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Comment by quectophoton | Hacker News Reader

This talks about licenses and stuff, but it seems to forget what the current status quo is.

> People: I don't want my stuff to be used to train models.

> Companies: To use our service you grant us perpetual license to use your stuff in whatever way we want, and also the right to sublicense so we can sell your stuff to others while granting them the same rights.

> People: Sure, here you go! Here's my art/code/voice/face/photos/videos/telemetry!

> Companies: [use data according to the license that was granted to them]

> People: pikachu_face.jpg

So enforcing what the manifesto wants to enforce wouldn't change much, if anything at all.

Disclaimer: I have pirated others' stuff (e.g. anime, manga, novels, music, I have shared memes with others (that's distribution), etc), so I can't complain when others pirate my stuff without being a hypocrite. The most I can do myself is call them out for profiting off it.

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So? You can't sign a contract to sell your liver either.

A broad license like that should not be obtainable by merely having the user click a checkbox.

Repeating myself, that's the status quo.

Companies already are doing what they say they are doing, even if it's unenforceable. The profit from doing so is more than the liabilities from any lawsuit might be receiving.

History shows that creating more legalese text won't add any more teeth. A specific example is how 90% of websites[1] are in violation[2] of the GDPR already.

The manifesto raises a good point about data not protected by copyright; but one can argue that models created from copyrighted content, what most artists I see are complaining about, are already in violation of copyright due to being derivative works (IANAL), yet already-existing copyright laws aren't helping[3].

So they way I understand this manifesto is, they are not adding anything new for copyrighted works (AFAIK, IANAL), but they are taking away rights from public domain works (let's see how that plays out with Disney, for example).

Hopefully this additional context clarifies where I'm coming from.

[1]: I'm making up that number but I'm probably lowballing it anyway.

[2]: Example: https://pkg.go.dev

[3]: But I bet if someone made a model from TV shows, now suddenly the already-existing copyright law would magically work for those specific cases. So basically, these randos without power are making a law that will only be enforced by those with power.

> [1]: I'm making up that number but I'm probably lowballing it anyway.

uhhh, the popular "I don't know what I'm saying, but I'm sure I'm right, because it's me saying it"

But even if it was true, most of the violations of traffic laws go unpunished, for obvious reasons, does it mean traffic laws are useless?

> [2]: Example: https://pkg.go.dev

did you report it?

Oof my bad. I should have added "websites I visit", or "website I've seen". I don't keep track of them, but if I try to think of any websites that I've visited e.g. since last month that are not in violation, only ~4 come to mind. And since I don't have any exact numbers, I have no choice but to give a conservative estimate.

I'm usually careful with wording since not everyone tries to read in good faith, but I was probably too tired at the time to notice.

I apologize for any offense that my comment might have caused.

No offense, I simply wanted to show that, even if what you say it's true, there is no "police state" trying to monitor and eventually shut down the Internet, like many are suggesting here and that there is a lot of leeway for the smaller actors.

Nobody is really worried if the website for Go packages doesn't fully respect GDPR, except maybe Go it's a Google product, but the best they can infer it's the demographics of Go developers, which they probably already know.

What is important is that the data collectors can be held responsible for the infringements.

Same objective I imagine for EIGAR (I know some of the founders), it is not to stop generative art using AI, but to stop pretending that massive data scraping of copyrighted material is fair use when Disney or Amazon or Netflix or any other tech mogul profits from them.

Hollywood writers and the actors' guild have already gone on strike over this, this is nothing new or unexpected, it was simply waiting to happen, it's Newton's third law of motion applied to humans.

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