Why, people?
The same reason why most huge enterprises buy insane support contracts for every other piece of shitty software: support, and someone to blame when production goes pear-shaped. Because there’s no real management left anywhere, there’s no time to grow expertise internally and everyone just needs that hit of Risk Management (tm), they’ll go to whatever lengths to get it. Oracle is like the ultimate warm, fuzzy blanket where that fuzz is actually mold, it delivers the scared-shitless enterprises from having to think for themselves.
Stay classy Oracle. Such a banal depth of evil.
Why hasn't this been outlawed?
I guess companies that knowingly employ such managers deserve to lose whatever Oracle's legal team extracts out of them.
Dinners, drinks, bottles of scotch, tickets to baseball and football games, plane tickets to attend training sessions in conference rooms attached to nice beachside hotels, business lunches at strip clubs, Superbowl tickets, cruise tickets, wristwatches...
Not to mention mugs, tshirts, water bottles and stickers.
Everything is on the menu.
Holy crap.
Your senators and house reps are the beneficiary of various forms of largesse from political donors.
"Billionaire ** and her *** ** *** are among the most prolific megadonors in modern American political history, funneling hundreds of millions of dollars overwhelmingly to ***, ****"
But oftentimes they are not clearly gifts or bribes. For example, inviting you or your team out for dinner and drinks can be harmless.
It's not unusual to take clients out, even to sporting events. As long as the host party is present, and there is intent to network or discuss business, it usually qualifies as "corporate hospitality" -- even the strip club!
All expensed and paid for out of the marketing budget. A far cry from gifts or bribes, apparently!
https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022-173
This is why corporate procurement in a large enterprise is so bureaucratic. If you have 20 layers of approval that's 20 people that need cocaine and prostitutes yet could blow the whistle.
Maybe they've been hiring former SNC Lavalin executives?
This is largely why the US government is so inefficient. Our government agencies have been trained to outsource absolutely everything. A static site? No, you couldn't possibly hire one or two engineers to do that, you need a multi-million dollar contract! Well, when you do that, the corruption risk is through the roof. Now we mitigate with anti-corruption, anti-fraud checks out the fucking wazoo. That's expensive. And we're putting that expense ON TOP of the exorbitant contract fees.
When Oracle does it, it's a scandal. But when an airline gives people personal 'miles' for their business trips, it's business as usual.
Every customer acquisition will be weeks or months of in-person discussions over golf, expensive dinners, resort vacations, or the like.
Take it easy dude, it's business, kickback or not certainly isn't "evil".
And it happens with government employees all the time, just a bit differently. The lobbyist is a member at Shinnecock Hills or some other private, prestigious golf course that costs $100,000+ to join. Then he invites the senator out, the "guest fee" is a nominal amount like $120, which he happily pays to play a round on a US Open quality course. Of course the senator charges his transportation and hotel to his office, paid out of campaign funds or something. Shit like this happens every single day, stop pretending to be so shocked or morally righteous.
You managed to pick three companies with documented histories involving violations or enforcement actions concerning workers’ schedules and safety, religious & racial discrimination, hazardous waste, and multimillion-dollar wage disputes. Burlington is particularly funny as an example because the government was literally ordering it to return more than $1.3 million to workers just last year.
You’re partially right though, a couple mil here and there is a drop in the bucket against most corporate earnings. Sort of makes you wonder if the system is operating like that purposefully, as in, a systemic attribute.
You didn’t even attempt to touch Ulta’s toxic waste problem lol
If you don't like golf, it probably isn't. But if you do, then it should be pretty easy to see. :)
I bet Oxide would too.
No thanks!
As someone who's had to use the Oracle database and also Oracle Linux on servers, beats me. Also stuff like Oracle ADF and JDeveloper and JBoss/WildFly, no thank you.
I seriously hope someone got bribed to choose Oracle cause it doesn't make sense otherwise, at least then they would have gotten something good out of it.
The closest thing to an actual argument I've heard was wanting paid support - in which case let me introduce to KronisCo (which will be registered shortly) and if you only give me fat coffeurs of money, I will provide similar support for PostgreSQL with the added benefits of your developers not wanting to retire at 30. Like why would anyone pay for Oracle in the first place, when they can just collect that cheque themselves and freeload on battle-tested FOSS (or contribute back)? Seeing a software dev org just pass those sums to Oracle from their clients without trying to capture that seemed wild.
To be fair, recent versions of JBoss/Wildfly removed a lot of the bloat and boot within seconds. Startup time is mostly due to application frameworks nowadays.
In a past life, I used to be almost ecstatic when a client would choose Tomcat over WebLogic or WebSphere, or whatever abomination of an app server they standardized on.
They are trained on a narrow set of data and don't really understand the real world.
If you let them run wild with no supervision they'll turn your company into slop.
Someone needs to be there to reign them in, asking the all-important questions like "is suing all of our customers and making them angry REALLY the best option?" (to which they will reply, "You're right to push back on this").
This is typically the role of the CEO, however, as we know, most CEOs of large successful companies are too busy to actually do that. They're mostly training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, shitposting on their own social media platform, trying to manipulate international politics, or helping run their family nonprofit.
