So, this article describes the sequence of events as the Trump administration attempting to replace the librarian of congress, and Trump's named replacement saying he was replacing the Copyright Register with a Trump DOJ person.
I am not a lawyer but I thought it was pretty well established that (a) the library of congress is part of the legislature, not an executive branch office and (b) that the president can remove some people but can't install people in the other branches without confirmation (e.g. when a SCOTUS justice dies or retires, the president can't name a temporary justice).
It's kind of confusing since the LOC serves Congress, but the Librarian of Congress is a President-appointed and Senate-confirmed position. They're supposed to serve for 10-year terms (she was appointed in September 2016) though, and my understanding is it's a open question whether the President can legally fire a LOC before their term is up.
I think the "senate-confirmed" part is important and relates to three president's inability to just install a replacement independently. He can remove an official nominated by the president, but he can't unilaterally fill the vacancy (even temporarily ) for positions outside of the executive.
It’s complicated because there are some executive-like functions which have created legal question about it. As always in this kind of debate, remember that Congress could resolve all of this by clearly stating their intention in statute rather than leaving it to the courts to try to balance concerns.
The President can, in fact, recess appoint a Supreme Court justice per Article II, Section 2, Clause 3[0].
Since the George W. Bush administration, Congress has used pro forma sessions[1] to prevent recess appointments. Both the House and Senate would have to agree on a time to adjourn Congress per Article I, Section 5, Clause 4. If they disagree but one of them wants to adjourn, the President can adjourn them under Article II, Section 3. But no president has ever done this. President Trump talked about doing it to ram through his appointments both in 2020 and last year during the transition period. But so far it hasn't been deemed necessary because the Senate has, surprisingly to me, confirmed his cabinet in a timely manner and without significant pushback even on the less conventionally conservative choices like the DNI and the HHS Secretary. In all likelihood, the threat of adjourning Congress and of using his billion dollars plus of fundraising for 2026 to primary uncooperative Republican members of Congress has forced them to largely fall in line for now.
Recess appointments to the Supreme Court were common in the old days when the Court was less politically contentious. Justice William J. Brennan was recess appointed by Eisenhower and later confirmed by the Senate. A recess appointment who is not confirmed by the Senate would be null and void at the start of the next Congress on January 3rd of the next odd numbered year. I doubt any president would recess appoint a Supreme Court justice today both because it would be likely derail their nomination and also because a recess Justice might get to hear at most 1 term of cases depending on timing. Recess appointing somebody to run the FDA or the Justice Department or even to be a district court judge would be much more useful to a President's agenda.
[0]: "The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session."
[1]: These are sessions where they immediately adjourn by unanimous consent after doing the formalities to open the session. C-SPAN broadcasts them live and they only last a few minutes at most.
The idea of actual AI being used by governments (or just rich people) to spy on everyone, profile them, shape their ideas through targeted manipulation[0] and eliminate undesirable ones through social (destroying reputation), psychological (driving to suicide) or physical (killbots) means is way scarier than being turned into a paperclip.
[0]: Not just or fake videos or comments. Do you have someone on the internet you consider a friend but have never met in person? In the future, rich people or governments will be able to plant ideas in people and influence their thinking by generating fake friends.
I’m not sure if the comment below is alluding to this, but search for Project 2025. Robert Reich has published some informative articles in the Guardian newspaper, but plenty of other sources.
"This website" is a diverse bunch of people with diverse goals and policy positions. Please don't make generalizations.
Copyright in its current form is ridiculous, but I support some (much-pared-back) version of copyright that limits rights further, expands fair use, repeals the DMCA, and reduces the copyright term to something on the order of 15-20 years (perhaps with a renewal option as with patents).
I've released a lot of software under the GPL, and the GPL in its current form couldn't exist without copyright.
Current copyright is too strong in terms of length but too weak in terms of derived work. Well, pending some lawsuits, perhaps.
What copyright should do is protect individual creators, not corporations. And it should protect them even if their work is mixed through complex statistical algorithms such as LLMs.
LLMs wouldn't be possible without _trillions_ of hours of work by people writing books, code, music, etc. they are trained on. The _millions_ of hours of work spent on the training algorithm itself, the chat interface, the scraping scripts, etc. is barely a drop in the bucket.
There is 0 reason the people who spent mere millions of hours of work should get all the reward without giving anything to the rest of the world who put in trillions of hours.
Indefinite royalties on Spotify are one thing, but how are they supposed to work in neural nets? Dividing equal share based on inputs would require the company to potentially expose proprietary information. Basing it on outputs could make sense as well I suppose, but would take some slightly ridiculous work for an arguable result.
Your point remains, but the problem of the division of responsibility and financial credit doesn't go away with that alone. Do you know if the openAI lawsuits have laid this out?
It can be as simple as "you cannot train on someone's work for commercial uses without a license", It can be as complex as setting up some sort of model like Spotify based on the numbers of time the LLM references those works for what it's generating. The devil's in the details, but the problem itself isn't new.
>Dividing equal share based on inputs would require the company to potentially expose proprietary information.
I find this defense ironic, given the fact that a lot of this debate revolves around defining copyright infringement. The works being trained on are infringed upon, but we might give too many details about the tech used to siphon all these IP's? Tragic.
>Do you know if the openAI lawsuits have laid this out?
IANAL, but my understanding of high profile cases is going more towards the "you can't train on this" litigation over the "how do we setup a payment model" sorts. If that's correct, we're pretty far out from considering that.
I admit, rewarding work fairly is very difficult with perfect information, much more with proprietary models and training data.
With code, some licenses are compatible, for example you could take a model trained on GPL and MIT code, and use it to produce GPL code. (The resulting model would _of course_ also be a derivative work licensed under the GPL.) That satisfies the biggest elephant in the room - giving users their rights to inspect and modify the code. Giving credit to individual authors is more difficult though.
