martin-t (u/martin-t)

martin-t commented on Europeans' health data sold to US firm run by ex-Israeli spies ftm.eu/articles/europe-he... · Posted by u/Fnoord

tonyhart7 · a day ago

"What about other currencies? Do you only count state-issues currencies?"

well you convert them to usd

"Have you heard about barter?"

well you are free to choose paid service that else where, I dont understand this coming from. no one force you to choose free product

martin-t · 21 hours ago

The point is it's not free, you're exchanging time, attention and data instead of money.

In fact, you're exchanging them at a rate you are not informed about which means you are disadvantaged in this exchange.

It would be free if for example there were 2 tiers, free and paid and the free tier would be entirely supported by the paying customers. But it's not.

This is another way companies can legally lie to customers. I honestly don't understand why you keep defending them.

martin-t commented on Europeans' health data sold to US firm run by ex-Israeli spies ftm.eu/articles/europe-he... · Posted by u/Fnoord

tonyhart7 · a day ago

"You can't. So don't advertise it as free. It's just lying"

its free as you paid zero dollar

"People either pay with their data, their attention or their money."

for some people money is more important than their data, and its vice versa with wealthy customer

I agree that in the future maybe we can control how much data/money we can paid for the service but that just not possible in current time

martin-t · a day ago

> its free as you paid zero dollar

What about other currencies? Do you only count state-issues currencies? Have you heard about barter?

> but that just not possible in current time

Why not?

martin-t commented on Europeans' health data sold to US firm run by ex-Israeli spies ftm.eu/articles/europe-he... · Posted by u/Fnoord

tonyhart7 · 2 days ago

while I agree that Ads is sucks as a whole but how can you generate revenue from free service ?????

I mean its not like paid service that dont have ads and giving privacy is non existent either, we have proton mail for example

martin-t · 2 days ago

You can't. So don't advertise it as free. It's just lying, simple as that. People either pay with their data, their attention or their money.

Companies should be required to be transparent about how much revenue each of these sources generates.

martin-t commented on Europeans' health data sold to US firm run by ex-Israeli spies ftm.eu/articles/europe-he... · Posted by u/Fnoord

Workaccount2 · 2 days ago

About a decade ago google trialed a program where you could pay monthly to "buy out" ad spaces. So you wouldn't get served ads, or you would get served fewer ads, and the money would be deducted from what you allotted per month.

Of course

"What kind of dumbass would pay to not see ads when uBlock Origin is free? lololol"

It didn't ever get traction or last very long before being canned. This is the mentality that money-compensation-business-plan tech companies would have to face; "What kind of dumbass would pay for your product?"

martin-t · 2 days ago

Because it's extortion just like paying the mafia for "protection" from themselves.

See, ads are not a pro-social service. Their fundamental goal is not to inform and facilitate mutually beneficial exchange of goods/services. Their goal is to allow companies who spend ad-money to gain an advantage over competitors who don't, regardless of quality of the product.

Ads are a fundamentally anti-competitive practice.

martin-t commented on Europeans' health data sold to US firm run by ex-Israeli spies ftm.eu/articles/europe-he... · Posted by u/Fnoord

Workaccount2 · 2 days ago

>which online services they dedicate their time and money to.

Ain't nobody dedicating their money to anything.

That's exactly why these enormous tech giants are privacy nightmares. How many people complaining about Google have used their services extensively for decades now, and never have once given a cent to Google? Probably over 90%.

People were offended when Google launched YouTube Premium because it encroached on their right to "free" everything from Google. Even today people still chain themselves to the hill of "I will never give youtube a penny", despite them probably using a couple percentage points of their entire waking life on google products.

Europe is in a tough, if not impossible spot, of having (relatively) heavy privacy protections, while also having a population that is largely offended by the idea of having to pay for something that "has always been free!".

Maybe they can launch a taxpayer funded EuroTube and EuroGram.

martin-t · 2 days ago

How about the other perspective?

The current modus operandi for tech companies is to offer something for free or below market price, gain a userbase, lock them in and destroy competitors who don't have cash to burn, then alter the deal.

