Thought AI companies farming copyrighted work on the other hand, that's a different story.
Personally, I'm not really okay with what you're calling public forum harvesting either. I've put a lot of work into Stack Exchange answers and I am not okay with a for-profit company recycling and possibly outright regurgitating that work without attribution. (The latter would be a flagrant violation of CC BY-SA, of course.)
twitter and reddit will soon be bots talking to bots (if they aren't already) so the AI can train on that.
Copyright also happens to be opt-out. You have to explicitly say “this is not copyrighted” for copyright to stop applying.
See your comment and my reply? Both copyrighted. Right now. As soon as we hit publish we started to own copyright. There is an EULA somewhere on HN that probably says we give HN implicit permission to host this content in perpetuity and can even make it available in APIs, show it to bots, etc. But that’s not the same as no copyright. If somebody who is not HN wants to screenshot this comment and publish it in a book, they in theory have to find us and ask for permission.
This isn't possible under US copyright law. You can say "this is not copyrighted" all you want, but it's still copyrighted. The closest you can get to voluntarily putting something in the public domain is to refuse to take enforcement actions against violations of your copyright.
When you put it that way, yes, you obviously are. So is every other individual.
> Thought AI companies farming copyrighted work on the other hand, that's a different story.
All post on Stack Overflow are still copyright of respective posters. They are offered publicly under Creative Commons license that require attribution.
EDIT: some links [0,1]
[0] https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-judge-finds-flaw...
[1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/art...
Copyright is still deeply important to prevent behemoths from just straight-up taking stuff individuals wrote and profiting from it with no consequences.
For instance, without copyright, traditional publishers could just take everything the authors they currently contract with have written, and every other current author, and publish it without paying the authors a cent.
ML training is a legal gray area right now, because it's a new thing, and we haven't had time to properly sit down and both understand what its effects are, and how it should be treated legally. It is possible that this process, when it ends up happening, will be captured by corruption; it is possible that it won't. But using the current frustrations and anger about ML training as evidence that copyright has "failed" is a vast oversimplification that ignores the very real good that copyright does in our society.
It's failing right now to protect millions/billions of people, because we've decided that it's "legal gray area right now".
Maybe it should be, I don't know. I mean maybe it's time we said bye bye to copyright?
There could be flip sides. If the world decides that ML sidesteps copyright then I look forward to the entire corpus of LibGen, SciHub etc being legally released as open models and the overnight demise of Elsevier et al. (I once wrote a fiction about that [0])
My objection here is to seeing the clear wishes of the majority being trodden over roughshod.
[0] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-informatio...
This is exactly the kind of oversimplified, baby-with-the-bathwater proposal I was talking about.
No, we should not "say bye bye to copyright". We should actually take the harder, more complex steps, requiring actual critical thinking and analysis, to fix the problem, rather than just pretending that a one-step grand gesture will be a magic bullet.
Those are fine words. We're all about critical thinking and analysis round here. But way I see it, folks already did some real hard critical thinking and their analysis was "bollocks to that!"
And the judges said, "sorry the law that applies to you doesn't apply when big money is involved". One rule for you, another rule for them.
So I'm kinda thinking we'll maybe have to get a little more critical than you might be comfortable with.
> to fix the problem
It's always a good idea to pause right there. What is the problem? I mean seriously... what exactly is the problem going on here? Because from where I see it, the problem is a massive power imbalance
And it's a structural one. Because AI training compute and global crawling/scraping is expensive and in the hands of the few.
I don't think this problem would look the same if every kid was running AI training on a Raspberry Pi, and hoovering down JSTOR like Aaron Swartz. People would be getting arrested, no?
It is not a structural power imbalance that can be fixed by abolishing copyright. Indeed, abolishing copyright is vastly more likely to hugely increase the power imbalance.
You are looking at the problem too narrowly (identifying it as "a problem with copyright", rather than "a problem with the power structures in our society"; "AI training and compute...in the hands of the few" rather than "most of the money and resources in the hands of the few"), and thus coming to counterproductive conclusions about how we might solve it.
It's very satisfying to imagine taking a big hammer to a system we know to be corrupt and serving those without our interests at heart. But just smashing the system does not build a new one in its place. And until you address the power imbalances, any system built to replace one you smash—assuming you can manage to do the smashing, which is highly suspect—is nearly guaranteed to simply be designed to serve the desires of the powerful even more than the one we have now.