@cstross "The former Meta executive"?

It's nice to see that his status as corporate quisling has already overshone his leadership of a major political party & deputy premiership.

@cstross

Either copyright exists or it doesn't. The law needs to catch up quick.

@cstross
Treason doth never prosper: what ’s the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.
- John Harrington

I guess we are going to find out if the same applies to lawlessness.

As for your second assertion, I give you Purdue Pharma (or any of the cryptocurrency scams, but I repeat myself)

@cstross

My local Jeweller refuses to hand me bags of diamonds.

These woke monsters are killing my diamond selling industry!

@cstross This argument is a pattern I've seen repeatedly in the past years. “We can't make profit without collecting huge amounts of personal data about everyone who visits our website!” or “You cannot expect us to secure our software [that handles medical data] before we go live! That inhibits innovation! We'd go broke”.

If your business model does not work without infringing someone's rights, it's not a business model. It's criminal activity.

1/2

@cstross it seems to me that there is a very simple choice. Kill AI by enforcing existing copyright laws, or take the long way around by letting AI trash copyright laws thereby killing all the creative industries AI needs to steal content from, thereby slowly starving the AI industries of the content they need to improve.

One choice at least leaves us with something valuable. The other will just take longer.

@cstross (I must show restraint. Oops! I failed...)

I'll hit it with a simple stick: Let's not allow 'industry' to do bad things.

If we can imagine a better world without those industries, then let's have that world.

Let's not preserve the bad ones for purposes of continuity. Or more directly, let's demolish the empires created using systems of exploitation, and create better.

@cstross but then Chinese will win!

I think they should remove labor laws since they are it.

And democracy.

@cstross But ... tobacco and alcohol businesses are absolutely on the stock exchange.

It's all about power.

@cstross
Kill it already then!

Mafiosis are also "industrialists", making our lives miserable by the minute ignoring rules we are bound to execute without question!

@cstross

When did we - by which I mean people in general - accept that the proliferation of bullshit engines is any type of 'industry'? The end result is never going to be anything other than a shrug at all the wasted time, money, water and other resources which could've been used to solve problems, but instead went to increasing the number of jets per-capita amongst the already morbidly wealthy. That's not an industry, it doesn't produce anything in the end. That's a shell game.

@cstross copyright doesn't give you total control over your creative work.

under US and Canadian law, there are "fair use" exceptions, and "being transformative" is one of those, meaning, no consent of the original author is required. And as far as I know, most copyright lawyers expect "training an AI" as transformative.

So, artists are actually demanding a change to the law in free use, while the drug cartels are breaking law that already exists.

#freeUse #generativeAi