mrmaplebar
@mrmaplebar@fedia.io
- Comment on NVIDIA Contacted Anna’s Archive to Secure Access to Millions of Pirated Books 2 weeks ago:
These are all nothing more than arguments from authority. There are too many more creative people on the other side of the issue to even bother trying to list them.
The number of artists who release their creations into CC0 or public domain is not even a drop in the bucket. Good for them, that's a valid and maybe noble choice to relinquish their copyright--but it is a personal choice, not a law, nor should it be.
I've also written GPL code for years. That's my choice. I don't even regret it, despite knowing that it's being exploited. I'm not going to pretend that entitles me to the code that other people write. I'm not going to try to mandate that laws force everything to be GPL. It also doesn't mean that my code can be freely scraped and abused by AI companies.
"If you really want to keep control of your art, keep it in your house, don't share it with anyone, don't share it with the world."
Because that's really conducive to living in a capitalist society where the only way to make art is to have money, and the only way to have money is to sell your time, isn't it?
Sounds like a pretty shitty deal to me for artists, musicians, writers, filmmakers, designers, etc.
Copyright exists, at least in theory, to prevent us from living in such a world.
I reject all of that. It's a false dichotomy to tell artists that they have to either "keep their art in their house" or share it openly with an entire world of rich assholes like Altman, Musk, Zuck, Huang, and others who seek to exploit it for their own gain.
Personally I think you're the one who needs to get his head out of his ass and stop worshiping the words of other people as if they were gospel. I don't dwell on the every word of my favorite musicians. You're so busy looking up to people that you're not looking at the world around you as it is, right now, in 2026.
Look at the rampant, flagrant and shameless exploitation of the creative class by the pompous, rich, powerful, tech-bro elites who feel endless entitlement to everything that they can see. Are we just gonna pretend like this comment isn't attached to an article about how the richest company in the world purchased a massive trove of copyrighted works to train their AI? Are we gonna pretend like Anthropic, Google, X, and OpenAI haven't all done the exact same thing?
Sorry. I can't subscribe to that.
I care much more about art and artists than I care about tech or "open culture" on the internet.
At any rate, today's my birthday and I'm trying not to waste my time getting all worked up... Your opinion is valid and we probably aren't going to change each other's minds on this, so it's hardly worth continuing this conversation. I don't dislike you, I just disagree. Have a good one.
- Comment on NVIDIA Contacted Anna’s Archive to Secure Access to Millions of Pirated Books 2 weeks ago:
The basic trade-off inherent in copyright is a simple one. On the one hand, increasing
copyright yields benefits by stimulating the creation of new works but, on the other hand,
it reduces access to existing works (the welfare ‘deadweight’ loss). Choosing the optimal
term, that is the length of protection, presents these two countervailing forces particularly
starkly.Unfortunately this "research" is merely the subjective opinion of a "open data activist" who, to my knowledge, has not created anything, and is based on a flawed and entitled premise that the world is owed "access" to the creations of artists. I invite you to use your own brain, and reach your own conclusions:
- If I write a song from my own mind, what entitles you or anyone else to access of that song?
- If you paint a painting and hang it up on the wall of your bedroom, does that entitle me to have access to it in any way?
The answers to these questions are obvious.
There is no need to optimize copyright laws to balance the the rights of creators with the accessibility of media, because copyright exists simply to protect creators to own and control their own creations, which other people are in no way entitled to. "Access" isn't a factor, or at least it shouldn't be within the lifetime of the original creator.
“The AI + open data combo is incredibly powerful—but it must be democratic, ethical, and human-centered.” - Rufus Pollock, CKAN Monthly Live #33, July 6th 2025
It "must be" democratic? ethical? human-centered?
Guess what? It's none of those things... And the only way to even begin to force it to be any of those things is creating robust copyright laws that protect creators from exploitation of the technology-controlling elite oligarchs who have monopolized money, power, and the means of production (if you can even call generously generative AI "production", instead of mere theft.)
So again, I'll ask you, "what have you made in your life that leads you to think copyright should be limited to 15 years?"
The answer for someone like Rufus Pollock seems to be "I've created nothing, I just want access to other people's things", probably only so that he and other highly privileged tech bros can further engineer a society where they can use people's data for their own benefit.
