I watched this guy on YouTube for a bit years ago, but he devolved into a culture warrior who seems to live off of hype. I’m also not sure what he does exactly, he worked at Microsoft for awhile but his GitHub is (was at least) completely bare so I think he’s just IT.
Most of this article is downright misleading or wrong, but I'll mention some the worst parts:
1. You can't append his special "no-AI" amendment to the GPL like he says. The GPL prohibits additional restrictions and tells recipients that they can discard those restrictions.
2. I'm pretty sure fines can only be imposed by government, not companies or individuals.
3. AI companies don't agree to any license when training anyway.
Change "fines" to "royalties", don't license GPL and/or modify the license to allow for some restriction, and as far as the last point, when I torrent a movie (in Minecraft of course) I don't agree to any terms of use either, which is precisely the violation the owner would charge me with. When using licensed content there is an implied agreement to abide the license.
This reads like a spoilt child. If his claims about copyright are true (and I am not a lawyer but my understanding is that there are several high profile cases in progress about exactly this ,at least for code and art) then there is no need for his license - he can just sue under existing copyright laws.
I don't believe any major legal system world wide currently has the concept of people being able to decide their own damages up front.
It's becoming more clear that the pain of this transition back to the "natural order" where laws are incapable of protecting ideas and their reduction to words, music, or other form will be great. I'm not against efforts to resist this transition as it will give societies more time to adjust.
But the shift appears inevitable eventually.
This 1-2 century period of tight IP controls could be seen as a blip on radar after a few more generations die and are replaced by younger generations whose views are already moving quickly in that direction.
Tbh. by that reasoning, every human who visits his website also should pay him a fee because they read his texts, their brains form new memories, new synapses are formed, and at some point in the future they might use that knowledge to make money! It is actually strinklingly similar to how a LLM does it. By that reason, he should start fining every website visitor for 100k, because they all used his website to improve their internal model.
Readit News
1. You can't append his special "no-AI" amendment to the GPL like he says. The GPL prohibits additional restrictions and tells recipients that they can discard those restrictions.
2. I'm pretty sure fines can only be imposed by government, not companies or individuals.
3. AI companies don't agree to any license when training anyway.
I don't believe any major legal system world wide currently has the concept of people being able to decide their own damages up front.
Everything else he says about how the law works is largely also false.
An example of said "stealing" would be most helpful in order to gain some context as to why he's upset.
But the shift appears inevitable eventually.
This 1-2 century period of tight IP controls could be seen as a blip on radar after a few more generations die and are replaced by younger generations whose views are already moving quickly in that direction.