselves). For identities I think it is very important to consider publication. If you publish something you have no right to tell others what to do with it. An actor in a movie has no right to tell someone that their fan cut of a movie is not allowed to exist. On the other hand, as long as you do not publish some part of your identity you should have a right to it. If you are recognizable on a photo that you do not want to have published it should not be published.

To make it short I essentially agree with the GDPR, with the exception of being able to retract consent, but I do not believe it invalidates my stance on IP in any way. Your likeness is not an immaterial idea derived from a creative process, neither is your own house address. You should be allowed to publish it and by publishing it, that publication is no longer yours to own and control.

[delusional]

I'm glad I elaborated. A complete dismissal of all IP-rights is a very fringe very radical position. Most people have a more nuanced IP-rights view about which IP-rights ought to be protected and for how long.

You'll find many more people of the opinion that authors life+70 years is too long, than you will dismissing it entirely.

[caconym_]

In other words, (for instance) you believe in the right of massive corporations who control the lion's share of consumer distribution channels to, on an ongoing basis, scrape all authored content that is made publicly available in any form (paid or not) and sell it in a heavily discounted form, without the permission of authors and other rights holders and with no compensation to them, while freezing out the "official" published versions from their distribution channels entirely. More generally, you believe that creators should create for free, and that massive moneyed and powerful interests should reap the profits, even while those same creators toil in the mines to support their passions which do evidently have real value, though it is denied to them.

You think this will make the world better? For whom? Or worse, for whom? Or you place the highest importance on having a maximalist viewpoint that simply cannot be argued with, because being unassailably right in an abstract rhetorical framing is most important to you? Or you crave the elegance of such a position, reality and utility notwithstanding? Or you feel the need to rationalize your otherwise unfounded "belief" that piracy and/or training AI on protected IP should be allowed because you like it and are involved with it yourself? Or you think ASI is going to completely transform the world tomorrow, and whether we get Culture-style luxury gay space communism or something far darker, none of this will matter so we should eat, drink, and be merry today? Or some hybrid of that and a belief that we should actively strive toward and enable such a transition, and IP law stands in its way?

What is it? I've seen some version of all of these and frankly they are all childish nonsense (usually espoused by actual children). Are you a new species?

[EvanAnderson]

Not the OP, but I believe very strongly that once an idea has been expressed it should be free for others to build upon and share. That's how ideas work, naturally.

All of human culture is derivative. The current legal regime stifles human expression and makes it impossible for creations to ever be shared in a reasonable human timescale.

To state it in an arguably hyperbolic manner: The "moneyed interests" you're railing against exist because of the current scheme of "intellectual property". They reap virtually all the benefits of human intellectual toil in the system already. Wiping away their stranglehold on the market would be a good thing for creators. Taking away the legal framework their existence is predicated upon would do that.

The copyright industry's influence on social norms, including the massive shift of the social contract in favor of their interests ( functionally infinite copyright terms, attacks of fair use, plundering the public domain to sell it back, works being lost forever because they are "orphaned", etc), all seems natural to you because they want it to be that way. The concept of someone "owning" an idea, which seems perfectly normal to you, was taught to you by people who want the world to be that way, not because it's some natural law. You've been conditioned to believe it your entire life.

I would prefer a fairer system to burning it all down, but the needle has moved so far away from fair that burning it all down seems pretty satisfying.

[caconym_]

> Not the OP, but I believe very strongly that once an idea has been expressed it should be free for others to build upon and share. That's how ideas work, naturally.

> All of human culture is derivative. The current legal regime stifles human expression and makes it impossible for creations to ever be shared in a reasonable human timescale.

In the context of copyright law, this is absurd. Fair use exists and it generally isn't even required to "allow" artistic and cultural influence to propagate. If I want to write a sci-fi novel that is heavily influenced and arguably even derivative of my favorite work of some other author, I am completely free to do so---i just can't copy it wholesale. Established fair use doctrine is certainly subject to criticism and future reform, but in a much more nuanced scope than you are applying here.

If you're talking about patents, that's a different conversation. But based on context, that isn't the conversation we're having here.

> burning it all down

Generically, this is another common suggestion from people with naive viewpoints and little or no relevant experience and/or exposure. Notably, people said that about both of Trump's presidential terms to date. I will let you make up your own mind on how that is going for us.

edit: I should also mention that literally every working artist I've talked to about the prospect of abolishing IP law is vehemently opposed to it.

