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>When I acquire a hammer, I don't have to sign an agreement that it will never be used to build a wall, and the world is better for this.

Eh, this is where it gets problematic...

For example if you're a seller of an items and the person says "I am going to use this item to commit a crime" before you sell it, you could very well find yourself on the very expensive end of a civil lawsuit.

This black and white world where you throw all liability on the end user does not exist. You will quickly find yourself buried up to your butthole in heathen lawyers looking for their pound of flesh.

People can make the things the way they want to make them. Makers have no obligation to make things maximally permissive.

What this sounds like is entitlement. That really should be obvious.

Besides, if users want permissivity and it doesn't exist, one of them can step up, make it, and be a hero.

FWIW, I'd be more OK with this if liability for later use were then fairly distributed: if you sell me a hammer (or a phone or let me make phone calls), and I can do anything I want with it, and what I want to do is evil, the hammer seller is off the hook; but, if the hammer seller wants to believe they are in control of the use cases of their hammer, and attempts to use legal and/or technological controls to limit what I later do with our hammer (via licenses or digital rights management technology or even an army of moderators), they should be now--at least partially--at fault for what I do with the hammer, and they should suffer consequences along with me, whether it be in the form of costly joint and several liability on a tort claim or even indirect criminal liability from at least negligence if not racketeering charges.

Regardless, as a lot of the weight of your argument seems to rely on the rhetorical use of "entitlement", note that that word applies to both sides: people who sell hammers and then expect to still be involved in the life of the hammer after they sell it are clearly the ones with entitlement issues, and if they didn't want to sell me the hammer then they shouldn't have sold it in the first place; if you want a lot of control over something, you should continue to own it, as it violates the entire notion of selling something and transferring physical possession for you to be continuing to employ legal and technological restrictions that have nothing to do with you anymore. Buyers have no obligation to care one iota about the wishes of a maker after the sale, and it is only due to the messed up incentives and (to many of us) unconstitutional extensions of copyright law in the last 30 years that have made this look even slightly reasonable.

This simple "no you" reframing of the user being entitled misses that the two situations are totally asymmetric.

1. A user is "entitled" to use a product how they see fit without being harassed

2. A maker is "entitled" to wield the power of the state to go after and (potentially) cause the fining and even imprisonment of a user who is using it "the wrong way".

You might say that copyleft software licensing (which I agree with) is aligned with point 2, but I'd respond with the fact that copyleft primarily exists to subvert the system of copyright (point 2) from within, as it pertains to software. Even then, copyleft only restricts people who want to redistribute modified versions of the software, and explicitly not normal users.

I get the desire to have a parsimonious system, but if you take these two axioms in vacuo, then you've nullified cyber security law[1]. Or in other words, if you didn't want to get hacked, you shouldn't have had any exploits.

Maybe this is what you're going for? If not, you'll need more or different axioms.

1. 18 U.S. Code § 1030 - "access[ing] a computer without authorization or exceeding authorized access" https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030

No, that's not "what I'm going for", because I'm talking about using a thing that I own, within the law. I'm not advocating for abolishing all laws that make "using a thing in a certain way" illegal, I'm saying that we shouldn't bestow corporations the right of legal prosecution against anyone they believe is using a product that they own "unacceptably". Just as I don't want a hammer to come with a terms-of-usage agreement, I don't want a hammer company to be held liable for crimes committed with one of their hammers.

Obviously all simple axioms have a breaking point (if a hammer company sold someone a hammer for the express purpose of murdering somebody with it) but under any reasonable applications I think these hold up absolutely fine and are much better than the axioms we have now.

> Besides, if users want permissivity and it doesn't exist, one of them can step up, make it, and be a hero.

Or instead of that we can recognize that we live in a society and we can make rules that cause society to be better.

We make laws all the time.

And it is perfectly reasonable to make laws that increases peoples permissive ability to do whatever they want with things that they own.

> Makers have no obligation to make things maximally permissive.

Well, they would if we remove the "makers" ability to leverage the law to target users.

If we take away their ability to use the government's monopoly on violence, we can effectively cause things to be much more permissive.

I'm curious. It seems like the world is very maligned against your desires. How did this happen?

