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Probably not. We have witnessed, over the past few years, an "AI fair use" Pearl Harbor sneak attack on intellectual property. The lesson has been learned: I

Probably not. We have witnessed, over the past few years, an "AI fair use" Pearl Harbor sneak attack on intellectual property. The lesson has been learned: In effect, intellectual property used to train LLMs becomes anonymous common property. My code becomes your code with no acknowledgement of authorship or lineage, with no attribution or citation. The social rewards (e.g., credit, respect) that often motivate open source work are undermined. The work is assimilated and resold by the AI companies, reducing the economic value of its authors. The images, the video, the code, the prose, all of it stolen to be resold. The greatest theft of intellectual property in the history of Man.

CamperBob2 7mo ago
The greatest theft of intellectual property in the history of Man. Copyright was always supposed to be a bargain with authors for the ultimate benefit of the public domain. If AI proves to be more beneficial to the public interest than copyright, then copyright will have to go. You can argue for compromise -- for peaceful, legal coexistence between Big Copyright and Big AI -- but that will just result in a few privileged corporations paywalling all of the purloined training data for their own benefit. Instead of arguing on behalf of legacy copyright interests, consider fighting for open models instead. In a larger historical context, nothing all that special is happening either way. We pulled copyright law out of our asses a couple hundred years ago; it can just as easily go back where it came from.
- goku12 7mo ago
  There is one missing factor in your argument. The wealth transfer. The public was almost never the beneficiary of copyright and other IPs. Except perhaps its earliest phases where the copyright had a strict term limit, it was always the corporations who fought for it (Disney being the most infamous), using it to prevent the public from economically benefitting from their work almost forever. And then people found a way to use the same copyright law to widely distribute their work without the fear of losing attribution or being exploited. Here comes along LLMs that abuse the 'fair use' argument to break attribution and monetize someone else's work. Which way does the money flow? To the corporations again. IP when it suits them, fair-use when it benefits us. One splendid demonstration of this hypocrisy is how clawd and clawdbot were forced to rename (trademark law in this case). By twisting and reinterpreting laws in whatever way it suits them, these glorified marauders broke a trust mechanism that people relied on for openly sharing their work. It incentivices ordinary people to hide their work from public. Don't assume that AI is going to solve that loss. The level of original thinking in LLMs is very suspect, despite the pompous and deceitful claims by its creators to the contrary. Meanwhile, the lack of knowledge sharing and cooperation on a global scale will throw civilizational growth rate back into the dark ages. Neither AI, nor corporations are yet anywhere near the creativity and original thinking as the world working together. Ultimately, LLMs serve only the continued one-way transfer of wealth in favor of an insatiably greedy minority, at the cost of losing the benefit of the internet (knowledge sharing) and an enormous damage to the environment - all of which actively harm the public.
  - CamperBob2 7mo ago
    Ultimately, LLMs serve only the continued one-way transfer of wealth in favor of an insatiably greedy minority Including the ones I can run on my own PC at home? I couldn't do that before. Maybe I'm the greedy minority, but I'm stronger and (at least intellectually) wealthier than I was before any of this started happening. Qwen 3.5, which dropped yesterday, is a genuine GPT 5-class model. Even the ones released by US labs such as OpenAI and Allen AI are legitimate popular resources in their own right. You seem to feel disempowered, while I feel the opposite.
    - atomic128 7mo ago
      Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. ... Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind. -- Frank Herbert, Dune
      - CamperBob2 7mo ago
        Eh, we already have a name for the concept of living by plausible-sounding works of fiction: religion. Yet another post who misses (or chooses to overlook) my point: this stuff is running on my machine. "Seizing the means of production" means going into my back room and pulling a computer out of a rack.
        atomic128 7mo ago
        Alibaba (China) thinks for you. They control you, to some extent. Wikipedia: "Qwen (also known as Tongyi Qianwen, Chinese: 通义千问; pinyin: Tōngyì Qiānwèn) is a family of large language models developed by Alibaba Cloud. Many Qwen variants are distributed as open‑weight models under the Apache‑2.0 license, while others are served through Alibaba Cloud. Their models are sometimes described as open source, but the training code has not been released nor has the training data been documented, and they do not meet the terms of either the Open Source AI Definition or the Model Openness Framework from the Linux Foundation."
- mixdup 7mo ago
  >If AI proves to be more beneficial to the public interest than copyright, then copyright will have to go. Going forward? Okay, sure. But people created all of the works they created with the understanding of the old system. If you want to change the deal, then creators need to know that first so they can decide if they still want to participate Allowing everyone to create everything and spend that labor with the promise of copyright, and then pull the rug "oops this is just too important" is not fair to the people who put in that labor, especially when the people redefining the arrangement are getting 100% of the value and the creators got and will get nothing
  - CamperBob2 7mo ago
    Life isn't fair, and 100+ year copyright terms enforced eternally with unbreakable DRM sure as hell aren't. But open-weight LLMs are a pretty decent compromise.