[EvanAnderson]

I wish I'd written "...derivative creations..." in that sentence, but heat-of-the-moment being what it was I did not. Having said that, I believe the scope of an infringing derivative work is a lot broader than you are suggesting.

Finding success defending a derivative work on the basis of fair use, particularly if the derivative work is itself financially successful and derivative of a work "owned" by a rights holder with deep pockets, doesn't seem to be very easy in today's legal climate. It certainly doesn't take "wholesale" copying to attract the attention of a rights holder, either. Heck, with the music industry it doesn't take any copying at all to end up losing a lawsuit.

I'll cite the Tolkien or Marvin Gaye estates as good examples among many. I, too, believe it's a ton more nuanced than how you're characterizing it.

> Generically, this is another common suggestion from people with naive viewpoints and little or no relevant experience and/or exposure.

I said "I would prefer a fairer system to burning it all down...". I even qualified my writing as hyperbolic. It seems disingenuous that you'd choose to belittle and make unfavorable comparisons, given both of those statements.

Characterize my viewpoint how you will, but my viewpoint isn't "burning it all down". I will admit that indulging in a little daydreaming about morally repugnant rights hoarders getting what they deserve is fun, but it isn't realistic or productive for society. A fairer system, enabled by shorter copyright terms and better handling of "orphan" works, would be the right thing and what I wish for. Just like I said.

> I should also mention that literally every working artist I've talked to about the prospect of abolishing IP law is vehemently opposed to it.

Well, yeah-- of course they would be opposed to such a vast, sweeping change. It would be madness if they weren't.

The interesting conversation to have with working artists would be about reducing copyright terms, and how that would both "cost" them in potential lost revenue but at the same time free them from the specter of potential litigation and, at the same time, open up vast tracts of public domain work they could build upon.

[constantcrying]

>In other words, (for instance) you believe in the right of massive corporations who control the lion's share of consumer distribution channels to, on an ongoing basis, scrape all authored content that is made publicly available in any form (paid or not) and sell it in a heavily discounted form, without the permission of authors and other rights holders and with no compensation to them, while freezing out the "official" published versions from their distribution channels entirely. More generally, you believe that creators should create for free, and that massive moneyed and powerful interests should reap the profits, even while those same creators toil in the mines to support their passions which do evidently have real value, though it is denied to them.

Yes.

(Obviously there is zero point in corporations doing this as costs are near zero and competition for this infinite. Right now almost all art is available for free, it is just illegal.)

>You think this will make the world better? For whom? Or worse, for whom? Or you place the highest importance on having a maximalist viewpoint that simply cannot be argued with, because being unassailably right in an abstract rhetorical framing is most important to you? Or you crave the elegance of such a position, reality and utility notwithstanding? Or you feel the need to rationalize your otherwise unfounded "belief" that piracy and/or training AI on protected IP should be allowed because you like it and are involved with it yourself? Or you think ASI is going to completely transform the world tomorrow, and whether we get Culture-style luxury gay space communism or something far darker, none of this will matter so we should eat, drink, and be merry today? Or some hybrid of that and a belief that we should actively strive toward and enable such a transition, and IP law stands in its way?

I think it will marginally improve the world. I am not training any AIs though.

Could you consider what abolishing IP laws would do to the average YouTuber. Exactly nothing. Their content is available for free, they support themselves without selling their art directly. Loosing rights to their art would have zero impact on them, as their monetization works without it. Sponsoring, direct support, advertisement is enough to make many of them wealthy.

[caconym_]

Thank you for affirming your position!

> Obviously there is zero point in corporations doing this as costs are near zero and competition for this infinite. Right now almost all art is available for free, it is just illegal.

This is incredibly naive. You grossly underestimate the grip massive media corporations with essentially unlimited marketing budgets and total control over mainstream distribution channels have over how the vast majority of consumers consume media. And, to whatever extent you think piracy being legal will change that, either way you've completely destroyed individual creators' ability to even partially support themselves with their work, unless...

> Could you consider what abolishing IP laws would do to the average YouTuber. Exactly nothing. Their content is available for free, they support themselves without selling their art directly. Loosing rights to their art would have zero impact on them, as their monetization works without it. Sponsoring, direct support, advertisement is enough to make many of them wealthy.

