Such an extreme and emotional statement makes me think you've never really thought it through. For instance: without copyright the GPL is nothing. Also without copyright, all of the profit made on creative works (of a perhaps smaller pie) would get be kept by distributors like Amazon or Netflix. Authors wouldn't get a dime anymore, it'll all go to the likes of Bezos.
That’s ok, GPL’s entire purpose and only restriction is to prevent other copyrights.
> without copyright, all of the profit made on creative works (of a perhaps smaller pie) would get be kept by distributors like Amazon or Netflix
This is already true in most cases: companies own everything their employees create for them. And without copyright, studios would still pay artists, because that’s the only way art is created (which even rich people want, although you probably and I think their taste mostly sucks, so does everyone else’s…)
"Prevent other copyrights" = "keep open source open"
Your second point seems to agree: if copyright was abolished, people (even rich) still want art, so studios would still end up paying artists, from patronage or some other system.
> if copyright was abolished, people (even rich) still want art, so studios would still end up paying artists, from patronage or some other system.
Yes, it would be exclusively the domain of the rich and powerful. If you're a little guy, they'll just shamelessly take what you make, because abolishing copyright abolishes the legal protections a small-time creator depends on.
Let's say you put a ton of effort into making an awesome YouTube channel people love. Copyright is what means a bunch of randos can't just copy all your work and take all the revenue from it. They can even undercut you, because they don't actually have the costs of creating anything. Copyright give you recourse.
> If you're a little guy, they'll just shamelessly take what you make
Like LLM scrapers?
> Copyright is what means a bunch of randos can't just copy all your work and take all the revenue from it. They can even undercut you
If copyright is abolished, nobody's getting revenue from views. They can resell your work for $0, or can try charging, but word spreads and everyone will seek the free alternative (yours).
Attribution is different, but covered by trademark. Or may be covered by trusted sources like internet archives which prove who was first.
> If copyright is abolished, nobody's getting revenue from views. They can resell your work for $0, or can try charging, but word spreads and everyone will seek the free alternative (yours).
Exactly. Abolish copyright, and no little guy can do it for a living if he's good at it and people want it. He'll have to spend his time working a day job to pay the bills, and may not even have the energy for creative work afterwards. Creative work becomes the domain of large corporations and nepo babies.
Copyright was created to solve real problems that were once common. Abolishing it is foolish, the reasonable path is some solution that solve both the original problems and whatever new ones you've identified.
> Abolish copyright, and no little guy can do it for a living if he's good at it and people want it. He'll have to spend his time working a day job to pay the bills, and may not even have the energy for creative work afterwards. Creative work becomes the domain of large corporations and nepo babies.
For the niche artists (and musicians and writers) I’m aware of, this is already true. Few people pay for niche art, because there are so many decent quality old works (and modern ad-filled slop) for free (and most people would rather not pay for things even for worse quality). Those who still pay are the same who’d donate if the artist offered their work for free, which would get them more attention thus more money overall. And with few people paying, COL is way too high for a niche artist to not get a second job, large donor, family inheritance, or other source of income.
And I’m sure non-niche artists would have no problem getting enough patrons (evidenced by those who do via merch and Twitch donations).
Abolishing copyright entirely would make patronage more common, benefiting these artists: specifically, the ones who already sell barely anything relative to COL, or already make their work free to get enough attention, who comprise most of the artists I know.
> without copyright, all of the profit made on creative works (of a perhaps smaller pie) would get be kept by distributors like Amazon or Netflix
Assuming copyright gets dismantled is a good-faith way, Netflix/Amazon remaining as gatekeepers sounds unlikely, IMO. Free software clients like Popcorn Time provide a better experience and would be able to exist without threats from copyright trolls.
It's also much more robust regarding cultural preservation (as users and organizations can keep DRM-free local copies) and censorship (being torrent-based makes it much harder to delete a movie from existence).
Besides the unfairly long duration of protection, intellectual property also is unfairly used to squash small firms via frivolous lawsuits.
I won't use an argument in favor of AI training here because AI can probably still be trained by fair-use information extraction from copyrighted works.
Without copyright, we can return to a patronage based system. Both rich and poor consumers gladly offer proportional patronage for authors they truly believe in.
Humanity will progress just fine via its scientific works which don't really require a copyright. Arxiv proves it.
The cost imposed by GPL not working will be negligible compared to the benefit of free use.
> If you believe it will be developed regardless and that that there's a 30% chance of doom, they want a company prioritising safety research to be the one threading that needle.
They also want to be trillionaires. If they don't built it, no trillions. So they have to build it, now (and get their IPO done before the bubble pops).
> This certainly did strike me as a big scam. A few minutes in I was thinking "the LLM actor is going to ask for donations at some point here" and low and behold. There's the claim of debt, the call for pity, and the crypto address.
But that's a pretty dumb scam: act obnoxious then beg for (a lot of) money to compensate for your own mistakes? If that was the plan all along, it seems pretty incompetent. I'd expect a competent scammer to have a better understanding of psychology.