We don't need some 20 year old joke of a research paper from Cambridge to judge what we are seeing with our own eyes right here and now. If you need a concrete example of where forced "open data" (as in, "we've pirated every song ever and hosted them on Anna's Archive so big tech can use them to train a model to rip off musicians who are already working 2-3 jobs to make ends meet") has failed, it has been the abuse and exploitation of copyrighted works on the part of generative AI companies in a system that has only served to make the rich richer and the poor, including the creative class, poorer.
Pollock isn't entitled to "access" to the things I create, nor is Altman entitled to train his over-valued company's for-profit product off of them. Fuck that.
The increasingly broke creative proletariat are being ripped the fuck off by the disgustingly wealthy techno-oligarch bourgeoisie, all because generative AI training seems to barely be a gray area in existing copyright laws--showing once and for all that giving these people even a single inch of "access" to our work will end in nothing but rampant exploitation.
- Comment on NVIDIA Contacted Anna’s Archive to Secure Access to Millions of Pirated Books 2 weeks ago:
Sorry. I'm not sure what happened here. I thought I copied the link last night, and it seems to work for me when I click it now. Maybe a mod fixed it.
- Comment on NVIDIA Contacted Anna’s Archive to Secure Access to Millions of Pirated Books 2 weeks ago:
Exactly. This is why you can't tie property ownership to life and death, because then you're simply creating a business incentive to seeing that people with valuable property die.
So to solve that, instead of tying the property to a specific person's lifetime, you tie it to a generic estimation of human lifetime (say 80-110 years, optimistically), and that brings us right back to where we are.
- Comment on NVIDIA Contacted Anna’s Archive to Secure Access to Millions of Pirated Books 2 weeks ago:
The more I think about how to fix copyright, the more I wonder whether we really need copyright.
Are you think about this from the standpoint of a creator? Have you written anything? Have you composed or recorded a song? Have you drawn or painted a picture? Taken an artistic photo? Even written some source code?
Or are you simply looking at copyright from the perspective of a consumer, who sees it as little more than an inconvenience to your access to free media? (I understand the populism of this, because consumers always outnumber creators, and we all like having the power to pirate media in an economy where so much is becoming unaffordable to us.)
I mean, think about it, the original idea behind copyright is to protect the small guy who creates media and wants to sell it from companies that might want to sell it themselves. Well, it's not working whatsoever. The small guy gets pennies on the dollar, while the big companies rake in the profits.
The original idea of copyright was that if you write a story (for example), you exclusively own it, and thus do not have to compete for the ability to print and sell it. This was meant to be a real solution to a real problem at the dawn of industrialization; how can the person who writes a story compete with a person who owns a printing press?
Sure, we can argue that the publisher still often wins today, because artists are so BROKE and desperate for cash that they will too often agree to a contract with bad terms. (See Spotify, for just one of many examples.) But without copyright, the writer loses and the printing company wins 100% of the time. The author would have zero ability to capitalize of their work, and the entity with the largest printing press would be unbeatable in the free market.
If AI is going to be treated like a printing press, artists should be protected from it like they were protected from the printing press. That demands stronger copyright laws, not weaker ones.
So honestly, let's just abolish copyright altogether and work on more of a donation base (that actually gets to the artists, since they control it) which is already being used with video a lot, and to ensure that artists can afford the necessities, add universal basic inco... OK shit I'm at it again.
As an artist myself, I'm tired of hearing non-artists propose solutions in which artists can only "afford the necessities" while billionaire tech bros hoard 99.9% of the wealth for themselves. Whether it's some kind of social safety net or UBI, what you're proposing amounts to little more than an allowance or table scraps from society, for the people who do what I think is the important work of creating large parts of human culture. Promising creative people a meager future in which they scrape by on only the bare minimum needed to survive is not the glamorous sales pitch that some people seem to think it is...
Why is the prescription a society where creative people are the only ones who can't capitalize on their creations?
If we are to abolish intellectual property, we might as well abolish all property (including land, patents and money as well) because then at least everybody is in the same boat. But if we do so, we'd better be careful to make sure that we aren't simply giving the federal government (and the shitheads who run it) even more power and control over everything. A society like that would need a MUCH stronger Bill of Rights, and one that is actually enforced.
- Comment on NVIDIA Contacted Anna’s Archive to Secure Access to Millions of Pirated Books 2 weeks ago:
I actually don't understand your reasoning here... What have you made in your life that leads you to think that copyright should be limited at all? Have you never written a story? Composed or recorded a song? Drawn a picture or taken a photograph? Written some computer code?
