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Comment by mmcnl | Hacker News Reader

The business model is strong. AI is stealing traffic/money from creators. That's not a problem with the business model, it's a problem with AI. AI hyperscalers shamelessly monetize other people's work without compensation. Truly an awful dystopia.

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The output of AIs that is "churned out" wouldn't exist without templates like this being used as an input to the training. But that isn't "Copyright Infringement", according to the AI companies.

They have more and better lawyers. But I know what feels morally unjust.

You and I would not get away with this no matter how much lawyering we buy.

This has nothing to do with the actual facts or arguments of the case. Our "Justice" system has openly and capriciously emphasized corporate rights over individual rights for at least 50 years now.

I disagree. The bare minimum they could have done in all these years was build a proper high quality, tightly coupled component library instead of riding this "copy paste your way to a result" trend.

Not stuff like shadcn and Tailwind Catalyst, but a proper versioned, tightly coupled UI library with rich theming capabilities made for the 99% of users who aren't skilled enough at design to be cobbling together their own design systems or editing a Button component directly.

Instead they rode the wave (despite being best positioned to redirect the wave) and they're paying the price.

If it wasn't AI it'd be the first version of MUI that moves on from Material Design 2 as a default. Or Hero UI v3. Or literally anyone who brings sanity back to the space of component libraries and leaves "copy and paste code snippets" behind

I don't understand how a component library would be AI-proof in a way CSS templates are not.

There are more knobs to turn when you have an actual library, and you become a lot less fungible than a random collection of TW classes.

HeroUI faces the same problem, and now their React Native library includes an optional (paid) conpiler solution that makes it faster.

MUI has the same problem but besides templates they have their MUI X data components which aren't limited in complexity to what can be ergonomically copy and pasted to a clipboard.

If a business model can't withstand being disrupted, it is no longer viable. It's like Uber putting cabs out of business with something better. Selling templates is now no longer viable, and blaming AI will not do anything. As Darwin would say, adapt or die.

If the disruption comes from theft, is the business not viable?

Just like piracy isn't theft, so too isn't AI scraping. Personally I think copyright should be abolished and I think it's wild to see people on HN turn from hackers to copyright hawks literally supporting massive corporations which are the primary beneficiaries of long copyright laws, like Disney and their Mickey Mouse laws.

Now is not the time to take a principal stance on copyright. The harsh reality is that trillion dollar companies are taking the word of individual creators like Tailwind for free and monetizing it without any form of compensation. That feels incredibly unjust and needs to be fixed. I don't care what the fix is called.

What do you mean? If don't take a principled stance on something even when it hurts, you don't have principles.

I'm not a fan of copyright either but big corporations have abused them for so long, either enforce them to punish these companies or abolish them so these companies die, either one is fine with me. But don't just selectively enforce them to the benefit of these corpos but ignore them when they punish them, that's the worst of both worlds.

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