...Unless you force them all to be social media personalities and marketers first. Unless you think YouTube and its ilk can carry art and culture forward alone (as "content", of course). Unless you want to live in a world where art of original substance is no longer produced, a hall of mirrors in which YouTubers endlessly inter-react and beef and soy face. You may very well think that sounds great, but I think it sounds fucking terrible.

[constantcrying]

>...Unless you force them all to be social media personalities and marketers first. Unless you think YouTube and its ilk can carry art and culture forward alone (as "content", of course).

How much do you think I am paying an artist hen listening to their songs on Spotify 1000 times? Every album they ever made, dozens of times. The answer will surprise you!

Already every single musician has to be a personality and marketer. There is no other way to make money. You can not finance yourself by the rights to your music, right now.

Only a very select group of artists has any kind of real revenue from the rights over their music. The rest is already using other channels to profit, which are not protected by IP.

[visarga]

> What ML does is not in any way akin to human learning in methodology. When we call it learning that's an analogy.

Of course it's different, but if we look closely, it is not copying. The model itself is smaller, sometimes 1000x smaller, than the training set. Being made of billions of examples, the impact of any one of them is very small (de minimis).

If you try to replicate something closely with AI it fails. If regurgitation was a huge problem we'd see lots of lawsuits on output, but we see most suits for input (training). That means authors can't identify cases of infringement in the outputs.

[delusional]

I'm not sure I agree that most suits are on input. Most of the ones I've read have been related to the output of a model. Early worried about CoPilot were about its tendency to regurgitate code verbatim. The WaPo suit was about verbatim output of segments of their articles.

[const_cast]

> artist could own the right to let people learn from his music.

They don't, what's happening here is their music is being fed to a computer program in a for-profit venture.

This anthropomorphism of LLMs is concerning. What you're actually implying here is that you believe some computer programs should be awarded the same rights as humans. You can't just skip that like it's some kind of foregone conclusion. You have to defend it. And, it's not easy.

[constantcrying]

>They don't, what's happening here is their music is being fed to a computer program in a for-profit venture.

I believe that no artist has the right to tell anyone what to do with the art they have published. It does not matter what happens inside the algorithm with that art. Whether NNs (LLMs, by definition are about language) learn like humans or not is totally irrelevant to my point.

[const_cast]

It may be irrelevant to your point, but most people are not as radical as you.

Most people support copyrighting to some extent, and this argument against anthropomorphism does work on them.

[spacecadet]

I had a client train an AI on images I created without extended usage and so added adversarial noise to the images next time around. The models I tested with misclassified the images and image generation seemed broken, so Im curious how it impacted their attempts, if they even attempted it again, I don't know. I don't expect them to come to me and ask why their model is so interested in ducks...

[constantcrying]

Companies put measures into place to make sure that their software only functions correctly with a paying customer. Some Video Games include intentional problem when the game believes IP laws are violated.

[pixl97]

If the client is sophisticated enough to realize that I don't believe it's difficult to prefilter to remove said noise.

[spacecadet]

For sure. It was a test to see what would happen. I heard nothing, but also didn't see my work appear again- who knows...

[kmeisthax]

Benn Jordan is a musician who is probably one of the most critical of the current copyright regime in his space. For context, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJSTFzhs1O4

Copyright exists to enrich the interests of the publishers of a work, not the artists they funded. A long time ago, copyright was a sufficient legal tool to bring publishers to artists' heels, but no longer. Long copyright terms and the imbalance of power between different wealthy interests allowed publishers to usurp and alienate artists' ownership over their work. And the outsized amount of commercial interest in current generative AI tools comes down to the fact that publishers believe they can use them to strip what little ownership interest authors have left. What Benn is doing is looking for new tools to bring publishers to heel.

IP is fundamentally a social contract, subject to perpetual renegotiation through action and counter-action. If you told any game publisher in the early 2000s, during the height of the Napster Wars, that they'd be proudly allowing randos on the Internet to stream video of their games being played, they'd laugh in your face. But people did it anyway, and everyone in the games biz realized it's not worth fighting people who are adding to your game. Even Nintendo, notorious IP tightwads as they are, tried scraping micropennies off the top of streamers and realized it's a fool's errand.

The statement Benn is making is pretty clear. You can either...

