Comment by CaptainFever
3 years ago
Right. This new outrage is just the copyright owners realising that their power is not safe. Where is the outrage when self checkouts happened?
3 years ago
Right. This new outrage is just the copyright owners realising that their power is not safe. Where is the outrage when self checkouts happened?
Copyright owners indeed. That's what these artists are. They're copyright owners. Monopolists. They are the capital. Capitalism is all about owning property. Copyright is intellectual property. Literally imaginary property. Ownership of information, of bits, of numbers. These artists are the literal epitome of capitalism. They enjoy state granted monopolies that last multiple human lifetimes. We'll be long dead before their works enter the public domain. They want it to be this way. They want eternal rent seeking for themselves and their descendants. At least one artist has told me exactly that in discussions here on HN. They think it's fair.
They are the quintessential representation of capital. And they come here to ask us to "resist" the other forms of capital on principle.
I'm sorry but... No. I'm gonna resist them instead. It's my sincere hope that this AI technology hammers in the last nails on the coffin of copyright and intellectual property as a whole. I want all the models to leak so that it becomes literally impossible to get rid of this technology no matter how much they hate it. I want it to progress so that we can run it on our own machines, so that it'll be so ubiquitous it can't be censored or banned no matter how much they lobby for it.
> It's my sincere hope that this AI technology hammers in the last nails on the coffin of copyright and intellectual property as a whole.
If it does, I will give you one thousand United States dollars, and you can quote me on thst whenever you like.
More likely, big companies will retain control as they always have (via expensive lawyers), and individual artists will get screwed.
Right. IP is about balancing the harms done to the public versus the incentives given to the creators. That's why discussions about "creators want this and that" produce unbalanced objectives because... what about the public? IP is meant to benefit the public domain, it is not meant to protect creator interests.
I'm glad free software came about, where software owners realised that the power they had over their users were unjust. Hopefully the same can happen to other creative fields.
The original social contract was we'd all pretend we couldn't trivially copy and reproduce "their" works so they could make some money for a decade or so and then their works would enter the public domain.
When's the last time your culture entered the public domain?
I grew up watching films like Star Wars and Home Alone, playing Super Nintendo and PlayStation games. All these corporations have already made a million fortunes off of these things. When is all this stuff gonna become public property?
What about the public? They couldn't give less of a fuck about the public. They don't even care enough to fulfill their end of the bargain which was agreed upon when this copyright nonsense was created. Oh look, our property's about to become public? Better lobby the government and get them to extend the terms. Just pull the rug from under everyone, just move the goalposts, they won't even notice.
They use their fortunes to systematically rob us of our public domain rights. Yes, rights. We have rights to "their" works which they actively deny. They're literal robber barons. Therefore copyright infringement is a moral imperative. We should all stop pretending that copyright exists because the reality is it doesn't, it's completely made up and unenforceable and there's absolutely no reason anyone should recognize it as a legitimate law. Copyright infringement is civil disobedience and morally justified.
This AI stuff is exactly what we need. It's world changing technology. It's subversive. It gives me hope.
Claiming that a single artist of modest means whose work was used for model training explicitly against their wishes.... is exactly the same as the multibillion corporation doing the training and profiting off it at fleet-of-megayachts scale.... certainly is a take, I'll give you that. If you ever quote "first they came" in a self-pitying context, remember that you deserve it.
The issue of white collar workers finding it harder to support themselves is real and valid. The solution is unionisation, social support nets and potential UBI, that includes all workers.
But campaigning for stricter IP laws only benefits the copyright owners (both you and Disney), a subset of white collar workers, and is still immoral for all the reasons that copyright is immoral in the first place. That is what we're against.
Capitalism is not defined by the relative wealth of individuals. It's defined by ownership. Capitalists own property. Factories, buildings, companies, land, goods, stock, assets, copyrights, patents... All privately owned. If you're an owner, you're a capitalist. It's that simple. You're part of the ownership class. The common serfs? They don't own, they rent.
Claiming you're not a calitalist owner just because you're a poor starving artist, when the government quite literally grants you functionally infinite monopolies over everything you create whether you want it or not, is quite the take indeed. Not my fault artists are prone to selling off the rights to that monopoly to corporations for short term profit. It's like they don't even realize the power they have and the real capitalists are only too happy to relieve them of it.