> But that's a pretty dumb scam: act obnoxious then beg for (a lot of) money to compensate for your own mistakes?
It is the sort of dumb crap some humans try, and occasionally manage to get away with because other humans are chronically gullible. So it wouldn't be beyond the realms of reason that the agent couldn't have had relevant information in the training sets such that it generated such a plan and guardrail checks didn't flag it as a problem.
> Why is there an imbalance between what an employer gets paid for a unit of production and what an employee gets paid for a unit of production?
Because labor gets exploited to make the owners richer. That's the basic fact, even though the owners (as a class) have financed a lot of propaganda to justify and obscure it.
> Let's rephrase: labor is used to ultimately provide owners more money than they put in.
I'd rephrase that: labor is used to provide the owners the maximum amount of money they can manage to extract from the people doing the labor.
A technology 10x's worker productivity? That means 9x more goes to the owners, and 0x (zero) more goes to the workers. Maybe the workers get even less, because now you can fire some.
> Who starts a company to lose money? Who starts a company solely for "creating jobs"?
A more equitable distribution of company profits does not imply the company loses money. It does not imply useless make-work jobs.
> A more equitable distribution of company profits does not imply the company loses money. It does not imply useless make-work jobs.
I fully agree, and remind you it's completely legal and simple for you to go and start a company that does equitable distribution of company profits. More people should do it instead of complaining that few people do.
Nobody does it because the incentives make it impossible. If you do this, then you just lose. Because everyone else will be doing it, so you’ll get pushed out.
Think of it this way: if slavery was legal, would anyone be running a fair labor farm? Maybe, for like a week, before they’re out of business.
Or, consider this: at any point in time, any of the tobacco company could have made nicotine-free cigarettes. But they never did. Why not? Because it’s a fundamentally impossible position to hold.
Now, this is very reductive, I admit. There is a niche for appealing to people’s conscience. But that niche is a luxury, and luxury goods don’t perform well in a tight economy. And, luxury goods will never have the breadth of the staples.
> I...remind you it's completely legal and simple for you to go and start a company that does equitable distribution of company profits. More people should do it instead of complaining that few people do.
No. Instead of doing that, the effort should go into making all companies act that way.
IMHO, what you just did is part-and-parcel of one angle of the "propaganda to justify and obscure it" that I referred to above (e.g. "Don't like it? Then I say your only response should be this ineffective and limited-scope action I specify that strictly adheres to the status-quo").
And it would be ineffective. Building a little oasis in the middle of the status quo would only help a few and is unlikely to resist the tendency of things to eventually revert to the mean. The mean needs to change, and the best path to that is probably through regulation, other kinds of social standards-setting, and increasing the power of the exploited groups (e.g. through unionization).
> Instead of doing that, the effort should go into making all companies act that way.
That's because creating a business is a lot of hard work and risk, and surely you'd instead better virtue signal in your free time to look better to other people who are also lazy.
Doctrine and propaganda can make someone that sure, and the thing they're sure about doesn't even have to be true.
> There's been massively successful government funded and run projects before. Soviets beat the Americans to space, after all.
Don't let facts get in the way of ideology!
Also the Americans subsequently beating the Soviets to the moon was the government literally allocating huge amounts of capital towards the literal trope-namer moonshot.
> It would be impossible for the govt to allocate this much capital towards such a moonshot...
You have a false definition of "impossible." It would be true to say it could be challenging, given current political dysfunction, but it's not impossible.
> ...and even if they could, they would do it in a way that would get 90% frittered away to fraud and waste
Same with private business.
I'd prefer government funding, because there a greater number of important goals than the two or three the market is capable of optimizing for.
> The comment is just asking for evidence. I am curious too.
Given "before 2006" includes the entire history of Soviet espionage, that's kinda like demanding evidence that the sun rises in the East. It's very obvious that Soviet espionage would have supported far-left groups in the West, so if you want evidence you should probably do your own research.
Now the post-Soviet period in that range, 1991-2005, is a different question.
That's kinda what i was going to. I had the impression that post soviet russia was much more geopolitical - support anyone destabilizing west. That included often completely contradictory support.
Russia != Soviet Union, even though Russia was the Soviet political-administrative center, contemporary Russia Federation is very different to the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.
Russia was also communist in Soviet times, and it's not like the slate was completely wiped clean when the Soviet Union fell. IIRC the Russian Federation also is officially the successor state to the Soviet Union, and took on its treaty obligations, etc.
Making Firefox even less desirable by "googlifying" it pushes Firefox users away and kills its image of a viable competitor. That's exactly what Google is paying for.
Why would Google destroy the cover they have for keeping control over Chrome and 70% of internet users, just to squeeze a bit more ad revenue from what, 2% of users?
Copying Chrome at the expense of loosing even more of their user share has been Firefox's MO for the last decade. It doesn't have to make sense to be reality.
> I don't see why prompt injection to delete files on someone else's machine would be any different.
The difference: they chose to download and execute your prompt without examining it, vs you injecting it into their system.
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