We are approaching the "UBI or Guillotine" fork simply because rules and regulations work selectively. Just like with the "If we pay for copyright or business becomes impossible" defense, this is yet another wast unfairness against those who had to transfer their resources to learn a skill. Awful lot of people had hard life or got into debt for things that big tech is immune from.
Or maybe we will come into the conclusion that all this works only if there's no such thing as IP, reset the playing field for everyone and if anyone wants to make money will have to actually work for it every single time. IIRC that's what's happening in China and its how they surpassed US in innovation.
Technically, that's a deregulation - just not the kind of deregulation the big tech is pushing for. Maybe the next time there's a graph showing how regulations made EU lag behind, add the graph of China too to spice things up.
With so many technical people out of work and promises of make the employed ones obsolete too, it can be a good idea to let people build thing instead of unfairly concentrating even more power onto kleptocratic entities.
Even in the 18th century, the French aristocracy mostly cruised through the Revolution from afar, surviving with fortunes largely intact to this day [1]. If the fork is UBI or guillotine, the selfish move by the private-jetting billionaire class—personally and financially more mobile and global than the French aristocracy ever was—is the latter.
> if there's no such thing as IP, reset the playing field for everyone
Your thesis is letting Altman, Zuckerberg and Musk have free rein would decrease inequality?
unlike then, today global mobility is within the means of most the western world. A French Revolution today could very well extend globally to identify and re patriot.
The "U" in UBI is for "Universal". There is no means-testing. Everyone gets it regardless of assets or income, which means there is no need to spend any effort on checking whether someone is "poor enough".
Though the state would have to make sure the person receiving the benefit actually exists, is still alive, etc.
No, you can do a UBI that keeps the money supply the same, and use it as a way to stabilize the economy.
With a $2000/mo UBI, 50% flat tax on other income, 25% VAT, phase it in by doing 10% of that the first year (and 90% of your current taxes, 90% of current support payments), second year 20% and 80%, so the impact isn't too disruptive.
Adjust the flat tax rate as the Federal budget changed (a spending bill is automatically a tax bill as well). Adjust the VAT to control inflation.
Even assuming this scaremongering scenario, the world would be in a far better place if society assured everyone would be guaranteed a certain income.
Also, the scenario that supports the hypothesis of higher inflation is that more people in society are suddenly able to afford goods and services that were out of their reach without UBI. Can anyone actually put to words why that is undesirable?
It's gonna be complex and messy.
On the one hand yes, many people receiving UBI = inflation. On the other hand many highly paid software devs (And soon after - accountants, lawyers, marketers, sales people etc etc) are losing their incomes = very deflationary.
Training on copyrighted works licensed for such use is inarguably conforming.
Acquiring and using works without such license is just piracy. Whatever your stand on piracy is, most individuals and businesses are not free to incorporate it into their projects. Normal people have faced significant penalties for piracy, and concientious business operators avoid it.
Sure would be disappointing to all those people if there were suddenly a ruling that said "well, but it's okay that these guys did it because they're filthy rich and went real hard with it"
How can it possibly be the case that it's ok for meta to download and ingest the entire contents of libgen but it is not ok for an individual human to selectively download a single work and read it?
Whatever legal contortions used to justify this are, quite frankly, bullshit. This isn't how anything should work even if these companies can buy themselves a regulatory regime where it does.
The idea that abolishing IP protections and letting AI companies run rampant is an offramp for wealth inequality is such a wild take to me?
Realistically billionaires are using racist and homophobic populism as a way to direct working class energy away from wealth inequality. Making people think "woke" is the reason why the earth is on fire and they can't have health insurance.
I think OP is coming from the "temporarily embarassed billionaire" perspective where if only we had a libertarian hellscape without pesky laws they would be a funeral baron who runs Bartertown.
How can you get the definition of fairness so backwards? Giant corporations provide literally everything you take for granted and they should be punished because you are envious? I don't get it.
There is a reason everyone with over 130 IQ wants to work for them rather than starting their own companies.
They shouldn’t be punished because people are envious, they should be punished because they’re not respecting other people's intellectual property without an agreement in place.
We can’t protect IPs only when that benefits big corps. We should protect them always or accept that the world is better if we go in another direction, changing the rules for everybody.
How can you get the definition of fairness so backwards? The King provides literally everything you take for granted and he should be punished because you are envious? I don't get it.
There's a reason why every vassal with a sizeable estate wants to be in the King's court rather than starting their own country.
Alluded multiple times in the comments already but worth being explicit: Aaron Swartz killed himself 12 years ago yesterday for facing "a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison" [0] after downloading academic journal articles, which would be only a small percentage of what's available on LibGen.
Swartz was charged with 35 to 50 years, realistically faced up to 10, and was offered 6 months if he plead guilty [1]. That offer moreover wasn’t the final offer.
