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Comment by benreesman | Hacker News Reader

Some laws are just bad. When the API-mediated/closed-weights companies agree with the open-weight/operator-aligned community that a law is bad, it’s probably got to be pretty awful. That said, though my mind might be playing tricks on me, I seem to recall the big labs being in favor at one time.

There are a number of related threads linked, but I’ll personally highlight Jeremy Howard’s open letter as IMHO the best-argued case against SB 1047.

https://www.answer.ai/posts/2024-04-29-sb1047.html

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> When the API-mediated/closed-weights companies agree with the open-weight/operator-aligned community that a law is bad, it’s probably got to be pretty awful.

I’d be careful with that cognitive bias, because obviously companies dumping poison into water sources are going to be opposed to laws that would prohibit them from dumping poison into water sources.

Always consider the broader narrative in addition to the specific narratives of the players involved. Personally, I’m on the side of the fence that’s grumpy Newsom vetoed it, because it stymies the larger discussion about regulations on AI in general (not just LLMs) in the classic trap of “any law that isn’t absolutely perfect and addresses all known and unknown problems is automatically bad” often used to kill desperately needed reforms or regulations, regardless of industry. Instead of being able to build on the momentum of passed legislation and improve on it elsewhere, we now have to deal with the giant cudgel from the industry and its supporters of “even CA vetoed it so why are you still fighting against it?”

I’d advise anyone to conduct their career under the assumption that all data was public.

As a wise SysAdmin once told me when I was struggling with my tone in writing: “assume what you’re writing will be read aloud in Court someday.”

It’s probably a google search away, but if I’ve typed it slack/outlook/whatever, but not sent it because I then thought better of it, did the app still record it somewhere? I’m almost sure it has to be and I would like to apologize in advance to my senior leadership…

That depends greatly on your tooling, your company, as well as the skills and ethics of your Enterprise IT team.

Generally speaking, it’s in ours’ and the company’s best interests to keep as little data as possible for two big reasons: legal discovery and cost. Unless we’re explicitly required to retain historical records, it’s a legal and fiscal risk to keep excess data around.

That said, there are situations where your input is captured and stored regardless of whether it’s sent. As you said, whether it does or not is often a simple search away.

As someone who was once asked under oath "What did you mean when you sent the email describing the meeting as a 'complete clusterfuck'?" I can attest to the wisdom of those words.

> The definition of “covered model” within the bill is extremely broad, potentially encompassing a wide range of open-source models that pose minimal risk.

Who are these wide range of >$100mm open source models he's thinking of? And who are the impacted small businesses that would be scared to train them (at a cost of >$100mm) without paying for legal counsel?

It's too bad companies big and small didn't come together and successfully oppose the passage of the DMCA.

My understanding is that tech was politically weaker back then. Although there were some big tech companies, they didn’t have as much of a lobbying operation.

As I remember it, among other reasons, tech companies really wanted “multimedia” (at the time, that meant DVDs) to migrate to PCs (this was called the “living room PC”) and studios weren’t about to allow that without legal protection.

There were a lot of questionable Federal laws that made it through in the 90s, such as DOMA [1], PRWORA [2], IIRIRA [3], and perhaps the most maddening to me, DSHEA [4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_Marriage_Act

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Responsibility_and_Wo...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_Immigration_Reform_and...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietary_Supplement_Health_and_...

"Questionable" is a very charitable term to use here, especially for the DSHEA which basically just legalizes snake-oil scams.

No snark, but what's wrong with the DMCA? From what I understand it, they took the idea that it's infeasible for a site to take full liability for user-generated copyright infringement (so they granted them safe harbor), but that they will be liable if they ignore take down notices.

The biggest problem with it, AFAICT, is that it allows anyone who claims to hold a copyright to maliciously take down material they don't like by filing a DMCA notice. Companies receiving these notices have to follow a process to reinstate material that was falsely claimed, so many times they don't bother. There's no mechanism to punish companies that abuse this.

Among other things, quoth the EFF:

"Thanks to fair use, you have a legal right to use copyrighted material without permission or payment. But thanks to Section 1201, you do not have the right to break any digital locks that might prevent you from engaging in that fair use. And this, in turn, has had a host of unintended consequences, such as impeding the right to repair."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/what-really-does-and-d...

forgot about the anti-circumvention clause ;(((

that's the worst

Louis Rossman is very against DMCA. It's used as a bludgeon against right to repair.

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