Comment by presentation
11 hours ago
Maxwell Tabarrok has a take on this, basically in his words:
> The confusion of intellectual property and property rights is fair enough given the name, but intellectual property is not a property right at all. Property rights are required because property is rivalrous and exclusive: When one person is using a pair of shoes or an acre of land, other people’s access is restricted. This central feature is not present for IP: an idea can spread to an infinite number of people and the original author’s access to it remains untouched.
> There is no inherent right to stop an idea from spreading in the same way that there is an inherent right to stop someone from stealing your wallet. But there are good reasons why we want original creators to be rewarded when others use their work: Ideas are positive externalities.
> When someone comes up with a valuable idea or piece of content, the welfare maximizing thing to do is to spread it as fast as possible, since ideas are essentially costless to copy and the benefits are large.
> But coming up with valuable ideas often takes valuable inputs: research time, equipment, production fixed costs etc. So if every new idea is immediately spread without much reward to the creator, people won’t invest these resources upfront, and we’ll get fewer new ideas than we want. A classic positive externalities problem.
> Thus, we have an interest in subsidizing the creation of new ideas and content.
And so you can reframe whether or not IP rights should be assigned in this case, based on whether you believe that the welfare generated by making AI better by providing it with content is more valuable for society than the welfare generated by subsidizing copyright holders.
[1] https://open.substack.com/pub/maximumprogress/p/ai-copyright...
There's no inherent right to anything, really. The statements in whatever declaration or philosophy are just arbitrary lines. Physical property rights are just as arbitrary as the divine right if kings (and incredibly closely related when that property is inherited!)
The argument really isn't based on rights, it's based on the rules of the game have been that people that make things get to decide what folks get to do with those things via licensing agreements, except for a very small set of carve outs that everyone knew about when they made the thing. The argument is consent. The counter argument is one/all of ai training falls under one of those carve outs, and/or it's undefined so it should default to whatever anyone wants, and/or we should pass laws that change the rules. Most of these are just as logical as if someone invented resurrection tomorrow, then murder would no longer be a crime.
> the divine right if kings (and incredibly closely related when that property is inherited!)
These seem to be very different indeed. You only need to be able to own and give property to have inheritance.
If your property is owned by a monarch or de facto the state, and you work your lifetime to rent it from them, then you don't get inheritance.
The similarity between divine right of kings and inheritance is that an unearned is transferred via circumstances of birth.
Your statements seem to extend that further: If you rent an apartment, you the property is owned by an landlord (lord is literally in the title!) and passed down by their wishes. Similarly if you work for Walmart for life, the company is owned and passed down by the Waltons. In these cases the property rights extend beyond life and are transferred via circumstances of birth, while the rights of labor end.
Interesting that IP rights are ended by death (or death+n years) as well. This line of reasoning suggests maybe that should apply to all property.
That's the standard rubric, but it doesn't actually answer the question of differential enforcement, which comes down to the usual questions: money and power.
In this case, the money and power are there precisely because people perceive AI as having the potential to reshape society, resulting in its creators receiving money and power, so it’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation.
>the welfare generated by making AI better by providing it with content is more valuable for society than the welfare generated by subsidizing copyright holders.
Isn't the AI in this case also copyrighted intellectual property that benefits its owners and not the society? As far as I know, Perplexity is a private, for-profit corporation.
I don't see how improving Perplexity's proprietary models is any more beneficial to society than YouTube blocking ad blockers.
Because there is arguably more societal value in commercial AI being able to do tasks well than there is in users being able to avoid looking at ads on an ad-supported platform.
You should also look at the welfare generated by showing that all are equal under the law, versus showing that companies can get away with blatant lawbreaking if they can convince people that it’s for the greater good.
The proper way to decide this would be to pass a law in the legislature. But of course our system in general and tech companies in particular don’t work that way.
The USA tends to invest a great deal of legislative power in the courts, and as you mention the legislature isn’t very responsive nor effective, so this is what we get.
I actually think physical property rights are much more problematic than copyright.
Works are so sparse, and there is such an explosion in how many texts there are that when someone has a right to the exclusive use of one of these huge numbers that are almost unrepresentable, you lose almost nothing.
If someone didn't announce that they had written, let's say, Harry Potter and there was a secret law forbidding you from distributing it, that would be really bad, but it would never matter.
Copyright infringement is a pure theft of service. You took it because it was there, because someone had already spent the effort to make it, and that was the only reason you took it.
Land, physical property, etc. meanwhile, is something that isn't created only by human effort.
For this reason copyright, rather than some fake pseudo-property of lower status than physical property, is actually much more legitimate than physical property.
How one adjudicates ownership or authorship disputes under copyright is fundamentally different than disputes about land and property ownership. We can go to records and so on in each case, but a resolution would be different in each case, because they are different sorts of potential violations or transgressions.
I don’t think it’s as clear who is at fault if I mention “he who must not be named” in a hypothetical scenario where Harry Potter was never published, and then start telling people about the manuscript I found. If I violated someone’s rights to privacy or property to get or keep the original manuscript, that’s one thing, but merely having it even if the author didn’t want me to have it as a copy especially is another issue. If I never published it but merely described it to others, I’m not sure if I’m any less culpable, but it seems like I should be.
I’m not sure how much more I can explore your thought experiment, but I appreciate you for sharing it with me.