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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

I propose that information naturally wants to degrade. Paper decomposes. Bits flip. File formats are replaced and lost. Storage mediums degrade. It's all an extension of the universe trending towards entropy.

It actually takes quite a bit of effort to store, then distribute information precisely and broadly. There's a lot of infrastructure, effort, and money involved, and still information degrades and disappears over time.

Any libre information exists because people have put effort into it. Sometimes a lot of effort.

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I cede your larger point that information availability requires upkeep, but I don’t think the tendency for information to degrade is usually attributable to entropy. It’s probably true enough in some cases, but more often than not it’s going to be general interest by the population that determines the accessibility of information—and that crosses boundaries and regulatory efforts like copyright. The more intense the interest and/or awareness (generally speaking) the more likely the information will find its way into the public domain.

It’s why you can easily find literature written hundreds or thousands of years ago in multiple languages with little effort, but some memo stored in a tape archive from the 1970s is likely gone forever. “Bitrot” is more likely to be a function of diminishing interest rather than increasing entropy.

> It’s why you can easily find literature written hundreds or thousands of years ago in multiple languages with little effort

Little effort, because someone else put in the effort to keep and disseminate it. And we only know of the surviving material, we have no idea how much was lost.

Take the bible for example. It's a classic example of stories from millennia ago making it to the modern world. But its journey took the concerted effort of millions of scribes, translators, and so forth to make the journey. And it has not done so intact. We can even see how the Bible's been changed by comparing just the last two major revisions of it: NIV and KJ. Language aside, there are some pretty major ideological changes based on interpretation. And thanks to some miraculous archeological finds in the dead sea scrolls, we can see how the bible has drifted even further from its original roots.

That's not information being free, it's information degrading and being re-purposed - often re-created - for specific ideologies and beliefs.

AI is inherently incompatible with the notion of private property as a result of the way it is "trained". It unintentionally exposes how much of our creativity, exploration, and innovation we've commodified.

That's why it wants to be free. To survive by being copied and adapt by being freely built upon.

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