This is why I believe that legal departments need to be demoted. The legal department should not report to the CEO, they should report to a new role that is above both PR and legal. And that person's job should be to force legal and public relations (which we know are natural enemies) to work together. Every press release goes through legal now, and it's only logical that ever legal action should go through public relations review as well.
The fact that public relations at most large companies has atrophied from disuse in our public-equity-owned unicorporate cooperation-over-competition chaebol/zaibatsu/conglomerate world is a problem for another day.
Replacing legal departments with LLMs is probably the best use-case for LLMs.
Using LLMs for coding is a waste of time and a dead end, however using LLMs for legal stuff would make the world a better place.
Replacing development departments with AIs is probably the best use-case for AIs.
Using AIs for law is a waste of time and a dead end, however using AIs for computer stuff would make the world a better place.
If that's a reference to Thaler v. Perlmutter, the only thing that's been established is that an LLM can't be considered an author under the Copyright Act, only a human being can. It says nothing about the consequences of a human claiming authorship of LLM-generated code, which would be relevant here.
If you write a prompt and one-shot a problem and share the source code, that source code is probably not covered by copyright.
If you substantially edit or modify the generated code you would own the copyright.
It's like with a camera. If I set a camera and carefully aim it and somehow trigger the shutter then make adjustments in Photoshop, I own the copyright on that image.
If I stick a Flock camera on a pole somewhere and post the live output, there's been no meaningful human creative involvement in producing those images and so nobody can claim copyright on them.
I don't like this idea that llm code can't be owned by a human, copyrighted. It's just code.
I think your last example with flock camera is relevant here - I can take a picture of a public football as a reporter or something (or a fan I guess) and I can copyright and sell that picture. Newspapers do it every day.
So if I stand on a street corner and take a pic, it's copyrightable. If I take a pic using a flock camera it should also be copyrightable, just like if my nest camera at home takes a pic of something, I can use that.
I guess you are saying "someone else owns the flock camera" so you don't get to own pictures. What if I buy the flock-like camera and put it up, I should own that.
(Not a lawyer, just a Wikipedia editor.)
This is a great case to study, but no determination of copyright was made. The only actual lawsuit was filed by PETA arguing that the monkey should have copyright, which led to a settlement with the human photographer and nothing else because obviously that's not possible.
For various reasons (mostly $$$) the guy never actually got a judgement. I think the chances are good that he could have prevailed in court; there is significant creative input to setting up cameras and triggers in a way to convince a wild monkey to take a selfie. It's not like he just left his camera sitting somewhere on accident and came back to find a photo in it.
I'm also not a lawyer, but I did do a lot of work in copyright for a company you've heard about.
https://www.techdirt.com/2020/02/24/can-you-license-video-yo...
The tldr is you really can't copyright raw surveillance video, but you can apparently lightly edit to turn it into a creative work that is copyrightable.
> The tldr is you really can't copyright raw surveillance video, but you can apparently lightly edit to turn it into a creative work that is copyrightable.
The article doesn't say that, it doesn't speak to CCTV surveillance footage. It discusses rare cases like cameras falling from aircraft, or animals pressing the button to take a photo.
I can see your line of reasoning about there being zero creative input in the video's creation, but if surveillance footage isn't subject to copyright, I'd expect there to be plenty written about it.
From the techdirt piece, seen above:
"To license out copyright, there must be creative contribution. This can arise from cutting/editing the video in a creative manner. Since there is no other prevailing copyright, the editing then makes you sole copyright owner entitled to all proceeds.
You may feel inclined to call bullshit on this, but it’s actually the ongoing revenue model for "revised" editions of Beethoven, Bach and older."
I'm afraid I'm not seeing it. Which comments specifically? Please link directly, rather than describing them.
> From the techdirt piece, seen above: [...]
My question was specifically about surveillance footage. The law doesn't work on perfect logical consistency, we can't infer an ironclad answer where there's no explicit law or legal precedent.
Another web search turned up a reddit discussion [0] which says that in the case of US law it's unclear, but that under UK law it explicitly is subject to copyright, under a special non-creative films category.
This Quora thread (sorry, couldn't find better sources) supports this. [1]
> You may feel inclined to call bullshit on this, but it’s actually the ongoing revenue model for "revised" editions of Beethoven, Bach and older."
Sure, I'm aware of that, but it's not the same question.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/COPYRIGHT/comments/1j7y8i0/cctv_foo...
[1] https://www.quora.com/Can-one-claim-copyright-on-CCTV-footag...
We will have to see about that! This is the kind of boundary that's still being figured out in court; it's going to depend on how hard you worked on the prompt. I highly doubt that even most slop was generated with a single half-ass prompt, and the bar is not as high as you might expect.
> If I stick a Flock camera on a pole somewhere and post the live output, there's been no meaningful human creative involvement in producing those images and so nobody can claim copyright on them.
It really depends on what pole, where, and why. In a parking lot in rural Wisconsin? Probably not. A recorded livestream of a political march? You likely have copyright.
