lynn / clarissa

It hit me this morning that often what I find frustrating in discussions around "intellectual property", piracy, large datasets for training things like CLIP, &c. is that IP is a really really poor substitute for actually useful conversations around consent and respect

Like Elsevier asking me to "pwease no steal uwu" about journal articles is very different than, like, an individual selling self-published books on the side saying "hey I need this money to pay rent, so please purchase it legit"

An artist saying "hey I don't like for-profit companies building generators from my work that I posted to deviant art" is very different than Disney cracking down on people making shit with characters they "own".

Someone saying "hey this is really personal work, I don't really want it passed around and edited without my consent" is not the same as pebbleyeet getting mad at anti-fash edits of his comics.

IP is bullshit but that doesn't mean we have to take unnuanced all-or-nothing approaches to things.

That would be like saying if you want to support squatters taking over an airbnb then you can't have a lock on your bathroom door: it's conflating such wildly different things that it's a little silly.

Dec 4, 2022 at 9:33pmWeb
Show threadEconEnbyDec 4, 2022
@left_adjoint yeah i feel like any response inevitably has to go to "okay but without the state how can we ever protect ourselves and our work" and that's a whole 'nother conversation than specifically "why is IP bad"
Show threadmorbidaDec 4, 2022
@left_adjoint mostly I think this comes down to "we should be able to have conversations about respect and consent without falling into a trap where the most decisive element is 'property'?"
Show threadlynn / clarissaDec 4, 2022
@mxmxyz Exactly! That is exactly my point!
Show threadlynn / clarissaDec 4, 2022

@mxmxyz property is a blunt instrument based in capitalistic ideas

autonomy, consent, the needs of the individual, respecting someone's wishes, understanding that art can be an extension of one's self, &c. are just some of the myriad factors and concerns that are getting bundled together as "property"

which only serves to help people who already have power and disadvantage those that already don't

Show threadRob LandleyDec 8, 2022
@left_adjoint @mxmxyz Universal Basic Income and citing your sources have nothing to do with intellectual property law, and are often harmed by them.
Show threadLurkieDec 4, 2022
@left_adjoint The really annoying thing with IP is that only people with a lot of money can actually afford to enforce their copyright. It ends up being a weapon for corporations, rather than a tool to promote creativity (as lots of people have been fooled into thinking)
Show threadCyber YukiDec 5, 2022

@left_adjoint

Completely agree with you here; The difference in scope, effort, intent and scale between deviantart user works and Disney is so abysmal that even comparing them is an insult.

As a side note: You just reminded me of Existential comics; they did a wonderful fictional story which finished in Murray Rothbard asking Karl Marx for his brandy, to which Marx replies: "Rothbard, allow me to explain the difference between personal property and private property."

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/234

Desert Island Economics

A philosophy webcomic about the inevitable anguish of living a brief life in an absurd world. Also Jokes

Show threadlynn / clarissaDec 5, 2022
@yuki2501 haha oh my god I was *literally* thinking about that comic when I wrote this post
Show threadPsyMar aka SamDec 7, 2022
@left_adjoint I'd also add that even within these categories, there's variance; Disney "owns" Mickey Mouse because Walt Disney created him, but disney "owns" Luke Skywalker because they paid the creator money
Show threadFrazell ThomasDec 7, 2022

@left_adjoint It is an area that we definitely need new structures for. With existing protections afforded to digital property it is largely a trust based system. One that doesn’t translate into the new computing capabilities of Machine Learning and AI.

A person whose work that is being stolen may never be able to know as they are 1 of 500K photos in a training set, for instance. Additionally, granting permission today may end up more expansive tomorrow than they could have imagined

Show threadjoëlDec 7, 2022

@left_adjoint thanks, I've been craving a nuanced view. maybe creative commons needs an "do not use for AI training data" clause?

