[Rumors that start to become lawsuits]
Some speculations are:
- LibGen (4M+ books)
- Sci-Hub (80M+ papers)
- All of GitHub
This is the most funny, but in the end sad aspect. If ChatGPT was indeed trained on pirated content and is able to be(come) such a powerful tool, then the copyright laws should have been abolished yesterday. If ChatGPT was not trained on all these resources out there, then think how much powerful a tool it would be if it were trained, then copyright laws are actively stifling advancement and should have been abolished yesterday.
That is a very dangerous way to approach copyright laws. They are definitely abused by corporations like Disney, infamously so, but abolishing them is absolutely not the answer. Art makers are already struggling en masse, taking away their ability to earn money off their work isn't an answer, especially if it's just to train a predictive text generator.
Counterpoint: there's way too much "art makers", copyright is keeping the quality ceiling down, good content loses monetization game with spam - all while that "predictive text generator" is, for better or worse, pretty much the most magnificent piece of technology invented this century, and - for better or worse - it's likely to become next major shift to economy and life.
How do you believe copyright is keeping the quality down in particular? As I see it, the reason is marketability and trying to conform to standards. Making a new Marvel Movie is sure to have a payoff. Making Parasite MIGHT have a higher payoff, but the risk is way higher.
Removing copyright might help to get various more spin-offs and reiterations on previous work, which does increase the scope, but taking the ability for makers to profit from their work in a traditional sense, will bring us closer (back) to a time when commissioned artwork was the main art you saw
Letting "makers" (studios) profit from "their" (stolen by unbalanced contracts) work for unreasonable amounts of time has clearly proven to be a failure while crowd-comissioned spaces (patreon etc) are thriving financially AND artistically.
To nitpick, the second article is from 1970, back then a concept such as the Amazon Antitrust Paradox [1] would cause burning at the stake in the legal field. Similarly, we also have an Elsevier Antitrust Paradox, a Nature(.com) Antitrust Paradox, and so on.
Just the fact that I cannot freely read an article published 53 years ago is beyond ludicrous. And also, if I pay JSTOR ($19.5/month) and read the 1970 article, do you think the money will go to Stephen Breyer [2], the author? No, 100% of the $19.5/month will go to Ithaka Harbors, parent company of JSTOR [3], that's where the "accrued to large corporations" lies.
> the fact that I cannot freely read an article published 53 years ago is beyond ludicrous
And has as much to do with individual versus corporate power as the health of a single tree can speak for a forest.
Nobody is saying the current situation is good or even sustainable. OP just made a big claim for which there is no evidence, despite many looking for it.
As quoted above, "Ithaka's total revenue was $105 million in 2019, most of it ($79 million) from JSTOR service fees". All those $79 million and more JSTOR has stolen from the authors. Although JSTOR should have been dissolved long before this for effectively killing Aaron Swartz. But yes, there is no justice in this world. I suppose that's my main contention, why pretend anymore, we live in a society, yada yada.
This isn’t a cogent argument. You’re identifying troubling behaviour. But it’s not being stitched into anything cohesive. Hiding bad rhetoric behind post-modernist nihilism is in vogue, but unproductive.
Not sure where you picked nihilism in my reply, referencing the "we live in a society" meme I actually smiled. Nevertheless, stopping the pretence today, painful as it is, realizing the state of the world is far from perfect, is the first step for a better tomorrow.
There is no political debate in which increasing the opposition’s nihilism is not advantageous. Nhilihism keeps people from thinking. It keeps people at home, away from voting booths. There is daylight between Panglossian utopia and dystopia. If you’re cynical, one of the most productive uses of your time might be engaging the other side and convincing them civic engagement is worthless.
Incidentally, just to give you some more to rummage about, staying away from the voting booth seems like the best thing to do and civic engagement is indeed worthless. Unless you are able to say and vote "No", effectively banning all the "sides" from political action, forcing new sides to emerge. No people will ever be free, representational democracy or not, if they can't even say "No". Not being able to say "No" is also the root of the cynicism.
I'm not sure how that has to do with abolishing copyright, when that mostly has to do with weak and skewed protections current laws offer. They're not allowed to take names off copyrighted text, which is partly why that name is still on that paywalled text. They're not effectively forbidden by law to purchase to become a corporate owner of copyright, which is how they get to paywall it in their name.
If they, in loose usage of the pronoun, were allowed to deface an art, papers, code, anything copyrighted, they will. Stripping copyright text could even become an "etiquette". Conversely, if they were not allowed to profit off of a thing, copyrighted, with appropriate enforcement, they won't. These should go without saying for core Internet users and software engineers.
I never argued that copyright should be abolished, I was responding to a comment that essentially said that anyone who was opposed to copyright is doing so at the behest of large corporations at the expense of individuals, which is a really flawed and one sided way of looking at copyright laws, the first linked article you provided being a great example.