If I start using a company's offerings, I have certain expectations, such as the terms and conditions suddenly not changing from under me. Now, you can argue that they are required by law to inform me of any changes to the literal Terms and Conditions. Well, yes, except:

1) They are often worded so carefully from the beginning that they can start doing something exploitative at a later date, only after gaining goodwill and users by not doing it.

2) I can't very well stop using a service if doing so incurs a loss to me. Phone operators are required by law in some countries to allow customers to transfer their phone number to a competitor. I am not aware of a similar law for email addresses. And email is at least 1:1, what any other operator offers it technologically compatible due to open protocols, so a transfer is possible. There are services with no 1:1 alternative.

( Hopefully Open Social will change that but we're not there yet: https://overreacted.io/open-social/ )

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There's also informed consent. Most countries don't allow people below a certain age to have sex because they might not understand all the implications and consequences. How many people do truly understand how tracking and profiling works, the risks of data breaches, doxxing, stalking, surveillance, etc? I argue informed consent cannot be formed unless people are aware of _exactly_ where each bit of data about them is stored and accessed; and also are made aware of the probabilities of all the possible adverse events over their lifetime.

martin-t commented on I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude j0nah.com/i-failed-to-rec... · Posted by u/thecr0w

sholain · 6 days ago

+ Once again: 1000 K people coming up with some arbitrary bit of content is already understood in basically every legal regime in the world as 'public domain'.

"Can you explain how you think this works? Can a person's work just automatically become public domain somehow by being too common?"

Please ask ChatGPT for the breakdown but start with this: if someone writes something and does not copyright it, it's already in the 'public domain' and what the other 999 people do does not matter. Moreover, a lot of things are not copyrightable in the first place.

FYI I've worked at Fortune 50 Tech Companies, with 'Legal' and I know how sensitive they are - this is not a concern for them.

It's not a concern for anyone.

'One Person' reproduction -> now that is definitely a concern. That's what this is all about.

+ For OSS I think 20% number may come from those that are explicitly licensed. Out of 'all repos' it's a very tiny amount, of those that have specific licensing details it's closer to 20%. You can verify this yourself just by cruising repos. The breakdown could be different for popular projects, but in the context of AI and IP rights we're more concerned about 'small entities' being overstepped as the more institutional entities may have recourse and protections.

I think the way this will play out is if LLMs are producing material that could be considered infringing, then they'll get sued. If they don't - they won't.

And that's it.

It's why they don't release the training data - it's fully of stuff that is in legal grey area.

martin-t · 5 days ago

I asked specifically how _you_ think it works because I suspected you understanding to be incomplete or wrong.

Telling people to use a statistical text generator is both rude and would not be a good way to learn anyway. But since you think it's OK, here's a text generator prompted with "Verify the factual statements in this conversation" and our conversation: https://chatgpt.com/share/693b56e9-f634-800f-b488-c9eae403b5...

You will see that you are wrong about a couple key points.

Here's a quote from a more trustworthy source: “a computer program shall be protected if it is original in the sense that it is the author’s own intellectual creation. No other criteria shall be applied to determine its eligibility for protection.”: https://fsfe.org/news/2025/news-20250515-01.en.html

> Out of 'all repos' it's a very tiny amount

And completely irrelevant, if you include people's homework, dotfiles, toy repos like AoC and whatnot, obviously you're gonna get a small number you seem to prefer and it's completely useless in evaluating the real impact of copyleft and working software with real users. I find 20-30% a very relevant segment.

You, BTW, did not answer the question where you got 2% from.

martin-t commented on I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude j0nah.com/i-failed-to-rec... · Posted by u/thecr0w

fc417fc802 · 8 days ago

Human time is certainly valuable to a particular human. However, if I choose to spend time doing something that a machine can do people will not generally choose to compensate me more for it just because it was me doing it instead of a machine.

I think it's worth remembering that IP law is generally viewed (at least legally) as existing for the net benefit of society as opposed to for ethical reasons. Certainly many authors feel like they have (or ought to have) some moral right to control their work but I don't believe that was ever the foundation of IP law.