I found this article quite interesting, mainly because it goes deep into the training data that is used (which is full of porn): https://reticular.hypotheses.org/5216

Show threadlarge mozz Dec 7, 2022

@jollysea @left_adjoint our view on "exclude from AI training" is that, legally and ethically, it's completely backwards

the legal element is pretty straightforward: if you have licensed your images to allow essentially any use, then use by AIs is fair game. if you require attribution, however, AIs have no way of accommodating that (today), and so the onus is *on AI developers* to respect that requirement. and if your images are licensed to prohibit commercial use then any inclusion in an AI data set by a corporation *is against that license*. again, these are all pretty cut-and-dried

ethically, taking a bunch of people's images (or anything else), churning them through a program, then handing out the results to people without any consideration for the people who did all that initial labor is just really crappy. doing it *for profit* is even crappier. there are plenty of potential uses for that work that might not have serious ethical concerns, but since the intention is to teach a computer to reproduce other people's work, the elimination of those people from their own field is a pretty overt implication

a central problem in AI has been a lack of collaboration between all stakeholders--not just those developing AIs, but the people who develop the data used in data sets. it is valuable that people are collecting and cataloging this data to begin with, to be sure, but the people whose work is being collected should have a right to influence how that collection is done, too. as far as we are aware, they are usually excluded from such pursuits, under the very techbro assumptions that "information wants to be free" and "if it's on the internet, it's forever" and so forth

we'd also say it's a very Western colonialist mindset to see massive troves of other people's efforts and think "i can harvest and exploit this for my own ends however i please." legally, sure, maybe you can. ethically? if you aren't thinking about (or more importantly, consulting with) the people who actually created everything you are looking at harvesting, you're doing something deeply antisocial

Show threadjoëlDec 7, 2022

@bigmarinara thanks, those are some very good points. when I published the toot, I thought "wait, there is non-commercial, that should apply"

but then again, they wouldn't care, because they don't care at all and just take everything they can find.

Show threadGargravarDec 7, 2022
@left_adjoint to be fair, that's your point of view. There are others. The system of balancing conflicting interests is politically moderated through the creation of law. Those laws mean we don't have to negotiate each and every interaction, nor appreciate or anticipate side-effects others have seen but we haven't. If you don't like it, vote differently, or convince more people to align their vote with yours. Not understanding this is partly why democracy is being captured by corps.
Show threadCharlotteDec 7, 2022
@brrbrr @left_adjoint The way you've phrased this, you're glossing over how often laws are already slanted in favour of the more powerful interest, how frequently unjust laws get passed, and how political equality (in terms of who actually has influence on what laws get passed and what exactly they say) is at least 75% an illusion in our current system. "Just go vote" is at this point only a slogan to silence criticism.
Show threadGargravarDec 7, 2022
@chaostheorie @left_adjoint odd interpretation. Think about how radically things would change if Trump came to power again? Hitler was elected. Putin was elected. Bolsinaro was elected. Disastrous. Voting isn't irrelevant. Imagining it is, is precisely what lends corporate capture legs, as I mentioned. I'm not sure how you regard that as "glossing over"...
Show threadGargravarDec 7, 2022
@chaostheorie @left_adjoint however... I do think it is perfectly fair to say that a functioning democracy can't just obey "the will of the people", that ends up with populist autocracy (including, absolutely, communism). Democracy should and does act as a pressure valve, providing early warning when these mindbogglingly complex societies - built over generations - go too far off track (no longer serving the people that occupy and embody them).
Show threadGargravarDec 7, 2022
@chaostheorie @left_adjoint ... Because some of the structures essential to maintaining society require planning and influence that stretches beyond the immediate selfish interests of most individuals, this structures also need a voice - more than a single vote. Yes, that's lobbying, and yes, it gets curle corrupted, but that can only be fought politically, which brings us back to voting.
Show threadCharlotteDec 7, 2022
@brrbrr @left_adjoint Of course voting is not irrelevant; never said that. But it's also not the only legitimate way of effecting political change.
Edit: Replaced "it" with "voting" to make toot clearer without context.
Show threadGargravarDec 7, 2022
@chaostheorie @left_adjoint In a democracy every other path to change, outside of corruption or revolution, ends in choices being made by elected representatives. Doesn't it?
Show threadCharlotteDec 7, 2022
@brrbrr @left_adjoint No, actually. Many changes are made directly by civic organisations and the like; and those are often far more immediate.
Show threadGargravarDec 7, 2022
@chaostheorie @left_adjoint but only within the scope of the law, or by challenging the law's interpretation which throws the ball back into the law makers court. My original point is only that social systems are complex. They are an eco system of organisations, from the individual up, which exist in radically differing local environments and have radically differing expected lifespans. The OP was being more than a little naiive in how government could/should work.
Show threadCharlotteDec 7, 2022
@brrbrr @left_adjoint Of course not only within the law! (Note that I'm not saying all law-breaking is legitimate political action, but being against the law doesn't automatically make it illegitimate.)
Resistance against the Nazis (you brought up Hitler, not me), was illegal, but legitimate; so were the actions taken by the black civil rights movement in the US and many others...
I don't think the OP was in any way denying the complexity of social systems.
Show threadCharlotteDec 7, 2022
@brrbrr @left_adjoint Also, careful with the historical laundering -- Hitler was never elected chancellor, much less president, *by the population*. His party came first in an election, yes, but never got close to 50% of the parliamentary seats. He got into power because traditional elites (nobility & military, for example) supported him.
Edit: Inserted missing phrase in **
Show threadGargravarDec 7, 2022
@chaostheorie @left_adjoint careful splitting hairs. Hitler became chancellor according to the parliamentary rules of the day. His party won twice as many votes as the party in second place. The German electrical system then, as now, is not directly analogous with the US or UK system. Precisely what makes the example of Hitler so chilling is that it was a revolution from within and at the tip of the system.
Show threadCharlotteDec 7, 2022

