[zerobees]

> Knowledge should be free. It was never created in a vacuum.

This is a common perspective on HN, but it's so jarring. Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks. Someone pirates books and it's fine - really, the authors should be thanking us.

Good books are incredibly challenging to write, more so than good software. It's not like you grab Harry Potter and say "I'm just gonna change character names and rephrase some of the text". Most authors recognize that not everyone can afford books and then contend that some amount of sharing is healthy, no different from borrowing books from a local library. If you ask nicely, they will probably send you a PDF for free. But the scale of online book piracy is absolutely staggering and demoralizing, and most of it has nothing to do with taking any serious moral stance. It's just "lol, why pay when you can download for free".

[__rito__]

If this is not bad faith argument, then I don't what is. When someone is violating an OSS licence, they are doing it for commercial gains and monetary profit. Nobody is angry at someone using FOSS software for himself with no money getting involved.

As opposed to that, books, movies are pirated for personal consumption. Not monetary gains. If someone bought a $30 book, and then ran a BaaS with millions of VC money in his pocket, people in HN would be angry at him, too.

[rbanffy]

> When someone is violating an OSS licence

It’s worth pointing out that violating a FOSS license is ALWAYS about denying users rights the upstream already gave them. Violating a FOSS license is stealing from your users.

[librarianscott]

The original thought on copyright was that facts should not be copyrightable. This should be extended to all science and all non-fiction. Also the original thought was that parody should not be copyrightable. Most fiction is formula-based, so not too original there, either.

[pruppy]

Now that AI is decimating a lot of bullshit jobs we need a basic income of some kind. A universal one.

That would enable the authors, activists and hackers to pursue what's meaningful, instead of the profit of the multinational leeches that do not need to adhere to laws, borders or taxes.

If a zillion dollar corporations (Meta and the likes) can torrent Annas Archive and decimate the copyrights I see it a moral imperative for the people to do the same and spare the pennies that would profit the publishing / media / ... industries to support the authors directly, instead of the trickle up method, where majority goes in to the hands of the dystopican narcissist zillionaire.

[bruce511]

I too think Basic Income is a necessity. I don't think it can happen in the US (for cultural reasons) but I think elsewhere it can work. (And indeed in many places it kinda, sorta, already does).

>> That would enable the authors, activists and hackers to pursue what's meaningful

I would counsel not using the word "meaningful" in the context of BI. We already have a way of evaluating "meaningful", it's called "money". If society gets to judge what is meaningful or not, well, that's the system we currently have.

BI is about letting people do whatever they like especially if it is meaningless. BI implies an economy (you have to spend the Income on something) so meaningful will always be richly rewarded.

Incidentally publishers exist to act as curators and filters. The value they add is real. There's no shortage of self-published stuff on say Amazon, but 99% of it is drivel. I go into a bookshop to find the 1% that at least someone thinks is worth reading.

[Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe]

> I don't think it can happen in the US (for cultural reasons)

Cultural reasons are just a matter of spindoctoring/propaganda.

Nixon almost implemented a form of UBI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Assistance_Plan

In Alaska there's already a form of UBI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund

[bruce511]

The reason I think it is hard in the US is because there is a very strong "work or die" ethic in the US. Everything is driven by money. Even basic things like healthcare are driven by money. Your life after retirement is determined by how much money you accumulated. The word-association between "poor" and "lazy" is strong. Taxation should be light. Each man should keep what he accumulates.

BI by contrast values people over money. It recognises not just the social responsibility of the rich to the poor, but also the dignity of being human.

Some countries are further along that path than others. Health care, education, unemployment benefits, are all steps towards BI. The wealthy are taxed to pay for the poor. Ultimately the suppresses the excess, while raising the floor.

From a cultural point of view, the US has many steps to take before society is really for (real) BI.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I have an Irish friend that got a Ph.D, while on the dole.

That would never happen, in the US. We have a strong “Why do they get special treatment?” thing going on.

[Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe]

I insist:

> Cultural reasons are just a matter of spindoctoring/propaganda.

[mlrtime]

Top 10% already pays 70.5% of all federal income taxes. US high income payers are already taxed to pay the poor.

Almost half of US federal tax payers pay 0 income tax.

