Hacker News Reader

Comment by kordlessagain | Hacker News Reader

Just because someone can convert text to numbers doesn’t mean they have a right to the numbers. That’s like trying to own the emotion a book has on someone, or the things they see in mind when they read it.

View on HN

What I find rather amusing is they spend the whole paper dismissing it as ineffective yet still feel the need to worry about the 'ethics' and 'legality'. They don't cite anything with regards to a discussion/evidence of either, of course, and looking at the authorship list I don't believe any of them are lawyers or ethics experts.

No one should have "rights" to any data, information, bits, or whatever. It's not physical and any attempt to apply artificial scarcity to replicate the physical world is a crime against humanity. The lines around which data is protected and which is copyable is arbitrary bullshit. You aren't stealing a fire when you light one candle with another. It's my storage device and I'm not breaking the law all of a sudden because the gates are holding a different set of charges.

By that logic, you also need to accept that no one should ever need to pay you for creating artifacts that are not bound to the physical world solely. I assume you work for free for your employer or in a space that is not “dealing” with data, information, bits, whatsoever.

Hairdressers charge for a service and none of them will assume that they "own" your hair.

They are transforming physical objects very much the same way a carpenter does. The service industry is not equal to Tech / digital. A hairdresser does not create Bits or data. I would also argue in this particular case you are wrong. You hand over the hair on the ground to them which they then dispose or maybe resell (maybe without explicit consent but at least implicit). If that wasn’t the case they would commit theft when they dispose your hair…

I am honestly shocked that this hasn't happened, what with how the world has been going in recent decades.

Well, they probably can since you give them consent to keep your hair when you leave the shop… Disposing it would otherwise be considered theft, no?

Like a torrent of the last GoT season then?

… with compression.

Imagine the GoT producers used GRRM's books without licensing and then claim copyright on the series.

Does OpenAI have the rights on all the texts they used to train their GPTs?

i think we agree

I would like the big players to argue that they have some right to the numbers as it has important applications to BitTorrent and cryptography too for that matter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com