- Negotiate royalties for, and purchase training data from, actual artists, who will then in exchange give you high-quality training data, or,

- Spend increasing amounts of time fighting to filter an increasingly polluted information ecosystem to have a model that only sorta kinda replicates the musical landscape of the late 2010s.

A lot of us are reflexively inclined to hate on anything "copyright-shaped" because of our experiences over the past few decades. Publishers wanted to go back to the days of copyright being a legal tool of arbitrary and capricious punishment. But that doesn't mean that everything that might fall afoul of copyright law is automatically good or that generative AI companies are trying to liberate creativity. They're trying to monopolize it, just like Web 2.0 "disintermediation" was turned into "here's five websites with screenshots of the other four". That's why so much money is being poured into these companies and why a surprisingly nonzero amount of copyright reformists also have deeply negative opinions of AI.

[constantcrying]

I am not against IP because it does or doesn't benefit artists. I am against the idea because it does not make sense. It gives ownership and control over imaginary things to people, a song you create and public isn't "yours". You do not get to decide what others do with it and how they use it.

I believe that artists see the current IP laws critically, of course they do as it directly impacts how they finance themselves and how they bargain. But I do not care how good/bad the bargain for the artist is. IP laws should be abolished regardless of what artists want.

[kmeisthax]

Every kind of property is imaginary. Yes, physical property has an element of physical possession, but that's not enough legal infrastructure to, say, rent that property out for a recurring fee that must be paid on pain of eviction or repossession. All of that has to be enforced by violence dealt by the state, which renders it just as "imaginary" as the copyright laws that are also backed purely by the fact that the state allows authors to call down the full force of the US government on people that infringe their copyright.

What you are mad about is not imaginary-ness, but centralization[0]. Any critique of law should be done on this yardstick - i.e. is that law protecting the interests of the many, or the few?

In prior decades, ordinary people did not have to care about copyright law, which is why the bargain was tolerable then: copyright took money out of the pockets of the few (publishers) and gave it to the many (authors). But now that publishers figured out how to buy up all the valuable assets and you can practically enforce copyright on individuals, the system has changed to one that takes money from the people at-large and puts it in the pockets of about four publishers. On that basis alone you can argue for abolishing copyright[1] because it no longer serves the interests of the public.

Now, let's look at the business model of AI companies. AI compute is hideously expensive, and so every company involved is already a highly centralized tech monopoly. And with only a few exceptions the largest models are all jealously protected trade secrets you're only allowed to access through heavily monitored APIs. Models with published weights do exist, but they are invariably either too big to run on most hardware or lag in capability and performance. The practical fact of the matter is that most people will use AI - even open models - through inferencing servers ultimately owned by tech monopolies. This is a deeply, incredibly centralizing force.

And, unlike copyright, trade secrecy is one of those few IP laws[2] that aren't completely imaginary. It's rooted in possession, just like physical property rights are. The "no imaginary rights" argument still gets us horrible tech monopolies that can censor or marginalize you.

[0] aka "wealth inequality"

[1] What you replace it with is a separate question, but again, Benn Jordan wants socialized ownership.

[2] "Laws that allow you to dictate the conduct of your competitors"

[voidhorse]

But that's precisely the problem—while in theory the ideal is good, it is impractical unless you fundamentally change the economic model.

Artists rely on some form of IP to help secure payment for their creative works. They need this payment to be able to afford their own subsistence so that they can continue to live and create.

In an alternative system, maybe you could abolish all forms of IP outright, but how will you do that under capitalism while sustaining (already impoverished) artists?

If you are against the principle of IP, you are essentially saying that an entire segment of capital should be deactivated, and effectively the only jobs remaining would be those of active service/tangible goods. In the age of digital media, basically everything is instantly and infinitely replicable, so you are effectively asking for a world in which it becomes rapidly impossible to make money off of any kind of digital good (music, literature, film, software, etc.) This has an obvious material consequence of disincentivizing creation of these works simply because if the creators need to earn wages in tangible good/service markets they have strictly less time to devote to the creation of creative works.

[constantcrying]

>In the age of digital media, basically everything is instantly and infinitely replicable, so you are effectively asking for a world in which it becomes rapidly impossible to make money off of any kind of digital good (music, literature, film, software, etc.)

Plainly false. YouTube clearly proves this wrong. You can be funded by your fans.