[jamiejquinn]

I disagree with your definition of meaningful here. Society's willingness to pay is certainly a signal for meaning in an output but it seems quite inaccurate. Think of the number of artists and thinkers that weren't recognised in their lifetimes, their work was still meaningful but society hadn't discovered it yet.

Similarly, there are a number of things that would be incredibly meaningful to all of society (eradication of disease, nuclear fusion, etc) that we choose to deprioritise to instead eat fois gras and fight.

Sorry to jump down your throat on this, we're on the same side, I think BI is inevitable and worthwhile. But it's worth pointing out that BI enables more than just the meaningless things.

[bruce511]

BI does not stop people doing meaningful things. Society will (mostly) reward things which add value. We have a very efficient system for that, and it doesn't go away under BI.

We are already spending massive amounts of money on disease, fusion and so on. There's no issue there, and BI doesn't move that needle.

At the moment society (especially in the US) operates on a "add value or starve" basis. (That's an over simplification, but the underlying "morality" us strong in that direction.)

BI moves the needle for those who are not "adding value" (in a materialistic sense.) Artists and Authors are free to spend their time creating works, of which a rounding error will have any value. Sure there's some unappreciated author out there cranking out literature, but there's also everyone else cranking out rubbish.

BI doesn't make 'big things' easier to do. Arguably it makes them harder. Rather it allows individuals to gain satisfaction from little things. Budding poets can write all day long. But if (great) poetry is currently ignored, do not expect much on that front.

I say this not to denigrate BI but rather because allowing the meaningless is precisely its goal. To miss that is to miss the point. It allows people to find worth and dignity without having to add value to society.

[mathgeek]

> allowing the meaningless is precisely its goal

I think you’re getting pushback because of this choice of language. It’s not the only goal, but it is a key feature. BI supports choices of how to spend your time and enables freedoms.

[cess11]

"add value or starve"

I think this is wrong. It's not about value, it's about being submissive.

[rbanffy]

> We already have a way of evaluating "meaningful", it's called "money".

This is a mechanism that’s very narrow and creates notable distortions between financial and artistic value, just to keep the example specific enough.

[phatskat]

> I would counsel not using the word "meaningful" in the context of BI. We already have a way of evaluating "meaningful", it's called "money". If society gets to judge what is meaningful or not, well, that's the system we currently have.

I’m also going to take issue with this interpretation of “meaningful” - I’ve known several amazing crafters and artists who have had an incredibly hard time doing their craft simply because the demands of capitalism prevent them from putting the time and effort into honing those skills, finding a market, creating a portfolio, etc.

If anything, I think BI is just as likely to add meaningfully to society as it is to give people the option to do meaningless things.

[sucrosesucrose]

Universal basic income is dystopic. It's a way of finally making everyone completely dependent on the government. It's a Brave New World kind of dystopy.

[orangesilk]

Are you independent of your government yet?

I am dependend on government not giving subsidies to my competition. I am dependend on them not to raise taxes. I even depend on them for keeping the infrastrukture alive. If I cant trust the state I life in, it is time to move to a different state.

[pbhjpbhj]

Interesting perspective.

To me it makes you more dependent on the other people in your society - only if you don't earn more than the BI of course.

That is true under Western Capitalism too, you're already dependent on your society, unless you filter and pump your own water; grow your own food; generate your own power; make your own devices; school your own children; do your own healthcare, etc.

For those reliant on BI, instead of greed being the moderator through which your income is determined, it is determined through the democratic processes of state.

Now, if your have an oligarchic dictatorship like USA and Russia, sure you'd need to be particularly worried if you were relying on BI. If you've got a strong democracy (probably true of any country with state-run services that are competitively priced) then BI should work if there's enough total income that it can be redistributed.

I think there are problems with BI though.

[altmanaltman]

Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta: yeah totally, personal consumption only

[28304283409234]

Altman et al take knowledge and lock it a way. The add restraints, borders, limitations of things they got for free. They stole freedoms.

[NeutralCrane]

If knowledge is to be free, that means there should be no restrictions on how it is used. Even an open source license misses the point, because the implication is still that one person can dictate how another person can make use of knowledge. It’s still premised on the same dystopian view that a person can own an idea.

