Hacker News

> Eventually, [Zuckerberg] manages to sit next to Xi at a dinner where he begs Xi to name his next child. Xi turns him down.

That Mark never fails to deliver.

> When Wynn-Williams give birth to her second child, she hemorrhages, almost dies, and ends up in a coma.

> Afterwards, Kaplan gives her a negative performance review because she was "unresponsive" to his emails and texts while she was dying in an ICU.

Holy shit.

I liked Doctorow better before he cheered for stricter copyright enforcement.

Thank you, that was the quote I was thinking of, but couldn't remember.

As someone who’s engaged in private piracy basically my entire life I’ve never even considered venturing into gray areas of licensing when procuring for my company. In fact I’ve done the opposite and rooted it out wherever I’ve found it.

It just seems obvious to me that a profit seeking venture should be held to a higher standard when it comes to infringing on the property rights of other companies and individuals, especially if they seek to enforce their own.

Those kids weren’t hypocritically enforcing their own property rights and making employees sign ndas while downloading shit from tpb.

Do you think if there was a mass movement of students moving off Spotify and downloading MP3s, they would _not_ be charged today?

The hypocrisy is what has at least me upset

Because there is no reasonable expectation that we are not going back to those days. In fact, we are more likely to go back to those days then not.

Those students are not Zuckenberg. They will not be treated as Zuckenberg. The legal theories that apply to them dont apply to Zuckenberg and vice versa. They do not have money to mount defense and if they do, they will be in debt till the end of their lives.

False dichotomy. We can obviously have both. We can destroy corporations that rely on copyright to exist and then abuse that system to profit. We can also ignore college students and minor contributory copyright infringement.

The difference in scope here should be obvious.

We can similarly punish drug dealers while not punishing drug users. In fact it's already policy in large parts of the USA.

Because the 'perhaps' there is a load-bearing word that is doing a lot of work and it's going to be come crashing down sooner or later.

Of course some kids are going to be charged for this kind of shit, it's still a rules for thee but not for me world, the 'not for me' folks are just a hell of a lot more brazen about it.

I'm a copyright abolitionist. I don't care at all that they're training AIs on copyrighted works. I care a lot that they're not getting relentlessly hunted down by the copyright industry for it like all the "pirates" that came before them. The copyright industry has actually ruined lives by litigating their "infringement" nonsense. It's only fair that they go after this guy as well.

His constant violation of people's privacy is also horrendous and worthy of condemnation, but that's not directly related to the copyright infringement matter. It's a separate issue.

You get Al Capone on the charge you can make stick.

Lets define more things society doesn't want to happen as not-crimes so we can do more of them.

Principles and law (that determines 'crime', a legal word) are not the same thing.

What are his real crimes?

I'm kinda being upset because on top of his ridiculously amoral and sometimes illegal behavior there are people which lives were ruined because they shared few mp3 files. Now this person once again — have absolutely no responsibility for his actions even for something so idiotic like copyright infringement when others were severely punished.

Why not both?

Because the rich can do it and we can’t.

It's the increase in emotionality, principles loosely held, it allows a particular goal they get tossed, Tbc this extends far beyond the current topic and commenters.

He likes sham investigations of attorneys general.

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A company being "worth" some amount doesn't mean it has that much money and real property; it means there exist people willing to buy shares, on the margin, at a price which works out like that. One of the common (very rough) approximations is that a business is worth as much as the profit it's expected to make over the next 20 years. But one of the reasons (there are many) that this is only a rough guide, is that if you tried to sell too much of a big company all in one go, it usually depresses the price a lot, and the other way around (trying to buy a whole company) tends to raise the price a lot; both effects are because most people have different ideas about how much any given company is really worth despite that rough guide, and trade their shares at different prices while you're doing it. You may note this is a circular argument, this is indeed part of the problem.

IIRC, Facebook's cash is more like $81-82 billion.

It's been a real game of cat and mouse over the last few years. I used to do daily iptables updates to block repeat scrapers on my small niche stats site I run. About 5-6 ago it become more common to see broader ranges - so I started blocking ASNs which worked great (esp for the regulars like Alibaba, Tencent, compromised DigitalOcean/OVH, ...). In the last 2-3 years though the overall bot traffic has skyrocketed - it's easy to spot bot activity after the fact (no requests to the CDN for static assets, user agent changes from one request to the next, predictable ID enumeration, etc) but not in a real time. They're also often using residential-based proxies and Cloudflare bot detection has become pretty bad.

It would still be useful to share as an example and reference point. People can use Claude Code / etc. to re-write it to their specific situation.

Yeah they’d have to use it to stand at the back of the unemployment line. Companies don’t care, someone more desperate will take the job.

Some spines are just crooked, and the extra rigidity would hurt more than help.

"One moment: reticulating spines..."

One could imagine a different legal standards for recreational, research, and commercial uses.

> It would be disingenuous framing because the argument against copyright stems from a belief that information should be free. Meta does not do things in this spirit.

Don't they? They release the llama model weights, they do things like this:

https://www.opencompute.org/wiki/Open_Rack/SpecsAndDesigns

They also make significant contributions to Linux and are the originators of popular open source projects like zstd and React.