Besides, if you are a musician and get just tens of thousands of plays on Spotify you are basically not making any money of it. Only extremely few artists make any kind of money of the copyright of their songs. Already distribution rights are near worthless.

Again. I am not opposed to IP rights because of what artists want or do not want.

[jeremyjh]

So you are against paying artists and musicians for their work? You are just entitled to it since it exists?

[constantcrying]

Yes.

I also pirate every single book I read. Sometimes I buy them though.

I also pirate every single show I watch. I never buy them.

Music is a bit difficult, but I pay for Spotify, but I wouldn't mind paying for the service if Spotify had no rights to the songs and wasn't compensating the artists.

[jmuguy]

So... do you want someone to present you with evidence that paying people for their work is a good thing? We're getting to the point of arguing the color of the sky here.

[andy99]

The world doesn't owe you a business model. It's not work if someone doesn't value it, just like a street performer isn't working just because they're putting on a show.

If people can't make money without the government enforcing artificial scarcity of their output, they can always chose another business model.

[jmuguy]

People with a conscience and an ounce of empathy will always value creative work if they themselves intend to make a profit with it in someway. If you take someone's work, and use it to make money, you should pay them for that work. Its really not that hard of a concept.

[constantcrying]

>If you take someone's work, and use it to make money, you should pay them for that work. Its really not that hard of a concept.

How many paid products are using foss software without paying the developers. 99%? I do not consider that being evil.

If there are no IP laws nobody will have the expectation to have control over what other people do with their creative output. If you are unwilling to accept that you do not get to make art, the same is true now for art as well. If you do not want someone to make a parody of your art your only option is to never publish it.

[EvanAnderson]

> People with a conscience and an ounce of empathy will always value creative work if they themselves intend to make a profit with it in someway.

Is that empathy, or just self interest / good business? If I need a product I can't produce for my business to make a profit I'd better be giving my supplier a cut, lest they stop supplying me. With intangibles it's more fluid than with good bound by scarcity, but novel expressions of creativity become not-novel pretty quickly and, inevitably, you're going to need to go back to the well.

[const_cast]

> If people can't make money without the government enforcing artificial scarcity of their output, they can always chose another business model.

Okay, but this literally goes for every single good ever. Case in point: theft. If theft wasn't "arbitrarily" made illegal, then there exists no business models for anything, ever. Because you could just steal it for free.

The idea behind IP is that IP is a good but an ephemeral one, one without a physical manifestation. So, we need to translate a type of theft that works for that.

Or, we could not. But keep in mind IP doesn't just mean music. It means, like... everything that isn't physical. Including my job, and probably your job too.

[6510]

I think I've spend more on street music than any other music.

Imagine I put up a ghetto blaster and a hat. I play the finest music ever made. Would you put money in the hat? Would the idea to put money in the hat ever cross your mind? Would one even understand they want you to put money in the hat for playing the music?

[EvanAnderson]

Moreover, technological progress shouldn't be stifled by attempts to create artificial scarcity by technical means (read: DRM, war on general purpose computing, "The Right to Read", etc).

[alpaca128]

A lack of IP protection would incentivise even more extreme DRM. DRM exists because copyright law alone is considered insufficient protection by rights holders. A lack of such laws would not get rid of DRM, it would do the opposite.

[anigbrowl]

FOH with that Calvinist nonsense

[constantcrying]

I do not mind if these artists do not get paid. I absolutely realize that much of corporate art would not exist without IP laws and I accept that.

For books, most of the ones I read are passion projects and if I like them I buy them as thanks to the author/publisher.

I also have absolutely no problem with paying people for their work, I just do not believe they have any rights to their so called "IP".

[mitthrowaway2]

May I ask what you do for a living?

[constantcrying]

Research. Which really is an interesting case study. While patents exist, most research is distributed freely, except for a fee to an intermediary for doing absolutely nothing. My ideas are, after I published them, free to use and I have absolutely no right to tell orhers what to do or don't do with this.

Even corporate funded researchers, e.g. for AI, will publish and most of the published results are not protected by patents. Everyone is free to implement someone else's research paper and use it for their own commercial application. Science is also gravitating more to open access, e.g. with arxiv for mathematics and CS. Nobody owns "the right" to some mathematical proof or concept.

Citation is of course encouraged, but plagiarism is not a legal matter, much less a criminal matter.