@brrbrr @left_adjoint Right, and that is why we do not have that political system anymore... Because it did not in fact need majority support to establish a dictatorship through legal means.
I think it is important to remember that what got Hitler into power was conservative elites being so afraid of communism and socialism that they threw their hat in with the fascists, in spite of having very different political goals and ideas from the nazis. Provides a good warning for our times, too.

But honestly, I've forgotten what all of that that has to do with copyright and IP. All I'm saying is that politics is not only voting and that pushing for change beyond the electoral system is not per se illegitimate.
You cannot seriously think that as long as something hasn't been voted out, we should quietly acquiesce to it - in fact, all the examples you've given show precisely why that is a terrible idea.
No big historical injustices were overcome by voting alone.

Show threadGargravarDec 7, 2022

@chaostheorie @left_adjoint who's we? Germany has PR today. What it's learnt is how to close ranks to keep out extremist parties like the AfD, and even that may not work. The communist autocracies were also ideological concentrations of power in political hands : they went in similar directions.

I agree we all need to fight for progressive change... but I'm very aware that (for instance) it took the UK labour party *120* years of campaigning to get the power it needed to really make change.

Show threadCharlotteDec 7, 2022
@brrbrr @left_adjoint "We"=Germany in this particular context. I'm Germany and intimately familiar both with its political system today and in the Weimar Republic.
Germany's electoral system in the Weimar Republic was very different from what it is today. Today, the Chancellor is elected by parliament. In the Weimar Republic, the chancellor was instituted (and could be fired) by the president. The president was incredibly powerful and only elected every 7 years himself, being able to do pretty much what he wanted, including against the will of parliament, in the meantime.
That's the sense in which Hitler was not elected, but today's Chancellors are - the Bundestag elects them, and the MPs are elected according to proportional representation.
Show threadGargravarDec 7, 2022
@chaostheorie @left_adjoint yes, absolutely. A first attempt to replace a dictatorial monarch with a semi-dictatorial president.
Show threadCharlotteDec 7, 2022
@left_adjoint Totally! I have seen and encountered this so often lately in the context of z-library being shut down!
Show threadElda KingDec 7, 2022

@left_adjoint Yeah, I really think "author rights" is a much better concept than "intellectual property" (though countries that use author rights frameworks are usually near indistinguishably from intellectual property, for many reasons).

But like, the right to be correctly credited, or the right to not want your work used for something you find abominable (like your character used for nazi propaganda or used for weapons), or the right to not have your work taken out of context and distorted... those are kind of important, or at least valid, even if not absolute (sometimes, subverting an author's work against his wishes is the ethical choice).