I haven't been following the lawsuits much, I am powerless to influence them and having written my fair share of GPL and AGPL code, this whole LLM thing feels like being spat in the face.
Your approach will be completely untenable in future when we'll have embodied LLMs capable of dynamically learning (live weight updates). It'd make it illegal for such a machine to read any book, watch any movie or browse any webpage, because it could potentially memorise and regurgitate the content. Which would be completely impossible to enforce.
BTW, I like that you spell it GAI. General artificial intelligence feels more natural to say. I wonder if there's some rule of english I don't know which makes AGI more correct or if all the highly educated people are just trying to avoid sounding like they're saying "gay".
Please, don't anthropomorphize it. A model does not "read" a book - an algorithm updates weights which are _based on_ (therefore derivative work) existing training data. Basing them on more work performed by other people does not make it less derivative.
It's not only about regurgitation verbatim. Doing that just means it gets caught more easily.
LLMs are just another way the uber rich try to exploit everyone, hoping that if they exploit every single person's work just a little, they will get away with it.
Nobody is 1000x more productive than the average programmer at writing code. There is no reason somebody should make 1000x more money from it either.
> A model does not "read" a book - an algorithm updates weights which are _based on_ (therefore derivative work) existing training data. Basing them on more work performed by other people does not make it less derivative.
This isn't really how derivative works operate.
If you read Harry Potter and you decide you want to write a book about how Harry and Hermione grow up and become professors at Hogwarts, that's probably going to be a derivative work.
If you read Harry Potter and decide you want to write a book about a little Korean girl who lives with abusive parents but has a knack for science and crawls her way out of that family by inventing things for an eccentric businessman, is that a derivative of Harry Potter? Probably not, even if that was the inspiration for it.
To be a derivative work it has to be pretty similar to the original. That's actually the test, it's based on similarity. Causing it to not be one is done exactly by mixing it with so many other things that it's no longer sufficiently like any of them.
- how things work now vs how they should work
- and also how it works when a human does something vs when a an LLM is used to generate something imitating the human work.
A human has limited time and memory. Human time is valuable, computer time is not. Memorizing something by a human takes time.
When a human is inspired by a work and writes something based on that, he invests a lot of time and energy into it. Therefore people have decided that this creative output should be protected by the law.
Also a human is limited by how much he can remember from the original work. Even if writing what you described, he would inevitably fall back on his own life experiences, opinions, attitude, ways of thinking, etc.
When an LLM is used, it generated a statistical mashup of works it ingested during training. No part of this process has any intrinsic value. It literally only costs what the electricity does. And it's almost infinitely scalable. The law might not call it derivative because it was written at a time where this kind of mechanical derivation was not feasible.
Simplistically yes, because many see copyright as the thing that protects corporate interest from the social hacker.
The reality of course is more complicated. Without copyright there's no GPL. Which I guess is fine if you're in the OSS camp more than the FSF camp. MIT and BSD licenses basically (functionally) give up copyright.
Copyright is also what allows for hybrids like the BSL which protect "little guys" from large cloud providers like AWS etc.
Copyright allows VC startups to at least start out life as Open Source (before pivoting later.)
Of course thus is all in the context of software copyright. Other copyrights (music, books etc) are equally nuanced.
And there are other forms of IP protections as well (patents, trademarks) which are distinct from the copyright concept.
So no, I don't think most people here are against copyright (patents are a different story.)
That's the thing you don't need to enforce anything if there is no law which forbids you from doing things. It's the copyright law which restricts you from doing most of the things that GPL license gives you permission. GPL gives you back the rights to copy, modify, create derivative works and redistribute any GPL licensed software you receive. Without copyright law you could copy, modify, create derivative works and redistribute any software you receive.
Sure having source code would be nice, but then again half the software nowadays is using electron and written in javascript anyway. Also plenty of examples of hardware manufacturers using software/firmware copyright as excuse and making legal threats to people who have made their own software to control hardware they bought even though they didn't have access to original source code.
There are probably more examples of people reverse engineering an reimplementing or decompiling large nontrivial software than there examples of companies making their whole software open source due to using a GPL licensed library (as opposed to avoiding the GPL licensed code or violating the GPL by not releasing the source code).
> you don't need to enforce anything if there is no law which forbids you from doing things
This is extend-and-extinguish on rails. Raise capital, hire a team to fork a public project, develop is closed and only release inscrutable blobs. Add a marketing budget and you get to piggyback on the open-source project while keeping the monetisation.
Those things work against hobbyists, sometimes, temporarily, if the hobbyists are busy with other things or not very enterprising.
Do they work against Red Hat or Intel or Google or Mozilla, once those organizations can openly distribute the reconstructed code they've assigned full-time people to decompile? For that matter, what stops any government from doing it to any foreign company?
Which hardware company is going to build your DRM if there is no law you can use to stop the same company from also selling circumvention tools, or stopping anyone else (including major corporations) from extracting keys and selling them openly?
> companies making their whole software open source due to using a GPL licensed library
Does not mean that GPL is ineffective. IT forces them to reimplement the functionality, thus giving copyleft more time to compete with them. Imagine if they were to free to take all public code and just use it. They would always be ahead and open source products wouldn't stand a chance competing.
Not to mention I feel like GPL being so strong is why big companies pretend to love open source but permissive licenses so much - to drown out the GPL competition they hate so much and to attract more developers to permissive rather than copyleft open source projects.
1. I'm OK with no GPL if there's no copyright, because then proprietary programs can be copied and reverse engineered without restrictions from law or EULAs.
2. I generally don't like the BSL.
3. No comment. I think OSS projects that exist incidentally versus being the company's main product have always been more reliable (and less susceptible to the company pivoting to closed-only offerings).
