[HN Gopher] Meta torrented & seeded 81.7 TB dataset containing c...
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Meta torrented & seeded 81.7 TB dataset containing copyrighted data
Author : gameshot911
Score : 1033 points
Date : 2025-02-07 11:26 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| tremarley wrote:
| ebooks are a 1-2 mb each max. 81.7 TB are a lot of books, like
| 42-85 million books.
| thunkingdeep wrote:
| I've got 70-80mb pirated books, I think because of the
| illustrations. Guess it depends on the book.
| mateus1 wrote:
| I don't think they're using picture heavy book for LLM
| training, no?
| moralestapia wrote:
| Yes they do, there's multimodal models.
| mnsu wrote:
| For multi-modal models, why not? They would be probably
| some of the best data.
| michaelt wrote:
| Sometimes the PDF of a book is big because the book's
| packed with important illustrations and charts - like a
| textbook or journal paper.
|
| Other times a PDF of a book is big because someone
| scanned it and didn't have trustworthy OCR, so they
| figured distributing images of text at 1.5 MB per page
| was better than risking OCR errors.
| WithinReason wrote:
| Presumably they didn't create the torrent
| rbanffy wrote:
| Whoever created it has a lot of spare hard disk space.
| RIMR wrote:
| 100TB is like 6 hard drives...
| hulitu wrote:
| > 100TB is like 6 hard drives...
|
| Discounted Seagates ? /s
| rbanffy wrote:
| You can get recertified 18TB drives, but still it's a lot
| of disk space. I simply don't have enough data.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Even if they didn't use the illustration(which isn't clear
| given multimodal models), they'd still make use the text in
| the books.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I don't think they need to be selective. It's not like Meta
| can run out of storage.
| RIMR wrote:
| Just because the LLMs are trained on text doesn't mean that
| images we're a part of what they downloaded.
|
| You clean up the data after you acquire it, not before.
| hulitu wrote:
| Why not ? Do you think that AI doesn't enjoy porn ? /s
| squigz wrote:
| It could be anywhere from a few million to a hundred million
|
| https://annas-archive.org/datasets
| weberer wrote:
| The article says they got datasets from Anna's Archive. It was
| most likely the scihub/libgen torrent which is 96.0 TB right
| now and contains 92,872,581 files. That's about 1 megabyte per
| file.
|
| https://annas-archive.org/datasets
| panki27 wrote:
| They could have at the very least seeded some more, to give
| something back to the, uh, community.
| Havoc wrote:
| Really curious what the judges are going to do here.
|
| Horse has functionally bolted on this already
|
| I'm guessing slap on wrist despite courts going after individual
| for a couple of movies torrented pretty hard
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| Is there any other possible outcome than a fine? That too one
| which will not really affect Meta's overall earnings
| Havoc wrote:
| Ideally we have a conversation about how we as society have
| ended up in a situations where we have a two tier justice
| system.
|
| At a minimum the starting point of discussion here should be
| that if life ruining $80,000 per item is an acceptable fine
| for individuals then why is it not the same for corporations.
| Which would probably get you a number in the trillions at
| which point we could have a discussion about reforming this
| entire system.
|
| But yes realistically slap on wrist is what is going to
| happen here.
| empath75 wrote:
| The reality of the situation is that the economic value and
| utility of AI is going to cause the laws to be restructured
| around them.
| mnsu wrote:
| So according to some AI, the damages awarded per infringed work
| is ~$750 minimum in the US. 80TB of books, each let's say 10MB on
| average, would be 8 million works. So Meta should pay 6 billion
| USD for their copyright infringement?
| oersted wrote:
| Nice calculation, that's actually quite doable for them, they
| have already been paying similar fines for a while.
| gorbachev wrote:
| Minimum doesn't cover willful copyright infractions, for which
| maximum penalty is $150K per work. That comes out to quite a
| different number.
| timeon wrote:
| Prosecutors filed for Swartz 50 years of imprisonment and $1
| million in fines.
|
| Can you calculate how many years that would be for Mark and his
| people?
| qup wrote:
| I ran it, it came out to zero
| bmsleight_ wrote:
| So if I torrented and seeded, I would be doing it for my own
| entertainment, not commercially. I expect big copy-write holders
| to come after myself. If Meta does it - I guess they have better
| lawyers ?
|
| Could make interesting case law.
| unification_fan wrote:
| > Could make interesting case law.
|
| Yeah, to perpetuate this system where only those who can afford
| lawyers get to benefit
| echoangle wrote:
| Since it's case law, everyone would benefit from the
| precedent
| timeon wrote:
| There already is precedent with cases like Aaron Swartz.
| echoangle wrote:
| No there's not, he killed himself before there was a
| decision. That doesn't create precedent.
| passwordoops wrote:
| Eye for an eye. Meta losses rights to 81.7 TB of IP. Transcribed
| into a text file
| cma wrote:
| Meta already does that to themselves every year or so, deleting
| all internal communications.
|
| They've thrown away a huge amount of communication to source
| code commit reinforcement training data as a result. They do it
| to avoid emails making it into trials like this.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > Meta already does that to themselves every year or so,
| deleting all internal communications.
|
| Aren't they obligated by law to keep all internal
| communication?
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Yes, they are. But I can imagine the fine/impact for this
| being much, much lower than the consequences of all their
| nefarious communication being used in trials.
| cma wrote:
| When there is a specific order after proceeding starts, but
| not before. There can sometimes be other orders as part of
| govt settlements like Google was recently accused of
| violating.
|
| You may be thinking of certain financial institutions where
| it is a hard requirement, and maybe there are some other
| regulated industries too that have it.
| immibis wrote:
| Companies often don't do what they're obligated to. As long
| as they can keep plausible deniability.
| zaik wrote:
| No large company will ever consider training a public LLM on
| all their internal communications.
| cma wrote:
| Could be a private finetune, or even a complete private
| model. They already have one for their internal codebase.
| openplatypus wrote:
| Something tells me uncle Donald will exonerate his new favourite
| lapdog from any criminal or civil liability.
| Terr_ wrote:
| IANAL but the pardon power (A) only extends to criminal
| punishments, not civil liabilities and (B) copyright lawsuits
| can be launched by anybody, not just the Department of Justice.
|
| So, barring further Might Makes Right shit--which I'm not
| willing to fully rule out--Trump can't fully shield Zuckerberg
| et al.
| ksynwa wrote:
| A good chance for federal prosectutors to "send a message" as
| they did with Aaron Swartz but I don't see things going that way.
| courseofaction wrote:
| Even after JSTOR declined to press charges in that case.
| Despicable. The US has dug the hole it's going down.
| acomjean wrote:
| If you were wondering why meta was making a lot of donations to
| the new government (including settling a lawsuit for 25 million
| with the New president, 1 million to the inauguration).... I
| suspect there will be no federeal charges.
|
| The rules have always seemed different for corporations
| regardless.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-settles-lawsuit-meta-m...
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Before I decided my opinion on this I need to know their ratio.
| adamsocrat wrote:
| Article states: Meta also allegedly modified settings "so that
| the smallest amount of seeding possible could occur"
| MaKey wrote:
| Damn leechers!
| moffkalast wrote:
| The jury of their peers finds them guilty!
| malfist wrote:
| Big tech taking and not giving back, where have I heard this
| before?
| RobotToaster wrote:
| In that case, throw the book at them.
| nyoomboom wrote:
| Remembering Aaron Swartz in this moment
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Which was arguably more innocent -- scientific papers.
| piyuv wrote:
| Meta is not "innocent", and comparing this instance with
| Swartz is a huge offense to his legacy.
| Philpax wrote:
| I don't think you've read the parent comment correctly?
| piyuv wrote:
| Parent comment implies Swartz was guilty of some degree.
| I vehemently disagree with that.
| aruametello wrote:
| > Parent comment implies Swartz was guilty of some degree
|
| as a constructive criticism, you might want to reconsider
| your interpretation of
|
| >"Remembering Aaron Swartz in this moment" -> Which was
| arguably more innocent -- scientific papers.
|
| As in, both hold some degree of illegality (objectively),
| so when pointed that "he is guilty of some degree" is due
| to the jurisdiction laws (broken or not) regardless of
| societal/moral values that the context may apply.
|
| perhaps a better answer would be to point that he
| shouldn't be punished for those actions.
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| You're quoting a different user
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > As in, both hold some degree of illegality
| (objectively)
|
| What did Aaron Swartz do that was illegal?
| maverwa wrote:
| I think comparing it is reasonable and valid. Equaling it
| would be incorrect. What Meta is (allegedly, likely) doing
| here is several orders of magnitude worse, in scale and
| intention. I'd say both ethical and probably juristical.
|
| But just because the scale and intention are different,
| does not mean we cannot compare both cases. They are not
| equal, far from it. But they are compareable.
| qup wrote:
| Would Aaron have preferred us to download the material and
| train the AI?
| gameshot911 wrote:
| Beyond illegal downloading and distribution of copyrighted
| content, the article also describes how Meta staff seemingly lied
| about it in depositions (including, potentially, Mark Zuckerberg
| himself).
| malfist wrote:
| Huh, a big tech CEO lied to us?
|
| Flippant response I know, but too many people worship at the
| alter of the job creater and believe these folks are moral
| upstanding citizens
| gizmo wrote:
| Based on the encyclopedic knowledge LLMs have of written works I
| assume all parties did the same. But I think there is a broader
| point to make here. Youtube was initially a ghost town (it
| started as a dating site) and it only got traction once people
| started uploading copyrighted TV shows to it. Google itself got
| big by indexing other people's data without compensation.
| Spotify's music library was also pirated in the early days. The
| contracts with the music labels came later. GPL violations by
| commercial products fits the theme also.
|
| Companies aggressively protect their own intellectual property
| but have no qualms about violating the IP rights of others.
| Companies. Individuals have no such privilege. If you plug a
| laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers
| you forfeit your life.
| newsclues wrote:
| Comprehensive intellectual property needs to happen for the
| modern (digital) era.
|
| Basically the entire legal system needs to be retooled and
| rethought for computers.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Looks like the entire legal system is being retooled at the
| moment.
| threeseed wrote:
| No we just need to enforce the existing laws.
|
| And the legal system is for humans not computers.
| newsclues wrote:
| The existing laws are a problem, and are not enforced in a
| fair and just manner.
|
| Yes, the legal system is for humans, but we can use
| technology to improve the system for humans, so it's
| faster, better and more fair, because humans aren't
| perfect, and now we have technology to be better than the
| system create a long time ago. You don't think the legal
| system should run on pens and paper right? Adapting to
| typewriters, was a benifit to the system?
|
| Well, video on demand, live streaming, and things like LLMs
| can also make the system better for humans.
| nottorp wrote:
| Aren't all LLMs based on models published by the big two
| or three, so built on IP theft and if you're using them
| you are guilty of handling stolen goods?
| newsclues wrote:
| that's the point.
| Qwertious wrote:
| Plenty of the existing laws are insane and indefensible.
| Copyright duration of _life of the author plus 70 years_?
| Patents on videogame mechanics?
|
| We need to both reform the laws _and_ enforce them.
| Otherwise...
|
| >The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and
| poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets,
| and to steal bread.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| Pantents on video game mechanics... oh how I wish this
| weren't true. I would love a first person adventure game
| with the best mechanics and controls taken from genres
| that did that mechanics very well.
|
| The one that always comes to mind for me is the boxing
| controls from Fight Night games. It pains me a little
| every time I play a game where pugilistic battles come
| down to smash 1 or 2 buttons.
| pbh101 wrote:
| > Google itself got big by indexing other people's data without
| compensation
|
| Weird framing given how much value was and is still placed on
| Google driving traffic to you
| joshstrange wrote:
| Even before the LLM-craze Google was showing their Answers
| box or whatever it was called at the top of the results that
| told you the answer (sometimes) so that you didn't have to
| visit any website.
| mrkeen wrote:
| For Google's case the order was reversed.
|
| Google used to send customers to your site. Now they try to
| show you the information on their site so that the customer
| doesn't need to go to your site.
| sitkack wrote:
| Unless your site is an SEO cesspool serving THEIR ads, then
| you do end up there.
| ysofunny wrote:
| the english empire once tried to mantain a monopoly over steam
| loom machines
|
| the americans cheated their way to competition,
|
| heck, even before that, the english empire got jumpstarted by
| stealing gold from the spanish (who were themselves exploiting
| it away from aztec and other mexican natives)
|
| I'm saying it's business as usual, but also, culture doesn't
| work like tangible physical widgets so we must stop letting a
| few steal this boon of digital copying by means of silly ideas
| like DRM, copyright, patents. all means to cause scarcity
| choult wrote:
| Hollywood became popular for filmmaking because they were
| literally the opposite side of the country from Thomas Edison
| and his patents...
| anotherhue wrote:
| That and the predictable weather (old film needs lots of
| light).
| kristianp wrote:
| This is interesting, is it really true?
| miltonlost wrote:
| People criming in the past is not an excuse for companies
| committing crimes today. You're excusing lawlessness.
|
| Cain killed Abel and got away with it!! I can kill someone
| today too!!!
| appreciatorBus wrote:
| I think it's fine to criticize the hypocrisy of viciously
| defending the copyrights you own, while gleefully running
| roughshod over the ones you don't.
|
| But it's also possible that copyright as a concept, or in
| its current implementation, is bad and unjust.
|
| I'm sure some copyright holders would like nothing more
| than to see an argument that elevates copyright violation
| to the level of murder, morally or legally. But I think
| it's more akin to jaywalking - violating an unjust law that
| mostly shouldn't exist.
| CptFribble wrote:
| the reform needs to happen at the layer where whether a
| copyright is valid or not is decided upon, not before (at
| the point of "should copyright exist") and not after
| (enforcement).
|
| a world without copyright means those with the largest
| advertising budgets will reap nearly all the rewards from
| new IP created by small artists. BigCorp Inc. can just
| sit around and wait for talented musicians to post
| something interesting on soundcloud, for example, then
| just have their in-house people copy it and push it out
| to radio and streaming platforms via their massive ad
| budgets and favorable relationships for getting new
| material onto the waves immediately. meanwhile the
| original artist gets nothing.
|
| the position of advocating against all copyright
| protections at all only makes sense for people who are
| already wealthy enough that they don't need proceeds from
| their art to survive.
| brookst wrote:
| I don't think this is true. At least in music, bands make
| far more money from touring and merch than they do from
| music sales.
|
| If copyright disappeared altogether, most smaller artists
| would be just fine because they have loyal fans and
| adjacent monetization strategies.
|
| See: Grateful Dead. They did just fine despite
| _encouraging_ infringement of IP.
|
| IMO copyright mostly serves to protect the very biggest
| artists and companies, not the small ones.
| gmokki wrote:
| I think the point was that the big corporations get the
| money from selling music.
|
| And saying that bands currently make more money from
| touring kind of proves the point. They get too low % cut
| of music sales.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| But the point of the response is that "getting money from
| selling music" is, in digital era, artificial scarcity.
| I.e. the copyright laws that big corporations are
| lobbying for continued enforcement and tightening, are
| the very thing that create this artificial scarcity that
| they are best positioned to profit off.
|
| Cut out copyright, and _no one_ will be getting any money
| from selling music per copy (or equivalent) - _as it
| should be_.
| CptFribble wrote:
| digital music is not artificial scarcity, because it's
| not the copied bits that are the resource, it's
| attention. we only have so much time and attention for
| consuming media, and only so much attention and memory
| space in our brains for keeping track of where to find
| it. large budgets can easily dominate these channels and
| limit the average person's apparent choice.
|
| this is what I mean when large players would outcompete
| smaller players in a digital marketplace with no
| copyright. the only way for this to work would be with a
| benevolent neutral 3rd party managing the marketplace,
| like Steam, so users can easily see when a large player
| is cloning a smaller players work - but even then it
| still depends on the good will of the general public to
| prefer the "original" artist which is not guaranteed.
| appreciatorBus wrote:
| > the position of advocating against all copyright
| protections at all only makes sense for people who are
| already wealthy enough that they don't need proceeds from
| their art to survive.
|
| This makes it sound like the majority of people produce
| more content than they consume.
|
| The reality is that 99.99999% of people do not produce
| "art", let alone with the intention of living of it.
|
| Whatever harms you might envision for the tiny minority
| who do want to try living off copyright, those concerns
| are dwarfed by the benefits for the rest of us.
|
| Further, not many people who are serious about reform are
| literally "advocating against all copyright" A reform
| that simply curbed the duration to something less insane
| than 150 years would resolve much of what makes copyright
| bad, even if it continued to exist.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Cain was severely punished.
|
| v@`at'ah arv'r at'ah minhaadamah asher p'ats@tah etp'iyha
| laqakhat etd'@mey akhiyka miy'adeka: Therefore, you shall
| be more cursed than the ground, which opened its mouth to
| receive your brother's blood from your hand.
|
| https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.4.12
| miltonlost wrote:
| Jack the Ripper killed people and got away with it!!!
| Happy?
| fortran77 wrote:
| Better! Thanks.
| roenxi wrote:
| But the crime is creating something new. If laws are
| enforced that criminalise creation, then the world will be
| rather static.
|
| It seems to be a consistent direction of history's arc that
| the people who make it easy to create and innovate get
| ahead.
| miltonlost wrote:
| We don't allow indiscriminate human experimentation in
| medicine. We have crimes against this, and yet we still
| have new medicines. Sure, it won't be as quick if we
| could just use humans as test subjects from the start,
| but that's an unethical line. Innovation done immorally
| is progress that shouldn't have been made. The ends don't
| justify the means, but I'm not an ethical nihilist.
|
| The crime is downloading and copying and distributing
| copyrighted materials! Not creating the LLM! Get the
| crime right
| roenxi wrote:
| Those medical policies have condemned thousands, possibly
| millions, to lives of unnecessary pain and suffering.
| They're more damaging than copyright.
| miltonlost wrote:
| Ok, I'll go tell the Nazis that their medical experiments
| using live humans were A-OK!!!
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| You actually don't know that. The question would be, what
| proportion of human experiments are successful, and you
| don't know the answer to that question, so the victims of
| experiments could dwarf the beneficiaries of successful
| research. That's always the hard thing with basic
| utilitarianism.
| portaouflop wrote:
| Why do I get sued when I share some BitTorrents but $bigcorp
| can just do it with 1000 scale without problems?
|
| The issue here is not copyright/patents/etc - the issue is
| that the law is applied selectively -- the issue is that
| Aaron Schwartz is dead for sharing knowledge with the public
| and Zuccborg is a billionaire building his torment nexus
| brookst wrote:
| I mean this news broke today. It may be premature to
| declare that nobody will sue Meta. In fact I would
| cheerfully bet that someone will, and that they will spend
| more in defense/settlement than any 1000 individuals would.
| nottorp wrote:
| Interesting, if we're to trust what NotOpenAI and Facebook
| say about their IP, the US should pay the UK reparations for
| IP theft based on textile industry profits starting in the
| 1850s until today?
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I don't think I've heard the term "English empire". Is it an
| attempt by the Scottish to pretend they weren't involved?
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Just like Austria's greatest historical accomplishment:
| convincing the world the Hitler was German
| nkozyra wrote:
| I was assuming they were talking about pre-1706 given the
| Spanish gold context.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| Is this an attempt to imply the Scots had imperial
| ambitions and have not been fighting to keep their homes
| free of invasion for several thousand years?
|
| Fuck this sounds familiar right now
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| >Is this an attempt to imply the Scots had imperial
| ambitions and have not been fighting to keep their homes
| free of invasion for several thousand years?
|
| Obviously yes. Who have they been fighting to avoid
| invasion exactly?
|
| >Fuck this sounds familiar right now
|
| Maybe you read it in a history textbook.
| m4rtink wrote:
| The textile industry in Brno here in Czech Republic
| (sometimes called "Moravian Manchester") was hugely helped by
| a local noble posing as a worker in England & the smuggling
| detailed self-drawn plans of industrial machinery back:
|
| "Brno's fortunes were changed forever when a young freemason
| called Franz Hugo Salma set out for England in 1801. He
| intended to steal the plans for the most modern textile
| machinery in the world. His crime, the first recorded act of
| industrial espionage, boosted the competitiveness of Moravian
| textiles. Soon after smuggling the plans out disguised as a
| worker, and handing them over to Brno's fledgling textile
| industry, Brno became the most important textile centre in
| the Habsburg empire."
|
| You can even go see some of the original plans in a museum:
|
| "Eleven designs are still preserved in the library of the
| Rajec chateau. They form a unique set of documents
| demonstrating both the level of wool processing technology at
| the turn of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as well
| as the aims and means of the relatively rare business of
| industrial espionage at that time."
|
| https://www.gotobrno.cz/en/brno-phenomenon/this-is-brno-
| kate... https://www.gotobrno.cz/en/place/salm-reifferscheidt-
| palace/
| illegalmemory wrote:
| " If you plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some
| scientific papers you forfeit your life."
|
| This is exactly what I immediately thought while reading the
| article. It almost feels like the legal system only punishes
| general public, while most of these guys are above it.
| G_o_D wrote:
| Money speaks ! Money buys !
| rahton wrote:
| The legal system is built to favor large corps and capital
| owners. See Katharina Pistor books for instance.
| cheschire wrote:
| I think it's the other way around. Those large entities
| break all the same laws and rules as others and then get to
| the point where they can influence the creation of a
| regulatory moat around themselves to prevent competitors
| from taking the same path as them.
| ttoinou wrote:
| True but lets take examples one by one to see what we can
| learn : Spotify was doing illegal things until they made
| a deal to become legal and not to be trialed over what
| they done. Seems like business deals is what saved them,
| not regulatory capture (the regulations around IP for
| music pre existed Spotify)
| cheschire wrote:
| Sure that is what saved them initially, but following
| that early 2010's period of hemorrhaging money and
| eventual recovery, then they started digging that moat.
|
| https://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/spotify-
| washington-lo...
|
| https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-
| lobbying/clients/issues?...
| ttoinou wrote:
| Very interesting thank you for the links. I'm not
| knowledgeable in the Music Modernization Act, but maybe
| some of this lobbying is to avoid being sued rather than
| building legal long term moat
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Same would be the case for YouTube. Google case was
| different in that AFAIK there wasn't any obvious legal
| problem with indexing, and, back then, they were actually
| doing everyone a favor.
|
| Hardly anyone had any issue with Google search until the
| time when news media screwed themselves over by going all
| in on ads, overdoing it, then trying to bring back the
| paywall, only to realize no one is actually browsing
| their sites but instead relies on Google to find specific
| articles. All kinds of legal and technical nonsense
| started happening (and then Google improved the blurbs
| under search results and added the "answer box", leading
| publishers big and small to collectively lose their
| minds...).
| nayuki wrote:
| And then news media in Canada got even worse a few years
| ago. They demanded the government make a law so that when
| Google or Facebook even _links_ to an article, they must
| pay the news org. Google decided to pay the link tax.
| Facebook decided to block all news links. From talking to
| people, most think that Facebook is the villain, in
| reality it 's the news orgs in collusion with state
| power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_News_Act ,
| https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/charter-
| charte/c18_...
| gardnr wrote:
| Then Facebook complied with the new law which had
| negative outcomes for Canadians. The politicians then
| blamed Facebook for the negative outcomes:
| https://www.wired.com/story/meta-facebook-instagram-news-
| blo...
|
| I do believe that large companies should be taxed to help
| improve society. This law was not the right way to do it.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I guess I sort of understand where this idea comes from,
| and when I was young I was totally into it, but now being
| in the corporate world for a decade and having my own
| small business, I just don't really see it anymore.
|
| Big corps tend to be extremely conscientious of the the
| law. The law may not be ideal, but they tend to be hyper
| aware of it and have lawyers to ensure it. Small
| companies on the other hand are the wild fucking west,
| and tend to be overflowing with "turn a blind eye to
| that".
|
| What big corps love is regulation that is expensive for
| small shops to overcome. They can drop $500k on a product
| cert no problem, be legally in the clear (and graciously
| compliant!), while making it near impossible for small
| guys to compete.
| isaacremuant wrote:
| It doesn't "seem". The entire system in most countries works,
| by design, that way because the people in power trade in
| influence at a different plane.
|
| That's why democracy often feels "failed" in that no change
| can be achieved because "it's just more of the same". Few
| Lobbyists representing the interests of a few people have
| more power than millions voting differently.
| vladms wrote:
| What happens in US right now shows that change is achieved
| through voting. There are other examples as well in Europe
| where things did change because of how people voted. If the
| change is good or bad depends on your perspective.
|
| For me the annoying part is that people vote for a guy
| because of a couple heavily advertised issues, ignoring all
| the other plans or the fact that he might not keep his
| word. Then they are unhappy that things "fail" for them.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| It's unclear yet whether anything will really change. It
| is a perfect example though of how the rich are above the
| law.
| daedrdev wrote:
| USAID has already been shut down
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| What I mean is that people are going to sue, and they
| will go to the courts. It's unclear how much will really
| stick.
| brookst wrote:
| I like your optimistic take. My more cynical one is that
| what's happening in the US shows that real change is
| achieved through corruption and lying: honest policy
| discussions and iterative improvement stand no chance
| against a charismatic populist who will say anything to
| entrench an oligarchy.
| vladms wrote:
| It's not primarily optimistic. I just think that
| education of the people can bring the best improvement on
| the long run, and not adjusting democracy, demonizing
| rich guys or another "new" system.
|
| While I hope iterative improvement is the way, I think
| there are people that have it (or feel) so bad (due to
| various reasons) that they would take a 50% chance to die
| for the chance to live better.
|
| The charismatic populists are not supported only by
| people that are well off, without any worry (neither in
| US, nor in Europe). (ex:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1535295/presidential-
| ele...)
| isaacremuant wrote:
| Yes. US and places where people can elect a democracy
| have a higher chance of some change than European
| countries with parliamentary systems where a sudden
| populist candidate won't make it through that system.
|
| I'd argue that, even if some change does happen in the
| US. Most change (see healthcare, military spending, etc)
| won't happen because big money will beat the majority of
| the populace every time.
| veggieroll wrote:
| Wilhoit's law:
|
| > There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not
| bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not
| protect.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Is that a prescriptive or descriptive law?