I've done all of these things, and I don't see any logic in the idea that I shouldn't have exclusive legal rights over a work that I've created throughout my lifetime, at the very least. I write a song and I only get 15 years to perform and sell it? I paint an illustration and I only get 15 years to prevent other people from drop-shipping t-shirts and posters of it on Amazon?
Copyright exists, in theory, to protect the original creators of works. Whether it does a good job of that or not is a secondary point. It seems that you're essentially arguing that artists should have less rights, power and value simply to justify piracy. No offense, but this strikes me as the argument of a consumer trying to justify piracy, with zero consideration of protecting writers, artists, musicians, and other creators of "intellectual property".
Indeed, one solution to corporations getting away with breaking the law is to make the law more lax for everyone. But another (much more preferable) solution is to simply enforce the laws equally and take action to protect creators.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to technology@beehaw.org | 27 comments
- Comment on Micron addresses Crucial exit backlash: 'We are trying to help consumers around the world' — company warns that DRAM drought could last until at least 2028 3 weeks ago:
Oh, fuck off...
- Comment on X could be banned in UK amid sexualised AI images concerns 4 weeks ago:
"Could be"? Why the special treatment?
If any other website was distributing such disturbingly illegal content they would've been banned in the span of days and the owners and creators or that content would've been prosecuted.
- Comment on Vince Zampella, video game developer behind 'Call of Duty' franchise, killed in mountain road crash 1 month ago:
Fuck man...
- Comment on Gamers Are Overwhelmingly Negative About Gen AI in Video Games, but Attitudes Vary by Gender, Age, and Gaming Motivations. 1 month ago:
Ooof. And it's only going to get more expensive when the AI industry is no longer able to afford to subsidize it with buttloads of investment money.
- Comment on What free to play games can run smoothly on my old laptop? 1 month ago:
Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart - A super fun and challenging Mario Kart style game made in the original Doom engine.
CatsEyeXI - An unofficial, custom Final Fantasy XI MMO server with fast leveling, solo play and many quality of life features. (Following guides is still recommended, because it's a complicated and vague game at the best of times!)
ETLegacy - A free to play version of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, a fun and fast team-based first person shooter.
- Comment on Gamers Are Overwhelmingly Negative About Gen AI in Video Games, but Attitudes Vary by Gender, Age, and Gaming Motivations. 1 month ago:
To be perfectly honest, I'd still be against it as long as it is trained on the stolen work of regular people.
Not only is it devoid of artistry and creativity, generative AI as it is today is cultural exploitation and plagiarism on an unprecedented industrial scale. It's incredibly unethical on top of being slop.
- Comment on Gamers Are Overwhelmingly Negative About Gen AI in Video Games, but Attitudes Vary by Gender, Age, and Gaming Motivations. 1 month ago:
We were told that games were "art", and that this new "creative" medium that we grew up with really mattered. Many of us (gamers and gamedevs alike) happy agreed...
But where is the artistry in outsourcing your assets to the big tech slop machine? What is creative about outsourcing your design, code and storytelling to an LLM?
Is it easy? Sure... Quick? Maybe... Cheap? For now, while big tech is happy to prop it up with other people's money.
But it's not cool and it's not "art". Like every piss filtered Studio Ghibli knockoff, there's no artistry or creativity in it whatsoever. (They know that too, which is why companies are trying to hide or understate their use of AI.)
I just hope that they aren't naively expecting people to pay full price, or even at all, for AI slop games.
- Comment on Indie Game Awards Disqualifies Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Due To Gen AI Usage 1 month ago:
Putting aside the massive ethical and legal implications of blatantly exploiting human culture and works in the name of corporate profits...
I really hope they aren't expecting us mere mortals to pay for AI generated games and media.
Because if I end up losing my job to a robot that was trained on my own stolen words, images, code and sounds, paying $70 for some slop is right down at the bottom of the list of things I want to do.
- Comment on Indie Game Awards Disqualifies Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Due To Gen AI Usage 1 month ago:
Sure, they could have used Mickey Mouse, a gray box, or a low poly model whipped in Blender in 5 minutes... After all, that's what people have been doing for like 30 years. None of those things would have required the mass industrialized exploitation of millions of people's work and culture. None of those things would add value to some tech bros business.
As a side note, something tells me that if they had used Mickey for their placeholder art it wouldn't have "accidentally" found its way into the final game.
Plus... how do I know they didn't use AI as the basis for all of the art in their game? For all I know, AI was central to setting the aesthetic of this game due to being at the very front end of their production pipeline. Hard to know, especially when they are so sketchy about it. (At least Larian were bold/stupid enough to admit that the concepts for their game start with AI.)