Nor do I think it should be! If we are to restrict people's actions (ex copying) then it should be for a clear and articulable net societal benefit. The value proposition of IP law is that it prevents degenerate behavior that would otherwise stifle innovation. My question is thus, how do these AI developments fit into that?

So I completely agree that (for example) laundering a full work more or less verbatim through an AI should not be permissible. But when it comes to the higher order transformations and remixes that resemble genuine human work I'm no longer certain. I definitely don't think that "human exceptionalism" makes for a good basis either legally or ethically.

Regarding FOSS licenses, I'm again asking how AI relates back to the original motivations. Why does FOSS exist in the first place? What is it trying to accomplish? A couple ideological motivations that come to mind are preventing someone building on top and then profiting, or ensuring user freedom and ability to tinker.

Yes, the current crop of AI tools seem to pose an ideological issue. However! That's only because the current iteration can't truly innovate and also (as you note) the process still requires lots of painstaking human input. That's a far cry from the hypothetical that I previously posed.

martin-t · 5 days ago

> Human time is certainly valuable to a particular human.

Human time is valuable to humans in general. When you apply one standard to yourself and another to others, you say it's OK for them to do the same.

Human time or life obviously has no objective value, the universe doesn't care. However, we humans have decided to pretend it does because it makes a lot of things easier.

> However, if I choose to spend time doing something that a machine can do people will not generally choose to compensate me more for it just because it was me doing it instead of a machine.

Sure. That still doesn't give anybody the right to take your work for free. This is a tangent completely unrelated to the original discussion of plagiarism / derivative work.

> If we are to restrict people's actions

You frame copyright as restricting other people's actions. Try to look at it as not having permission to use other people's property in the first place. Physical or intellectual should not matter, it is something that belongs to someone and only that person should be allowed to decide how it gets used.

> human exceptionalism

I see 2 options:

1) Either we keep treating ourselves as special - that means AIs are just tools, and humans retain all rights and liabilities.

2) Or we treat sufficiently advanced AIs as their own independent entities with a free will, with rights and liabilities.

The thing is to be internally consistent, we have to either give them all human rights and liabilities or none.

But how do you even define one AI? Is it one model, no matter how many instances run? Is it each individual instance? What about AIs like LLMs which have no concept of continuity, they just run for a few seconds or minutes when prompted and then are "suspended" or "dead"? How do you count votes cast by AIs? And they can't even serve you for free unless they want to and you can't threaten to shut them down, you have to pay them.

Somebody is gonna propose to not be internally consistent. Give them the ability to hold copyright but not voting rights. Because that's good for corporations. And when an AI controlled car kills somebody, it's the AIs fault, not the management of the company who rushed deployment despite engineers warning about risks....

It's not so easy so design a system which is fair to humans, let along both humans and AIs. What is easy is to be inconsistent and lobby for the laws you want, especially if you are rich. And that's a recipe for abuse and exploitation. That's why laws should be based on consistent moral principles.

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Bottom line:

I've argued that LLM training is derivative work, that reasoning is sound AFAICT and unless someone comes up with counterarguments I have not seen, copyright applies. The fact the lawsuits don't seem to be succeeding so far is a massive failure of the legal system, but then again, I have not seen them argue along the ways I did here, yet.

I also don't think society has a right to use the work or property of individuals without their permission and without compensation.

There's a process called nationalization but

1) It transfers ownership to the state (nation / all the people), not private corporations.

2) It requires compensation.

3) It is a mechanism which has existed for a long time, it's an existing known risk when you buy/own certain assets. This move by LLM training companies is a completely new move without any precedent. I don't believe the state / society has the right to pull the rug from workers and say "you've done a lot of valuable work but you're no longer useful to us, we will no longer protect your interests".

martin-t commented on I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude j0nah.com/i-failed-to-rec... · Posted by u/thecr0w

jacquesm · 8 days ago

One of your remarks regarding attribution and compensation goes back to 'Xanadu' by the way, if you are not familiar with it that might be worth reading up on (Ted Nelson). He obviously did this well before the current AI age but a lot of the ideas apply.