They make their money from selling ads, not selling licenses.

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> If you write a book and I take it and embed its knowledge into my product that is so pervasive that no one needs to buy your book any more (and I don't even credit you so no one knows where that knowledge came from), to you really still have what was stolen?

The trouble with this analogy is that it proves too much.

Suppose you write a book, and so does someone else, but they have better marketing than you and then people in the market for that genre buy theirs instead of yours. Let's even stipulate that the existence of their book actually lowers your sales, because people who want that kind of book already bought theirs by the time they find out about yours and then some people don't have time to read or can't afford to buy both.

Notice that we haven't yet said a word about the contents of either book. They could be completely independent and they've never even heard of you or your book -- they "didn't even buy a copy of your book to copy it". All we know is that they're the same genre and the existence of theirs is costing you sales. By that logic all competition would thereby be "stealing", and that can't be right.

Which implies that you don't have a property right to the customers.

Yes. That's not to say that something damaging wasn't done, but nothing was stolen. Stealing/theft requires deprivation of property. It's like receiving a normal nonlethal punch in the face and calling it murder. Murder requires someone dying.

> Theft [...] is the act of taking another person's property or services without that person's permission or consent with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it. --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealing

That's a privacy violation, not relevant.

I don't see how me quoting the actual complaint the news was about, in both threads, was me being swiftly corrected. If you where to base it on upvotes then this one shows I'm right and you got swiftly corrected here. In both cases it was relevant as both threads where not yet merged and about the same complaint. And held two positons on front page and I was adding to the discourse.

The wood tends to have an impression of the hammer that hits it. The book isn't in there, the weights are just shaped by what tools were used to form it.

When large quantities of source material are replicable by prompting its a bug not a feature.

>don’t use my book to train your LLM.

What makes you think you are entitled to tell people what they can and cant do with data they purchased (or otherwise acquired) from you. Extremely honest question. I just cant put myself in your shoes.

Like if I had written anything useful I would be overwhelmingly flattered that my content be considered so worthy for inclusion.

Your profile suggests that you are a philosopher. Did you get into philosophy hoping to exploit the publishing industry to the extent that you can squeeze every cent out of your thoughts, and deny their potential uses downstream?

Its actually crazy how bad things are, I am usually keen on capitalism and exclusivity, but the whole thing with LLMs, I see people pushing hard to tighten the grip of intellectual property. I see people making 50 cents a month on Kindle Unlimited suddenly shocked that someones LLM generated output might be ever so slightly influenced by weights ever so slightly influenced by their work, seemingly thinking they might get some big payday out of it.

Give me a tiny little wedge of understanding of your thought process. Your book is right now, doing a greater social good on your behalf than me running around and removing all the trash from my neighborhood, and the benefits of that social good are going to accrue long after you and I are gone. Your work is now going to live on, in a very tiny way, in these systems forever. I am honestly envious.

If anything, I would be trying to get bad writing removed from LLM training data. Things that I dont want to influence others. But as a potentially honest promoter of your work, you want it removed?

Whats the number? If not 1:1 exactly what you charge for the book, what do you think the proper compensation for slightly influencing training weights you should receive?

I find it hard to think of a reasonable analogy. But it's like coming into your house, stealing all your belongings, and then building a new house with all your shit inside and then selling it back to you.

And yet I continue to rage against the dying of the light.

advocating for more punishment under copyright law is directly opposed to reform or removal of the laws

court precedent is a useful tool of advocacy

Nah, it’s short for metastasis. The only apt name for a company that is after growth an any cost

This is rage bait and isn't worth spending any oxygen on it.

https://www.readtangle.com/the-everything-everywhere-all-at-...

This article doesn’t even remotely itemize all of Trumps corruption, but it’s long and extremely damning.

I would hope that anyone still supporting this administration reads this article and does some introspection on why. I’m guessing that ship probably sailed 6 years ago, though.

probably this, since it was 7 years after he was convicted for prostituting a minor, so its hard to believe any excuse saying they didn't know his background: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/epstein-secret-pic-wild-...

Also that there are over 2,000 emails with Peter Thiel. Or maybe the part where Sergey Brin was helping Epstein shop for an aircraft carrier (also after conviction). Honestly it was incredibly revealing that none of these people care that he raped kids. I would love to see the Trump files which were withheld but clearly thats never gonna happen.

Anyway, congrats to everyone involved on the MAGA golden age!

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Fun fact, if you link AA on FB it gets removed

> Some. In some cases they've "stolen" tens of thousands in content.

That's not revenue.

but it is easier to enforce law on the powerless

I'm gonna have to go dig up the link, but isn't there a guy that Nintendo basically has on indentured servitude for the rest of his life?

Ah, found it:

>In April 2023, a 54-year-old programmer named Gary Bowser was released from prison having served 14 months of a 40-month sentence. Good behaviour reduced time behind bars, but now his options are limited. For a while he was crashing on a friend’s couch in Toronto. The weekly physical therapy sessions, which he needs to ease chronic pain, were costing hundreds of dollars every week, and he didn’t have a job. And soon, he would need to start sending cheques to Nintendo. Bowser owes the makers of Super Mario $14.5m (£11.5m), and he’s probably going to spend the rest of his life paying it back.