For the record, I can’t find a single large corporation pushing for the dissolution of copyright, and many clear examples of large corporations lobbying for increased copyright protections and terms. I thinks this puts the onus for providing evidence on those who would argue that corporations are completely failing to act in their own interest.
Already copyright laws do not offer protection for writers (see the current [screen]writers strike [1]), visual artists, musicians (see the recent Taylor Swift re-recording debacle [2]), not to speak of the "lower" arts, crafts & merch, where colossi such as H&M and Zara steal art, designs, concepts regularly [3] (not to even mention the sweatshops).
Copyright laws, or in fact generally laws, are for the rich and powerful, perhaps even for the corporations, not the individuals, since they paid for them to be so [4], it's just us, individually, the hoi polloi, who are still trapped into believing that there is rhyme or reason to our current system.
The joke is that while our system extolls itself as the most efficient system in history, based on competition of equals and free markets (two contradictions in terms contradicting each other), it harbours terrible inefficiencies such as the copyright laws, the patent system, and so on.
No, they get paid but would, understandably, like to be paid more. Something which would be even less likely to happen if copyright was abolished so anybody could use their output at zero cost.
From what I understand they are not getting paid since the paradigm changed: "the way it's changed is most of these streaming services focus on a metric called ARPU, which is the average revenue per user", "the main difference is it used to be that the incentives were linked. So the writers and the studios were trying to get people to watch the show and get high ratings and get people to pay attention to the show. Today, the streamer is trying to get people to subscribe to their service, so they're looking more at the aggregate of the service versus the individual show." [1]
I'm not sure quite why you're continuing to post articles explaining why writers get paid less as streaming services' revenue is less linked to the ratings of new shows as an argument in favour of marking down the value of the intellectual property they create to zero...
My original point still stands. Ask the writers. They're not getting paid nothing yet, and they won't approve of your passionate advocacy of a future in which they are paid nothing.
I'm not quite sure why you are not understanding that with the streaming model of business the writers, and even the actors, no longer get residuals, here is another article [1]: yes, they get paid nothing.
I am advocating for the abolishment of copyright laws, not for not being rewarded for one's work.
[1] Euphoria actress Sydney Sweeney revealed in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter that "They don’t pay actors like they used to, and with streamers, you no longer get residuals.", https://nofilmschool.com/streaming-services-residuals
I'm not sure why you are not understanding that not getting residuals is not the same as not getting a salary or a per writing contribution payment. Or that production companies are not paying these salaries (and the rest of the production budget) out of the kindness of their hearts, but out of revenues accrued from networks and streaming services having to pay to screen their shows.
Or that writers will not be paid anything (and certainly not by streaming services) in a copyright-free world in which anybody is allowed to use any creative work in any way free of charge. The abolition of copyright laws is literally the abolition of virtually[1] all existing rewards for creating IP.
This is not complicated stuff: if it's genuinely news to you that writers aren't working for free, perhaps you are not the person to lecture us on how copyright should work.
[1]I guess writers could still ask for donations. They could do this already, but they prefer negotiating with networks for higher pay packages...
If it's genuinely news to you that exploitation is a normal day-to-day part of any industry, perhaps these pointless replies should end here.
Yes, writers have been working for free [1].
[1] "In October 2015, Wil Wheaton created a stir when he declared that he had turned down an offer to write for the Huffington Post. He refused, according to him, because they had declined to pay for his work, in keeping with their policy of reimbursing writers with "exposure" in lieu of payment." https://www.vox.com/2016/2/26/11106006/writing-for-free Guess what writers who aren't famous have to do? Work for free, for "exposure".
Strangely, it is not news to me that exploitation is a normal day-to-day part of any industry .
(This is why I have not made any statements to that effect, never mind done anything as ludicrous as post articles about unionised screenwriters seeking to negotiate a higher pay rate as evidence that "most" of them earned "nothing")
And this is also why I am not advocating a copyright-free world in which HuffPo has the right to sell ads around everything Wil Wheaton ever wrote without paying him a penny or even seeking his permission. Guess what writers whose work isn't copyrightable will be paid in? That's right, "exposure", and not even exposure with much prospect of paid compensation if their work takes off.
Hope at least you are getting paid and you don't deploy such ridiculous amounts of bad faith for free.
My reply from above "Most of them already don't get paid, hence the strike" was specifically in the context of the streaming platforms not paying residuals in the same manner the studios do, hence the reference to the article.
What I find most funny is that you don't even know or care about alternative solutions, you just assume the copyright laws is for the best in the best of all possible worlds [1] and anything else would be chaos.
What I find most funny is that you're implying there are alternative solutions that you do know and care about.
