Hacker News Reader

Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

This claim of contradiction has never worked for me.

Let say person A wants everyone to be rich.

Person B plots a plan to make themself rich and everyone else poorer.

One can make an argument that any action by A is now a contradiction. If they work with B, it makes a lot of people poorer and not richer. If they work against B, B do not get rich.

However this is not a contradiction. If a company use training data in ways that reduce and harm other peoples ability to access information, like hiding attribution or misrepresenting the data and sources, people who advocate for free information can have a consistent view and also work against such use. It is not a shift. It is only a shift if we believe that copyright will be removed, works will be given to the public for free, and companies will no longer try to hide and protect creative works and information.

View on HN

You can certainly argue second-order effects (ie. we have to restrict information to save information), but the movie studios were making that same argument at the time:

> If copyright can no longer protect the distribution of the work they produce, who will invest immense sums to create films or any other creative material of the kind we now take for granted? Do the thieves really expect new music and movies to continue pouring forth if the artists and companies behind them are not paid for their work?

--Jack Valenti, Motion Picture Association of America, 2000 (https://archive.is/PBy7C)

It sounds remarkably similar to what people concerned about AI say today. How do we make sure that artists get paid?

I don't think many hackers found the argument compelling at the time.

You're taking Jack Valenti at face value. He said "we're here to protect the artists" because the artists were popular and the record labels were not. He was in the business of protecting the labels and screwing the artists and everyone knew it.

The artists were certainly making more money from the studios and record labels than they got from the authors of DeCSS, Napster, BitTorrent, The Pirate Bay, etc.

When Gillian Welch wrote "Everything is Free" in 2001, she wasn't complaining about the record companies, she was complaining about Napster.

> Q: Do you remember where you were when you wrote “Everything is Free”?

> A: I do. I remember exactly where I was and what was going on. It was when Napster was starting to decimate the traditional recording industry dynamic, the viability of making your livelihood [from] your art.

--Gillian Welch, 2018 (https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/gillian-we...)

Most artists were making way more money off the fans (even those downloading music) via touring and merch sales, than they were making off of the labels from residuals. Most were not making anything from residuals.

Valenti was desperate to enlist musicians because people hated the labels and did not feel bad about stealing from them. But the vast majority of musicians were not willing to back the labels against the fans. The few he managed to enlist, like Metallica were notable because they were exceptions. And the fact that they were already rich and already at the end of there career was noted by many at the time.

In contrast you have, for instance, Courtney Love who wrote a widely-distributed essay about how she and most artists make almost nothing from record sales.

https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/

It's an interesting essay, and the TLC case does sound pretty egregious. But the premise is undermined by the fact that Love is worth an estimated $100M today, largely thanks to owning Nirvana's publishing rights, which she inherited from Kurt Cobain.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com