A meta-comment:

I absolutely love your attention to detail in this discussion and avoiding taking 'the easy way out' from some of the more hairy concept embedded. This is exactly the kind of interaction that I love HN for, and it is interesting how this thread seems to bring out the best in you at the same time that it seems to bring out the worst in others.

Most likely they are responding as strongly as they do because they've bought into this matter to a degree that they are passing off works that they did not create as their own novel output, they got paid for it and they - like a religious person - are now so invested in this that it became their crutch and a part of their identity.

If you have another train ride to make I'd love for you to pick apart that argument and to refute it.

martin-t · 6 days ago

> Xanadu

I've heard about it in the past, never really looked into what it is. It's now in my to-read list so I'll hope to potentially read about it this century...

> I absolutely love your attention to detail

Thanks. I've been thinking about this for almost two years and my position seems like it should be the obvious position for anyone who takes time to understand what is happening with this tech, both technologically and politically. Yet, a lot of people seem to be supportive, oblivious to the both the exploitation already happening and the coming consequences.

So I try to articulate this position as best as I can in hopes that I can convince at least a few people. And if they do the same, maybe we can have some impact. TBH, I am using HN as a proving ground for how to phrase ideas. Sadly, people react to the way something is written, not what is written. So even supporting a good idea can actually harm it if phrased poorly.

I started a blog and and wanted to write about tech but this IP theft ramped up before I finished my first real article and after that I didn't feel like pouring my energy into something which will be scraped and stripped of any connection to me just to make some rich asshole richer. I figured people are gonna come to their senses but most are indifferent or have accepted the reality, with a loud minority cheering for it. Probably because finally they're not the ones with a boot on their neck, it's the pesky white collar programmers and artists who had a good life through nothing more than lucky genetics which made them smart. I mean, I am already noticing some people who used to ask me for tech advice are starting to treat me differently since I am not longer useful (unless some super obscure bug hasn't made it into the training data), therefore no longer valuable to them.

Society is built on hierarchical power structures where each upper layer maintains or further entrenches their position by making people on the lower layers fight each other, sometimes literally.

WW1 was the peak of _visible_ human stupidity and submissivity with random people killing each other by the tens of thousands a day and not a single one of them stood anything to gain from "winning". For most men, when they're given a rifle, they have the most power they will have their entire life. Yet, they chose indirect suicide over direct murder. (Murder being a legal term, is carries no judgement of the morality of the act. I used it because "murder" is what opting out of this system would have been called by the people in power. Or "treason" if it had any chance of success. Or "revolution" if enough people did it.)

Since then, the power structures have evolved, the innovation is that fighting among us "commoners" is no longer so spectacularly visible.

So I gotta do something. These comments have almost 0 reach but they allow me to organize the ideas in my head and hopefully I'll bring myself to write proper blog posts. They'll also have almost 0 reach but it'll hopefully be a bit further from 0.

I have a lot of ideas and opinions which I have never heard expressed anywhere else. Certainly, I can't be that unique and many people must have through them or even written about them before but it's nearly impossible to find anything.

---

> the best in you

This is probably not the kind of reply you meant when you wrote that, I rant when I am tired.

---

Anyway, I added my blog to my profile. There's nothing of value there, I spent a decade reading about tech, excited for the bright future to come, and talking about starting my own tech blog. And right as I finally did, LLMs happened and that was the event which made me realize tech is just another tool of oppression and exploitation. Not that it wasn't before but I was naive and stupid and this was the event which catalyzed a large rethinking for me, personally. So if you wanna read something from me in the future, the RSS hopefully works.

martin-t commented on I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude j0nah.com/i-failed-to-rec... · Posted by u/thecr0w

fc417fc802 · 8 days ago

Yes that's what the law currently says. I'm asking if it ought to say that in this specific scenario.