4. Copyright has perhaps been the most evil in the music industry; books, less so. I'd rather not even talk about movies or TV right now. Nonetheless, I'd tolerate an extremely limited duration copyright, if no copyright at all isn't an option.
5. Trademarks are mostly fine, because they're primarily supposed to serve customers, not the companies. I'd like to get rid of patents now, however.
Also consider that Thomas and Alito dissented in the Google/Oracle ruling, and wrote something inflammatory, to the effect of it being unreasonable that Google was being allowed to infringe upon Oracle's copyrighted code (by implementing a compatible API). And that was before the Supreme Court was stacked with more like-minded people.
Not having sensible people steering copyright in a direction toward winding down its scope is being paired with a court that's likely to make it far more draconian, and create some massive problems that will be a problem for software development.
My experience on this website gives me the opposite impression. People more or less want to grab whatever they can and try to build and sell on top of it.
There's a huge difference between "We don't want copyrights" and "We're just going to have no one enforcing laws for a random period of time and it's unknown if there will be historic enforcement activities if/when that changes"
Copyright is mostly privately enforced. The USPTO being dysfunctional doesn’t prevent me from suing someone for infringement, it just sucks informed voices out of that room.
Ones position on copyright is completely irrelevant. The president does not have the right to make unilateral decision like this, full stop. It doesn't matter if I agree with the end result or not.
Funnily enough, this idea that the method matters is part of what separates Trump's supporters from sane people.
Reform would be best, abolishment would be better and status quo would be worst. Of course there's always making things even worse... but we're talking about what people want, not what might happen.
Patents are gatekeeping ideas. Two people come up with the same idea independently but one gets a patent and keeps the other from using their own idea.
Copyright is protecting from copy pasting the implementation of the idea.
The Copyright Office doesn't have much to do with copyright enforcement. That's almost entirely hashed out in court. If anything, the office provides one of the few streamlining mechanisms in an unwieldy system by maintaining registration records so you can track down ownership and at least arrange licensing for works that would otherwise represent an unknown rights minefield.
That's a dangerous assumption to make. Dropping staffing levels at the US copyright office doesn't change the law. The next administration (or even this one, given how fickle Trump can be) may ramp up enforcement again and go after people committing violations during the current period.
And it's not like copyright outside the US is a wild west; most national and international copyright regimes in the developed world are based on the US's system (often because the US has strong-armed other countries to comply).
> Dropping staffing levels at the US copyright office doesn't change the law.
We see this at the patent office, where overworked patent examiners leads to more junk patents being granted. Which is utterly backwards, and stems from viewing patents as something the applicant has earned and needing a good justification to deny them the fruits of their labor, and not as what they are - an enormous restriction on everyone else.
At this point it’s a bold assumption they’ll go after people violating anything. It’s become apparent the decade of accusations of “weaponizing government” was a projection and the only people they’ll go after are people they consider enemies, whether they’re breaking any laws or not.
That’s the beautiful part of a puppet Supreme Court, you don’t actually need to worry about the laws, you can just make it up as you go.
They don't have to. youtube and every other company are doing it for them, only without any of that annoying due process or assumption of innocense or burden of proof or right to recourse or any of that stuff a real public legal process should have.
It's being deprecated for billionaires. IP laws are one of the most blatant cases I've seen in this country of wealthy connected people being immune from laws that affect everyone else. I know it happens in many other areas, but usually it's much quieter and less in the public's face.
>I know it happens in many other areas, but usually it's much quieter and less in the public's face.
Not as of late. The Executive office and inauguration were full of it on full display, when the year before they were influencing who gets to run for president. They are sucking as much from the nation as possible while eliminating as many jobs as possible (the main way they get defended).
They got away with a lot by being boring an overall boiling the frog. But the suffering is very explicit and immediate as of late.
There are two broad classes of software people write.
One is general purpose software used by significant numbers of people. This is the sort of software that could be, should be, and often already is open source. Enough people use it to sustain a community around maintaining it, and then you don't have to deal with the overhead and rent seeking incentives created by proprietary software. Obvious advantage: No more ads in the start menu.
The other is custom code. Here "IP protection" is pretty worthless, because the company employing you is the only one that wants or uses the thing, or they're a SaaS company not interested in publishing or licensing the code to anyone else anyway.
Neither of these has a strong need for IP laws and moreover either of them would do fine under a regime where copyright terms last 14 years, there is no extrajudicial DMCA takedown process or anti-circumvention law and software patents don't exist, but you can still sue a company that violates the GPL or fails to pay you for services rendered.
It's more like "you criticize society, but vote for its destruction". It's fine having those views, but it's "curious" how those same views go against the incentive structure for making new technology.
That can be understandable in other communities with diehard FOSS folk. But this place is a a startup incubator. Clearly appealing more to the entrepreneurial side of industry.
without siding with the perspective being voiced, i feel compelled to point out your comment sounds like you believe there is a real alternative to criticize yet participate. even if you attempt to disengage and decide to go live in a cabin in the woods off the grid, the irs and any number of other agencies will go after you and your loved ones for doing basic human things like having and raising kids in a non-sanctioned way. so is there really any practical alternative to just voicing dissent?
That's why I'm not an anti-copyright extremist. I've seen enough examples where the best implementation does not in fact win, but merely the one that put the most money into shoving it into people's eyeballs. Or the most money into scaling up production from a small business' idea.
The rich will still abuse it, but copyright gives smaller creators some channel to fight back with. It's another means to prevent the rich from getting richer without compensating those who helped get them there. It's basically what powers places like YCombinator; Why would someone pay for your pitch instead of hearing it and going to shop for the lowest bidder to implement it?
