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Comment by jkepler | Hacker News Reader

Imagine we're a primitive people in a forest village. If I steal your ax, that's theft. However, if I see your ax, and make my own ax based on your idea, did I steal anything from you?

In the 2nd scenarios above, you may have to work harder in your woodchopping business, as I'm now competition, but doesn't that mean that the villagers benefit from better access (cheaper prices) to wood-chopping services?

We currently define ideas as property. But is that ethically defensible? Now, if I claim to have originated the ax idea, I'm maybe stealing your brand or reputation. I should have to give credit to you for the idea of an ax, but I don't see how making a copy is theft. Ideas are not scarce; they're inherently shareable.

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Well lucky us we don't live in a primitive society, and that's basically the point of this whole debate.

> you may have to work harder in your woodchopping business, as I'm now competition

So China copying our products is good, because we now have competition?

My comment is regarding whether ideas fall in the same category as physical goods. Ideas are fundamentally different, in that they're non-scarce unless we make them scarce via intellectual property laws. And I question whether those laws really promote human flourishing, or whether they simply protect whoever is close to the government.

Regarding China, copying without attribution should be prosecuted as a form of reputational or brand fraud, as it fails to give credit to others for the idea. And sure, under existing intellectual property laws many Chinese firms ought to be prosecuted and held accountable---I don't advocate breaking existing laws.

I simply think that the laws out to be brought into better alignment with reality, and ideas simply aren't scarce (at least in how economics considers scarcity).

> as it fails to give credit to others for the idea

That is precisely the issue at hand.

> Ideas are fundamentally different

But that's essentially what products are. It's not like chinese companies take a product and clone it, they take the idea of how to make a product look like and work and implement it. Same applies to code, art, books. OpenAI takes those products, the results of ideas, modify them and resell them without attribution or without having paid a license. That's simply theft.

> Ideas are fundamentally different, in that they're non-scarce unless we make them scarce via intellectual property laws.

Is code an idea? Is the corpus of Github an idea?

Also, assuming you're writing from a United States perspective, part of the reason so much of our manufacturing sector was outsourced to China (and other nations) is that since 1971 the US dollar has been our primary export, as the global reserve currency among all the fiat currencies. This is starting to change, so I think we'll see more and more manufacturing returning to the USA as the dollar looses international reserve status. And I wonder to what extended Chinese copying our technologies is connected to macro monetary realities.

It will be generally good for the world, for American manufacturing, workers, businesses, and families---pretty much for all except Wall Street banks and those close to the government money spigots.

I am writing from a european perspective as we share common problems caused by countries copying our products and ideas. Now it would appear that the US wants to do the same but for intellectual work. That's not nice to put it mildly. I think licensing data, expensive as it may be, would eventually lead to higher quality ai and healthier growth. At the moment this whole campaign of promoting openai's products, and those of similar companies, appears to be focused on: 1) i'll take your products (books, art, software, music) 2) resell them 3) put you out of a job.

That's precisely what malicious actors such as China have done. Not only are we swamped with lower quality products, but as you wrote, we are also facing significant social and economic issues. This time at an unprecedented scale.

Your solution will definitely employ a lot of lawyers! A strange utopia of full employment

> So China copying our products is good, because we now have competition?

Yes? Isn't that the entire point of the market driving innovation and improving things over time?

Let's try the opposite: Why is China copying foreign products bad? And to whom?

So if you don’t believe in IP protection, how come Open AI are allowed to have their weights and training methods secret ?

I’m aware you might think that their approach sucks too but we can’t have it both ways.

Same rules have to be applied across the board.

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