but what about people getting paid for the invested money of movies made by their ancestors, dead over 50 years ago (and up to more than 100 years ago, whatever is the current copyright term for movies)
do they have a right to enjoy being rewarded for work they didn't do but their ancestors did?
if the intention of those laws was to encourage creativity, how come they're stiffing it more than encouraging without any signs of any government trying to correct the laws to better match their purported intentions?
Even that notion is tricky in the context of text AI. It doesn't seem obviously clear to me what the implied stance towards AI training would be for many popular license types. It seems more like the creators of many licenses didn't explicitly consider this use case.
And the more meta question is whether the creators' rights should even extend to that realm. Can you specify in a license "This text must not be read by students in the context of an educational course" (which is arguably the closest analogue to AI training)? If that's not possible, then where do we draw the line between tools-assisted learning by humans and human tools learning on their own? You can arrive at answers, but it seems to me like there are many possible reasonable interpretations.
Why is it fair use if you train a model on copyrighted material and use its transformative output, despite going against the will of the author?
Can we all legally pirate educational books since it's for self training and producing transformative outputs? Can I consume all media (books, movies, music) the same way, and call it fair use? Also for software?
Content that hasn't been legally obtained wouldn't be legal to consume in any way. That's not what I meant, and I think that's a bit of a disingenuous interpretation of my comment.
The debate is about content that is generally legally obtained, but might come with certain restrictions. Where restrictions is a broad term and might also just come in the form of a copyleft license, eg. My main point was that in many situations, eg involving open source licenses, it's really not clear from the terms what the creator's intent regarding AI training was. And the broader question is whether training is fair use, or something else, maybe even a new legal concept that would have to be established. Or, what's the difference between art students going to the museum to be inspired, and Dall-E 'looking' at public domain images?
I acknowledge I stretched a bit your comment. I meant it as a way to try to find the line on what's OK with these new AIs rather than ill-intended O:)
Regarding your point, I wonder how different is it to break the "terms of use" for fair right, vs breaking the "terms of obtaining" alltogether. They both are about jumping over owner's will, who has the full rights of the work.
I very much look forward to see how the ethics and law around these issues evolve.
I don't want you taking my car because I need to use my car and only one of us can use it at a time. Intellectual property can be endlessly copied without anyone losing anything. This is not a defense of IP theft (and it's pretty reasonable to think that IP law serves an important purpose protecting creatives' ability to get compensated for their work) but it means that they require a fundamentally different approach.
indeed, the first step (IMO) towards revising the notion is to recognize that physical (material, tangible) assets inherently work differently than digital assets.
As I understand so far the main reason to seek a revision of the concept of ownership is exactly due to the existence (enabled by internet technology) of digital assets.
copy-pasting is HOW computers work. copy-pasting does not do well in society ruled by the exclusivity-mindset inherent to marketplaces (and their societies) of tangible assets
I agree with you that digital "asset" ownership is new, unexplored territory for humans.
We've never been able to separate the content from the distribution medium before now, and we're struggling to recreate a model we're familiar with (physical media) by imposing absurdities like DRM.
NFTs are also an absurd way of trying to solve the same problem.
The issue we wrestle with is mistaking "ownership" with a access.
I can own a physical book, but I do not own the content of the book, I've paid for access to that content and the book is the medium.
Digital assets are the same, I don't own them, they are a form of access to content that someone else owns, and has granted me an either implicit or explicit license to use.
I think this is the concept of ownership that needs to be revised.
Rather than a mp3 being treated, and thought of, like a book - it should be thought of more as a movie ticket. Something that grants me access to content within the limits defined by the content owner.
but this essentially restricts the spread of the 'digital boon' (referring the the new possibilities afforded by this new technologies)
I'm trying to point out that this distinction (ownership as distinct from access) leads towards a capture of the digital advantage by people with better leverage.
moreover, I disagree that if I own a book I do not own the contents of it. the mindset that I don't seems too close to saying that I can know things (well understood learned concepts) but still somehow not own them.
This in my view is like a 'hook' which pulls towards the reality that somebody else owns the contents of my own mind, hence that I do not own that part of myself. I hope you see where I'm going with this and why I find your posture troubling.
It's only a few short (conceptual) steps from doing away with individual freedom for the sake of what?
Historically rent-seeking has been a negative for the health of society.
Granting overlords the power of ownership, reducing individuals to renters that must comply with the whims of the property masters, is not a path to increased liberty.
> Historically rent-seeking has been a negative for the health of society.
Sure. I mean, I'm not an economist nor a sociologist, I bet there's some nuance to that, eh?
> Granting overlords the power of ownership, reducing individuals to renters that must comply with the whims of the property masters
Peasants and serfs. In re: technology I talk about Morlocks and Eloi. Yeah I think that's a lousy way to structure society.
The original point that you replied to was, "ownership is a concept in dire need of revision" and it sounds to me like that's where you're coming from too?
private property successfully didn't exist in various societies, including larger scale societies and ones that had discovered agriculture, and not only under communist regimes. it does mean to share, without ownership.
Depends I guess, there are a million definitions of communism, but commonly the idea is, to give the tools and factories into the hand of the workers (in theory), so you probably could argue that code ownership of productive code falls under this.
My point is that there is socioeconomic theories which were based on the goal of common ownership of all means of production (which in a digital society would often translate to code). I guess all movements that have tried to transition to such societies have failed (thus my comment: they are alternatives, the trick is to make them working). While public domain is (except maybe for government agency) is a model you chose, this is completely different. If we are talking about alternatives to ownership we cannot do this without thinking in political dimensions.
well yea, because your parents were essentially slaves, the property of higher elite classes. I'm pointing to the class relationship, nothing specific to your parents.
I wonder if such practices were used in schools reserved for royalty and other nobles in the UK
depends on how close you wanna get to the servers, and then the hardware?
I suppose it's a super rare occurrence now, but back when I was starting on this, I would mess up my X server and was forced to fix it from the command line.
All I see is the display of the egos and so-called philosophy of a bunch of rich "libertarian" punks who's basic MO is "I've got mine, screw the rest of you." They are as altruistic as a hungry bear.
If one of them walked up to me and said "I'm going to make your life better!" I'd have two questions: "How do you define better?" and "What's the catch?"
These are the type of people that push crypto cons and other destructive things.
They want to make the world better? Start by addressing the income disparity between rentiers like themselves and the people who actually build what they claim to have "invented".
I wish I could study (and explain) those 19KB of javascript (and including the rest of the locked down software stack taken for granted) as the sheet music that I take them to be from a fully academic music-technological standpoint.
but I don't want a bend over backwards to have to do this. oh well.
I wanna bend over backwards as I do it, from the very hardware (intel x86) all the way to the sound and back down the stack again. going through (or across??) the ADC and DAC cards and all that. I would never finish, so I wouldn't be allowed to start in any typical academic programs.
I think within the academia is the only place this could possibly be brought up.
do they have a right to enjoy being rewarded for work they didn't do but their ancestors did?
if the intention of those laws was to encourage creativity, how come they're stiffing it more than encouraging without any signs of any government trying to correct the laws to better match their purported intentions?