[strogonoff]

One can believe in the capability of a technology but on principle refuse to use implementations of it built on ethically flawed approaches (e.g., violating GPL licensing laws and/or copyright, thus harming open source ecosystem).

[CamperBob2]

AI is more important than copyright law. Any fight between them will not go well for the latter.

Truth be told, a whole lot of things are more important than copyright law.

[esafak]

Important for whom, the copyright creators? Being fed is more important than supermarkets, so feel free to raid them?

[CamperBob2]

Conflating natural law -- our need to eat -- with something we pulled out of our asses a couple hundred years ago to control the dissemination of ideas on paper is certainly one way to think about the question.

A pretty terrible way, but... certainly one way.

[strogonoff]

I am sure it had nothing to do with the amount of innovation that has been happening since, including the entire foundation that gave us LLMs themselves.

It would be crazy to think the protections of IP laws and the ability to claim original work as your own and have a degree of control over it as an author fostered creativity in science and arts.

[soulofmischief]

Innovation? Patents are designed to protect innovation. Copyright is designed to make sure Disney gets a buck every time someone shares a picture of Mickey Mouse.

The human race has produced an extremely rich body of work long before US copyright law and the DMCA existed. Instead of creating new financial models which embrace freedoms while still ensuring incentives to create new art, we have contorted outdated financial models, various modes of rent-seeking and gatekeeping, to remain viable via artificial and arbitrary restriction of freedom.

[strogonoff]

Patents and copyright are both IP. Feel free to replace “copyright” with “IP” in my comment. Do you not agree that IP laws are related to the explosion of innovation and creativity in the last few hundred years in the Western world?

Furthermore, claiming “X is not natural” is never a valid argument. Humans are part of nature, whatever we do is as well by extension. The line between natural and unnatural inevitably ends up being the line between what you like and what you don’t like.

The need to eat is as much a natural law as higher human needs—unless you believe we should abandon all progress and revert to pre-civilization times.

IP laws ensure that you have a say in the future of the product of your work, can possibly monetise it, etc., which means a creative 1) can fulfil your need to eat (individual benefit), and 2) has an incentive to create it in the first place (societal benefit).

In the last few hundred years intellectual property, not physical property, is increasingly the product of our work and creative activities. Believing that physical artifacts we create deserve protection against theft while intellectual property we create doesn’t needs a lot of explanation.

[soulofmischief]

What you see as copyright violation, I see as liberation. I have open models running locally on my machine that would have felled kingdoms in the past.

[strogonoff]

I personally see no issue with training and running open local models by individuals. When corporations run scrapers and expropriate IP at an industrial scale, then charge for using them, it is different.

[soulofmischief]

What about Meta and the commercially licensed family of Llama open-weight models?

[strogonoff]

I have not researched closely enough but I think it falls under what corporations do. They are commercially licensed, you cannot use them freely, and crucially they were trained using data scraped at an industrial scale, contributing to degradation of the Web for humans.

[soulofmischief]

Since Llama 2, the models have been commercially licensed under an acceptable use policy.

So you're able to use them commercially as you see fir, but you can't use them freely in the most absolute sense, but then again this is a thread about restricting the freedoms of organizations in the name of a 25-year-old law that has been a disgrace from the start.

> contributing to degradation of the Web for humans

I'll be the first to say that Meta did this with Facebook and Instagram, along with other companies such as Reddit.

However, we don't yet know what the web is going to look like post-AI, and it's silly to blame any one company for what clearly is an inevitable evolution in technology. The post-AI web was always coming, what's important is how we plan to steward these technologies.

[strogonoff]

The models are either commercial or not. They are, and as such they monetise the work of original authors without their consent, compensation, and often in violation of copyleft licensing.

> The post-AI web was always coming

“The third world war was always coming.”

These things are not a force of nature, they are products of human effort, which can be ill-intentioned. Referring to them as “always coming” is 1) objectively false and 2) defeatist.