>Otherwise, everyone loses out so that one individual can artificially collect rent through a government-enforced monopoly.
copyright isn't on ideas, it's on implementation. And experience also tells me there's dozens of ways to skin a sheep. Especially in an industry like tech. You try to rest on your laurels protecting your idea, and someone else will just improve on the idea with a new one.
There can be a few BS copyrighted ideas, but for the most part you are only copyrighting a very small part of how something works. Not the very idea of making a rounded square phone.
> I've seen enough examples where the best implementation does not in fact win, but merely the one that put the most money into shoving it into people's eyeballs.
I thought that was the default?
Are there honestly _any_ examples of the best implementation winning against a solid advertising budget?
Copyright certainly needs improvement but in the direction of protecting individual creators from mass exploitation, not abolishing it to remove one more restriction from what the rich can monetize to get more rich.
Leads to a class system where those who actually create for society are parasitically leeched on by a class whose wealth only exists because of another government enforced monopoly.
If someone's unable to find anyone willing to pay them in advance for their work or purchase a subscription, is their work really creating much value to society?
In fact, if _just taking_ someone else's material possessions (rather than intellectual work) was legal, why would anyone build anything they can't physically protect themselves?
A lot of the people bashing on copyright seem to have no concept of the second order effects abolishing copyright would have and no intention to game it out.
Copyright has issues. For example it protects corporations instead of individual creators and workers. But not having it means rich people who own brands and have access to massive advertising can just take someone's work and make money from it while contributing nothing of value by themselves.
I wonder how many people see themselves as just temporarily embarrassed millionaires so they sympathize with the upper class where they feel like they should belong.
Or they just have no mental model of how incentives work. All this talk about abolishing copyright coming from people whose job literally consists of creating intellectual property. I have never seen one of them try to think it through and come up with the new equilibrium a world without copyright would settle into.
> a) invest more and more energy into self-promotion, advertisement, etc. (zero- or negative-sum games)
How is advertising a book you've written and are selling different than advertising your writing or skills to potential patrons and clients with regard to being negative-sum?
b) flat out give a part of their income to people who are already richer than them?
Who said anything about the relative wealth or patrons and authors? People seem totally willing to subscribe to people whose creative output they value. Sometimes such patronage is barely enough to live, sometimes it's an impressive total sum.
re a) For starters, the difference is you already have a product which people can judge vs you claim you're gonna produce something great. Anybody can lie, some people can lie very well. Even ruling out malice (which many people underestimate), people just end up not keeping their promises. Would you pay GRRM for the finished Winds of winter? Would you fall for him asking for money to write it a few years ago?
re b) An employer ("user") is generally richer than the person they're employing ("using"). The reason they can employ people and people are willing to be employed is because they have access to tools such as trademarks, patents, other employees or advertising budgets the employee ("person used") does not. It's a relationship where power is fundamentally imbalanced.
Ever since I learned that my open source work was stolen and is being resold to me (laundered through statistical algorithms) without any credit or compensation, I stopped writing open source.
Any copy-left code is basically free to be used in closed source software, as long as it's not a verbatim copy? Count me out.
LLMs are used to subvert the spirit of GPL, if not the letter.
That's where I'm at as an author of several popular open source libraries.
That's it, they're in maintenance mode and I'm not releasing anything again in the future.
My model used to be to build products and spin off components into generic open source libraries others could use, and some caught on. Now I'm just keeping them for myself or attempting to monetize them somehow.
Coming to about the same conclusion here. Companies are using my AGPLv3 project without following the license already and enforcing the license seems bleak with not much gain for me.
Now they can just copyright-wash it through AI models.
Before AI, copyright was a way to increase profits for the ruling class, now with AI it’s disadvantageous to keep copyright to the detriment of the petite bourgeoisie (like artists and self-employed software engineers). It’s the rule in capitalism that big capital eats small capital leading to income concentration in fewer and fewer hands.
https://archive.ph/MF378
So, this article describes the sequence of events as the Trump administration attempting to replace the librarian of congress, and Trump's named replacement saying he was replacing the Copyright Register with a Trump DOJ person.
I am not a lawyer but I thought it was pretty well established that (a) the library of congress is part of the legislature, not an executive branch office and (b) that the president can remove some people but can't install people in the other branches without confirmation (e.g. when a SCOTUS justice dies or retires, the president can't name a temporary justice).
https://www.govtrack.us/posts/503/2025-05-13_president-trump...
It's kind of confusing since the LOC serves Congress, but the Librarian of Congress is a President-appointed and Senate-confirmed position. They're supposed to serve for 10-year terms (she was appointed in September 2016) though, and my understanding is it's a open question whether the President can legally fire a LOC before their term is up.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/2/136-1?hl=en-US
I think the "senate-confirmed" part is important and relates to three president's inability to just install a replacement independently. He can remove an official nominated by the president, but he can't unilaterally fill the vacancy (even temporarily ) for positions outside of the executive.
It’s complicated because there are some executive-like functions which have created legal question about it. As always in this kind of debate, remember that Congress could resolve all of this by clearly stating their intention in statute rather than leaving it to the courts to try to balance concerns.
https://www.authorsalliance.org/2025/05/09/carla-hayden-remo...
The President can, in fact, recess appoint a Supreme Court justice per Article II, Section 2, Clause 3[0].
Since the George W. Bush administration, Congress has used pro forma sessions[1] to prevent recess appointments. Both the House and Senate would have to agree on a time to adjourn Congress per Article I, Section 5, Clause 4. If they disagree but one of them wants to adjourn, the President can adjourn them under Article II, Section 3. But no president has ever done this. President Trump talked about doing it to ram through his appointments both in 2020 and last year during the transition period. But so far it hasn't been deemed necessary because the Senate has, surprisingly to me, confirmed his cabinet in a timely manner and without significant pushback even on the less conventionally conservative choices like the DNI and the HHS Secretary. In all likelihood, the threat of adjourning Congress and of using his billion dollars plus of fundraising for 2026 to primary uncooperative Republican members of Congress has forced them to largely fall in line for now.