| qup wrote:
| He left out part of the quote, which is misappropriated
| as well. Wikipedia:
|
| > This quotation is often incorrectly attributed to
| Francis M. Wilhoit:
|
| > _Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to
| wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but
| does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds
| but does not protect._
|
| > However, it was actually a 2018 blog response by
| 59-year-old Ohio composer Frank Wilhoit, years after
| Francis Wilhoit's death.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_M._Wilhoit
| diogocp wrote:
| A restatement of Orwell's "all animals are equal, but
| some are more equal than others".
|
| The irony must have been lost on him.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Lol, that's clearly a descriptive law/maxim not an actual
| law.
| jamesbfb wrote:
| RIP Aaron
| rchaud wrote:
| Airbnb and Uber have showed us that laws matter only to the
| extent that the political will to enforce them exists. Throw
| enough lawyers and lobbying money at the problem and the laws
| can simply be re-written to be friendlier to your business
| model.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| The reason there was no political will to punish Airbnb and
| Uber for violating the law was that initially they were
| subsidized with VC money and so were able to undercut
| traditional hotels and taxis on price. In the world of
| tradable goods, pricing below cost with the intent of
| putting competition out of business so you can raise prices
| later is known as "dumping" and is itself illegal.
| buran77 wrote:
| The reason is that everyone who was supposed to do
| something about it was "subsidized with VC money".
| grepfru_it wrote:
| Or in Ubers case, used to actively hinder those doing the
| investigation
| mapt wrote:
| Is it? Really?
|
| Or is it just "illegal" for an overseas competitor to a
| domestic industry, in trade disputes?
|
| What is the fine? How many days in jail does the company
| spend? What portion is its stock diluted by?
|
| We remember the tale of Jeff Bezouis the Wise, who
| tragically lost his company when he decided he didn't
| want to buy diapers.com at the offered price, and instead
| wanted to dump 200 million dollars into selling diapers
| well below cost until their site folded.
| hammock wrote:
| You're right. Dumping refers to international trade. I
| believe parent commenter was thinking of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing
| hylaride wrote:
| The traditional taxi industry was rife with corruption,
| bad experiences, and poor service in many jurisdictions
| before uber/lyft. As terrible of a human being that I
| think Travis Kalanick is, it was only going to take
| lawbreaking to overcome such a tainted system.
|
| Medallion systems often prevented any competition,
| sometimes to absurd effect. The number of licenced taxis
| often didn't keep pace with population growth, sometimes
| even staying flat. Many drivers didn't own their own
| medallians then had to rent from owners, often making
| little money. In my city (Toronto) cabs were often dirty,
| broken, refused short distance fares (illegal) and
| smelled of cigarette smoke that was obviously from the
| driver.
|
| Examples (paywalls, but you get the idea):
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/26/nyregion/amid-a-
| heritage-...
|
| https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-
| drive/adventure/red-li...
| slices wrote:
| I've never been a huge user of either, but my worst Uber
| ride was much better than my best taxi ride.
| ses1984 wrote:
| The last time I dragged my family into a taxi because of
| my anti Uber ideology, the driver stank to hell of body
| odor, asked me to input directions on his phone covered
| with dried snot from him sneezing with his mouth open, he
| drove dangerously under the speed limit on the freeway,
| and it took twice as long to get home as normal.
|
| But at least I didn't give Uber any money...
| jamespo wrote:
| Strange, my last Uber driver had BO. Normally they are
| fine however.
| derektank wrote:
| I'm immediately reminded of the Slavoj Zizek quote,
|
| "I already am eating from the trashcan all the time. The
| name of this trashcan is ideology"
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It sucked, but not everywhere equally. Meanwhile, Uber
| rode their one-trick pony (an app), which everyone
| quickly replicated, all the way to upending taxi
| businesses _worldwide_ , thanks to their infinite money
| supply letting them survive long enough in any new market
| to get the public behind them, which took away support
| from local regulators trying to keep the market from
| being gutted by what at this point was a multinational
| corporation (and technically a _criminal enterprise_ ).
|
| Sure, taxi services aren't usually known to be paragons
| of virtue, but then they weren't _that_ bad everywhere;
| Uber is just another case of an US org trying to address
| an US-specific problem and then bludgeoning the entire
| world with their solution, whether the rest of the planet
| has such problems or not.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| That seems a little dramatic. They never forced anyone to
| take an uber right? If taxis were so amazing in other
| countries why would anyone be interested in switching to
| uber?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Uber was able to subsidize prices, that's why.
| theshackleford wrote:
| > It sucked, but not everywhere equally.
|
| Ok, but "everywhere" isn't my problem. They sucked
| _everywhere_ I had to use one which is my problem.
|
| > they weren't that bad everywhere
|
| They were beyond a joke where I am from, which is not the
| US. Even today, they remain a worse option.
|
| > US specific problem
|
| There was nothing US specific about it.
| nayuki wrote:
| Moreover, I believe Uber fundamentally solved two
| problems with taxis:
|
| The driver can't scam the passenger. The driver can't set
| the meter wrong, drive an unnecessarily long route, or
| just be an outright unlicensed taxi. Instead, the driver
| maintains a relationship with Uber, and the passenger can
| preview the fare before committing.
|
| The passenger can't scam the driver. In a traditional
| taxi, you could theoretically just walk out ("dine and
| dash" style). The passenger can also make a call to
| dispatch and not show up for the ride. Instead, the
| passenger maintains a relationship with Uber, and the
| driver doesn't need to handle any payments.
|
| > Medallion systems often prevented any competition,
| sometimes to absurd effect. The number of licenced taxis
| often didn't keep pace with population growth, sometimes
| even staying flat.
|
| And thus medallion owners collect economic rent on their
| artificially scarce resource, distorting the free market.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent
| cratermoon wrote:
| > The driver can't scam the passenger
|
| > The passenger can't scam the driver.
|
| Progress! Uber scams both passenger _and_ driver. Hooray
| for Free Markets(tm)!
| umanwizard wrote:
| Under what definition of "scam" is that the case?
| cratermoon wrote:
| https://locusmag.com/2024/05/cory-doctorow-no-one-is-the-
| ens...
| nayuki wrote:
| > Uber scams both passenger and driver.
|
| Then why do people keep using it? It seems like a pretty
| transactional relationship to me. If drivers aren't
| getting paid as much as they wanted, they should find
| another job with a higher price. If passengers are paying
| more than they wanted, then they should find another way
| to call a taxi with a lower price.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > they should find another way to call a taxi with a
| lower price.
|
| like what? Uber's business plan was always about
| eliminating competition. The company successfully did so
| by undercutting prices, only to jack them up when they
| had the market to themselves. There is no Free Market
| Fairy way to fix that.
| andrewaylett wrote:
| Meanwhile, in places with sensible rules about taxis and
| private hire, the only thing that Uber did was make it
| easier for people to break the rules. And rack up an
| enormous tax bill that they somehow believed they'd be
| able to get out of paying.
|
| https://www.londonreconnections.com/2021/uber-loses-
| appeal-a...
| harrison_clarke wrote:
| in my experience, taxi quality varies wildly depending on
| where you are
|
| in bay area, it absolutely makes sense to invent uber,
| because the taxis were awful. and in vancouver (canada),
| they're also awful, and deserve the disruption: they
| would often tell you it'd be a 40 minute wait, and then
| just not show up
|
| taxis in new york were and continue to be totally fine.
| you just stand outside and get in ~20 seconds later, with
| no hassles or apps. i've been in an uber/lyft a handful
| of times in nyc, but they're just worse (possibly
| cheaper, but the subway also gives them stiff
| competition, and i don't care that much if i'm in enough
| of a hurry to take a cab)
| selectodude wrote:
| >taxis in new york were and continue to be totally fine.
| you just stand outside and get in ~20 seconds later, with
| no hassles or apps
|
| Unless you weren't white, or you wanted to leave
| Manhattan (or even go north of 96th street). Otherwise,
| yeah I guess they were okay.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > taxis in new york were and continue to be totally fine.
| you just stand outside and get in ~20 seconds later, with
| no hassles or apps.
|
| This is only true in a small subset of New York.
| avidiax wrote:
| Vancouver was a great example of the corruption inherent
| in monopolies. Vancouver had neither Lyft nor Uber until
| 2020. I heard (internally, when I used to work for Uber)
| that the reason is that some politicians there had a
| personal stake in the taxis, so they got a $50 minimum
| fare passed for all booked rides.
|
| The thing that Uber and Lyft really provided was a
| surveillance economy to keep both the drivers and riders
| somewhat in-line. Without it, every ride is an almost
| anonymous one-shot transaction with almost no recourse on
| one side, so the game theory suggests that service only
| has to be good enough that the police aren't called.
|
| https://www.urbanyvr.com/uber-lyft-vancouver-launches/
| _heimdall wrote:
| Speed had a lot to do with this as well.
|
| VC funding allowed them to move quickly enough that they
| got to a scale where they could afford legal and lobbying
| protection when challenges eventually happened.
| johnebgd wrote:
| I rooted for Uber to smash the Taxi cartels. Let us not
| forget that Taxi Cartels were also insidious beasts. Taxi
| drivers abused their walled garden with their price
| gouging by taking longer routes, refusal to take a credit
| card, and extremely poorly maintained fleets of vehicles.
| I have had mostly good experiences with Uber, whereas I
| had experiences that mostly bordered on general
| condescension toward me whenever I took a ride in a Taxi.
| I am glad the political will to block Uber never
| materialized.
| walrus01 wrote:
| What's interesting is that in many cities now, Uber and
| Lyft are in fact _more expensive_ than taxis. And the
| experience is equally mediocre. The pendulum has swung
| back the other way. The only thing they have going for
| them now is the app based convenience, which is eroding
| as more "yellow cab" type traditional taxis band
| together and get set up with their own sort of city-
| specific app.
| gardnr wrote:
| I remember calling a taxi 3 hours before my flight to get
| to SFO. After an hour and four different phone calls to
| the taxi company, I took BART and barely made it before
| the counter closed.
|
| The feedback system incentivizes drivers and riders to
| behave.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| This is getting off-topic, but I am curious, why didn't
| you go with BART in the first place? If you had an hour
| to call the taxi company and still arrive in time,
| presumably, you had more than enough time.
|
| I know there are reasons for not going with public
| transport, but preferring to take a taxi/uber when a
| train line can get you there in time maybe has more to
| say about public transport than about taxis. Well
| functioning rail is typically one of the most effective
| and reliable way of getting to an airport, and often much
| cheaper than taxis.
| godot wrote:
| Not OP but many many reasons. If you have the money and
| you prefer comfort (and/or have kids along) taking a
| taxi/uber/etc. is much more preferable than dragging
| several (probably heavy) luggages up and down platforms
| (elevators may or may not work), walking long paths, etc.
| especially when you consider the alternative is simply
| putting luggages in a trunk, sit down and relax, and most
| likely get there faster. And all of this is before we
| even talk about any safety issues with BART.
| rangestransform wrote:
| I refuse to take public transit with a checked bag until
| the NYC subway has 99.9% escalator uptime and escalators
| at every station, realistically possible with redundant
| escalators. We will never have nice things as long as we
| let the trade unions bend us over
| ryandrake wrote:
| I've waited an hour for a Lyft while driver after driver
| accepted then canceled the ride. Ridesharing does not
| have great reliability either.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| The price people are willing to pay sets how nice a cab
| fleet can be while still turning a profit.
|
| Same reason you don't see landscaping crews filled out
| with stellar employees.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > What's interesting is that in many cities now, Uber and
| Lyft are in fact more expensive than taxis. And the
| experience is equally mediocre.
|
| That, of course, was the plan all along. Such august
| figures as JP Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D.
| Rockefeller,and Andrew Carnegie all made their fortune by
| undercutting the competition, putting them out of
| business through means legal and otherwise, and finally
| monopolizing the markets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R
| obber_baron_(industrialist)
| oremolten wrote:
| It does always seem like a race to the bottom.
| phil21 wrote:
| > What's interesting is that in many cities now, Uber and
| Lyft are in fact more expensive than taxis.
|
| Sure, agreed.
|
| > And the experience is equally mediocre.
|
| Absolutely not. I regret using a taxi nearly every time I
| opt for the cheaper option. It's only the "better" choice
| if you happen to be standing right in front of one. This
| experience is nearly universal no matter where I travel.
|
| I think people really forget how utterly terrible Taxis
| were pre-Uber. I have no idea about competing apps these
| days, maybe they are similar to Uber, but the typical
| Taxi experience is nearly as awful as it's always been at
| least in the US.
|
| Uber/Lyft certainly has gotten worse - but at least I can
| fairly reliably get a car when I need it with reasonable
| reliability. The rest of the "soft" product or pricing I
| really care far, far, less about than that simple fact.
| haswell wrote:
| > _the typical Taxi experience is nearly as awful as it
| 's always been at least in the US_
|
| It seems impossible/problematic to generalize the taxi
| experience to "The US".
|
| If you're in a city center, cabs can be far easier. The
| number of times I've ordered an Uber or Lyft and
| regretted it while watching taxi after taxi drive by has
| been increasing. But I expect the Chicago loop experience
| to be quite different from say, the suburbs.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| > quite different from say, the suburbs.
|
| My small rural town of 9000 people had multiple taxi
| services that poorer people relied on to do even their
| grocery shopping. We didn't need "disruption"
|
| Tech bros generalizing a negative experience from NYC or
| SV to the entire US has been so stupid.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| It's not really that surprising when the cities are
| passing laws to try to turn Uber back into the taxi
| cartel by e.g. making it harder for them to use part-time
| and on-demand contract drivers. The way you get the price
| down is by reducing friction, increasing flexibility and
| supply and taking advantage of efficiencies like people
| willing to do a dozen rides a week during surge pricing
| without making it a full-time job. Pass bad laws that
| make things more rigid and they get more expensive.
| rangestransform wrote:
| Last time I used curb, the cabbie told me that the curb
| payment wasn't working and I had to Zelle him, ended up
| needing to report the driver to Curb to get my money
| back. Shoulda taken an uber!
| burningion wrote:
| This argument ignores the fact that there were other
| alternatives to Uber at the time, ones that didn't break
| the law! Believe it or not, there were multiple ride
| hailing apps on the iPhone, but none were as great at
| accumulating capital or breaking the law without
| recourse.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The laws they allegedly broke were the taxi medallion
| cartel laws, which were the things keeping taxis terrible
| by limiting supply and competition. And those laws in
| general apply to the drivers rather than the ride hailing
| service. There is also a lot of ambiguity there, e.g. if
| you have a ride sharing service where people go on the
| app to find people to carpool with on a trip they'd be
| making anyway and then contribute gas money, is that a
| taxi service?
|
| But the taxi services obviously hated the competition and
| waged a continuing media campaign to paint the renegades
| as the villains.
| burningion wrote:
| No, these are not only the laws they allegedly broke.
|
| They created a project named Greyball to identify law
| enforcement and mislead them.
|
| They created a kill switch for the event of a government
| raid to gather evidence.
|
| They ordered and then canceled rides on competitor apps.
|
| They tracked journalists and politicians...
|
| The list goes on and on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co
| ntroversies_surrounding_Uber
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Several of those things aren't even necessarily illegal
| and are the sort of things they shouldn't have had have
| any _reason_ to do unless they were being targeted by a
| media campaign or captured government. There is also some
| dispute about whether some of those even happened or are
| just mischaracterizations from the media campaign.
|
| It's like saying "well, they weren't only violating the
| taxi medallion cartel laws, they were also violating laws
| against evading enforcement of the taxi medallion cartel
| laws". There is a central cause here.
| ok_dad wrote:
| Move the goalposts any more and they're going to be
| outside the stadium. What laws matter to you? I agree
| there are shit laws but why can uber break them with
| impunity but individuals are jailed for smoking some fun
| lettuce?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The question you should be asking is, what do you want to
| do about it? Throw the people challenging the taxi
| cartels in prison, or get rid of the laws against fun
| lettuce?
| ok_dad wrote:
| Something else, I'm not sure what yet. Honestly, I'm not
| the best guy to ask but I know that I don't want startups
| to continue breaking laws with impunity and I don't want
| individuals to get imprisoned for stuff they do that
| isn't affecting others in a meaningful way.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| There isn't really a something else. You have bad laws
| that are in practice only enforced against the little
| guy. You could demand they also be enforced against the
| big guy, but that's hard to do when they're bad laws,
| isn't really a great outcome because they're bad laws,
| and its primary benefit would be in service of calling
| attention to the flaw so the bad laws can be repealed.
| And then maybe you should just start there to begin with.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| That is partly true, but it's also true that vastly
| increased enforcement against the big guys would still be
| better than what we have now.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Suppose that the status quo is the worst option, the
| second worst is enforcing the bad laws against the big
| guys, the best is getting rid of those laws.
|
| Now, that might not be the case. _Given the existence of
| bad laws_ , having someone who is able to break out of
| the bad cage might be better than if no one can, but
| let's consider what happens if we assume that it's worse.
|
| Regardless of how they're ranked relative to each other,
| you would only pick either of the two worse options over
| the best if it was easier to do it. But getting bad laws
| enforced against well-heeled players is actually the
| hardest thing to do because they're doing something
| sympathetic and have the resources to fight, which is
| harder to do than repealing the bad laws.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| I don't agree. Getting more comprehensive enforcement of
| laws in general against well-heeled players is a good
| thing. We would have a lot less bad law if laws were
| enforced more evenly, because people would more quickly
| see their true effects, rather than having to wait until
| companies exploited the loopholes in enforcement so
| egregiously.
|
| (I also don't agree that the only problem here is bad
| laws. Yes, some of the laws that big players break are
| bad; some are fine. I'm not just talking about Uber
| here.)
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Getting more comprehensive enforcement of laws in
| general against well-heeled players is a good thing.
|
| Whether something is good independent of what it takes to
| achieve it is a separate question from whether that's
| where you should focus your efforts.
|
| > We would have a lot less bad law if laws were enforced
| more evenly, because people would more quickly see their
| true effects, rather than having to wait until companies
| exploited the loopholes in enforcement so egregiously.
|
| Which is exactly why it's so hard to do it. The status
| quo is: Pass lots of laws that make everything illegal so
| that anyone without resources can be brought up on
| charges if they ruffle the wrong feathers. If you wanted
| to actually enforce all of those laws, they would
| immediately have to be repealed or _everyone_ would be in
| jail. Which isn 't in the interests of the people who
| want to keep them on the books to use for selective
| enforcement, so they don't enforce them that way in order
| to keep them on the books.
|
| The consequence is that it takes even more political
| capital to have those laws rigorously enforced than to
| have them repealed, because then you have to fight _both_
| the big guys who don 't want short-term enforcement
| against themselves and the autocrats who don't want to
| long-term have the laws repealed, instead of only the
| latter.
|
| > I also don't agree that the only problem here is bad
| laws.
|
| When laws are enforced against the little guys but not
| the big guys, it's _usually_ because they 're bad laws,
| because letting the rich openly get away with literal
| murder is highly unpopular.
|
| The most significant category of good laws that big
| companies regularly violate with impunity is antitrust
| laws, but those also don't often get enforced against the
| little guy because the little guy isn't even in a
| position to violate them.
| opello wrote:
| Why isn't at least one of those things actually
| addressing (disbanding, regulating, whatever--left to
| people experienced in policy or with context to have some
| remediation plan) those taxi cartels' behavior?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The argument is that getting rid of the bad laws is
| better than enforcing them more rigorously. This can be
| applied to the laws propping up the taxi medallion
| cartels as well as the ones prohibiting personal drug
| use. Then anyone (not just Uber) could compete with them
| and thereby disband the taxi cartels previously using
| those laws to constrain competition.
| thwarted wrote:
| Because more money and special interests are behind fun
| lettuce smoking enforcement than local taxi companies
| could put behind protecting their own cartel from
| interlopers. If the taxi companies had more money to dump
| on politicians than is poured into drug enforcement, then
| the priorities would have changed.
| ok_dad wrote:
| The best thing to ever happen to corpo scum was that
| social media took over most of the news. Now there's no
| trusted journalists to write a big article about this
| kind of stuff, instead folks just defend the corpo scum's
| actions and spread lies for them, while the truth is
| still putting on its shoes.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Taxi Medallion laws were also a Reputation Engine that
| was _publicly queryable_ , subject to FOIA laws and
| generally had easy to search public databases for them,
| with detailed notes. Sure Uber/Lyft boil that into a
| "friendly" 5-star UI, but do you have any idea what data
| contributed to that star rating? Do you always trust the
| algorithms that compute them from a bucket of metrics you
| can't directly request?
|
| Sure, Medallion laws had problems, and got Regulatory
| Captured in _some_ cities to also become terrible Trusts
| controlling prices that needed busting. But the answer to
| "fix the Regulation" isn't always "break the Regulation",
| and the Regulation had a lot of good intent of having
| public accessible information about drivers and that data
| not just owned by a single company and locked in their
| opaque algorithms. It might have been nicer to fix the
| Regulatory Capture and Bust the Trusts.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Taxi Medallion laws were also a Reputation Engine that
| was _publicly queryable_ , subject to FOIA laws and
| generally had easy to search public databases for them,
| with detailed notes.
|
| You just landed at the airport and need a cab. You fax
| your FOIA requests for each of the hundred cab companies
| in the area, which they're required to provide within 20
| business days. Your return flight is in 3 days and it
| would be nice to leave the airport before then.
|
| > Sure Uber/Lyft boil that into a "friendly" 5-star UI,
| but do you have any idea what data contributed to that
| star rating? Do you always trust the algorithms that
| compute them from a bucket of metrics you can't directly
| request?
|
| So compete with them instead of banning them. Fund an
| open source ride hailing app with open data. Don't
| require anyone to use it. If it's better, they will. If
| it's not better, why should they be forced to?
| WorldMaker wrote:
| > You just landed at the airport and need a cab. You fax
| your FOIA requests for each of the hundred cab companies
| in the area, which they're required to provide within 20
| business days. Your return flight is in 3 days and it
| would be nice to leave the airport before then.
|
| If you just landed at the airport, you rely on police
| enforcement keeping bad actors from having medallions.
| The medallion itself _is_ the primary "this person is a
| reputable cab driver". That's also entirely why the
| Regulatory Capture in some cities was so effective in
| controlling supply of medallions, because it was city
| police enforced.
|
| Many cities required taxis to have their medallion number
| painted on the outside, and there were phone numbers you
| could quickly call (in the days of payphones even) to get
| quick information about a medallion or to report a
| complaint/problem with one.
|
| Today a few cities have updated that external paint
| requirement (and inside the car medallion papers) to
| include QR codes for even quicker lookup on modern phones
| or to even use an app to do nice things like pay for the
| Taxi without needing to broker/negotiate it. Those kind
| of technological improvements have kind of gotten lost in
| the wash of the speed of which Uber/Lyft moved fast and
| broke things, but were always possible.
|
| > So compete with them instead of banning them. Fund an
| open source ride hailing app with open data. Don't
| require anyone to use it. If it's better, they will. If
| it's not better, why should they be forced to?
|
| The history of taxi companies say that they are only as
| open as they are forced to be. I never said anything
| about banning Uber/Lyft. Competition is not the problem;
| destroying public safety regulations in the name of
| competition is the problem. I said that Uber/Lyft should
| have been required to do the same or similar paperwork
| that medallions represent, that both of their data should
| be open under the previously existing laws, as a public
| good. Break the artificial scarcity, sure, give Uber/Lyft
| a license to "print medallions" if that breaks existing
| Trusts. But get that data open and available to the
| public (and enforceable by the public's law enforcement).
| Neither would want to do that because their rating
| systems are secret sauce and "competitive advantage",
| they would need to be coerced by regulations. That's what
| regulations are _for_ , the public good that competition
| doesn't care about/can't care about/needs to keep "secret
| sauce" for advantages.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > If you just landed at the airport, you rely on police
| enforcement keeping bad actors from having medallions.
|
| Well that's not going to work. You now have people from
| outside the jurisdiction having a government they didn't
| elect cast in the role of their protectors. Instead what
| happens is the local government protects the incumbents,
| which is what we've seen in practice.
|
| > Many cities required taxis to have their medallion
| number painted on the outside, and there were phone
| numbers you could quickly call (in the days of payphones
| even) to get quick information about a medallion or to
| report a complaint/problem with one.
|
| As opposed to the license plates already on all cars?
|
| > The history of taxi companies say that they are only as
| open as they are forced to be.
|
| People keep trying to regard Uber as a taxi company. They
| keep claiming to be an app, because... they are. So
| replace the app with an open source one. Create an
| independent non-profit to handle payments and maintain a
| server to hold the driver ratings and take a small cut of
| the payments to cover its costs. Operate it as a live
| auction where drivers list how much they'll charge per
| mile and riders pick a driver based on their rating and
| price. Publish all the data.
|
| If you do it well, people will use it voluntarily. If you
| do it poorly, you haven't demonstrated enough competence
| to be trusted making regulations that people would have
| to follow even if they're dumb.
|
| > Competition is not the problem; destroying public
| safety regulations in the name of competition is the
| problem.
|
| The problem is that incumbents call the things they use
| to destroy competition "public safety regulations".
|
| > Neither would want to do that because their rating
| systems are secret sauce and "competitive advantage",
| they would need to be coerced by regulations.
|
| Not when you can "coerce" them through competition. If
| people like the ratings system which is more open or the
| one that extracts lower margins and the app is otherwise
| fungible with theirs, they don't even exist unless they
| can be better than the competing system you created to do
| better, which implies that you failed to actually do
| better and then they're _supposed_ to win. Which in turn
| applies pressure on the public system to do better
| itself, instead of getting captured, because if it gets
| captured then it becomes uncompetitive and actually has
| competition.
| standyro wrote:
| Let's recap the past: Taxis were borderline unusable in
| almost all American cities before Uber (except for NYC)
|
| I certainly didn't love their ruthless business
| practices, but let's not delude ourselves and admit that
| Uber or Lyft wouldn't exist if they didn't break the laws
| around taxi medallions.
|
| Sometimes laws do more harm than good (by limiting supply
| and slowing innovation) and it requires creatively
| skirting regulations.
|
| Things were always possible to improve the taxi industry.
| Smartphones had been around a few years. But it would've
| taken the industry 20 years to implement it correctly. In
| the same way that rampant music and movie piracy in the
| early 2000s hastened the development of iTunes and
| Netflix's subscription model way of doing business.
|
| Uber shows the driver's name, their photo, and has a
| process for flagging drivers. Public safety is important
| to their business. As someone who's driven an Uber and
| Lyft and been through their process, I've seen it
| firsthand.
|
| It's not like "medallions" worked - I remember driving in
| multiple taxis in pre 2010 days where the photo DID NOT
| MATCH UP to the driver. My high school physics teacher
| who grew up in Brooklyn in the late 1970s told stories
| about how he learned how to drive by illegally working
| and driving taxis around as a 15 year old.
|
| Right now, we're just going through the same thing with
| AI again, and Silicon Valley is applying it's ethos of
| the past few decades.
|
| There are reasons why in various industries, China is
| "winning the race", so to speak.
|
| Regulations exist, but sometimes people who creatively
| ignore the "regulations" can win the tide of the public.
| It's one of America's best (and incredibly divisive)
| cultural capabilities.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| > Let's recap the past: Taxis were borderline unusable in
| almost all American cities before Uber (except for NYC)
|
| My experience was very different and "almost all" doesn't
| feel correct. It's certainly fun hyperbole. NYC the
| systems worked more than they didn't. In part because of
| spot lights from famous TV shows and 70s corruption
| documentaries/news exposes. Most smaller cities the taxis
| quietly worked with little corruption and a lot of
| trustworthiness. In the early oughts I had good
| experiences hailing cabs in cities a lot smaller than NYC
| that people didn't believe you could even hail cabs in.
|
| Because Taxi regulations were so wildly different from
| cities, it's hard to generalize what the experience used
| to be. It varied a lot from city to city and was a
| massive spectrum, with a few national certainties like
| some of the big Franchises to help smooth things a bit.
|
| > I certainly didn't love their ruthless business
| practices, but let's not delude ourselves and admit that
| Uber or Lyft wouldn't exist if they didn't break the laws
| around taxi medallions.
|
| In the early oughts, a few cities like Seattle were
| pressuring the big national Franchise companies like
| Yellow Cab through a mixture of regulatory body pressure
| (but not actual laws) and bottom up consumer
| messaging/volume customer requirements to move to
| "Computer Dispatch". There was a growing competition in
| that space, and a bunch of innovation happening between
| the competitors, including some of the things Uber and
| Lyft take credit for today because Yellow Cab mostly
| broke apart in the onslaught of VC subsidization and rule
| breaking.
|
| I don't think it would have taken "20 years" to implement
| it "correctly". We don't know because the whole thing got
| disrupted so sideways by the gig economy. (Which also
| really didn't care about making the taxi business better,
| but about making the labor market worse. We should also
| not forget that breaking the worst parts of taxi
| medallion laws also broke the good ones that helped build
| useful labor-side things like taxi driver unions and paid
| for things like healthcare.)
|
| All I'm saying is that there _was_ a path that this could
| have all been done under the old regulations, legally. It
| 's a path not taken here, and probably to our detriment.
| Though I can't prove that just as much as you can't prove
| that innovations like smarter apps would have taken "20
| years" in that other timeline.