Put another way, it’s not clear that the law is being applied to Zuckerberg differently than it was to Swartz given the law wasn’t actually ever applied to Swartz. (Or that they wouldn’t gladly trade this lawbreaking for $1mm in fines and a negotiation over penalties where the prosecution opens with 6 months jail.)
The prosecutor acted inappropriately in that case; MIT, more wildly so. That doesn’t, however, carry over to a transgression of the law given we never got to that stage.
It's not just a collection, it's the collection. It contains almost every scientific book ever printed, for one thing.
Frankly, it's a massive boon to researchers. It's like a top-tier research university library at your fingertips, and usually more convenient than the real thing.
Funny that the world where almost all human knowledge and art is free and accessible for everyone exists in parallel to one where articles about which McDonalds meal are you
are paywalled, and funny which world civilized nations have chosen in order to protect The Suite Life of Zack & Cody and all the artists whose livelihoods depend on reruns of iCarly.
I would argue that it's right call:
1) it's in the world's best interest. I am running llama locally on laptop, and the ability to have the distilled world's knowledge at your fingertips will generate much much more value than what it takes.
2) it does not 'take' any value from the book creators. No one's going to 'not buy a book' because an LLM has been trained with its content (in contrast you might argue that you are likely to not buy a book because you downloaded it from libgen).
Copyright laws are not millennia-old ethical laws that everyone agrees on (like don't steal), they are a modern human construct that were created for the greater good (incentivize creation), and we should revisit them with new tech.
wat? facebook is going to 'not buy a book' for each book it's gone through. world's best interest that one of the wealthiest companies in the world don't pay their dues?
world's best interest? when we know nothing about the societal and political effects llms will have in the hands of such people?
"Meta's request is preposterous. With one possible exception, there is not a single thing in those briefs that should be sealed."
"It is clear that Meta's sealing request is not designed to protect against the disclosure of sensitive business information that competitors could use to their advantage. Rather, it is designed to avoid negative publicity."
"If Meta again submits an unreasonably broad sealing request, all materials will simply be unsealed."
"One final comment. Between this sealing request and assertions in Meta's opposition brief such as "[t]hat document expressly discusses torrents and seeding", Opp. at 7, the Court is becoming concerned that Meta and its counsel are starting to travel down a familiar road. See In re Facebook, Inc. Consumer Privacy User Profile Litigation, 655 F. Supp. 3d 899 (N.D. Cal. 2023)."
I don't understand your comment. This is about a lawsuit which shows that Zuckerberg OK'd the downloading and use of LibGen data. The case exists at least since mid-2023 and was in discovery phase until 13. Dec 2024. Shortly before the deadline Meta provided this new information, because they had to.
I guess the parent is saying that the new administration could be more business friendly in prosecuting this type of cases. It might even drop this case altogether. But only if Meta is "friendly" to the administration too.
PP is referring to Facebook/Meta's new policy changes like banning intelligence/sanity-based insults on the Platform, but carving out an exception specifically and explicitly for transgender people as targets, and removing tampons from men's bathrooms.
The antitrust one is most relevant as the new party in power would be gleeful to see it broken up but otherwise disagrees with the concept of antitrust
There are three positions around the usage of of shadow libraries.
1- Should we develop this argument into more discussion as society and humans around the knowledge publication and the publication industry greed and the rent-seeking business model.
2- Big Corporation shouldn't just ignore the copyright law while maintaining the strongest copyright protections and going after small folks.
3- The usual argument about how LLMs training is different from people actually using pirated textbook because it is expensive (college and learning is hard and expensive specially in places like Africa).
These are different angles and I think we can try to address all of them as they are not exclusive. There are good arguments around point 3 on two sides. I don't think there is a good argument why we should allow the status quo regarding the first point though. For two, it is more complicated to even discuss specially on HN.
Readit News
Or maybe we will come into the conclusion that all this works only if there's no such thing as IP, reset the playing field for everyone and if anyone wants to make money will have to actually work for it every single time. IIRC that's what's happening in China and its how they surpassed US in innovation.
Technically, that's a deregulation - just not the kind of deregulation the big tech is pushing for. Maybe the next time there's a graph showing how regulations made EU lag behind, add the graph of China too to spice things up.
With so many technical people out of work and promises of make the employed ones obsolete too, it can be a good idea to let people build thing instead of unfairly concentrating even more power onto kleptocratic entities.
Even in the 18th century, the French aristocracy mostly cruised through the Revolution from afar, surviving with fortunes largely intact to this day [1]. If the fork is UBI or guillotine, the selfish move by the private-jetting billionaire class—personally and financially more mobile and global than the French aristocracy ever was—is the latter.
> if there's no such thing as IP, reset the playing field for everyone
Your thesis is letting Altman, Zuckerberg and Musk have free rein would decrease inequality?
> IIRC that's what's happening in China
Not really [2].
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37655777
[2] https://www.chinaiplawupdate.com/2023/08/china-prosecutes-11...