And yet instead of addressing my actual objection - that screenwriters seeking to get paid more for co-creating IP would be unlikely to see abolition of IP protection as a solution - by articulating those alternatives and how it would allow them to get paid more, you chose to assert they don't get paid.[1]
I mean, I'm not the one advocating the radical change here, even though actually I don't "assume that the copyright laws is for the best in the best of all possible worlds". So it's not really incumbent on me to answer my own objections by imagining screenwriter-satisfying solutions involving the abolition of copyright. If you actually had one and were able to advocate it with as much zeal as you have defended the claim "most of them already don't get paid" this might be a more interesting discussion.
[1]doesn't really matter if you were doing so "specifically in the context of streaming platform residuals" since whether or not they get residuals from a particular media type is irrelevant to the fact screenwriters are not in favour of proposals which would entail them losing both the residuals they do get and their job
Ok, I'll bite, we are already at the 6th reply, who cares anymore.
The alternative solution is, shortly put, to quote Geoffrey Hinton: socialism [1]. Longly put: fully automated luxury communism [2].
Once the first two tiers of Maslow's pyramid (physiological and safety needs) are covered by automated systems people will be truly free; some will express themselves in writing, and expecting copyright protection over their work will seem as ridiculous as if one of us today would start charging money from people for using the word "the" [3]. We are currently tasked to give rise to the automated systems.
Sorry, to Gordian problems [4] I have only Gordian solutions.
since when is struggling artist making use of the copyright system. They are protected by it entirely in theory alone, they aint taking someone to court.
Sean Carroll, following Everett, puts it in the most concise form: (i) systems are described by wave functions, (ii) wave functions obey the Schrödinger equation [1]. "Many-worlds", universes, observations, observers, and so on become just entia multiplicanda [2], superfluities.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOgalPdfHxM, one set of rules in quantum mechanics at 36:00; at 1:13:14 where does the energy come from? energy of the set of all universes is conserved.
102 years ago General Motors started poisoning the entire planet with lead [1] (being helped by DuPont, the same DuPont which manufacture PFAS, to manufacture tetraethyllead-TEL, and in collaboration with Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, now known as ExxonMobil, the same ExxonMobil that predicted very accurately climate change 50 years ago, in the 1970s [2]).
Today, in 2023, General Motors has a market cap of $55B with $156B revenue in 2022; DuPont, $32B market cap, $13B revenue 2022; ExxonMobil $417B market cap, $413B revenue 2022.
These planetary-scale terrorists are killing you, your children, and any possible future for a few trillions, and you have been conditioned to sustain, maintain, defend, extend this criminal system.
These world-destroyers thinly masked as "companies" should have been dissolved literally 100 years ago. But in the words of the contemporary ponderer, George W. Bush, after receiving "$1.5 million from the oil industry for his 2000 presidential campaign, at the time, the largest donation from the industry to a single political candidate" [3], and asked by Manmohan Singh, India's Prime Minister, why must ExxonMobil approve India's largest state-owned oil company to buy into the Sakhalin-1 energy project in Russia and "why don't you just tell them [Exxon] what to do?" Bush replied: "Nobody tells those guys what to do."
A somewhat modernized version is to say: it's not nature, nor nurture, it's stigmergy [1]. Or another way: the organism is larger than the collection of the cells [2] [3].
[1] "mechanism of indirect coordination, through the environment, between agents or actions. The principle is that the trace left in the environment by an individual action stimulates the performance of a succeeding action by the same or different agent", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy
[3] Michael Levin and Wayne Frasch (2023) From molecular physiology to anatomical form, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l8I4gJ6D0w, at 27:32 the hybrid agent frog cells + scientists + AI exploring morphospace.
Perhaps one would drop the quotes around self-reflect if one would implement something more akin to a Markov blanket [1], blankets within blankets, model ourselves modelling the world.
"We don’t have AGI, and without that, we have only another wave of automation, and we don’t seem to have any a priori reason why this must be more or less painful than all the others."
We don't need AGI to eliminate 200+ million jobs. The output of a network driving a car can be literally two signed floating points, left-right/accelerate-brake; in hindsight we will understand there is little intelligence in going from A to B without crashing, a bee does it, in 3D even. To eliminate 1+ billion jobs you take the driving network and give it hands: flipping burgers, feeding a CNC machine, handling packages, all these jobs will be gone forever, as they should.
The only question is what will politicians do when their solutions so far have been to raise the retirement age.
The article speaks more about the "knowledge workers", the CC Baxters of the world performing more or less bullshit jobs [1]. The 2-3 billion unemployables of the next 10-20 years are not knowledge workers and will all be replaced forever by embedded robotics with good enough networks and statistical learning for following given goals while generating sub-goals.
Boston Dynamics' Spot costs $75K today and Atlas is around $150K, once the price gets closer to $10K there is very little reason to ever employ persons as assembly line workers, construction workers, warehouse workers, machine operators, truck drivers, janitors and cleaners, agricultural workers, security guards, food service workers, garbage collectors, and so on.
