Comment by DannyBee

Let's separate criminal and civil here, because this is all civil law.

Civil law systems largely aren't about "good" or "bad". Justice there isn't "good guys win" and "bad guys fail". It never has been.

It's about trying to reasonably resolve disputes. That's all. Civil legal systems were created not to enforce morality or social order, but instead to formally resolve disputes. The system is pretty good at doing that. It will never resolve all disputes, let alone resolve all disputes in an "optimal" way (for any possible definition of optimal you come up with). It only tries to do a reasonable job of it.

If your expectation is that the law will stop "bad" actors from acting "badly", i think your expectations are out of whack. Yes it gets tried, but it is a fairly miniscule portion of the system overall, and generally not a very successful part of it. It's also remarkably recent in the history of legal systems. It is a quasi-political thing that the legal system simply isn't good at dealing with, and really is not a good match for it. I think results bear that out so far

You can take that for whatever you want - I can only tell you why the system is there, historically and currently. That doesn't mean you have to like that idea, and you are welcome to rail against it.

How are you defining "justice"/"bad guys"? Under HN rules, if a company requires payment, it's explicitly only OK to post if a “workaround” to avoid paying is available. Additionally, HN explicitly says it's OK for HN comments to ask how to get around payment requirements, and for HN users to help other users to get around payment requirements.

Source: Official HN FAQ page.

The question is not how then is one supposed to trust the law, because you already know the answer. The question is what one does about it.

What if writing proprietary and/or non-free software was the real evil? LLMs have made everything open source. All software is free now.

The Justice is the liberation of code from those that wish to seek rent from it.

I imagine most people don't expect actual justice in life.

What I am hearing is "if you can't beat em, join em". If there is no justice for software pirates then we should all pirate everything, at least from companies we dislike.

This is HN so nothing else to expect than Big Tech people giving us the scoop with the tagline "let's be realistic here".

> In all seriousness, this kind of stuff happens every day: bad guys getting away because the law does not have the ability to do anything. How then is one suppose to trust the law, when there is virtually zero chance of seeing justice?

Guess why trust in democracy itself is eroding everywhere and why even executing a health insurance CEO on broad daylight is not just widely approved but widely beloved.

The rich can get away with anything (Trump's claim of "I could shoot someone on 5th ave and get away" is pretty realistic, to say nothing about the Epstein crap), but if you are poor or, even worse, an immigrant - pray to God to help you because not just will no one else help you, but in the worst case you might end up getting fucked over for seeking help.

This is what HN has devolved into: someone taking adware and removing the ads is a "bad guy".

The only effective protection for software IP is hiding the logic on servers you control (SaaS). Anything released to execute on client hardware can be decompiled and cloned. This has always been the case but LLMs have made the issue more obvious.

To be fair, Open Source has always been a threat to proprietary software. To be concrete, and I don't care what anyone else says, I will always prefer Krita to PhotoShop (because it is free, open, _and_ better, IMHO).

LLMs just make it possible to get a minimum-viable-clone very quickly (whether it is as good as a traditional open-source re-implementation, is a different matter).

The only software that I am happy to pay for is: Mathematica, and a handful of video games.

A big problem with patents is that they are designed to deprive other people of the right to practice an idea. Even if all software was automatically patented (somehow), you almost certainly would not be able to afford to defend your patents. And even if patent-defense-costs became socialized, you would still have to ensure that you are practicing fewer _external_ patents than _internal_ patents (otherwise, your royalty costs will exceed your royalty profits).

Edison industrialized the creation of patents (e.g. he would hire thousands of bright young graduates, and have them invent things, and then patent them in his own name). I once read a book that said Thomas Edison was the "greatest inventor" because he held thousands of patents. The reality is that he invented a tiny fraction of those patents, and he merely put his name on the work of other people.

My point is, if the auto-software-patent scenario becomes true, then wealthy people/organizations/oligopolies will create a patent-factory, made of either people, LLMs, or (more likely) both.

In a sense, OpenAI is already doing this for mathematical theorems (they use both LLMs _and_ a team of world-class mathematicians, much like Edison did in his day).

When I was growing up, patents were explained to us (children) as a means to protect the brilliant, solitary, but underfunded inventor -- a way to even the playing field. This has not been true for the entirety of my lifetime (36 years now), and has probably been untrue for the last century, at least.

The laws are not there to protect you and your interests, but rather they are there to protect the interests of the oligopolists (any protections you receive are _downstream_ of that).

If you want protections, you need to be sitting on top of a giant money-faucet. If you are already sitting on the money-faucet, then you probably don't strictly _need_ the protections.

Making money off of software has been a disappointing business for a while now (e.g. when I started out in the industry, the dominant business model was: turn a free Unix tool into a SaaS, and charge the innocent computer-user extortionary rents, or feed them ads, or both). The current business model is: sell plagiarism as a service.

The only reason that people talk about "moats" is because rent and food and healthcare are not free. The LLM companies are in the business of draining every moat they can find, and use the water to fill their own moat. Relying on the law to protect your moat for you is a fantasy, because every successful company finds a way to avoid or externalize the consequences of breaking the law.

Furthermore, the laws get changed whenever they become inconvenient. For example, the draft-age-limit was 35. When the Iran War started, I was relieved that I would become undraftable in less than a year. But a few months ago, they raised the limit to 42.

My rhetorical question to you (plural) is: if the establishment can change the rules, whenever they deem them inconvenient, why should we not _break_ the rules, whenever _we_ deem them inconvenient?

Physical/digital has the same answer, just different effect.

As a general rule, you can write off what it costs for you to make something, but not what you lose from not being able to sell it.

Which means for physical goods, you write off the cost to make them, and for digital goods, you can similarly usually deduct development cost to make the software.

In neither case can you write off the amount you would have made had it not been stolen/sale had not been lost.

The practical effect is that because physical goods have a per-unit to-make cost, and most digital goods don't, physical goods get written off per-unit-lost and digital goods do not.

At least, this is the most general answer I can give you for that level of general question.

Digital losses to piracy sounds like something that would be impossible to quantify.. even if they can prove that people are downloading these pirated copies, that's not proof that the downloader was ever going to pay for the software in the first place.

Please don’t attack other HN members. It’s not nice and it’s against the guidelines.