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this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
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Sam Altman is a grifter, but on this topic he is right.
The reality is, that IP laws in their current form hamper innovation and technological development. Stephan Kinsella has written on this topic for the past 25 years or so and has argued to reform the system.
Here in the Netherlands, we know that it's true. Philips became a great company because they could produce lightbulbs here, which were patented in the UK. We also had a booming margarine business, because we weren't respecting British and French patents and that business laid the foundation for what became Unilever.
And now China is using those exact same tactics to build up their industry. And it gives them a huge competitive advantage.
A good reform would be to revert back to the way copyright and patent law were originally developed, with much shorter terms and requiring a significant fee for a one time extension.
The current terms, lobbied by Disney, are way too restrictive.
I totally agree. Patents and copyright have their place, but through greed they have been morphed into monstrous abominations that hold back society. I also think that if you build your business on crawled content, society has a right to the result to a fair price. If you cannot provide that without the company failing, then it deserves to fail because the business model obviously was built on exploitation.
I agree, which is why I advocate for reform, not abolishment.
Perhaps AI companies should pay a 15% surcharge on their services and that money goes directly into the arts.
That's not fair to change the system only when businesses require it. I received a fuckin' letter from a government entity where I live for having downloaded the trash tier movie "Demolition".
I agree copyright and patents are bad but it's so infuriating that only the rich and powerful can choose not to respect it.
So I think openAI has to pay because as of now that shitty copyright and patent system is still there and has hurt many individuals around the world.
We should try to change the laws for copyright but after the big businesses pay their due.
But Sam is talking about copyright and all your examples are patents
It just so happens that in AI it's about copyright and with margarine (and most other technologies) it's about patents.
But the point is the same. Technological development is held back by law in both cases.
If all IP laws were reformed 50 years ago, we would probably have the technology from 2050, today.
It's all the same shit. No patents and copyrights should exist.
Is it? In Sam's case, we're mostly talking about creative products in the form of text, audio, and video. If an artist releases a song and the song is copyrighted, it doesn't hamper innovation and technological development. The same cannot be said when a company patents a sorting algorithm, the method for swiping to unlock a smartphone, or something similar.
If copyrights are used to add a huge price tag to any AI development, then it did just hamper innovation and technological development.
And sadly, what most are clamoring for will disproportionately affect open source development.
If open source apps can't be copyrighted then the GPL is worthless and that will harm open source development much more
I'm not sure how that applies in the current context, where it would be used as training data.
Because once you can generate the GPL code from the lossy ai database trained on it the GPL protection is meaningless.
In such a scenario, it will be worth it. Llm aren't databases that just hold copy pasted information. If we get to a point where it can spit out whole functional githubs replicating complex software, it will be able to do so with most software regardless of being trained on similar data or not.
All software will be a prompt away including the closed sourced ones. I don't think you can get more open source then that. But that's only if strident laws aren't put in place to ban open source ai models, since Google will put that one prompt behind a paychecks worth of money if they can.
I don't see how you can write the law such that it allows training ai on copyrighted data without making it possible to train a special llm on a single github instead of the entire universe, and essentially treat it as a full compression of the source.
The outputs are still bound to copyright laws. Tracing pixel per pixel over an artwork doesn't make it immune to copyright laws, maliciously over training gen ai to act like a database and outright copy shouldn't either.
If you have a carbon copy of someone's github, it doesn't matter if you generated it, it's still a copy. Although code is a difficult example since I'm not entirely where the line is for one repo to be different then the other when they are accomplishing the same task.
I always imagined businesses just grabbed the gpl software and would tell their employees to rewrite it but different. Most things I dive down into seem to stem from one algorithm or two from a paper and the rest is fluff.
I mean, I'd say there's a qualitative difference between industrial products and a novel, for example.
Lmao Sam Altman doesn't want tbe rules chanhed for you. He wants it changed for him.
You will still be beholden to the laws.