Recess appointments to the Supreme Court were common in the old days when the Court was less politically contentious. Justice William J. Brennan was recess appointed by Eisenhower and later confirmed by the Senate. A recess appointment who is not confirmed by the Senate would be null and void at the start of the next Congress on January 3rd of the next odd numbered year. I doubt any president would recess appoint a Supreme Court justice today both because it would be likely derail their nomination and also because a recess Justice might get to hear at most 1 term of cases depending on timing. Recess appointing somebody to run the FDA or the Justice Department or even to be a district court judge would be much more useful to a President's agenda.
[0]: "The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session."
[1]: These are sessions where they immediately adjourn by unanimous consent after doing the formalities to open the session. C-SPAN broadcasts them live and they only last a few minutes at most.
The purpose of copyright has evolved from protecting creators to mass oppression.
AI is way better at mass oppression, however, and copyright is a threat to it, so it (copyright) will be dismantled.
Killing off copyrights, if it does, would be a big win for AI.
Meh, AI doesn't have to kill copyrights. The two oppressive systems will find a way to unite into something worse than either of them alone.
The idea of actual AI being used by governments (or just rich people) to spy on everyone, profile them, shape their ideas through targeted manipulation[0] and eliminate undesirable ones through social (destroying reputation), psychological (driving to suicide) or physical (killbots) means is way scarier than being turned into a paperclip.
[0]: Not just or fake videos or comments. Do you have someone on the internet you consider a friend but have never met in person? In the future, rich people or governments will be able to plant ideas in people and influence their thinking by generating fake friends.
> is way scarier than being turned into a paperclip
5 paperclips:
• Iron in an adult: ~5 grams
• Weight of a steel paperclip: ~1 gram
Don't need it anymore. President decides who owns what now, supreme court will confirm it sometime next week.
You're going to have to expand on that because I'm out of the loop.
I’m not sure if the comment below is alluding to this, but search for Project 2025. Robert Reich has published some informative articles in the Guardian newspaper, but plenty of other sources.
Start by reading up on who won the November 2024 US presidential election and then read https://bsky.app/profile/stevevladeck.bsky.social.
I see so nothing concrete happened and this is just speculation.
Exactly, what happened to the libertarian spirit of HN?
Isn’t this what this website has always wanted?
"This website" is a diverse bunch of people with diverse goals and policy positions. Please don't make generalizations.
Copyright in its current form is ridiculous, but I support some (much-pared-back) version of copyright that limits rights further, expands fair use, repeals the DMCA, and reduces the copyright term to something on the order of 15-20 years (perhaps with a renewal option as with patents).
I've released a lot of software under the GPL, and the GPL in its current form couldn't exist without copyright.
The top comment in this thread is about deprecating copyright
And the dumb strawman the post is answering to isnt.
Current copyright is too strong in terms of length but too weak in terms of derived work. Well, pending some lawsuits, perhaps.
What copyright should do is protect individual creators, not corporations. And it should protect them even if their work is mixed through complex statistical algorithms such as LLMs.
LLMs wouldn't be possible without _trillions_ of hours of work by people writing books, code, music, etc. they are trained on. The _millions_ of hours of work spent on the training algorithm itself, the chat interface, the scraping scripts, etc. is barely a drop in the bucket.
There is 0 reason the people who spent mere millions of hours of work should get all the reward without giving anything to the rest of the world who put in trillions of hours.
Indefinite royalties on Spotify are one thing, but how are they supposed to work in neural nets? Dividing equal share based on inputs would require the company to potentially expose proprietary information. Basing it on outputs could make sense as well I suppose, but would take some slightly ridiculous work for an arguable result.
Your point remains, but the problem of the division of responsibility and financial credit doesn't go away with that alone. Do you know if the openAI lawsuits have laid this out?
>how are they supposed to work in neural nets?
It can be as simple as "you cannot train on someone's work for commercial uses without a license", It can be as complex as setting up some sort of model like Spotify based on the numbers of time the LLM references those works for what it's generating. The devil's in the details, but the problem itself isn't new.
>Dividing equal share based on inputs would require the company to potentially expose proprietary information.
I find this defense ironic, given the fact that a lot of this debate revolves around defining copyright infringement. The works being trained on are infringed upon, but we might give too many details about the tech used to siphon all these IP's? Tragic.
>Do you know if the openAI lawsuits have laid this out?
IANAL, but my understanding of high profile cases is going more towards the "you can't train on this" litigation over the "how do we setup a payment model" sorts. If that's correct, we're pretty far out from considering that.
I admit, rewarding work fairly is very difficult with perfect information, much more with proprietary models and training data.
With code, some licenses are compatible, for example you could take a model trained on GPL and MIT code, and use it to produce GPL code. (The resulting model would _of course_ also be a derivative work licensed under the GPL.) That satisfies the biggest elephant in the room - giving users their rights to inspect and modify the code. Giving credit to individual authors is more difficult though.
I haven't been following the lawsuits much, I am powerless to influence them and having written my fair share of GPL and AGPL code, this whole LLM thing feels like being spat in the face.
Your approach will be completely untenable in future when we'll have embodied LLMs capable of dynamically learning (live weight updates). It'd make it illegal for such a machine to read any book, watch any movie or browse any webpage, because it could potentially memorise and regurgitate the content. Which would be completely impossible to enforce.
LLMs are stalled out in progress as is. We can burn that bridge of GAI when it becomes more than a twinkle in the eyes of investor board meetings.
Given how it's going, I hope you're right.