[MarsIronPI]

Not so. Stallman created copyleft licenses as a defense against the current implementation of copyright. Copyleft uses the existing system of copyright to protect authors of free software from people who want to use copyright to restrict distribution. It wouldn't be necessary if copyright didn't exist.

[degamad]

Important nit-pick:

Copyleft was created to protect users of free software from authors/distributors who tried to use copyright to control the software running on the users' computers.

[jll29]

Stallman wanted to protect the right to fix bugs, he was not against paying for goods and services.

[MarsIronPI]

Sure, but an idea is not a (physical) good, nor is it a service. Coming up with an idea or writing a book is a service and should be paid for (probably by commission), but (and Stallman would agree) the idea or book itself should be free.

[LocalH]

He was also famously staunchly against proprietary software in any way, so therefore he wouldn't have been spending money on software unless there was no other option that came close to meeting his needs.

[degamad]

He was not opposed to paying for the software. He was opposed to being limited in what he could do with it after it was paid for.

[minraws]

Knowledge is free as in *free beer once in a while because you genuinely can’t pay*, not free as in *scale up the freemium model, keep grabbing free stuff daily, weekly, monthly, and then start running your own pub with the free beers you took from the neighboring pub.*

This discussion is intellectually dishonest. Either some people here genuinely dont understand the concepts of kindness and gratitude, or they do understand them and are just choosing to spread falsehoods anyway.

Just because my beer pub isnt going out of business because you took some free beers doesnt make it ethical for you to exploit my kindness and use those free beers to build your own competing beer pub.

If people are still confused: that setup is not sharing knowledge. It is stealing with nicer branding to help you and your friends sleep at night.

[psychoslave]

But then we step back a little further and ask what this thing that is called property, why should any human be granted any beyond what actually constitute them as an entity of their own.

What matter at the end of the day is not what the document pretend about who possess what, but how people feel in their life, what they can access to, and what they are bared to access for which actual reason.

It can't even be purely narrowed on what human people feel like. We all know our species is dependent on many physical phenomena and other species which owe nothing to us.

[minraws]

Property may be a social construct, but the costs of living are not.

You can question ownership in the abstract, and I am not even against that conversation. But that does not answer the actual point here. We still live in a world where food, rent, healthcare, clothing, hygiene, servers, tools, and time all cost money.

So if someone gives something away out of kindness, access, public benefit, or community spirit, that does not automatically mean everyone else is entitled to industrialize that kindness for their own business.

Open source is not a mystical anti-property pact.

Open source is not a contract where people are expected to provide endless unpaid labour for others to build businesses on top of. At some point this stops being a discussion about sharing knowledge and becomes a way to justify taking advantage of people’s work.

I just don't like these replies, if this was sarcasm, it might not have worked for me. I just find these social comparisons deeply unserious when the discussions are against theft or harm done to actual people with actual human needs.

[psychoslave]

> We still live in a world where food, rent, healthcare, clothing, hygiene, servers, tools, and time all cost money.

We, as "anyone online able to read this", certainly are pushed by social pressure to consider world through that kind of lenses. Not sure money mean anything for any animist tribe isolated in Amazonia.

We can even consider costs, without talking about money. We can for example deem attention span, ecological impact, human relationship, emotional burden. So many things that money tend to weight zero in its process to flatten judgements to dull "well ordered" scalars.

[NeutralCrane]

First of all, I’d recommend you not accuse others of being intellectually dishonest simply because they have a stance you disagree with.

Second of all, “knowledge is free” doesn’t mean it is free to generate. It means that it literally cannot be owned. Property implies scarcity. If I use a thing, it makes it so you can’t use that thing. This does not apply to something like knowledge. The fact that I use your idea doesn’t mean you can no longer make use of that idea. Your analogy is flawed, because drinking a beer means that is a beer that cannot be used by someone else. Intellectual property is an oxymoron. There is nothing actually stopping someone from making use of someone else’s knowledge, and therefore we must artificially construct barriers in order to maximize the ability to profit off of it. In the most charitable sense, this in theory provides financial incentive for people to generate knowledge. In a less charitable sense, it is literal though policing for the sole purpose of extracting money.

I get that making use of knowledge without compensating the person who produced it is “theft” under our system. The problem is not with the act. It is with the system in which knowledge work can only support an individual if these dystopian measures are enforced. Frankly, most knowledge work is built on mountains of previous knowledge work that never is compensated for it anyways, so the model of the world isn’t even internally consistent.