[yoyohello13]

This has to be bait.

How can you possibly justify this? Do you propose professional artists/authors/musicians just shouldn't exist?

[EvanAnderson]

They wouldn't exist in the way they do now. It would be different. They existed before intellectual property. There are other models.

You've been conditioned to believe the current model is the only one that works. I'd argue that this is, in large part, because a bunch of interests who aren't "creators" profit from this current regime.

[voidhorse]

I fully agree, but the vision is not practical unless you want to change the entire economy around the shift.

Yes, artists existed before IP but they also existed before the internet and digital works. Prior to the internet, creative works met real material limits and real scarcity due to the limitations of physical media. In the digital age, these limits are obliterated. You then have two options:

1. You instate something like IP to make digital markets roughly (and admittedly arbitrarily) like real material markets. 2. You establish no such system. No property rights exist in digital space.

I am a major fan of (2) myself, but history gave us (1). At this stage, too many people make a living off digital markets for us to just impose a radical shift—you're taking about reworking the entire global economy here. Without concomitant shifts toward socialism globally this would probably just result in digital space becoming sparse and people adopting "analog only" release models to try and sustain incomes off of creative work.

If you want to abolish IP, go the full mile and abolish the principle of property period. The distinction between IP and physical goods is just an accidental feature of digital technology. If you are against the idea of IP you are against property. Period. And I'm in full agreement, but I also don't think it's easy to achieve this at this historical juncture. Go read Proudhon.

[6510]

They will exist regardless. The profit motive makes inferior art. Nothing of value is lost if one has to dance for the sake of dancing.

[constantcrying]

>This has to be bait.

Everything in my post is true. And I do not intend to be inflammatory.

>How can you possibly justify this?

Easy. I buy the books from authors I respect. Books are mostly passion projects anyway and most of the ones I read are from authors who absolutely do not make a living from them or are dead.

The other category of books are scientific publishers I hate all of them and they do not deserve a single cent from me. I would feel bad giving them any money at all. I also am already paying their authors with my taxes.

For shows. I hate most of them anyway and I wouldn't mind if corporate entertainment were gone.

For musicians. I see it the same as with books. I support the artists I like and I give them money for products they put out.

Nobody owes an artist his existence. Especially since most artists are commercial failures any way and somehow that does not threaten the art itself.

Also consider YouTube. Do you think YouTubers would care about IP laws being abolished? Their products are available for free anyways and they commercialize themselves in many different ways.

[voidhorse]

You aren't thinking far along enough in your arguments.

If you abolish IP youtubers will not be able to make money because if I rip someone's monetized video and host my own ad-free copy, people will prefer to watch that and seeing as there is no legal claim over their IP, the youtuber has no recourse to get me to take down the video. There you go, I just divested a youtuber of a potential revenue stream.

This is why people who favor IP argue that it stimulates the creation of creative works. Look, whether we like it or not, everyone needs to earn wages in our system. If you can earn wages solely on creative works, you are empowered to spend more time and energy on those works because they give you a direct return. If the return on creative works becomes effectively zero modulo charity of consumers, you will have way less resources to devote since now you need to spend them making wages in other ways.

I am all for an IP free world, but I think it requires a fundamentally different economic reality from the one we currently have.

[constantcrying]

>If you abolish IP youtubers will not be able to make money because if I rip someone's monetized video and host my own ad-free copy, people will prefer to watch that and seeing as there is no legal claim over their IP, the youtuber has no recourse to get me to take down the video. There you go, I just divested a youtuber of a potential revenue stream.

Haha. Do you think that isn't happen right now? Anyways it is irrelevant to the YouTuber, ad revenue is just a small part of it. As blockers are widely in use and YouTubers still exist. YouTube ad revenue is low anyways.

YouTubers make money through merchandise and sponsorships. Merchandise can not be replicated as people buy it to support the YouTuber (selling merchandise while lying that it is to support the creator is fraud, even without IP) and for sponsorships it is irrelevant who also watches the video.

If anything the YouTuber should upload to the ad free site himself to get more reach.

[ForHackernews]

Not people, bots. He is not against people learning from his music.

[constantcrying]

Obviously. But it still a pretty strict form of IP protection.