> Criminal trademark infringement made up the majority of IP crimes with 10,384 people prosecuted accounting for 88.9% of the total.
Trademark infringement is of a completely different character from copyright.
Trademark infringement is pure fraud and lying.
Take out trademark infringement, and you have only 1 prosecution per year per 700,000 people.
Though the state would have to make sure the person receiving the benefit actually exists, is still alive, etc.
Even assuming this scaremongering scenario, the world would be in a far better place if society assured everyone would be guaranteed a certain income.
Also, the scenario that supports the hypothesis of higher inflation is that more people in society are suddenly able to afford goods and services that were out of their reach without UBI. Can anyone actually put to words why that is undesirable?
It's gonna be interesting that's for sure.
We saw a bit of that with Covid cheques.
The trained models are trillionths the size of their training sets. There is no archive of copied data in them.
You pay for access to materials, not using or remembering the material in its original format.
Acquiring and using works without such license is just piracy. Whatever your stand on piracy is, most individuals and businesses are not free to incorporate it into their projects. Normal people have faced significant penalties for piracy, and concientious business operators avoid it.
Sure would be disappointing to all those people if there were suddenly a ruling that said "well, but it's okay that these guys did it because they're filthy rich and went real hard with it"
Whatever legal contortions used to justify this are, quite frankly, bullshit. This isn't how anything should work even if these companies can buy themselves a regulatory regime where it does.
Realistically billionaires are using racist and homophobic populism as a way to direct working class energy away from wealth inequality. Making people think "woke" is the reason why the earth is on fire and they can't have health insurance.
There is a reason everyone with over 130 IQ wants to work for them rather than starting their own companies.
We can’t protect IPs only when that benefits big corps. We should protect them always or accept that the world is better if we go in another direction, changing the rules for everybody.
There's a reason why every vassal with a sizeable estate wants to be in the King's court rather than starting their own country.
Deleted Comment
Free for me, not for thee.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
Swartz was charged with 35 to 50 years, realistically faced up to 10, and was offered 6 months if he plead guilty [1]. That offer moreover wasn’t the final offer.
Put another way, it’s not clear that the law is being applied to Zuckerberg differently than it was to Swartz given the law wasn’t actually ever applied to Swartz. (Or that they wouldn’t gladly trade this lawbreaking for $1mm in fines and a negotiation over penalties where the prosecution opens with 6 months jail.)
The prosecutor acted inappropriately in that case; MIT, more wildly so. That doesn’t, however, carry over to a transgression of the law given we never got to that stage.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesdev/2023/02/28/increase-w...?
Has Zuckerberg actually been charged with something with equivalent potential consequences?
If not, then your statement is false on its face.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=libgen&type=all ("LibGen")
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=anna's%20archive&type=all ("Anna's Archive")
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=z%20library&type=all ("Z-Library")
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=scihub&type=all ("SciHub")
Frankly, it's a massive boon to researchers. It's like a top-tier research university library at your fingertips, and usually more convenient than the real thing.
But the sad state of the affairs is that if Aaron Swartz does it, he ends up dead; if Meta does it, everything is fine.
Copyright laws are not millennia-old ethical laws that everyone agrees on (like don't steal), they are a modern human construct that were created for the greater good (incentivize creation), and we should revisit them with new tech.
How is pleasing Meta's shareholders in world's best interest.
Humans do that naturally (see: children)
The copyright laws are to protect profit.
what are you rationalising about?
Text: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67569326/373/kadrey-v-m...
"Meta's request is preposterous. With one possible exception, there is not a single thing in those briefs that should be sealed."
"It is clear that Meta's sealing request is not designed to protect against the disclosure of sensitive business information that competitors could use to their advantage. Rather, it is designed to avoid negative publicity."
"If Meta again submits an unreasonably broad sealing request, all materials will simply be unsealed."
"One final comment. Between this sealing request and assertions in Meta's opposition brief such as "[t]hat document expressly discusses torrents and seeding", Opp. at 7, the Court is becoming concerned that Meta and its counsel are starting to travel down a familiar road. See In re Facebook, Inc. Consumer Privacy User Profile Litigation, 655 F. Supp. 3d 899 (N.D. Cal. 2023)."
Rather famously, some elements of that administration are above the criminal code, so that's not implausible.
1- Should we develop this argument into more discussion as society and humans around the knowledge publication and the publication industry greed and the rent-seeking business model.
2- Big Corporation shouldn't just ignore the copyright law while maintaining the strongest copyright protections and going after small folks.
3- The usual argument about how LLMs training is different from people actually using pirated textbook because it is expensive (college and learning is hard and expensive specially in places like Africa).
These are different angles and I think we can try to address all of them as they are not exclusive. There are good arguments around point 3 on two sides. I don't think there is a good argument why we should allow the status quo regarding the first point though. For two, it is more complicated to even discuss specially on HN.
Will be interesting to see where this lands, because all outcomes seem to have significant secondary effects.
You're welcome! :P