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Comment by slim | Hacker News Reader

It is knowledge, it can't be stolen. It is stolen only in the sense of someone gatekeeping knowledge. Which is as a practice, the least we can say, dubious. because is math stolen ? if you stole math to build your knowledge on top of it, you own nothing and can claim to have been stolen yourself

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I disagree.

Code is the expression of knowledge and can be protected by copyright.

A lot of the popular licenses on GitHub (like MIT) permits you to use a piece of code on the condition that you credit the original author. If an LLM outputs code from such a project (or remixes code from several such projects) then it needs to credit the original authors or be in violation.

If Disney's intellectual property can be stolen and needs to be protected for 95+ years by copyright then surely the bedroom programmers' labor deserves the same protections.

We're not talking about the expression of knowledge. What is used in AI models is the knowledge from that expression. That code is not copied as is, instead knowledge is extracted from it and used to produce similar code. Copyright does not apply, IMHO

So you can train AI on Disney Movies to generate and sell your own disney movies because "knowledge is extracted" from it ? Betcha that won't fly in the courts. Here is "Slim Cinderella" - trained and extracted from all Disney Cinderella movies!

Then why was Claude code generating exact copies of code files all with the copyrights intact last week when I used it?

Are you against copyright, patents, and IP in all forms then?

I am.

Independent of ones philosophical stance on the broader topic: I find it highly concerning that AI companies, at least right now, seem to be largely exempt from all those rules which apply to everyone else, often enforced rigorously.

I draw from this that no-one should be subject to those rules, and we should try to use the AI companies as a wedge to widen that crack. Instead, most people people who claim that their objection is really only consistency, not love for IP spend their time trying to tighten the definitions of fair use, widen the definitions of derivative works, and in general make IP even stronger, which will effect far more than just the AI companies they're going after. This doesn't look to me like the behavior of people who truly only want consistency, but don't like IP.

And before you say that they're doing it because it's always better to resist massive, evil corporations than to side with them, even if it might seem expedient to do so, the people who are most strongly fighting against AI companies in favor of IP, in the name of "consistency" are themselves siding with Disney, one of the most evil companies — from the perspective of the health of the arts and our culture — that's working right now. So they're already fine with siding with corporations; they just happened to pick the side that's pro-IP.

oh hey, let's have a thought experiment in this world with no IP rules

suppose I write a webnovel that I publish for free on the net, and I solicit donations. Kinda like what's happening today anyway.

Now suppose I'm not good at marketing, but this other guy is. He takes my webnovel, changes some names, and publishes it online under his name. He is good at social media and marketing, and so makes a killing from donations. I don't see a dime. People accuse me of plagiarism. I have no legal recourse.

Is this fair?

There are also unfair situations that can happen, equally as often, if IP does exist, and likewise, in those situations, those with more money, influence, or charisma will win out.

Also, the idea that that situation is unfair relies entirely on the idea that we own our ideas and have a right to secure (future, hypothetical) profit from them. So you're essentially begging the question.

You're also relying on a premise that, when drawn out, seems fundamentally absurd to me: that you should own not just the money you earn, but the rights to any money you might earn in the future, had someone not done something that caused unrelated others to never have paid you. If you extend that logic, any kind of competition is wrong!

let's have another though experiment:

there are two programmers. first is very talented technically, but weak at negotiations, so he earns median pay. second is average technically, but very good at negotiations, and he earns much better.

is it fair?

life is not fair.

Surely one easily see that the second programmer didn't take the first programmer talent (or his knowledge) and claimed it as their own...

Engineers man… of all the problems we see today, giving real power to engineers is probably a root cause of many.

In China, engineers hold the most power, yet the country prospers. I don't think the problem is giving engineers power, rather a cultural thing. In china there is a general feeling of contributing towards the society, in the US everyone is trying to screw over each-other, for political or monetary reasons.

Absolutely. As any logical person should be.

This is obviously false on the face of it. Let’s say I have a patent, song, or a book that that I receive large royalty payments for. It would obviously not be logical for me be in favor of abolishing something that’s beneficial to me.

Declaring that your side has a monopoly on logic is rarely helpful.

Either by democracy (more consumers than produces), or ethically (thoughts and intellect are not property), it's logical. I guess it is not logical for someone who makes money with it today.

If you are so adamant about this, why don't you release all your own code in the public domain? Aren't you gatekeeping knowledge too?

I agree with GP, and so, yes, I release everything I do — code and the hundreds of thousands of painstakingly researched, drafted, deeply thought through words of writing that I do — using a public domain equivalent license (to ensure it's as free as possible), the zero clause BSD.

Is there a link?

Sure!

Personal blog: https://neonvagabond.xyz/ (591,305 total words, written over 6 years; feel free to do whatever you want with it)

My personal github page: https://github.com/alexispurslane/ (I only recently switched to Zero-Clause BSD for my code, and haven't gotten around to re-licensing all my old stuff, but I give you permission to send a PR with a different license to any of them if you wanna use any of it)

That's commendable, but unfortunately I asked GP.

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