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Comment by cj | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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

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.

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?

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