Comment by mkfs
6 days ago
> Meanwhile, software developers spot code fragments seemingly lifted from public repositories on Github and lose their shit. What about the licensing? If you’re a lawyer, I defer. But if you’re a software developer playing this card? Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property.
> The median dev thinks Star Wars and Daft Punk are a public commons. The great cultural project of developers has been opposing any protection that might inconvenience a monetizable media-sharing site. When they fail at policy, they route around it with coercion. They stand up global-scale piracy networks and sneer at anybody who so much as tries to preserve a new-release window for a TV show.
This is pretty disingenuous and mean-spirited. He's using SV startup types to smear all developers, including the typical, humble, un- or undercompensated FOSS dev who absolutely respects intellectual property, and quite reasonably, expects their own IP to be respected as well. But because Sam Altman types follow the "It's Better to Beg for Forgiveness than to Ask for Permission" rule, altruistic, non-sociopathic developers have no right to complain?
> non-sociopathic developers have no right to complain
The very same developers that advocate pirating from Netflix or Disney?
He's pointing out the hypocrisy in a class of people (generally, tech-savvy programmers) that have no problem advocating for piracy and gleefully thwarting the concrete IP rights of businesses on one hand, while defending and bemoaning the abstract IP rights of other content creators on the other hand.
My take away is that he's saying IP rights is a weak argument to use to defend a personal position for not adopting LLM's in your workflow, especially given the context of modern piracy.
> The very same developers that advocate pirating from Netflix or Disney?
Even the ones advocating or engaging in personal piracy aren't creating unauthorized derivative works and monetizing them, which is arguably what these AI systems and their customers are doing. And Thomas wasn't talking about personal piracy, but instead trying to use the IP-hostile conduct of Google and certain startups (like Scribd or GrooveShark) to smear all developers and de-legitimize their IP-based objections, even of those releasing code under permissive licenses (like the GPL) in exchange for expected adherence to certain terms and conditions that these systems and their users ignore.
> but instead trying to use the IP-hostile conduct of Google and certain startups (like Scribd or GrooveShark) to smear all developers
I challenge you to point out the language in his post making this claim. Otherwise you're just making stuff up.
He's specifically addressing high-level arguments used against LLM's, and this case he's calling out the fact that one group of people are railing against LLM providers for "IP theft" while simultaneously encouraging and using pirated content. It's perfectly reasonable to call out the hypocrisy in these contradictory positions, to demonstrate that the "IP theft" argument is mostly virtue signaling.
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