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| You understand they're a global company and broke many
| laws in many countries, right?
| mikepurvis wrote:
| The only alternative I remember is "black car" services,
| eg airport limos and the like. But there was very little
| automation around it; you had to speak on the phone with
| someone to book, and it was always like 24+ hours out
| rather than "go to the place now" the way a cab is.
| kmoser wrote:
| Most taxi services will send a car to your address
| immediately, no reservation required. Problem is, you
| have to know the exact address where you want to be
| picked up, which can sometimes be difficult to determine
| if you're new in town and/or standing on a street with no
| obvious sign or address, e.g. on the edge of a large
| university campus. That's where GPS-driven apps really
| shine, plus the ability to see the car's location in near
| real-time, and why I will never be sad at the demise of
| traditional way of having to call a cab.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Indeed, but I was referring specifically to the charge
| that taxi _alternatives_ (eg, outside the medallion
| system) existed pre-Uber. And I think, they did, but only
| in very limited use cases like airport shuttles, and not
| with fleets anywhere near large enough to have a car five
| minutes from anywhere at all times-- hence the need to
| book those things ahead.
| brisky wrote:
| It is possible that digitization and improvement of taxi
| services was inevitable anyway
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Not only was it inevitable, if we were so inclined and
| willing to use the regulatory pen, we could've simply
| written into law that for Taxi's to operate, they must be
| well maintained and must accept all major forms of
| payment. And yeah, the Taxi industry would've fought it
| because every company ever has fought every regulation
| ever no matter how much it stands to benefit both their
| customers _and they them-fucking-selves_ but companies
| having a say in how they are regulated is both how a Taxi
| company would fight this, _and_ how Uber, AirBnb, OpenAI,
| Meta, etc. blatantly and flagrantly violate the law and
| instead of consequences, they get fines, and court
| hearings. So maybe we just shouldn 't be allowing that?
|
| It drives me up the goddamn wall how people will say shit
| like "the Taxi industry needed to be upended" when
| like... I mean, maybe? But on balance, given all the
| negative externalities associated with these companies,
| are they really a gain? Or are they just a different set
| of overlords, equally disinterested in providing a good
| service once they reach the scale where they no longer
| are required to give a shit?
|
| Just... regulate the fuckers. Are you sick of filthy
| Taxis that break down? Put a regulation down that says if
| a cab breaks down during a trip, they owe the customer a
| free ride and five thousand dollars. You bet your ASS
| those cabs will be serviced as soon as humanly possible.
| This isn't rocket science y'all. Make whatever
| consequence the government is going to dispense
| immeasurably, clearly worse than whatever the business is
| trying to weasel out of doing, and boom. Solved.
| drdaeman wrote:
| > Just... regulate the fuckers.
|
| That's true, however we must also keep in mind that Uber
| (and alikes) happened because regular institutions failed
| to do this for some reason or another. I won't try to
| speculate why, because I have no idea (and of course it
| looks obvious in the hindsight).
|
| There was a demand for safer and more reliable taxis.
| There was not enough supply for that. Government haven't
| paid enough attention to the sector. So, naturally,
| someone came and used that whole situation to provide
| supply for this demand.
|
| Of course it's not this simple, and there were a lot of
| other things going on. But if we narrow the scope down to
| just this, then we can see that the core problem here
| wasn't Uber, it was that that governments were too slow
| to react in time.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Not only was it inevitable, if we were so inclined and
| willing to use the regulatory pen, we could've simply
| written into law that for Taxi's to operate, they must be
| well maintained and must accept all major forms of
| payment.
|
| That was frequently already the case. They were required
| to accept credit cards but then the card reader would be
| "broken" and it wasn't worth anybody's time to dispute it
| instead of just paying in cash.
|
| You also... don't really want laws like that. They're
| required to accept "all payment methods", which ones? Do
| they have to take American Express, even though the fees
| are much higher? Do they have to take PayPal if the
| customer has funds in a PayPal account? What about niche
| card networks like store cards accepted at more than one
| merchant? If _not_ those and just Visa and Mastercard,
| you now have a law entrenching that duopoly in the law.
|
| > Are you sick of filthy Taxis that break down? Put a
| regulation down that says if a cab breaks down during a
| trip, they owe the customer a free ride and five thousand
| dollars. You bet your ASS those cabs will be serviced as
| soon as humanly possible. This isn't rocket science
| y'all.
|
| It's not rocket science, it's trade offs.
|
| Is there a $5000 fine for a breakdown? You just made cab
| service much more expensive, because they're either going
| to have to pay the fines as a cost of doing business and
| then pass them on, or propylactically do excessive
| maintenance like doing full engine rebuilds every year
| because it costs less than getting caught out once, and
| then passing on the cost of that. And even then, there is
| no such thing as perfect. The cabbie paid to have the
| whole engine rebuilt by the dealership just yesterday and
| the dealer under-tightened one of the bolts when putting
| it back in, so there's a coolant leak? Normally that's
| just re-tightening the bolt and $20 worth of coolant, but
| now it's a $5000 fine on top of the $4000 engine rebuild.
|
| The way you actually want to solve this is with
| competition, not rigid rules and onerous fines. If
| someone is always having breakdowns then they get bad
| rating, customers can see that when choosing and then opt
| for a different driver that costs slightly more -- but
| only if the cost is worth the difference to them. Maybe
| it's worth $2 for the difference between two stars and
| five but it isn't worth $50 for the difference between
| 4.7 and 4.8. Either way you shouldn't be deciding for
| people, you should be giving them the choice.
| rangestransform wrote:
| I would rather ruin the taxi livelihood than have to
| argue with my driver about turning on the meter again
| clarkmoody wrote:
| Possible, yes. Probable?
| rangestransform wrote:
| They still haven't properly digitized, curb sucks ass, I
| had to report a driver to curb when he made me Zelle him
| because "curb payment wasn't working"
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The solution to that would not have been rabid capitalism
| just bulldozing over laws because the laws suck and
| further entrenching that "laws only matter for the poor".
|
| The solution to the pre-Uber state of the taxi industry
| would be to actually have the regulations authorities
| enforce the regulation. But it seems across the Western
| world that having regulations authorities do their job
| and regulate is like the devil and holy water.
|
| Additionally, in some cases the regulations themselves
| were crap.
| Domenic_S wrote:
| Let's not pretend that the taxi situation was hunkey-dory
| before big-bad-tech came onto the scene. There's no
| regulation that says if I call dispatch to request a taxi
| one has to show up, and "we'll pick you up when we pick
| you up" was (and is still) a common mode of operation.
|
| In NYC, it was (is?) against the law to hail a black car
| on the street, even if they were sitting there ready
| willing and able to drive you, because the taxi cartel
| got _regulations_ to make it that way.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > In NYC, it was (is?) against the law to hail a black
| car on the street, even if they were sitting there ready
| willing and able to drive you, because the taxi cartel
| got _regulations_ to make it that way.
|
| That's precisely what I meant with "in some cases the
| regulations themselves were crap". But that doesn't imply
| the idea of regulation is bad - it is saying that maybe
| voters should make their voice clear to lawmakers and
| parties to get stuff changed. Regulation can only be as
| good or bad as the voters allow it to be.
| thatcat wrote:
| Political will shouldn't be required to enforce existing
| law. If i started a 1 man illegal taxi service it would
| be shut down even though it has little effect on the
| community, but saudi vc funded startup wasn't shut down
| even though it violated laws in every major city. That is
| a weird asymmetry as a us citizen.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| What's really happening here is that the laws are
| supposed to _reflect_ the political will, i.e. the will
| of the people, but in many cases they don 't, because the
| lawmakers have been captured by incumbents.
|
| Then if a little guy comes in and tries to challenge
| them, they don't have the resources to resist the
| incumbents' pocket government officials and get
| destroyed. But if a big fish does it, people actually
| notice if the government tries to enforce stupid laws
| against them, and then government officials are afraid to
| do it because the public would not only not like it but
| _actually notice the unreasonableness of the law_.
|
| But the problem here isn't that the law _isn 't_ being
| enforced against a well-heeled challenger, it's that
| those laws _exist_ to be enforced against the little guy,
| when they should instead be repealed.
| thatcat wrote:
| i will simply disagree that the dominant social dynamic
| leading to this favoring of foriegn capital over us law
| is not systemic corruption.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| So there are two different categories of things here. One
| is, they ban cannabis and put individuals in prison for
| it, but then if you pay thousands a year for overpriced
| health insurance and the insurance pays thousands of
| dollars for a doctor to ask you some cursory questions
| and a pharma company to manufacture the drug, you can get
| a prescription for opioids, which are way more dangerous.
| But that isn't the big guys violating the law, it's them
| _following_ a law that they bought and paid for. That 's
| bad in a different way.
|
| The relevant thing here would be that they pass excessive
| copyright laws, but then Meta violates them and maybe
| gets away with it because they're doing it in a
| sympathetic way and the government doesn't want to
| hamstring emerging industries in their country, whereas
| if an individual would be sued into oblivion even if the
| thing they were doing was equally sympathetic.
|
| Because it's not just about the public noticing it, it's
| about the public noticing it in time to do something
| about it. If an individual gets sued or arrested, they're
| _immediately_ screwed and will be under pressure to
| settle or plea bargain before they 're bankrupted by
| legal fees. But once they do, the case is over. Whereas
| large companies can fight, or pay lawyers to stall while
| they wage a media campaign to counter the usual imperious
| press releases from the prosecution, or use their money
| to lobby the government while public opinion is in their
| favor.
| arp242 wrote:
| It really screwed over a lot of regular working-class
| people. In some European cities getting a taxi license
| was a serious monetary investment. People took our huge
| loans for this. This was now suddenly worthless. It's
| like being told your very expensive university education
| is no longer accredited, but the student loan still
| exists. kthxbye.
|
| I'm not saying the existing systems were always good
| (they weren't), but you need to be willing to overlook a
| lot of real-world suffering to be "rooting for Uber".
| Phrases like "taxi cartels" sound nice, but they're
| hardly neutral phrasings that simplify things to the
| point of being useless phrases.
|
| And "I'm just going to willingly and knowingly ignore
| laws I don't like for personal profit" is not a great
| take-away either. This isn't Aaron Swartz breaking a law
| as a matter of "civil disobedience" - it's just a plain
| "how can we make money?"
|
| And where does that leave competitors who are NOT willing
| to break the law? It's an unlevel playing field; there
| can be no free market if some people don't need to follow
| the same set of rules. Uber's actions are fundamentally
| anti-capitalist and anti-free market.
| 6510 wrote:
| I always tell the story of this restaurant 18 km from my
| house. If I order their cheapest 6 euro hamburger they
| deliver it for free within 30 minutes. If I take a taxi
| to the restaurant I may have to wait for an hour and it
| costs about 100 euro and another 100 to get back.
| decimalenough wrote:
| There is no way anybody is making a profit on driving 36
| km to deliver a hamburger for 6 euros, and it's a matter
| of time until whatever faucet of VC money subsidizing
| this runs dry.
|
| In much of the world the price of food delivery has risen
| to the level needed to make it profitable, and it's not
| cheap. I paid around $10 in fees plus Uber's 30-50%
| markups on the food itself to get a couple of burritos
| yesterday from a shop a mile down the road.
| arp242 wrote:
| I took a ~20 minute 12km taxi ride just last Monday, and
| it was about EUR22. That's in Ireland. Considering fuel,
| the drive back for the driver, and that taxis have a lot
| of downtime, that seems like a reasonable price.
|
| You live in Netherlands according to a recent comment; I
| can't believe taxis are almost 4x more expensive, unless
| you're stuck in traffic for a long time, but then your
| burger can't arrive in 30 mins?
|
| And free delivery on EUR6 food item is almost certainly
| netting them a loss.
| twelve40 wrote:
| > getting a taxi license was a serious monetary
| investment. People took our huge loans for this
|
| it was a terrible system that sucked for everyone
| involved. For all of Uber's flaws, would you rather go
| back to that today? really??
| arp242 wrote:
| > would you rather go back to that today? really??
|
| I absolutely said said no such thing. There are good ways
| to change things and bad ways to change things. Allowing
| a private entity reap huge profits by blatantly breaking
| rules and screwing people is not a good way to change
| things.
| slashdev wrote:
| Uber definitely improved things.
|
| When traveling it's also so much safer than taxis.
|
| My brother was robbed at gunpoint in a taxi. My wife had
| to jump from more than one moving taxi to escape. My ex
| girlfriend too. My Swiss friend had his camera and wallet
| stolen.
|
| You can have issues with Uber too, but not as frequently
| because there's a digital audit trail, you can report
| them to the platform and the police. The threat of those
| consequences lead to better behavior.
| kmoser wrote:
| Were these acts committed by the drivers or somebody
| else?
| slashdev wrote:
| Drivers
| leshow wrote:
| It didn't improve things for the drivers
| slashdev wrote:
| That's not universally true
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Unfortunately now Ubers are exactly the same experience
| but more expensive/unpredictable. It's only nicer if you
| spend more on black and such, which makes it easily
| double a standard cab fare.
| harrison_clarke wrote:
| shouldn't there be a lot of political will from the
| traditional hotels and taxis, and their lawyers? i can
| see that the answer is "no", but i don't know why
|
| especially with hotels, i would have expected there to be
| small enough oligopoly to overcome the freerider problem
| (taxis are more regional, so i don't expect them to be
| able to fight an (inter)national company very easily)
|
| plus the president owning a hotel chain
| lupusreal wrote:
| There are a lot more people who own a few properties as
| investments than there are hotel owners. Even if these
| people don't plan to rent through Airbnb, the way Airbnb
| distorts the housing market is still beneficial for their
| investments. Also, by the time Trump became president
| Airbnb was already entrenched for years.
| rangestransform wrote:
| > shouldn't there be a lot of political will from the
| traditional hotels and taxis, and their lawyers?
|
| Yes there is, I am reminded of this every time I take an
| uber by the yellow cab medallion buyout fee that I'm
| charged because of the lobbying power of the TLC lobby in
| NYC
| umanwizard wrote:
| Taxis and hotels suck compared to Airbnb and uber even at
| the same price, so I find it hard to be upset.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Part of the reason Airbnb got a pass must be how
| profitable it was to people who own many properties,
| despite the harm it does to the communities of people who
| only own one property.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > The reason there was no political will to punish Airbnb
| and Uber for violating the law was that initially they
| were subsidized with VC money and so were able to
| undercut traditional hotels and taxis on price.
|
| That's just a trope. They were initially losing money
| because they had high fixed costs (developing a platform,
| spending enough on advertising to get a critical mass of
| people using it), which are long-term investments. If you
| only spread the cost of the long-term investment over the
| short-term sales, they were "losing money" in the early
| years, but that's how all long-term investments work.
|
| Dumping is when you sell below the _unit_ cost, e.g.
| paying drivers more than you charge customers, which isn
| 't what they were doing in general. And as long as they
| _weren 't_ doing that, the incumbents could have
| responded by lowering their own prices (and therefore
| margins) without themselves losing money on each sale,
| which is competition working as intended. Unless the
| competition is too hidebound to accept a reduction in
| profits in order to stay competitive or otherwise insists
| on using a less efficient method of operating, in which
| case they go under.
| cpursley wrote:
| The hotel and taxi industry were legit terrible before
| those two disrupted them.
|
| Laws are ment to be broken. Especially in cronist systems
| where incumbents write the laws.
| dboreham wrote:
| Not terrible everywhere.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Hotels were just fine.
|
| Taxis were discriminatory and "uncool" to the point were
| Uber has saved thousands by preventing drunk driving.
|
| Now if you go out with the boys and get drunk, it's a 30
| second casual call to get an Uber and get home.
|
| Live in a neighborhood Taxis are afraid to service,you
| can either make some extra income working for Uber or use
| it yourself. When Ubers used as its intended purpose, to
| basically make a quick buck, it's a lifeline to many low
| income people .
|
| Say your rents it's going to be late, you can pick up 20
| or 30 hours of Uber this month to make it happen. It's
| not really a career though...
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| > Say your rents it's going to be late, you can pick up
| 20 or 30 hours of Uber this month to make it happen
|
| that sounds so incredibly dystopian, not sure if that was
| the intention :(
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I forgot to mention, Jitney cabs( unlicensed cabs
| primarily serving minority neighborhoods)came long before
| Ubers. They're more of less gone now though.
|
| What's better. Taking out a 300% APR payday loan, getting
| evicted or working an extra 20, 30 hours of Uber.
| BrandonM wrote:
| Maybe to you, but I was broke during and shortly after
| college. If I could have picked up some gig work when I
| needed it, that would have been a huge help.
| verall wrote:
| It's super dystopian and it creates bad incentives (the
| harder the underclass is squeezed the better a product it
| is for the middle class), but I have to agree that gig
| work is often a lifeline for poor people.
|
| I consider it similar to access to unsecured credit that
| way - it's easy to feel like "wow this industry is
| scamming these people it should be illegal" but people
| without any other backstop will probably need access to
| unsecured credit sometime and it's better than losing
| their house/car/job/pet/family etc..
| gardnr wrote:
| maintaining a precarious class benefits those in power
| Marsymars wrote:
| > Say your rents it's going to be late, you can pick up
| 20 or 30 hours of Uber this month to make it happen.
|
| Maybe... I really don't get how the economics work out
| here though. If you look at the numbers, it mostly just
| seems like you're converting car equity into cash via
| depreciation.
|
| But also, I'd guess that for a big chunk of people who
| are going to have trouble paying rent with any
| regularity, they'd have to overpay for their car in the
| first place to get something that's Uber-appropriate. My
| car's a couple years too old for Uber now, but is still
| perfectly functional, and there's just no way the math
| would work for me to buy a newer car so that I can
| convert its capital cost into cash via Uber.
| __loam wrote:
| The level of casual criminality in this industry is
| astounding sometimes.
| classified wrote:
| That's what makes a banana republic, and for all intents
| and purposes the U.S. are exhibit A.
| infamouscow wrote:
| The purpose of having an executive branch of government
| is _explicitly_ to apply the law based on subjective
| opinions.
|
| There's no purpose of having an executive branch of
| government separate from the other two branches if not to
| cushion the inflexible and glacial nature of the other
| branches of government.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >The purpose of having an executive branch of government
| is explicitly to apply the law based on subjective
| opinions.
|
| What? No, the purpose of having a separate executive is
| _separation_ of powers and checks and balances.
| infamouscow wrote:
| You haven't explained _why_ there is an executive branch
| in the first place.
|
| Why does the executive branch exist _at all_ if it 's
| simply to enforce written law?
|
| Why do we elect the executive _at all_ if they are merely
| to enforce written law?
|
| Why do executives have the power to pardon someone when a
| court of law finds a person guilty of breaking law?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Why does the executive branch exist at all if it's
| simply to enforce written law?
|
| Someone has to be in charge of enforcing things.
|
| > Why do we elect the executive at all if they are merely
| to enforce written law?
|
| Do you have a suggestion of another way to do it that
| doesn't put congress in charge?
|
| Also the president has some other very important roles.
|
| > Why do executives have the power to pardon someone when
| a court of law finds a person guilty of breaking law?
|
| That one is definitely subjective by its nature, but also
| the average number of pardons is around two thousand, a
| very small fraction of cases.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| The executive exists to enforce the law the legislature
| writes primarily to make sure the legislature isn't in
| charge of enforcing the laws. It's a check on the power
| of the legislature.
|
| You could still have discretion with the legislature in
| charge of executing on their own laws. I think countries
| exist like that, but I don't know enough to say which.
|
| A separate executive is not necessary to have discretion
| or pardons or flexibility in law. A separate executive is
| _necessary_ if you want physically different human beings
| controlling the organizations who enforce the law (DOJ,
| FBI, etc)
|
| Consider that Judges and the judicial branch of the
| government ALSO gets to use subjectivity and their own
| opinion in adjudicating cases. Another check.
|
| The entire point of the Constitution was to put the power
| of a King in a bunch of different hands, and then tie
| some of those hands with specific constraints, and then
| give a couple different options on how to change those
| constraints over time. Leeway and discretion goes both
| ways, so Congress does have the ability to further
| constrain such discretion. A previous president tried to
| argue he could choose to not spend money congress told
| him to spend, so they wrote up a bill saying very
| clearly, Uh, no, if we say spend, _you spend_. They have
| that power as a _check_ on the power of the executive.
| All three branches are ostensibly MEANT to be vying for
| power. It 's an antagonistic system, like the court
| system. The founders loved that shit. In reality, it
| probably is a dysfunctional system that modern systems
| engineers would not like, and other countries get that
| "system fights and moderates itself" effect by
| encouraging coalitions between parties in a strong
| parliament. IMO those have demonstrated better stability.
| I'm not convinced the US would have survived getting it's
| whole shit blown up like the UK did.
|
| Checks. And. Balances. 5th grade civics class.
| deegles wrote:
| I've also heard the term "regulatory arbitrage" to describe
| this.