CamperBob2 7mo ago

The greatest theft of intellectual property in the history of Man. Copyright was always supposed to be a bargain with authors for the ultimate benefit of the public domain. If AI proves to be more beneficial to the public interest than copyright, then copyright will have to go. You can argue for compromise -- for peaceful, legal coexistence between Big Copyright and Big AI -- but that will just result in a few privileged corporations paywalling all of the purloined training data for their own benefit. Instead of arguing on behalf of legacy copyright interests, consider fighting for open models instead. In a larger historical context, nothing all that special is happening either way. We pulled copyright law out of our asses a couple hundred years ago; it can just as easily go back where it came from.

goku12 7mo ago
There is one missing factor in your argument. The wealth transfer. The public was almost never the beneficiary of copyright and other IPs. Except perhaps its earliest phases where the copyright had a strict term limit, it was always the corporations who fought for it (Disney being the most infamous), using it to prevent the public from economically benefitting from their work almost forever. And then people found a way to use the same copyright law to widely distribute their work without the fear of losing attribution or being exploited. Here comes along LLMs that abuse the 'fair use' argument to break attribution and monetize someone else's work. Which way does the money flow? To the corporations again. IP when it suits them, fair-use when it benefits us. One splendid demonstration of this hypocrisy is how clawd and clawdbot were forced to rename (trademark law in this case). By twisting and reinterpreting laws in whatever way it suits them, these glorified marauders broke a trust mechanism that people relied on for openly sharing their work. It incentivices ordinary people to hide their work from public. Don't assume that AI is going to solve that loss. The level of original thinking in LLMs is very suspect, despite the pompous and deceitful claims by its creators to the contrary. Meanwhile, the lack of knowledge sharing and cooperation on a global scale will throw civilizational growth rate back into the dark ages. Neither AI, nor corporations are yet anywhere near the creativity and original thinking as the world working together. Ultimately, LLMs serve only the continued one-way transfer of wealth in favor of an insatiably greedy minority, at the cost of losing the benefit of the internet (knowledge sharing) and an enormous damage to the environment - all of which actively harm the public.
- CamperBob2 7mo ago
  Ultimately, LLMs serve only the continued one-way transfer of wealth in favor of an insatiably greedy minority Including the ones I can run on my own PC at home? I couldn't do that before. Maybe I'm the greedy minority, but I'm stronger and (at least intellectually) wealthier than I was before any of this started happening. Qwen 3.5, which dropped yesterday, is a genuine GPT 5-class model. Even the ones released by US labs such as OpenAI and Allen AI are legitimate popular resources in their own right. You seem to feel disempowered, while I feel the opposite.
  - atomic128 7mo ago
    Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. ... Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind. -- Frank Herbert, Dune
    - CamperBob2 7mo ago
      Eh, we already have a name for the concept of living by plausible-sounding works of fiction: religion. Yet another post who misses (or chooses to overlook) my point: this stuff is running on my machine. "Seizing the means of production" means going into my back room and pulling a computer out of a rack.
      - atomic128 7mo ago
        Alibaba (China) thinks for you. They control you, to some extent. Wikipedia: "Qwen (also known as Tongyi Qianwen, Chinese: 通义千问; pinyin: Tōngyì Qiānwèn) is a family of large language models developed by Alibaba Cloud. Many Qwen variants are distributed as open‑weight models under the Apache‑2.0 license, while others are served through Alibaba Cloud. Their models are sometimes described as open source, but the training code has not been released nor has the training data been documented, and they do not meet the terms of either the Open Source AI Definition or the Model Openness Framework from the Linux Foundation."
mixdup 7mo ago
>If AI proves to be more beneficial to the public interest than copyright, then copyright will have to go. Going forward? Okay, sure. But people created all of the works they created with the understanding of the old system. If you want to change the deal, then creators need to know that first so they can decide if they still want to participate Allowing everyone to create everything and spend that labor with the promise of copyright, and then pull the rug "oops this is just too important" is not fair to the people who put in that labor, especially when the people redefining the arrangement are getting 100% of the value and the creators got and will get nothing
- CamperBob2 7mo ago
  Life isn't fair, and 100+ year copyright terms enforced eternally with unbreakable DRM sure as hell aren't. But open-weight LLMs are a pretty decent compromise.