[harshreality]

If knowledge is to be free, then any corporate/commercial interest that locks up modified knowledge (code) to run their own services should have that locked-up knowledge freed from their commercial silo as well.

[NeutralCrane]

If they lock it up, they lock it up. They don’t need to be forced to open it up. But they also shouldn’t be able to prevent others for making use of any knowledge gleaned from it.

In the case of AI, I don’t think LLM providers are required to make their models completely open source just because they were trained on the data freely available on the internet. Those model weights aren’t the original data anyways, so they aren’t even selling access to that original data. However, there is should be nothing preventing others from creating and selling something produced from those LLMs. Distillation, for example, is free game.

In short, you should be required to make your knowledge freely available. But once someone has access to that knowledge, you can’t stop them from using it however they wish, including if they wish to sell it themselves.

[xboxnolifes]

This is ultimately just a reframing of "a tolerant society cannot tolerate intolerance".

[rbanffy]

> Even an open source license misses the point, because the implication is still that one person can dictate how another person can make use of knowledge

To be considered open source software, the license cannot impose any restrictions on how the software is used. You are free to use the software for whatever purpose you want.

[bornfreddy]

Absolutely not. Go read e.g. GPL license before spreading such falsehoods.

[kennywinker]

Nowhere in the GPL does it say how you can USE the software - you are free to run, modify, and use it any way you see fit. All its restrictions are triggered by DISTRIBUTION of the software, especially modified versions.

[bornfreddy]

The big gotcha is what one understands under the word "use". If I want to USE it as a basis for my business where I sell routers with the GPL software, there are some tiny restrictions regarding that, as Linksys learned [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWrt (see History section)

[NeutralCrane]

Distribution is a subset of use

[rbanffy]

Please enlighten us.

[NeutralCrane]

There’s plenty of licenses that dictate that code can’t be used in commercial applications, or what kind of license derivatives can use.

[mathgeek]

This is the same “beer not speech” argument that has been going on for decades. A quick search will show you why your claim is incomplete.

[rbanffy]

Would you like to clarify how open source licenses restrict how you use the software?

[jchw]

Knowledge should be free, but that can't be treated too literally. Not a unique case of this kind of phrase. If we're doing capitalism people have to be paid somehow, and when people say "free" they don't mean "absolutely". I mean, speaking of open source, consider "free" software.

Open source licenses are almost entirely unrelated. They're strictly a hack around the copyright system, and not only that, they literally do nothing other than grant you rights you wouldn't otherwise have. Talking about open source is mostly a distraction. When people say knowledge is free they almost always mean access to knowledge. Open source grants people access and more.

People are not mad that they can't just steal things, they're mad that access to things is tied behind massive gatekeepers (essentially indefinitely...) that essentially exist to continue to enrich themselves while somehow almost none of the money makes it back to the authors, and is sometimes completely untethered from where the money comes from that funds the works to begin with. You can't just freely navigate, search through and consume information, it's all tied up behind various pay walls and monetization schemes while authors starve anyways.

We could have a more equitable and reasonable system that allows broad access to knowledge while providing some approach to monetization that is reasonable for both people seeking it out and people consuming it. There's little point in trying to enumerate the number of ways it could be done. We already have a system for taxes, we already have seen commercial schemes like Spotify, you could slice it thousands of different ways. Plenty of pros and cons. I'm just saying it could be done and we know it could be done.

But it can never work if all media and knowledge dominated by rent seeking gatekeepers standing in the middle whose primary purpose will always be to enrich themselves first and foremost. They will always want to get more and give less, because that is more or less their fiduciary duty.

[NeutralCrane]

> If we're doing capitalism people have to be paid somehow, and when people say "free" they don't mean "absolutely".

Therein lies the entire issue. Intellectual property is a paradox and a farce, but our current systems require IP as a concept to exist. 99% of human history existed without the concept of IP law, and yet people still innovated, learned, and shared knowledge. But now we are at a point where human beings can only survive if they have something they can productize and sell to others, and so for knowledge to be produced, it has to turned into something that is artificially scarce, so that those producing it can be compensated for their labor. Maybe this is unavoidable for this point of our evolution. I doubt it, as 99% of human history managed without the concept of IP, and we still produced and shared knowledge.