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| its a term used to describe "corporate criminal acts" yes
| pdntspa wrote:
| This has always been the case. Laws are only as good as
| their enforcement. This is why the business class is so
| aggressive about tearing down regulation until they can
| wield it as a weapon. Do as I say, not as I do, etc etc
|
| If you as an individual can prevent the enforcement of a
| law, or be sure that it will not be enforced against you,
| then it does not apply to you.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _Airbnb and Uber have showed us that laws matter only to
| the extent that the political will to enforce them exists._
|
| Laws matter to the extent that they don't interfere with
| actual progress. Laws that would have prevented the LLMs we
| have today from being developed _should_ be ignored, as
| should laws requiring us to pay tribute to taxi and hotel
| cartels.
|
| Respect for the law is going to be an increasingly-hard
| sell going forward, and that's mostly the lawmakers' own
| fault. When the law does not respect the people, the people
| will not respect the law.
| censorfree wrote:
| >This is exactly what I immediately thought while reading the
| article. It almost feels like the legal system only punishes
| general public, while most of these guys are above it.
|
| Welcome to the modern day aristocracy. Not only what you
| mentioned, this world is also divided into a group of insider
| who can get capital from 0 - 2%, while rest of us has a cost
| of 17%, 22% or 30%?
| jeffwask wrote:
| Welcome to the two-tier legal system of the modern world. Why
| obey the law when the penalty is a rounding error?
| ossobuco wrote:
| It's an oligarchy, always has been. I don't know how colossal
| the pile of evidence supporting this has to get before people
| finally accept it.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| They are paid, handsomely, by it. Or otherwise brainwashed
| by it. And pummelled into ignorance by it, as they are told
| that to understand is stupid or delusional, knowledge ends
| at STEM, and the world only exists for efficient production
| of capital products.
|
| The poets write laments about such false ages. Prophecies
| were written about such ages thousands of years ago.
|
| The cycles are larger than us all.
|
| One stable insight is that the chaos breeds possibility,
| and thus hope. In the meantime, however...
| rixed wrote:
| Conscious life in general seems possible to me unless our
| brain tells us a better story than reality.
|
| A story in which we are the hero, in which we are not
| mortal, in which we are important, in which people care
| about us, in which we are intelligent and our perceptions
| rarely fail us, in which our life has a meaning and also in
| which the social game we play is determined, or at least
| influenced, by some just principles. We would despair if we
| were aware of the full extent of our meaninglessness and
| powerlessness.
|
| I believe that it is the core reason why we love to believe
| that God/Nature is good, that the king is legitimate and
| that the laws are fair.
| meeech wrote:
| At this point, I think it's safe to say it doesn't 'feel'
| that way. It is that way. Sorry if you were being facetious
| and I didn't pick up on it.
| gscott wrote:
| It is more a money thing. Meta can pay x billion like pocket
| change. Regular people are run through the ringer to teach
| the plebs to not get out of line.
| jmount wrote:
| They may have just been the friendly step A. We didn't end up
| seeing where that was going to go.
| nico wrote:
| > the legal system only punishes general public, while most
| of these guys are above it
|
| It's because the legal system is not about justice, it's
| about money
|
| Most people can't afford lawyers or expensive legal battles
|
| On the other hand, individuals and organizations with a lot
| of money get to weaponize and exploit the legal system to
| their advantage
|
| "To my friends, anything; to my enemies, the law"
| btown wrote:
| At the risk of wading into politics - consider a legal
| environment, in any country, where laws become increasingly
| strict, but where prosecutorial discretion, pardon powers,
| and a justice system designed to allow well-resourced law
| firms to delay cases indefinitely, are all transparently
| used for political purposes. Such an environment could
| easily exhibit a feedback loop that allows justice to be
| arbitrary and opposition voices to be silenced.
|
| I'll refrain from value judgments on the above - but for
| heaven's sake, we're on a site called "Hacker News." We
| should understand that a machine like this could turn on
| any one of us in an instant for any reason.
| devwastaken wrote:
| if you get a group of people and call it an llc then criminal
| elements are largely eliminated.
| bmitc wrote:
| It's not a feeling. It's exactly what happens. It's
| completely blatant.
|
| For some reason, whenever you're a billionaire or company,
| things suddenly get so difficult that you can claim that it's
| impossible to be held accountable for anything. Murder,
| insider trading, laundering, treason, etc.
|
| OpenAI complained about this, as did Google and everyone
| else. If your company can't exist without stealing data, then
| it's not a viable company. Companies don't have a
| constitutional right to exist.
| TZubiri wrote:
| How so? It is still illegal if meta does it, they will face
| trial.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| It's not "almost" like that. The legal system IS that.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| When individuals are assigned heroic status despite clear
| evidence of mental illness and crimes, such as "breaking and
| entering", it prevents society from having rational
| discussions about both law enforcement and mental health
| support. This dynamic repeats across multiple high-profile
| cases.
|
| People often elevate deeply flawed figures to heroic status
| when those figures seem to challenge authority or "the
| system." This happens especially with individuals who present
| themselves as outsiders fighting the establishment, have a
| compelling personal struggle narrative, or voice grievances
| that resonate with public frustrations
|
| Trump fits this pattern - his supporters overlook concerning
| behaviors and statements because they see him as fighting a
| system they distrust. Like Manning and Swartz, his mental
| state and fitness are often ignored in favor of the "hero
| against the system" narrative.
|
| This dynamic creates a feedback loop where legitimate
| criticism becomes harder to discuss rationally.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| > MIT
|
| I think Aaron Swartz went to Harvard, not MIT
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz
| xemoka wrote:
| Yes, he went to Harvard; the laptop was plugged in at MIT
| using his Harvard Fellow credentials to access JSTOR.
| quaintdev wrote:
| I read the same thing earlier today on Reddit, weird!
| arp242 wrote:
| If you do something wrong then you, as a person, are held
| responsible and accountable.
|
| If you do something wrong as "part of your job" then you're
| typically not held responsible and accountable but the
| company is (the exceptions being spectacular fraud: Enron, VW
| diesel).
|
| It's not hard to see how this can go off the rails.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| "The revolution will be incorporated."
| threeseed wrote:
| > Google itself got big by indexing other people's data without
| compensation
|
| Wrong.
|
| a) Robots.txt which defines what content you wish to make
| available to third parties predates every search engine
| including Google. Web site owners _chose_ to make it available
| to Google and search engines have respected their wishes
| despite it not being in their best interest.
|
| b) The difference here is that OpenAI, Meta etc have not even
| tried to honour the wishes of copyright holders. They just
| considered everything as theirs.
|
| c) Google grew big because it had no ads, fast interface and
| PageRank was significantly better. It wasn't because it had the
| most comprehensive index.
| RALaBarge wrote:
| To your first point, the op said without compensation, not
| without permission.
| fredgrott wrote:
| point c is wrong...they had ads since the original yahoo
| contract....
| threeseed wrote:
| Yahoo contract was 2 years after it launched.
|
| I remember using Google the day it went public and it had
| no ads which made it unique compared to Altavista.
| karamanolev wrote:
| > Web site owners chose to make it available to Google.
|
| Strong disagree. Since robots.txt is optional and the default
| is "crawl me as you please", website owners don't "choose to
| make it available", they just don't choose to make it non-
| available.
| XorNot wrote:
| That's a functionally meaningless distinction. If you setup
| a web server that responds to requests, then you're
| choosing to make content available because your server can
| choose to _not_ respond to requests. The entire protocol
| includes mechanisms to negotiate access.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Granting access and granting right to redistribute (even
| just title + snippet) and use your content commercially
| are two completely different things.
| XorNot wrote:
| And yet it is legal to produce and redistribute summaries
| as sufficiently transformative derivative works, and this
| has been court tested[1]. Of course in Australia we
| passed rather specific laws to the contrary, because lo
| and behold Rupert Murdoch wanted money and gosh darn it
| our government was going to give it to him[2].
|
| [1] https://www.practicalecommerce.com/Search-Engines-
| Indexing-a...
|
| [2] https://www.alrc.gov.au/publication/copyright-and-
| the-digita...
| eviks wrote:
| This is a meaningless simplification. In this framework
| "robots.txt" has no role, because your server "can
| choose" not to respond. Heck, even DDOS is fine, because
| "protocol"
| boesboes wrote:
| Wrong. Google ignores robots.txt entirely
| threeseed wrote:
| I wasn't aware. Can you please update Wikipedia then:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt
|
| Maybe also get Google to update their docs:
| https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-
| indexing/...
| nottorp wrote:
| It must be nice to believe everything people say by
| default... ;)
| phit_ wrote:
| their own docs also specify that the robots.txt does not
| stop indexing or showing up in search, they even bolded
| it "it is not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of
| Google"
|
| https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-
| indexing/...
| alphan0n wrote:
| The only way for links to appear in a Google search would
| be to host a public resource, that is linked from another
| public resource.
|
| If you have specified in your robots.txt that you do not
| want the page(s) or directories ingested then only the
| url is indexed (if it is linked from another page). It
| _does_ prevent the public display of the content of a
| page and creation description /summary.
|
| https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7489871?hl=e
| n
| threeseed wrote:
| From the docs:
|
| "While Google won't crawl or index the content blocked by
| a robots.txt file"
|
| They will show the URL if someone else has linked to it.
| But the content itself is not indexed.
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| a) If you don't have a robots.txt, you're indexed by default.
| It's opt-out, not opt-in. If you do nothing, you're being
| indexed.
| antiframe wrote:
| It's an opt-out of an opt-in. If you run a webserver
| hosting your files, you already opted-in to people
| accessing that data. If you then don't go ahead an
| configure it properly, that's not exactly "opt-out"
| anymore. By default your files are not accessible to the
| network, you have to first opt-in to serving them.
| veggieroll wrote:
| Robots.txt is irrelevant after hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn (2019)
| gnfargbl wrote:
| I think if Google attempted to download the entirety of JSTOR
| with the express intent of making the full dataset freely
| available, then Google would also face legal consequences.
|
| It's true, and relevant, that Google would feel those
| consequences much less sharply than Swartz did.
| vintermann wrote:
| Don't buy into the rhetoric and call it "consequences". It's
| always a choice to sue, a choice to prosecute, and this would
| be true even if these choices were made consistently and
| impartially (which they certainly aren't).
| gnfargbl wrote:
| I wasn't meaning to attach a pejorative to "consequences",
| but the word does typically have that meaning so you're
| right to call me out. Perhaps "resulting legal issues"
| would be a better way to put it.
|
| For the record, I think the consequence was grossly
| disproportionate to the action.
| josefx wrote:
| Google book search was declared fair use and copyright
| holders ended up having to explicitly request removal of
| their works.
|
| Apparently he would have gotten away with downloading the
| JSTOR database if he made it clear that he intended to only
| publish half of each paper.
| dekhn wrote:
| Google Scholar explicitly made direct deals with publishers
| to scrape their content, with the constraint that while they
| can use the content to serve search results in Scholar, but
| cannot show the content of the papers on the site- just
| titles and short fragments that match. the deals were tenuous
| and I had to step carefully around my plan to use that
| database to implement large-scale scientific search over the
| literature (this was a long time before anybody was seriously
| considering using LLMs on research data).
|
| I've spoken to several very wealthy/powerful people and tried
| to get them to negotiate a large-scale content license with
| the various publishers that would allow researchers and
| individuals to access more research in lower-friction ways.
| None of them (NIH, Schmidt, etc) were really interested.
| dcchambers wrote:
| I guess the solution is to create a shell company for your
| illegal activities?
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| You must be new to billionaire business practices: break the
| rules first, ask for forgiveness later.
|
| By the time the cheque comes, your illicit venture either
| went bust or you built a bilion dollar empire capable of
| buying the best lawyers and lobbying to walk away clean.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| The modern solution has been to grow so fast that by the time
| anyone can go after you legally you've already amassed so
| much money/power that you can have the laws rewritten (or at
| least enforced) around your existence.
|
| IMO part of the reason the SV tech bros are embracing right
| wing grift culture so publicly now is that this method, which
| had been serving them well for decades, doesn't really work
| without the infinite free money lending spigot being wide
| open.
| cduzz wrote:
| That's why you should go straight to the treasury's RSS
| feeds.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > Based on the encyclopedic knowledge LLMs have of written
| works I assume all parties did the same.
|
| I don't understand why you wouldn't just buy copies of the
| books. Seems like such a relatively inexpensive way to
| strengthen your legal case.
| cess11 wrote:
| Too much paperwork, too much effort. These are important
| people, doing much more important stuff than whatever book
| authors do.
|
| Or so they think, I think.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I doubt they think that way, but even if they did, they'd
| be right - for 99% of the works in question, the biggest
| value they gave to the world is, by far, being part of the
| LLM training corpus.
|
| There's _lots_ of content out there. Most of it is noise.
| People forget because they 're only ever exposed to an
| aggressively curated fraction of it.
| cess11 wrote:
| No, it's not.
| gosub100 wrote:
| thanks to the byzantine copyright system, you can't easily do
| it. Plus, just speculating, but maybe by paying, it
| establishes "consideration" for some implied contract? "You
| implicitly entered a contract with us by purchasing the book,
| then violated the contract by 'distributing' the material for
| commercial use" ?
| almatabata wrote:
| There must be a publisher out there that forbids you from
| training an AI on the copy you buy from them by now.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Buying the books won't automatically give you permission to
| use the content commercially
| londons_explore wrote:
| Pretty sure that even if you gave a purchasing team enough
| money for retail price and a list of all books ever
| published, they wouldn't be able to buy even a quarter of
| them.
| oblio wrote:
| Plus some people will just not sell at any price.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Buying a copy of the book doesn't grant you the right to copy
| it. That is what copyright is _for_.
| ivell wrote:
| They might even have gotten away with legitimate use
| argument if it was not seeded.
| qup wrote:
| It grants you the right to read & study it though.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| The right to read and study you have _by default_. It 's
| getting your hands on a book that has legal caveats
| attached.
| qup wrote:
| Yes, but getting your hands on the material isn't a very
| interesting legal question IMO.
|
| Whether you can train your LLM on it is a very
| interesting question.
|
| I've personally never been in favor of punishing people
| for downloading (or seeding) things.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| One which buying books for your LLM doesn't answer
| either. In analogy to humans, you might as well give your
| LLM a library card.
| jml7c5 wrote:
| Anna's Archive has 40 million books and 100 million papers.
| It's unlikely they could achieve similar coverage.
| cess11 wrote:
| It's roughly the Spotify story too. They had an extremely
| impressive catalog very early, way before they were bought by
| the entertainment cartel. The founders had background in
| torrenting and the initial product was quite similar to The
| Pirate Bay but with clearly capitalist ambitions and branding,
| in contrast to the anarchist leanings of the Pirate Bureau and
| rather anarchic attitude of The Pirate Bay.
| immibis wrote:
| Something to understand about capitalist competition (also in
| politics) is that it's a war. Not one with guns and bombs, but
| more like a cold war, with espionage and hacking and just
| generally doing anything you can to gain an advantage without
| bringing negative consequences on yourself.
|
| The limit is what you can actually get away with, not what the
| rules say you can get away with, and the system aggressively
| selects players who recognize this. It's amoral - there is no
| "ought", only "is". An actor gets punished or not, with
| absolutely no regard to whether it "should" get punished. One
| thing is consistent: following the rules as written means you
| lose.
|
| You can see it in Y Combinator (and other) startups. The
| biggest ex-startups are things like AirBNB (hotels but we don't
| follow the rules but we don't get punished for not following
| them) and Uber (taxis but we don't follow the rules but we
| don't get punished for not following them).
|
| One way to not get punished for not following the rules is to
| invent a variation of the game where the rules haven't been
| written yet. I again refer you to AirBNB and Uber; Omegle also
| comes to mind, although they didn't monetize.
|
| Viewed in this light, Aaron Swartz's mistake was not the part
| where he downloaded journal articles, but the part where he got
| caught downloading journal articles. Shadow library sites are
| doing the same thing, minus the getting caught. So are Meta and
| Google and OpenAI. sci-hub is only involved in a lawsuit
| because it got caught and is now in the stage where it finds
| out whether it gets punished or not.
| oblio wrote:
| > Something to understand about capitalist competition (also
| in politics) is that it's a war.
|
| Turns out there are 2 simultaneous wars there. One where
| companies and individuals compete ruthlessly.
|
| And another one where if non profit associations of
| individuals form, guns come out.
| bko wrote:
| The thing is Google, meta and YouTube weren't giant entities
| when they did this stuff. I think it's good no one cracked down
| on them for copyright stuff. Now they're developing an LLM that
| will generate potentially trillions in value to humanity and
| looks like they're not exactly playing by the rules. But I
| prefer looser intellectual property rights anyway so Im ok with
| it
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _But I prefer looser intellectual property rights anyway so
| Im ok with it_
|
| I think more people, potentially anyways, would feel similar
| to to this if it applied even somewhat equally.
|
| Instead, companies can seemingly do whatever they please
| whereas lawyers will send letters to your home for
| downloading a single episode of game of thrones.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| From the article, they took steps to avoid using their IP
| addresses. Individuals doing the same using a VPN are
| pretty much immune from any legal issues.
| ziddoap wrote:
| This is one small blip in an incredibly long history of
| companies being able to not care about copyright while
| individuals must.
|
| Workarounds with a VPN are great and all, but they are a
| band-aid on a systemic problem.
|
| (You are not _immune_ , by the way, if your VPN company
| is subject to a subpoena and isn't one of very few
| actually no-log services)
| ndriscoll wrote:
| IME companies take copyright _way_ more seriously than
| individuals. e.g. my last 2 jobs have had scanners to
| ensure we 're not accidentally pulling in GPL code to our
| products, and one of those was a startup. I'd be
| surprised if corporate security software weren't looking
| for torrent clients and if you wouldn't get fired for
| torrenting on corporate machines or networks at most
| companies. Meanwhile the same people setting those
| security policies have a 100TB array at home with fully
| automated pirating setups. They very much don't care
| personally, but it's a huge business risk.
|
| In high school/university in the 00s, _everyone_ casually
| pirated things. In college people passed around a USB
| drive with all of the books needed for our degree
| program. People in the dorms traded music collections
| with 10s of thousands of songs. Tellingly, Apple
| advertised that iPods could store 10,000 songs, which
| approximately zero people could afford to buy
| legitimately. If anything, the consequences for piracy
| have gone down since then, but streaming is convenient
| enough and phone storage /UX is hobbled enough that
| people pay.
|
| In any case, I think the other poster is right that
| companies flouting copyright law is a good thing. It
| stops us from pretending that it's helpful for the little
| guy, making it easier to argue for abolition or vastly
| reducing the length. That they did it to build an open
| model is even better: it shows directly the kinds of
| benefits copyright is taking from us. We _should_ be
| looking to scan every book out there to build better
| training sets (and better indexed search into scholastic
| datasets; at this point all of Anna 's Archive only costs
| a little over $11k in raw storage, which puts it into
| "affordable as an upper middle class home library"
| territory. In another few years, it may be affordable to
| nearly everyone. Better ML models could help here with
| better compression as well), but copyright law restricts
| use of works dating back to a time before electrification
| was widespread. Obviously they're an evil company in
| general, but llama was an actual good deed from them.
| bko wrote:
| > Instead, companies can seemingly do whatever they please
| whereas lawyers will send letters to your home for
| downloading a single episode of game of thrones.
|
| I don't get it. All these companies took copyrighted data
| when they were tiny grew to be large, they still do that
| now. Google and OpenAI don't send these letters. They're
| not the copyright holders.
|
| I have no idea what argument you're trying to make.
| Corporations bad?
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _Google and OpenAI don 't send these letters._
|
| Right. I'm not saying they do?
|
| > _I have no idea what argument you 're trying to make._
|
| I thought my point (not really an argument) was pretty
| clear, sorry.
|
| "Rules for thee, but not for me" is the point. Where
| "thee" is individuals and "me" is corporations. (My
| comment was general commentary, not specific to Meta,
| Google, OpenAI, LLMs, or the article)
|
| Right now "loose restrictions" seems to apply to
| corporations only. More people might be in favor of
| looser restrictions if it also applied to individuals,
| not just corporations.
|
| I'm not sure how else to reword my comment more than
| that. It wasn't really meant to be too deep, and it
| wasn't intended to be argumentative.
| ok123456 wrote:
| DRM for thee not for me.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| Well, we'll see how will it generate value and for whom.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > If you plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some
| scientific papers you forfeit your life.
|
| Just to point, but the material in question was public domain,
| so nobody had even a copyrights claim over it.
| scottbez1 wrote:
| Do you have a citation for that claim? I've not seen a claim
| that none of the material had copyright before.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's a library of historical scientific work. You will find
| the famous Einstein's 3 1905 papers there, for example.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Every scientific paper in the last 90 years or so is
| still under copyright, owned by the authors, the
| published, or the universities.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| JSTOR was explicitly a library of public domain works,
| consolidated in a single place so that academic libraries
| could access those papers that nobody had an interest in
| distributing anymore.
|
| It recently added a bunch of copyrighted journals. It
| didn't have any of those at the time.
| lolinder wrote:
| Yes. And the problem here isn't that companies get away with
| doing things like this, the problem is that individuals don't.
| Attempting to lock information behind a nightmarish legal
| system is the problem.
|
| I'm pretty much at the point now where I don't buy the
| "copyright incentivizes creation" argument any more. Copyright,
| like advertising, incentivizes creation by enormous
| corporations, but also like advertising it incentivizes
| creations that overwhelmingly have little value.
|
| Creative individuals don't need copyright to be incentivized to
| create--they need a safety net that gives them the _freedom_ to
| spend time on the creativity that naturally wants to bubble
| out. If the goal is to encourage creativity, copyright is a
| lousy and _enormously_ expensive substitute for Universal Basic
| Income.
| post-it wrote:
| Also, in Canada, it's basically impossible to protect your IP
| as an individual due to the astronomical cost and lack of
| options to recover that cost. So copyright will never
| incentivize _my_ creations, or those of any small creator.
| derektank wrote:
| Sure creative people will always create but the scope of that
| creativity will be limited if we do away with intellectual
| property. Steve Spielberg would probably always have created
| movies, but he wouldn't have been able to make Jurassic Park,
| Saving Private Ryan,or Indiana Jones without capital from the
| studio system, and the studio system wouldn't have provided
| him with that capital of they couldn't extract economic rents
| from the copyright for those films.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| I think a limited, short copyright can do good that the
| current many-year copyright does not. Imagine a 1 year
| copyright in the context of film. Companies would
| prioritize box office sales no doubt, but that's how it
| used to be and it was generally positive. It's really the
| extremity of modern copyright that I think causes these
| issues.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| They could have started a crowdfunded project and might
| still have made a great movie. If people truly like the
| created movie, why noch fund another one? Only no one would
| be paid millions for acting most likely, and that would be
| fine.
| ok_dad wrote:
| Do we need to always have big-budget films and productions?
| Perhaps we should live smaller, and enjoy local art and
| low-budget films. Do I really care that Jurassic Park was
| made? I could read the book and it's more detailed and
| imaginative anyways, and any lessons to be learned are
| definitely better when read than when watching a
| blockbuster CGI film with more effects than message.
| startupsfail wrote:
| Nothing stops you from downloading Ann's archive and training
| a model on it, right? The likelihood that you, as an
| individual, get sued over is is virtually zero.
|
| This is what Meta tried to do, quietly download and use the
| data, to do research and advance their LLMs, without trying
| to establish any legal precedents or pick up fights.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Individuals do get away with it _all of the time_.
| modzu wrote:
| i know of a company that poisoned an entire town! thats
| terrorism if done by an individual. the company still exists,
| just paid a settlement and carried on...
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I agree with your point, but will split hairs on using the
| word "terrorism". I think that should be reserved for people
| that commit atrocities for some political aim. I'm fairly
| sure the company in question (I assume Union Carbide) did not
| poison the town to advance a political agenda.
| winthrowe wrote:
| Profit at all costs is a political agenda.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Kinda terrifying that you can get away with shit if you
| just argue that it's not politically motivated, you did it
| because you really wanted a yacht.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| You also get a lesser offense killing someone
| accidentally as opposed to a premeditated murder.
|
| There's a difference between an intentional act, an
| accident, and an accident due to extreme neglect and our
| laws reflect that.
| drawkward wrote:
| Money is the ultimate political agenda.
| dahart wrote:
| Are you talking about Bhopal in 1984? If so it would be an
| understatement to refer to half a million people as a "town",
| and an overstatement to imply it was terrorism. Willful
| negligence, yes, but terrorism, no.
| pockmarked19 wrote:
| > Spotify's music library was also pirated in the early days.
|
| I want to know more, please enlighten me (anyone who knows). I
| read the book "The Spotify Play" and it made it seem like the
| pirated music was an internal-only thing and not something
| available to customers. Is that true?
| arwineap wrote:
| Users would upload their copies of the music and spotify
| would replay them. This was obvious to early users, even if
| they were only consumers, because of the pirate-shout-out-
| overlays that were in a lot of the poorer quality releases.
|
| Another interesting note, in the early days of spotify, the
| app would saturate your upload bandwidth while using it.
| Given their close ties to utorrent, I always assumed that's
| how they were affording the bandwidth as well.
|
| Pretty brilliant way to bootstrap I guess; they didn't have
| to pay for bandwidth or content until they already had
| contracts in place
| lysace wrote:
| Afaik, the trick was to stream (via http, I assume) the
| first few hundred kilobytes or so from fast/expensive
| servers and then _try_ to p2p the rest in some clever
| order. I guess seeking also triggered the fast /expensive
| path for a while.
| mzl wrote:
| Before the launch, Spotify had a deal with the music rights
| holders association in Sweden (STIM) that they could use a
| merged collection of friends and families music libraries.
| All this was removed before Spotify went out of beta.
|
| So while it was using pirated media, it was sanctioned by the
| rights holders for the experiment of building Spotify.
| billdybas wrote:
| "Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the
| Perfect Playlist" by Liz Pelly goes into more detail about
| their origins and the culture around piracy in Sweden at the
| time.
|
| https://lizpelly.info/book
| larodi wrote:
| The most outrageous thing about the whole story is that smart
| people (like here and not only) knew this all since day one.
| They been uncovering this the whole time.
|
| And in their face, with all the fierce ignorance, broligarchs
| deny, evade and totally pretend this never happened. The most
| non open company of all even went to lengths to accuse others
| of stealing their IP - not theirs to begin with.
|
| Just think of it - why did all major content platforms closed
| their APIs the day after GPT-2 got the word going...? Cause
| they knew all this very well - the content is precious and
| needed. They been doing it all along. Distilling the essence of
| world's writing and digital imagery they had no right to.
|
| We have a saying where I come from - no mercy for the chicken,
| no laws for the millions. I thought it was a local thing at
| first, it turned is how the world goes. Nothing new under the
| sun, indeed.
| qup wrote:
| Speaking of GPT2, I remember that nobody gave a shit what it
| was trained on, because it sucked then.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Crunchyroll started off as a straight up piracy site, it now
| has millions of paying subscribers and was sold to Sony for
| over a billion a few years ago.
| belter wrote:
| "Zuckerberg was at White House for meetings on Thursday" -
| https://www.reuters.com/world/us/zuckerberg-was-white-house-...
| coliveira wrote:
| Yes, these companies are based on massive IP and copyright
| theft. And they still want to lecture others about their
| "property rights".
| throwawaygmbno wrote:
| Everyone on here is smart enough. Just do not participate and
| save your money. Do not pay for digital goods. If Netflix
| raises their prices, it doesn't matter because there is a
| torrent of all of their shows. If Spotify raises their prices,
| it doesn't matter because your favorite artist has their entire
| library in a torrent. If some game company ask you to pay real
| life prices for a digital costume, find the crack online and
| play on a private server. If YouTube wants to interrupt your
| video with an ad in the middle of the sentence, download one of
| the many options that blocks all ads. Billion dollar companies
| have shown they do not care about you. The people who complain
| about losing their salary, should just get replies thanking
| them for paying.
|
| All the sad poor people who might be hurt were already paid.
| The caterer on your favorite show is not getting residuals. NBC
| also isn't going to stop making TV shows because that is all
| they can do. Content creators also existed on the internet long
| before that was a job. They just did it because they cared
| about it not for ad money. If you really want to support the
| artist directly go to a concert or just mail them a check. If
| you can't actually identify a person who might be hurt, then do
| not care.