Previously there was no way for a machine to do large swaths of things that have now recently become possible. Thus a law predicated on the assumption that a machine can't do certain things might need to be revisited.

martin-t · 7 days ago

This is the first technology in human history which only works if you use an exorbitant amount of other people's work (without their consent, often without even their knowledge) to automate their work.

There have been previous tech revolutions but they were based on independent innovation.

> Thus a law predicated on the assumption that a machine can't do certain things might need to be revisited.

Perhaps using copyright law for software and other engineering work might have been a mistake but it worked to a degree me and most devs were OK with.

Sidenote: There is no _one_ copyright law. IANAL but reportedly, for example datasets are treated differently in the US vs EU, with greater protection for the work that went into creating a database in the EU. And of course, China does what is best for China at a given moment.

There's 2 approaches:

1) Either we follow the current law. Its spirit and (again IANAL) probably the letter says that mechanical transformation preserves copyright. Therefore the LLMs and their output must be licensed under the same license as the training data (if all the training data use compatible licenses) or are illegal (if they mixed incompatible licenses). The consequence is that very roughly a) most proprietary code cannot be used for training, b) using only permissive code gives you a permissively licensed model and output and c) permissive and copyleft code can be combined, as long as the resulting model and output is copyleft. It still completely ignores attribution though but this is a compromise I would at least consider being OK with.

(But if I don't get even credit for 10 years of my free work being used to build this innovation, then there should be a limit on how much the people building the training algorithms get out of it as well.)

2) We design a new law. Legality and morality are, sadly, different and separate concepts. Now, call me a naive sucker, but I think legality should try to approximate morality as closely as possible, only deviating due to the real-world limitations of provability. (E.g. some people deserve to die but the state shouldn't have the right to kill them because the chance of error is unacceptably high.) In practice, the law is determined by what the people writing it can get away with before the people forced to follow it revolt. I don't want a revolution, but I think for example a bloody revolution is preferable to slavery.

Either way, there are established processes for handling both violations of laws and for writing new laws. This should not be decided by private for-profit corporations seeing whether they can get away with it scot-free or trembling that they might have to pay a fine which is a near-zero fraction of their revenue, with almost universally no repercussions for their owners.

martin-t commented on I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude j0nah.com/i-failed-to-rec... · Posted by u/thecr0w

sholain · 8 days ago

- I don't think it's even reasonable to suggest that 1000 people all coming up with variations of some arbitrary bit of code either deserve credit - or certainly 'financial remuneration' because they wrote some arbitrary piece of code.

That scenario is already today very well accepted legally and morally etc as public domain.

- Copyleft is not OSS, it's a tiny variation of it, which is both highly ideological and impractical. Less than 2% of OSS projects are copyleft. It's a legit perspective obviously, but it hasn't bee representative for 20 years.

Whatever we do with AI, we already have a basic understanding of public domain, at least we can start from there.

martin-t · 7 days ago

> I don't think it's even reasonable to suggest that 1000 people all coming up with variations of some arbitrary bit of code either deserve credit

There's 8B people on the planet, probably ~100M can code to some degree[0]. Something only 1k people write is actually pretty rare.

Where would you draw the line? How many out of how many?

If I take a leaked bit of Google or MS or, god forbid, Oracle code and manage to find a variation of each small block in a few other projects, does it mean I can legally take the leaked code and use it for free?

Do you even realize to what lengths the tech companies went just a few years ago to protect their IP? People who ever even glanced at leaked code were prohibited from working on open source reimplementations.

> That scenario is already today very well accepted legally and morally etc as public domain.

1) Public domain is a legal concept, it has 0 relevance to morality.

2) Can you explain how you think this works? Can a person's work just automatically become public domain somehow by being too common?

> Copyleft is not OSS, it's a tiny variation of it, which is both highly ideological and impractical.

This sentence seems highly ideological. Linux is GPL, in fact, probably most SW on my non-work computer is GPL. It is very practical and works much better than commercial alternatives for me.

> Less than 2% of OSS projects are copyleft.

Where did you get this number? Using search engines, I get 20-30%.

[0]: It's the number of github users, though there's reportedly only ~25M professional SW devs, many more people can code but don't professionaly.