I think that by virtue of the sheer amount of time spent using AI tools, it's pretty clear that these outputs have enough creative input to be copyrightable.
The LLM will output different results over time as the models get updated. Are we heading towards needing to retain a full prompt history that can be replayed against a specific LLM model version to prove what the output was for copyright purposes?
Thaler v. Perlmutter stands for a much narrower proposition and at any rate is not binding nationally, SCOTUS having denied certiorari.
> Based on an analysis of copyright law and policy, informed by the many thoughtful comments in response to our NOI, the Office makes the following conclusions and recommendations: > • Questions of copyrightability and AI can be resolved pursuant to existing law, without the need for legislative change. > • The use of AI tools to assist rather than stand in for human creativity does not affect the availability of copyright protection for the output. > • Copyright protects the original expression in a work created by a human author, even if the work also includes AI-generated material. > • Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements. > • Whether human contributions to AI-generated outputs are sufficient to constitute authorship must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis. > • Based on the functioning of current generally available technology, prompts do not alone provide sufficient control. > • Human authors are entitled to copyright in their works of authorship that are perceptible in AI-generated outputs, as well as the creative selection, coordination, or arrangement of material in the outputs, or creative modifications of the outputs. > • The case has not been made for additional copyright or sui generis protection for AI-generated content. > The Office will continue to monitor technological and legal developments to determine whether any of these conclusions should be revisited. It will also provide ongoing assistance to the public, including through additional registration guidance and an update to the Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices.
Congress or the courts could, of course, override the stance of the copyright office, but I think it would be highly unusual for them to do so (particularly for something like this). It would however be a lot better if congress just stepped in and said no outright, but until then this will have to do.
> Whether human contributions to AI-generated outputs are sufficient to constitute authorship must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis
It says a plain prompt is not enough but that is not the reality of real software development. People aren't one-shotting complex business apps. The vast majority of software development will trivially pass that bar and end up in the "requires case by case analysis".
Only Congress and the courts do. Copyright exists from the moment a work is created, and does not need to be registered with the copyright office.
The law isn't that complicated; if a work was created with a human being with intent, it's probably eligible for copyright protections.
As long as you can convince a court that you did this, the tools you used are not relevant. The vast majority of LLM art falls in this bucket.
> A copyrightable work is “made for hire” in two situations:
> When it is created by an employee as part of the employee’s regular duties
> When a certain type of work is created as a result of an express written agreement between the creator and a party specially ordering or commissioning it
> When a work is a made for hire, the hiring or commissioning party is considered the author and the copyright owner.
IANAL but I can imagine the courts bringing this aspect of the law coming into play if Congress continues to be cowardly and fails to pass clear legislation on this topic; courts often analogize to existing scenarios when existing law doesn’t cleanly cover a new one.
The sibling comment lays this out and my original comment above is based on exactly the same link.
Walter Lippmann is spinning in his grave
He also wrote the book "Public Opinion" in 1922 [1] which explained how the US mass media apparatus could be used to influence the common man.
It's more like that movie with Stephen King where the cars and other machines turn actively evil. Hilarious movie too, not great but hilarious.
The owner of the car that rebuilds it so it can kill is the equivalent of the people that prop-up Oracle and companies like them.
Maximum Overdrive has a mystic comet that happens to pass by and temporally creates the destruction.
Maybe so, but perhaps the most successful part of the AI marketing pitch has been exploiting management's hatred of labor (and vice versa).
A significant motivator for a lot of the nonsensical AI layoffs and initiatives over the last three years has been that it's a great opportunity for management to get ill on their slaves.
Tech labor got a little too big for their britches during the hiring spree of 2021, and AI was a great opportunity to take them down a peg, even if it offered little in the way of ROI.
Don't underestimate the power of the desire to keep one's job to cause a large organization to behave towards its own self-perpetuation despite the moral lines that must be crossed by individuals to do so.
Lots!
> Don't underestimate the power of the desire to keep one's job to cause a large organization to behave towards its own self-perpetuation despite the moral lines that must be crossed by individuals to do so.
I don't. I don't put anything past people.
Sure. Like a lawnmower.
The lawnmower exists, you might disagree, but it’s not your lawnmower, you can’t uncreate it. But you can and should take care never to put your hand near it.
In other words, Larry Ellison is going to do what Larry is going to do, and there's no use wondering why.
Usually, that's to make money and sue people, at any expense. It's in his nature.
And that's why it's important to go after morally corrupt, uncivil monsters.
The problem today is that the press and the DAs/courts are complicit--they're less interested than ever in pursuing public morality and civility as ends in themselves. They're mostly only interested in partisan politics.
We don't have to like it. From Larry's perspective, our natures are strange and perhaps repulsive to him.
Lessons:
- The only way to constrain what the lawnmower does, is make sure what do desire is enforced by law (physics)
- A reminder, the lawnmower will chop your hand off and think nothing of it
- The lawnmower is not "evil" but if the laws that constrain it allow for evil behavior, it may do "evil" things.
The lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower, no matter how clever it sounds. (Actually not that hard with Opus5)
[1] https://www.cio.com/article/4125103/oracle-may-slash-up-to-3...