| dingnuts wrote:
| if you want to support an artist go to the show and BUY MERCH
| at the table! almost all of their income comes from that. the
| importance of buying a T-shirt at the show cannot be
| overstated and sometimes you get to say hi to your idol, too
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's a stupid situation, though. There are many creators
| I'm happy to support - but for 99% of them, _I don 't want
| their stupid merch_. It's mostly low-quality garbage with
| high markup, that nevertheless cost _something_ to design
| and produce, thus wasting both precious resources and labor
| - an useless tax on contributions to artists that doesn 't
| even help anything. I really wish this wasn't necessary.
|
| (Even the okay-quality merch is a waste, since for most
| artists I'd want to support, I don't _identify with them
| enough_ to display that stuff, so it 's again just buying
| to put away and eventually throw away.)
| BrandonM wrote:
| I don't think I've ever seen a band selling merch that
| didn't also have a tip jar.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I've never seen a band that had. I usually end up buying
| CDs that then end up on the shelf or in a drawer, never
| opened.
| throwawaygmbno wrote:
| What is the point of this comment? Just a stream of
| consciousness for a future LLM sweep? Nobody thinks that
| the actual creator should get nothing. Are you asking for
| better T shirts? Do you want more direct ways of just
| giving cash?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| The latter, yes.
| nosioptar wrote:
| I agree mostly with their comment.
|
| What I want more than anything is for bands to just sell
| me a damned CD. I've lost track of how many times an
| artist I want to support doesn't release their music on
| CD. I'd even settle for DRM-free flacs, if it costs less
| than a CD.
|
| High quality sheet music would be cool. Lindsey Stirling
| is the only artist I can think of that does that though.
| Rasputina used to at one point.
| gpvos wrote:
| Let them ask a tenner for an album download code.
| macromagnon wrote:
| A lot of artists are under a 360 deal and they take a cut
| of everything, so that might not always be true.
| hnpolicestate wrote:
| I'm not paying for Led Zeppelin IV after having probably
| bought 3 copies in my lifetime. I agree with you.
| ericyd wrote:
| I just can't get behind the sentiment that the unethical
| behavior by big companies means I get to access all the
| content I want for free.
| throwawaygmbno wrote:
| Thank you for your service
| jamespo wrote:
| At least your human right of watching a netflix show is
| unaffected
| tdb7893 wrote:
| Also if you pirate everything you're not incentivizing
| people to make things in a more ethical manner. I've mostly
| cancelled my streaming services (I'll get different ones
| for a month at a time for specific shows) but I still pay
| for Dropout.tv (when they turned a profit they paid out a
| dividend to actors) and Patreon for YouTube creators that
| have high quality content.
| drawkward wrote:
| They have no morals, therefore I shouldn't either! That'll
| teach 'em!
| chefandy wrote:
| A whole lot of people in the tech scene got really mad
| when Huawei was using obviously stolen Cisco designs and
| code for their switches. Didn't humanity benefit from
| having cheaper access to switches because they didn't
| have to pay for Cisco's sunk costs? A whole lot of people
| got mad when Microsoft reportedly ganked open source code
| for things like DNS. Didn't humanity benefit from one of
| the world's most popular server OSs having more reliable
| name resolution?
|
| Oh, but corporations were the primary beneficiaries,
| right?
|
| Well, corporations are the primary beneficiaries of this
| too from a financial perspective. A vanishingly small
| percentage of people will run, let alone train these
| models themselves-- it's almost exclusively used to make
| commercial services that directly compete against the
| people that made the initial _" data"_. But, the
| vanishingly small percentage of people that directly
| utilize this stuff for non-commercial use frequent echo
| chambers like this that make them think more regular
| people benefit directly. And the companies that are
| competing directly with creatives and intellectuals using
| their stolen work employ a whole lot of people here,
| directly or not.
|
| The distinction between a reason and a justification gets
| pretty difficult to distinguish the closer you are to the
| group benefiting from injustice.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| The observation being made here is that copyright law
| serves to protect the interests of large companies, not
| the public, so violating copyright law is, in and of
| itself, not unethical.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Imo it's not about you accessing things you want for free.
| If your family purchased a disc copy of the goonies before
| you were born and you watched it as a kid, your accessing
| of that content you wanted for free has no moral bearing.
| The core question is what impact does your consumption
| have, and I don't think that participating in the streaming
| landscape is making things any better for anyone but their
| ceos.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Well yeah, because it's dumb.
| timcobb wrote:
| "There is no ethical consumption under capitalism"
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Who even thinks that ethical consumption exists under any
| system? Any of your consumption denies it to others. Some
| consumption is a necessity of course. We wouldn't speak
| of something absurd like "ethical breathing".
| stevage wrote:
| I think the point is, using Spotify is already essentially
| listening to your artists without supporting them. You
| might as well do that without supporting a company that is
| harming them.
| swozey wrote:
| lol I absolutely do not want non digital goods nor pirating.
| Ever. It's 2025. I don't have a cdplayer, a tape player, a
| blue ray player, I don't even know what the most modern "blue
| ray" disc would be. I have $2k worth of vinyls that are just
| unique copies I display as art I'll never put in my record
| player, that's also never been used. I don't want to
| constantly worry about 60gb of mp3 files.
|
| Oh no, that TV show I'll forget about in a year cost me
| $15/mo instead of $60 of blurays.
|
| I jump in my cars and hit a button and music plays. Almost
| any music I want. That's amazing.
|
| I'm also not pirating games. I'm not 12 without a job. I have
| a job. I pay developers for their work. I want more games,
| like Kingdom Come 3, to come out.
|
| Weird ass comment. You seriously think we're going to put our
| lives on hold to.. what, fight "digital media"? You think I
| care about netflix? Or societies use of it? I haven't used
| netflix in years. I don't know anybody under 40 with a
| netflix account. Everyone on your end of the pirate spectrum
| uses debrid nowadays, anyway.
|
| Next you're going to tell people to install the "Black XP
| Windows" edition to not support Microsoft and they all get
| malware and their credit cards stolen because they installed
| some pirated and modified cracked windows. Genius.
|
| MSNBC just cancelled Andrea Mitchells TV show, today, because
| she brought in no younger audiences. So yes, shows do get
| cancelled by not being watched.
|
| This comment was upvoted? Hn needs a break. This is some I'm
| 14 and edgy bullshit that sounds like it belongs on an
| eastern european piracy forum.
| Larrikin wrote:
| >MSNBC just cancelled Andrea Mitchells TV show, today,
| because she brought in no younger audiences. So yes, shows
| do get cancelled by not being watched.
|
| Did anyone, young or old, want to watch an 80 year old
| stumble over her words, lose her train of thought, and
| speak so painfully slow? She had built up connections over
| her long career but was basically unwatchable. The worst
| part of a Kamala presidency would have been her on the news
| and not in retirement.
| swozey wrote:
| I'm celebrating it today. No idea who is replacing her
| but I am ecstatic.
| tumsfestival wrote:
| I don't know how you went from "don't pay for overpriced
| digital goods, just pirate them instead" to "hurr durr
| start using blurays and vinyls".
|
| Reading comprehension is a lost art nowadays.
| hnpolicestate wrote:
| You're arguing for media as a service. I think many people
| are tired of the SASS everything model. It's generally user
| hostile, you need multiple different services, there are
| dark patterns and you still have to endure ads. Privacy
| issues too. Piracy is definitely superior.
| MourYother wrote:
| I sometimes think my adblocker should very much lie to the
| page that "yeah, watched that, totally" in an undetectable
| way.
| ffpip wrote:
| https://adnauseam.io/
| amarcheschi wrote:
| Goat
| earthnail wrote:
| In Spotify's defense, they used the pirated data only to show a
| proof of concept to the copyright holders, and that use was
| sanctioned by the local rights holders organization STIM.
|
| The copyright holders then approved their concept, and
| subsequently Spotify got the rights to offer their service to
| customers. Everybody won.
| tanjtanjtanj wrote:
| That's not entirely true, in Spotify's early days you could
| upload files to the service and listen to songs uploaded by
| other people. I think the majority of any song I wanted to
| listen to before they went Europe-only for a time was
| "pirated".
| earthnail wrote:
| Fair. I stand corrected.
| kqr wrote:
| Indeed. I remember there was one song that used a pirated
| variant and you could tell because it had an obvious
| artifact that was accidentally introduced in a pirated copy
| of the song!
| electriclove wrote:
| Some can pirate on a large scale and see no repercussions.
|
| Some can steal from stores and see no repercussions.
|
| Some can steal from others and see no repercussions.
|
| Some can violently harm others and see no repercussions.
|
| Some can damage property and see no repercussions.
|
| Some can't. This world is not right.
| ls612 wrote:
| The strong do what they wish and the weak suffer what they
| must. Any morality beyond that is a fairy tale that the weak
| tell themselves.
| vel0city wrote:
| > once people started uploading copyrighted TV shows to it
|
| End users, not YouTube employees, right? And they would take
| things down following DMCA requests and what not, right? So,
| pretty much following the law?
|
| > Google itself got big by indexing other people's data without
| compensation
|
| Scraping public websites to build a search index isn't the same
| as making LLMs that can recreate the source verbatim devoid of
| even attribution. I do agree there's an argument to be had
| about the LLM's transformative nature in the end though.
|
| > Spotify's music library was also pirated in the early days
|
| Not any version generally available to the public, and with the
| copyright holder's permission to do so.
| sylario wrote:
| And Hollywood was created on the west coast because for
| intellectual property it was still the far west and it allowed
| them to ignore patents on movie technologies.
| bayindirh wrote:
| They became the thing they lamented.
|
| This is the inevitable.
| smugma wrote:
| Spotify was born as a response to piracy. Why do you say their
| catalog was pirated?
| chanux wrote:
| Corporations are people. Just a notch above the regular kind.
| Lucasoato wrote:
| > If you plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some
| scientific papers you forfeit your life.
|
| In case anybody here doesn't know, that's a reference to Aaron
| Swartz, an activist (and Reddit co-founder) that was risking 35
| years in prison and a $1 million fine just for downloading a
| lot of academic papers from JSTOR. He eventually took his life
| because of the pressure. May his soul rest in peace.
| ThaDood wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this. Reading his story is kind of insane
| honestly. He created the CC licenses which I did not know.
| What an icon, truly.
| CuriousSkeptic wrote:
| On that note, Lawrence Lessigs talks on copyright from that
| period are worth a watch https://youtu.be/9xbRE_H5hoU
| gruez wrote:
| Except he was offered 6 months in a plea bargain, which he
| declined because he wanted a trial. Whether 6 months was
| reasonable punishment for "plug a laptop into a closet at MIT
| to download some scientific papers" is another matter, but
| "you forfeit your life" or "35 years in prison and a $1
| million fine " is massively misleading.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Swartz wasn't the kind of person to accept a plea bargain
| from an overzealous prosecutor who was indicting him on 13
| felony charges with a possible sentence up to 35 years
| along with a $1 million fine. I assume he wanted a trial
| because he wanted to continue his fight for open access.
| And maybe he thought he might lose, but wouldn't lose on
| all counts, and would make the prosecution look
| unreasonable in the public eye. Was that decision rational
| from a self-interest point of view? Maybe not.
|
| And then you might ask, if he wanted a trial, why did he
| kill himself? Obviously no one knows what was going through
| his head when he did it. He left no note. But the prospect
| of being locked in a cell until he was an old man probably
| had something to do with it.
|
| You can certainly argue it was his own fault for not
| pleading down, but even if that's your view, that doesn't
| absolve the prosecutor. Ortiz has a lot of blame in this
| too, and the fact she still hasn't acknowledged it over a
| decade later speaks volumes to the kind of person she is.
| ianhawes wrote:
| His criminality is one matter, but the full weight of the
| Federal Government on him was an entirely separate
| matter. A federal prosecutor's job is to jail you
| regardless of whether it is for downloading a file from a
| server or for trafficking in humans, and they will come
| at you with the same vigor regardless of the crime. And
| nothing has changed about that.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Treating a human trafficker and someone who downloaded
| some files from a server the same is not in the job
| description of a prosecutor. What an absurd statement.
| It's very much the job of a prosecutor to make judgements
| about the severity of the crime and how to respond. And
| in this case, the prosecutor showed incredibly poor
| judgement. There wasn't even a particular reason why the
| case should go federal in the first place. The state
| prosecutor saw things very differently.
| chasd00 wrote:
| The job of a prosecutor is to get a guilty verdict, the
| judge decides the sentence. At least that's how i
| understand it.
| wavemode wrote:
| I agree there's more nuance here than was initially stated,
| but I also think there's more nuance than simply "he was
| offered 6 months". Even if he was offered 6 days, the ways
| in which someone's life and livelihood changes by having
| ever been convicted of a crime and gone to prison, is
| dramatic. This is especially true in white collar work
| and/or knowledge work.
|
| Schwartz was a research fellow at Harvard. Really think he
| would've been able to continue?
| bobbob1921 wrote:
| Thanks, I thought it was a sarcastic reference to torrents.
| So this cleared that up
| sneak wrote:
| > _If you plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some
| scientific papers you forfeit your life._
|
| I'm opposed to copyright and pro-aaronsw, but the state did not
| kill him.
| roguecoder wrote:
| Absolutely.
|
| 1.8 million people are in United States jails today. It isn't
| a death sentence, and it is a foreseeable consequence of some
| ethically-appropriate actions.
|
| Supporting folks spending time in jail is a valuable role in
| any social movement.
| yurlungur wrote:
| I think the difference may be LLMs may not be laundered clean
| of copyright data anytime soon. Even if chatgpt got big and
| profitable, it's not so clear that it won't contain copyrighted
| data as that may simply be necessary to train the best models.
| yowzadave wrote:
| > Youtube was initially a ghost town (it started as a dating
| site) and it only got traction once people started uploading
| copyrighted TV shows to it
|
| To this day, there are a huge number of videos that show
| copyrighted content on YouTube; they are usually crappy clips,
| reversed and with different music playing in the background to
| avoid automated detection.
| soheil wrote:
| So be a company? Last I checked it costs a couple of hundred
| dollars to form an LLC, what am I missing?
| wcfrobert wrote:
| VC and startups are fundamentally about disruption. You can't
| make an omelette without breaking a few eggs (laws). The
| incumbent players are not going to sit still and let things be
| "disrupted". A common response is to make sure the public knows
| about the broken eggs. I would say youtube, Google, Spotify,
| Uber, doordash, etc. all have made my life much better.
| soheil wrote:
| You don't know a world without them so you actually have no
| idea if they have made your life compared to that world much
| better or much worse. How your life was at the time is
| irrelevant.
| theatomheart wrote:
| 100%
| warkdarrior wrote:
| This is a vacuous statement. You can say the same thing
| about electricity, or antibiotics, or any other modern
| advancement.
| wcfrobert wrote:
| Why would I say something is better without a point of
| comparison?
|
| I was born in the 90s. So definitely alive before YouTube
| and Spotify albeit as a teenager rather than an adult. I
| guess you're right I'm not familiar with the world of Sony
| Walkman, Blockbuster, and IBM PC. But I definitely remember
| dial-up modems, CDs, Windows 95 and XP. Technology has
| improved most aspect of my life better since then. (maybe
| minus all the ads + dopamine slot machines part...)
| soheil wrote:
| Aaron committed suicide and FBI going after him was meant more
| as a lesson to the other kids at MIT than anything.
|
| MegaUpload did the same, kim dotcom got raided in his sleep by
| FBI in New Zealand! So no I don't buy your reductionist
| argument, there are forces at play that allow companies with
| founders with the likes of Google to get away with it but not
| others.
| whatever1 wrote:
| How does that prosecutor sleep at night?
| observationist wrote:
| This frames Google's indexing of the web in a totally, abjectly
| wrong fashion. It wasn't "other people's data", it was data
| people published to the public internet, implicitly and
| explicitly granting permission to download through the act of
| serving that data without restriction to whoever navigated to a
| particular URL.
|
| That's how the internet works. If you want private content, you
| need to put up a gate mechanism of some sort with
| authentication or other methods of restricting access. Without
| that, you are literally having your server "serve" the content
| to whoever asks for it, without restriction or exception,
| without ToS or meaningful contract or agreements.
|
| You can't have it both ways. "But they didn't know" or other
| post-hoc claims of innocent people publishing content to the
| web being misled or confused or abused is infantilizing
| nonsense.
|
| The web wouldn't have been as amazing and revolutionary and
| liberating if the fundamental public and open nature of its
| systems was private and walled off by default.
|
| Your take on YouTube going viral initially over copyrighted
| content isn't correct, either - it was ease of use and access.
| It was fairly popular by the time Google bought it, and once it
| was reachable and advertised by google itself, it exploded,
| because by that time, everyone had defaulted to using google
| for search.
|
| Other people corrected your Spotify take.
|
| The reason they pirated is because it is functionally
| impossible to gain access to the data in any other way. For
| consumers, there are lots of old shows, music, and other
| content that aren't accessible, so they turn to piracy. A vast
| majority of the time, if content is accessible, people will pay
| and do the technically legal and "right" thing.
|
| Publishers exploit authors and content creators in the name of
| "platforming" and "marketing" , effectively doing as little as
| possible to take 90%+ of the value of a product and providing
| as little as possible to the producer of content or books or
| music. They get by on technicalities and have captured the
| legal arena entirely, with any attempt at reform or revolution
| meeting a messy death at the hands of lawyers and big money
| publishers.
|
| Screw those people. They lie, cheat, and steal, and somehow
| have gotten away with fooling the world into thinking they're
| the good guys.
|
| Copying bits and bytes is not stealing, and the ones trying to
| shill that narrative are trying to fool as many people as
| possible into giving them more money without any return of
| value in kind. I'd download the hell out of a car. Pirate
| everything.
| mrtesthah wrote:
| Don't forget the original developers of Skype also created
| Kazaa first.
| sandeepkd wrote:
| Reminds me of recent discussions about similar topic, what may
| clearly look like a crime can be treated differently depending
| on if you do it as an individual or as a company. Somewhere
| down the line its all about understanding the limits and
| boundaries of the system, its a skill in itself.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Mmm, the broader point is: laws are are as real as the cash you
| can pay a lawyer to fight.
| plasticbugs wrote:
| I briefly worked for Crunchyroll, which began life as an anime
| pirating service with subtitles. The contracts with the
| Japanese anime publishers came later. Now they vigorously
| protect their content from "pirates".
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "Spotify's music library was also pirated in the early days."
|
| "Ek, who had been the CEO of the piracy platform uTorrent,
| founded Spotify with his friend, another entrepreneur named
| Martin Lorentzon. Both-Ek at 23 and Lorentzon 37-were already
| millionaires from the sales of previous businesses. The name
| Spotify had no particular meaning, and was not associated with
| music. According to Spotify Teardown, the company developed a
| software for improved peer-to-peer network sharing, and the
| founders spoke of it as a general "media distribution
| platform." The initial choice to focus on music, the founders
| said at the time, was because audio files are smaller than
| video files, not because of a dream of saving music.
|
| In 2007, when Spotify first publicly tested its software, it
| allowed users to stream songs downloaded from The Pirate Bay, a
| service for unlicensed downloads. By late 2008, Spotify would
| convince music labels in Sweden to license music to the site,
| and unlicensed music was removed. From there, Spotify would
| take off across Europe and then the world."
|
| https://qz.com/1683609/how-the-music-industry-shifted-from-n...
| BrenBarn wrote:
| Exactly. We need leaders with the political will to apply a
| "financial death penalty" to companies that engage in this kind
| of brazen behavior. That means all assets seized, the company
| dissolved, personal assets of executives seized, executives
| jailed. People running companies should live in mortal fear of
| ever doing the things that they routinely do today.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Do people even take civics classes anymore? That isn't how
| any of this works. Political will doesn't allow arbitrary
| punishments. You would need legislation at very least and
| that could face issues with the Eighth Amendment. (Which
| could not be post-facto of course.)
|
| At least you're not calling for jailing all the
| shareholders....
| fimdomeio wrote:
| It really makes you think about those crazy internet folks from
| back in the day who thought copyright law was too strict and that
| restricting humanity to knowledge in such a way was holding us
| all back for the benefit of a tiny few.
| stefan_ wrote:
| The more concerning thing is that the best thing these overpaid
| people could come up with was.. download the torrent, like
| everyone else. Here you are, billions of resources, and no one
| is willing to spend a part of it to at least digitize some new
| data? Like even Google did?
| dietr1ch wrote:
| I think they are morally required to improve the current
| state.
|
| - Seed the torrent and publicly promote piracy pushing
| lawmakers.
|
| - Contribute with digitisation and open access like Google
| did in the past.
|
| - Make the part of their dataset that was pirated publicly
| accessible.
|
| - Fight stupid copyright laws. I can't believe that copyright
| lasts more than 20 years. No field moves that slowly, and
| there should be tighter limits on faster moving fields.
| malfist wrote:
| Copyright and patent aren't the same thing. "Fast moving
| field" doesn't make sense in terms of copyrights. There's
| no reason the copywriter should last some minimum duration
| after the life of the creator.
|
| If I write a really popular book, I don't want Hollywood to
| make it into a movie without compensating me just because
| they waited a few years
| everforward wrote:
| Fast moving field does make sense in terms of copyright
| because the knowledge is recorded in documents which are
| then copyrighted. E.g. research papers.
|
| > If I write a really popular book, I don't want
| Hollywood to make it into a movie without compensating me
| just because they waited a few years
|
| I genuinely don't understand this. Even at a decade
| copyright, pretty much anybody who was going to buy the
| book and read it has already done so. It costs you
| virtually nothing in sales, and society benefits from the
| resulting movie.
|
| Your goal is to deprive everyone of having a movie,
| because someone who isn't you is going to make some money
| that was never going to you anyways? Your goals for
| copyright appear to be a net negative to the system that
| enforces copyright, which begs the question why should
| the system offer protection at all?
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > Even at a decade copyright, pretty much anybody who was
| going to buy the book and read it has already done so. It
| costs you virtually nothing in sales, and society
| benefits from the resulting movie.
|
| If the movie can be made then the book can be printed and
| sold by any publisher, under the current system. It
| creates a race to the bottom on the price of the book as
| soon as the copyright duration is done. Perhaps extending
| "fair use" stuff could allow one and not the other.
| everforward wrote:
| That race to the bottom is a feature, not a bug. It
| allows poor people to engage with culture. That's the
| tradeoff here. At some point copyright is protecting a
| tiny amount of profits for the author in exchange for
| locking people out of access.
|
| Copyright is supposed to be a societal benefit, or
| there's little reason for society to spend money on
| enforcing it. That's where we currently are, and I think
| why there's such a strong reaction to copyright
| currently. We pay to protect the works and then we pay
| again to buy them. They become free when they're so
| culturally irrelevant that nobody wants them even for
| free. The costs of enforcement are socialized and the
| benefits are privatized.
|
| At some point, copyright is going to have to provide more
| back to society or society will get tired of paying to
| enforce it.
| dietr1ch wrote:
| > Copyright and patent aren't the same thing.
|
| They achieve the same, lock down knowledge and art.
|
| > If I write a really popular book, I don't want
| Hollywood to make it into a movie without compensating me
| just because they waited a few years
|
| If it was good enough maybe they wouldn't risk waiting
| and having someone else win the 10yr race.
|
| There's just too much stuff that won't make any more
| money locked behind laws that pretend they magically
| would.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I'm all for chopping up copyright law. But until we do so,
| companies like Meta need to be treated just like everyone else.
|
| That means lawsuits, prison sentences, and millions in fines.
| And that's just the piracy part, there's also the lying/fraud
| part.
|
| Interestingly, a Dutch LLM project was sent a cease and desist
| after the local copyright lobby caught wind of it being trained
| on a bunch of pirated eBooks. The case unfortunately wasn't
| fought out in court, because I would be very interested to see
| if this could make that copyright lobby take down ChatGPT and
| the other AI companies for doing the same.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| >need to be treated just like everyone else.
|
| So a copyright warning letter in the mail from their ISP?
| Maybe someone should tell them about VPNs...
| fsflover wrote:
| > crazy internet folks from back in the day
|
| You mean Electronic Frontier Foundation?
| https://www.eff.org/issues/innovation
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Probably the single biggest thing I learned growing up is that
| you can safely live by "Everyone is in it for themselves".
|
| It's incredibly rare to find people who hold ideals that are
| detrimental to their own life.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Hence why I became obsessed with just about the only
| Philosopher who engaged with this idea seriously:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ego_and_Its_Own
| erikerikson wrote:
| This hasn't been my observation. Instead, I see a society
| where people regularly help and serve one other, frequently
| for free. Consider parents, social workers, most academics,
| food banks, charity in general, most workers in most
| businesses, et cetera. I wonder: who do you know and work
| with? A minority of people profit wonderfully off this.
| Incidentally, they seem to also preach principals that can
| only lead to the end of their gravy train.
|
| You can counter by insisting that these "altruistic"
| behaviors are simply less directly but still in the
| altruist's interest. I would entirely agree.
| tredre3 wrote:
| I don't disagree with your point that, in life, not
| everybody is in it for themselves. But the examples you
| chose to demonstrate altruism are a bit ridiculous:
|
| - parents: they wanted a child and now they have to take
| care of it, it's not a selfless act at all
|
| - social workers: are paid to pretend to care. Often they
| genuinely _do_ care, but this isn 't altruism, it's a job
|
| - most academics: I see you haven't met many academics.
| Altruistic (and selfless) are not terms I would use to
| describe them. The majority is very much in it for
| themselves...
|
| - food banks, charity in general: very true, some charity
| do strive on unpaid volunteers, that is altruism
|
| - most workers in most businesses: okay now you're getting
| ridiculous...
| erikerikson wrote:
| Many children are unwanted. Consider adoption and
| neglect. Parents know not to admit these things broadly.
|
| Social work is a very low paid existence and most of the
| social workers I know could easily have earned more
| elsewhere which they are pained to know but persist
| through regardless because they care more for living in a
| world with less total suffering even at the cost of their
| own.
|
| I earned my MSc from the University of Edinburgh and
| interacted thoroughly with academics there and in the
| process of getting there. I know many people with their
| PhDs and have had personal friendships with professors,
| postdocs, and other researchers. I would agree that
| academic incentive structure have been made deeply
| dysfunctional and delusion abounds. Also that defection
| is common. I have known some of those evil actors (e.g.
| Sharon Oviatt) so I don't deny their existence.
|
| The very premise of business is that it takes a profit
| from the excess efforts of labor. I'm not the ridiculous
| sort that fails to recognize that often workers
| productivity is both made possible and enhanced by the
| accumulated coordination and structure of firms and
| owners should capture some of that value. However,
| increasingly research is showing that the advantages of
| our society are being captured by firms. Meanwhile, too
| many owners are failing to responsibly reinvest in the
| population and have made religions out of not fostering
| true growth.
|
| My claim is that multiple cultural norms live side-by-
| side and I'm trying to help you and others realize that
| different options are plausible and more advantageous.
| The cooperators learn self preservation and hiding while
| they are also harvested while and beyond doing so. My
| speculation is that the expanded belief holding of
| perspectives like yours decreases the size of that
| population which will be a downward spiral of
| inefficiency and impoverishment. I expect the bottom will
| fall out viciously if it gets to that.
|
| My spending time on this conversation is altruism, what
| is it for you?