BTW, I like that you spell it GAI. General artificial intelligence feels more natural to say. I wonder if there's some rule of english I don't know which makes AGI more correct or if all the highly educated people are just trying to avoid sounding like they're saying "gay".
Please, don't anthropomorphize it. A model does not "read" a book - an algorithm updates weights which are _based on_ (therefore derivative work) existing training data. Basing them on more work performed by other people does not make it less derivative.
It's not only about regurgitation verbatim. Doing that just means it gets caught more easily.
LLMs are just another way the uber rich try to exploit everyone, hoping that if they exploit every single person's work just a little, they will get away with it.
Nobody is 1000x more productive than the average programmer at writing code. There is no reason somebody should make 1000x more money from it either.
> A model does not "read" a book - an algorithm updates weights which are _based on_ (therefore derivative work) existing training data. Basing them on more work performed by other people does not make it less derivative.
This isn't really how derivative works operate.
If you read Harry Potter and you decide you want to write a book about how Harry and Hermione grow up and become professors at Hogwarts, that's probably going to be a derivative work.
If you read Harry Potter and decide you want to write a book about a little Korean girl who lives with abusive parents but has a knack for science and crawls her way out of that family by inventing things for an eccentric businessman, is that a derivative of Harry Potter? Probably not, even if that was the inspiration for it.
To be a derivative work it has to be pretty similar to the original. That's actually the test, it's based on similarity. Causing it to not be one is done exactly by mixing it with so many other things that it's no longer sufficiently like any of them.
Let's differentiate
- how things work now vs how they should work - and also how it works when a human does something vs when a an LLM is used to generate something imitating the human work.
A human has limited time and memory. Human time is valuable, computer time is not. Memorizing something by a human takes time.
When a human is inspired by a work and writes something based on that, he invests a lot of time and energy into it. Therefore people have decided that this creative output should be protected by the law.
Also a human is limited by how much he can remember from the original work. Even if writing what you described, he would inevitably fall back on his own life experiences, opinions, attitude, ways of thinking, etc.
When an LLM is used, it generated a statistical mashup of works it ingested during training. No part of this process has any intrinsic value. It literally only costs what the electricity does. And it's almost infinitely scalable. The law might not call it derivative because it was written at a time where this kind of mechanical derivation was not feasible.
Simplistically yes, because many see copyright as the thing that protects corporate interest from the social hacker.
The reality of course is more complicated. Without copyright there's no GPL. Which I guess is fine if you're in the OSS camp more than the FSF camp. MIT and BSD licenses basically (functionally) give up copyright.
Copyright is also what allows for hybrids like the BSL which protect "little guys" from large cloud providers like AWS etc.
Copyright allows VC startups to at least start out life as Open Source (before pivoting later.)
Of course thus is all in the context of software copyright. Other copyrights (music, books etc) are equally nuanced.
And there are other forms of IP protections as well (patents, trademarks) which are distinct from the copyright concept.
So no, I don't think most people here are against copyright (patents are a different story.)
GPL was always about fighting the system with its own tools. The end goal is not good licenses but free software as a baseline.
How else would you enforce Free Software, though? Without copyright, I cannot release the source to my software and require anything of any recipient.
It would be nice of FOSS was the baseline, but I don't see that ever happening, especially in a world without an enforcement mechanism.
That's the thing you don't need to enforce anything if there is no law which forbids you from doing things. It's the copyright law which restricts you from doing most of the things that GPL license gives you permission. GPL gives you back the rights to copy, modify, create derivative works and redistribute any GPL licensed software you receive. Without copyright law you could copy, modify, create derivative works and redistribute any software you receive.
Sure having source code would be nice, but then again half the software nowadays is using electron and written in javascript anyway. Also plenty of examples of hardware manufacturers using software/firmware copyright as excuse and making legal threats to people who have made their own software to control hardware they bought even though they didn't have access to original source code.
There are probably more examples of people reverse engineering an reimplementing or decompiling large nontrivial software than there examples of companies making their whole software open source due to using a GPL licensed library (as opposed to avoiding the GPL licensed code or violating the GPL by not releasing the source code).
> you don't need to enforce anything if there is no law which forbids you from doing things
This is extend-and-extinguish on rails. Raise capital, hire a team to fork a public project, develop is closed and only release inscrutable blobs. Add a marketing budget and you get to piggyback on the open-source project while keeping the monetisation.
You release that blob what stops others just copying it?
> You release that blob what stops others just copying it?
Obfuscation techniques. Compatibility updates. Hell, hardware-enforced DRM.
Those things work against hobbyists, sometimes, temporarily, if the hobbyists are busy with other things or not very enterprising.
Do they work against Red Hat or Intel or Google or Mozilla, once those organizations can openly distribute the reconstructed code they've assigned full-time people to decompile? For that matter, what stops any government from doing it to any foreign company?
Which hardware company is going to build your DRM if there is no law you can use to stop the same company from also selling circumvention tools, or stopping anyone else (including major corporations) from extracting keys and selling them openly?
> companies making their whole software open source due to using a GPL licensed library
Does not mean that GPL is ineffective. IT forces them to reimplement the functionality, thus giving copyleft more time to compete with them. Imagine if they were to free to take all public code and just use it. They would always be ahead and open source products wouldn't stand a chance competing.
Not to mention I feel like GPL being so strong is why big companies pretend to love open source but permissive licenses so much - to drown out the GPL competition they hate so much and to attract more developers to permissive rather than copyleft open source projects.
1. I'm OK with no GPL if there's no copyright, because then proprietary programs can be copied and reverse engineered without restrictions from law or EULAs.
2. I generally don't like the BSL.
3. No comment. I think OSS projects that exist incidentally versus being the company's main product have always been more reliable (and less susceptible to the company pivoting to closed-only offerings).
