@benno Wait that might empower workers, that sounds like you're planning a revolution.

What's next, unions

@benno Copyright exists to help humanity share information. Where it has been used to do otherwise is a miscarriage of justice and indicates that we need to change the law.

If the AI startups don't think copyright protection should exist, they can start by opening all of their code and training data.

If they think copyright should protect them but not others, we should revoke their business' legal existence and liquidate them.

@benno I think we should just demand that all AI software needs to be open source, all AI models for the software need to be in the public domain, and everything generated with AI also needs to be in the public domain. No patents, no trademarks, no copyright, no intellectual property rights whatsoever, and full transparency, for everything AI related.

AI is too powerful to be anybody's property. And if we can remove big money from the equation, we get fewer huge AI models that need a datacentre to run and many more small ones that can run on your local processor, trained by enthusiasts and volunteers on human managed data collections. Whether the data collections contain copyrighted materials or not shouldn't matter, it should be considered fair use, but the resulting artificial neural networks and the software built around those networks need to be free and open.

@benno

I wish I’d used this argument when doing my startup years back building the MovieGoer app, that “we need unhampered access to all cinema showtime data worldwide because it’s not possible to achieve my startup dream without it.”

Boo-hoo to the frickin’ AI companies. Don’t steal my book, pay me megabucks and maybe I’ll license it.

@benno I don’t think that’s the reasoning for it? I think within the US copyright law at least, it’s covered under fair use as being transformative? But the NYT vs. Open AI case will probably be a landmark decision this year about that specifically, especially if/when it goes to the supreme court.

I am not a lawyer, though, so I could easily be wrong about that.

@benno I'm sure there are lots of marginal businesses that only become viable if you can get the product of other people's labour for free.

I'm pretty sure arguments in favour of slavery went along the same lines.

@benno
We should give to all children: free access to food and shelter and clean water and books and toys and answers to questions and a safe place to be.

It's not possible to train one properly without that.

@benno This sounds like a fun gotcha, but let's go look at the Classroom Use Exemption...

(Relevant precedent may also be found in the settlement of the Google Books case, wherein the various book-scanning-and-indexing projects were allowed to continue, so long as the public couldn't just reconstruct the original book by trawling the dataset).