It cheapens the game and undermines whatever work they actually did.
Calling your game "indie" when you're actively exploiting artists to make it is like calling your Etsy store "diy" despite knowing that it's a bunch of Chinese dropped shipped junk made by children in a sweatshop. It's disingenuous at best.
- Comment on Indie Game Awards Disqualifies Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Due To Gen AI Usage 1 month ago:
Unless the model that they used was trained entirely on artwork that was public domain, creative commons, licensed or owned, then its basically certain that it wasn't used responsibly.
You cannot make something on a foundation of someone else's exploitation and be considered responsible, ethical, original or independent.
- Comment on US government uses Halo images in a call to 'destroy' immigration, Microsoft declines to comment 3 months ago:
- Comment on 3 months ago:
All signs are that we are getting the new VR headset first.
Yeah :(
And it is probably in Valve's best interest to let other people drive the HTPC consoles. They are not going to be cheap since "1024 at 40 FPS" doesn't scale all that well to a 50 inch 4k display. So let other integrators deal with that. Just release the steam controller 2 already.
I'm not sure this is a good idea, personally. The original Steam Machines and the ROG Xbox Ally are pretty good indicators that it's not very smart to rely on OEMs to drive major change in the PC market.
The current gen consoles are basically already just standard AMD x86-64 PCs that just happen to be running locked down proprietary OSes. So it really seems like low hanging fruit to me for Valve to just put out a price-competitive Steam Machine "console" akin to the Steam Deck that boots into SteamOS and otherwise is a normal PC that with a normal UEFI bootloader. That seems both technically easier and cheaper to do than putting out yet another prohibitively expensive VR/AR device.
As a fan of Linux and FOSS, my main concern is that Valve misses a big window of opportunity by failing to capitalize on the current weakness of Xbox and Windows during this awkward transition period from traditional consoles to PCs.
When Valve put out the original Steam Machines, people didn't understand why they would want a computer in their living room that didn't run Windows. But now the Steam Deck has shown people that Valve can deliver a console-like PC gaming experience that gives people the best of both worlds. SteamOS has a compatibility disadvantage, but a huge UX advantage. They've finally sold people on the concept that Windows is not the alpha and omega of PC gaming. But I think Microsoft understands that too, and the only reason that they're doing what they're doing today is because they clearly see SteamOS as a huge threat in the living room.
But as the saying goes, you gotta "strike while the iron is hot".
So if Valve sits back and allows Windows to continue to catch up to SteamOS in terms of gaming UX, then I think it's very possible that Microsoft could sell a lot of Windows-Xboxes, killing a lot of the interest in Steam Machines.
And I'll say that you can get a really nice AMD NUC HTPC for under 500 bucks that can handle "steam deck games" on a TV. And I THINK I have a way to get Display Port -> HDMI 2.1 that I need to sit down and test.
True, I can build my own Steam Machine by just throwing Bazzite on just about anything that's reasonably capable. I've been tempted, I'm just waiting to see what Valve has up their sleeve.
But it's not me that I'm worried about. Mass appeal comes from a company like Valve or Microsoft putting out a dedicated gaming box for a decent price that comes preinstalled with a gaming OS. I just hope it's Valve and Linux, and not Microsoft and Windows...
- Comment on Microsoft's OpenAI losses hidden as part of $4.7 billion 'other' expense — stake in AI company still doesn't turn a profit as companies grapple with ongoing contract negotiation 3 months ago:
Putting aside my ethical and cultural issues with training generative AI for a second, I have no idea what the appeal of this stuff is as a product.
Like, if they want me to pay a monthly subscription, what do they expect me to do with it? I have zero interest in chatting to a computer that's not thinking and is just stringing together words based on probabilistic bias, and I have zero interest in making or consuming AI-generated media. I don't want an AI "girlfriend", nor do I want an AI to play a video game for me. Finally, I don't see the value in having an AI tell me things that it summarized from various internet sources when we all know that the chances of it "hallucinating" (aka: making shit up or generally being totally wrong) is extremely high and basically unavoidable.
So, aside from the basic novelty of talking to your computer, what the hell is the point of all this?
Personally I wouldn't pay $2/month for LLMs, let alone $200/month...
- Comment on 3 months ago:
It's starting to get annoying waiting for Valve to announce a Steam Machine and having to listen to Microsoft's future Xbox-as-a-PC plans instead.