And even if 3 billion people could be forced to do spreadsheets to "earn" a living, "by the sweat of [their] brow", that would be an even sadder world than our currently sad world.
My argument is that we need a new metaphysics for what work and life means, one where the right of a person to have food and shelter is not tied to the economic value they produce. But I have no hope for this world: the trillionaires of tomorrow will share even less than the billionaires of today.
$3.4 million is a not even funny bad napkin mathematics. Just thinking of the work done by the moderators of /r/science, /r/AskScience, or /r/AskHistorians, not to speak of the moderators that handle celebrities AMA [1], and even $300 million would be a low amount if the platform really cared about the ones that make sure the platform is not a steaming pile of poppycock.
You're making the mistake of assuming that 100% of the unpaid work performed by a few niche subreddits converts to equivalent wages on the free labour market.
Is anyone going to pay first-world wages for someone to moderate a subreddit? It doesn't seem like anyone is willing to do so, because the mods do it for free. Nobody is willing to pay for this service. Social media companies that do pay for moderators tend to pay them not well at all. It's not a great job. It burns people out. It is in fact entry-level no-experience-needed grunt work.
The caveat was "if the platform really cared". For instance, if I was running a platform that had such an interesting (and important, one might argue) social phenomenon as the Ask Me Anything of celebrities or of vacuum repair techs [1] reaching 22+ million people I would pay the ones doing the work way beyond the equivalent wages of "free labour market". But what do I know, I generally regard exploitation as bad and social media companies as a scourge.
Some moderators have public personas which are valuable to a community, have built up trust, have specific hard to find skills, contribute valuable content, etc. If a moderator (or set of moderators) are able and willing to move a community, the market price of their work is the greater of what Reddit is willing to pay them and how much revenue they can receive from moving their community and capitalizing on it themselves.
"Is this really the way forward?" No. The way forward for scale-free systems which implement a hierarchy of competence is to have "the factory smaller than the product" [1]. Instead of the Chrome Canary team and the various Working Groups dictating from above what passes as valid, let the rules be sent at the same time with the interpretation of the rules [2]. In the same manner DNA encodes proteins with no mention of the underlying morphology, but once the RNA starts building the morphology arises.
[2] Not even such a new idea, "Building a Better Web Browser - James Mickens - Harvard CS Colloquium 2015", on rendering at 04:20, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uflg7LDmzI
I've been thinking about this lately: Writing a rendering engine for WASM or something, which then draws to a canvas.
The rendering engine can then be shipped along with the actual UI.
Sure, the rendering engine will take some time to load. However, compiling styling etc. to WebGL instructions at build time might also speed things up considerably.
(The actual reason, however, I'd be interested in this is not performance but improving upon the developer experience and replacing CSS with something better.)
To keep in mind, à la longue, the best CSS is probably no CSS. Does a user really need all these buttons and dropdowns, modals and scrollable containers, or do they need only an input and a container rendering a few paragraphs, an image, a video/audio, possibly a 3D model.
I see no problem if instead of using all these web sites/applications with such a plethora of visual and experience spam, I just have a single input box connected to an agent through which I interact with them all, letting the APIs settle in the background.
Furthermore, concepts such as file systems, operating systems, networking protocols, and so on, are probably terrible abstractions, just the fact that a 10 year old printer is pretty much unusable with a "modern" operating system or that a VFD shipped yesterday from the factory can be rendered useless due to a single byte error in the Modbus connection ought to give second thoughts to anyone daring to call themselves an engineer.
First of all: your current society has no chance at a future, AI overlords, mogul trillionaires, climate change and so on being the least currently concerning of your issues.
Nevertheless, one counter-intuitive policy which would end corporate control [1] (hence will never be implemented, again, no future for you) is supra-unitary taxation: effectively, tax rates above 100%, ensuring that the corporation has by default a lifetime (like a person they wish to be). Once the forever-in-debt corporation gets past a certain level of debt, it gets liquidated. Of course, corporations affected by this would have a certain scale (above $10 trillion, let's say) and a certain domain of activity (embedded AI, synthetic biology, nuclear fusion, asteroid mining, and similar).
A realpolitik lesson for the scientists of the future: next time you have the power, hold it, don't squander it on politicians, begging for crumbs, grants and the decency of a private life. Oppenheimer should have continued his quote "now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds" with "bow to me mortals, cause it is I that controls the machine" not "here you go Mr. Truman, go nuts with the bombs".
Also, Turing can never be overrated, beyond being the one who pulled us into a new metaphysics of computability (alongside Alonzo Church and others, sure), he will also be the one to bring the 22nd century into a new metaphysics of morphogenetic freedom [1] [2] [3]. Not sure about Flowers, but Turing knew there were realms of computationality way beyond their present tubes and levers.