I'm not even a tiny bit supportive, but there is precedent.

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/feb/01/the-man-who-ow...

American executives have been pushing to criminalise copyright infringement for decades, and America has worked hard to pressure countries all round the world to do this as part of trade deals. There is, for example, a Brit serving an eleven year sentence right now *.

Why should Zuckerberg be exempt?

* https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-65697595

The non-strawman way to interpret the parent comment is that they want them to be treated the same as normal copyright violators. Jail is a common result of (criminal) copyright prosecution, with 44% of convicted offenders being imprisoned, averaging 25 months [0].

Now, I personally find the idea of imprisoning people for copyright offenses horrific, but I don't think it's remotely insane that someone else might come to that conclusion, given that we broadly accept it as a society.

[0] https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...

Is this controversial? Executives should be held liable, certainly moreso than just regular people sharing files.

I would prefer a harsher punishment, but I would begrudgingly accept throwing him in jail for decades.

I always heard that criminals should be thrown in jail, it's time we started doing it to the real criminals.

Decades? Maybe not. A few years at minimum? Hell yeah!

There aren't enough things an executive can go to jail for.

Fines don't do anything to deter bad behavior. Either:

* The company pays

* They pay and the company mysteriously increases next year's comp / grants a "loan" / etc

* D&O insurer pays

In all three cases the money comes out of the shareholders' hides. It provides zero personal deterrence. The payoff matrix, as seen by a sociopath, makes it rational to always defect against the common good.

The only punishment that can really focus attention is physical imprisonment in a facility they can't choose.

SOX did this for financial reporting and gee shucks it turned out executives can follow the law after all!

> I'm all for strong justice, but you want to imprison an executive for decades for copyright violations?

They stole the life's work of millions of people.

In less civilized times, they likely would have been drawn and quartered by strong horses, and had their limbs drug to the 4 corners of the continent as a warning to anyone else that would consider doing it again.

I mean the act of reproducing the copyrighted material is what is illegal. LLMs I've used for coding has outputted exact copyrights for code verbatim into my code before. When that happens it feels kind of fishy to be honest.

It would hardly make a dent. And if you hired hundreds of savants, the knowledge would still be spread over hundreds of separate minds.

And even if we grant that those savants are also very skilled at creating "market substitutes" based on their training that are capable of competing with the original works, their maximum creative output would only be a relatively small number of new works, because they can only work at human speed.

I don't think anyone is arguing that the consumption is illegal. It's the reproduction that is illegal.

Read a book, that's fine. Write a book, that's fine. Read a book and then write a book that is 99.9% the same as the book that you read and sell it for profit without a license from the original author, that's infringement.

>The problem is producing the copyrighted work, not processing it beforehand.

the distinction isn't particularly clear cut with an open source model. If it is able to reproduce copyright protected work with high fidelity such that the works produced would be derivative, that's like trying to get around laws against distribution of protected works by handing them to you in a zip file.

It's a kind of copyright washing to hand you the data as a binary blob and an algorithm to extract them out of it. That wouldn't really fly with any other technology.

And that's really where a lot of the value is mind you, these models are best thought of as lossily compressed versions of their input data. Otherwise Facebook ought to be perfectly fine to train them on public domain data.

You asked, I answered.

If you’re struggling to comprehend that a person reading a book is different then you’re a bad bot.

I did some quick googling and most of cliffs notes guides are on public domain works so no problem there, they've also paid to license content, and also have been protected by fair use as parody

The issue is certainly not so simple. But it seems to me, purely theoretically, that the rules don't necessarily have to be the same for living people and non-living machines.

But machines don't do things. People do things, and they use tools/machines to do those things more easily or efficiently.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48029673

There's nothing in the law to support your argument either. The law however does say, very unambiguously, that copying without permission isn't allowed . There aren't exceptions for "training" just because it's superficially similar to a human activity (reading a book). A human isn't allowed to hand-copy Harry Potter. Even if they bought all the Harry Potter books.

By ”using it”, I mean using the AI model.

First, LLMs do not reliably cite works. They are not looking things up in a database and repeating them. I think this false idea occurs a lot in people who don't understand what LLMs are or how they work.

Second, royalties are not required to cite a source.

Can you imagine how disastrous it would be to everything from news reporting to scientific publishing if that was the case?

... LLMs cannot reliably provide citations. If you ask for citations, and the model did not use a web search tool, then whatever "citations" you receive are unreliable. Please do not trust these models to be honest. Just because they can discuss a topic doesn't mean they "know" where the knowledge came from in the same way that you don't need to have studied physics to catch a ball.

So like a teacher?

What if you are performing your own song which was heavily influenced by other artists?

Also I believe performing covers is legal

Even better, what if you transform that stolen CD into an MP3, so the data isn’t the same as a lossy process was used, then share the MP3 with the world as your own work?

I don’t get why the training process doesn’t count as any other form of transformation but then I’m not a lawyer.

even better if it is a pirate radio station