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Comment by ClumsyPilot | Hacker News Reader

As a society we have gone through great pains to protect the software developer's incompe and job, source code was given copyright and patent protection - no other industry gets both protections at once.

Now you seek to deny others such protection while taking advantage of it yourself.

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Let's not kid ourselves. Those protections exist for the benefit of corporations, not software developers. If those corporations could have robots write the software and copyright that software and patent it, they absolutely would.

Ironically, the high salaries the software industries is able to pay is precisely because of the copyright protection afforded that prevents the value of the software from being diluted by way of rampant copying.

This is also the same reason due to which open source projects often struggle with funding, and why many databases (among other OSS software) are moving towards stricter licenses such as the AGPL.

I don't think so. The highest paying companies don't distribute software, they provide access to a remote service. Even if copyright didn't exist, you couldn't copy the Google executable.

You're making my point though. The fact that Google is successful, in part, is because of the fact that you can't copy their trade secrets and methods; which is one reason no solid competitor has come up to challenge Google.

(There are infrastructure challenges as well, but this thread is about intellectual property.)

My understanding is that trade secrets are distinct from patents. For patents, you tell everyone how to do it but they're not allowed to for 20 years. For trade secrets, you don't tell anyone how to do it, but if someone else figures it out for themselves, it's fair game. Most of Google's search IP is protected as trade secrets rather than patent/copyright, I believe.

Your point is that you can't copy Google's secrets because of copyright, and therefore copyright is valuable to its employees. I'm saying that the reason you can't copy that information is different from copyright.

> Even if copyright didn't exist, you couldn't copy the Google executable.

If copyright did not exist, you could take it as a google employee and start your own google without going to jail.

Pretty sure you could sue them using other means, such as through contract law, if they signed an appropriate contract. You really don't need copyright if you aren't broadly distributing information.

if Guy A copied your code, and i got it off him, you can sue him for violation of contract but you cant stop me, a third party.

Your ability to sue him will be limured, he cant go to jail, he can deckare bancrupsy, and you have to be spesific about what is protected, 'idea' is a vague term that cant be protectedm

Many (most?) software developers believe that software shouldn't be patentable at all. Many also believe that copyright terms should be way shorter.

They only believe this because this won't (immediately) affect their material prospects.

Or maybe they genuinely believe that the content they make today shouldn't be copyrighted for the next 100 years? Lifetime of the author +70 years is a very long time.

Given a binary choice between unemployability and extending patent protection to (even) snippets of code, I am quite confident that 90+% of salaried developers today will chose the latter.

thats not the argument we are discussing - the question is should these protections exist at all. We are talking about denying the artists all protection, only fair to confront developers with the same dialemma.

Whether they are 3 years or 300 is a finer point, and is only worth discussing after nessesity and legitimacy of sich protections is established

What a load of nonsense. The last 40 years has made the barrier of entry to software development lower than it's ever been.

We got applications like unity for game generation, low code solutions that let you generate a crud dashboard for a database in a few clicks, etc.

As a developer with an actual degree in comp sci, I can guarantee I'd be a helluva lot better paid if everyone had to do their software development in low level C.

That wasn't to protect software developers that was to protect companies & corporations. Twisting the law/politics is what capitalism has always had companies try to do.

Software developers aren't protected at all, we are simply just in demand for the time being. There will probably be a time in the far flung future where our jobs are phased out, too.

It doesn't matter what any of us think. The genie is out of the bottle and cannot be put back because unlike pirating existing media, this new style pirates the whole style.

Visual arts as a career will be dead soon. Visual arts as a hobby will live on.

>Visual arts as a career will be dead soon

Put a fine of 10% of annual turnover if a company cannot prove that images used in its product/ads are human generated. Make payment to visual artists part of the process of proving it. Boom, visual arts as a career saved.

It's one thing to say we shouldn't do it, it's quite another to say we cannot.

With the amount of power the copyright lobby has, who knows it might be true. However advertising is not the only industry where visual arts will be affected. Gaming, Comics, Animation, VR, Movies etc will be affected as well. And regulation isn't going to keep up across all the countries.

Even if we assume the above rule is made, there is no way to prove it because even if a human does it, he might still use the help of photoshop etc which are planning to integrate such tools currently. Most favorable outcome I see out of this is for famous/competent artists to license out their style of art to these generation companies which then train their models on them (which sounds win-win but won't be as profitable as it is today)

>Even if we assume the above rule is made, there is no way to prove it because even if a human does it, he might still use the help of photoshop etc which are planning to integrate such tools currently.

It's unclear to what extend tool producers will support AI in this context at all. Also, this is a problem for safeguarding the integrity of the product of artists, not for safeguarding their income.

That's a profoundly stupid idea. There are low code solutions that generate fully compilable pieces of programs and applications, so let's make sure we ban those.

Plenty of music is procedurally generated so we gotta make sure we ban those as well.

What's profoundly stupid is to assume every piece of technology is good so we should do nothing about its proliferation. Yes, we should ban low-code tools based on deep learning over "fairly used" (not) datasets and we should ban the same for music, writing, whatever. AI bros can go cry in the corner, I don't care.

Think of it from a non-monetary way and ignoring job security for a moment. Why would anyone (artists/programmers) spend their time doing something a machine can do ? It would be a terrible way to spend ones life. Perhaps the datasets can be licensed (if that's the sticky point) and embrace the AI ?

It's the difference between a bus and hiking: With a bus, you can arrive at lots of places fast but you will never experience the place as the hiker does.

>Why would anyone (artists/programmers) spend their time doing something a machine can do

Why do humans play chess after 1997? Why do they play checkers after the 70s?

AI capability is destroying human enjoyment of activities because it also destroys the economic rationale for engaging in them and/or allows other humans to cheat.

The obvious conclusion of this position is that we should just all kill ourselves if strong AI ever starts to exists. No, thank you, I'd rather do everything possible to prevent it from being created.

> The obvious conclusion of this position is that we should just all kill ourselves if strong AI ever starts to exists.

Indeed that is the logical conclusion. I expect some people advocating this line of logic to follow through

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