← Back to context

Comment by jerf

6 days ago

"I don't know when the extreme intellectual property viewpoint entered software engineering as a mainstream opinion because I have never before seen it expressed so strongly in this community"

It's not copyright maximalism, it's just bog-standard rationalization. I don't like what this company is doing, it looks like I can hit them with the "copyright" stick, so I will. One day later, I like playing abandonware games and that should be legal and copyright is stopping me so copyright bad, grrr argh.

At least, at the HN gestalt level. Individuals may say one or the other of those things from a principled perspective, but I perceive a lot of rationalization in these discussions overall.

There's not a lot people coming at this from any sort of principled position. I think one measure of that is that the modal principled position right now ought to be something fairly close to "I don't know". AI has kicked a lot of the foundation out from underneath copyright and I don't think anyone serious has more than a first draft of what the plan moving forward should be. Even if you can get two people to agree on the goals we should shoot for, which is already a tough ask even in a pre-AI era, getting them to agree on how to achieve those goals will be a long shot... and that's entirely separate from the question of whether the actions would in fact end up accomplishing the goal, which I don't trust anyone to have a good bead on right now.

Nominally, the principle of copyright has been to preserve creativity. Ten years ago we all had a reasonably similar idea what that meant, but we don't even have that now.

2 comments

jerf

Reply
rmunn  6 days ago

> At least, at the HN gestalt level. Individuals may say one or the other of those things from a principled perspective, but I perceive a lot of rationalization in these discussions overall.

I'd be careful attributing anything to the "HN gestalt"; it's a very, VERY wide range of individuals, with widely-ranging views. And I've been surprised, at times, when I've posted something that I thought would be widely disagreed with and downvoted, and yet my comment ended up with 5 net positive votes. Because the "gestalt", which I would call the consensus, on any given thread depends entirely on who feels invested enough in that topic to click on the thread and vote on it.

So on one thread you might find a lot of people holding position A, then on the other thread the vast majority is expressing position not-A, in direct contradiction. "Oh," you might conclude, "the HN gestalt is self-contradictory"... but if you were to actually dig into the comments and put together a spreadsheet of names and what they were advocating, you might find that most individuals were being consistent; it's just that there were largely different people posting on the two threads. (And some A advocates were posting their A advocacy on the second thread, but being drowned out by the majority of voices on that thread; while the first thread had a few not-A advocates, but not very many).

As for copyright, I've long felt that "death of the author + X years" was a bad system, and was worse as the value of X kept on being bumped up. I think it should simply be "X years", period, so it's predictable. For a reasonably large value of X, such as 50 years: authors who write a masterpiece in their 20's should still get to profit from its sales until they're 70+ years old. (And most authors don't just write one book and stop, so unless that hypothetical author is a one-and-done writer, he/she would still have many other books to profit from when that first book lapsed into the public domain).

But I haven't given much thought yet to what it looks like once AI use is common. (And if you think AI use is common now, just wait until open models start taking off in popularity, and AI use no longer requires a subscription fee. Might take a while for hardware to come down in price, so it might be 10 years instead of 5, but there's going to be a definite shift in lots and lots of ways once many more people can just pay a one-time hardware price rather than an ongoing subscription or per-token API price). So I can't really offer much else to the conversation than that.