Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sayrus | Hacker News Reader

The torrents you are talking about are outlawed. Whether enforcement is working or not is another issue.

Torrents are legal until someone, at great expense and difficulty, proves otherwise (even then, jurisdiction and content dependent). At which point everyone involved will ignore the fact and carry on. That is a situation with enormous will, lots of money and ongoing enforcement effort to suppress the things.

And compared to torrents abliterated models are more complicated to identify, harder to suppress and there is a lot less reason for anyone to care.

Maybe it would be easiest for everyone if you clarified what country you live in, because abliterated LLM torrents are not "outlawed" in any of the major Internet-using countries that I am aware of.

I think that was the point being made? Outlawing something does nothing if enforcement is not feasible. The music and movie industries didn't crush torrents, they switched business models to streaming with prices being determined mostly by how much hassle was avoided by skipping the torrents.

I think a major difference is that while torrents are illegal, the main people enforcing it are copyright holders. I think the discussion would change if the government would label people who build/use/distribute "illegal" models as terrorists.

Agreed. While the IP mafia (pardon the derogative) has vast influence on legislators and even the executive, it pales in comparison to the "terrorist" and "think of the children" scarecrows.

Aggressive enforcement tactics certainly haven’t won the war on drugs.

No, but if someone is violating those laws, they make it easier to ruin that person's life if so desired

Torrents can't be illegal right now, can they? Maybe in China, but Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, etc all advertise the ability to recieve their ISOs via torrent and even seed the torrent in varying capacities.

Do you really believe that all of these major non-profits are advertising, encouraging, and participating in the use of an illegal network protocol?

Using any network protocol to violate copyright law on the other hand, is and has been illegal. But it's the violation of copyright, not the network protocol.

Saying torrenting is illegal is like saying ftp is illegal.

source:

Outlawed? Only in safetyist dreams

Reply on news.ycombinator.com