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Comment by avivallssa | Hacker News Reader

Will this make people who make indirect money through their content, less motivated from publishing their content on the Web ? This might be arguable.

May be, there should be a similar amount of openness in publishing the content used for training commercial models.

The copyright owner should have a privilege to ask for that content to be removed from training. This may also allow individual authors to gain their share with their Advanced RAG applications, that are specially focussed on the content they own and also published on the web.

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Steelmanning against this, when you publish any form of content online you have to be prepared for the consequences of it's digital proliferation. When Napster was all the rage people said the same thing about music, and before that they decried home taping as the death of the music industry. The music industry lived on, it just changed form as the shape of music did.

If the online newsletter community that Substack and Medium built consequently dies from sheepish author syndrome, very little will change. The content they made will be replaced, and the internet will survive fine without them as it did for dozens of years before digital subscription services were a realistic revenue stream.

>Steelmanning against this, when you publish any form of content online you have to be prepared for the consequences of it's digital proliferation.

when you walk down the street in skimpy dress you have you have to be prepared for the consequences too, right? Whatever you're trying to say it has nothing to do with what rights companies have to use content.

The point is that you cannot claim damages to something that you give away for free. What did they take from you, notoriety? Content? Traffic?

When the Author's Guild pressed Google for their indexing of plaintext copywritten books, they lost in court. Transforming freely-available content can't be gatekept because the intent isn't strictly what the author imagined. There is a degree of fair use that exists when you make anything public. Music, art, text, videos, all of it can be consumed in novel and unexpected ways. People haven't been concerned about the legal ramifications of abusing intellectual property since teenage Neil Cicierega made Mr Rogers fight Batman in 2005: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrzKT-dFUjE

> you cannot claim damages to something that you give away for free

Maybe you can't claim damages based on loss of income, but that's not the only kind of damages.

For example, say I post an article and don't charge anything for reading it, and an LLM, based on its training data which includes my article, generates an article in my writing style. Sure, it hasn't cost me any money, but it might still affect my reputation if people think I wrote the article. Copyright is supposed to cover cases like that as well as cases where income is lost.

Maybe it’s better if people stop publishing for profit? The internet was better when everyone wasn’t trying to profit from it and it was a bunch of hobbyists.

>The copyright owner should have a privilege to ask for that content to be removed

Just so you know, privileges can be (and probably will be in this case) denied.

Rights on the other hand can't be denied.

Right, nobody on the internet has ever violated copyright and gotten away with it. /s

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