ArtemisMar 20

When you get taught about scary, scary communism as a kid, they make it sound as though it means you couldn't even own your teddy bear.

No one explains (likely because they themselves believed the same when they were taught) the difference between your teddy bear & a factory.

Show threadArtemisMar 20

Maybe people could enjoy their own personal objects WITHOUT us having to allow some people to hoard resources. Maybe those two things really aren't the same type of thing. Maybe the fact we call them both "property" obscures their differences.

We can share the resources in common for the common good AND you can have your very own teddy bear that is just yours. I promise.

Show threadTzimisce FleshMar 20
@artemis Yeah, "use the same word for two different adjacent things" is an absolute blight for discourse.
Show threadTzimisce Flesh
@artemis You can say you don't like intellectual property and people will go "so you support lying about authorship?".
Mar 20 at 1:28pmWeb
Show threadqwazixMar 20

@flesh @artemis I've actually had this exact response, by a professor no less.

Well dude nobody doubts it's Homer that authored the Odyssey but I can do whatever I like with Ulysses, which part of this is confusing you?

Show threadLaurent BercotMar 20

@flesh @artemis it happens all the time. And it's impossible to tell if it's done in bad faith or out of pure ignorance, which makes attempts to educate a bad strategy because it can be used by bad actors to waste your time and energy.

I hate this timeline.

Show threadSobri | Zoe (she/her)Mar 20
@flesh @artemis we can protect authorship claims pretty fucking easily with timestamps and GPG key signatures.
Show threadTzimisce FleshMar 20
@cutesobri @artemis The relevant point is that "getting to exploit the idea monetarily with exclusive rights to its reproduction" and "people acknowledging you came up with it" are often treated as synonymous concepts falling under the same term.
Show threadd@nny disc@ mc²Mar 20
@flesh @artemis @cutesobri astral is a startup recently acquired by openai. their entire business model is predicated on work i did very publicly in 2020 for pip. multiple PEPs from their henchman directly erase my work to justify protocols that suck. this goes further than erasure. i then developed several techniques for zip files in rust. they use but do not cite my work there either and managed to introduce a security vulnerability because they can't read the spec.
Show threadd@nny disc@ mc²Mar 20
@flesh @artemis @cutesobri i have never once attempted to sell my code for monetary gain. it is trivial for this company which does sell code for money to act like they invented it while fucking it up. the lack of acknowledgement is central to this. gpg is so far removed from being relevant to anything at all here. not acknowledging credit is a form of wage theft, and copyright is a labor protection. i interviewed for this company before they started using my work without the safety checks.
Show threadd@nny disc@ mc²Mar 20
@flesh @artemis @cutesobri it's cool if you think citing sources is just a nice thing to do but i spent years on this and have been unable to find employment during and since then while this startup has billions of dollars from investors who believed they were funding engineering work. i don't want a fucking litigation path i want people to cite me when they profit off my work and when they fuck it up i want users to know they made a choice to introduce a security vulnerability. there is no way i can ensure that without a defensive patent because copyright is completely insufficient. patents are evil and corporations are evil and speaking in generalities elides the evil
Show threadd@nny disc@ mc²Mar 20
@flesh @artemis @cutesobri corporate exploitation has made me evil. i think it's ridiculous to say the word "exploit" like an exclusive license is the only way exploitation occurs
Show threadTzimisce FleshMar 20
@hipsterelectron @artemis @cutesobri Yeah, nah, for every worker that somehow manages to use copyright to defend themselves from corporate exploitation, there are countless who have their work become the exclusive property of the company and multiple companies keeping strangleholds over their fields with their IPs.
Treating ideas as property is not actually helpful in the fight against the owning class.
Show threadMorgan ⚧️Mar 20
@flesh @artemis @cutesobri yeah... if we had some form of copyright that could only apply to the laborers who made the thing, I'd me more inclined to agree that it's good for labor protection. As it is, @hipsterelectron did the company not simply steal your work and then copyright it somehow? Don't they currently "own" the IP? Because that's the pattern I keep seeing over and over again, a worker has an idea or does a thing and then IP laws let a corporation profit off their work but not them
Show threadd@nny disc@ mc²Mar 20

@raphaelmorgan @flesh @artemis @cutesobri copyright applies this way in germany. i did not publish the work under license because (1) i didn't think anyone would care because nobody gives a shit about packaging unless they can coerce people with it (2) the project i contributed it to uses a permissive license which i accepted because i didn't expect anyone would seriously try to profit without citing me.

i also spent quite some time with other tool developers, all of whom have been extremely helpful and contributed back improvements to the work. this was an outsider who read my design discussion and reimplemented it because while i assumed "many public posts + design documents in public forum + conference talk" means "nobody would seriously claim credit" it actually means "copyright protections cannot be claimed for the work". this disincentivizes working in the open or indeed working at all

Show threadd@nny disc@ mc²Mar 20
@raphaelmorgan the person you boosted with the purple orb avvy just blocked me btw
Show threadMorgan ⚧️Mar 20
@hipsterelectron ah darn
Here I thought this was a "we all want the same thing and are discussing the best ways to go about it"
Show threadd@nny disc@ mc²Mar 20
@raphaelmorgan i engaged because i believe this to be true
Show threadSobri | Zoe (she/her)Mar 20

@hipsterelectron @raphaelmorgan @flesh @artemis

your mad you signed away your rights
that sucks

Show threadSobri | Zoe (she/her)Mar 20
@hipsterelectron @raphaelmorgan @flesh @artemis
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 is less permissive
Show threadd@nny disc@ mc²Mar 20
@flesh @artemis @cutesobri yes that's why copyright shouldn't be transferable. "ideas as property" makes two claims first that because the VC class calls it intellectual property that anyone else should use that term two that copyright is about "ideas". patents are evil because they are about ideas and not labor. copyright does not cover "ideas"
Show threadd@nny disc@ mc²Mar 20
@flesh @artemis @cutesobri "for every worker" is a strange comparison to make when your first clause is about workers who own their copyright and the second is about workers who don't. copyright is not the thing that keeps the second group under control, it's the lack thereof, which is why transferring copyright should not be legal as a contract provision.
Show threadd@nny disc@ mc²Mar 20
@flesh @artemis @cutesobri i very specifically said copyright didn't and wouldn't help because i wasn't trying to debate this but hoping that it could be acknowledged that exploitation occurs regardless of copyright and labor is a more general framing. i think it's super fucking cool how any concrete claims are immaterial in the face of abstract generalities
Show threadd@nny disc@ mc²Mar 20
@flesh @artemis @cutesobri do corporations keep strangleholds over "fields" with copyright? because they do do that with patents, which are evil because they cover "ideas". microsoft's copyrights are immaterial because i would never allow their code into my repos but they filed a patent for jarek duda's ANS compression technique because the USPTO is scum. i am implementing it regardless because i desperately want an excuse to get sued by microsoft. there's a distinction to make here which is not only visible but directly actionable
Show threadSobri | Zoe (she/her)Mar 20

@hipsterelectron @flesh @artemis

The copy in copyright is sharing. I believe everyone should be able to access information right now copyright is baring folks from accessing most science due to journals locking down copyrights this slows progress. The money men will do whatever to make more money so they don't do attribution that sucks it needs a lot of reform.