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| These are such funny, self important comments.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Considering prices for single work, this must be multi-billion
| dollar compensation.
|
| Take for example 675k paid for 31 songs. So 20k a song. If we
| estimate book to be say 10MB that would 8 million works. So I
| think reasonable compensation is something along 163 billion. Not
| even 10 years of net income. Which I think is entirely fair
| punishment.
| pinoy420 wrote:
| For creating a backup of library genesis. No. They should be
| awarded a philanthropic prize.
| striking wrote:
| There's evidence of them seeding back as little as possible.
| I'm not sure how that's "creating a backup".
| ralusek wrote:
| They're talking about creating and releasing Llama...not
| seeding the torrent
| pseudalopex wrote:
| A model is not a backup.
| qup wrote:
| Then why are we mad about the copyright stuff?
| striking wrote:
| Both things can be true:
|
| * an AI model is not a backup of the contents of all of
| the books in the sense that it would preserve their
| contents or similar such it might e.g. be useful for
| future generations
|
| * Meta has (allegedly) been unfairly benefiting /
| profiting off of the copyrighted work of others by
| illegally reproducing copies of their work. Not just in
| the AI model sense[1], but actually (allegedly)
| downloading them directly from pirate repositories in a
| way that isn't straightforwardly fair use and even
| uploading some amount of this pirate data in return.
|
| I feel like the parent commenter may have been making the
| typical argument for preservation of copyrighted
| materials, and I'm amenable to it... when it's regular
| people or non-profits doing that work, in a way that
| doesn't allow them to benefit unfairly or profit off of
| the hard work of others (or would be connected to such a
| process in some way).
|
| Plaintiffs allege that Meta didn't just do all this, but
| also talked about how wrong it was and how to mitigate
| the seeding so they might upload as little as possible.
| So no matter how you slice it they allegedly 1) knew they
| were doing something at least a little bit wrong and 2)
| took steps to prevent the process that might otherwise
| have preserved the copied materials for the public
| interest.
|
| And I feel like you probably knew all this, but maybe I'm
| missing something.
|
| 1: the typical argument wherein the model wouldn't exist
| without the ingested data, a lot of it is still in there,
| it is of course a derivative work and the question is
| really how derivative is it and what part of the work can
| they claim is their own contribution
| dizhn wrote:
| In that case they should also be sued for not complying
| with bittorrent's tit-for-tat ethiquette. Leechers should
| be punished. :)
| karel-3d wrote:
| Meta argues that it's fair use, and that they just downloaded,
| and never seeded, all the torrents.
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| The article is purposely conflating the downloading from the
| seeding statistics. Saying "just 0.008%" the size resulted in
| big punishments is confusing when Meta is also saying they
| set their client to be leechers.
| larodi wrote:
| No they never seeded the essence of it ALL :;))
| qiqitori wrote:
| They have so much bandwidth and never seeded anything? Damn
| leechers! That is not fair use of torrents at all!
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| Seeding and downloading are in the same protocol. You can't
| do one without the other
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Why comment if you have no idea what youre talking about?
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| I've written my own torrent clients. Have you?
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| clearly not good ones
| tredre3 wrote:
| So have I. So we both know that it's possible to not seed
| a torrent while downloading it.
|
| It's even possible to _pretend_ to seed whilst not
| transferring anything, just to boost your ratio on a
| private tracker.
|
| That's the protocol we're talking about.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Beyond the absurdity of those amounts, the funny thing is that
| the authors wouldn't ever see a dime of that money. Not in the
| music case, not in this one either. Fairness?
| postepowanieadm wrote:
| That's horrible! Magnet anyone?
| pinoy420 wrote:
| Library genesis
| ykonstant wrote:
| Weird shenanigans are happening in libgen at the moment;
| better go through Anna's Archive to look for the items you
| want, it will link you to the corresponding mirrors more
| reliably.
|
| At least this has been the recent experience of a friend who
| used libgen and anna's archive to download legal, public
| domain works!
| bmacho wrote:
| No, AA is rate limited to being unusable, while libgen is
| fast enough.
| addandsubtract wrote:
| Anna's Archive: https://annas-archive.org
| immibis wrote:
| specifically https://annas-archive.se/torrents - this is a
| meta-project which aggregates illegal copyrighted material
| from other illegal projects. You absolutely should not
| download any material this page links to, although you can
| use it for the purpose of researching about shadow libraries.
| gorbachev wrote:
| Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42673628
| uncomplexity_ wrote:
| did they not seed enough, is that the crime? lol
| palata wrote:
| Good, we know it. Nothing will happen, because nothing happens to
| billionaires and their companies. Musk is proving it every day
| now.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| This is why we need to abolish the government. If the
| government doesn't have any power, they can't do preferential
| treatment to their cronies.
|
| Enough with laws for thee but not for me!
| ArnoVW wrote:
| I was having difficulty figuring out if this was parody or
| not. But I guess the username checks out.
| palata wrote:
| The problem is precisely that those billionaires are too
| powerful. If anything, we need to abolish the billionaires.
| nprateem wrote:
| If you're an author with a book likely to have be hoovered up, I
| wonder what you'd get from the fb models if you asked "complete
| this in the style of [author] in [book]: [quite a long excerpt]"
|
| If you get a direct quote then you're good with your claim,
| surely.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| I believe that is part of this lawsuit pretty much
| Nemo_bis wrote:
| That's the NYT's case. Not necessarily very strong.
| https://www.techdirt.com/2024/03/05/openais-motion-to-dismis...
| unraveller wrote:
| The way it works counts if you bring prompting into it. It
| could easily have learned enough style chops of [author] from
| other sources to mimic/predict those stanzas from raw data
| points.
|
| Whatever the ruling one thing is for sure, plagiarism is no
| longer the sincerest form of flattery. The human authors are
| out for AI blood on this.
| yoavm wrote:
| We all like hating big corporations, especially Meta, and people
| seem to use this as an opportunity to advocate for punishing
| them. I think it's wiser to advocate for changing our IP laws.
| Ekaros wrote:
| First punish them. Then change the laws.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| I bet you and my "first build the product, then worry about
| security" manager would get along.
| Ekaros wrote:
| My approach is same. First fire that manager. Then define
| security.
| ngneer wrote:
| That one is tough, because they are blind to the risk. I
| try to only work with people who have been burned before or
| have been around long enough to have seen the aftermath.
| Let me guess, they are probably telling you "show me the
| vulnerability", but refuse to delay shipping or fund the
| PoC.
|
| Best advice is to communicate in writing the most likely
| risk and threat scenarios, with as much data or
| extrapolated data as possible. When the security flaws are
| later discovered, that is data you can refer to.
|
| From what I read, this is what Zoom was like early on. They
| had amateur hour security and then when s*t hit the fan
| they beefed it up and retained a security team. I guess you
| could say it worked for them?
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| I think most of the public is probably in favor of stronger IP
| laws now that big corps are threatening to make them jobless
| with IP-disrespecting AIs
| rchaud wrote:
| Something tells me stronger IP laws will be drafted by
| holders of that IP, with little if any regard to the
| potential for job losses for regular people from AI.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| Maybe, but it's better than the current situation with 0
| regard for potential job losses for regular people,
| probably why they're in favor of trying something vs the
| status quo
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Most of the public has jobs based upon IP? While it is
| probably a bigger share than farming, I doubt that. The
| actual drivers appear to be a mixture of hysteria, and
| reflexive anti-corporate sentiment as we see even self-
| proclaimed leftists going "WTF, I love copyright now!".
| miltonlost wrote:
| Big corporations all like hating their consumers abd legal
| laws. You love committing crimes it seems.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| I fail to see how you arrived at GP being a hobbyist criminal
| based on their suggestion that IP laws need to be modernized.
| lrvick wrote:
| I truly hope Meta has a serious security issue that burns their
| company to the ground.
|
| That said, I want them to burn for the right reasons.
|
| Downloading data that should be available to the public is not
| one of them.
| lblume wrote:
| Exactly. Everyone should have the right to have access to
| this.
| palata wrote:
| Are you sure that everything should be in the public
| domain? Say you spend a year writing a book, shouldn't you
| be able to sell it?
| rafaelero wrote:
| They should sell for a price it would make pirating it
| pointless. Like what Spotify or Netflix did to audio and
| visual content. Then they can use the exposure to find
| other ways to make money.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| Or if you don't agree with the price, _do not buy_ it.
| You are NOT entitled to entertain yourself in any way you
| want. (unless it 's funded by taxes etc, in which case...
| okay, it's open to discussion.)
|
| Look, let's be honest - what gives you or others the
| right to steal from others?
| lrvick wrote:
| If buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.
| palata wrote:
| Which is completely off topic. You can buy a paper book
| and own it, but it doesn't mean that you are allowed to
| make copies of it and sell them.
| qup wrote:
| That's what I do, personally.
|
| But you call it "stealing," others call it "copying."
|
| Stealing takes, from someone, something they own.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| There's such a mass of possible works that it hardly
| constrains someone that if you could cast a magic spell
| preventing someone from distributing or accessing your
| particular work and then burned it, your spell would have
| essentially no effect-- no one would notice it and no one
| would be harmed.
|
| As long as discussion of a work that has published is not
| impeded, the public is not harmed even by these 50-years
| after life copyrights other than by that they are
| accumulated by certain companies who themselves become
| problems.
|
| When someone decides to use someone's work without
| compensation he is, even though he is not deprived of the
| work itself, still robbed. But it's not a theft of goods,
| it's theft of service. The copyright infringer isn't the
| guy who steals your phone, it's the guy who even you have
| done some work for but who refuses to pay.
|
| With this view you can also believe, without hypocrisy,
| that what the LLM firms are doing is wrong while what
| Schwartz did was not, since the authors in question
| weren't deprived of any royalties or payments due to them
| due to due to the publishing model for scientific works.
| alickz wrote:
| > what gives you or others the right to steal from
| others?
|
| I think technically it's copying more than stealing
|
| Like if you could wait for someone to design and build a
| car and then CTRL+C/V it for yourself (is it possible to
| steal in a post-scarcity society?)
| palata wrote:
| You do realise that artists don't make a living from
| Spotify, right?
| lrvick wrote:
| I have open sourced all work I legally can for the past
| 20 years, and it has only given me more exposure and made
| it easier for people to trust me with significant budget
| to solve their hardest problems.
|
| Also I happily buy lots of books from people like Cory
| Doctorow and nostarchpress -because- their books are
| public and I want to support authors that value the
| freedom of their readers.
|
| Books that are DRM or copyright protected however, I buy
| used paper copies or pirate because why would I
| financially support people that do not respect my
| freedom?
| palata wrote:
| Where do you find Cory Doctorow's books for free? Because
| here it requires me to pay: https://craphound.com/shop/
|
| Are you sure they are free?
| philipkglass wrote:
| He has released many of his stories and novels under
| Creative Commons:
|
| https://www.freesfonline.net/authors/Cory_Doctorow.html
| boesboes wrote:
| They broke the law and should be punished for that. Whether the
| law should change is a separate discussion.
|
| Also, change the law so this is legal for poor meta? smh..
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| We're sick of the double standards.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#United_States_v._...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Death
|
| While Aaron Swartz was bullied to suicide, these corporations
| will walk free and make billions. I say give every tech CEO the
| Swartz treatment, _then_ change the law.
| nashashmi wrote:
| The lesson here is make sure you only break the rules in the
| limits of severity that your wealth class allows.
|
| MIT students will get away with breaking bigger rules than
| community college students will.
| willturman wrote:
| Ah, you're citing that inviolable document, the United
| States Constitution, which brought forth the even-handed
| dawn of a legal caste system.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Double standards is how the law is practiced since time
| immemorial. Copyright is Disney-Sony law made up few decades
| ago for no reason other than money. Pick your battles.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Swartz committed suicide because he was mentally ill. He also
| attempted suicide multiple times in his life while not being
| "bullied".
|
| If he was acting rationally and came to the conclusion that
| dying was better than spending X years in jail, he would have
| committed suicide _after_ sentencing, not before any trial
| had even happened.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > He also attempted suicide multiple times in his life
| while not being "bullied".
|
| Citation?
| crazygringo wrote:
| Why not change the law first?
|
| Two wrongs don't make a right. If a law is unjust, then what
| good is there in continuing to punish people who have broken
| it, just because other people have been punished in the past?
|
| Either you think the law is just or unjust. If you think it's
| unjust, I don't possibly see how you think people should be
| punished for it. Meta wasn't responsible for what happened to
| Aaron Swartz.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Motive matters. What Swartz did was in protest for a cause,
| a form of civil disobedience (which has always been a valid
| form of protest in democratic societies).
|
| The other was to make a quick buck.
|
| I know which has earned my respect more.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Motive matters when you believe something _should_ be
| criminal, but there are extenuating circumstances.
|
| But if you don't think something should be illegal to
| begin with, why do you want to see someone punished?
| Regardless of motive? If you think it should be allowed,
| then it should be allowed period, regardless of whether
| it was to make a quick buck or for civil disobedience.
| Right?
|
| I totally get who you respect more. What I don't get is
| "give every tech CEO the Swartz treatment" first. If you
| don't think what they did should be illegal, then there's
| just no justification for that.
| palata wrote:
| You're conflating different problems.
|
| Big corporations are too big, they should just not exist. When
| you have corporations more powerful than the government of the
| biggest states, it's a bug, not a feature.
|
| The IP laws may need rethinking. Saying that they should
| disappear because big corporations are above the law doesn't
| help, though. First kill the big corporations, then think about
| fair laws. Changing the law now would not change anything since
| those corporations are already above the law.
| larodi wrote:
| Perhaps they just did, or we are doing it - basically this
| should lead to abolition of copyright to any published
| article there is. Not sure how'd it impact open source, we'll
| either have all of it open, or none at all.
| bbor wrote:
| Even without copyright there are trade secrets, not to
| mention trademarks and patents. Maybe we could get rid of
| the latter, but I think we'd need to be pretty heavily into
| socialist utopia before considering nixing the former two!
| everforward wrote:
| Trademarks and patents are very different from copyright.
| Trademarks especially so because they aren't designed to
| "own" knowledge, just to prevent confusion about who made
| a product or what it is.
|
| "Intellectual property" is an abomination of a term
| because it conflates 3 separate mechanisms with differing
| goals, pretending that they're related in any meaningful
| sense.
|
| Patents protect a process. Trademarks protect identity.
| Copyright protects knowledge. Disparate mechanisms for
| disparate goals.
| palata wrote:
| > Copyright protects knowledge.
|
| Not at all. I am amazed by how badly copyright is
| understood.
|
| You can buy a physics book, learn about physics from it,
| and use that knowledge somewhere else. That's totally
| legal, an copyright doesn't prevent you from doing that
| _at all_.
| larodi wrote:
| We need different perspective to copyright. Besides -
| what is a trade secret 10, 20, 30 years ago is a common
| wiki article now... very often if not always.
|
| The idea of people owning information is really beyond
| comprehension for me. There's no patent for ideas, only
| for mechanisms or implementations.
|
| Besides we're already tossing world's knowledge in our
| palms, all the copy shit seems so irrelevant.
|
| I'm not against closed source or keeping trade secrets.
| But once a story becomes public it should be accessible
| at no cost or else we get where we are atm.
| palata wrote:
| Copyright does not protect knowledge. If you can write a
| full OS from scratch, Microsoft will not come sue you
| because they had the knowledge before.
| qup wrote:
| How do you suggest making them smaller?
|
| For instance, what if google was still just serving search
| results w/ ads, and they never expanded that. How would you
| make them smaller?
| Timon3 wrote:
| Then they'd already be smaller, so there's no reason to
| make them smaller. Or am I misunderstanding your question?
| qup wrote:
| Okay, they would be smaller, but you said "big
| corporations should not be able to exist" and they would
| already be a big corporation with just search--they
| started this way.
|
| Or, just to follow it through, let's say "WidgetBoss LLC"
| makes a new Widget that every single human has to have,
| they become the biggest company ever by making one
| widget. What will you do to make them smaller? Why?
|
| I have a big problem with Google & Meta, and I can
| understand arguments about those companies. But not just
| "big companies" as a generality.
|
| But that's how everyone speaks now. "Literally every
| billionaire is evil and exploiting blah blah blah"
| palata wrote:
| I'm not sure if you're in good faith, but I will assume
| that you are.
|
| > "Literally every billionaire is evil and exploiting
| blah blah blah"
|
| Nope. Not every billionaire is evil and exploiting blah
| blah blah. But nobody deserves to be a billionaire,
| period.
|
| > let's say "WidgetBoss LLC" makes a new Widget that
| every single human has to have, they become the biggest
| company ever by making one widget
|
| Which hasn't happened because, obviously, it is not
| possible to become the biggest company ever by making
| something trivial.
|
| It is not possible to promote your product by putting it
| at the top of the search results if you don't own the
| search engine.
|
| It is not possible to get statistics about popular
| products in your webstore, copy them and put them at the
| top of the search results if you can't own both the
| webstore and the products.
|
| It is not possible to force everybody to use your email
| provider in order to use their smartphone if you don't
| own both the email provider and the smartphone OS.
|
| etc.
| alickz wrote:
| > First kill the big corporations, then think about fair
| laws.
|
| It's not possible to kill big corporations before fair laws,
| because as you said yourself "corporations are already above
| the law"
|
| Unfair laws don't apply to big corporations, they only apply
| to the people opposed to big corporations
|
| It's akin to hamstringing a horse and saying you'll fix it
| when they win
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Anti-Trust laws are a little different though. It's
| specifically about bringing giant corps down a peg, and has
| been used multiple times against companies that otherwise
| skirt the law quite a bit.
|
| Standard Oil, AT&T, the railroads, all thought they were
| above the law, for good reason, but they were all still
| broken.
|
| Not going to happen for 4 years at least.
| qudat wrote:
| > When you have corporations more powerful than the
| government of the biggest states, it's a bug, not a feature.
|
| The only distinction between corporations and governments is
| one of them are morally bankrupt arbiters of force.
| palata wrote:
| If that's the only distinction you see, then you don't
| really understand the concept of "government".
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Big corporations are too big, they should just not exist.
|
| Nor should big governments.
|
| Nor should big countries, for that matter.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| Economies of scale generate value
| palata wrote:
| And monopolies do the opposite.
| blueboo wrote:
| We may in retrospect find that the moment may have passed where
| "big corporations" have become more powerful and impactful on
| our lives than the IP laws on the books. After all, we can
| already plainly see they only come into effect when useful by
| the powerful
| yodsanklai wrote:
| Big corporations don't have morale or ethics. They'll break any
| laws as long as it's profitable. There's no point complaining
| about Meta or Zuck. Meta does what it's designed to do. If
| people aren't happy, they should vote for more regulations.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| ...and boycott the offender's products.
| jillyboel wrote:
| First we must prosecute Meta into committing suicide like was
| done to Aaron Swartz. After justice is served, we should change
| IP laws.
| freeAgent wrote:
| The point is about the hypocrisy and double-standards evinced
| by this behavior.
| perihelions wrote:
| Best way to "punish" Meta is to slash the Gordian knot and
| abolish copyright. Level the playing field, incrementally, for
| everyone else who isn't a trillion-dollar corporation.
|
| The alternative is a futile legalistic attack against a monopoly
| entity too powerful to be meaningfully punished. That won't
| accomplish anything useful. It would, rather, help cement this
| status quo, where copyright infringement is selectively legal or
| illegal, for different entities at the same time; and companies
| like Meta thrive arbitraging that difference. You can't defeat
| Meta--but you _can_ help dig them a moat.
| miltonlost wrote:
| Ridding copyright would level the playing field for individuals
| and companies????!!!! Getting rid of laws that protect the
| individual only will help the larger empowered businesses.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| >only will help the larger empowered businesses.
|
| I'm pretty sure I could list ten megacorps that would
| collapse overnight if copyright was abolished. The music
| groups, movie studios, streaming platforms...
| nkrisc wrote:
| What's the alternative to copyright then? Anything I create
| will be instantly reproduced and sold for less than I can
| afford to by some entity far larger and more efficient than me.
|
| > Level the playing field, incrementally, for everyone else who
| isn't a trillion-dollar corporation.
|
| There is no level playing field when you have individuals and
| trillion-dollar companies in the same market.
| clueless wrote:
| Right, all this talk about getting rid of copyright and no
| one is talking about what should replace it? how would we we
| incentives people to write good books? to pour 1000s of hours
| of their time to produce new knowledge?
| empath75 wrote:
| As we all know, not a single book or work of art was
| produced before the creation of copyright.
| lrvick wrote:
| This should be legal. Copyright law does more harm than good.
|
| The only ethical problem here is that only Meta sized companies
| can afford to pay the "damages" for such blatant law violations
| at worst, or the fees of their lawyers at best.
| pleeb wrote:
| If an individual was the one tormenting almost 82 TB of
| copyrighted books, the damages they would have to pay would be
| in the trillions (mostly because of how broken the copyright
| law system is)
| maronato wrote:
| Copyright law does more harm than good to individuals who just
| want to learn and enjoy content without profiting from it.
|
| Companies like Meta and OpenAI, however, should definitely have
| to pay to use the hard work of humans to train their AI.
| moffkalast wrote:
| If only these corporations with vested interests in permissive
| copyright would put their money where their mouth is with
| lobbying for a change. Or is that only allowed when they're
| trying to do something scummy? I forget.
| woadwarrior01 wrote:
| I wonder what happened to the related OpenAI training GPT3 on the
| books3 dataset story[1] from ~2 years ago?
|
| [1]: https://www.wired.com/story/battle-over-books3/
| gundmc wrote:
| I think this one is different because the legality of training
| on copyrighted material is an open legal question while
| distributing/seeding copyrighted material is decidedly illegal.
| iimaginary wrote:
| We need better laws that would create a better way to do this
| legally whilst compensating rights holders.
| miltonlost wrote:
| We need better justice system that enforces the laws we have in
| the books that would help compensate right owners when big
| companies in emails pirate terabytes of data.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I really don't think that Meta did this because the alternative
| would have been too onerous; they are a huge org, they could
| work through whatever loopholes required. They did it because
| it would have cost money and there will be no penalty for not
| paying.
| belter wrote:
| "Supposedly, Meta tried to conceal the seeding by not using
| Facebook servers while downloading the dataset to "avoid" the
| "risk" of anyone "tracing back the seeder/downloader" from
| Facebook servers, an internal message from Meta researcher Frank
| Zhang said, while describing the work as in "stealth mode." Meta
| also allegedly modified settings "so that the smallest amount of
| seeding possible could occur," a Meta executive in charge of
| project management, Michael Clark, said in a deposition..."
|
| They will be getting a lot of Frommer Legal letters...
| mik1998 wrote:
| Libgen is a civilizational project that should be endorsed, not
| prosecuted. I hope one day people will look at it and think how
| stupid we were today to shun the largest collection of literary
| works in human history.
| rafram wrote:
| I think you're overstating its importance. The internet already
| makes it possible to order almost any book in existence and
| have it arrive at your doorstep within a week or so, or often
| on your ebook reader instantly. And your local library probably
| participates in an interlibrary loan system that lets you
| request any book held by any library in the country for _free_.
|
| LibGen gives you access to a much smaller body of works than
| either of those. It's a little more convenient. But the big
| difference is that it doesn't compensate the author at all.
|
| Just go to a real library.
| mik1998 wrote:
| No one sells scans of older books, which are often sparsely
| available in obscure (often private) libraries.
| rafram wrote:
| Sure, but I have a strong feeling that scans of out-of-
| print books only constitute a small portion of LibGen's
| traffic.
|
| It's like the idea that most BitTorrent users are just
| using it to share free software and Creative Commons media.
| (See the screenshots on every BitTorrent client's website.)
| It would definitely be helpful if it were true, but
| everyone knows it's just wishful thinking.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Why does the proportion matter?
|
| Academics are huge users of LibGen for academic books
| from the entire past century and beyond. It's infinitely
| more convenient to instantly get a PDF you can highlight,
| than wait weeks for some interlibrary loan from an
| institution three states away.
|
| Just because the majority of people might be downloading
| Harry Potter is irrelevant.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| 1. We are not talking about physical books.
|
| 2. DRM is built in to most purchased ebooks, which means you
| can't consume the book on any device. "Illegal" tools exist
| to circumvent this.
|
| 3. Large ebook stores - like other digital stores -
| essentially lend you a copy of the book. So when they are
| forced to pull a book, they'll pull your access too.
|
| Of course, now that the big players have consumed/archived
| the entire book dump, they can go ahead and kill it to
| prevent others from doing the same thing.
| intotheabyss wrote:
| And what about the other billions of people on the planet
| that don't even have a library, let alone a doorstep to
| receive a first world delivery service.
| thfuran wrote:
| There are a whole lot of books that are out of print, and if
| a book went out of print before ebooks were a thing, it
| probably doesn't have a legal digital edition either.
| xtracto wrote:
| This. Few people here would remember
| ebooksclub/gigapedia/smiley/library.nu [1] which predated
| LibGen by several years. But that online library had a lot
| of books that are not availble nowadays. There were lots of
| scanned books (djvu) that people uploaded. So much lost
| knowledge.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library.nu
| ALittleLight wrote:
| It is *much* more convenient. When a research path takes me
| to an article or book - I could buy or order or go to a
| physical library, that would take hours or days. I could also
| open it as a PDF in seconds. If you need to read a chapter
| from a book, or an article, or skim such checking to see if
| it's worthwhile, 20-30 times to figure something out, then
| libgen is the difference between finishing in a day or a
| month.
