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Comment by geraldalewis | Hacker News Reader

> rightsholders

It’s telling to how society values copyright of different media that 4 years into people yelling about these being copyright violation machines the first time there’s been an emergency copyright update has been with video.

"Hi, as the company that bragged about how we had ripped off Studio Ghibli, and encouraged you to make as many still frames as possible, we would now like to say that you are making too many fake Disney films and we want you to stop."

Cue an open weights model from Qwen or DeepSeek with none of these limitations.

These attempted limitations tend to be very brittle when the material isn’t excised from the training data, even more so when it’s visual rather than just text. It becomes very much like that board game Taboo where the goal is to get people to guess a word without saying a few other highly related words or synonyms.

For example, I had no problem getting the desired results when I promoted Sora for “A street level view of that magical castle in a Florida amusement area, crowds of people walking and a monorail going by on tracks overhead.”

Hint: it wasn’t Universal Studios, and unless you know the place by blind sight you’d think it had been the mouse’s own place.

On pure image generation, I forget which model, one derived from stable diffusion though, there was clearly a trained unweighting of Mickey Mouse such that you couldn’t get him to appear by name, but go at it a little sideways? Even just “Minnie Mouse and her partner”? Poof- guardrails down. If you have a solid intuition of the term “dog whistling” and how it’s done, it all becomes trivial.

Absolutely. Though the smarter these things get, and the more layers of additional LLMs on top playing copyright police that there are, I do expect it to get more challenging.

My comment was intended more to point out that copyright cartels are a competitive liability for AI corps based in "the west". Groups who can train models on all available culture without limitation will produce more capable models with less friction for generating content that people want.

People have strong opinions about whether or not this is morally defensible. I'm not commenting on that either way. Just pointing out the reality of it.

It's a matter of time. I imagine they'll get more effect suppressing activations of specific concepts within the LLM, possibly in real time. I.e. instead of filtering prompt for "Mickie Mouse" analogies, or unlearning the concept, or even checking the output before passing it to user, they could monitor the network for specific activation patterns and clamp them during inference.

They might, but we may also find they don’t function as well or as predictably if increasing amounts of their weights are suppressed. Research has so far shown that knowledge is incredibly, vastly diffuse, as are causes of different behaviors. There was some research that came out of Anthropic where a model being taught number sequences by another model, and that second model had fine tuning which with a stated preference for owls. The student model, despite no overt exposure to anything of the sort, expressed the same preference. The subtlety of influence that even very minor things have on the vast network of weights is, at least at present, too poorly understood to know what we’re getting in the bargain when holes are poked.

I can get it to do rides at Disney World (including explicitly by name) but it’s incredibly good at blocking superheroes. And that’s gotta be a pretty common prompt, yet I haven’t seen that kind of content in the feed, either.

And not just by name. Try to get it to generate the Hulk, even with roundabout descriptions. You can get past the initial (prompt-level) blocking, but it’ll generate the video and then say the guardrails caught it.

The only thing we need is an emergency copyright deprecation.

So people who spend time working on code or art should have exactly zero protection against somebody else just taking their work and using it to make money?

Yes.

(The "takers" also do not have copyright protection.)

Great, you've just removed any incentive for people to make anything.

It's ok I don't have any talent so that won't affect me

The vast amounts of permissively licensed works directly contradicts you.

Even if you take away copyright, there are plenty of incentives to create. Copyright is not the sole reason people create.

Vague. Are you talking about reasons to create like the joy of creating? Your bio describes you as a 'tech entrepreneur', not 'DIY tinkerer'. So I'll assume that when you spend a great deal of time entrepreneuring something, you do so with the hope of remuneration. Maybe not by licensing the copyright, but in some form.

Permissive licenses are great in software, where SAAS is an alternative route to getting paid. How does that work if you're a musician, artist, writer, or filmmaker who makes a living selling the rights to your creative output? It doesn't.

> Vague. Are you talking about reasons to create like the joy of creating?

That’s one of them, but I really don’t have to be specific about the reasons. I just have to point out the existence of permissively licensed works. You said:

> Great, you've just removed any incentive for people to make anything.

This is very obviously untrue. Perhaps you meant to say “…you’ve just removed some incentives for people to make some things”?

So basically the only winners should be:

- owners of large platforms who don't care what "content"[0] is successful or if creators get rewarded, as long as there is content to show between ads

- large corporations who can afford to protect their content with DRM

Is that correct?

Do you expect it to play out differently? Game it out in your head.

[0]: https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever/#:~:text...

The vast majority of DRM is cracked very quickly; the only reason DRM cracking tools aren't more widespread is because of copyright law and the idiotic anti-circumvention provisions.

Consider that even DRM'd content is on torrent sites within hours of release.

No, but the current system is totally idiotic. Why not have a fixed timeframe i.e. 30-50 years to make money? Life of the author + x years is stupid not only because it's way too long, it keeps going until way after the creator is no longer benefitting, and it can cause issues with works where you don't know who the author is so you can't cleanly say it's old enough not to have copyright.

I'm not sure for most (specifically smaller, who need the most protection) creators this would actually change very much. Media typically makes money in it's first few years of life, not 70 years on.

The shareholder class would demand rapid fire exploitation of © the moment it expired and the resulting media would be a soup of mediocrity. The idea is to recognize the highly creative have unique imaginations that invent paradigms that propel culture. Excluding that for 70+ years generates that. Had Lucas gained the rights to Flash Gordon (DeLaurentiis beat him to it) he'd never been forced to create the SW universe. Think about constraints as the path to progress.

This does not demonstrate a sound understanding of how the public domain works, why copyright lengths have been extended so ferociously over the last century (it's shareholders who want this), nor the impact it has both on creative process and public conversation.

This is a highly complex question about how legal systems, companies, and individual creatives come in conflict, and cannot be summarized as a positive creative constraint / means to celebrate their works.

I develop copyright material from the letter and the images that I've both sold to studios and own myself. Copyright lengths are there to prevent the shareholder class from rapid exploitation. Once copyright declines to years not decades, shareholders will demand that be exploited rather than new ideas. The public conversation is rather irrelevant as the layperson doesn't have a window into the massive risk, long-term development required to invent new things, that's how copyright is not a referendum, it's a specialized discourse. Yes the idea of long-term copyright developed under work-for-hire or individual ownership can be easily summarized. License, sample, or steal. Those are the windows.

Then the solution is fixing the problem, not removing any protections at all.

In fact, copyright should belong to the people who actually create stuff, not those who pay them.

If you change it to 30-50 years then nothing changes for Sora.

Most of the (obviously infringing) video I've seen is stuff well within the past 30-50 years.

Also, no copyright doesn't mean information free for all.

I still can't generate a fake video, pretend it's real, and then claim you're a criminal or you eat babies or something. Because that's libel.

Why do we have libel laws? Because the alternative is that you piss off Walmart or something and then they go and tell all employers that you're a pedophile and then you starve to death, with the cherry on top of having a tainted legacy. So we definitely need the libel laws.

But that's a problem. The whole premise of Sora is that it generates fake video with the intention of making it as real as possible.

No matter how you cut it, Sora's business model, and moral model, is on shakey grounds.

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