I have open sourced all work I legally can for the past 20 years, and it has only given me more exposure and made it easier for people to trust me with significant budget to solve their hardest problems.
Also I happily buy lots of books from people like Cory Doctorow and nostarchpress -because- their books are public and I want to support authors that value the freedom of their readers.
Books that are DRM or copyright protected however, I buy used paper copies or pirate because why would I financially support people that do not respect my freedom?
I do not believe copyright makes any sense in the global post-internet world.
It is a major hindrance to progress. The many countries that do not enforce copyright law will share everything that can be shared and are going to progress much faster than the US in the long run.
Impersonation would be a dick move, and would ruin my reputation. Do not need laws to avoid such things. Obvious social repercussions are enough.
Still impersonation sucks, and it happens. Thankfully we can solve this with cryptography without trying to beg the legal system of hundreds of countries to agree on enforcement tactics.
I publish 100% of code I write as FOSS. I also sign my commits. If the code shows up later without attribution to me, I would prove it publicly to call out dishonest behavior.
I would also never use legal action for this though. All information should be free. I only put FOSS licenses on code to ensure I do not get sued and so corporations bound by such silly rules have a difficult time using my work in private codebases without paying me for an alternate license.
I would abolish all IP law if I could. Let all information be free without legal risk to authors or those that share it.
MIT, ISC licenses etc offer minimum anti-liabiliy CYA here and are what I typically use. They are a hack to get around the fact you cannot actually public domain code without legal risk.
> So... you benefit from copyright laws.
I sometimes exploit laws that I feel should not exist at all specifically to target corporations who abuse them the most. In my preferred world where copyright and patents did not exist, I would not need to play such games.
Right. So you use copyright laws because you need them.
I wish we did not need money, but I don't go around telling people that they should stop using money because in my preferred world, money would not exist and we would all live happily.
I do not need copyright law. Just anti-liability licenses so i do not get sued. My interest is protecting myself, not the work.
I believe all knowledge should be freely available and live by that.
While I do not believe in IP law but I am happy to take money from those that do.
I sell my time so long as the buyer allows my work to be freely licensed for all. They can do with their own copy whatever they want and not credit me though. That is fine.
It honestly feels like your view on the topic is entirely defined around yourself. Like if a billionaire could genuinely not understand why people need medical insurance, because "you can just pay cash, like I do".
You are in a special situation where customers pay for your time. Of course it's easy to say "as long as I am paid for my time, I want my work to be public". But say you create a video game. You invest two years working on it, and at the end you sell it for 50$. The first customer buys it, and publishes online for everybody to download legally for free. Does that sound okay for you?
Because you don't need copyright laws doesn't mean that nobody does. And again, you admitted yourself that you do need them and you do use them. You just wish you didn't. And I can agree with you on that. I wish there was no war, and no poverty, too.
I am not saying that everything about IP laws or copyright is perfect. Just that it's more complicated than "it's just a ball of worms, throw it away". Some people abuse copyright, some people need it. Whoever is fine screwing those who do because it doesn't affect them are jerks.
> But say you create a video game. You invest two years working on it, and at the end you sell it for 50$. The first customer buys it, and publishes online for everybody to download legally for free. Does that sound okay for you?
More users for my game! Wonderful. Every person playing, even for free, means more people talking about it if they like it. Give every digital thing away and get people sharing it with others. If a free game is popular a small subset that can afford it will pay you if you disclose, perhaps in the game, what your financial goals are and how far you are from them kindly, but without demand.
People should be proud they make anything in a crowded internet anyone feels worth copying and sharing. That attention can be monetized all sorts of ways if a creator is paying attention. Sell merch, or a funding campaign for new upgrades or extensions.
The pay what you want (or nothing) Humble Bundle model is a step in the right direction. Gets lots of exposure to indie devs who otherwise no one might trust to give any money to sight unseen otherwise.