But even if it is necessary for this stage, it is still a dystopian model. And I imagine we aren’t far off from a point where we can provide for everyone’s basic needs, and therefore we don’t need to introduce artificial scarcity to make knowledge work economically viable.

[sam1r]

Wow very well put.

[kennywinker]

Except it’s not. That poster is just doing an IP law version of the “paradox of tolerance”. Their argument is just: you say you want information to be free yet you believe in licenses that keep information from being made un-free.

[NeutralCrane]

Has absolutely nothing to do with the paradox of intolerance. If you have a more substantive criticism, feel free to elaborate.

[kennywinker]

That was what’s called an analogy. What you said and the PoT are similar because they both rely on eliminating nuance using language.

Paradox of tolerance: to maintain a tolerant society one must be intolerant of intolerance.

> Even an open source license misses the point, because the implication is still that one person can dictate how another person can make use of knowledge. It’s still premised on the same dystopian view that a person can own an idea.

Your proposal: to make information free one must restrict how information can be used.

The biggest hole in your argument is just the MIT and BSD licenses. Sure what you say might apply to the GPL and other copyleft licenses - but MIT/BSD are as close to no-strings attached as can be achieved in our current legal framework.

So, clearly plenty of people are happy to freely give up ownership of their works. But others value keeping the code out in the open - not zero restrictions.

This is analogous to the paradox of tolerance, because they both rely on eliminating the variability in what people want when it comes to free knowledge or a tolerant society, and they both rely on using words to create a false dichotomy: tolerant vs intolerant, free vs restrictive. A tolerant society is still tolerant event if it is “intolerant” of murder - just because i used an antonym doesn’t mean those are the same exact concepts being negated.

[dghlsakjg]

There’s also the argument that copyright has been extended to the point of absurdity.

I respect copyright, but I can’t respect a lockup period that can push to 130 years or more. For example: if JK Rowling is alive in 4 years the first Harry Potter book will have a valid copyright extending from the 20th, 21st and into the 22nd century. Is it really defensible to say that your great, great (great?) grandchildren should benefit from a government mandated monopoly on your work?

[fragmede]

JK Rowling is the exception. The duration is one thing, but so are her proceeds. Most authors are never going to see that much money, if any, from writing. Maybe copyright would expire once the original author has made enough money to pay for lavish living expenses for themselves for the rest of their life, inflation adjusted. So their family wouldn't automatically be taken care of, but they are.

Kind of weird too think about it that way, but food for thought.

[b112]

I think that as you said, she's the exception. Why are people using superstars as the rule, instead of the exception? Authorship covers everything, from software to how-to books. Comic book authors. It covers authors which are barely successful. Most authors struggle to write all sorts of little pieces which used to end up in magazines, thousands, just struggling to get by.

While the current copyright length indeed seems excessive, looking at the most successful and determining fairness seems very untoward. As it stands now, an author could build up a library of their writings, and perhaps even sell it for their retirement, as it has value.

Is that what is happening often for indie novelists? I don't know, but to others in this thread know?

I know you were just musing, but I really dislike this "let's create a hyper-invasive tax framework, so that anyone who etches out a little wealth has it capped" concept. There's no wealth to redistribute, not in the way people think. Money isn't real. It's just an indicator of things. In some cases, it's an indicator that someone owns a lot of stock in a company that could be worth 1/20th of its value tomorrow, after a crash, and further is valued at hundreds or thousands of times the actual value of the company today.

In such cases, it's often an indicator of capacity to steer the economy, not of any tangible wealth.

But people need something to strive for. Wealth is one of those things. In a free market economy, wealth is the reward for job well done. It does make people hustle. It's not perfect, but we've seen how poorly and incapable any centrally planned economy seems to be.

As a Canadian, I do believe the government should be involved in certain things. I have a post office, schools, police stations, fire department, food inspections, and so no on that the government is involved in, so I think health care makes sense too. Yet I absolutely do not believe the government should be planning most sectors of the economy, nor should it be meddling too deeply in the wealth ratios of its citizens.

To put this in that context, would you want to have the current US administration determine how every sector of the economy works, and how people are paid, etc, etc, eg central planning? Can you imagine?

