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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

IMO it is sad that the sort of… anti-establishment side of tech has suddenly become very worried about copyright. Bits inherently can be copied for free (or at least very cheap), copyright is a way to induce scarcity for the market to exploit where there isn’t any on a technical level.

Currently the AI stuff kind of sucks because you have to be a giant corp to train a model. But maybe in a decade, users will be able to train their own models or at least fine-tune on basic cellphone and laptop (not dgpu) chips.

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> IMO it is sad that the sort of… anti-establishment side of tech has suddenly become very worried about copyright

It shouldn't be too surprising that anti-establishment folks are more concerned with trillion-dollar companies subsuming and profiting from the work of independent artists, writers, developers, etc., than with individual people taking IP owned by multimillion/billion-dollar companies. Especially when many of the companies in the latter group are infamous for passing only a tiny portion of the money charged onto the people doing the actual creative work.

This.

Tech still acts like it's the scrappy underdog, the computer in the broom cupboard where "the net" is a third space separate from reality, nerds and punks writing 16-bit games.

That ceased to be materially true around twenty years ago now. Once Facebook and smart phones arrived, computing touched every aspect of peoples' lives. When tech is all-pervasive, the internal logic and culture of tech isn't sufficient to describe or understand what matters.

IMO this is looking at it through a lens which considers “tech” a single group. Which is a way of looking at is, maybe even the best way. But an alternative could be: in the battle between scrappy underdog and centralized sellout tech, the sellouts are winning.

> in the battle between scrappy underdog and centralized sellout tech, the sellouts are

Winning by what metric?

Copyright is the right to get a return from creative work. The physical ease - or otherwise - of copying is absolutely irrelevant to this. So is scarcity.

It's also orthogonal to the current corporate dystopia which is using monopoly power to enclose the value of individual work from the other end - precisely by inserting itself into the process of physical distribution.

None of this matters if you have a true abundance economy, but we don't. Pretending we do for purely selfish reasons - "I want this, and I don't see why I should pay the creator for it" - is no different to all the other ways that employers stiff their employees.

I don't mean it's analogous, I mean it's exactly the same entitled mindset which is having such a catastrophic effect on everything at the moment.

> IMO it is sad that the sort of… anti-establishment side of tech has suddenly become very worried about copyright.

Remember Napster? Like how rebellious was that shit? Those times are what a true social upsetting tech looks like.

You cannot even import a video into OpenAI’s Sora without agreeing to a four (five?) checkbox terms & conditions screen. These LLM’s come out of the box neutered by corporate lawyers and various other safety weenies.

This shit isn’t real until there are mainsteam media articles expressing outrage because some “dangerous group of dark web hackers finished training a model at home that very high school student on the planet can use to cheat on their homework” or something like that. Basically it ain’t real until it actually challenges The Man. That isn’t happening until this tech is able to be trained and inferenced from home computers.

Yeah, or if it becomes possible to train on a peer-to-peer network somehow. (I’m sure there’s researching going on in that direction). Hopefully that sort of thing comes out of the mix.

The copyright question is inherently tied to the requirement to earn money from your labor in this economy. I think the anti-establishment folks are not so rabid that they can't recognize real material conditions.

I think that would be a more valid argument if they ever cared about automating away jobs before. As it stands, anyone who was standing in the way of the glorious march of automation towards a post-scarcity future was called a luddite - right up until that automation started threatening their (material) class.

I mean, you don't have to look any further than the (justified) lack of sympathy to dockworkers just a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41704618

The solution is not, and never has been, to shack up with the capital-c Capitalists in defense of copyright. It's to push for a system where having your "work" automated away is a relief, not a death sentence.

There's both "is" and "ought" components to this conversation and we would do well to disambiguate them.

I would engage with those people you're stereotyping rather than gossiping in a comments section, I suspect you will find their ideologies quite consistent once you tease out the details.

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