> a small subset that can afford it will pay you if you disclose, perhaps in the game, what your financial goals are and how far you are from them kindly, but without demand.
But you are not the one publishing it! Someone else is, because they copied your public-domain game and put their name on it. That someone else is getting a lot of money, and you aren't.
> Wonderful
Really? I genuinely don't understand how you can not see how it is a problem?!
> But you are not the one publishing it! Someone else is, because they copied your public-domain game and put their name on it. That someone else is getting a lot of money, and you aren't.
That is going to happen. Not all countries have or enforce copyright laws even if you rely on those.
It would however be trivial for the author to go public proving the third party game used their code without attribution. Apple famously used openstreetmap data without crediting them and openstreetmap publicly shamed them until they corrected the mistake.
People should have attribution if they ask for it, but it also should not be legally enforced. Only socially and technically.
> Really? I genuinely don't understand how you can not see how it is a problem?!
Anyone in the connected world has likely benefited from software I have written or security bugs I have identified and helped get fixed. Some of that work took years with little to no pay.
If you can get my work to more people than I can, do it!
My experience is still easy enough to monetize enough on a contract basis to pay my bills, and that is plenty. Often people pay to prioritize what features I add to open source projects they benefit from. Paid or not, I am always happy knowing my work benefits as many people as possible, rather than having it benefit only those that can afford to pay for it. My ego is not so fragile as to demand my name be in everyone's faces all the time.
Our mission in life as humans should not be about maximizing dollar amounts in our bank accounts. It should be about maximizing the amount of value we can give back to society. If value can be copied and replicated to benefit a lot of people, that is amazing! Shame we cannot do that with food, but at least we can do it with information, media, etc.
> My ego is not so fragile as to demand my name be in everyone's faces all the time.
Yet you keep bringing everything back to you. "It's okay for me because I manage to get a decent salary". Sure, what about those who don't?
> People should have attribution if they ask for it, but it also should not be legally enforced. Only socially and technically.
Laws are here because reputation is not enough anymore in our world. Those who think that laws are unnecessary generally don't directly need them. Can you show some empathy and accept that some people need to be protected by more than reputation?
> That is going to happen. Not all countries have or enforce copyright laws even if you rely on those.
You mentioned Doctorow as an example, right? Do you even know what he thinks of BigTech abusing their power? He's totally for more regulations for those, not fewer.
> Yet you keep bringing everything back to you. "It's okay for me because I manage to get a decent salary". Sure, what about those who don't?
You seem to be operating under the assumption I came to these views from an ivory tower.
I have been open sourcing all of the work I legally can since I was living in my car working on library computers. Yes. I stand by this for everyone.
I had no degree, no credentials, and the only reason I was able to make a career for myself as an uneducated vagrant is -because- my work was public and free, people often used it, and demonstrated my capabilities better than any degree could.
Plenty of peers have made careers for themselves the same way.
> Laws are here because reputation is not enough anymore in our world. Those who think that laws are unnecessary generally don't directly need them. Can you show some empathy and accept that some people need to be protected by more than reputation?
This -is- coming from a pace of empathy.
My meals as a kid sometimes came from food stamps and food pantries. Most of my early internet access came from abusing 30 day AOL trial dialup cds, and I had to wait in line 3 days for a $200 black friday sale laptop I could afford. I had to break a LOT of copyright laws to get unlimited access to information my local library did not have.
Laws work in a subset of countries, and a lot of countries straight up ignore them. That gives them a major advantage over us. They can pirate freely and openly to level up their skills and capabilities with no risk of legal consequences... and we cannot? Why should the poor in America not have the same free access to any digital goods the poor in other countries do?
> You mentioned Doctorow as an example, right? Do you even know what he thinks of BigTech abusing their power? He's totally for more regulations for those, not fewer.
My read of Cory Doctorow on these topics is that the copyright wars were a failed experiment. Copyright laws are almost mostly weaponized by big corporations to hurt individuals. We should regulate the shit out of corporations to protect the freedom and privacy of users and prevent monopolies. It is perfectly compatible to both anti-big-tech and also against the current IP law system.
