Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

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> I can absolutely see why someone rational would want to share a whole lot less, anywhere, in an open fashion, regardless of where it's hosted.

I've reached the same conclusion.

All data is just bits. Numbers. Once it's out there, trying to control their spread and use is just delusional. People should just stop sharing things publicly. Even things like AGPLv3 are proving to be ineffective against their exploitation.

I really didn't expect to live in this "copyright for me, not for thee" world. The same corporations that compare us mere mortals to high seas pirates when we infringe their copyrights are now getting caught shamelessly AI laundering the copyrights of others on an industrial scale.

It's so demoralizing. I feel like giving up and just going private. Problem is I also want to share the things I made. To talk about my projects with real people. Programming is lonely enough as it is. Without sharing I'm not sure what the point even is. I have no idea what I'm supposed to do from now on. I just know I don't want to end up working for free to enrich trillion dollar corporations.

I can relate to the sentiment. For what it's worth, I also know that if someone's personal site/repos/pictures are used to train AI, they have no recourse short of said person having TONS of money to go and fight the legal battles similar to how media companies do.

But you know what, I grew up in a family of educators whose whole life mission was to help others by sharing their knowledge. That's what I am doing through my blog. I learned something? Blog about it. I built a reverse-engineered wrapper over some API? Share it openly. For every AI ingress job over this content there will be a few people that will read my code or blog post and either learn from it, be inspired, ignore it, or unblock themselves from a problem that they tried to solve. I think that makes the effort worth it to me.

For what it's worth, even before AI emerged, I've seen sites that would shamelessly rip off my content and re-publish it on their own domains under a different author. One even tried charging people for it. On several occasions I fought it and won with the help of Google/Bing. Other times, nothing happened. And that's fine. Such is the fate of online content. If my content helped at least one person, it was worth sharing it in the open.

> I really didn't expect to live in this "copyright for me, not for thee" world

Having been interested in copyright activism for two decades, that's exactly what I expected. Copyright is very much about power, and concentration of power.

Yeah, I hear this. Anything I put online is feeding the machine that will replace me.

Maybe I can carve myself a niche if I can find an audience, and maybe turn that into something kind of reward-shaped, but that's not happening without me feeding the machine. And almost certainly I won't succeed, and I'll just make it harder for myself and everyone like me to succeed in the future.

It seems the only thing to do is do it anyway and try to be unique enough to make it work. And somehow just be fine with pulling up the ladder behind you.

Yeah, I'm trying too. Specifically, the GitHub Sponsors thing.

I'm opposed to advertising and don't want to inflict it on others. So I don't generally advertise my work on sites like this one, I just participate in threads about it whenever I see them.

Somehow people found my projects and posted them here. Just woke up one day and saw I had one sponsor. Not gonna lie, I'm still amazed about it. Not even close to providing for my family despite an incredibly favorable exchange rate, so I can't work full time on my projects. It's still the only thing that gives me hope right now. Really thankful to that person.

> And somehow just be fine with pulling up the ladder behind you.

Do you really think it will come to that? I mean, this AI situation has got to come to a head at some point. We can't have these corporations defending copyright and simultaneously pretending it doesn't exist while exploiting software developers. One of those things has got to go away.

> So I don't generally advertise my work on sites like this one

Please do — I for one always love to hear about indie projects, if they are relevant to the topic discussed.

If a machine can replace a creative, the creative isn’t creative and should be replaced.

Who cares? Information wants to be free. You put your stuff out there for free, it's hoovered up and sold back to you by capitalists, that sucks, but you've still made a real contribution to society. Meanwhile a select few will still find your stuff directly. Maybe what you shared will make just one person's life a little bit better, and that was your impact - you made a difference! Capitalists will never have that feeling, because anyone consuming their repackaged content is paying for the privilege - any benefit to society is just an incidental side-effect of their greed. Sucks to be them.

The way I see it, this is exactly what life is about. Do you want to make a positive impact in society? Then share your knowledge, your experiences, your creations. People will try to capitalize on your work, and they might even get rich from it, but oh well. It doesn't take away from your own contribution to the ongoing story of humanity.

I don't have or want kids, but I see my existence in society and free contributions to the "collective consciousness", such as it is, as my legacy. For me that's comforting. I'm choosing to be part of something bigger. If I just disappeared from society and lived like a hermit, or if I buried myself completely in my day job working for capitalists and not producing anything outside of that, I think I'd lose my sense of meaning.

Everyone who put their stuff out there, on the Internet, has contributed to the AI Leviathan. Maybe the end result will be a utopia, maybe it'll be a dystopia. It's definitely too soon to say producing content for the AI titans to consume is a positive impact on society.

There are two ways we can go from "copyright for me, no copyright for thee"

We can force it to "copyright for me, copyright for thee" by injecting AI poison and by not sharing at all. See Nightshade.

Or we can force it to "no copyright for me, no copyright for thee" by ignoring their copyright just like they ignore ours, and making sure they don't find us. See Anna's Archive.

We can also do “copyright for thee, no copyright for me”! It does sound a bit hypocritical, but until we see where the copyright needle goes this might be the safest option.

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