4. Copyright has perhaps been the most evil in the music industry; books, less so. I'd rather not even talk about movies or TV right now. Nonetheless, I'd tolerate an extremely limited duration copyright, if no copyright at all isn't an option.
5. Trademarks are mostly fine, because they're primarily supposed to serve customers, not the companies. I'd like to get rid of patents now, however.
No? Copyright reform, sure, copyright abolished, maybe, but an uncertain future which may result in worse laws overall? Not really.
Also consider that Thomas and Alito dissented in the Google/Oracle ruling, and wrote something inflammatory, to the effect of it being unreasonable that Google was being allowed to infringe upon Oracle's copyrighted code (by implementing a compatible API). And that was before the Supreme Court was stacked with more like-minded people.
Not having sensible people steering copyright in a direction toward winding down its scope is being paired with a court that's likely to make it far more draconian, and create some massive problems that will be a problem for software development.
"This website" is a sweeping statement for a group of people who have a wide range of views on this.
If I was to guess, I would imagine most on here believe in some copyright, and not total anarchy.
My experience on this website gives me the opposite impression. People more or less want to grab whatever they can and try to build and sell on top of it.
Reform comes through legislation, not through executive incompetence and malfeasance.
There's a huge difference between "We don't want copyrights" and "We're just going to have no one enforcing laws for a random period of time and it's unknown if there will be historic enforcement activities if/when that changes"
Copyright is mostly privately enforced. The USPTO being dysfunctional doesn’t prevent me from suing someone for infringement, it just sucks informed voices out of that room.
Ones position on copyright is completely irrelevant. The president does not have the right to make unilateral decision like this, full stop. It doesn't matter if I agree with the end result or not.
Funnily enough, this idea that the method matters is part of what separates Trump's supporters from sane people.
Reform would be best, abolishment would be better and status quo would be worst. Of course there's always making things even worse... but we're talking about what people want, not what might happen.
You're confusing Copyright (implementation) with Patent (idea).
We don't like gatekeeping ideas because many people have the same ideas.
I don't think anyone is gatekeepign ideas. There's plenty of them, they're a dime a dozen.
Implementation: yes, that should be protected. People seem to not like that here, though.
Patents are gatekeeping ideas. Two people come up with the same idea independently but one gets a patent and keeps the other from using their own idea.
Copyright is protecting from copy pasting the implementation of the idea.
Not this way
Copyright is finally being deprecated as it should be.
I'm still waiting for an update on the final removal timeline.
The Copyright Office doesn't have much to do with copyright enforcement. That's almost entirely hashed out in court. If anything, the office provides one of the few streamlining mechanisms in an unwieldy system by maintaining registration records so you can track down ownership and at least arrange licensing for works that would otherwise represent an unknown rights minefield.
> Copyright is finally being deprecated as it should be.
If you hide behind corporations and have millions of dollars, sure, but not for us normies it isn't.
That's a dangerous assumption to make. Dropping staffing levels at the US copyright office doesn't change the law. The next administration (or even this one, given how fickle Trump can be) may ramp up enforcement again and go after people committing violations during the current period.
And it's not like copyright outside the US is a wild west; most national and international copyright regimes in the developed world are based on the US's system (often because the US has strong-armed other countries to comply).
> Dropping staffing levels at the US copyright office doesn't change the law.
We see this at the patent office, where overworked patent examiners leads to more junk patents being granted. Which is utterly backwards, and stems from viewing patents as something the applicant has earned and needing a good justification to deny them the fruits of their labor, and not as what they are - an enormous restriction on everyone else.
> go after people committing violations
At this point it’s a bold assumption they’ll go after people violating anything. It’s become apparent the decade of accusations of “weaponizing government” was a projection and the only people they’ll go after are people they consider enemies, whether they’re breaking any laws or not.
That’s the beautiful part of a puppet Supreme Court, you don’t actually need to worry about the laws, you can just make it up as you go.
How does the copyright office enforce the law?
They don't have to. youtube and every other company are doing it for them, only without any of that annoying due process or assumption of innocense or burden of proof or right to recourse or any of that stuff a real public legal process should have.
It's being deprecated for billionaires. IP laws are one of the most blatant cases I've seen in this country of wealthy connected people being immune from laws that affect everyone else. I know it happens in many other areas, but usually it's much quieter and less in the public's face.
>I know it happens in many other areas, but usually it's much quieter and less in the public's face.
Not as of late. The Executive office and inauguration were full of it on full display, when the year before they were influencing who gets to run for president. They are sucking as much from the nation as possible while eliminating as many jobs as possible (the main way they get defended).
They got away with a lot by being boring an overall boiling the frog. But the suffering is very explicit and immediate as of late.
Software engineers and tech workers will make their living off producing IP then say shit like this.
There are two broad classes of software people write.
One is general purpose software used by significant numbers of people. This is the sort of software that could be, should be, and often already is open source. Enough people use it to sustain a community around maintaining it, and then you don't have to deal with the overhead and rent seeking incentives created by proprietary software. Obvious advantage: No more ads in the start menu.
The other is custom code. Here "IP protection" is pretty worthless, because the company employing you is the only one that wants or uses the thing, or they're a SaaS company not interested in publishing or licensing the code to anyone else anyway.
Neither of these has a strong need for IP laws and moreover either of them would do fine under a regime where copyright terms last 14 years, there is no extrajudicial DMCA takedown process or anti-circumvention law and software patents don't exist, but you can still sue a company that violates the GPL or fails to pay you for services rendered.
> You criticize society and yet you participate in it. How curious.
It's more like "you criticize society, but vote for its destruction". It's fine having those views, but it's "curious" how those same views go against the incentive structure for making new technology.