> It seems like the world is very maligned against your desires

Oh it's not maligned against my desires!

In my previous post I was referencing existing laws, and the existing ability of individuals in society to do basically whatever they want with things that they own.

In the USA, consumers have large amounts of freedom, at least individually.

The specific topic of model weights makes this even more clear. I have my own GPU, and nobody knows what I use model weights for, nor are they likely to stop me, (excluding some very rare but extreme edge cases obviously!).

Isn't the USA great, and isn't it amazing that "makers" have basically no effective power to stop others from using their work in ways that the maker doesn't like?

That's freedom for you.

How do you feel about terms of service or use contracts where individuals can freely enter into in order to use products?

How I feel is that for physical products, and things that users individually own (ex model weights in this example), users right now can basically ignore terms of service and use contracts in the USA almost entirely and completely get away with it.

And that's a good thing.

That's the existing situation that we live in now, and it is a good thing that consumers can freely ignore the TOS on basically everything and do so constantly.

The exceptions, are of course, if you are referencing online services with a TOS, but that bothers me less because it involves other people and other people's live services, whereas a TOS that involves something a single user has (like a physical object or even software on someone's own computer), individually, those TOS can be completely ignored right now.

Isn't our existing freedom great?

Also, do you acknowledge that I made strong arguments that directly addressed your question? Because you seem to just be ignoring the content of my post by just switching to a new question every time I fully answer one with strong arguments.

I eschew the idea that two people need to both take a position on a topic to/and debate it. In the most extreme version(and we're nowhere near this), someone can be proven wrong without the other person being proven right or even taking a position at all.

To put it in the language we're using for this discussion, if it's part of the ToS to engage with you, then I'm free to disregard it. Freedom and all that :)

I will take this as an agreement that my arguments were strong and that I directly answered them with well thought out and supported ideas.

Because, as we both know, if there was a problem with anything that I said then you would have pointed it out. So the absence of an objection is effectively an admission that you are in agreement that my points were strong.

So I am glad that you agree with me!

Is this a normal interaction for you or sort of a one-off? I'm just wondering if you apply silence=agreement in the rest of your life or just online, or just now? How important is winning perceived arguments important to you and how did you get to that spot in life? Genuinely curious.

> I'm just wondering if you apply silence=agreement in the rest of your life

Oh it mostly applies to online interactions where I can tell what someone is trying to do by asking pointed questions and not acknowledging the response.

In that situation, it is almost 100% always because a good point was made and the other person has no way to respond to it, so they don't acknowledge it.

Even what you did just now was a similar type of pattern of behavior, where you ask a question meant to imply an attack on my personal relationships (thus the "in the rest of your life" statement) instead of acknowledging the content of the post.

The reason, of course, that it is much easy to switch things up to a personal attack or switch up the topic, so that you don't have to acknowledge correct responses.

Its an extremely common behavior in online conversations when someone else doesn't want to admit that the other person is correct.

> How important is winning perceived arguments

Whoa. There doesn't have to be any fighting here! You can just say that you agree with my statements. Thats not a fight! If you agree then you agree. Problem solved. There is no need to say that you lost anything if you just admit that you agree with me.

Although, that would be repeating yourself, because you already did agree with me effectively by not responding to the content of the post. That is the most common form of internet agreement and it is pretty much the only way that anyone can effectively get some to admit to agreement, like you just did.

Also, I didn't bring up winning or losing at all. Nobody has to lose if you are just in agreement with me.

Furthermore, I would say that 2 people coming to an agreement is a win for everyone, including you! So now that you brought up winning (I am not sure why you wouldn't want people to win. I want everyone to win, myself!), I am glad that we both get to win, although I don't think there was any "fight" to begin with.

So the take here is:

- I like how it feels to own a hammer, so everything should be like that. (I guess people shouldn't be able to rent hammers, or anything else?)

- You can't prevent the government from using what you build, so you might as well set up no barriers to anybody using it.

If you don't see any difference between limited control and no control, I don't think I'll convince you. But I think most of the ways we engage with the world involve degrees of control, and that there's value in picking where to exercise yours.

Which film?