The emphasis on recognizing rights only insomuch as they can be used to make money - you have to attribute because that can be used for marketing; you can't use it in a way that damages the brand; you can't create derivative works that compete with it - ends up with creators less protected, and corporations more.

Show thread@krisnelsonDec 7, 2022

@left_adjoint Yes, excellent points in this about how blunt and pro-capital “intellectual property” typically is. European law (and the Berne Convention) have a concept of “moral rights” for creators that US law almost entirely rejects or elides.

These “moral rights” don’t completely get at your issues, but I do think they have potential to be part of what you’re talking about?They at least create convos that to beyond the purely capitalistic.

Show threadPierre MasséDec 7, 2022

@left_adjoint can i just say you have an absolute top-tier username

(also i agree with everything you wrote)

Show threadæon Dec 7, 2022
@left_adjoint yeah, i guess the issue here is that property relations are bad but also the only thing that has material force. if a bad actor is determined to rip off someone's work then no amount of lecturing about consent or respect is gonna stop them; you need to apply actual consequences, and the only (socially-sanctioned) way to do that is w/ lawyers
Show threadHACKthePRISONSDec 7, 2022

@pluralistic

is this your main social media now?

Show threadCory DoctorowDec 7, 2022
@bigMouthCommie https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#hfbd
Pluralistic: 13 Jan 2021 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Show threadHACKthePRISONSDec 7, 2022

@pluralistic

i read you voraciously ca. 2006

when i first joined masto, years ago, i found someone mirroring your tweets, and i thought it **was** you, but when you didnt have any interactions from that acct, i was like "oh,well"

it's super cool u r here and i'm thrilled 2 b subbed to u.

Show threadlarge mozz Dec 7, 2022
@left_adjoint yeah, we find the IP law arguments interesting but always try to discuss them separately from ethical considerations, because they really are completely different things
Show threadLevel 420 Uber VeganDec 7, 2022

@left_adjoint

Absolutely agree. IP profiteers (i.e. Disney) love to confuse things by conflating themselves (a matrix of corporations in hundreds of jurisdictions ultimately owned by faceless capitalists) with your favorite artists who, you know, are cool and good and you don't want to steal from.

But this is not unique to IP. All anti-leftist arguments basically boil down to:

"What, you don't like property laws? I guess you'd be OK with my stealing your grandma's car then! Gotcha!"

Show threadDylanDec 7, 2022
@left_adjoint @b0rk This seems to rhyme with the conflation of “low taxes for the capitalist class” and “…because it’ll benefit me, a middle-class citizen”. Can’t help but think that this confusing conceptual mashup is deliberate on the part of BigCo’s.
Show threadSayuri Firebrand 💛 ⬜️ 💜 🖤‏Dec 7, 2022
@left_adjoint this. I hear lots of anarchist takes about how you should pirate everything even indie games because copyright should be abolished when indies are just trying to make a little bit off their own labor.
Show threadMateRhyuDec 8, 2022
@left_adjoint
I had this conversation some days ago, after watching a series via the free-trial of appleTV, for which a second season was due out of the trial period and -well- I just suggested it wasn't at all morally wrong to make another trial with another email. Despite discovering apple prevented even that through appleIDs, I ended up arguing on a parallel of stealing from multinational food stores against local farmers, which resulted a mess as I couldn't frame this as good as you here 🖖
Show threadRob LandleyDec 8, 2022
@left_adjoint Ownership, attribution, and sustainability are three different things.
Show threadUglyhackDec 8, 2022

@left_adjoint
I think we need to remember that copyright isn't a right. Maybe I would prefer the term copy concession.

The natural state is that you can copy whatever you want, and we as a society concede this right to copy to certain (legal) persons for various reasons.

Maybe I want to concede the right to copy an artists work because I feel they shouldn't have their work defiled.

I'm willing to concede the right to copy a Hollywood to the studios because I like movies and want them to pay to make more, so I want to allow them to make some profit. However, I believe they'll still pay for movies if we only concede for a limited time, so why don't we just limit it to 10 or 20 years?

I think if more people thought about it this way we (as a society) could have a much better deal, where we still get the movies and books we want, but don't give as much away to large companies.