I would like to start with this: what is the advantage of other countries enjoying the work of artists/authors for free?
My point, from the very beginning, is that the concept of copyright does not seem entirely, as in 100% stupid. I am not saying that it is perfect the way it is now. Just that throwing it away entirely is maybe not what we want. I hate it when BigTech abuses copyright, but the problem is BigTech there.
Copyright is also what makes copyleft possible. Which I believe is a good thing to protect the users from the corporations.
And finally IP laws are what prevents an employee from leaving a company with all the code, renaming/rebranding it and selling it for a fraction of the price. Doesn't seem completely ridiculous, does it?
> You seem to be operating under the assumption I came to these views from an ivory tower.
Not at all. I operate under the assumption that you don't have that need anymore. Apparently you did, and because you got to where you are, you now believe that it's all based on merit and that people who don't manage to do the same don't deserve any empathy. Or something like that?
It's a typical US mentality, though (the "all I have is based on merit and merit only, and I don't want to pay for others").
> Laws work in a subset of countries, and a lot of countries straight up ignore them. That gives them a major advantage over us.
There is plenty of need for laws inside a country as big as the US. Not seeing that suggests that you are in a pretty good situation now and don't care about those who aren't.
Reputation doesn't work. Do I need to mention the nazi billionaire who now controls the US government as an example?
> We should regulate the shit out of corporations to protect the freedom and privacy of users and prevent monopolies.
Exactly. I don't think he says "we should remove copyright as a concept entirely.
Which is beside the point. The person I am answering to says that they don't believe in copyright laws, but still they use licenses like MIT. Why not using CC0 then?
"CC0 has not been approved by the Open Source Initiative and does not license or otherwise affect any patent rights you may have. You may want to consider using an approved OSI license that does so instead of CC0, such as GPL 3.0 or Apache 2.0."
CC0 is great but it does not go far enough for software. Patent and trademark rights are complex and it caused CC0 to be withdrawn from OSI consideration.
They should sell for a price it would make pirating it pointless. Like what Spotify or Netflix did to audio and visual content. Then they can use the exposure to find other ways to make money.
Or if you don't agree with the price, do not buy it. You are NOT entitled to entertain yourself in any way you want. (unless it's funded by taxes etc, in which case... okay, it's open to discussion.)
Look, let's be honest - what gives you or others the right to steal from others?
I author a lot of technical documentation actually.
Even so, yes. I make all my work public, 100%.
I use public repositories as my backup for anything I create, regardless of stage of completion and so others can learn from or help improve my work as they see fit.
I do not believe proprietary technology should exist and I put my code where my mouth is.
Humans progress faster when we collaborate freely. Fork anything I do and make it better if you can.
So here you say that you put all your work in the public domain, and in a comment above you say that you don't put it in the public domain because you fear a lawsuit?
That is the fundamental problem with trying to project property rights onto ideas. Capitalism works fine for distributing scarce goods and resources, but information and software are both public goods.
In a reasonable world, we would be imposing high taxes on all LLMs and using that money to fund grants for future writers and artists. It would be good for the LLM makers in the long run, since it would give them more fuel for their models, and it would be good for the artists and writers because it would provide sustainable, reliable wages.
Unfortunately, that isn't the world we live in. LLM makers don't seem to care about the impact they will have on society or even their own livelihoods, as long as they get rich today. And in addition to all the regulatory capture, we are having our governments gutted on the mere fear that they might do their job and prevent the wholesale looting of society by these new robber-barons.
So with the economically-optimal approaches off the table, we have to fall back on imposing false scarcity in the hopes that maybe capitalism can limp along.
There's such a mass of possible works that it hardly constrains someone that if you could cast a magic spell preventing someone from distributing or accessing your particular work and then burned it, your spell would have essentially no effect-- no one would notice it and no one would be harmed.
