IP laws have more or less handled humans stealing ideas from humans for commercial gain. not perfectly by any means…
“Until author’s death + 70 years”… not perfectly, is WAY of an understatement.
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gwindli@lemy.lol 4 months agoi disagree. IP laws have more or less handled humans stealing ideas from humans for commercial gain. not perfectly by any means… but both the scale an impunity and frankly the entitlement exhibited by these GenAI companies is on another level.
no matter how many times people make the argument that AIs are just “doing what humans do”, it fails to sway me. an AI copying, ingesting and tokenizing other people’s intellectual property is nothing like a human watching a video or hearing a song and creating something based upon or derived from it. a database backed algorithm does nothing even remotely like a human mind. it’s using software to process and regurgitate the works of others, and that is pretty plainly IP theft.
jarfil@beehaw.org 4 months ago
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 4 months ago
I’m not saying the process is exactly the same but conceptually it’s quite similar. Humans don’t create original ideas. They build on what came before. Maybe a truly brilliant artist or inventor adds 1% new ideas. That’s not enough to justify the extremely broad ownership of ideas that exists in our society.
Humans have been freely copying each other for millions of years. It’s how we built everything we have. Ideas and art were not meant to be owned. The very concept of owning something non-physical is violent and authoritarian in nature. Without physical possession, the only way IP laws can be enforced is a global police empire, which the US has successfully created for its own enrichment at the expense of the global poor.
jarfil@beehaw.org 4 months ago
False. Master artisans have been keeping their knowledge secret in order to maintain a competitive advantage, only eventually passing their knowledge to the most advanced of their apprentices. Temporary monopolies (Patents), and temporary Copyright protections, have enabled the exponential expansion of knowledge.
Keyword being “temporary”. We have Disney to thank for turning Copyright’s temporariness into a mockery of itself.
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 4 months ago
I’m not sure I buy this argument but I will admit that I’m not extremely familiar with the hoarding or sharing of trade secrets prior to patents. If your logic is correct, patents should be as short as practically possible to encourage information sharing.
I don’t see how this applies to copyright though. Are you concerned people will create works and then bury them? I don’t see the risk here.
jarfil@beehaw.org 4 months ago
On patents and lost knowledge:
ipwatchdog.com/2022/09/07/…/id=151264/
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stradivarius
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificio_de_Juanelo
Modern patents require the disclosure of information prior to being granted, so anyone can access the knowledge to build on it from the start. The patent owner’s rights are enforced after the fact, by punishing anyone who tries to make money off the invention without a license from the owner. Their term is generally reasonable for mechanical inventions, with a maximum of 20 years, and the cost of maintaining the patent grows exponentially. Main problems are the term, and whether a patent should be granted at all, when applied to non-mechanical items, like software, medicines, organisms, etc. which don’t follow the same pattern of investment vs. incentive.
Copyright, was initially intended to let publishers have some time to get their investment back, between printing, distributing, and selling copies of a book. Initially, in the 18th century, that was set to 28 years. However, instead of staying true to that intention and adapting to new forms of distribution, with the internet being the latest one, Disney lobbied like crazy to get to the current “until author’s death + 70 years” term:
…m.wikipedia.org/…/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
That, is a complete mockery of the initial rationale. With digital distribution, Copyright should’ve shrunk to a fraction of the original 28 years, not grow even longer!
The concern is that people, particularly publishers paying an advance to an author, would not want to do that if they didn’t have some assurance on the return of their investment. Nowadays, something like 1 or 2 years after publication, would be more than enough, even for films, which get most of their revenue during the first few weeks after release. Games follow a similar pattern, when they don’t require an ongoing subscription.
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
Injecting logic, facts, and moderation into an AI conversation? Get the fuck outta here!