Comment by baranul | Hacker News Reader

Comment by baranul | Hacker News Reader

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Basically, AI has turned everything into open-source. People are likely to not buy your product because: (1) they can get it for free (2) ask AI to reverse engineer whatever you put out (3) they have no money (as out of work or AI putting them out of work soon).

The only winner (kind of), is the AI companies, with "token addicts" and subscription fees. But even that is in doubt, because of the data center debt[1][2] many are in and artificially low prices (to create addicts).

Unless laws are put up quickly to protect IP, which is doubtful (as courts and politicians are mostly clueless about technology), this has become the new weird reality.

[1] https://archive.ph/wWY2g (Investors dump data centre bonds as AI borrowers face ‘Darwin moment’)

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KChHY1kDOFQ (AI Bubble | Ed Zitron)

> Unless laws are put up quickly to protect IP

Protect IP from what? The fundamentals of the situation have not changed. The only difference now is that the models are doing the work.

Replace 'models' with 'humans', and you get bog-standard RE. The models just accelerated the timeline where this scenario would've happened.

The solution you propose already exists in its primitive form: It's called Section 1201 of the DMCA. What you're asking for extends that protection to the whole program, not just the DRM, and thus killing all of reverse engineering altogether.

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Copyright as it exists is no different than real estate: Landowners extracting rent from properties they own, in exchange for promises on routine maintenance & upgrades.

What we have now is a machine that can look at a building & remake it to at least 90+% similarity, given enough iterations.

And we're discussing about banning the machine.

Actually, there are also protections against reverse engineering in many software licenses, so that goes to court under various contract laws.

No matter which laws are used in the attempt to protect IP, it requires lawyers and going to court, and the little guys will usually have neither the money or time to fight.

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