| greenavocado wrote:
| > LibGen gives you access to a much smaller body of works
| than either of those.
|
| > Just go to a real library.
|
| The thrill of waiting a week for a book to arrive or
| navigating the labyrinthine interlibrary loan system is truly
| a privilege that many can afford. And who needs instant
| access to knowledge when you can have the pleasure of paying
| for shipping or commuting to a physical library?
|
| It's also fascinating that you mention compensating authors,
| as if the current publishing model is a paragon of fairness
| and equity. I'm sure the authors are just thrilled to receive
| their meager royalties while the rest of the industry reaps
| the benefits.
|
| LibGen, on the other hand, is a quaint little website that
| only offers access to a vast, sprawling library of texts,
| completely free of charge and accessible to anyone with an
| internet connection. I'm sure it's totally insignificant
| compared to the robust and equitable systems you mentioned.
|
| Your suggestion to "just go to a real library" is also a
| brilliant solution, assuming that everyone has the luxury of
| living near a well-stocked library, having the time and
| resources to visit it, and not having any other obligations
| or responsibilities. I'm sure it's not at all a tone-deaf,
| out-of-touch recommendation.
| JambalayaJimbo wrote:
| Your library almost definitely offers digital loans as
| well.
| crtasm wrote:
| Seeing the high prices they are charged for a digital
| licence which expires after a fairly small number of
| loans, I feel it'd be better for my library if I pirate
| when possible. Save those limited loans for someone who
| prefers/needs them.
| rafram wrote:
| Yes, publishers don't pay authors as much as they deserve,
| but LibGen pays them literally nothing. Authors tend to
| love libraries but hate piracy. Why? Because earning
| something is better than earning nothing.
|
| Have you ever submitted an ILL request? It's extremely
| simple. Many library systems even integrate with WorldCat,
| so submitting a request for any book just takes a few
| clicks.
|
| I'm mostly speaking about people in the US. Every single
| county in the entire country has a public library. Almost
| all of them have ILL.
|
| I think equity is a fair argument for the existence of
| services like LibGen in many parts of the world, but the
| reality is that almost everyone using a book piracy sites
| in a first-world country is using it to pirate an in-print
| book that they just don't want to go to the trouble of
| borrowing or buying.
| sva_ wrote:
| Libraries can burn down (see Library of Alexandria),
| civilizations end (see various). LibGen makes it possible for
| an individual to backup a snapshot of cumulative human
| knowledge, and I think that's commendable.
| luqtas wrote:
| Libgen turns into a problem when you have a company developing
| generative AI with it, either giving money to GPU manufacturers
| or themselves with paid services (see OpenAI)
| bbor wrote:
| ...why? Will people buy less books because we have intuitive
| algorithms trained on old books?
|
| Personally, I strongly believe that the aesthetic skills of
| humanity are one of our most advanced faculties -- we are
| nowhere close to replacing them with fully-automated output,
| AGI or no.
| luqtas wrote:
| old books? i can imagine the shit/hallucinated-like
| generative AI we would have if the training weight was
| restricted to public domain stuff...
|
| i think when chatGPT was around version 2 or 3, i had
| extracted almost 2 pages (without any alteration from the
| original) with questions that considered the author from
| this book here, https://www.amazon.com/Loneliness-Human-
| Nature-Social-Connec...
|
| now it's up to you to think this is okay... but i bet you
| are no author
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The answer is to censor the model output, not the
| training input. A dumb filter using 20 year old
| technology can easily stop LLM's from verbatim copyright
| output.
| esafak wrote:
| What if the model simply substitutes synonyms here and
| there without changing the spirit of the material? (This
| might not work for poetry, obviously.) It is not such a
| simple matter.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| It's pretty simple, you are absolutely allowed to do
| that, and it's been done forever.
|
| Imagine having the copyright claim to "Person's family
| member is killed so they go and get revenge".
| bbor wrote:
| I know that this seems likely from a theoretical
| perspective (in other words, I would way underestimate it
| at the sprint planning meeting!), but
|
| A) checking each output against a regex representing a
| hundred years of literature would be expensive AF no
| matter how streamlined you make it, and
|
| B) latent space allows for small deviations that would
| still get you in trouble but are very hard to catch
| without a truly latent wrapper (i.e. another LLM call). A
| good visual example of this is the coverage early on in
| the Disney v. ChatGPT lawsuit:
|
| [1] IEEE: https://spectrum.ieee.org/midjourney-copyright
|
| [2] reliable ol' Gary Marcus:
| https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/things-are-about-to-
| get-a-...
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I find this such a strange remark on this front.
|
| You got less than 1% of a book... from an author who has
| passed away... who wrote on a research topic that was
| funded by an institution that takes in hundreds of
| millions of dollars in federal grants each year...
|
| I'm not an author (although I do generate almost
| exclusively IP for a living) and I think this is about as
| weak a form of this argument as you _possibly_ make.
|
| So right back at ya... who was hurt in your example?
| sanderjd wrote:
| I think the key is to think through the incentives for
| _future_ authors.
|
| As a thought experiment, say that the idea someday
| becomes mainstream that there is no reason to read any
| book or research publication because you can just ask an
| AI to describe and quote at length from the contents of
| anything you might want to read. In such a future, I
| think it's reasonable to predict that there would be less
| incentive to publish and thus less people publishing
| things.
|
| In that case, I would argue the "hurt" is primarily to
| society as a whole, and also to people who might have
| otherwise enjoyed a career in writing.
|
| Having said that, I don't think we're _particularly_
| close to living in that future. For one thing I 'd say
| that the ability to receive compensation from holding a
| copyright doesn't seem to be the most important incentive
| for people to create things (written or otherwise),
| though it is for some people. But mostly, I just don't
| think this idea of chatting with an AI _instead of_
| reading things is very mainstream, maybe at least in part
| because it isn 't very easy to get them to quote at
| length. What I don't know is whether this is likely to
| change or how quickly.
| bbor wrote:
| there is no reason to read any book or research
| publication because you can just ask an AI to describe
| and quote at length from the contents of anything you
| might want to read
|
| I think this is the fundamental misunderstanding at the
| heart of a lot of the anger over this, beyond the basic
| "corporations in general are out of control and living
| authors should earn a fair wage" points that existed
| before this.
|
| You summarize well how we aren't there yet, but I'd say
| the answer to your final implied question is "not likely
| to change at all". Even when my fellow traitors-to-
| humanity are done with our cognitive AGI systems that
| employ intuitive algorithms in symphony with deliberative
| symbolic ones, at the end of the day, information theory
| holds for them just as much as it does for us. LLMs are
| not built to memorize knowledge, they're built to
| intuitively transform text -- the only way to get
| verbatim copies of "anything you might want to read" is
| fundamentally to store a copy of it. Full stop, end of
| story, will never not be true.
|
| In that light, such a future seems as easy to avoid today
| as it was 5 years ago: not trivial, but well within the
| bounds of our legal and social systems. If someone makes
| a bot with copies of recent literature, and the authors
| wrote that lit under a social contract that promised them
| royalties, then the obvious move is to stop them.
|
| Until then, as you say: only extremists and laymen who
| don't know better are using LLMs to replace published
| literature altogether. Everyone else knows that the UX
| isn't there, and the chance for confident error way too
| high.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| It isn't that someone was hurt. We have one private
| entity gaining power by centralizing knowledge (which
| they never contributed to) and making people pay for
| regurgitating the distilled knowledge, for profit.
|
| Few entities can do that (I can't).
|
| Most people are forced to work for companies that sell
| their work to the higher bidder (which are the very
| entities mentioned above), or ask them to use AI (under
| the condition that such work is accessible to the AI
| entities).
|
| It's obviously a vicious circle, if people can't oppose
| their work to be ingested and repackaged by a few AI
| giants.
| andybak wrote:
| Are you talking about Meta? They released the model. It's
| free to use.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Then you should be in support of OSS models over private
| entity ones like OpenAI's.
| luqtas wrote:
| that was just a metaphor, you can ask your AI what's that
| or use way less energy and use Wikipedia's search
| engine... or do you think OpenAI first evaluates if the
| author is an independent developer &/or has died &/or was
| funded by a public university before adding the content
| to the training database? /s
|
| and one thing is publishing a paper with jargon for
| academics, another is to simplify the results for the
| masses. there's a huge difference between finishing a
| paper and a book
| qup wrote:
| What are we actually worried about happening?
|
| Are AI-written books getting published?
|
| If they start out-competing humans, is that bad? According to
| most naysayers, they can't do anything original.
|
| Are people asking the AI for books? And then hoping it will
| spit it out a human-written book word for word?
| jjmarr wrote:
| > Are AI-written books getting published?
|
| Yes, online bookstores are full of them:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/travel/amazon-
| guidebooks-...
|
| The issue is there's an asymmetry between buyer/seller for
| books, because a buyer doesn't know the contents until you
| buy the book. Reviews can help, but not if the reviews are
| fake/AI generated. In this case, these books are profitable
| if only a few people buy them as the marginal cost of
| creating such a book is close to zero.
| qup wrote:
| This really has fuck-all to do with copyright though,
| correct?
|
| If you can't tell how the content is before you read it,
| it could be written by a monkey.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| This is starting to get pretty circular. The AI was
| trained on copyrighted data, so we can make a hypothesis
| that it would not exist - or would exist in a diminished
| state - without the copyright infringement. Now, the AI
| is being used to flood AI bookstores with cheaply
| produced books, many of which are bad, but are still
| competing against human authors.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| the problem with how circular the argument is is that the
| essence of there being an actual problem is being taken
| for granted
|
| it's not clear that detriments actually exist, and the
| benefits are clear
| roguecoder wrote:
| The benefits are not clear: why should an "author" who
| doesn't want to bother writing a book of their own get to
| steal the words of people who aren't lazy slackers?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| It's as much stealing as piracy is stealing, ie none at
| all. If you disagree, you and I (along with probably many
| others in this thread) have a fundamental axiomatic
| incompatibility that no amount of discussion can resolve.
| volkk wrote:
| > Are AI-written books getting published?
|
| actually i think they are. lots of e-book slop
|
| > If they start out-competing humans, is that bad?
|
| Not inherently, but it depends on what you mean by out-
| competing. Social media outcompeted books and now
| everyone's addicted and mental illness is more rampant than
| ever. IMO, a net negative for society. AI books may very
| well win out through sheer spam but is that good for us?
| qup wrote:
| Nobody has responded to me with anything about how
| authors are harmed, so I don't really get who we're
| protecting here.
|
| It feels more like we just want to punish people,
| particularly rich people, particularly if they get away
| with stuff we're afraid to try.
| volkk wrote:
| > Nobody has responded to me with anything about how
| authors are harmed
|
| i imagine if books can be published to some e-book
| provider through an API to extract a few dollars per book
| generated (mulitiplied by hundreds), then eventually
| it'll be borderline impossible to discover an actual
| author's book. breaking through for newbie writers will
| be even harder because of all of the noise. it'll be up
| to providers like Amazon to limit it, but then we're then
| reliant on the benevolence of a corporation and most act
| in self interest, and if that means AI slop pervading
| every corner of the e-book market, then that's what we'll
| have.
|
| kind of reminds me of solana memecoins and how there are
| hundreds generated everyday because it's a simple script
| to launch one. memecoins/slop has certainly lowered the
| trust in crypto. can definitely draw some parallels here.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I think the concern goes to the point of copyright to begin
| with, which is to incentive people to create things. Will
| the inclusion of copyrighted works in llm training
| (further) erode that incentive? Maybe, and I think that's a
| shame if so. But I also don't really think it's the primary
| threat to the incentive structure in publishing.
| qup wrote:
| > the point of copyright to begin with, which is to
| incentive people to create things
|
| Is it?
|
| (I don't agree)
| satvikpendem wrote:
| People have created for millennia before the modern
| institution of copyright, so I'm not sure how that's a
| cogent argument.
| roguecoder wrote:
| That is not actually the goal of it.
|
| Copyright was invented by publishers (the printing guild)
| to ensure that the capitalists who own the printing
| presses could profit from artificial monopolies. It
| decreases the works produced, on purpose, in order to
| subsidize publishing.
|
| If society decides we no longer want to subsidize
| publishers with artificial monopolies, we should start
| with legalizing human creativity. Instead we're letting
| computers break the law with mediocre output while
| continuing to keep humans from doing the same thing.
|
| LLMs are serving as intellectual property laundering
| machines, funneling all the value of human creativity to
| a couple of capitalists. This infringement of
| intellectual property is just the more pure manifestation
| of copyright, keeping any of us from benefitting from our
| labor.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| >What are we actually worried about happening?
|
| Few company can amass such quantities of knowledge and
| leverage it all for their own, very-private profits. This
| is unprecedented centralization of power, for a very select
| few. Do we actually want that? If not, why not block this
| until we're sure this a net positive for most people?
| qup wrote:
| Meta open-sourced it my guy
| greeniskool wrote:
| Anna's Archive encourages (and monetizes!!) the use of their
| shadow library for LLM training. They have a page dedicated to
| it on their site. You pay them, and they give you high download
| speeds to entire datasets.
| adamsb6 wrote:
| I wonder how much more libgen traffic can be attributed to the
| lawsuit.
|
| When Metallica sued Napster, for many people the reaction was,
| "wait I can download music for free?"
| Refusing23 wrote:
| their whole business is stealing data..
|
| so its quite funny to see they freely share it too.
| seydor wrote:
| We have at least 4 types of ill-defined concepts of property in
| the 21st century , largely due to our laziness, intellectual
| inertia and lack of motivation to make forward-thinking
| definitions for the coming age of AI and ubiquitous access to all
| information and all communication.
|
| 1) the concept of copyright is as old as the word suggests
| (copies are the least of our worries going forward - it should be
| possible to define processes for exploitation of ideas in a fair
| way)
|
| 2) we allow humans to learn from other people's ideas and
| transform them to commercial products and the same should happen
| for AIs in the future
|
| 3) we have an ill-defined concept of "personally identifying
| information" which gives people ownership to information that
| others have created via their own means - there should be better
| ways to ensure a level of privacy (but not absolute privacy)
| without overly-broad, nonsensical definitions of what is
| personally protected information
|
| 4) We allow social media and other telecommunications media to
| arbitrarily censor people's speech without recourse. This turns
| people's speech to property of the social media companies and
| imposes absolute power on it. This makes zero sense and is
| abusive towards the public at large. We need legal protections of
| speech in all media, not just state-owned media.
| thfuran wrote:
| >we have an ill-defined concept of "personally identifying
| information" which gives people ownership to information that
| others have created via their own means - there should be
| better ways to ensure a level of privacy (but not absolute
| privacy) without overly-broad, nonsensical definitions of what
| is personally protected information
|
| What information about me could a corporation create via its
| own means that would be legally protected but shouldn't be? PII
| is generally information that a corporation _collects_. Unless
| you mean that my cellphone provider creates the association
| between my name and phone number and should therefore be able
| to do with it as they please?
| seydor wrote:
| It's not just about corporations. Banking and government
| services e.g. are required to keep your personal information
| stored for years and years even against your will
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Great, can we get the full Kim Dotcom treatment for Zuckenberg
| now?
|
| I'm also ok with abolishing copyright all together if he's too
| untouchable
| wnevets wrote:
| My ISP will shut off my internet if it catches me torrenting
| copyrighted material but if you're a massive corporation that
| steals TBs of data its barely a blip in the news.
| freeAgent wrote:
| Wouldn't it be amazing if all of Meta's ISPs cut them off for
| torrenting? One can dream...
| gkbrk wrote:
| You should look into changing your ISP, or at least get a VPN.
| hackerbeat wrote:
| One of the many reasons why Zuck's been sucking up to Trump. He's
| in desperate need of some Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free cards.
|
| Same for all the other sleazy tech bros.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| You wouldn't download a car.
| rvz wrote:
| Maybe you should go after the worst offender (OpenAI) first
| before going after Meta, since the latter already gave back their
| model away for free for everyone and the architecture.
|
| We will know why OpenAI isn't getting investigated.
| unraveller wrote:
| Could be why OpenAI paid them so much, to go after their open-
| source competition hardest of all.
| hruzgar wrote:
| So true. It seems like there is a controlled operation to shut
| open models down starting with Meta. Obviously they can't go
| after deepseek atm
| peterclary wrote:
| I strongly urge people to read Thomas Babington Macaulay's
| speeches on copyright, its aims, terms, and hazards. Very well
| reasoned and explained.
|
| In particular, people often cited the case of authors who had
| died leaving a family in destitution, and claimed that copyright
| extension would be a fair way of preventing this, but in most
| cases the remaining family had never held the copyright; the
| author had initally sold the reproduction rights to a publisher
| who had then sat on the work without publishing it. The author,
| driven into penury, was then induced to sell the copyright to the
| publisher outright for a pittance. So in such cases a copyright
| extension only benefited the publisher, and indeed increased
| their incentive to extort the copyright.
| bbor wrote:
| I'm a huge IP hater and am sure that happens, but to be fair,
| letting copyright extend past death also increases the amount
| the author can sell it for in the first place.
| ttyprintk wrote:
| The current workaround is to attribute footnotes to your
| beneficiaries, or quote them in the dedication. Those become
| derivative works subject to the lifetime of your beneficiary.
| kshri24 wrote:
| > Thomas Babington Macaulay
|
| The one who got Hindu Sanskrit books translated in a horrible
| manner and then claimed: "I have no knowledge of either
| Sanskrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a
| correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of
| the most celebrated Arabic and Sanskrit works. I have conversed
| both here and at home with men distinguished by their
| proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take
| the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists
| themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny
| that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the
| whole native literature of India and Arabia."
|
| This chap will educate us on copyright?
|
| No thanks!
| demosthanos wrote:
| This is the corollary of the fallacy of appeal to authority:
| the rejection of an argument on the grounds that the speaker
| was horribly wrong on an unrelated or very loosely related
| topic.
|
| If you reject Macaulay on copyright because he was an
| imperialist, you can use the exact same logic to reject the
| arguments of essentially every person who ever lived. Very
| few humans who ever wrote anything important will perfectly
| align with your morality, and most will be horribly
| misaligned in at least one way.
| sigbottle wrote:
| I do think that context is still important in general, but
| probably only if you're doing deep research into Macaulay
| (or the specific target in mind). Treating everything in a
| vacuum isn't great either. Plenty of philosophical works
| for example, you really have to read in the time period and
| in the context of the author's life.
|
| I find an acceptable tradeoff for now is, if I want to do
| deep research for myself, opening myself up to this sort of
| mushy subjective stuff is actually really important for
| making deep, objectively correct observations. Especially
| if the goal is to steelman, not strawman, the opponent's
| argument.
|
| Otherwise, this kind of worst-case analysis thinking is
| fine. It's a logically sound conclusion, it's just kind of
| unsatisfying because we can't make stronger claims.
|
| How do we decide when to make this tradeoff and for what
| things? Uhh.... idk. For me though, there has been value in
| using both kinds of thinking before though.
|
| On a public forum, worst-case analysis is probably fine
| because the discussion ain't that deep. Also probably 90%
| of comments are made within the intention of a "gotcha" and
| not actually for discussion.
|
| Basically, I totally agree with this, it's just that I've
| seen one too many online forums devolve into thought-
| terminating cliches using "rationality" as the basis. Here,
| I think it's totally justified to take this line... I
| instinctively had the same reaction upon reading GP's post
| (but then you could argue it's tone policing... and ahh
| we're off to the good ol' internet debate race spiral)
| kshri24 wrote:
| > If you reject Macaulay on copyright because he was an
| imperialist
|
| On the contrary I would argue that this is precisely why
| you SHOULD NOT take his opinion on copyright. One of the
| main outcomes of imperialism/colonization is
| denigrating/destroying/appropriating works of art,
| literature with the primary goal of subjugation, subversion
| and thereupon replacement of native
| culture/traditions/institutions. I did not quote the other
| half of his nauseating take but I'll post it nevertheless:
|
| "[...] And I certainly never met with any Orientalist who
| ventured to maintain that the Arabic and Sanscrit poetry
| could be compared to that of the great European nations.
| But when we pass from works of imagination to works in
| which facts are recorded, and general principles
| investigated, the superiority of the Europeans becomes
| absolutely immeasurable. It is, I believe, no exaggeration
| to say, that all the historical information which has been
| collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit
| language is less valuable than what may be found in the
| most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in
| England. In every branch of physical or moral philosophy,
| the relative position of the two nations is nearly the
| same."
| esafak wrote:
| Touche.
| demosthanos wrote:
| > One of the main outcomes of imperialism/colonization is
| denigrating/destroying/appropriating works of art,
| literature with the primary goal of subjugation,
| subversion and thereupon replacement of native
| culture/traditions/institutions.
|
| Which is irrelevant to the question of whether copyright
| law within the country of England and within English
| culture is beneficial or not.
|
| It is the nature of racism that it bypasses rational
| thought--it does not follow that because someone is
| racist they therefore don't have anything valuable to say
| on loosely related topics. Someone can see clearly about
| copyright when thinking about English authors while
| treating non-English authors as strictly inferior.
|
| These kinds of contradictions are to be expected when
| racism is involved, because racism inherently lives in
| the lizard brain (occasionally justified by post hoc
| rationalizations). Someone's arguments about an issue
| touching only their own tribe will tend to be more
| rational than those that touch on other tribes, and
| you'll miss out if you assume the rationality is going to
| be correlated and dismiss all arguments accordingly.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Feels a little pat though doesn't it? If racism itself is
| necessarily defined by irrationality then you'd think the
| entire course of Western civilization would have gone a
| little differently. Not to mention, we have some pretty
| dark lessons from history already that are precisely the
| result of excessive rationality. One could easily
| demonstrate the "rationality" of a given colonial
| project, for example.
|
| I'm not saying we need to choose between a broader
| humanism or rationality necessarily, but I just think it
| feels a little archaic Enlightenment-era thinking to
| reduce it down this particular way. Or just you know, its
| all Spock and no Kirk!
| kshri24 wrote:
| > Which is irrelevant to the question of whether
| copyright law within the country of England and within
| English culture is beneficial or not
|
| It is irrelevant from your POV because you don't see
| anything wrong in IP violations when it comes to
| Knowledge being taken out of India, credit removed and
| then reproduced in European Languages, including English,
| as if it was some novel discovery. So those who indulged
| in this specifically (I am not talking about current
| British folk but people like Macaulay) should not be
| giving sermons on Copyright Law.
|
| To give you an analogy:
|
| Using the same logic, you would have to give CCP a pass
| and say they did not "steal IP from the US" because
| Copyright Law in China specifically applies only within
| the Country of China and within Chinese culture. Surely
| you wouldn't learn about specifics of Copyright Law from
| the CCP I presume (yes they do have a Copyright Law that
| applies internally in China). If that is the case, then
| the same argument applies to the British Empire as well.
|
| > it does not follow that because someone is racist they
| therefore don't have anything valuable to say on loosely
| related topics
|
| It is not irrelevant considering many of the same
| Sanskrit scriptures were translated by Arabs, which were
| then translated by Europeans, whose concepts then went on
| to become foundations of Modern Science. So when it comes
| to Copyright, the least one can do is not wipe out
| credits. And least one can do is not take advice on
| Copyright from such people.
| demosthanos wrote:
| > It is irrelevant from your POV because you don't see
| anything wrong in IP violations when it comes to
| Knowledge being taken out of India, credit removed and
| then reproduced in European Languages, including English,
| as if it was some novel discovery.
|
| Uh, no, I didn't say that.
|
| There's no point in writing to you if no matter what I
| say you're going to just make up stuff you think I
| believe and respond to that instead of to my actual
| words.
| gosub100 wrote:
| if Indians are so free from colonialism, why are their
| parents forcing them to choose between medicine or tech,
| simply so they can get a job on the antipode of where
| they are born??
| kshri24 wrote:
| Because the wealth was transferred from India to the
| "antipode" through Colonization. GDP reduced from 25%
| Pre-Colonization (and 30% if you take Pre-Islamic
| Colonization) to merely 4% Post-India's Independence. At
| least Indians are not reverse-colonizing the West.
| Terr_ wrote:
| I kind of hate it that the auto-complete in brain launched
| off in this direction:
|
| > The one who got Hindu Sanskrit books translated in a
| horrible manner and then claimed: "I have no knowledge of
| either Sanskrit or Arabic. But
|
| ... Here's what they mean, from ChatGPT."
| golergka wrote:
| > in most cases the remaining family had never held the
| copyright; the author had initally sold the reproduction rights
| to a publisher
|
| He was able to sell it because it is something valuable,
| exactly because of the copyright protections. Regardless of
| whether author sells the rights or not, he and his family would
| equally be better off with copyright.
| grayhatter wrote:
| Why does this argument remind me so much of those of slavery
| apologist arguments?
|
| copyright as written serves the interests of publishers who
| don't create valuable works more than the creators of the
| work...
| bn-l wrote:
| This one example does not make stealing acceptable which is
| what you're implying.
| grayhatter wrote:
| Copyright infringement isn't stealing. I will die on this
| hill!
|
| also, I don't think that implication is required, but lets
| pretend the implication is the only reasonable conclusion one
| could draw. Maybe it does make it acceptable?
|
| If the vast majority of copyright enforcement isn't to
| protect creators of valuable work, but only serves to enrich
| those who take advantage of those creators. Then isn't it not
| just reasonable or acceptable, but ethically required for
| someone to do everything they can to dismantle the systems
| they're abusing against the interests of those who are
| actually improving the world with their creations?
| jfbaro wrote:
| They are getting shittier and shittier
| snapcaster wrote:
| The powerful do what they can, the weak suffer what they must
| api wrote:
| One of the largest businesses of the Internet to date has been
| piracy. Individual informal piracy has been the smallest
| component of this. By far the largest has been corporate mass-
| scale piracy, and LLMs are probably the largest heist to date.
| They've literally downloaded the sum total of all human thought
| and knowledge, compressed it into queryable lossy compression
| models (which is what LLMs are), and are selling it back to us.
|
| Meta, with its "open weights" models, is one of the least guilty
| parties, since at least they've made the resulting blobs of mass
| piracy available to us. Same with Mistral, Deepseek, etc.
|
| ClosedAI, Google, and others have all probably done this and more
| and refuse to make even the model available.
