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Okay, so with news of Sam Altman's firing, I'm just now learning about the sexual abuse allegations against him and holy fucking shit. Can we please, for the love of FUCK stop holding SilVal tech dudes up as heroes or icons or whatever?
Like I already knew this guy was not good, but this is just horrific.
Also, seriously? Whenever one of y'all next tries to tell me that radical consent models of data collection and use aren't possible in "big data" and "AI," I'm gonna say "Thanks for the input Sam Altman, but I really don't know if your views on consent are the ones we'll be needing to hear today."
No: SERIOUSLY. Y'all need to have a good long think about why so many in "AI" and "Big Data" seem so determined to get others to believe that radical consent models of data collection and use are not only impossible, but wholly undesirable.
@dgavin @Wolven Getting rid of copyright would also mean getting rid of the only means we have right now to ensure that certain things that are part of the commons remain part of the commons. Without copyright, the AGPL licenses on my code would be invalid which would mean any corporation could enclose them. Similarly for any work licensed under CC ShareAlike licenses, etc.
@aral @Wolven Getting rid of copyright would mean: everything is in the public domain. If Ilya Suskever writes code for ChatGPT, he can do this because he went to schools, lives from infrastructure we all pay for, enjoys personal security we all pay for. He gets payed by his company, his company exists because the state offers the necessary economic security… no reason for a few to reap the fruits of the labor of many. All knowledge should be public because we all made it possible.
@dgavin @Wolven Getting rid of copyright wouldn’t mean that anyone is forced to release anything publicly. OpenAI and other corporations can and will keep all their code private and safe and you would have to physically break into their data centres to steal it (still a crime). Whereas anything anyone does share openly will be open to exploitation by the very same corporations without any legal recourse on your part to prevent it.
@dgavin @Wolven So, no, it wouldn’t be a level playing field. It’s not a level playing field today not because of copyright but because of the ridiculous power differential between individual human beings and trillion-dollar corporations. If we want to level the playing field, we can legislate to lessen or remove that power differential. (I won’t hold my breath.)
@dgavin @Wolven So you’re not just proposing that we abolish copyright but we enact legislation that forces all information to be public under penalty of law? So all health information, bank accounts, all corporate documents, every police record and military document… Well, that would definitely be interesting. Although I do wonder who would enforce that for the police and the military…
@dgavin @Wolven … and what other countries would do with that information if not enacted globally and if enacted globally, who would enforce it and who would enforce it on those enforcing it.
It feels to me like a more realistic solution would be to enforce radical transparency regulation on corporations and governments – alongside regulation to reduce their size and power – and protect the private rights of individuals.
@dgavin @Wolven Basically, my point is that copyright isn’t the problem, systemic inequality and radical power differentials between corporations/governments and individuals is. Abolishing the former without tackling the latter will not result in greater equality but a slightly different means for the former to exploit the latter.
@aral @Wolven It probably would be enough to prevent copyright lawsuits. I have no issue with artists, coders,… earning good money for their work. But the content mafia and patent trolls are the illustration of everything that’s wrong with todays copyright: rich people getting richer without doing anything productive or interesting for humanity.
@aral I have some sympathy for copyright abolition. Restrictive copyright on software created a lot of problems, excluding most of society from participation in the "digital revolution". I am pretty sure that there were many people of my generation who did not learn to code because compilers had enterprise price tags on them and most people did not want to become criminalised (don't copy that floppy!).
But as it stands at present copyright is the main regulator of the digital commons, and without it the status quo would be unopposed. It is never a "level playing field", since laws are made by the powerful to serve the interests of the powerful. That is unlikely to change without major societal restructuring. What we do have are some more or less dirty hacks to make the power work against itself (copyleft, et al). The more draconian the laws become the more the commons is "locked open".
@dgavin @aral @Wolven
How would this not just create a world where every small-time artist, developer, inventor, etc. is incredibly fucked from the start, having to constantly worry about properly and diligently engaging in whatever official disclosure procedure would be introduced, while billion dollar corporations would hire an army of lawyers to skirt these laws with outsourced data-centers or nightmare levels of abstraction to make sure their employees work would not fall under this proposed law?
In fact, what'd protect those small-time players from just getting Amazon'd & a corporation copying them, but cheaper?
What of private, potentially harmful information; in Finland we're dealing with a case where a hacker stole the private patient records of tens of thousands of individuals from a psychotherapy service, held them for ransom and finally leaked all of it. This has resulted in a ton of peoples' lives being ruined, how would your proposed legislation protect these kinds of vulnerable individuals?
@shi @aral @Wolven The present situation is that big corporations with armies of lawyers such the blood out of small artists (like Spotify now paying even less to nothing to small artists). Copyright and IP laws are there to protect the interests of rights administrators and multibillion $ companies instead of artists.
@dgavin @aral @Wolven I'm sorry, but I fail to see how that addresses anything I lined out?
So because corporations already have an upper hand in society at this time, we should burden the vulnerable and disfranchised even further, for some pie-in-the-sky legislative middle-finger to corporations, while also at the same time dismantling all forms of protection for private, potentially harmful information?
I'm as anti-capitalist as the next person, read my pinned tweets; I invite anyone to pirate my work if they can't afford to pay for it, but you don't seem to actually be arguing for anything sensible or reasonable, nor to have considered the ramifications of your idea beyond "big corporations bad". What does it matter to minorly inconvenience corporations if it's at the cost of the most vulnerable people in society?
¯\_(
)_/¯
@shi @aral @Wolven Private information has nothing to do with copyright, that's a question of privacy.
And hackers profit from private firms who don't use the best software to protect their data and instead rely on MS Exchange, Open Directory, Windows and Outlook. The winning combination for hacker attacks in 95+% of data breaches. It's the cover your ass mentality that puts compliance above safety out of convenience and because of flawed laws
@aral Typically the people making the legislation are the ones for whom maintaining a power differential is a high priority. For example, you have the trillion-dollar corps delivering oven ready bills to then be passed through parliaments, and lobbying for anything they can't have passed easily.