That can be understandable in other communities with diehard FOSS folk. But this place is a a startup incubator. Clearly appealing more to the entrepreneurial side of industry.
without siding with the perspective being voiced, i feel compelled to point out your comment sounds like you believe there is a real alternative to criticize yet participate. even if you attempt to disengage and decide to go live in a cabin in the woods off the grid, the irs and any number of other agencies will go after you and your loved ones for doing basic human things like having and raising kids in a non-sanctioned way. so is there really any practical alternative to just voicing dissent?
The alternative is corporations stealing your work with no recourse.
Yes. I am an anti-copyright extremist.
May the best implementation win.
Otherwise, everyone loses out so that one individual can artificially collect rent through a government-enforced monopoly.
Accelerate.
That's why I'm not an anti-copyright extremist. I've seen enough examples where the best implementation does not in fact win, but merely the one that put the most money into shoving it into people's eyeballs. Or the most money into scaling up production from a small business' idea.
The rich will still abuse it, but copyright gives smaller creators some channel to fight back with. It's another means to prevent the rich from getting richer without compensating those who helped get them there. It's basically what powers places like YCombinator; Why would someone pay for your pitch instead of hearing it and going to shop for the lowest bidder to implement it?
>Otherwise, everyone loses out so that one individual can artificially collect rent through a government-enforced monopoly.
copyright isn't on ideas, it's on implementation. And experience also tells me there's dozens of ways to skin a sheep. Especially in an industry like tech. You try to rest on your laurels protecting your idea, and someone else will just improve on the idea with a new one.
There can be a few BS copyrighted ideas, but for the most part you are only copyrighting a very small part of how something works. Not the very idea of making a rounded square phone.
> I've seen enough examples where the best implementation does not in fact win, but merely the one that put the most money into shoving it into people's eyeballs.
I thought that was the default?
Are there honestly _any_ examples of the best implementation winning against a solid advertising budget?
Copyright certainly needs improvement but in the direction of protecting individual creators from mass exploitation, not abolishing it to remove one more restriction from what the rich can monetize to get more rich.
I write novels. What am I supposed to do to earn in this new, copyright-free regime where anyone is free to “implement” my novels?
Attract an audience and ask for patronage or get a job writing on behalf of an employer.
Leads to a class system where those who actually create for society are parasitically leeched on by a class whose wealth only exists because of another government enforced monopoly.
It's called feudalism. The lords have a monopoly not just on the means of production, they own the full stack of society and economy in their domain.
> those who actually create for society
If someone's unable to find anyone willing to pay them in advance for their work or purchase a subscription, is their work really creating much value to society?
Why would someone that is somewhat constrained w.r.t. spending pay for something they would get for free?
In fact, if _just taking_ someone else's material possessions (rather than intellectual work) was legal, why would anyone build anything they can't physically protect themselves?
A lot of the people bashing on copyright seem to have no concept of the second order effects abolishing copyright would have and no intention to game it out.
Copyright has issues. For example it protects corporations instead of individual creators and workers. But not having it means rich people who own brands and have access to massive advertising can just take someone's work and make money from it while contributing nothing of value by themselves.
We had a few very violent revolutions and civil wars to get out of feudalism and patronage, and I can't believe how many techies want to take us back.
I wonder how many people see themselves as just temporarily embarrassed millionaires so they sympathize with the upper class where they feel like they should belong.
Or they just have no mental model of how incentives work. All this talk about abolishing copyright coming from people whose job literally consists of creating intellectual property. I have never seen one of them try to think it through and come up with the new equilibrium a world without copyright would settle into.
So basically instead of doing real work (positive sum games - producing value), everyone has to either:
a) invest more and more energy into self-promotion, advertisement, etc. (zero- or negative-sum games)
or
b) flat out give a part of their income to people who are already richer than them?
> a) invest more and more energy into self-promotion, advertisement, etc. (zero- or negative-sum games)
How is advertising a book you've written and are selling different than advertising your writing or skills to potential patrons and clients with regard to being negative-sum?
b) flat out give a part of their income to people who are already richer than them?
Who said anything about the relative wealth or patrons and authors? People seem totally willing to subscribe to people whose creative output they value. Sometimes such patronage is barely enough to live, sometimes it's an impressive total sum.
re a) For starters, the difference is you already have a product which people can judge vs you claim you're gonna produce something great. Anybody can lie, some people can lie very well. Even ruling out malice (which many people underestimate), people just end up not keeping their promises. Would you pay GRRM for the finished Winds of winter? Would you fall for him asking for money to write it a few years ago?
re b) An employer ("user") is generally richer than the person they're employing ("using"). The reason they can employ people and people are willing to be employed is because they have access to tools such as trademarks, patents, other employees or advertising budgets the employee ("person used") does not. It's a relationship where power is fundamentally imbalanced.
Downwards acceleration is free
Ever since I learned that my open source work was stolen and is being resold to me (laundered through statistical algorithms) without any credit or compensation, I stopped writing open source.
Any copy-left code is basically free to be used in closed source software, as long as it's not a verbatim copy? Count me out.
LLMs are used to subvert the spirit of GPL, if not the letter.
That's where I'm at as an author of several popular open source libraries.
That's it, they're in maintenance mode and I'm not releasing anything again in the future.
My model used to be to build products and spin off components into generic open source libraries others could use, and some caught on. Now I'm just keeping them for myself or attempting to monetize them somehow.
Coming to about the same conclusion here. Companies are using my AGPLv3 project without following the license already and enforcing the license seems bleak with not much gain for me.
Now they can just copyright-wash it through AI models.
Before AI, copyright was a way to increase profits for the ruling class, now with AI it’s disadvantageous to keep copyright to the detriment of the petite bourgeoisie (like artists and self-employed software engineers). It’s the rule in capitalism that big capital eats small capital leading to income concentration in fewer and fewer hands.