[Retric]

Current AI is stuck imitating what it’s exposed to. If they actually learned the material they would understand to reject incorrect information in their training data. LLM’s etc can’t do that under current methodology, simply sucking up more training data and tossing more processing power at the algorithm doesn’t solve that issue.

Leaning from music doesn’t mean imitating that music. People can for example learn from mistakes without imitating those mistakes.

[pixl97]

>LLM’s etc can’t do that under current methodology

I hate to give a smarmy result, but are you sure you know what RLHF is? Because this is one way to correct said data.

[Retric]

I am aware of RLHF, and no it doesn’t solve this problem.

There’s a great deal of lesions to be learned from X PB of training data that wouldn’t be covered.

[constantcrying]

I am against all IP. I do not care what algorithms are used or in what way it differs from human learning, it makes absolutely no difference to me.

[Retric]

If you actually rejected all forms of IP protection you’d insist AI companies freely share their source code, patroon can’t hide works behind a paywall, etc.

Is that your stance? Or do you have some more limited rejection of IP in mind.

[pixl97]

>you’d insist AI companies freely share their source code

Myself I don't see those as being related at all. Keeping something secret is allowed. What is not allowed is something being 'not-secret' yet special. Once you share the source code to the world there would be no closing the barn door.

[constantcrying]

No. There is no duty to publish anything.

Intellectual property is about someone having ownership over an idea. It does not mean that you have a right someone gives his idea to you. These are totally separate things.

I am free to write, paint, code or film whatever I want. I have zero obligation to share that with anyone.

[SCdF]

Use your ears to learn.

[visarga]

> IP is such a stupid concept

It's been struggling since the internet became a thing. People got more content than they can consume. For any topic there are 1000 alternative sites, most of them free. Any new work competes against decades of backlog. Under this attention scarcity mode, artists devolve into enshittification because they hunt ad money, while royalties are a joke.

On the other hand, people stopped being passive consumers, we like to interact now. Online games, social networks, open source, wikipedia and scientific publication - they all run in a permissive mode. How could we do anything together if we all insisted on copyright protection?

We like to make most of our content ourselves, we don't need the old top-down model of content creation. We attach "reddit" to our searches because we value comments more than official sources. It's an interactive world where LLMs fit right in, being interactive and contextually adaptive.

[aezart]

How do you propose that artists make a living?

[constantcrying]

They can work for their living like I do or get a following/sponsors which pays for their creative output. The later works quite well in the case of YouTube. YouTubers generally have proven that it is absolutely possible to commercialize an artistic output that is given out for free, removing IP laws would have essentially zero effect on them.

Nobody owes artists the ability to make a living just for being artists.

[voidhorse]

> They can work for their living like I do

Unless you have a service industry job or construct material goods, by your own arguments, I see no reason I should pay you either if you work on anything remotely related to intangibles like software.

I'm getting the sense that your perspective is colored more by some personal bias on what art is, what art making entails, and what art is good, rather than any sound logical principles around labor and economics, which is what any reasonable approach to IP should actually be based on.

[aezart]

Art is labor. Just because the end result is an "idea" with no scarcity doesn't mean that time, energy, blood, sweat, and tears didn't go into making it. I consider profiting off someone else's art without compensating them for that work to basically be wage theft.

[constantcrying]

Almost all art is created without any compensation. Some failed rock band should not be given money because they "tried hard".

Nobody owes artists commercial success for the act of making art.

The idea that it is work theft not to compensate failed artist is ridiculous. Who is to pay, the state?

Of course many of the most successful creators in the world give their creations away for free. They do not charge a single cent from their watchers and still can make enormous amounts of money. YouTube proved that you do not need IP protection to become wealthy from your creations. YouTubers make money in other ways, totally independent from policing their IP.

[aezart]

I don't know what you're arguing against but it's certainly not the point I was making.

I didn't say "artists should be given money because they tried hard." I said that if you're profiting off someone's work, you should pay them.

[constantcrying]

Haha. Do you think this applies to the FOSS world? What a cruel world you must think we live in.

[SkyBelow]

Even if we completely toss out IP, isn't an artist free to release whatever version of their content they want? I find that AI poisoning seems to be a speed bump at best, but I don't see an issue with artists using it if they wish. If anything, it gives a fun challenge for machine learning developers to try.

[constantcrying]

Of course. Just like a company is allowed to release software which whatever copyright measures in place.

