Our joy and suffering depends on our connection with other people, and being useful to other people has since the dawn of humanity been one of the ways we connect.
Our joy and suffering depends on our ability to fulfil our basic needs like shelter and food, and in current socioeconomic environment that ability intimately depends on the ability to create wealth, which in turn depends on our ability to provide value to others.
I can see both being undermined. What public policies reflecting this do you envision?
There’s a world of difference between people simply “copying websites” and providing tools that, along with other kinds of plagiarism[0], do so at scale while benefitting from that commercially.
Sure, you can do the same thing with people, but it’s 1) time-consuming, 2) expensive, 3) prone to whitleblowers refusing to do the shady thing, 4) prone to any competent and productive person involved quitting to do something worthwhile and more profitable instead.
[0] Mind you, “copying websites” is but a drop in the ocean in the grand scale of things.
If you pee on grass, does that make the dandelion that grows there later artificial? If you plant and grow a potato, is that an artificial potato?
The term “natural” is meaningless when used in ways like on “all natural juice” labels, because the line is arbitrary and suits whatever the argument is (usually by being a fancy substitute for “good”).
There are uses for the term, like in “natural sciences” (as opposed to philosophy, for example). Incidentally, the core limitation of natural sciences is related to the contention of “natural juice”: we are part of nature, and so when it comes to studying some aspects of nature it becomes circular and unproductively self-referential.
The line between ourselves and nature is paradoxical and it is worth pondering why we draw it at all.
Barriers is what makes a community; by definition, if there was truly zero barriers, there would be one ambient global pot. When barriers are eliminated, communities either erect new barriers or die.
The barrier of rejecting LLM content is a basic pre-requisite of any community of humans directly engaging with other humans in good faith.
There are always ways to achieve that: long vetting process and in-person meetings, high membership price, trusted computing verification, etc. It’s an arms race, but you only have to make it not worth it to the attacker.
Therefore, communities will either die, become much less accessible, or delegate human verification arms race to a service—most likely paid solutions provided by the very industry that is providing the products killing those communities[0].
It’s under-appreciated that a proper review takes at least as long as the actual work: it’s all the same time spent understanding the challenge and coming up with the best solution, minus the time spent typing in your solution (almost never a significant amount), plus the time spent understanding their solution and explaining how to get from theirs to yours.
Of course, it could be that dark matter does not exist. In a very real way, nothing in physics “exists” because like all natural sciences physics does not make statements of objective truth, it makes testable predictions.
Dark matter, string theory, aether, etc., those are models that we, at some point in time, think may help us get better predictions and design further experiments. All models turn out to be wrong in the end, but they can be helpful until we come up with better ones.
If you drop the dark matter model, then you would want to have some other model as for why we observe what we observe. Some people find that other available models are even worse than the dark matter one, but if you don’t think so you can take your pick.
If LLMs are just (sometimes) useful statistical generators, there is a problem of them being basically operated tools for creating derivative works commercially at scale. Some tend to paint the above as a non-issue by claiming they are sentient (“a human is allowed to read a book and be inspired by it, so should be LLMs”), but they are clearly have not thought through the implications.
Copyright is what facilitates copyleft. Getting rid of IP protections also rids us of GPL, which gave us a few things including the most popular OS in the world.
It’s one thing to reject the specifics of IP laws as currently implementated; it’s another thing to celebrate the dismantling of the entire foundation of open source by for-profit corporate interests who sought to do it for decades.
RMS on copyright
"This means that copyright no longer fits in with the technology as it used to. Even if the words of copyright law had not changed, they wouldn't have the same effect. Instead of an industrial regulation on publishers controlled by authors, with the benefits set up to go to the public, it is now a restriction on the general public, controlled mainly by the publishers, in the name of the authors.
In other words, it's tyranny. It's intolerable and we can't allow it to continue this way.
As a result of this change, [copyright] is no longer easy to enforce, no longer uncontroversial, and no longer beneficial"
First, if we assume Stallman is human, we have to grant he will not be right about everything (impossible on logical grounds and supported by the fact that he publicly changed his views on certain things in the past).
Second, when it comes to action, he only argues that copyright should have reduced power, which we can all agree with; he does not appear to argue for the death of copyright. Death of copyright would seem counter-productive, unless it also implied the death of corporate ability to withhold the source from the users and many other things.
You will note that the very text you linked to is copyrighted. There’s a reason for that.
Chesterson's fence. The existence of copyleft is the result of being forced to live within the domain of copyright, not the other way around.
> Getting rid of IP protections also rids us of GPL, which gave us a few things including the most popular OS in the world.
Linux became popular because of the persistent effort of Linus & the Linux community into making the kernel better, not because of copyleft.
> It’s one thing to reject the specifics of IP laws as currently implementated; it’s another thing to celebrate the dismantling of the entire foundation of open source by for-profit corporate interests who sought to do it for decades.
There are similar corporate interests who profit off of hoarding decades-old works so they can charge fees to what should've been in the public domain, under the original durations that should've stayed (28/14 years).
What has resulted from the endless extensions of the original terms has been the societal lobotomization of human creativity, with an untold number of works now being forever lost simply because they were derived from what should've been in the public domain.
When having lived in such a society, and recognizing existing copyright laws as the reason why it is creatively in such a state, the celebration of its destruction should not be treated as illogical.
> Linux became popular because of the persistent effort of Linus & the Linux community into making the kernel better, not because of copyleft.
Not at all. It was born thanks to Linus, but it exploded in popularity and gained its contributorship precisely thanks to the promise of GPL that volunteer work will remain for public benefit.
Without the ability to say that, a corporate entity could have taken volunteer work so far, built a closed-source solution on top of it, and ran with it commercially, with no repercussions and with great results.
In fact, we have just that example at hand: Apple. There’s a reason Linux distros are much more popular than BSD, nearly rivaling commercial systems on desktop and far surpassing them in the server world.
> The existence of copyleft is the result of being forced to live within the domain of copyright
Sure, and by that logic the existence of copyright is the result of being forced to live within the current socioeconomic reality.
The existence of copyright hinges on existence of property in general and intellectual property in particular. To eschew that is to propose a stark foundational change to society.
Sure, if we imagine a world where there’s no corporations hiding the source from users, everything belongs to everyone, no one is recognized for their work or has any control over it, etc., we can say that copyright is non-essential. There will be many questions to that reality, of course (for example, what would drive innovation in that world, if not the motivation for recognition and profit), but it has a right to be considered as a thought experiment. It could even be more desirable than the reality we live in!
However, we don’t live in that reality, and what people tend to mean when they propose getting rid of copyright is a half measure—a reality which has nothing in common with the above, which is all the same as now, except with copyright protections removed. Those protections used to be a hindrance to pirates, but now with the advent of LLMs are a massive issue for corporate interests building their new empires on top of our original work.
You yourself then proceed to argue that terms should be limited—as if I would disagree with that!
Our joy and suffering depends on our ability to fulfil our basic needs like shelter and food, and in current socioeconomic environment that ability intimately depends on the ability to create wealth, which in turn depends on our ability to provide value to others.
I can see both being undermined. What public policies reflecting this do you envision?
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