|
| I think the way to deal with this is very simple:
|
| If you have trained your model on works to which you do not have
| rights or permission, the resulting model is not copyrightable
| and cannot be sold. It must either be kept for research purposes
| only or released free of charge and in the public domain. All
| these models that have been trained on pirated works should
| become public domain.
|
| Of course now that we have full capture of the US Federal
| Government I'm sure any suggestion like that would be neutralized
| with one bribe to Trump.
| HPsquared wrote:
| If you owe the bank $1,000 it's your problem; if you owe the bank
| $1,000,000,000 it's the bank's problem.
| fsflover wrote:
| Support EFF if you think that the copyright laws should be
| changed and also applied equally to all:
| https://www.eff.org/issues/innovation
| maxwell wrote:
| I'm sure they'll throw the book at them.
| caterwhal wrote:
| Really strange how much torrenting is demonized by all of these
| companies and ISPs when individuals want to use it but when a
| company like Meta uses it there is so little scrutiny.
| toss1 wrote:
| >>"vastly smaller acts of data piracy--just .008 percent of the
| amount of copyrighted works Meta pirated--have resulted in Judges
| referring the conduct to the US Attorneys' office for criminal
| investigation.".....While Meta may be confident in its legal
| strategy despite the new torrenting wrinkle...
|
| Zuckerberg has paid the vig several times [0,1,2], which is
| evidently the best legal strategy under this administration. OFC,
| considering there are already multiple payments, there is no
| assurance the vig payments won't substantially increase as the
| Capo sees more opportunity for profit.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigorish
|
| [1] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/29/meta-settles-
| trump-...
|
| [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8j9e1x9z2xo
| breppp wrote:
| Yes it smells bad but facebook did the right thing (at least for
| facebook)
|
| After OpenAI trained their models on the famed _books2_ dataset,
| and seeing the technological implications of ChatGPT, there was a
| good chance they would let them get away with it.
|
| Would the USA really surrender its AI technological advantage for
| trivial matters like copyright? They would make some royalty
| arrangement and get it over with
| z7 wrote:
| How about a consequentialist argument? In some fields, AI has
| already surpassed physicians in diagnosing illnesses. If breaking
| copyright laws allows AI to access and learn from a broader range
| of data, it could lead to earlier and more accurate diagnoses,
| saving lives. In this case, the ethical imperative to preserve
| human life outweighs the rigid enforcement of copyright laws.
| KolmogorovComp wrote:
| There's nothing particular to AI about your comment, it's a
| general downside of IP.
| z7 wrote:
| No, the development of an artificial general intelligence
| does seem like a special case compared to usual IP debates,
| particularly in the potential multiplicative positive-sum
| effects on society overall.
| imgabe wrote:
| Boo hoo.
|
| We are trying to advance civilization here. To accumulate and
| make available all human knowledge to date. And you stand there
| with your hand out to stop this? You are a villain. There is no
| sympathy for you.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Come on publishers! This is your chance! Now you can really show,
| how you will treat all copyright infringements equally and not
| only go after easy target. Show us, how you spend all that money
| in a lawsuit against Meta!
| JW_00000 wrote:
| I don't understand why it's even a question that Meta trained
| their LLM on copyrighted material. They say so in their paper!
| Quoting from their LLaMMa paper [Touvron et al., 2023]:
|
| > We include two book corpora in our training dataset: the
| Gutenberg Project, [...], and the Books3 section of ThePile (Gao
| et al., 2020), a publicly available dataset for training large
| language models.
|
| Following that reference:
|
| > Books3 is a dataset of books derived from a copy of the
| contents of the Bibliotik private tracker made available by Shawn
| Presser (Presser, 2020).
|
| (Presser, 2020) refers to
| https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1320282149329784833. (Which
| funnily refers to this DMCA policy: https://the-eye.eu/dmca.mp4)
|
| Furthermore, they state they trained on GitHub, web pages, and
| ArXiv, which are all contain copyrighted content.
|
| Surely the question is: is it legal to train and/or use and/or
| distribute an AI model (or its weights, or its outputs) that is
| trained using copyrighted material. That it was trained on
| copyrighted material is certain.
|
| [Touvron et al., 2023] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.13971
|
| [Gao et al., 2020] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.00027
| gameshot911 wrote:
| Critically, by torrenting they also directly distributed the
| copywritten material itself. That is a standalone infringement
| separate from any argument about trained LLMs.
| qup wrote:
| And punishing them in the normal manner will be an incredibly
| small slap on the wrist, and do absolutely nothing to help us
| find out what will play out in court regarding a fair-use
| defense on training AI with copyrighted material.
| lucianbr wrote:
| Isn't there a "fruit of the poisoned tree" kind of thing?
| Sounds to me quite similar to the situation where you would
| murder your parent and get to keep the inheritance, even if
| you are convicted of murder. Inheriting stuff isn't
| illegal, yet, I think most jurisdictions would not allow
| you to keep it in this case.
|
| There should be a problem with stuff obtained through
| illegal means, even if having that stuff is in principle
| legal. In this case, copyrighted material.
|
| Obviously they would argue that having the data is only a
| consequence of the download part, and that part is legal.
| What I see is that these situations are always complicated,
| and if you're rich enough, you get to litigate the
| complications and come out with a slap on the wrist or
| maybe even clean hands, while if you are an ordinary
| citizen, you can't afford to delve into the complexities
| and get punished.
|
| These days I'm starting to give up on the whole concept of
| the legal system being fair. They're not even pretending
| anymore.
| jimjimwii wrote:
| They could have only leached and refrained from sharing any
| part of copyrighted data. If i were to commit something as
| risky as this, that is what i would do.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Then it would need to be determined, whether that is the
| case or not. Did every single machine they used have the
| configuration for only leeching and no seeding? The company
| is liable for what its employees on the job. If only one
| employee was also seeding ... that could be a very
| interesting case.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Did every single machine they used have the
| configuration for only leeching and no seeding?_
|
| I would certainly assume so. It's incredibly obvious
| that's what you would want to do from a legal standpoint.
|
| > _If only one employee was also seeding ... that could
| be a very interesting case._
|
| The torrenting wouldn't be done casually by employees
| acting on their own. And it's not like multiple employees
| are doing it simultaneously, unsupervised, on their
| personal computers.
|
| This is part of an official project. They'd spin up a
| machine just to download the torrent, being careful to
| disable seeding.
|
| This is Meta. They have lawyers involved and advising.
| This isn't a teenager who doesn't fully understand how
| torrenting works.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Did you not read the article? There are quotes from Meta
| employees doing exactly what you claim they wouldn't do.
|
| > This is part of an official project. They'd spin up a
| machine just to download the torrent, being careful to
| disable seeding.
|
| From the article:
|
| > "Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn't feel
| right," Nikolay Bashlykov, a Meta research engineer,
| wrote in an April 2023 message, adding a smiley emoji. In
| the same message, he expressed "concern about using Meta
| IP addresses 'to load through torrents pirate content.'"
|
| You also claim they would be "careful to disable seeding"
| but we know they did in fact seed (and anyone who uses
| private trackers knows they couldn't get away with
| leeching for very long before being kicked off):
|
| > Meta also allegedly modified settings "so that the
| smallest amount of seeding possible could occur," a Meta
| executive in charge of project management, Michael Clark,
| said in a deposition.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| There are two different things when it comes to discussing
| training LLM's on "copyright" protected data, and I almost
| _never_ see people differentiate.
|
| 1.) Training on copyright that is publicly available. You write
| a poem and publish it online for the world to read. That is
| your IP, no one else can take it an sell it, but they are free
| to read and be inspired by it. The legalitly of training on
| this is in the courts, but so far seems to be going in favor of
| LLMs.
|
| 2.) Training on copyright that is _not_ publicly available.
| These are pretty much pirated works or works obtained by
| backdoor to avoid paying for them. Your poem is behind a
| paywall and you never got paid, yet the poem is known by the
| LLM. This is just straight illegal, as you legally must pay to
| view the work. However there might be conditions here too like
| paying for access to an archive and then training on everything
| in it.
| farukozderim wrote:
| good distinction
|
| IMO there's a hack about this,
|
| authors can claim that they allow for public use unless it's
| used for training LLMs. And all of training work would fall
| under 2 because they would be used against the copyright.
| echoangle wrote:
| I think they would need to have some explicit contract
| every time they want to sell the book then, though. I don't
| think I am bound by some random terms someone writes into a
| book I'm buying. Those probably are only binding if a
| reasonable person would notice them before sale.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| If you arrive at the point of being able to buy that
| book, it means it has passed the publisher's hands and I
| would think, that the publisher was OK with those terms
| then, and limiting the usage of the text may in fact be
| effective. If it was self-published, then even more so.
| echoangle wrote:
| But the license restriction would have to apply both to
| the publisher and the customer.
|
| If I go to the bookstore, buy the book, make a scan, and
| train an LLM with it, how would you enforce your license
| as an author? The customer never knew that he shouldn't
| have been allowed to train LLMs.
|
| Edit: I think I misunderstood the original comment, I
| thought the idea was to sell books and restrict use for
| LLM training. If we're only talking about stuff that's
| publicly released, the restriction should be possible.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Whether you make a scan of it or not, the license applies
| to the IP, I guess (IANAL).
|
| Whether the shop makes a scan should not affect you as
| the buyer of the actual book. What does the scan have to
| do with you?
|
| Whether the author learns about that scan and perhaps
| training of some LLM using the scan or not, does not
| change the legality of it.
| echoangle wrote:
| But the license doesn't apply to me as a customer if I
| can't be expected to even notice it. If I buy a book in a
| bookstore, no one would assume that training LLMs on it
| would be explicitly forbidden. And adding a note to the
| book would probably not be binding because no one is
| expected to read the legal notice in a book.
| edelbitter wrote:
| I never gave my poem to Facebook. My site is for humans. And
| there was absolutely no problem with that website being
| public, until Facebook et al wanted to move the goalpost..
| again. Remember when companies started to claim that their
| abuse is on you, because you failed to publish the correct
| headers/robots.txt and their bot needs to be told the rules
| in specific language? And now we get the same attempt at
| making such distinction again, just this time its our fault
| for .. having a public website in the first place (should
| have operated a paywall, duh!)
| crazygringo wrote:
| I'm not sure there's any legal distinction though.
|
| Is a book publicly available? No, you have to purchase it.
| But once you do, you're legally allowed to let your friends
| and family and so forth read it too. As long as you don't
| _sell copies_ of it (the "copy" part of "copyright"), or
| meaningfully take away the ability for the publisher to make
| money from sales (so you can't post it for the _whole world_
| to see on the internet).
|
| And sure, there are lots of ToS for digital works, but are
| they actually enforceable? ToS can say you're not allowed to
| let anyone else read the book you purchased. But no court is
| going to say you can't lend your Kindle to your friend for
| them to read it too. Many ToS clauses are flat-out illegal.
|
| Meta will argue that training on books is no different from
| reading all the books at a friend's house. That as long as
| Meta isn't reselling or making publicly available the
| original text, they're in the clear.
| Snild wrote:
| I don't know what the deal is in the relevant
| jurisdictions, but in Swedish copyright law, the provenance
| of the original matters ("lovlig forlaga").
|
| This means that it's not legal to download a rip of e.g. a
| CD that was uploaded without consent, even if you own a
| copy.
|
| (This exception to the general right to make copies for
| private use was added in 2005 to make downloading illegal
| -- previously, only uploading was infringing.)
|
| I would assume just the act of downloading this content was
| illegal in the relevant US jurisdictions as well.
| wil421 wrote:
| I believe the most famous cases in the US have only gone
| after the people sharing or seeding or uploading content.
| My ISP could care less what I download from use net but
| they will definitely care when I start seating.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| The very idea that LLMs are "inspired" by copyright material
| is so far beyond absurd I just don't know what reality you
| people live in. They are ingesting copyright material in
| order to re-use it. Yeah they remix it to add their own
| (incredibly annoying) tone but that's what they're doing.
| antirez wrote:
| Copy-right is not learn/train-right. That said Meta full its
| mouth with open source while they release models that are not
| SOTA nor usable for commercial purposes.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| I as a individual would be liable to pay ~1000$ of damages if I'd
| downloaded a movie in Germany or Poland and the publisher would
| get to me.
|
| I'm going to assume as it's a corporation, then the laws no
| longer apply.
| Anamon wrote:
| That's okay, they should just charge The Zuck with it
| personally; I'd be fine with that.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| And they're going to get away with it simply because if you or I
| openly did this the DMCA fines would be for a million trillion
| dollars. Since Meta shareholders can't stomach a million trillion
| dollars in fines, their lawyers will wave their magic wands and
| poof! No laws were broken!
| sva_ wrote:
| > By September 2023, Bashlykov had seemingly dropped the emojis,
| consulting the legal team directly and emphasizing in an email
| that "using torrents would entail 'seeding' the files--i.e.,
| sharing the content outside, this could be legally not OK."
|
| I'm pretty sure you can theoretically download torrents without
| seeding, although this is frowned upon. If they really seeded
| (with full bandwidth?) that's indeed pretty brazen.
|
| It is sort of strange that Meta is being singled out here though,
| and sort of sad considering they at least release the model
| weights. What's the signal? Do illegal shit to be competitive,
| but make sure there is no evidence?
| voidUpdate wrote:
| You can, in transmission for example you can just set the seed
| percentage to 0%. I recognise that this makes me a bad
| torrenter, but I've been told in the past that my ISP wont be
| too happy about me seeding, and they already do something
| screwy to torrents I access through the surface web, so I'm
| just playing it safe
| sva_ wrote:
| I think your client may still be sharing IP addresses, not
| sure about the legality of that
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| So they're gonna go through every book that was stolen and apply
| the appropriate penalty, right? Each copyrighted work has a
| minimum penalty of $750 under the DMCA. That will be applied
| fairly in order to ensure that the rights holder is made whole by
| the infringer, right?
|
| It's so funny to see the law blatantly ignored by the overlords.
| Like, there isn't even a pretext anymore. They just steal what
| they want and budget for the fines and campaign donations to make
| the consequences go away.
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| That they'd focus on file sharing over transformation or outputs
| is exactly the risk I warned the companies about in my AI report.
| Most datasets, like RefinedWeb and The Pile, also require sharing
| copyrighted workers between people who are not licensed to do
| that. Many works also prohibit commercial use or have patents on
| them.
|
| They need to make datasets which don't have this problem or have
| entities in Singapore train the foundation models within their
| rules. The latter has a TDM exemption that would let AI's use
| much of the Internet, maybe GPL code, licensed/purchased works
| they digitize, etc. Very flexible.
| ofou wrote:
| Who would have known that BitTorrent, shadow libraries, and
| seeders will help to train the best AI models out there, that
| adds a whole new meaning to a "seed".
| 65 wrote:
| I'm more interested in piracy not being highly prosecuted than I
| am in Meta getting punished for this. I'm not trying to spend 20
| years in jail for pirating a TV show.
| ngneer wrote:
| Sounds just like how Facebook got started, harvesting photos
| without permission. From the Wikipedia article, the Facebook
| precursor was known as Facemash. On Zuckerberg, "He hacked into
| the online intranets of Harvard Houses to obtain photos,
| developing algorithms and codes along the way. He referred to his
| hacking as "child's play.""
|
| If I were younger, I would be livid.
| lazycog512 wrote:
| abolish knowledge rentiers
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| Unless Meta 'fessed up to this (which seems unlikely), the
| headline here is missing the word "allegedly".
| ofslidingfeet wrote:
| Yeah well, OpenAI compressed the whole internet into proprietary
| weights and is now providing access via paid subscription while
| the original internet gets deleted from our culture.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| "Say they hood robin, ain't that a b*, take from the poor and
| give to the rich."
|
| - Ice Cube.
|
| Meta will face no consequences. Say your a small publisher and
| you'd like a bit of compensation. If you dare sue Meta can just
| blacklist your books on its platforms. Even if they don't, you
| probably don't have the money to sue one of the biggest companies
| on earth.
|
| I think copyrights should be limited to 25 years after first
| publication. This would fix plenty of issues and give the AIs of
| the world plenty to learn from.
|
| Who am I kidding, Meta will take what they will. For that author
| making 20k a year, be honored to be of use to Meta.
| bwfan123 wrote:
| can people vote with their feet, and leave the platform ?
|
| but the masses are addicted to the slop that meta feeds them.
| losvedir wrote:
| Hooray! Or wait, are we not doing that anymore?
| TZubiri wrote:
| I love it. This plotline feels out of cryptonomicon or silicon
| valley series.
| dansitu wrote:
| I'm fine with them using my books to train an open source model,
| but it would have been nice to be asked.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| The only bad thing about this is that small time players who do
| it are treated poorly (Aaron Swartz). IP de-facto not existing
| for AI companies is a feature, not a bug.
|
| The fact that most of the world embraced hardcore copyright troll
| ludditism when the means of their (badly paying creative) jobs
| economic production was democratized implies that most people do
| not believe in any "egalitarianism" and especially not the left-
| wing form many profess to believe in. Certainly not "information
| wants to be free" or any of the other idealist shit that I or
| Aaron Swartz believed in. What meta did was software communism -
| full stop. They literally released their models to the public! I
| support all of this 10000%. The only issue is that they're not
| open enough (fully open source the dataset)
|
| So, unironically, good! Thank you, please pirate more! Please
| destroy the US IP system while you're at it. Copyright
| abolitionism is good and thank you Zuckerberg!
| zackmorris wrote:
| Is there a concept in the legal system of first-come-first-served
| that could be used as precedent?
|
| What I mean is: when someone is prosecuted for copyright
| infringement, but Meta isn't, then could the case be put on hold
| until Meta is found guilty and pays a fine?
|
| Also maybe the fine on the later case would have to be
| proportional to the prior case. So if Meta pays $1 per
| infringement, the penalty might be $1 for torrenting something
| else (which is immaterial and not worth the justice system's
| time) so pretty much all copyright infringement cases would get
| thrown out.
|
| It reminds me of how mainstream drug addicts get convicted and
| spend years in prison, while celebrities get off with a warning
| or monetary fine.
| kpgraham wrote:
| Damn! One of my old books can be found in the Anna's Archive
| search. The book has been out of print for years. I pity the Meta
| users who get results based on something that I wrote. (Check
| Anna's for 'Keith P. Graham', and the first book listed is mine.)
| yalogin wrote:
| LLMs are worse than search for figuring out what value a specific
| asset provides to the LLM. Atleast with search your work or page
| is not lost and still gets a click/user interaction, and may be
| give you a chance to monetize the interaction. However, LLMs just
| don't have any such option. Gemini adds links but the links they
| add are completely editorialized by the LLM and need not reflect
| the original at all. So how does anyone ask for compensation even
| if they sue?
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| The question is, if they could and would have paid for each book,
| would it be ok to train the LLM on them? I'm talking about prior
| books, I'm sure new books have language forbidding their use to
| train LLMs at the point of sale. But legally, how does using a
| book to train a LLM differ from a teacher learning from a book
| and teaching its contents to their pupils. Obviously, the LLM can
| do so at scale, but is there a legal difference?
| CryptoBanker wrote:
| A LLM is not a person. That is the legal difference...until we
| have Citizens United v2
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The question is, if they could and would have paid for each
| book, would it be ok to train the LLM on them?
|
| Whether training on AI model on an array of diffentent works,
| many of which are copyright protected, is itself a copyright
| violation, in addition to or distinct from any copyright
| violation that goes on gathering the dataset for training (and
| separate from any copyright violation in the actual or intended
| use of the LLM), remains to be resolved as a legal question,
| and may or may not have a simple yes or no answer (or the same
| answer under every system of copyright laws globally).
|
| My inclination is that it is probably generally not a violation
| in US law, but that's not something I am very confident in; how
| the definitions of copy and derivative work apply to determine
| if it would be without fair use, and how fair use analysis
| applies, are not clear from the available precedent.
|
| > But legally, how does using a book to train a LLM differ from
| a teacher learning from a book and teaching its contents to
| their pupils.
|
| It is very clear, by looking at how US copyright law is written
| and even more clear in its history of application, that
| information stored in brains of people are _without exception_
| neither copies nor new works that can be derivative works under
| US law, and so cannot be infringing, no matter how you gain
| them. It's also very clear in the statute itself and the case
| law that data in media used by artificial digital computers, on
| the other hand, _can_ constitute copies or derivative works
| that can be infringing. Even if the _process_ is arguably
| similar in legally relevant manners, copyright law is
| critically focussed on the result and whether it is a
| particular kind of thing which can be infringing, not _just_
| the process.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| Thank you for a good answer.
| djyaz1200 wrote:
| "Behind every great fortune lies a great crime" -Honore de Balzac
| liendolucas wrote:
| For some misterious reason I can't see Zuckerberg in front of a
| judge facing 50 years imprisonment. Anyone can?
|
| I truly hope that whoever takes the case goes after Meta with
| 1000 times the pressure that was put on Swartz, but honestly I
| don't expect much just as the top comment precisly expressed.
|
| And if we are going to be fair please also let's not forget about
| the other usual suspects, or anyone thinks they are falling
| behind?
| impossiblefork wrote:
| There are other countries than the US though and if
| rightsholders wish to sue, lawsuits can happen there too.
|
| Several EU countries, Switzerland, South Korea, Japan, etc. are
| viable countries to sue from. Even in Japan which has a law
| specifically permitting training on copyrighted material you
| must still obtain it legally-- i.e. you must license it.
| lvl155 wrote:
| I'd think people can get together to put this on a public space
| strictly for training purposes and have the consortium of some
| sort get paid per use.
|
| But we live in this stupid society where you have to move
| mountains to change things an inch.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Seeding it was probably most societally useful thing Meta ever
| did.
| mrinterweb wrote:
| Remember people getting sued insane amounts of money per-song
| they torrented. If we applied that precedent to Meta, Meta would
| need to declare bankruptcy. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/file-
| sharing-mom-fined-19-milli...
| Pxtl wrote:
| Laws are for poor people.
| srameshc wrote:
| At OpenAI we have seen some employees expressed their concern
| publicy about the moral grounds on which company was acting. We
| never heard about it from anyone at Meta but there were some
| jokes ofcourse. I guess everything is fair in AI and Corporates.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| Zuckerberg did more copyright infringement? Shocking!
| peterbonney wrote:
| The more I learn about how AI companies trained their models, the
| more obvious it is that the rest of us are just suckers. We're
| out here assuming that laws matter, that we should never
| misrepresent or hide what we're doing for our work, that we
| should honor our own terms of use and the terms of use of other
| sites/products, that if we register for a website or piece of
| content we should always use our work email address so that the
| person or company on the other side of that exchange can make a
| reasonable decision about whether we can or should have access to
| it.
|
| What we should have been doing all along is YOLO-ing everything.
| It's only illegal if you get caught. And if you get big enough
| before you get caught then the rules never have to apply to you
| anyway.
|
| Suckers. All of us.
| clueless wrote:
| yep, pretty much.
| wrs wrote:
| And if you were in any doubt before, this lesson is now
| exemplified by the holder of the highest office in the land and
| approved by popular vote. The rewards of acting ethically are,
| unfortunately, sometimes only personal. This must be a hard
| environment to raise children in, given the examples they see
| around them.
| formerphotoj wrote:
| THIS.
| hamburga wrote:
| Parent here: it takes a lot of discussion, but it's a great
| time to talk about the reality of evil and villains. My kids
| are on the good side, or at least I like to think so ...
| a123b456c wrote:
| This argument may focus too much on the category of external
| rewards.
|
| I might well be kidding myself or self-justifying, but I
| believe internal rewards are at least as important. Some
| materially successful people are deeply unhappy.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > approved by popular vote
|
| Quibble: The majority of people voted _against_ Trump, or at
| least not in his favor. He only got a plurality, not a
| majority.
| afandian wrote:
| If you have a spare few hours, the Acquired podcast episode on
| Meta is enlightening. They just stumbled through growth hack
| experiment after experiment without seemingly any risk
| assessment or ethics.
| hall0ween wrote:
| <Tether's ears burning>
| callc wrote:
| This sort of mindset is devoid of morals and honor. Don't fall
| into the this mindset trap.
|
| Like when Trump said he is "smart" for evading taxes during the
| presidential debates (IIRC the first ones, not recent ones).
|
| It's absolutely despicable. Have a moral compass. Treat people
| fairly. Be nice. Let's be better than toddlers who haven't
| learned yet that hitting is bad, and you shouldn't do it even
| if mommy and daddy aren't in the room.
| swozey wrote:
| I deleted my facebook account about 10 years ago. Downloaded
| data, deleted. Not deactivated.
|
| Nothing in my life made me ever want to go back except for when I
| got back into playing hockey, and all the hockey leagues use
| facebook to communicate a few months ago.
|
| I made a new account, had to literally upload a picture of my
| face to pass verification.. and then a few days later I was
| immediately banned and couldn't use my account. I assume because
| they searched previous data and compared my face to find out I
| have a "deleted" (lol) account and matched me. I've assumed
| they'll only let me log in if i use my original 10 years ago
| deleted account.
|
| Fuck meta. Fuck zuck.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| Wouldn't it be a real shame if the entirety of US constitution,
| laws, and legal precedence went out the window these days, and
| the only thing left unscathed was the rotten mess that is
| copyright law? Just saying, this might be the moment to burn it
| to the ground. Not that it makes up for any of the other stuff
| going on, but why waste a perfectly good crisis?
| abigail95 wrote:
| This reminds me of Peter Sunde's "komimashin"
|
| https://www.engadget.com/2015-12-21-peter-sunde-kopimashin.h...
|
| It's obviously absurd to enforce copyright as bytes are copied
| around instead of as it is used. Training an LLM is a different
| thing than re-hosting and giving away copies to other people.
|
| If you don't want people to transform your works - keep them
| private. You don't own ideas.
| golly_ned wrote:
| As the article says, Meta /was/ giving away copies to other
| people by seeding the libgen torrents. This isn't the usual
| case of "should companies be allowed to train on books".
| ocean_moist wrote:
| At least they seeded!
| stevage wrote:
| Wow, I'm actually a bit shocked that senior levels of management
| at Meta were fine with torrenting pirated books. WTaF.
|
| Meta does a lot of stuff I disagree with, but they're usually not
| just straight breaking the law.
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