Comment by dofm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dofm | Hacker News Reader

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Say you spend a hundred working hours on an ephemeral painting (that is, it won't last, it will fade, disintegrate in nature, can't be moved, etc.). You then have that painting scanned at high resolution, to make a limited series of a dozen very large prints.

Scenario 1: a scalper takes the medium resolution image from your e-commerce website, and slaps it on a series of products they sell for their own profit on Amazon without your permission.

Scenario 2: someone buys one of those prints, scans it to a high resolution, and then makes a series of slightly smaller, high quality prints that they sell for their own profit without your permission.

Is it your contention that both of these things are something that should be allowed and the original artist has no recourse?

Because it seems like your more specific concerns about e.g. disease cures could be addressed by targeted legislation creating new exemptions from intellectual property without destroying the means of protecting income from creative work.

(Scenario 1 has happened to an artist I know, luckily with a piece of non-ephemeral work)

Yes, art has no inherent economic value, and neither does the hundred hours you spent making it.

I am not making a claim that the work has inherent value, am I?

Nor is the artist in this scenario!

They are merely saying that they have made a limited series of objects they wish to assign a price to, if the market will pay.

But if the people who can buy it can sell essentially identical reproductions for whatever price they choose, then its assigned product price tends to zero too.

If you follow your own argument, then what you are saying is that compensation for effort can only come from a one-time contract. But since intellectual work is not then protected by copyright, those contracts are really difficult to write, because the buyer is not getting any unique thing either.

It doesn't take much to get from "there's no such thing as copyright" to demand collapse for almost every industrial product. Would we even have the PC if there was no copyright protection for intellectual work?

You picked the Personal Computer, the product of hacker culture, open architectures (the IBM/Phoenix/Compaq story alone makes your example hilarious), clones, open source, and a software scene so filled with piracy that Bill Gates himself wrote the “Open Letter to Hobbyists”, as your example for why copyright was indispensable? LMFAO

PS: look up the cover of the reissued Lions’ “Commentary on UNIX”

> PS: look up the cover of the reissued Lions’ “Commentary on UNIX”

Hey, weirdly enough, I don't need to, because I have a copy of it that I bought the week it was reissued, during his lifetime, from which AFAIK he made money, as the author?

I know that story and I don't think you really understand, actually, that the Lions book folklore is not actually a story of abusing or invalidating Lions' copyright.

But Bill Gates didn't make the PC. IBM did. And it was not aimed at hacker culture: it was aimed at business, at writers, at publishers, at a knowledge industry that exists only as a result of copyright.

You think the IBM/Phoenix/Compaq story exists outside copyright? All of that is grounded in copyright. Again, PC clones exist because of clean-room techniques, within copyright. Not in ignorance or contravention of it.

Open source licences are all grounded in copyright.

This is just weird gish-galloping of unrelated concepts now.

A gish gallop is attacking the opposing side with a flurry of different arguments, I merely supplied a long list of rebuttals to your assertion we would not have the PC without copyright. I included the IBM mention because I assumed you meant “Personal Computer” not “IBM PC”, as the latter, while vastly important in its own right, is still eclipsed by the PC as a concept. The world would be different without the IBM PC, while the world would be much MUCH poorer without computers in every home and/or pocket. The IBM lineage might be resilient, but we could just as easily have had a (non-Apple) NeXT, Magic Cap, PSION, Be, Amiga, etc descendant as predominant computing platforms instead. And my point with the Lions book, is that it’s emblematic of the control AT&T exerted on Unix, instead of letting it be free, where they (and descendants USL and SCO) attempted but failed to squash an open information revolution (*BSD and Linux) that had been seeded by Unix to begin with.

You're mixing up copyrights and patents.

Also, would we have something more advanced than PCs by now if we weren't hindered by unnatural "ownership" of thoughts?

> You're mixing up copyrights and patents.

I'm not, at all. aeon_ai's original point was "Intellectual property is a myth, as any hacker knows. A world where AI can solve diseases easily, and corporations can find ways to claim ownership over those novel solutions, is not one where we should be encouraging stronger IP laws."

So what I did was mount a straightforward, easy defence of the simplest form of intellectual property, and observe that his concerns about disease cure ownership could be addressed by targeted changes, and not by a world where "intellectual property" is written off as myth.

> Also, would we have something more advanced than PCs by now if we weren't hindered by unnatural "ownership" of thoughts?

No? Why on earth would you think this? Intellectual property protection is the way that you get people to invest in the development of ideas. Almost no groundbreaking ideas in the industrial revolution or later would have happened if their subsequent monetisation was not protected.

It also explicitly doesn't grant "ownership" of thoughts or ideas.

One can make all sorts of arguments that software patents are bad (mostly I think they are), that copyright durations are too long or grant undue protection (I think it's possible that the total protection window is now too long) and that copyright extension law was bogus (most of it was).

But the legal construct of intellectual property is why we have the progress we have already. Will it need changing going forward? If it survives at all, yes.

But if intellectual property does not survive then the alternative is corporate thuggishness of an unimaginable kind.

Your “simple defense” is one that misunderstands the economic value of creative work.

I know an artist who has done well for themselves. They have done so because they have revealed that they know what it is they sell. “I sell paper”

The artist is the source of value. An AI can produce visual media, but it can not be an artist. The artist is not one work, but the source of many arts.

Copyright is the protection of the creative work in a fixed media. It is not the protection of ideas or styles.

My thrust is therefore not that protection of creative work should be abolished, but that the notion of “theft” of ideas and styles is one that is not protected by copyright today, and only serves entrenched corporate interests.

We are either entering a world of hyperliquid culture or tyranny.

Surely the market says otherwise?

Well everywhere I look there’s AI generated images, songs, videos, articles, books, etc. Sure the quality is all over the place, but AI songs are charting /topping Spotify (not all of that is organic I grant), Suno exists, roughly a million other apps and sites to generate content, etc. And we have the article itself bemoaning that authors are losing jobs. Sounds like the market is speaking quite strongly to me.

I would argue that the stuff AI is replacing is not art, it’s mostly advertising. Posters and the like.

But “art has no economic value” is a statement way beyond that. Art collectors pay millions for original works. Copies go for pennies. People pay large sums for live music performances. Broadway and the West End continue to make a lot of money. To me it seems the market indicates that art absolutely has value.

No object, labor, or knowledge has inherent economic value.

Its value is subjective, determined by what the market (i.e., a bunch of humans) will pay for it.

Given the gigantic pile of money that's spent on music, film, and books every year, it's quite clear that there can be large amounts of economic value in a piece of art.

That modern technology makes it easier to take an artist's with with absolutely no recompense, and that many choose to do so regardless of the maker's wishes, does not change that.

It just underlined what's been obvious since the dawn of civilization, that many humans are happy to ignore what other humans want and to enrich themselves at the expense of others.

...which brings us back full circle to the actual article, which is a clear illustration of the OpenAI executive team's conscious choice to do exactly that.

They should be allowed. The author should have an alternate way of being compensated for his work, e.g. patronage, and people who approach the e-commerce site should be able to do a reverse image search to find the print available for free elsewhere.

> e.g. patronage

This is nothing more than an argument that 99% of working interior designers and artists shouldn't get an income.

But it's also an argument that software developers should be paid minimum wage; you just have to work through the consequences of the abandonment of copyright to see software development reduced to day labour.

If that is what you want, you should be honest about it.

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