Of course there is nuance. Of course there are exceptions. But overall management of individual wealth seems very invasive to me.

[drnick1]

If most authors don't make much money, if any, then what is the point of copyright? It only really seems to benefit publishers.

[harshreality]

I'm not here to defend publishers or the insane current copyright terms. However, in the traditional model of publishing, publishers subsidize production of new books from unproven authors--through book advances, copyediting services, and printing and distribution costs--via the money they make on the few successful and very few ultra-successful books.

If you take away copyright, you reduce the revenue of publishers, which reduces the number of unproven authors they can take chances on. (They're not very good at picking winners from the pool of new author manuscripts, not nearly as good as "agents" like to think they are, but that doesn't matter; they still wouldn't be able to take as many chances.)

[dghlsakjg]

Sure, but for the lower volume authors the royalties at year 20 are effectively 0. Most books don’t even sell out their first printing. Its a money grab to defend/prosecute copyright on a book that you couldn't even sell.

100+ year copyrights only help the descendants of the people that have already become extraordinarily wealthy. Cutting off at 2 decades would have close to 0 effect on the huge majority of creatives, while benefitting society immensely. JK Rowling would still be a billionaire, and small authors would be fine too.

[andai]

Individuals did not push for these laws.

[andai]

JK Rowling is irrelevant to the question of whether "lifetime plus 70 years" is an absolutely batshit fucking insane copyright term.

[TFNA]

> Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks.

If you look back through the annals of Free Software, one often encounters the claim that the GPL was a way to use copyright against itself, and if there were no more copyright, there would be little need for these licenses.

[rbanffy]

> there would be little need for these licenses.

The GPL ones explicitly disallow the removal of user rights from work derived from GPL software. That wouldn’t be possible without copyright.

[psychoslave]

>This is a common perspective on HN, but it's so jarring. Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks. Someone pirates books and it's fine - really, the authors should be thanking us.

This is only apparent contradiction. The underlying issue is of course the social concentration power.

It's not the same when an author is deprived of virtual money the copyright system entice them to extract from readers regardless of whether they have money or not, and deprive authors from a negotiation mechanism against corporate that swim in money. In both case, with current legal systems the most obvious law enforceable mechanism is copyright. It doesn't mean the underlying issues at stake are the same.

What's really staggering and demoralizing is that humans have all that it takes to feed all mouths, make equal incomes, live in peace in all kind of diversities that encompasses reciprocity of accepting differences, and yet we end up with people dying from war and starvation while other accumulate a toxic level of wealth in a system that tries to uniform everyone and harshly cuts anything that don't fit the standard box.

[NooneAtAll3]

> Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks

we grab pitchforks because you violate the licence by making knowledge NOT free?

what exactly is the contradiction?

[alexwennerberg]

> This is a common perspective on HN, but it's so jarring. Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks. Someone pirates books and it's fine - really, the authors should be thanking us.

If the books were released under an open source license, there would be no problem here?

[nzeid]

Taken out of context, you're right. But the parent comment couldn't buy these books even if they wanted to. I'd say there's a consensus that the primary motivation for piracy is hurdles to access having nothing to do with payment.

[bigiain]

I think iTunes Store and Netflix both showed 15 or so years back that if you give people and easy and convenient way to pay a reasonable price for music/movies - a huge number of people will willingly choose to pay and support the artists/creators, instead of hanging out on Bittorrent trackers and paying for seedboxes and sharing with friends.

And the siloing of movies by Netflix nd all the other streaming services, and the introduction of advertising into the "reasonable price" tiers, shows that people can and do remember piracy in still an option, for when corporations and copyright holding groups enshittify things. Lately amongst a lot of my friends I've seen more usb stick with movies being shared that even in the heyday of Bittorrent.

[rbanffy]

BitTorrent is one form of collective archive for things that either have restricted or no commercial availability. I wish more cultural artifacts were archived this way.

[appreciatorBus]

Copyright is not an unalloyed good.

In small doses, and short terms, I might agree with your classification.

But when copyright is 150 years It no longer has anything to do with reward for the author or encourage you creativity, it’s just a cartel.