As long as discussion of a work that has published is not impeded, the public is not harmed even by these 50-years after life copyrights other than by that they are accumulated by certain companies who themselves become problems.
When someone decides to use someone's work without compensation he is, even though he is not deprived of the work itself, still robbed. But it's not a theft of goods, it's theft of service. The copyright infringer isn't the guy who steals your phone, it's the guy who even you have done some work for but who refuses to pay.
With this view you can also believe, without hypocrisy, that what the LLM firms are doing is wrong while what Schwartz did was not, since the authors in question weren't deprived of any royalties or payments due to them due to due to the publishing model for scientific works.
> But it's not a theft of goods, it's theft of service.
What service? If somebody washes your windshield without you asking, it isn't a theft of service to not pay them. A theft of service arises from entering into an agreement and then failing to pay as stipulated in that agreement.
Copyright isn't an agreement you can choose whether to participate in. Copyright is a legal enforcement system that imposes legal liability even on those who don't use it. You may not see this legal liability as "harm", but it absolutely is. Arguing that copyright extends to training is arguing for a dramatic increase in the scope and power of this legal enforcement system.
But the thing here distinguishing it from the windshield thing is that there are so many possible texts that you choosing their particular text is to choose the work they've done.
You think of choosing somebody's particular text as the way of contracting him. Just as it isn't a restriction of your freedom of speech that going into restaurant and ordering a meal creates a contract to pay, so it isn't a restriction of your freedom of speech when you choose to seek out and repeat somebody's very particular text.
Why Harry Potter when you have any of hundreds of million of stories of similar sort that you could easily write yourself? When you choose that one, you choose it because it's already been prepared by somebody else, just as you choose restaurant because they've done work and have food ready for you. By choosing the one that's already written you accept that the author has done work for you.
> so it isn't a restriction of your freedom of speech when you choose to seek out and repeat somebody's very particular text.
I hadn't made that claim, but I will in now that you've brought it up. Art operates as part of a discussion, the reference to and re-use of prior art is a key part of the how that happens. There are sooo many cases of copyright being used to limit the freedom of expression, that this really isn't disputable. Copyright clearly restricts speech.
> By choosing the one that's already written you accept that the author has done work for you.
No I don't, at least not in a sense that's different from the shoulders of all the people that author learned from and so on. Cultural works exist and take on roles in our cultural semiology, our memes our language without our choice. You can coose to not engage with a work, but you can't choose which works will be culturally relevant or not.
When you publish something, it becomes part of our shared culture and no-one has an inalienable right to own that. The limited rights we granted to encourage commercial creativity have already snowballed out of control and now people are blythly buying into another dramatic expansion of them.
But we're talking about extremely direct copying. Actual computerized copying, typically verbatim.
Doing things relating to discussion of a work are typically permitted, but you have no reason to use anybody's particular work other than to make use of the work he did in creating it.
> But we're talking about extremely direct copying. Actual computerized copying, typically verbatim.
Copyright doesn't just extend to "literal direct copying". When you claim copyright doesn't harm anyone, you can't ignore all the other types of activity it prohibits.
> Doing things relating to discussion of a work are typically permitted,
Only if you limit the meaning of "discussion" so much that it no longer includes the process of making art.
> but you have no reason to use anybody's particular work other than to make use of the work he did in creating it.
Did you not ready my comment? I already explained the reason. Creative works become part of our culture, you can't choose which works will do that, you can only choose to participate in that culture or not.
Copyright is a social system for artificially limiting access to our shared culture and thus also limits participation in that culture.
I understand the value of a limited copyright system, but anyone that claims that our copyright system doesn't cause harm or cost us anything isn't being realistic. Copyright duration should be far more limited and we need significant reforms to the DMCA. Personally, I think even all non-commercial distribution should be legal as copyright should only grant commercial rights.
That said, I want them to burn for the right reasons.
Downloading data that should be available to the public is not one of them.