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Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

This goes beyond Copilot, it's also about big tech exploitation of any publicly available asset - whether its your blog or wikipedia.

Big tech uses other public or "free" CC, etc knowledge bases to train ML models. Like Wikipedia as a training set for a GPT or word2vec model. Or using WikiData to seed a knowledge graph. Or training based on a common crawl dataset. All of these resources are used to make the assets that major tech companies use to make their products a lot smarter. They're built on the free labor of the rest of society.

Big tech reaps tremendous, society altering benefits from the free labor of others. And "training a model" seems to whitewash away the licensing concerns.

Shouldn't that be disconcerting whether we are developers or wikipedia editors?

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I agree completely. It would be great to see content licenses that were “viral” towards ML the way GPL is within code, plus restrictions on fair use for this kind of thing. Then if you want to use everyone’s collective labor, you have to give back as well.

Right on every account. This GitHub debacle allowed me to see how these machine learning products coming from large tech corporations are parasites on not just software released in good faith by the community but all copyright-protected content released by the community, especially photos. Someone else did the labor of labeling and creating the training set for them. They know exactly how much value they are getting for free. It’s sickening

We can amend the constitution. We can abolish copyright (https://breckyunits.com/the-intellectual-freedom-amendment.h...)

I think we have overwhelming data at this point. What you rather have: Linux or Windows? The WWW or American Online? Wikipedia or Encyclopedia Britannica? Sqlite or Oracle?

> I think we have overwhelming data at this point.

I mean, I disagree with your conclusion, I think "aboloishing" copyright is a bad idea.

But I even more strongly disagree with how you phrase this. "Overwhelming" data? What are you talking about? There's a valid debate to be had, but if you're starting form the assumption that it's completely clear that your way is right, I think it's going to be pretty hard to convince anyone else of this since almost everyone disagrees with this idea.

> "Overwhelming" data? What are you talking about?

Well first I am a big believer in always building more datasets, and I have been involved with some efforts to built datasets on the copyright issue, and expect there to be many more. But this is a "pebbles" and "planets" type of situation, where the value of the public domain creations dwarf those of the copyrighted ones (American Online vs The World Wide Web; Microsoft Windows vs Linux; Patented medicines vs public domain ones). It's not that public domain innovations are a little bit better, they are OOM better. In the long run it's no contest.

So I think building bigger and better datasets across all domains is important, but this is not going to be a close call. I thought I might have a blind spot in medicine, but then spent a few years in biomedical research and realized that nope, the copyrighted and patented stuff in there is mostly junk compared to the public domain innovation.

Abolishing copyright will remove copyleft as well. Careful what you wish for; it might just become a pre free software world with all source carefully locked away from the public eye.

If copyright cease to exist, of course open source licenses won't be based on it... They probably will be a bit (or a lot) simpler.

Someone should make a movie about a world without copyright.

We don’t need copyleft in a world without copyright.

I think they're referring to the idea of companies jealously guarding access to any and all source code because copyright doesn't protect them anymore, while FOSS authors have no protections.

I don't think that that's a realistic fear, though; this is basically already how it works with FOSS code being used in remotely-hosted SaaS systems and there being no effective legal recourse for FOSS authors.

It just doesn't officially say it yet in a law.

Well, for one, I am going to miss all those GPL kernel releases for various hardware devices. You will be able to forget about any sort of custom cell phone ROMs.

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