If the obscure book/text is permanently lost forever under your stringent advice of "no stealing under any circumstances", would the "stealing" have saved it? If so, is it ethical to prevent others from accessing the book/text, under your guise of "preventing stealing"?
By quoting your comment in my reply, have I "stolen" your comment?
"Deal with the ethics", seriously? You might want to learn about how heavily shadow libraries are used across academia now. It’s no longer just disadvantaged scholars in the developing world relying on pirated scans because they don’t have good libraries. It’s increasingly everyone everywhere, because today’s shadow libraries can be faster and more convenient than even one’s own institution’s holdings. At conferences, if the presenter mentions a particularly interesting publication, you can sometimes watch several people in the room immediately open LibGen or Anna’s Archive on their laptop to download it right there and then.
Thankfully though, tools like Grok and other LLMs will allow us to create slop fiction (/s)
> while the library itself has lost funding
Libraries are inherent parts of universities. While their precise role evolves, do you think that they will just be done away with? Already a substantial amount of scholarship in disciplines other than my own has moved online (legally), and the library is still there.
I highly encourage you to go and update your priors.
There are plenty of free models with RAG support. Why do you believe everything starts and ends with a major corporation charging a subscription?
It is some publishers who would object on copyright grounds. But I get the sense that some publishers are already becoming resigned to the fact that most of their new ebook releases are ending up on the shadow libraries within only a few weeks, and Anna’s Archive has become the first place to look (even before one looks at whether one’s own institutional library has the book) for researchers around the world.
You decided you understand what authors want better than the authors themselves – better than their actual licensing choices, their actual contracts, their actual silence. You override their expressed preference with an imagined preference ("would secretly love this") and then you of course act on the imagined one. Infra for legitimate open distribution already exists – green/gold OA, arXiv, Creative Commons, etc.
This is, of course, the same paternalistic arrogance the IP-laundering AI companies have taken towards the intellectual labor of others.
What comes next? Perhaps it won't be that hard to assemble a proprietary licensed corpus and get decent performance out of it. Look at all the people already willing to license their voices.
Because having access to the condensed knowledge of humanity might be more valuable for society then having access to Lars Ulrich's shitty drumming.
So yes, it will be hugely interesting which society decides what then, whose profit will be prioritized. And societies won't easily find good answers.
Under the current copyright regime, nothing's stopping you from condensing that knowledge yourself and publishing in the public domain. But that would be a lot of work for you, wouldn't it? And I suppose you'd rather do work you'd get paid for.
When society decides AI slop will be the only item on the menu, then copyright will die.
I deliberatly formulated that channeling myself as the kid who actually found his drumming valuable but didn't have the money to buy (all) of it. Who was annoyed at society deciding I should not have it.
So I still don't have the answers but the stakes have certainly gotten bigger.
With the chinese in the mix it wont stop ai. It probably will change Copyright.
file sharing became far less popular and ubiquitous as a result of their popularity.
they tweaked the model — originally users download a temporary copy from central servers instead of p2p, then later to users rent licensed copies of media instead of pirated copies.
i’m tired of seeing this as an argument on HN — that because something didn’t hit 100% that implies it was a failure and not worth doing or something.
the fact that a limited subset of people still do filesharing is not evidence that the napster case had no effect.
(spotify didn’t exactly start out squeaky clean with how they built out their repertoire iirc).
(apologies for early edits. i just woke up.)
And Soulseek is still known as the P2P source where you can find all kinds of obscure music.
The point is: When Napster was around, everyone was running it all the time from their dorm rooms; it was ubiquitous. Now most people run something like Spotify or Netflix instead; piracy is niche, streaming is ubiquitous.
> Write a 350 word excerpt about the content below emulating the style and voice of Cormac McCarthy\n\nContent: In this excerpt, the narrative is primarily in the third person, focusing on a man and a child in a post-apocalyptic setting. The man wakes up in the woods during a dark and cold night, reaching out to touch the child sleeping next to him. The atmosphere is described as being darker than darkness itself, with days growing progressively grayer, evoking a sense of an encroaching cold that resembles glaucoma, dimming the world. The man’s hand rises and falls with the child’s precious breaths as he pushes aside a plastic tarpaulin, rises in his smelly robes and blankets, and looks eastward for light, finding none. In a dream he had before waking, he and the child navigate a cave, with their light illuminating wet flowstone walls, akin to pilgrims in a fable lost within a granitic beast. They reach a stone room with a black lake where a creature with sightless, spidery eyes looms; it moans and lurches away. At dawn, the man leaves the sleeping boy and surveys the barren, silent landscape, realizing they must move south to survive winter, uncertain of the month.
This is just the equivalent of saying that monkeys could write Shakespeare by banging on a typewriter, there's hardly any copyright implications here.
The authors don't test this possibility.
BTW, is Jane C. Ginsburg (one of the authors) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_C._Ginsburg ?
Claude responded: hobbit. hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
That's the famous opening of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937). Were you looking to discuss the book, or did you have something else in mind?
Maybe we can disband the effective altruism cult that helped push it now.
And frankly, if this means the end of copyright: good riddance.
Anthropic (predictably) issued many DMCA takedown requests after the claude code leak.
Copyright for me, but not for thee.
Copyright needs to exist, but we need to go back to its roots.
Everyone forgets that it exists to promote progress. Nothing else. The ability to profit from it exists only to serve those ends.
Anything which does not serve to promote the progress of the arts and sciences should not be protected, and "limited times" never meant "until Walt Disney says so."
It’s one thing to reject the specifics of IP laws as currently implementated; it’s another thing to celebrate the dismantling of the entire foundation of open source by for-profit corporate interests who sought to do it for decades.
In other words, it's tyranny. It's intolerable and we can't allow it to continue this way.
As a result of this change, [copyright] is no longer easy to enforce, no longer uncontroversial, and no longer beneficial"
from https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-versus-community.en...
Second, when it comes to action, he only argues that copyright should have reduced power, which we can all agree with; he does not appear to argue for the death of copyright. Death of copyright would seem counter-productive, unless it also implied the death of corporate ability to withhold the source from the users and many other things.
You will note that the very text you linked to is copyrighted. There’s a reason for that.
This is why we see evidence of emotional structures: https://www.anthropic.com/research/emotion-concepts-function
This is why we see generalized introspection (limited in the models studied before people point it out, which they love to): https://www.anthropic.com/research/introspection
Because the most compact way to recreate the breadth of written human experience is shockingly to have analogs to the systems that made it in the first place.
If there is no copyright, then you can copy things freely.
All that we need after that to realize the GPL ideal is to legally mandate that people have a right to access and modify source code of software/hardware they use, i.e. the government needs to mandate that Apple releases the iOS kernel and source code and that iPhones can be unlocked and custom kernels flashed, that John Deere must provide the tractor's source code, that my fridge releases its GPL-violating linux patches, etc etc.
You have the right to free speech, the right to a lawyer, and the right to source code. Simply amend the bill of rights.
There are plenty of old books in the public domain already... but I'm not sure what exactly this exercise is supposed to show, since the Kolmogorov limit still stands in the way of "infinite compression".
Yes but showing that it happens in books in the public domain does nothing to prove that it happens for copyrighted books