I also never said that artists should not be allowed to do this, just that I hoped their methods were defeated. The same way I hope copyright protections are defeated.

[nkrisc]

This is about AI, not people.

[constantcrying]

Obviously. How does that make IP legitimate.

If you are against IP, you obviously are against artists policing which model is trained on their data and which isn't. As this very obviously assigns ownership to the creation of the artist, aka IP.

[nkrisc]

Are we talking about training AI models or about people learning? You are conflating those two as if they are the same.

[constantcrying]

I am against all IP. There is zero difference to me. Any use is acceptable to me.

[nemomarx]

I mean this poisoning doesn't stop people from learning from the music at all, does it?

[constantcrying]

It is designed to stop AI from learning from it. It is intended to work as another form of copy protection.

[nemomarx]

Maybe, but AI isn't people and doesn't do learning, it does "training" which we can roughly anthropomorphize as learning.

It doesn't really seem like an IP thing to me - it's like making music that's intentionally hard to classify in a particular genre on purpose or something. Maybe that defeats Spotifys recommendation algorithm but that's totally unrelated to any rights to stream it or so on.

[constantcrying]

I am against IP in general. It doesn't matter what the exact mechanism being used it. You should be able to use all data you can however you want.

[pixl97]

You cannot both have an algorithm that stops AI and allows humans to listen in the long run.

Eventually encoders/classifiers will get an 'anthropomorphic' loop of human ear capabilities to use as a prefilter and identify when sounds differ from the expected human hearing and identify the noise.

I mean this is what adversarial reinforcement learning is, humans cannot beat AI on this in the end.

[whimsicalism]

it’s interesting to see the cultural realignment of this in real time - being skeptical of IP becomes the right wing position

[daeken]

As someone both extremely left and extremely anti-IP, it's been ... Interesting for sure. But a lot of the "pro-IP" positions I've seen are more about the ability for artists to continue earning living wages, or about the sheer level of control we're giving to tech companies, than about IP itself. In other words, they're pro-IP positions only because it aligns with the other things they actually care about.

(This obviously doesn't cover every single person -- some are just legitimately pro-IP.)

[jmkr]

Yes this is pretty much it and it's obvious to me.

There's a big corollary to FOSS and gpl, but a lot of people seem to miss it. This future isn't for our culture, it's for business. And since our culture requires making money to make things adjacent to art, less culture will be made.

A lot of generated music is good enough to wind up in playlists. Lots of live bands already fake it, and lots of music venues have already replaced live music. That doesn't mean music will die, it just means it's harder to discover new music and go see a show.

I think there's some European countries that have some kind of basic income/stipend for artists. If this is the direction of the future we need to ensure something like this exists.

[garfield_light]

Sure, a Marxist might think IP is absurd on ideological grounds, but a Social Democrat? Maybe? A socially conscious neoliberal? They love IP. Someone may also hate Mickey Mouse's copyright extension and at the same time hate GenAI!

This type of vague posting is very popular in HN.

> X thing was originally universally leftist (it wasn't), now it's right wing only (it isn't), something something the real counterculture or grey tribe.

[constantcrying]

What are you on about? How is it "right wing" to believe that artists do not have the right to tell someone that he isn't allowed to train on his song?

[KennyBlanken]

Well, there is the small matter of a number of right-wing politicians in the US using musician's works without permission, not to mention those musicians not agreeing with said politician's extremist views.

What's particularly funny is when that extremist politician is too stupid to understand the meaning of the song they're playing. I think the most famous example would be a certain somebody who kept playing Fortunate Son at his rallies, both him and the crowd oblivious to the fact that nearly every verse's criticism directly applies to him. A rich kid who got out of serving in Vietnam, cheated on his taxes at every opportunity, and is screaming about how great the country is while vilifying a demographic that has always been one of the strengths of our society.

I'd say that "respecting the property rights of the creative class" is very much indeed a 'left wing' perspective, too. Not just on a moral issue of "stealing their work is wrong" but also because artists very often mock or satirize right-wing personalities and platforms - punching up. Right wing artists tend to just punch down at society's weakest.

[nice_byte]

simple, political stances do not exist in a vacuum. the same position taken in different contexts can be both "right wing" and "left wing". it depends on who's interests are being served. in this particular case, the being anti-IP serves the ruling billionaire class and is therefore a right wing position.