[paxys]

The issue with copyright law is that it is all or nothing. Rights to a work are either tightly held by an author/publisher, and even downloading a small excerpt can get you in trouble, or it is fully public domain and open for any and all use.

There needs to be a middle ground, such as: after 15 years of publication any private individual can access and read the work for free, but the rightsholder still controls commercial sales, merchandising, licensing, character rights, movie rights etc.

[globular-toast]

The pitchforks aren't being raised for licence violations, they are raised because software should be free and unencumbered and now somebody is distributing it in a way which doesn't afford the same freedoms to the users.

Free/copyleft licences like the GPL are just the way we've been able to effectively make software free in a world in which copyright applies to software.

[unsungNovelty]

> Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks.

Where do we do that? All LLMs are still doing it. I've not seen any MIT license or BSD license of all the repos LLMs have gone through. That's excluding copy-left licences. Zero pitch-forks in sight.

> Someone pirates books and it's fine - really, the authors should be thanking us.

I agree here with you. And I'll give a better reason to not pirate for most people. In the seas of endless content, If you want to read/learn from a book - try paying for them. You won't read most books. You'll curate/research better before buying. The books you buy will be worth it in your own mind. You re-consume them more which is very important IMO. For most pirates, I think the issue is not unavailability of resources/content. But need to consume in a better way. Buying slows things down. You'll consume better. Quality over quantity. Even then I have a ton of humble bundle books that I've not touched at all.

[squibonpig]

I'm not gonna buy the book as an alternative you know. If I'm pirating a book it's usually because I can't really afford to go buying the books I'm interested in. Sometimes if I love a book I'll get a physical copy so I can finish it in a more comfortable format and so I'll have it for another read. I figure most people who pirate are pretty similar, so I wouldn't expect an outsized effect on book sales. Add to that the fact that books by people who are literally dead still have copyright. That has nothing to do with it being hard to write a book, cause I don't think their fucking estate wrote the book.

[ritsource]

Just because something is challenging, that doesn't mean you should get paid for it. Art and business are two distinct endeavors. All the copyright and IP issues come up because of this one confusion.

[gorgoiler]

Capitalism works great for shoes. You pay the proletariat for their labor and they labor away in your shoe factory. The shoe economy ticks over on scarcity.

The knowledge economy is different. It’s hard to see how the system works in a world where everyone has the equivalent of a shoe replicator in their pocket.

Ironically the “free market” only survives by having arbitrary regulations on shoe duplication enforced in the interests of shoe-rights holders.

[otherme123]

The shoes would be free and not a market product, as is it currently air to breathe.

Free market is just the best way we know of dealing with scarcity, every other alternative that was attempted seems to fail sooner or later. If you invent a way to get an infinite amount of something, that something goes out of the free market rationing.

For the knowledge, a lot of free market more radical defenders don't believe at all in current state of "intelectual property", much less if et has to be enforced by the state. They are for "industial secrets" (if they leak, you lose them), NDAs (if they leak, you enforce the contract) and similar formulas.

[mdp2021]

> most of it has nothing to do with taking any serious moral stance

If many people are immoral, curb the roots of immorality then, fight that one battle - do not shift it to others' sound behaviour exercised with proportion and judgement.

[phatfish]

It's almost as if we are in a comment section where most peoples jobs exist due to "content" either being stolen (AI most recently) or crowd sourced under EULAs that effectively steal it.

Not that I think a back door to the shit Disney and other corporate content onwers pull is nessecarily a bad thing. But it is funny to see people here gaslight themselves into believing they have some moral right to just take what others have created.

[squibonpig]

I don't think the majority here work for ai companies and I also see a lot of people critical of AI and copyright violations by ai companies. They're also very clearly different things, one is done on a massive scale by a company for profit and another is done by one person to use the work in the way it was intended to be used.

[vishnugupta]

And yet JK Rowling is a billionaire and movies make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits.

So I guess we can have a world in which knowledge can be free without starving knowledge creators?

[defrost]

Not if you account for just how many authors never reach the pinnacle of breaking even.

Rowling is a rare exception and very much not the norm.

[andai]

> It's just "lol, why pay when you can download for free".

Well for starters because the research shows that reading on a screen literally makes you retarded.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36256-4

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/691462

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-05605-0

[squibonpig]

More interested in a study on e-readers