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Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

Using the term 'anti-piracy' makes the speaker a shill for 'pro-censorhip' or 'anti-knowledge' or 'elitist' or whatever groups. Look at the effectiveness of well-crafted public communications: The people you don't like are 'pirates' - criminals; threats to order; dangerous to civilians; wild, drunken and low status. And 'our' side is against piracy!

We need neutral terminology for both sides. Even 'intellectual property' tries to transform a time-limited monopolistic license from government for intangible goods into eternal real estate. Any ideas?

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This is a really good question. Can language be de-weaponised?

Wittgenstein and Marcuse thought not - that words stand in as tools of intent. It is our hostile times that make weapons of words.

But it's frustrating because neutral prose is hard to reach. We seem in an age where it's hard to say anything succinctly, in a fashion that will pique the wretched attention span of the ordinary reader, that isn't either drenched in political bias or ungainly.

I think the media industry absolutely embarrassed themselves by misappropriating the word "piracy". Even after 30 years it still jars as awful, childish cringe. When I see a grown man in a suit talking of "piracy" I can't help but see a pitiful clown before me.

But one cannot police other's language. They must be allowed to make themselves known through the words they choose.

Words can be reclaimed by social movements and used neutrally or positively instead of negatively within them. "Gay" used to be a slur, as did "slut", and language is culturally dependent on top of that - I'm lead to believe that "cunt" is a generic reference to another person in Australia, while it's not a particular term of affectation in the US. So it depends on the circles you run in. "Pirate" is villianized if you're in the shipping business due to actual piracy, but if your morals are a bit flexible, paying $100/month to have all the streaming services is definitively a choice; the word "piracy" just brings to mind that person's preferred torrent site, and is seen on the same level as breaking the speed limit on the highway.

Guess we're happy to have reclaimed "hacker" around here. In the South-West of England, we're all mostly pirates too :)

Boffin is a great UK word that doesn't especially have a US equivalent.

Boffin: A scientist or expert.

Saving my fellow nonUK people a click.

The particular tone those two words aren't a direct equivalent is that boffin bears a respectful tone. Nerd or geek (and lately, in polarized online US political discussions, scientist and expert) don't always have the same sort of caché or respect in all circles.

Oh good point. Caution must be used when trying to use words outside the context within which where they work. "Hacker" is fine to use in these parts, but having that be your profession on an immigration form is not likely to go over well!

I’m at the point where “piracy” isn’t even a Bad Word anymore, because it always refers to pirating from big companies where there’s either no way to legitimately buy, buying is unreasonably expensive (e.g. due to different seasons being on different platforms), or it’s research where the scientists don’t care about their work being pirated because they don’t get paid for it anyways.

You’d have to reword it to something like “anti-digital theft” to bring back the negative connotation. Or have more articles about how piracy is destroying small businesses, which are suspiciously rare.

I mean, except if they are clearly copying works they don't have copyright to, they are violating the law and effectively taking some amount of money out of the pocket of authors and rights holders. You can try and demand people use more "neutral" language to disucss copyright violations, but good luck.

I hope you never know the misfortune of having assets devalued by people that feel they don't need to operate within the boundaries of the rules.

That assumes the laws are fairly made and just, and therefore people who don't conform to them are doing something harmful.

If a company successfully lobbied and bribed the legislature to pass a law gving the company a monopoly on book publishing and sales, and someone bought books elsewhere, would that someone be doing something wrong? Are they harming that poor victim of a company?

Life isn't as simple as a hypothetical, of course, but it's also not as simple as assuming everything is just and fair.

> Using the term 'anti-piracy' makes the speaker a shill

No, it absolutely does not. "Piracy" is a reasonably neutral word with a specific definition (it's slightly different than "theft") - you are artificially assigning nonexistent emotional weight to it in order to push your own political agenda.

You're giving a lot of credit to the "pro-piracy side", which in this case are massive corporate surveillance platforms generating huge amounts of revenue with data they had no part in creating. There's gotta be a middle ground here that doesn't turn all artists and writers into paste for the AI machine.

No, there's no ideas. It's already trivial to devour the works of many good writers for the cost of an internet connection and the capital outlay of 'a laptop'.

Piracy is killing the motive to work. I've seen it happen countless times and nobody says a thing about it.

How about copyright becomes so pervasive and all enforced that massive corporations like Disney cannot bully the small fry into legally moving into their turf.

Copyright is an hellish nightmare because it used by big corporations to devour, rather than used to emancipate every single person.

ChatGPT ravaging and pillaging the internet was the last straw for "faith in freedom".

I'm putting all my faith and work into walking on water, establishing the cleansing task of getting out from under the sawblade.

People think to write is to compile and package in on itself like a computer program or a spirit-sucking business seminar. Typing on keyboards does that to a man.

It is known that LLMs are possible, so there is no stoping it. It's too late to think about if we like it. All ideas and skills are fair game now, but LLMs lack in depth in all of them. No LLM system is better than a domain expert.

Maybe with better training data we will have better models. There are some models trained only on public domain and synthetic (generated) data. So probably LLMs won't learn directly from our works. They need better data than internet stuff, human text is not good enough. See the Microsoft model Phi-1.5 [1], trained on diverse synthetic text of high quality.

[1] https://youtu.be/0lF3g4JtY9k?t=531

If copyright cannot be technically held any more, then it should rather be not held for everyone? Not just the small fry who have no recourse, but also for giants like Disney.

Since sharing of information is not a zero-sum game, areas where limiting access to an intellectual product is hard to achieve tend to build open and cooperative products instead. Of course it's much slower, and the output is smaller.

Here's the problem: we could potentially deescalate this debate by using more tactful language. But do we really want to?

Is the answer to this situation a neutral position? I don't think so.

Intellectual monopoly is bullshit. I see no value in deescalating the narrative.

What we need is change. Change can't be made by taking a step back and deescalating the narrative.

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