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Comment by basilgohar | Hacker News Reader

I think we, as humans (not executives, a different creature altogether if you ask me) make a distinction between a hobbyist hacker, someone doing something for their own curiosity or someone who frees something for others to use freely as well (e.g., F/LOSS licenses, Creative Commons, etc.), vs. someone who uses the "Hacker Ethos" and then promptly builds their own moat where they solely can profit and excludes others from the freedoms they themselves enjoyed.

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No, I think the overwhelming majority of copyrighted material should already be public domain. We should all be free to build on it as we wish. I don't begrudge OpenAI et al. for doing it at all. I begrudge copyright lobbyists for pushing for the rest of us to be unable to do the same. Because my position is consistent instead of being based on whether I like someone.

If it takes giant AI companies to show the extreme economic loss caused by maintaining the copyright farce, and to make it clear that we simply cannot continue to do so or we risk becoming economic vassals, then good. Them flouting the law is a good step toward reforming or dismantling it.

Aside: "it's fine if you're an individual but not if you're large" in this case sounds awfully self-serving. If you truly believe it's "theft" (I don't), then individuals stealing is still wrong. I don't see how that argument doesn't directly excuse e.g. retail theft or other antisocial behavior.

Thank you for putting my views into words better than I could. I apply the same thinking to patents. The enormous economic losses from patent trolls, normal litigation, licensing costs, and hell, general administration costs, it’s insane.

And you’re definitely right about the picking sides thing as well.

> If you truly believe it's "theft" (I don't), then individuals stealing is still wrong.

We as humans are allowed to have nuanced views on complex matters.

If all IP is public domain, why would anyone ever write another book? They won't be able to sell it if it's immediately freely available.

I don't see the word "immediately" in their comment.

People can pay for creation, not rent (i.e. patronage), or one could argue that there's a reasonable tradeoff with like a 5-10 year copyright. I don't think a 2016 or even 2000 book cutoff would materially affect the LLM training discussion. And research runs on government grants, so everything derived from public money is paid for already and should be public domain, meaning there is no knowledge cutoff for science, which is probably the more important area to have cutting edge knowledge.

The old model was designed to split the development costs among all of the readers. Just who is going to write books? Only people with government grants and the rich folks who can self-fund?

Sure, why not? ChatGPT linked me to an 11 year old estimate that public libraries were spending $102 million annually on ebooks[0], and put together a couple numbers to estimate ~$248 million more recently. That sounds plausible to me. Don't authors already sell a pitch to a publishing company? How is it any different to sell a pitch to a grant organization? Or a private crowdfunding organization? We already spend plenty of public money on books, except we don't build that as permanent public wealth.

We should at the very least demand that public money go to public wealth generation. So under the current 100+ year copyright regime, nothing copyrighted.

[0] https://s3.amazonaws.com/WebVault/ebooks/LJSLJ_EbookUsage_Pu...

The old model was that people who enjoyed creating made things. Copyright, starting around 1890, changed that to be about profit above all else. It’s telling that you can’t imagine writing a book if there isn’t the promise of money.

This is not a very fair framing of their point.

If you can’t feed yourself writing then you have to have a job, which means you won’t have nearly as much time (or energy) to write. Writing long form work is a very long, draining process. That’s why it’s a full time career for many.

I’d love to shoot documentaries I care about all the time but if I’m not getting paid it simply isn’t viable.

Sounds like an argument against capitalism rather than intellectual property.

If no one has to work to live, how many would spend time writing instead of working at a job they hate?

Well, did books exist before copyright?

Did digital distribution exist then as well?

Times have changed.

This is a very lazy argument that basically ignores centuries of technological change.

I’ve gotten really sick of people just ignoring how scale changes things.

Well, my apologies. For my part I’ve gotten tired of people handwaving “oh, none of that evidence matters, things are different now”.

But they are demonstrably different. How can AI be so revolutionary and powerful yet also not change things in meaningful ways?

The nature of internet search, which changed incrementally for years, has been upended. That alone is significant. Investment and general speculation has shifted the world economy. It is altering energy policy and infrastructure. These are massive changes.

>"it's fine if you're an individual but not if you're large"

That's not what the GP said, they were referring to someone who "builds their own moat where they solely can profit and excludes others from the freedoms they themselves enjoyed".

I don't want to speak for them but I guess that LLM companies which release exclusively open weights models, or better yet, open weights plus training pipeline sources, would not fall into this category.

I'm all for copyright no longer being a thing. Until that's the case, I don't want the world in which AI companies mass-violate it but individuals still get punished for that.

I want the world in which fanfiction is completely legal and the best of it is sold in bookstores. I want the world in which projects emulating macOS in the cloud, on non-Apple hardware, are widely used and legal. I want the world in which the many video game decompilation and enhancement projects are 100% legal. I want the world where every single creative project someone wants to build that draws upon the work of others is legal.

And until we have that, if AI is going to mass rip off all our work and use it to compete with us, I hope copyright is one of many tools used to burn it to the ground.

Are they even using it to compete with us? There's plenty of people talking here about how it doesn't make any economic sense to run a local LLM. Like, they're providing inference so cheap that even when you have models that are just as good, it still doesn't make sense for you to run it.

Anyway, my point is keep your focus on the actual injustice. The problem is that individuals get punished, not that AI companies don't. Saying we should punish the AI companies is just saying that we should solidify the legitimacy of IP. This is an important moment to say it's clearly insane to keep this going.

