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Comment by areoform | Hacker News Reader

While I appreciate your hustle here, it might not be such a good idea to become the hub for deepfakes and the endless lawsuits they will invite. The deep ethical issues involved should make anyone pause, but taking on record companies and artists should make you pause further.

Everyone loves Napster as a history lesson. But it is doubtful that anyone would want to live it.

Your position seems to be inviting all of the controversy and lawsuits for little-to-no payoff.

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There are no ethical issues in deepfake videos that weren't existent during the same infantile stages of faked and Photoshopped images on the internet. Some people could pick them out immediately. Some people are fooled even by obvious fakes. That will never change.

>There are no ethical issues in deepfake videos that weren't existent during the same infantile stages of faked and Photoshopped images on the internet

That is not the same thing as "there are no ethical issues". I'm sure some people, especially the celebrities portrayed, would feel there are the same ethical issues in all cases, and any difference is merely one of degree, not kind.

We are saying the same thing. Literally in the sentence you quoted, I said the same ethical issues exist in deepfakes that exist in altered still images.

Yes, but your comment has the potential to be read as dismissive of the ethical concern. I don't know if that was your intention, but I thought it relevant to make the distinction clearer.

I agree with pc86 on the ethical issues.

On the pragmatic ones:

- If the lawsuits ever become unbearable we can always choose to simply stop existing. One beautiful part of LBRY is that it does not depend on the company to work.

- It's not so much that we want to be thought of as the deep fake place, so much as we want to be thought of as a place for people who want to make their own choices. I think supporting this supports that goal.

If there is a lesson to be learned from Napster, it's that you should charge customers, still ignore copyright and pirate music to "bootstrap" your service. That's basically Spotify right there.

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