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Comment by nixpulvis | Hacker News Reader

I think LLMs providers pretty directly compete with content they scrape like Wikipedia and SO...

Remember the golden rule of the golden rules:

Who has the gold makes the rules.

If a society operates under a rule like this, it is no better than Russia or any other tyranny where law is for me but not for thee. This is not how it should work in a supposedly free and lawful country.

That’s how works everywhere

You're downvoted, but it's true. Some places just mask it with fancy processes and manners a bit better.

It’s been working like that in the US for a while.

Do you think the bottom 99% of the country would ever win a legal fight with one of the tech billionaires?

Even if they were 100% in the right, they could just drag out the legal process with endless motions and appeals until the average Joe lacked the funds to continue the fight.

Well I have heard that some people managed to sue some corporations and actually win some cases before.

PFAS case is a rare occurrence, and this is after DuPont knowing the harms and downplaying or ignoring it for decades.

A similar thing has been surfaced in Dalton, Georgia, again about PFAS [0]. Let's see how will it play out...

[0]: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/pfas-forever-chem...

When I said the tech billionaires I meant the actual oligarchs.

Companies will eventually take a cost benefit evaluation and stop fighting if the risk is too high or the fines too large.

A personal billionaire who decides to fuck you over is capable of behaving irrationally and just beating you via resources.

Look at trumps infinite appeal strategy which apparently works.

He only just was forced to pay Jean Carrol a few months ago, four years after he lost his civil case.

If you’re a regular Joe and some billionaire harmed you in a way that hurt your income. You’re not gonna be able to afford 4 years of legal battles.

As long as money buys power in our legal system, you can’t compete with someone with effectively infinite more wealth than you.

No kidding. I dunno what kind of traffic loss Wikipedia has had but SO is really dead these days

If they weren't competing with AI then why is AI killing it?

There's a difference between creating a market for something better, so that nobody wants the old thing, and competing _in_ the market for the old thing by copying it directly.

And what would be a read-only version of X like XCancel compete against, exactly? Ads impressions? That would be the only possible thing yet they don't add any ads.

It's depriving X of impressions that they could monetise, no? Xcancel doesn't have to make money itself, it just has to impair the rights of the copyright holder. Otherwise piracy would also be legal as long as it were non-profit...

> Otherwise piracy would also be legal as long as it were non-profit...

Which is in a few jurisdictions, or at least is not prosecuted if it's for personal use. Also, according to your definition, the creator of uBlock Origin or any other adblock system should be sued in the same way, because they are depriving $ADS_CORP of their precious impressions.

Well, adblockers don't copy the copyrighted content. They just control how it's rendered on the user's machine. Copyright cares about making copies and especially distributing them.

You have a point on this, I recognize, but it still seems a very thin line to walk (for X) - at least morally, because I don't think they are actually loosing real big money to anyone.

X doesnt own msot of those copyrights, except where its elon musk's own posts.

i dont think the actual copyright owners care, given they put their content onto a vaguely public view where they aim to get the most traffic to something else they are doing

Xcancel isn't copying the copyrighted content either. It takes the raw JSON/HTML data from twitter/x via reverse proxy and redisplays it on xcancel, as opposed to twitter/x. How is that copying?

I don't really buy this.

It's like saying "toaster oven/air fryer combos" don't actually compete with toaster ovens or air fryers because they are creating a market for something better

Of course they complete.

Toaster ovens compete with toasters. Microwaves compete with toaster ovens.

Just because it's not the exact same product doesn't mean it's not competing

Would I be allowed to steal LG's designs for a microwave and make a "superwave" that does laundry and heats food? Would you claim those products don't compete because the superwave is "something better"?

It's not illegal to write a similar book or song to an existing one. Copyright only protects existing works from literal copying (possibly in part).

And derivative works, like AI makes

If LLMs only made SO redundant by writing code and solving my technical problems autonomously so I never have to think about it, I would agree. But often I do ask LLMs technical questions, and they answer in great detail. And that part is a very direct SO competitor

If two things are competing, they are in the same market by definition.

> weren't competing with AI then why is AI killing it?

But it is not the AI who is killing it, users are doing it.

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