You don't say that it's unfair that Snoop Dogg didn't end up in prison forever for his marijuana use, and that we ought to lock him up too; you say it's unfair that other people did.

> Are they even using it to compete with us?

Ask anyone who has ever lost a job in a layoff that cites AI.

The (often stated) goal of AI is to be able to perform any and all human work, and cheaper than any human.

> Saying we should punish the AI companies is just saying that we should solidify the legitimacy of IP.

We are otherwise very likely to end up in a world in which AI companies can do it and individuals can't.

You can already do it yourself now though. The Qwen 32B models are quite capable and can be run on a ~$1400 GPU. I haven't gone through the trouble to set it up myself, but my understanding is image generation workflows are actually state-of-the-art local. i.e. local workflows are much better than the big cloud providers. My family's first computer in the 90s costed more than a modern AI machine nominally. I don't remember people screaming then about how computers were creating a moat that would lock individuals out of the economy despite actually be less affordable in real and nominal terms.

I want you to grab 100 people and tell them to set up LM studio and run a qwen model for anything productive. The average person won’t/can’t do this, especially when a better, faster model is a browser window away and (currently the case) is cheap or even free.

I consider myself pretty tech savvy as a non-engineer and I have to spend a lot of time making a local model actually useful. This feels like how everyone acts like it’s so easy for everyone to just adopt Linux.

If they’re lucky they’ll actually get it running, but good luck doing anything useful with it if you don’t know how to set up tool calls for web search and such. Their eyes will glaze over the moment you talk about MCP servers and api keys.

Models have been useful for actual work for about 10 months now. Do you think no one will come up with the idea of selling an appliance with software preloaded? Like Synology or QNAP, except if it's this disruptive of a market, you can expect Dell, HP, etc. to join in as well.

I did not say the models weren’t useful. I am saying running local models is not turnkey like browser experiences with the big companies and introduces significant friction - and they generally aren’t as fast as good, which is true. Plus it’s a whole skill set to optimize them.

This sounds like a variation of the same problem. Just another form of vendor lock in and exploitation. This is not the same as “running a local model yourself.”

Like you mention synology - they’ve gone the wrong direction the last few years. My employer won’t buy from themfor a reason.

My point is there's apparently a big market here, but it's also new. You didn't have Compaq, Gateway, Dell, Asus, HP, Vaio, Lenovo, Fujitsu, Samsung, Beelink, AOOSTAR, etc. competing in the PC clone market in 1993 yet either. Give it maybe more than a year to develop.

If it's important, I can't see why today's (and tomorrow's) computer vendors wouldn't move into the market. If it's not important, then it's not.

The NAS market is probably small because for most consumers, a single SSD already suffices. But even with that, you can already apparently buy from vendors that sell vanilla TrueNAS preloaded. Just like you can buy OpenWRT routers. Or even open Linux-based retro gaming handhelds designed to mimic a Gameboy Advanced SP. And soon GrapheneOS phones. I assume your employer buys from someone else?

> Are they even using it to compete with us?

Yes. They are literally pitching to investors and businesses that they can fire all of us.

And how's that going to work when they're already today commodified and you can already buy your own personal AI machines to run near SOTA models for a couple thousand dollars? Or buy SOTA from an inference provider for pennies.

If employers fire everyone because AI can just do it, why would somebody pay for their services when AI can just do it? Shouldn't the capital class be even more concerned that now anyone can start a competing knowledge business with no required investment?

We can debate this all day but I’m just telling you what is literally happening right now

It is also what the executives said according to this very submission, but you are still downvoted because people deliberately ignore any anti-AI information.

It is rather frustrating

> Them flouting the law is a good step toward reforming or dismantling it.

I wish I could believe this, but I suspect it's just another instance of the law ceasing to apply to entities whose net worth has enough zeroes in it.

With how much money is sloshing around in the AI industry, there's almost nothing AI companies can do which has any likelihood of resulting in legal accountability. You'll much sooner see laws changed and/or reinterpreted than enforced.

Yeah I’ve never understood that take either. They are not breaking down barriers for us, they are breaking them down for them personally and making sure everyone else is shackled by them.

I too pine for the days when writers/artists/creators depend solely on patrons and the rich show off among each other with their private libraries of books no one else has again. Great times. Much progress.

Cool: an individual ignoring IP for their own purposes or individuals sharing things they own with others

Cringe: Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, or Meta doing the same

None of the later should get to claim 'But we're hackers!' from an ethical standpoint.

They aren't -- they're shareholder-benefiting for-profit corporations (OpenAI obviously included).

Cool: an individual, or an organization, not believing in IP, reading what they want, and sharing what they want.

Cringe: an individual, or an organization, fierce defenders of their own IP and regular DMCA abusers, stealing the IP of others in order to sell it themselves.

There's a lot of twisting you have to do to make these two things the same. These people would happily deliver takedown requests to the original producers of IP if they knew they could get away with it. In fact, they long to.

The “for profit” isn’t even the entire story. The scale of the theft is unprecedented. It’s the combination between stealing everything and only for their profit that makes this impossible to defend.

Yeah. That difference is profit.

Someone ripping a copy of The Odyssey for watching in their own home is a loss of profit for the company's lawyers, and must be punished to the fullest extent of the law.

A company ripping off all of humanity to create profit for their company's lawyers is perfectly fine.

There's nothing magic here. Its money deciding the rules. Like it always has.

Basically. There's a difference between someone getting hunted after by RIAA asshats for downloading an album (people may be interested to look up Steve Albini's views of piracy) and an actual industrial industry of take-content-for-free

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